Tooth & Nail: A Rot & Ruin Story Read online

  Tony Grapes licked his lips. His eyes were bright and wet and his chin trembled.

  “Talk about what?”

  “About where,” corrected Marty. “My boss, a guy I’d knee-walk through broken glass for—and I don’t joke when I say this—really wants to find a place called Mountainside.” Marty leaned close so that his lips almost touched Tony’s. “Let’s all hope and pray that you can help us find it.”

  3

  Sanctuary

  Area 51

  A big man with a bowie knife tried very hard to kill Benny Imura.

  Benny yelled something loud and inarticulate as he flung himself out of the way of the slashing blade. He could feel the steel whistle past his ear. As he turned his panicked dive into a roll, he bumped and bounced to minimum safe distance, losing his sword in the process. The katana—Tom’s sword—lay in the dirt between Benny and his attacker.

  The man with the knife straightened and gave Benny a long, cold, harsh stare of contempt.

  “I thought you said you could fight.”

  Benny spat dust out of his mouth and unloaded a string of comments that could have burned the paint off a steel drum.

  “Nice,” said the big man. “You kiss your mama with that mouth?”

  “My mother’s dead,” Benny snarled. “Don’t you—”

  “Everybody’s mother’s dead, Sherlock. It’s the apocalypse.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Benny climbed to his feet, eyeing the fallen sword. “Don’t look so smug . . . you missed me.”

  “Sure, and missing you took some effort. It was all I could do to keep from carving a few pounds of stupid off you.”

  Benny laughed. “Oh, yeah, that’s what happened. You missing had nothing to do with me dodging and evading and doing a combat roll. Yeah, you missed on purpose.”

  Suddenly everything seemed to blur. The big man threw the knife with incredible, insane speed. One moment it was in his hand, and the next instant the knife was buried three inches into the hard desert sand exactly between Benny’s feet. But before it even stopped quivering the man hooked the toe of his boot under the sword, kicked it into the air, caught it one-handed, leaped forward, swung the sword, and then froze with the razor edge less than a hairbreadth from Benny’s throat.

  “Yeah,” said the big man, “I did.”

  The world was frozen into a moment of impossibility. Benny tried to look down at the blade without daring to move his head.

  He said, “Um . . . .urk . . .”

  Behind him three pairs of hands began a slow, ironic round of applause.

  The big man smiled—all white teeth and blue eyes in a seamed and scarred face—and stepped back half a pace. He reversed the sword in his grip and offered the handle to Benny.

  Benny had to take a moment to remember how to breathe before he dared raise his hand to accept the weapon. His hand was shaking so badly he almost dropped it.

  The audience was three girls—Nix Riley, Lilah the Lost Girl, and a former reaper named Riot. Nix and Riot were smiling, Lilah—typically—was not. The big man gestured for them to stop the applause and waved them over.

  The four of them stood in a loose half circle around Captain Joe Ledger. The ranger’s dog, Grimm, a massive American mastiff who usually wore armor fitted with blades and had been trained to hack zombies rather than bite them, sat nearby, watching Benny with undisguised dislike.

  The ranger’s own emotions were impossible to read. He had a sunbaked, scarred face that generally wore either a fake smile or a disapproving scowl. The man was still a bit unreal to Benny. He’d first read about him on a Zombie Card; Ledger was a hero of First Night, a former Special Operator. He had led a crew of world-class soldiers against terrorists who were armed with exotic bioweapons. In the weeks following First Night, Ledger was supposed to have saved thousands of people by organizing them, helping them find shelter, teaching them how to fight the limitless armies of the dead. He’d even fought alongside Solomon Jones, Fluffy McTeague, Hector Mexico, and Tom.

  This man had known Tom.

  The man had once been a great hero.

  He was still fighting the zoms and leading the fight against the reapers. Without him, Benny and all his friends would have died in the Nevada desert.

  He was a living legend.

