Jonathan Maberry - Tooth & Nail

This was being warrior smart.

That’s what Benny’s brother Tom called it. Warrior smart. Using training and good judgment, courage and determination to confront an obstacle and overcome it. The same rules of common sense and education applied. Faced with anything from finding food in the wasteland, avoiding the zoms, preparing a battle plan, to escaping a trap, or defeating an enemy.

Warrior smart was a better way of thinking than the gung-ho stuff Ledger wanted to teach.

Grinning, he began moving slowly and carefully along the goat path.

His courage and confidence stayed with him for almost three hundred yards, but after the first time the walkway cracked beneath his shoes, he began to doubt the wisdom of this plan.

Half an hour later he was only a third of the way to the crest of this broken hill, but the ground looked like it was a thousand miles down. Hot sweat ran down his face, but cold sweat tickled in lines beneath his clothes. His breath came in ragged gasps, and he tried to drill his fingers into the rock wall.

Once, when he closed his eyes, he thought he heard his brother Tom speaking to him.

Yo! Boy genius, said Tom. Exactly what do you think you’re doing?

“Shut up,” breathed Benny. “I’m trying not to die here.”

How hard are you trying?

“Bite me.”

Not even if I was alive.

They both laughed, but the laughs were ghostly and unreal. What Benny really wanted to do was sob. The ache he felt for his lost brother was almost unbearable at times. He kept seeing a hole in the world in the shape of Tom Imura, and he couldn’t imagine anything filling it.

However, he believed that he was supposed to fill it. He was supposed to become the next Tom Imura.

Him.

Not some old guy who used to be a soldier back when something like that mattered. Before the dead rose and humanity fell. Now — and especially to Benny — meeting an actual soldier was like being handed proof that the old system was never good enough, that it wasn’t strong enough. That it wasn’t warrior smart enough. The world still ended.

Hot wind whistled past Benny, flapping the cuffs of his jeans and stinging his face.

“Tom…?” murmured Benny.

Yeah, kiddo?

“I… I don’t know if I can do it.”

Tom laughed. A gentle laugh. It’s easy. Put one foot in front of the other and try not to fall.

“That’s not what I meant.”

For a moment Benny could really see Tom, standing there in the shade under the big oak that anchored one corner of their gated yard back home. Tom standing with a cup of iced tea. The smell of hot apple pie wafting out through the kitchen window. Really good pie too. With walnuts and raisins, the way Tom made it. Sour apples so it wasn’t too sweet.

“That’s not what I meant,” Benny said again.

I know what you meant, answered Tom.

“Tom, I—”

But Tom was gone.

The wind howled as it tore through the crags of the red rock wall.

Benny took as deep a breath as he could and sighed it out. Took another. And another. And then he continued climbing.

It took almost forty minutes to reach the top of the crest. By the time he did, his body was trembling with fatigue and jumpy from the residue of adrenaline in his blood. He staggered away from the edge onto a flat section that was covered with withered grass and strewn with huge boulders left over from the last glacier. Benny took two wobble-kneed steps and then sank down onto his knees.

His exhaustion was the only thing that kept him alive as something whipped over his head.

Benny flung himself sideways, thinking that it was the goat lashing out with hooves to defend its territory.

It wasn’t a goat.

It wasn’t an animal.

The thing that had nearly cut his head off was a broad-bladed field scythe.

And it was held in the fists of a reaper.

All around him, others reapers were emerging from hiding places among the glacial boulders.

Samantha and Tiffany plunged into the woods, and a veil of cool shadows dropped behind them. They ran hard and fast along a deer path for fifty yards and then cut sharply left toward a small stream that fed the larger creek. They stepped into the ankle-deep water and kept going, moving slower now, making sure they didn’t splash water onto the dry mud along the banks or dampen any of the low-hanging leaves. There was no way to know if their pursuers understood anything about tracking, but the girls were long practiced at stealth and concealment.

Samantha bent close to Tiffany. “Who were those people? Who or what are reapers?”

The younger girl was gasping for breath after her exertions, but she managed to get out what she’d learned. “I… was hunting in the eastern woods… and I heard a scream. I went running, thinking the dead were attacking someone, but it wasn’t that at all. Three men in black were chasing an old couple — they had to be seventy or eighty. The old lady saw me and begged for help.” She looked at Samantha for approval. “What else could I do?”

“No, Tiff, you did the right thing, I’m sure,” Samantha assured her. “Then what happened?”

Tiffany quickly told the tale. The old couple were the last of a small group of survivors who had been living in an old shopping mall. They barely had enough to eat, but they were safe from the dead. Then the people in black and red — the reapers — broke into the mall and just started killing everyone.

“Why?” asked Samantha sharply.

“That’s just it… they didn’t give any explanation. They kept yelling things about someone named Thanatos and about sending everyone into the darkness. Crazy stuff like that. The old couple and a few others escaped, but they were chased. They’d survived on the road, constantly heading west toward the mountains and forestlands, but the reapers picked them off one by one. Or they sent packs of the dead after them.”

“How?”

“The old man said that the reapers made up some kind of chemical stuff that keeps the dead from attacking them. They dip pieces of cloth into it and tie the cloth around their ankles and like that.”

Samantha nodded. “The red tassels,” she said. “But how do they make the zombies do what they want?”

“The old man thinks they use dog whistles.”

“But how does—?”

“The dead can hear it. Certain calls make the dead come to them, other calls make them go away. So, I guess they use the whistles to, I don’t know, steer them? Crazy, isn’t it?”

“It’s smart,” said Samantha. “Really smart.”

There was a sound in the woods and they both stiffened, ready to run or fight, but it was only a couple of zebras. More zoo escapees. The striped animals turned to where the girls hid, sniffed the air, and then whinnied in irritation and trotted away.

“Why were these reapers chasing you?”

Tiffany flushed. “Well, what I left out was how I had the chance to talk to the two old folks.”

“Tell me.”

It was a simple thing to say, but Samantha knew that there was a lot behind it. There’s always more to something than what it seems.

What Tiffany said was plain and honest and brutal. “They were trying to kill those two old people, so I killed them.”

Samantha studied Tiffany’s eyes. There were ghosts there, moving from one room of her mind to another. The reapers might have deserved the fate they got, but Tiffany would still carry the memory of what she’d done — what she’d been forced to do — for the rest of her life. Samantha saw similar ghosts when she looked in the mirror.

It made her wonder if the reapers were similarly haunted by the terrible things they were doing. Why, in fact, were they raiding camps and killing innocent folks? In a world where there was almost no one left, it was bad enough killing in defense of the innocent or oneself; but to kill for the joy of it, or for some other equally crazy reason, was a sin.