Fire & Ash Read online

  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?”

  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 gen
tly 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.