Jonathan Maberry - Fire & Ash

Benny sighed. “I know.”

Saint John sank slowly to his knees. But as he did so he looked up at Benny, and for just a moment there was a smile on his face. In that instant something passed between them. Benny felt it, though he could never really define it. It was some message, some shared awareness. And as that message was shared, Benny felt the great boiling hatred in his chest burn down to a cinder and then wink out. And he realized that he no longer even hated this man. All there was left inside him was pity.

“I hope you find peace in the darkness,” said Benny.

Saint John nodded.

He closed his eyes.

And drove the knife to the hilt into his own heart.

On a late summer afternoon Benny Imura sat on the back porch of his house. He sipped from a tall glass of iced tea and set it down next to a plate on which was a half-finished slice of apple pie. Dragonflies flitted among the sunflowers, and a mockingbird stood on a branch and told lies in a dozen different voices.

The house was on a green slope and there was a big oak tree in the yard, but the town wasn’t Mountainside.

Mountainside was gone.

The oil-soaked houses had been left to rot. There were some sketchy plans to destroy them with controlled burns, but that was someone else’s problem. Morgie and Chong were involved, so it would probably go wrong in one way or another.

Benny’s new house was a gift from the Nine Towns.

They still called themselves that. Nine Towns. Haven was being rebuilt. And Benny’s new town was just being built too. The sound of hammers and saws was constant, and there was a sense of “aliveness” to it, though Benny wasn’t sure that was a real word. He’d have to ask Chong.

This new town had the awkward and unpopular name of Reclamation. It was the kind of name thought up by a committee, and it made the town sound like a landfill.

New names were a big thing.

Haven was going to be New Haven.

And the Ruin?

This part of it, the area that stretched from the Nine Towns to the far side of Yosemite, was going to be called Tomsland. That was a name Benny liked a lot.

Movement across the yard nudged Benny out of his reverie, and he saw Nix Riley open the garden gate. She wore a pretty yellow dress with lots of flowers stitched onto it. She did not carry Dojigiri . She had no weapons at all with her. Benny’s sword was on the porch, laid across the arms of the rocker. He still carried it once in a while.

When he went out into the Ruin.

No. He had to start using its new name.

When he went out into Tomsland .

Nix carried a basket that she held out to him. Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She never tried to hide the two scars — the long one that ran from hairline to jaw, and the smaller one that bisected it. He loved that about her.

“What’s in the basket?”

“Muffins,” she said. “Blueberry.”

Benny cocked an eyebrow. “Who made them?”

“I did. First batch ever.”

“Really?” He sniffed them. They smelled like old socks.

“You don’t have to eat them,” she said. “They’re nasty.”

“Then why—?”

“They’re a peace offering.”

He took another sniff. “You trying to start a war?”

“No,” she said with a shy smile, “I’m trying to ask you out.”

It took him a couple of beats to catch up to that. “You… wait, I’m sorry… what?”

“Should I say it slower?”

“It might help,” he admitted.

“I would like to ask you out on a date.”

“But… I thought the agreement was that when this was all over, I’d ask you out.”

Nix folded her arms. “Um… it is over, and you haven’t asked me out.”

“Yet,” he said.

“At all,” she said.

“I was going to get around to it.”

“The world could end before you got around to it.”

“Could have,” he said. “But it didn’t.”

“No,” she agreed, smiling. “It didn’t.”

The next afternoon Benny and his friends sat at a picnic table whose timbers were so green that pine sap stuck to their plates. It was a party — the first American Nation Day that would be celebrated by the people in the Nine Towns. Most of those citizens were still in some aspect of shock, and Benny could sympathize. The day before Saint John brought his reaper army to California, all those people thought that they were the last people left alive on earth, the last survivors. None of them knew about the American Nation, or the drive to reclaim and rebuild the world. They didn’t know that an army was out there fighting back the hordes of zoms — fighting, and winning. They didn’t know that science hadn’t died with the old world, and that a cure to the zombie plague existed.

There were so many things they didn’t know. Or… hadn’t known. Now they had to make as dramatic a readjustment to their lives, their worldview, their expectations of the future as they had when the dead first rose. Now it was the living who were rising to conquer the world.

It was all so strange, even to Benny.

There was a world again, a real world; and that world had a future.

Benny looked around at all the people who’d come to the party. He saw Fluffy McTeague — for once without his pink carpet coat — talking with Captain Strunk and Sally Two-Knives. Solomon Jones was grilling steaks on a fire pit made from an old fifty-gallon drum that had been split down the middle. The two surfer dudes, J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, had started a make-it-up-as-you-go game called “goofball,” and they had half the kids in town running around and laughing.

Mayor Kirsch and his wife, Fran, sat at the head table, drinking beers and listening to Captain Joe Ledger explain how he’d survived that day after the fall of Sanctuary. Benny had heard the story. There wasn’t a whole lot to it — zoms, even the fast ones, can’t eat through a helicopter. The ranger simply waited them out, chowing on military-issue ready-to-eat meals and singing old blues songs until the staff from the blockhouse were sufficiently recovered to rescue him. It was a long five days. He said that the hardest part of it all was the fact that neither he nor Grimm could step outside to relieve themselves. Joe said the helicopter had to be cleaned out with a high-pressure hose.

The zoms at Sanctuary were all gone, collapsed into rotting heaps as the mutagen burned through them.

At the same table, Dr. McReady and Colonel Reid sat and listened and nodded. The doctor had brought enough of the mutagen to give the Freedom Riders a lot of work — spreading the chemical and then dealing with the faster, though doomed, zoms. Everyone’s best guess was that the zoms would be a problem for years. Maybe decades. There were, after all, seven billion zombies in the world. No one was dropping their guard. There would still be gates and fences and doors and fear.

It would end one day, though.

As for the infected like Chong… there was heartbreak there. McReady was working on a real cure, but who knew how long that would take. Or if there ever would be a cure. Until then, Chong took his pills and he lived a careful life. But he lived.

The colonel must have felt Benny’s eyes on her, because she turned and looked at him. They nodded to each other.

Before leaving Sanctuary, Nix had asked the colonel not to forget the people in the Nine Towns. It was as much a challenge as a plea, and the officer had risen to it. Two days after the surrender of the reapers, the morning sky had been shaken by the thunder of helicopter rotors.

Forty of them.

Colonel Reid’s people had managed to fix one of the radios, and she’d sent an urgent call to the nearest American Nation base. Her call was passed all the way up to the commander of the army and then to the president, Sarah Fowler. Reid had begged for help to stop the reapers from destroying the Nine Towns. For help in protecting citizens of the new nation, even those who had become disenfranchised and almost forgotten. There was almost a full day of inaction as the highest ranking military advisers and the political advisers wrangled over it. But in the end, Reid’s plea hit its mark. The Air Cavalry was dispatched. Had things worked out differently, those helicopters would still have arrived too late to save Mountainside, but they would have been able to save the other towns.