Fire & Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  Joe winced, but gave another nod. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. But we still have to try and find her. Now sit back and enjoy the ride. None of you have flown before, right? Well—you’re going to love this, I guarantee it.”

  They did not.

  Lilah was the only one who didn’t throw up.

  61

  THE MOTION OF THE HELICOPTER changed, and Joe called them all to join him. Green-faced, sweating, nauseous beyond imagining, Benny and the others unbuckled and staggered forward to crowd through into the tiny cockpit. Joe chased Grimm out of the copilot seat so Nix could sit there, and the mastiff sulked his way back into the main cabin. Benny and Lilah jammed the doorway.

  “Welcome to the badlands of Death Valley,” said Joe as if he was happy about it. “Zabriskie Point is dead ahead.”

  Below them was a landscape that Benny thought looked like the surface of some alien world. Stretches of barren ridges, wind-sculpted badlands, deep hollows cut into the terrain by millions of years of erosion, and the black mouths of caves carved by wind into the sides of grim mountains. Here and there were desperate splashes of color from hardy trees and shrubs that even this hostile wasteland could not kill.

  “This makes Nevada look like a rain forest,” observed Nix. “Guess the name isn’t ironic.”

  “And there’s not much out here. California State Route 190 cuts through this area, but that was mostly used by people who wanted to get through this territory as quickly as possible,” said Joe. “No towns, almost no animals, no—”

  “Whoa,” said Benny suddenly, “what’s that?”

  Joe looked where he was pointing, and his eyebrows rose in surprise. “Well, well, well . . . Isn’t that interesting as all hell?”

  Half a mile ahead there was an unnaturally flat shelf of rock set among the higher reaches of the rippled sedimentary rock. As Joe steered the helicopter toward it, they could see that it was paved with concrete. The surface was cracked and overgrown by some determined but leafless creeper vines. A symbol was painted on the shelf. A big circle with a capital letter H had long ago been painted in the center.

  “That’s a helipad,” said Joe. “A landing pad for helicopters.”

  “I thought you said there was nothing out here,” said Nix.

  “I did.”

  Benny nodded to the helipad. “So . . . what on earth is that doing out here?”

  “Guess we’re going to find out.”

  They rounded the end of a wall of eroded rock and hovered a hundred feet above the shelf. There were foot trails running down into the badlands, but no visible road and no buildings or structures.

  “Weird,” said Benny.

  Joe consulted his instruments. “That helipad is dead center of the coordinates. This is definitely where McReady’s team was headed.”

  “You said they probably took a small plane here,” said Nix. “Could a plane have landed on that?”

  “No. Only another helicopter . . .” Joe’s words trailed off. As they continued to swing around, they could see down the slope on the far side. It was a sharp drop of hundreds of feet. Halfway down, smashed in among spikes of jagged rock, was the wreckage of another helicopter. Most of the wreckage was twisted into meaningless shapes, but as if to mock them, a flat section of the hull lay on a smaller shelf in plain view. And painted on the side, faded by a year and a half of harsh sun and wind, was the flag of the American Nation.

  “Oh God,” gasped Nix.

  Benny said, “No one could have lived through that.”

  “It’s a wreck,” said Joe, “but let’s not read too much into it yet. We don’t know if it crashed when they got here or sometime later. Those crags are inaccessible. If anyone died in that thing, their zoms would probably still be trapped there.”

  Nothing moved, however.

  Joe brought the helicopter back up to the level of the helipad. The rear wall of the shelf was flat, but there was a ring of cracked boulders around the shelf, some as big as two-story houses.

  “What’s that?” asked Lilah, pointing to the rear corner of the shelf.

  A smile appeared slowly on Joe’s face. As he drifted closer, they could all see it. The object was eight feet high and five feet wide, and though it was caked with dust and clots of dirt, it was clearly made from solid steel.

  “An air lock,” breathed Benny.

  “An air lock,” agreed Joe.

  Nix turned a suspicious eye on him. “That’s just like the one at Sanctuary. Is there another lab hidden in there? Did you know about this?”

  He shook his head. “If so, then it’s news to me.”

  “More secrets?” asked Benny.

  “Too many secrets,” Joe said with a slow nod. “Too damn many secrets.”

