Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire Read online

  She couldn’t do that to someone, even if she’d never met this woman before. Especially not with children involved.

  So they could wait it out until sunset; she didn’t think it would be much longer before the sun went down, and she just hoped that no more Orcs would come their way. If she barricaded the door of the bus then they’d be safe enough here, at least until nightfall.

  Then at nightfall they’d have to move.

  “I’m going to stay here and make sure all of you are safe, okay?” Rachael asked, trying to keep her voice light. “I want to make sure Miss Dez gets back here to you tonight, and I don’t want to leave all of you here alone. Is that okay if I stay with you”

  Most of their hesitations around her had faded when she told them her big “secret,” and they nodded. Of course they wanted a superhero around. She could protect them from the big scary monsters.

  Well, she would do the best she could.

  ~16~

  Dez Fox

  Dez approached the house slowly, with caution, her shock and weariness falling away as her training and common sense came back online. She was badly rattled by how stupid she’d been, and she was glad Biel wasn’t here to see it.

  When she placed her foot on the bottom riser of the short set of steps to the porch it creaked. Just a little. Enough.

  If there had been ears to hear.

  Dez pointed the gun at the front door and then swung it slowly toward each of the two windows. Heavy shutters were in place, the slats down. No one could see out or in.

  She took a breath and leaned on the step a little heavier, making the creak louder, more deliberate.

  Waited.

  Heard nothing but the wind across the tobacco leaves. Birds began to sing in the trees. A good sign, most of the time.

  Dez took another breath, and this time used it to call out. “In the house.”

  Nothing.

  “It’s cool,” she said. “I’m alone. I’m not here to raid or anything. Just looking for help.” A pause. “I’m a cop.”

  As if that meant anything. She wasn’t all that sure if it meant much before the world fell off its hinges, and a badge sure as shit carried no weight now. Not authority, anyway. Reassurance, maybe, and that’s what she was hoping for.

  Nothing.

  She mounted the steps. They all creaked. So did the floorboards on the porch. The house was old, probably mid to late nineteenth century. It had seen a lot, felt a lot, and even after it was all falling apart the place had offered shelter to someone. Recently, too. She shifted her Glock to a one-hand grip and tried the door handle with the other. It turned and there was a faint click, then the door swung inward. The hinges, at least, had been oiled. Dez reclaimed her two-hand grip and followed the barrel of the automatic into the house.

  As soon as he moved from vestibule to living room she knew that she wouldn’t find anyone alive in there.

  There was a breeze blowing through the downstairs and as she moved forward it became clear that the back door was open. She moved through the downstairs all the way to the kitchen, finding no one but seeing signs everywhere that told her this place had been occupied very recently. The fireplace held the coals of a dying fire, and a pot had been hung there filled with soup that had boiled over. Eight sleeping bags on the living room floor. Empty cans, stacked supplies, some weapons—baseball bats, an empty shotgun that had clearly been used as a club, an axe with a notched blade—but no people.

  There was blood, though.

  Red and black. Human and dead. Furniture was pushed out of place, plates were broken. There had been a fight here. But when Dez checked the back door it didn’t show signs of having been forced. She retreated to the living room and studied the scene, looking at it as a crime scene, reading it. Two of the sleeping bags were stained with blood, and all of them were messy in a room that looked to be otherwise well-maintained. When she peered at one of the bags she saw two kinds of stains. The brown stains were old dried blood. Human blood. But spattered atop those were stains in which the white parasitic threadworms still wriggled. The adjoining sleeping bag was stained with blood that had not yet had time to turn brown. It was splashed red. She looked around and found the trashcan filled with old, stained bandages.

  The scene made sense. It was a tragic story, but a familiar one. One of this party had been wounded and they’d done their best to patch the injuries, but either the wound was a bite, or the damage was so severe that it became fatal. In either case the wounded person had died in his or her sleep, then revived as a monster. It attacked the person sleeping in the next bag, and from there it was a slaughter. Badly handled, badly fought, and ultimately lost.

  And yet…

  She walked over and looked at the spilled blood on the floor. There were scuffs in it, the marks of sneakers. Mostly the balls of the feet, though, as if whoever wore those sneakers was running through the house and out the back door, leaving it open.

  The dead do not run.

  Dez stepped out onto the back porch and saw the bloody sneaker prints heading off into the woods. The scuffling footprints of the dead followed, and Dez had no way of knowing if the runner had escaped. Or had she been one of the zombies she’d killed to get in here? Some of them looked fresh, and Dez figured them to be owners of those other sleeping bags. And the big farmer had been the house’s original owner.

  Jesus.

  She went back inside, closed and locked the kitchen door, and spent forty minutes prowling through the empty house. There were moldering corpses upstairs in the beds, which explained why the squatters hadn’t settled up there. Each of the corpses had a bullet hole in their head and old bite marks on their withered flesh. Dez kept her mouth and heart hard as she went through closets and the attic. The place was a treasure trove of supplies. Blankets, boots, scarves and coats, tools, and more. And downstairs there were the supplies amassed by the squatters. Plenty of food. Too much for them to have carried, so Dez figured they’d raided the pantry here and maybe neighboring farms. There was enough food here to feed her busload of kids for a month. And the well-water was pure.