  And Benny wished he could bury the man up to his chin in an anthill and pour honey over him.

  The feeling was clearly mutual.

  “You know what your problem is?” asked Ledger.

  “I’m standing too close to a jerk who thinks he’s Captain Wonderful?”

  “Cute. But no . . . the problem is that you have some skills. For the amount of training you say you’ve had, you’re actually pretty good. And that’s what’s going to get you killed.”

  Grimm looked at Benny the way a hungry wolf might look at a limping gazelle. Drool hung from his rubbery jowls.

  Benny waited for the other shoe to drop, and it hit with a thud.

  Ledger said, “What you are is an arrogant little . . .”

  There was more, a lot more, but Benny stopped listening. He turned and began walking away. He got a dozen steps before a strong hand grabbed him and whirled him around.

  It wasn’t Joe.

  It was Nix.

  She was beautiful even when she was furious, and right now she was absolutely furious. Her freckles glowed like hot embers and her green eyes were lethal. She pitched her voice into a low, fierce whisper that only he could hear.

  “You listen to me, Benjamin Imura,” she snapped. “Captain Ledger is trying to help us.”

  “I don’t want his help.”

  “Don’t be stupid. We need his help. We need to keep training.”

  “Tom trained us,” he fired back, his voice rising. “Tom was the best, and he trained us and we’ve been warrior smart. We survived everything because of Tom.”

  Nix got right up in his face.

  “Survived everything? Really? Why don’t you go tell that to Chong.”

  It was worse than a slap across the face.

  Chong.

  God . . .

  Benny tried to say something back, something witty and full of thorns, but the words caught in his throat; he couldn’t spit them out. Instead he turned, slammed his sword into its sheath, and stalked away.

  • • •

  Nix Riley watched Benny go. She was angry and hurt and sorry for what she’d said. Tears began burning the corners of her eyes. When she turned away from him, Captain Ledger was right there. She hadn’t heard him approach.

  “He—he had to go and—” she began, but he stopped her with a smile and a shake of his head.

  “Don’t make excuses for him.”

  “He’s been through a lot,” she said quickly. “He’s not usually like this. It’s not his fault.”

  “Fault?” he echoed as they rejoined the others. “No. But it is his responsibility. We’re at war, and we don’t have the luxury of letting our emotions get in the way of preparing for the fight.”

  “No,” agreed Lilah, and Riot nodded too.

  “Besides,” said Riot, “Benny don’t hold the only license on pain and grief.”

  It was true enough. Each of them had suffered terrible losses.

  And Lilah . . . she’d lost more than all of them. Lilah’s pregnant mother had died in an old farmhouse and Lilah, two years old at the time, had watched first her natural death during childbirth and then a second and more brutal death as the survivors defended themselves after she resurrected as a zom. A man named George became Lilah’s protector and guardian because he was the last survivor of that group of refugees in the farmhouse; but some years later he was murdered and his death made to look like a suicide. Around that time, Lilah and her little sister had been forced to fight in the zombie pits at Charlie Pink-eye’s Gameland. During an abortive escape, little Annie was mortally wounded and left to die on a desolate rain-swept road. Lilah found her just as Annie reanimated. And the Lost Girl did what had t
o be done. After that, Lilah lived alone in the wilds of the Rot and Ruin, fending for herself and killing zombies and bounty hunters and in the process becoming remote and strange. And perhaps a little crazy. She’d begun to come out of that shell after she’d been rescued by Benny, Nix, and Tom, and more so when she and Chong had fallen in love.

  Now Chong was lost. Dying or dead. Or maybe a monster.

  The people in the blockhouse on the far side of the trench wouldn’t tell them.

  Benny had lost Tom. And that was hard enough. Tom was a bit larger than life, a man of great gentleness, wisdom, and power who ultimately saved the Nine Towns from the evil of Charlie Pink-eye and his family.