  “Is Dr. McReady in there?” asked Lilah.

  No one answered. The door looked like it hadn’t been opened in years.

  “Well . . . on the upside,” said Benny, “at least there aren’t any zoms.”

  But once again the day seemed to want to mock them. A figure stepped from the shadows of a tall, rocky cliff and glowered up at the helicopter. Another joined it. And another. They moved out of the cave mouths and crawled from under the branches of large shrubs until at least a dozen of them stood in a cluster, hands reaching upward to the noise of the rotors.

  “That,” said Joe, “is not good.”

  Some of the zoms were dressed in the rags of what had once been military uniforms. One wore a bloodstained lab coat. A few wore black clothes with red tassels and white wings painted on their chests. Only three of the zoms were dressed in ordinary clothes.

  “This is really not good,” Joe muttered.

  Nix pointed to the zom in the white lab coat. The distance was too great to see the creature’s face, but the thing was clearly a woman.

  “Oh no . . . is that Dr. McReady?”

  Joe worked the joystick to bring the helicopter down, which made the engine whine increase. The zoms clawed at the sky as if they could tear the machine down and crack it open to get at the sweet meat inside. The ranger leveled off and hovered, then took a pair of binoculars from a holster beside his chair and peered through them. They all watched him, seeing the muscles locked in tension beneath his clothes. After a full minute, that tension eased by a few strained degrees.

  “No . . . that’s Dr. Jones. Merry, I think her name was.”

  Merry, thought Benny. What a sad name for a creature that would spend eternity down there, perpetually hungry, lingering in dried flesh long past the point where life had any meaning.

  Joe handed the glasses to Nix and nodded toward where the Teambook was tucked under the dashboard. At his direction she found the page for Dr. Merry Jones and confirmed the identity of the zom in the lab coat. Then she flipped through the other pages and identified three of the soldiers—Engebreth, Hollingsworth, and Carr. The others were reapers. She began to close the book when Lilah stopped her.

  “Go back,” she said urgently, and as Nix fanned back through the pages, Lilah thrust a hand out and stabbed one photo with her finger. “There.”

  It was the page for Sergeant Louisa Crisp.

  “What about her?” asked Joe.

  “There, she’s down by that tall rock,” said Lilah. “See her?”

  “That girl’s a reaper,” began Nix, but Benny cut her off.

  “No . . . look at her.”

  They did, their eyes flicking back and forth between the reaper who stood at the edge of the pack and the face of the staff sergeant in the Teambook. The thick black hair was gone, but the woman had a very distinct Native American face. She looked a lot like Deputy Gorman from the town watch, who was full-blooded Navajo.

  “That’s her,” Lilah said with certainty.

  “Damn,” breathed Joe. “Louisa Crisp was the squad leader for Field Team Five. It was her job to protect the science team.”

  Nix shook her head. “But she became a reaper. Why?”

  Joe didn’t answer that. His fi
nger rested lightly on a plastic trigger mounted on the control joystick. “Listen to me,” he said. “We have to set down and try to get through that air lock. That’s going to take time, and it’s going to leave us exposed. We have two choices. We trust to cadaverine and hope that it works on them. Smells don’t travel as well in air this dry.”

  “Or . . . ?” asked Benny with a sinking heart. He knew where this was going.

  “Or we eliminate the threat here and now.”

  “God,” breathed Nix. “We can’t just kill them. They’re victims. . . .”

  “We all know what they are, Nix,” said Lilah. “But I don’t see any real choice.”

  But something else was bothering Benny, something beyond the ethical dilemma. “Wait a sec,” he said. “Joe, can this thing get closer to the ground? I mean, can you like . . . skim just above the ground from one side of the clearing to the other? Maybe get almost to the ground near them and then sort of—I don’t know what to call it—drift away from them. Not up, but across the ground. Can you do that?”

  The ranger started to ask why, then smiled and nodded, getting Benny’s meaning. “Let’s give that a try.”

  Joe lowered the helicopter so that the wheels bumped against the rocky ground ten yards from the cluster of zoms. The zoms instantly broke into a flat-out run, screaming like demons, hands tearing the air as they swarmed forward. Joe didn’t bother to drift backward and instead rose to fifty feet and hovered.

  The truth was obvious.

