Fire and Ash

Page 3

When there was no immediate answer, Benny tried to shift topics, hoping that might nudge them into an actual exchange of information.
“What about that pack of wild boars that tried to chow down on my friend Lilah? Where’d they come from? I thought that only humans could turn into zoms.”
“We are aware of a limited infection among a small percentage of the wild boar population.”
“What does that mean? What’s a ‘small percentage’? How many is that?”
“We don’t have an exact number. . . .”
Benny sighed. They were always evasive like this.
After a moment the woman asked, “Are you experiencing any excessive sweating, Mr. Imura? Double vision? Dry mouth?”
The questions ran on and on. Benny closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. After a while the voice accepted that Benny wasn’t going to cooperate.
“Mr. Imura—?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m still here.”
“Why are you making this so difficult?”
“I keep telling you—I’m not. I’m trying to communicate with you people, but you keep stonewalling me. What’s that about? ’Cause the way I figure it, you guys owe me and my friends. If we hadn’t told Captain Ledger about the weapons on the plane, that reaper army would have come in here and killed everyone—you, all the sick people, the monks, and everyone in this stupid blockhouse.”
The plane in question was a C-130J Super Hercules, a muscular four-propeller cargo aircraft built before First Night. Benny and Nix had found it wrecked in the forest. It had been used to evacuate a scientist, Dr. Monica McReady, and her staff from Hope One, a remote research base near Tacoma, Washington. The team had been up there studying recent mutations in the zombie plague.
“Don’t confuse heroism with mutual self-interest, Mr. Imura,” said the woman scientist in an icy tone. “You told Captain Ledger about those weapons and materials because it was the only way you and your friends could survive. It was an act of desperation that, because of the nature of this current conflict, benefited parties that have a shared agenda. Anyone in your position would have done the same.”
“Really? That plane was sitting out there for a couple of years—pretty much in your freaking backyard—and you had no clue that it was there. If you spent less time with your heads up your—”
“Mr. Imura . . .”
He sighed. “Okay, so maybe we had our own survival in mind when we told you about it—we’re not actually stupid—but that doesn’t change the fact that we saved your butts.”
“That’s hardly an accurate assessment, Mr. Imura. Saint John and the army of the Night Church are still out there. Do you know where they are?”
Benny’s answer was grudging. “No.”
In truth, no one knew where the reapers had gone. Guards patrolling the fence had seen a few, and Joe Ledger said that he’d found signs of small parties out in the desert, but the main part of the vast reaper army was gone. Saint John himself seemed to have gone with them, but nobody knew where. At first Benny and his friends were happy about that—let them bother someone else; but on reflection, that was a selfish and mean-spirited reaction. An immature reaction. The reapers had only one mission, and that was to exterminate all life. No matter where they went, innocent people were going to die.
“So,” said the scientist, “you can’t really make the claim that you—and I quote—‘saved our butts.’ We might all be wasting our time.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” There was no answer. He kicked the wall. “Yo! What’s that supposed to mean?”
Nothing.
Then the lights came on and the door hissed open. Outside, the sirens were already blaring.
7
BROTHER ALBERT ESCORTED HIM ACROSS a bridge to the monks’ side of Sanctuary. On the other side, Benny spotted Lilah walking along the edge of the trench. He fell into step beside her. They walked for a while in silence. Behind them the guards used a winch to raise the bridge.
Lilah was tall, beautiful, with a bronze tan and blond hair so sun-bleached that it was as white as snow. She had wide, penetrating eyes that were sometimes hazel and sometimes honey-colored, changing quickly with her fiery moods. She carried a spear made from black pipe and a military bayonet.
Every time he saw her, Benny felt an odd twinge in his chest. It wasn’t love—he loved Nix with his whole heart, and besides, this girl was too strange, too different for him. No, it was a feeling he’d never quite been able to define, and it was as strong now as it had been the first time he’d seen her picture on a Zombie Card.
Lilah, the Lost Girl.
He finally worked up to the nerve to say, “They let me see him today.”
Lilah abruptly stopped and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. “Tell me.”
Benny gently pushed her hand away and told her everything that had happened. He left out the part about the soldier trying to hit Chong with his baton. There were already enough problems between Lilah and the soldiers. For the first few days after Chong had been admitted into the labs for treatment, Lilah stayed by his side. Twice soldiers had attempted to remove her, and twice soldiers were carried to the infirmary. Then on the eighth night, Chong appeared to succumb to the Reaper Plague. His vital signs bottomed out, and for a moment the doctors and scientists believed that he’d died. They wanted to have him quickly transported outside so he could be with the zoms when he reanimated. Lilah wouldn’t accept that Chong was dead. Either her instincts told her something the machines did not, or she went a little crazy. Benny was inclined to believe that it was a bit of both. When the orderlies moved in to take Chong away, Lilah attacked them. Benny never got all the details, but from what he could gather, four orderlies, two doctors, and five soldiers were badly hurt, and a great deal of medical equipment was damaged in what was apparently a fight of epic proportions. The soldiers came close to shooting Lilah, and if she hadn’t used one of the chief scientists as a shield—holding her knife to the fabric of his hazmat suit—they might have done it.
It was a stalemate.
And then the machines began beeping again, arguing with mechanical certainty that Chong was not dead. The scientist, fearing for his life and seeing a way out of the standoff, swore to Lilah that they would do everything they could to keep Chong alive, and to find some way of treating the disease that thrived within him. Lilah, never big on trust, was a hard sell. But in the end, Chong’s need for medical attention won out. She released the scientist. Chong was injected with something called a metabolic stabilizer—a concoction based on a formula found among Dr. McReady’s notes on the transport plane. Once Chong was stabilized, Lilah was taken—at gunpoint—outside the blockhouse and turned over to Benny, Nix, and the monks. She was forbidden to cross the trench. Four guards were posted on the monks’ side of the bridge to make sure of that.
