Fire and Ash
Page 2

The jet.
It had drawn Benny, Nix, Chong, and Lilah away from Mountainside. It was supposed to answer all their questions, to make sense of the world.
It sat facing the distant mountains, windows dark, door closed. But around that door were blood smears, arterial splashes and one handprint, faded now from crimson to brown. The metal stairs sat a few yards away. There was blood on every step, and trails of it along the ground heading toward the row of massive gray hangars beyond the blockhouse.
The first time Benny had seen the blood, he’d asked his escort monk, Brother Albert, about it. “Did the zoms attack the crew?”
Brother Albert flinched at the use of the word “zom,” and Benny regretted using it. The monks always called the dead the Children of Lazarus, and they believed that these “Children” were the meek whom God intended should inherit the earth. Benny was pretty sure he didn’t agree with that view, though it was a lot more palatable than the more extreme apocalyptic thinking of the Night Church.
“No,” said the monk, “the sirens called the Children away while the jet landed.”
The military people used a row of sirens on tall towers to lure the zoms away to clear the airstrip or allow access to the hangars and blockhouse. Soldiers stationed in a small stone building at the far end of the field controlled the sirens. When those sirens fell silent, the dead wandered back again, drawn by the living people on the monks’ side of the trench.
“Then what happened?”
Brother Albert shrugged. “Not really sure, brother. They were delivering supplies and equipment to a base in Fort Worth. Must have been an attack there.” He paused. “Do you know about the American Nation?”
“Sure. Captain Ledger and Riot told us some stuff. It’s in Asheville, North Carolina. Supposed to be, like, a hundred thousand people there. There’s a new government, and they’re trying to take back the country from the dead.”
“That’s what they say.”
Benny glanced at the jet. During the big fight with the reapers, it had come swooping down out of the sky like a monster bird out of ancient legend. Impossibly huge, roaring with four massive engines, it had sailed above the battle and descended toward Sanctuary.
When they’d first seen it almost a year ago, soaring high above the mountains in California, they’d thought it was a passenger liner. They now knew that it was a C-5 Galaxy military transport jet. The largest military aircraft ever built.
“What about the crew?” asked Benny. “Are they okay?”
The monk shrugged. “Don’t know. They don’t tell us anything.”
It was true. The military scientists ran a mostly underground base on one side of the trench, and the monks ran a hospital and hospice on the other. Except for interview sessions in the blockhouse, communication between the two was weirdly minimal.
Past the jet, at the far side of the airfield, was a huge crowd of zoms. They shuffled slowly toward Benny, though the closest of them was still a mile away. Every morning the sirens’ wail cleared the way for him to cross the trench, and every evening it cleared the field for Nix to come over. Each of them spent an hour being interviewed by scientists. Never in person, though. The interview booth was a cubicle built onto the corner of the blockhouse; all contact was via microphone and speakers. The novelty of this pre–First Night tech wore off almost at once, though. The scientists asked a lot of questions, but they gave almost nothing in return. No information, no answers. Allowing Benny to see Chong was a surprising act of generosity, though Benny wondered if it was just part of a scientific experiment. Probably to see how human Chong still was.
Hungry.
God.
Every evening the monk took Nix over there. Would they let her see Chong too?
They reached the entrance to the cubicle. It opened as Benny approached. Inside was a metal folding chair.
Benny glanced over his shoulder at the zombies. The ranger, Captain Ledger, had told Nix that there were only a couple hundred thousand. The monks said that there were at least half a million of them over there. They worked with the sick and dying far more closely.
“They’re waiting, brother,” murmured his escort monk, and for a moment Benny didn’t know whether Brother Albert meant the zoms or the scientists.
“Yeah,” said Benny. “I know.”
The monk pushed the door shut, and the hydraulic bolts slid back into place with a sound like steam escaping. There was only a tiny electric light that barely shoved back the shadows.
While he waited in the dark, he thought he could hear Chong’s voice.
Hungry.
5
THE LOST GIRL WAS LOST indeed.
Eight months ago she’d lived alone in a cave behind a waterfall high in the Sierra Nevadas. She spent her days hunting, foraging for books in deserted houses, evading zombies, and hunting the men who had murdered her family. From age twelve until just after her seventeenth birthday, Lilah spoke to no one.
The last words from her mouth before the long silence were spoken to her sister, Annie, as she knelt in the rain near the first Gameland.
Earlier that day Lilah had escaped from Gameland and then gone back for her sister. Annie was supposed to wait for her, but she didn’t. She escaped from her cell only to be hunted through the storm by the Motor City Hammer. In the windy, rainy darkness Annie tripped and fell, hitting her head on a rock. A mortal injury. The Hammer left her there like a piece of trash that wasn’t worth throwing away.
Lilah saw this from a place of concealment. She was twelve, emaciated, and weak. If she’d attacked the Hammer, he would have beaten her and dragged her back to the zombie pits. Knowing him as she did, he might have put Annie in with her. That was a guaranteed moneymaking attraction.
When the Hammer was gone, she crept onto the road to where Annie lay. She tried to breathe life back into Annie’s lungs, tried to push it into her chest the way George had taught her. She tried to will that fading spark to flare. She begged, she made promises to the heavens, offering her own life if Annie could be spared. But the slack form she held changed into something that did not want her breath or her prayers. All it wanted was her flesh.
Lilah held the struggling body tightly in her arms and buried her face in Annie’s hair. For a long, terrible moment she wondered if she should stop fighting, if she should lie back and offer her throat to Annie. If she could not protect her in life, she could at least offer her sustenance in death.
That moment was the longest of her life. The most terrible.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and reached for the rock onto which Annie had fallen. It was small, the size of an angry fist. Another half step to the right and Annie would have missed it and fallen into a puddle instead.