  They were all R3’s. Every last one.

  Joe slowly turned the Black Hawk to face the zoms, who had now stopped below the machine. Some of them tried jumping up to catch the helicopter, even though it was too far above them. The ranger curled his finger around the trigger.

  “You kids go back,” he suggested. “You don’t want to see this.”

  “No,” said Benny, “we don’t.”

  “Who would?” asked Lilah.

  Nix spoke some words very softly. It was a prayer they’d heard twice the day before they’d left town. First in one cemetery as the Houser family was buried, then in another cemetery as Zak Matthias, Charlie Pink-eye’s nephew, was put into the cold ground.

  A prayer for the dead.

  In the cabin behind them, Grimm tilted his big head and bayed like a hound from some old-time horror novel.

  As Joe opened fire with the thirty-millimeter chain guns, Benny thought he heard the big ranger murmur a single word.

  “Amen.”

  62

  THE BIG BLACK HAWK HOVERED above the scene of carnage. Where a minute ago there had been a cluster of R3 zoms, the fastest and most dangerous kind, now there was torn meat and broken bones. The chain guns had literally torn the dead apart.

  “God almighty,” breathed Nix.

  Joe’s face was set and grim as he put the machine down on the center of the helipad. The whirling blades threshed the gun smoke and scattered it to the dry desert wind, and blew most of the body parts over the edge. He cut the engine.

  “Okay,” Joe said, “gear up.”

  Lockers in the back of the helicopter were filled with protective clothing. Thin leather jackets covered with wire mesh and metal washers, arm and leg pads, and gauntlets for their hands. Helmets, too, with wire grilles. All the joints were flexible and the stuff was surprisingly lightweight. Joe showed them a special feature.

  “Will this take long?” Benny asked. “Brother Peter said we had until tomorrow night to—”

  “Let’s worry about Brother Peter tomorrow,” said the ranger. “We’ve enough to do today.”

  But Nix said, “Will he really attack Sanctuary?”

  “He can try,” said Joe. He tapped the minigun that was mounted on tracks inside the door. “Knives and axes don’t stack up well against a rate of fire of six thousand rounds per minute.”

  “Rockets, too,” said Lilah enthusiastically.

  “Rockets, too.” Joe shook his head. “If Brother Peter shows up tomorrow, we’ll explain the facts of life to him.”

  The ranger knelt down and buckled on the rest of Grimm’s armor. The dog’s helmet was set with daggerlike blades, and spikes sprouted all up and down the mastiff’s powerful body.

  “Note to self,” murmured Benny, “don’t hug the puppy.”

  Grimm agreed with a big wet glupp.

  Lilah dropped the magazine of her Sig Sauer, checked the rounds, and slapped it in place. Joe did the same. Nix, too.

  “Benny,” called Joe, “you want a handgun?”

  “No thanks. I’m not a very good shot.”

  In truth Benny didn’t like guns. Tom had been shot to death. Benny had no moral objection to Nix and the others having them; no, his decision was entirely personal. He was afraid that if he carried one, then he would be tempted to use it too often, to use it to solve problems rather than finding other solutions. That view was entirely his own, and he never shared it with Nix or tried to convince anyone that it was the only viewpoint or even the best. It was his decision.

  His sword? That was different. Perhaps it was the old belief that a samurai’s soul lives inside the steel of the sword that cast that weapon into a different aspect in his mind. This sword had once been Tom’s; now it was his. The sword was a close-range weapon; it required great skill. And despite the grim purpose for which it was created, there was an elegance and beauty about it.

  They clustered by the door.

  “This is how we’re going to do it,” said Joe. “I lead, you follow. Everybody keeps their eyes open. Keep chatter to a minimum. If anything happens or if we get separated, head back here to the chopper. There are enough supplies and weapons here for a couple of weeks. But let’s not need those supplies, okay? We stick together. We all go in, we all come out, no surprises, no drama. Got it?”

  “Warrior smart,” said Lilah.

  “Warrior smart,” they echoed. Even Joe.

  He pulled the door open, and a blast of hot air blew into the cabin. Grimm leaped out first, his spiked armor clanking as he landed and immediately began sniffing the ground. Joe was next, and everyone else followed him out into blistering heat that made the desert around Sanctuary feel cool by comparison. Only Joe seemed unaffected by it.