As Benny described Chong’s condition, Lilah staggered as if she’d been punched. She leaned on her spear for support.
“He spoke, though,” said Benny hopefully. “That’s something. It’s an improvement, right? It’s a good sign and—”
Lilah shook her head and gazed across the distance toward the white blockhouse. “My town boy is lost.”
“Lilah, I—”
“Go away,” she said in a voice that was almost inhuman.
Benny shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged off to find Nix.
8
BEYOND THE FENCE . . .
Through the long eye of the telescope, the boy with the sword slung over his back and the girl with the spear looked like they were standing only a few feet away. Close enough to touch.
Close enough to kill.
“I will open red mouths in your flesh,” whispered the man with the telescope. “Praise be to the darkness.”
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Zoms rely on one or more senses in order to hunt. Smell is big, we know that. They can smell healthy flesh. That’s why cadaverine works; it smells like rotting tissue.
Sight and hearing are just as important to them.
There has to be a strategic way to use these three senses against them. I’m going to talk to Captain Ledger about it. He seems to know more than anyone about fighting zoms.
9
SIX MONTHS AGO . . .
Saint John stood under the leaves of a green tree while the two most powerful women in the Night Church argued with each other.
“It’s old-world heresy,” insisted Mother Rose, who was the spiritual leader of the Night Church. She was tall and lovely, graceful as the morning, as beautiful as a knife blade. “That plane and its contents represent everything the church opposes.”
“I don’t dispute that,” said the other woman, a frail Korean named Sister Sun. A year ago she had been athletic and strong, but over the last few months cancer had begun consuming her. By her own diagnosis she had less than a year to live, and she was determined to use that year helping the Night Church conquer the heretics. “My point is that we need to examine those materials to understand what’s happening with the gray people.”
“Nothing is happening with—”
“Mother, you know that’s not true. Our people have seen case after case of gray people moving in flocks. That never happened before. There are rumors of gray people who move almost as fast as the living. Even some incidents of them picking up rocks and stones as weapons.”
“So what?” countered Mother Rose in her haughty voice. “All life changes. Even un-life. It’s part of nature, isn’t it?”
“That’s just it,” insisted Sister Sun. “The Reaper Plague isn’t part of nature, as I’ve said many times.”
Saint John turned now and held up a hand. Both women fell immediately silent.
“The plague that raised the dead and destroyed the cities of sinful man was brought to earth by the divine hand of Lord Thanatos.”
“All praise to his darkness,” said the women in unison.
“Therefore it is part of the natural order of the universe.”
“Honored One,” said Sister Sun, “please listen to me. Both of you—listen. I know this plague. I studied it after the outbreak. My team was working with the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. No one alive knows this disease better than me except for Monica McReady.”
“That heretic is dead,” said Mother Rose.
“We don’t know that for sure,” said Sister Sun. “We sent five teams of reapers out to search for her, and two teams never returned.”
Mother Rose dismissed the argument with a flick of her hand.
“If McReady was tampering with the disease—if she was trying to create a cure for it, then she might have caused it to mutate,” said Sister Sun passionately. “Any possible change to the disease can have a significant impact on the predictable behavior of the gray people, and that is a danger to our church. You know it is. If you let me look at the research materials on the plane, I might be able to determine what she was doing. Maybe I can stop it, or perhaps learn enough to predict what changes are occurring so we can adapt behavioral modifications into our church doctrine. But we can’t allow random changes to manifest without a response from the church. Think of how disruptive that would be, especially to reaper groups that have a high percentage of new recruits. Doubt is our enemy.”
Mother Rose shook her head the whole time. “The plane is a shrine, and I have put my seal on it. It stays closed.”
She turned her back and walked away.
Sister Sun gripped Saint John’s sleeve. “Please, Honored One, surely you understand the danger.”
“The shrine belongs to Mother Rose,” he said.
“But—”
“It belongs to her.”
The saint gently pulled his arm away and walked off under the shadows of the trees, aware that she stood and watched him the whole time. He did not let her see the smile that he wore.
10
THE MESS HALL WAS IN a Quonset hut set behind the dormitory hangar. Rows of long trestle tables, folding chairs, a steam table were set up for self-service. Benny picked up a tray and a plate, slopped some runny eggs and links of what he hoped was pork sausage. It might as easily have been lizard or turtle, as Benny had already found out.
There was never a lot of food. Enough, but none to spare.
The first time Benny had come here, he’d piled his tray high. No one had said anything until he sat down across from Riot, who gave him a stern glare.
“Y’all got enough food there for a pregnant sow,” she’d said to him, her voice heavy with an Appalachian accent.
“I know, right?” he said, and jammed a forkful of eggs into his mouth. “It’s not even that bad.”
Riot was thin and hard-muscled and very pretty, with a shaved head that was tattooed with roses and wild vines. She wore jeans and a leather vest buttoned up over nothing else that Benny could detect. “Maybe that zom knocked all good sense out your head, boy . . . but did it knock out all your manners, too? There’s four people not going to eat today because y’all took enough food for five. Look around—you think there’s anything close to abundance round these parts? Everyone here’s a few short steps away from starving and here you are, stuffing your face like it’s your birthday.”
When Benny looked around, all he saw were the bland, accepting smiles of the monks. Then he looked down at the heap of eggs, the mounds of potatoes and vegetables, and the half loaf of bread. Without another word he got up and walked back to the steam table and placed his tray in front of the first person in line. Then he left and didn’t eat anything else all day.