Jonathan Maberry - Fire & Ash

Only Nix remained silent, her eyes narrow and cunning.

“The other day,” said Benny, “when I was talking to Joe Ledger, he asked me how far I’d be willing to go to stop Saint John if he was coming after me and mine. He said that if I could look inside my own head and see the line that I won’t cross or a limit that’s too far, then Saint John will win.”

He turned to them.

“So, I guess I’m asking you guys the same thing. How far are we willing to go to stop Saint John?”

Nix pulled her journal from her pack and held it out to Benny. “As far as it takes,” she said.

They were five miles from Mountainside when they saw two men on horses standing in the middle of the road. Benny slowed his quad and stopped twenty feet from them. Both men wore jeans and carpet coats, and both had red sashes across their chests. The man on the left was the smaller of the two. He had dark skin and a shaved head and machetes slung from each hip. The man on the right was thick in the chest and shoulders, and the handle of a wooden bokken rose above his left shoulder, held in place by a cloth sling. The horses shied at the sound of the engine, so Benny cut the motor off. So did the others.

Everyone — the two men and the five of them — dismounted, and for a few fractured moments they stood in the road and stared at one another.

“Oh my God,” Benny heard Nix say.

He walked forward until he stood a foot away from the taller of the two. Close enough to shake hands. Close enough to punch.

He said, “Morgie.”

Morgie Mitchell looked at Benny, at the quads, at Chong and Lilah. At Riot.

At Nix.

Benny tensed against what was coming. Rage. Hard words. Fists.

Then Morgie suddenly gave a huge whoop of pure, unfiltered delight and swept Benny off the ground in a fierce bear hug.

“ You ugly monkey-banger! ” he bellowed. He swung Benny around in a circle, scaring the horses. Nix and Chong came running over. They wrapped their arms around Morgie. Nix kissed him. They spun in a crazy circle, ignoring all the stares and gasps and words.

Morgie tugged his arms free and then rewrapped everyone and pulled them close.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tears running down his cheeks. “Benny… Nix… I’m so sorry. I’m a stupid ape and you have every right to kick my ass.”

“Ughh… sure, okay… love to,” gasped Benny. “But… ouch .”

Morgie realized that the look on Benny’s face had gone from delight to pain, and he let him go. “Did I hurt you? Ah, jeez, I’m a freaking idiot. I—”

“No,” wheezed Benny, backing off and staggering. “I kind of have a knife wound thing going on, and I think I popped my stitches.”

“Knife wound?” echoed Morgie.

Benny’s knees buckled, and the other man darted forward and caught him.

“I never thought I’d see you again, Benjamin Imura,” said Solomon Jones. “I never thought we’d see any of you again.”

He helped Benny over to a fallen log and steadied him as he sat. The others clustered around. Benny could feel wet heat under his clothes.

“How are you here ?” asked Morgie, his face almost slack with confusion. “And how do you have cars ?”

“Not cars, Morg,” said Chong, clapping him on the back. “Quads.”

Morgie looked past him to the girl with the leather vest and scalp tattoos.

“Whoa,” he said. “Hello. Where’d you come from?”

“It’s a long story,” said Nix.

“Plenty of daylight for a good yarn,” said Solomon. “We have lots of time.”

Benny shook his head. “No,” he said. “We don’t.”

A terse hour later the story was told. The jet and the wrecked airplane. The mutagen and Archangel. Sanctuary and the American Nation. Joe Ledger. Slow zoms and fast. The Night Church and Saint John. Brother Peter. Benny, Nix, and Chong took turns telling different parts of it. Benny tried to read Solomon’s face, but the man was too practiced at keeping his emotions and reactions in check. Morgie was a different story — Benny could read everything on his face. Shock, doubt, horror, pity, and fear.

When they got to the part about Haven, Morgie looked like he’d taken a physical blow.

“My cousins are there,” he said. “They work in the feed and grain store.”

No one felt the need to correct the tense of that word to “worked.” It was an unnecessary cruelty.

Solomon straightened and walked a few paces away, his fists on his hips. “Three days, you say?”

“Maybe four,” said Chong. “It depends on how long they stay at Haven.”

“Forty thousand of them,” murmured Solomon. “Holy mother of God.”

“And all those zoms,” said Morgie. “The fence will never hold.”

“No,” agreed Nix. “But it might not matter.”

Solomon turned sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Nix touched Benny’s arm. “Tell him what you have in mind.”

Benny outlined his plan.

“No way, man,” said Morgie. “That’s crazy.”

“I know.”

“It’s impossible. No one would agree to that.”

“They could just do nothing and let the reapers kill them,” said Benny coldly.

Solomon sat down next to him on the log. He sighed.

“This is your plan?” he asked.

“Nix put a lot of twists in it.”

“It’s his plan,” said Nix, and Chong nodded. Even Lilah agreed.

“You’re just a kid, Benny,” said Solomon, but even he didn’t sound convinced. “How did you get from Mountainside to here?” It was a question about distance traveled that had nothing to do with geography or the length of time they’d been on the road. Everyone knew that. “Tom would never have thought of something like this.”

“I’m not Tom,” said Benny, and those were very hard words to say. Nix took his hand and squeezed his fingers.

“No,” said Solomon, “you’re not. And frankly, I don’t know who you are. You’re certainly not the kid who left Gameland a couple of months ago.”

“No,” said Benny. “He died somewhere out in the desert.”

His comment wasn’t meant as a joke, and no one took it that way.

Solomon ran a hand over his shaved head. “You really want to sell this plan to the people in town?”

“If they can think of another way to stop forty thousand reapers,” said Benny, “I’m all ears.”

“Even so…”

“You think I’m crazy?”

“I think this plan is crazy,” said Solomon. “But… I also think it’s brilliant. Brilliant in a way that hurts my heart, Ben. I can’t even guess what it’s doing to you.”

There was nothing to say to that.

Into the awkward silence, Chong nodded to the red sashes and asked, “What are those?”

Morgie brightened. “It’s for the Freedom Riders. We all wear them.”

“The what?”

Solomon answered that. “After Tom died, all of us who were out at Gameland — Sally Two-Knives, J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, Fluffy McTeague, the whole bunch of us — rode to Mountainside. We told everyone what happened. We found enough stuff in the rubble to prove that Gameland existed and that people from the towns were routinely going there to get in on the fights in the zombie pits. Easy to prove anyway, since a lot of town folks died out there and there was no other explanation for their absence from town. Mayor Kirsch called a meeting of the councils of all Nine Towns. I told the story again, and I brought a copy of the proposal that Tom had prepared.”

“What proposal?” asked Chong.

Benny said, “Tom kept submitting ideas for how to improve the town’s defenses and for creating a militia to patrol the Ruin. Like the town watch, but for outside the fence.”