  Nix cut a sideways glance at Captain Ledger, wondering what—and who—he’d lost; but the big ranger never spoke about himself. He didn’t even comment on the things he was said to have done to earn himself a place on the Heroes of First Night subset of the Zombie Cards.

  Ledger caught her looking at him. “He’ll be back,” he said, misreading her thought.

  Nix shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  The ranger smiled. “He’ll be back.”

  The day burned away and Benny did not come back.

  4

  Rattlesnake Valley

  Southern California

  They perched in the tree like a flock of birds. Five silent shapes, crouched on branches, their bodies and weapons dappled with sunlight and shadow. Only the fact that no actual birds shared the same tree hinted that they were there.

  The tree was a stout and twisted cottonwood with many crooked arms reaching in improbable directions. Spring had come early this year and the branches were thick with leaves, but the early season had brought drought with it, and the leaves were already curling for want of water. It was the hottest spring any of them could remember. The sky above the valley was as hard and blue as bottle glass. Only a few small clouds moved above them, pushed along by a brisk wind that offered no relief from the heat.

  A shadow cast by the largest cloud sailed down the far side of the valley, moving like a dark stain across the fields of weed-choked grass. The five figures watched as several zombies staggered in pursuit of the cloud shadow.

  The dead always followed movement. They were slow but relentless, walking on legs stiffened to sticks by withered tendons and nearly moistureless flesh. They would follow the shadow until it vanished or until the sun fell into the Pacific Ocean nearly four hundred miles away. They would chase it the way they chased anything else that moved, hoping for a meal they didn’t need to satisfy a hunger that was as bottomless as forever. And if they caught up to the shadow and found that it was nothing but an illusion, with no substance, they would not cry out in despair, because that is an expression of emotion, and the dead were empty.

  Nothing but empty shells.

  As the watchers sat on their perches, they saw that the dead began angling toward one another while still pursuing the shadow. Soon a dozen of them were lumbering along in a loose and awkward cluster.

  “See?” whispered Samantha, the oldest of the girls, pointing with the tip of her short spear. “I told you, they’re moving in packs.”

  A second group of dead came in from another angle, staggering out from the ruins of a small factory where they had probably worked and where they’d almost certainly died. Seven of them, stepping into the sunlight through different open doorways, hearing the moans of the other zombies and catching sight of the shadow. Without pause the seven dead formed a new pack and moved off in pursuit of nothing.

  “They’re doing it too,” said Laura, who was on a nearby branch. She had spiked hair and her face was painted to match the dappled sunlight. A hunting bow was slung across her back. “They never used to do that.”

  “I know,” agreed Samantha. “But they’re doing it now. Amanda and I saw a bunch of groups like that while we were hunting last week.”

  Amanda nodded. She was generally the quietest of the group, deep and brooding, but fierce in combat. She wore a pair of matched hatchets tucked through her belt. “We saw one pack with nearly fifty of them in it.”

  Michelle, the second archer of the group, shook her head. “No, that’s impossible.”

  “That’s too many,” agreed Laura.

  “Amanda’s right,” countered Samantha. “At least fifty. We both counted.”

  The two packs out in the field followed the shadow for long minutes, but then it reached the top of the valley and vanished from sight. The packs slowed as confusion set in. They looked around, saw nothing else to chase, and one by one the dead slowed to a walk and then stopped.

  And stood there.

  The five girls knew that they would continue to stand there until something else drew their attention. Otherwise they had no reason to go anywhere.

  Some of the dead, lacking an impetus to hunt, stood in fields with years of vines wrapped around them. Zombies like that were among the most dangerous. One of them could be lying on the ground covered by vines or fallen leaves or low-growing plants like pachysandra, and you’d never know until they smelled you. Or until you stepped on one.

  The girls remembered that lesson very well, as they remembered all such lessons.

  There used to be twenty-two of them. Girls, boys, and three adults.

  Now there were six girls. Five in the tree and one . . . missing.