  The building itself was sound, and she knew she could reinforce it and defend it. All she had to do now was go back and get the kids. Convincing them to leave the bus was either going to be a very easy or a very hard sell. Some were too terrified to leave; others were too terrified to stay.

  She thought about it as she ate some Spam straight out of the can—having opened it with the key they conveniently attached to the bottom—and washed it down with a quart of fresh water.

  Dez was just checking her gear for the trip back to the bus when she heard the scream. She raced onto the porch, gun up and out, and saw a teenage girl break from the shadows beneath the trees. Blond hair whipped behind her as she ran, and Dez looked for the pursuing dead. Saw none.

  Instead she saw a monstrous dog come charging out of the woods, and behind it was a big and brutal looking man. The girl fled from them, screaming, terrified, making for the farmhouse. The range was too great for accuracy with a handgun, so Dez knelt, braced her elbows on the porch rail to steady her aim, sighted on the dog.

  And fired.

  The shot banged, loud and hollow in the air. The dog flinched but kept running. Dez fired again. And again.

  Then, with a terrible cry of animal pain, the pursuing hound crashed forward and down, rolling over and over among the tobacco plants until it came to a stop. It lay there, panting and howling, its side pumping bright red blood.

  Dez snapped off three more shots at the man, but he dove for cover.

  The girl, startled by the shots, stopped in her tracks and looked wildly around. Dez rose up and waved frantically at her.

  “Over here! Come on, I’ll cover you! Run…run!”

  The girl ran.

  ~17~

  The Ranger and the Dog

  Joe Ledger lay flat and tried to melt into the dirt as bullets punched through the air above him. The farmhouse was sixty yards away from him
and he was certain whoever was shooting at him had a handgun. At that range a pistol is usually better thrown than fired, but this son of a bitch was dishearteningly good.

  Shit.

  Baskerville whimpered piteously, and that broke Ledger’s heart. He loved dogs more than he liked people, and Baskerville was a friend. If the shooter had killed his dog, then Ledger was going to paint the walls with hair and blood. He drew his Sig Sauer and tried to aim through the weeds and wildly overgrown tobacco plants, but his view was almost completely blocked. To get better line-of-sight he’d have to move to higher ground, and that was likely to earn him a bullet in the brainpan.

  Which is when he heard the shooter yell out.

  “Over here! Come on, I’ll cover you! Run…run!”

  It was a woman’s voice. Angry, scared. Desperate.

  Joe laid his gun down, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled as loud as he could. “Stop shooting,” he roared. “I’m not trying to hurt the kid.”

  There was a pause that lasted two full seconds and then two quick shots that struck the small ridge of dirt behind which he lay.

  Christ this woman could shoot.

  Then there was a longer pause. Either the woman was swapping out her magazine or she was conserving her bullets. Only people in old, bad movies and video games had an unlimited number of rounds. In the real world when you ran out of ammunition you couldn’t go to the store and buy more. And carrying a lot of bullets was problematic because they were heavy as hell.

  It would be a very nice thing if this crazy woman had fired her gun dry.

  After a full minute of silence, Ledger risked raising his head. He did it very fast and took a quick-look, then ducked back down and let his mind process what he’d seen in that fragment of a second. The farmhouse, the field, bunch of dead zoms, a well, and…

  And nothing else.

  No running girl, no woman.

  Baskerville whimpered again.

  “Screw it,” muttered Ledger and he began crawling toward his dog. He kept his gun in one hand, though. If the woman wanted to turn an ambush into a war, then that was on her. Ledger wasn’t a chauvinist. He’d blow a hole in anyone who wanted to kill him.

  God help her if the dog died.

  He crawled, teeth clenched, a furnace igniting in his chest.

  ~18~

  Rachael Elle

  A movement outside the window, barely visible through the grime on the glass, caught Rachael’s attention, and she held up her hand to gesture to the children to stay quiet. The movement was too fast to be an Orc she thought, but it was hard to tell. Drawing one of her daggers, she crept silently back towards the front of the bus, crouching low, peering around the corner, waiting for whatever or whoever was out there to approach the door.

  There was definitely someone out there, and Rachael was about 90% sure whoever was there… was alive. Now the question became was it someone that was looking to help them, or hurt them. Rachael had met enough people in this world so far to realize that it was about a fifty-fifty shot, and she didn’t want to take that chance, not with kids at risk.

  She could hear the person outside kicking a body of an Orc towards the back of the bus, and Rachael used their distraction to maneuver herself carefully down the steps of the bus, keeping herself close to the wall.

  Whoever it was obviously didn’t know that there were living people on the bus, or at least didn’t know who was on the bus, so it couldn’t be Miss Dez or anyone with the children out there. So it meant a stranger. A new player had entered the game, and Rachael didn’t like new, unseen NPCs she knew nothing about.

  If Brett knew all the stupid things I was doing today… she mused to herself, trying to keep her humor as a cover for her deep down terror. Taking a sharp intake of breath, she stepped out the door.