Lilah wanted to close her eyes so that she did not have to witness what she was about to do. But that was a coward’s choice. George had taught the girls to be strong. Always strong. And this was Annie. Her Annie. Her sister, born on First Night to a dying mother. She was the last person on earth who Lilah knew. To turn away, to close her eyes, to flinch from the responsibility of being a witness for her sister’s experience felt as cowardly and awful as what the Motor City Hammer had done.
So Lilah watched Annie’s face. She watched her own hand lift the rock.
She watched everything.
She heard herself say, “I love you.”
She heard the sound of what she was forced by fate and love to do. It was a dreadful sound. Lilah knew it would echo inside her head forever.
Lilah spent the next five years in silence.
There was conversation, but it was always in her head. With Annie, with George. Lilah rehearsed the words she wanted to say when she was strong enough to hunt down the Motor City Hammer. Now he was dead too. And George.
Annie.
Tom.
Lilah walked the trench, hour after hour, mile after mile. She was so much stronger now than she had been. She knew that if she could take this body and these skills and step back to that moment on the rainy road, it would have been the Hammer gasping out his last breaths in the darkness.
Lilah made sure that she was strong. Fast, and skillful and vicious.
Heartless.
That had been her goal. To become heartless. A machine fine-tuned for the purpose of slaughter. Not of zoms—they were incidental to her—but of the evil men in the world. Like the Hammer, like Charlie Pink-eye and Preacher Jack. Like Brother Peter and Saint John and the reapers. She willed herself to become merciless because if she accomplished that, then she would never know fear and she would never know love. Love was a pathway to cruel pain. It was the arrow that Fate always kept aimed at your back. Love would interfere; love would create a chink in her armor.
No, she would never allow herself to love.
As she walked, she thought about that. That promise was as vain and as fragile as the promise she’d given Annie to return and free her.
When Lilah rescued Benny and Nix from bounty hunters in the mountains, she had stepped across a line. When she met Tom and saw that a man could be good and decent, compassionate and strong, Lilah had felt her resolve weaken. George had been the only good man she’d ever known. A total stranger who’d been the last of a group of refugees from the zombie outbreak. He’d raised Annie and Lilah. He’d loved them like a father, fed them, cared for them, taught them. And had been murdered by the men who took the girls to Gameland.
Lilah had believed that he was the only decent man left alive, that all the others were like the Hammer.
Then Tom.
Whom she fell in love with. Who refused her love in the gentlest, kindest way.
Tom . . . who died.
She stopped and let her gaze drift across the trench to the blockhouse. To where Chong crouched in the darkness.
Lilah had never wanted to feel anything for Chong. He was a town boy. Weak and unskilled in any of the ways of survival. She had not wanted to like him. Falling in love with him was so obviously wrong that sometimes she laughed at herself. And when the absurdity of it struck her, she lashed out at Chong.
Stupid town boy.
“Chong,” she whispered.
What is the good of becoming strong if love bares your flesh to the teeth of misfortune? Why risk loving anyone or anything when life is so frail a thing that a strong wind can blow it out of your experience? She wanted to go back to her silence and her solitude. To find her cave and hide there among the stacks of dusty books. With the waterfall roaring, no one could hear her scream, she was sure of it.
How long would it take, how many weeks or months or years, before she could think of Chong’s name and not feel a knife in her heart?
The reapers had taken Chong from her.
Forever? Or just for now?
She didn’t know, and neither did the scientists in the blockhouse.
If it was forever, then a cold voice in Lilah’s mind told her what the future would be—an endless, relentless hunt to find and kill every reaper. In books the heroines vow to hunt an enemy to the ends of the earth. But she was already there. This was the apocalypse, and the future was awash in blood and silence.
“Chong,” she said to the desert sky, and tried to will her heart to turn to stone.
6
“GOOD MORNING, MR. IMURA,” SAID a cold, impersonal female voice through the wall-mounted speaker. “How do you feel today?”
“Angry,” said Benny.
There was a pause. “No,” said the voice, clearly thrown off track, “how do you feel?”
“I told you.”
“You don’t understand. Are you feeling unwell? Are—”
“I understood the question.”
“Have you been experiencing any unusual symptoms?”
“Sure,” said Benny. “My head hurts.”
“When did these headaches begin?”
“’Bout a month ago,” said Benny. “A freako mutant zombie hit me in the head with a stick.”
“We know about that injury, Mr. Imura.”
“Then why ask?”
“We asked if you had any unusual symptoms.”
“Zombie-inflicted stick wounds to the head actually aren’t all that usual, doc. Look it up.”
The scientist sighed—the kind of short nostril sigh people do when they’re losing their patience. Benny grinned in the shadows.
The next question wiped the smile off his face. “What happened in the holding cell today?”
“He . . . tried to grab me.”
“Did he touch your skin with his hands?”
“No.”
“Did he bite you?”
“No.”
“Did he get any bodily fluids on you?”
“Eww. And, no.”
“Are you running a fever?”
“I don’t know, why don’t you let me in there so you can take my temperature?”
A pause. “There is a safety protocol—”
“—in place,” completed Benny. “Yeah, I know. I’ve heard that forty million times.”
“Mr. Imura, we need you to tell us if the infected—”
“His name is Lou Chong,” barked Benny. “And I wish you’d tell me what you’ve done to him.”
A longer pause this time. “Mr. Chong has been treated.”
“I know that, genius. I want to know how. I want to know what’s going on with him. When’s he going to get better?”
“We . . . don’t have those answers.”
Benny punched the small metal speaker mounted on the wall. “Why not?”
“Mr. Imura,” said the woman, “please, you’re being difficult.”
“I’m being difficult? We gave you all that stuff we found in that wrecked transport plane, all those medical records. Why can’t you do something for us?”