  Tiffany had been on patrol in the woods surrounding the old motel where the girls lived, and sometime this morning she’d vanished. They found her weighted fighting sticks and a scuffle of footprints, but nothing else.

  The other five girls had formed a party to hunt for her. A cold morning had caught fire to become an inferno afternoon. Each of them was sick with dread at losing Tiffany. They couldn’t bear to lose another of their family.

  Now they perched in a tree, letting the day tell them what was happening, what was there, what to expect.

  They always paid attention to the lessons nature and experience provided. It was how they’d been raised. Samantha was the oldest of them by a few days. She’d been born one day before the world ended. The others had all been born in the days that followed. None of them ever knew their parents. Their mothers had been at a hospital near Sacramento. The nurses and doctors had tried to protect everyone from the dead, but they hadn’t been able to. During one terrible battle the hospital caught fire. Nine adults gathered up the babies in the nursery and fled in a convoy of cramped ambulances. The leader of that group of adults was a tough-as-nails prenatal care nurse named Ida from Haiti, a place that probably didn’t exist anymore. Because most places didn’t exist anymore. Not with names, at least. Ida brought her small group of survivors out of the teeth of the zombie uprising and away, deep into the forests of California, where people were always sparse even before the nightmare. There they settled and learned to survive. To forage, to hunt, and to kill.

  Or so the story went.

  That tale was passed down from the survivors of the hospital to other refugees they met along the way and finally to the children as they grew old enough to understand.

  The five girls were the last of that group.

  Ida’s main support and allies in the running of their group were Dolan, a man who used to be an actor, and Mirabel, who sold houses in Sacramento. Two springs ago Dolan had been attacked by a panther and dragged off. Ida said that the big cat probably escaped from a zoo during the End, or its parents did. There were all sorts of animals out here that used to be in zoos or circuses. Elephants and zebras and a huge white pregnant rhinoceros they saw heading north toward the Sierra Nevadas.

  Mirabel and three boys had gone hunting one winter day, and none of them were ever seen again. The only trace of them that anyone ever found was Mirabel’s locket—a beautiful thing with a cameo front. Samantha spotted it hanging from a tree branch. But its owner and the last of the boys were gone. That was nearly three years ago.

  And Ida . . . she died of the flu early last year.

  Ida came back almost at
once, but it wasn’t really Ida. It was a hungry thing that looked like her, but everything that had actually been her was gone.

  The girls did what they had to do, what they’d been trained all their lives to do. Afterward they buried Ida in the cemetery, which used to be someone’s garden. Ida now slept in the cool, quiet ground along with the other kids and the adults who’d died at home.

  Home.

  They lived in what had once been known as the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court. It was a V-shaped building with forty bedroom units, an empty pool, a tennis court, and a wall that had been meticulously built of tractor-trailers by previous tenants of the place who’d later died of plague. The tires of the big trucks had been slashed, and all the spaces under and around the vehicles had been packed with heavy stones and clay. There were a dozen ways out, but you had to know where they were and you had to have a working brain to use them. Even then, there were booby traps in case bands of human raiders tried to get in. A few tried every year. None had ever managed it. Not alive.

  One thing Ida and the other adults had taught the girls was that they had to do whatever they needed to do in order to survive. The girls learned those lessons well, which is why these five were still alive. Along with the missing Tiffany, they were the top hunters, the best fighters. They were the fiercest of the little tribe that had lived—and died—at the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court. They understood how to hunt, cook, do first aid, farm, observe, process, react, and fight.

  They knew about their world, and they relied on what they’d been taught and what they’d learned from doing.

  But now the rules were changing.

  The dead were beginning to move in packs.

  And Tiffany was missing.

  Heather, the fifth and youngest girl in the hunting party, was the only one with a working pair of binoculars. While the others talked, she sat in silence and studied the dead through the high-powered lenses. When she finally spoke, her voice was filled with doubt and fear. “They look the same as always.”