  “Not bad for May,” he said. “Probably no more than 110. I was here in July once and it was 134.”

  Nix plucked at the fittings of her combat suit as she stepped down. “Couple of hours in this suit under that sun and we’ll be baked hams.”

  “Baked hams are juicy,” observed Benny, dropping down next to her. “We’ll be more like beef jerky.”

  The helipad was pocked with hundreds of bullet holes. Shell casings had rained down and gleamed amid the pieces of things that had once been zombies. There was no blood, but black muck was splashed everywhere. There was more of it than Benny had ever seen around a dead zom, and it seemed to ooze out of the torn tissue. When he bent to examine it, he saw tiny white specks, like pieces of thread, wriggling in the mess.

  Grimm suddenly barked at Benny, and Joe wheeled around sharply. “Don’t touch that!”

  “Not a chance,” said Benny, “but what is it? Looks like worms, but I’ve never seem worms in zoms before.”

  They all clustered around. “They’ve always been there,” said the ranger. “At least the eggs have. In most zoms the larvae die off after laying eggs. They go dormant right around the time the zoms stop decaying. Some hatch, but they burrow deep into the nerve and brain tissue. They keep the zoms alive—or alive-ish—but don’t ask me how. Something about proteins they excrete.”

  “Okay, eww,” said Benny.

  “These aren’t eggs,” said Nix. “These are worms, just like in the zoms Lilah and I fought.”

  “Exactly,” said Joe. “The R3’s, the fast zoms. The larvae are active in the fast zoms. In the wild boars, too. It’s part of the mutation the science team was studying.”

  “Are they contagious?” asked Nix, shying back from them.

  “Very,” said Joe.
“Not too bad if you get some on your skin and wipe it off fast, but if you get it in a mucous membrane . . . eyes, nose, mouth, an open wound . . .”

  He didn’t need to finish.

  Benny had a horrible thought. If Chong was infected, then those eggs—or larvae—were in his body too. He wanted to scream. That was why the scientist had asked him if Chong had gotten any fluids on him. He kept his thoughts to himself. It would be abominably cruel to share this with Lilah, and he hoped she wasn’t already thinking those thoughts. He even avoided looking at her, for fear she’d read his mind.

  They backed well clear of the black goo and followed Joe to the air lock. It was almost exactly like the one at Sanctuary, with a small glass-fronted box set into a recess beside the door. The hand-scan device—the geometry scanner—was dark, the glass cracked and filled with sand. Joe punched two buttons and placed his hand on the glass, but nothing happened. He used the butt of his pistol to knock out the glass in order to access the wires, but after fifteen minutes of connecting one wire to another he flipped them back into the recess with a disgusted grunt. Then he pounded on the door with the side of his fist.

  Nothing happened.

  “I thought you said that beating on the door doesn’t do any good,” observed Benny casually. “They can’t hear it inside.”

  Joe shot him a venomous look. “Ever fall off the side of a helipad into a bunch of jagged rocks?”

  “Point taken,” said Benny.

  “Now what?” asked Nix. “Do we go looking for a back door?”

  “No,” said Joe, turning to walk back to the Black Hawk, “now we try plan B.”

  Once they were all inside the bird, Joe fired up the engine and lifted the helicopter into the air. It drifted backward from the air lock, past the edge of the drop-off.

  “There’s an old military saying,” mused the ranger. “If at first you don’t succeed, call in an air strike.”

  “What’s that mean?” asked Benny.

  “It means, ‘Fire in the hole!’ ”

  Joe flicked a switch on the cyclic grip and depressed a trigger. There was sound like steam escaping from a boiler, and then something shot away from under the stubby wing of the helicopter. Benny had only a hundredth of a second’s glimpse of something sleek and black, and then the entire front of the cliff seemed to bloom into a massive ball of orange fire. Chunks of stone and metal flew everywhere, but Joe was already rising into a fast climbing turn, and nothing hit the Black Hawk. The helicopter swung all the way around until it faced the cliff again. The fireball crawled up the side of the cliff, chased by smoke and hot wind. Then it thinned and fell apart into sparks. Joe angled the helicopter to use the rotor wash to whip away the smoke that clung to the helipad.