  The first step out the door told her a number of different things.

  One…the person outside was definitely alive, and her gut instinct was telling her that he definitely was not there to help them or anyone else he came across

  Two…the person outside really wasn’t expecting a superhero to come walking off of the school bus.

  Three...she really needed to do a better job at analyzing a situation before just jumping out into a battle. That was going to get her killed.

  The guy seemed startled to see her at first, though the nasty look on his face quickly melted into a neutral one, though still unsettling to look at to Rachael. He seemed like he was trying to wear a mask that didn’t quite fit him, and she didn’t like the vibe he was giving off.

  Rachael was a big fan of gut instincts.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, her dagger in her hand at her side, ready to strike if needed, but non-threatening.

  “Survivors!” He feigned excitement, though Rachael’s gut response didn’t lessen any. “There’s more of us! I’ve been looking for more survivors, looking for anyone. I’ve been on my own for so long…” He tried to look pitiful. “Do you have any food? Any water? There are more of you? How many are you?”

  “Okay, that’s more questions than I can answer at once!” She faked a smile and a laugh, trying to come across as non-threatening, naïve, trying to figure out what he wanted, why her gut told her not to trust him.

  “Here, let me get you some water first,” she started, turning her back a little, pretending to duck her head.

  He took the bait, jumping at her with his knife out, trying to attack her. Rachael was ready, though, and she swung her dagger around to block his, before using his surprise to push him backwards with a strong shove.

  They stared at each other for a moment, the girl in the leather warrior armor and the man with a nasty looking hunting knife in his hand and an even nastier look on his face, and Rachael cautiously adjusted the grip of her elven dagger which, compared to his, looked like a letter opener.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the man snarled at her, and the sarcastic part of Rachael that came out when she was very afraid threatened to give him a stern Captain America-like comment about his language.

  Not the time, Rachael, she chided herself, pulling her focus back on the man in front of her. “I could ask you the same thing, but I don’t want to know. So how about you just walk away and go back where you came from.”

  The man lunged at her mid-sentence, swinging his knife around and slicing it dangerously close to her breastplate. Jumping backwards just in time, she nearly stumbled over an Orc’s limp arm, catching herself on the side of the bus for balance before bringing her dagger up to block his second attack.

  It had been a long time since Rachael had fought against someone who could fight back with a weapon, and suddenly she wished she was fighting against an Orc instead of a person. There was no way she was going to be able to beat a man with obvious experience in a knife fight. All of her fighting experience was Player vs Player LARP fighting, and foam weapons and fake damage points had far less at stake.

  Using her free hand she pulled the second dagger out of its sheath on her belt, getting lower into a fighting stance. If she could block him with the one knife, maybe she could strike him before he got her. It was the only thought she could come up with, and she hoped it would work.

  All she knew was that she needed to stop him. The little voice in the back of her head was telling her that she needed to keep him as far away from the children as possible.

  He was fast, though, and she was barely able to keep up with blocking his attacks, let alone strike him with one of her own. Dancing away from one of his slices, she ducked quickly, using one knife to block his blade from hitting her, and swinging her other one down to slice across his side, before pulling a few steps back, trying to focus on a strategy. There had to be something.

  The man with the knife was coming closer, focused on her with a terrifying furor in his eyes. He was pissed, and that was both good and bad. Bad that he now was going to be fighting with more anger at her drawing blood, even if just a small cut. But good, because angry people
make mistakes, make stupid decisions. She’d learned that long ago in LARP.

  He swung again and Rachael ducked, catching his incoming blade with her dagger and slicing her secondary dagger across his arm, this time drawing a deep gash. He cried out, dripping his dagger in pain, which Rachael kicked to the side quickly, her daggers still out in front of her, ready to strike.

  She didn’t want to strike an unarmed man, didn’t want to kill anyone, but she would if he forced her to.

  But he was pissed, spitting in anger as he backed up, clutching his bleeding arm. “Fuck you, bitch,” he snarled, eyes burning her with an angry fire. “You better not be here when I get back with my friends, you better run fast, because if I find you, I’m going to love every moment of killing you. And it’s not going to be fast or fun for you.”

  And then he was gone into the woods, and Rachael let her weapons drop to her sides, the threat still lingering in the air.

  Oh, this was really not good.

  ~19~

  Dez Fox

  When Dez first yelled, the girl froze for a moment, caught in a moment of obvious doubt and confusion. The man and dog that chased her were one thing, and the farmhouse seemed to be a destination she thought might be safe. Or, safer, at least, than being caught by the blond-haired thug and his mutt. But Dez’s voice was coming from the farmhouse and it was clearly a woman’s voice.

  It took the girl time to process that and make a decision. Maybe one full second.

  And then like a startled deer she was running again. Moving fast and well on long legs. Dez fired four more shots at the spot where the big man had dropped. He heard him yelling something but couldn’t hear him and didn’t care what kind of bullshit he was trying to sell. The girl shot a terrified look over her shoulder, saw nothing, but ran as if there was a whole pack of killers on her tail. She blew past the well, ran up to the foot of the porch stairs and skidded to a stop, panting, face running with sweat, eyes wild.