Fire & Ash

by Jonathan Maberry

  He shook his head sadly.

  “Sanctuary is dead.”

  They all gaped at him.

  Benny got up in Joe’s face. “You brought us here, damn it. Why bring us to a graveyard?”

  Joe shook his head. “When I brought you here it was to save you from Saint John and Mother Rose. But we never let you inside. We kept you away from the plague until we could make sure you were uninfected. If it wasn’t for your friend Chong, I’d have taken you kids south to North Carolina. Now you’re inside the quarantine zone. You’re as trapped as everyone else at Sanctuary.”

  79

  SIX CORRIDORS AWAY, A TEAM of Red Brothers moved silently through the shadows, knives ready, eyes alert, killing anyone they met. Brother Peter ran with them, his face flushed with exertion, his clothes soaked with blood.

  Two soldiers tried to hold a doorway, but Brother Peter ordered a pair of reapers to rush them. The men smiled at the chance to serve their brother, serve their god, and leaped like heroes into the darkness. They let out earsplitting roars as they charged straight into a hail of bullets. The rounds chopped into them, splattering the walls with blood, turning the killers into dancing puppets and finally into inhuman rag dolls.

  But as they collapsed, Brother Peter, who had run up behind them at full speed, leaped over their corpses, a knife in each hand.

  The soldiers did not have time to scream.

  The rest of the Red Brothers swept through the doorway and into the lab complex. Gleaming machines, racks of sanitized instruments, cabinets of medicines, and banks of computers filled the room.

  One scientist was there.

  A woman, with gray hair tied in a bun and reading glasses that hung on a delicate chain around her neck.

  She dropped to her knees as Peter and the reapers fanned out around her.

  “Please,” she begged. “Don’t.”

  Brother Peter knelt in front of her. “Why not, my sister? Tell me.”

  Her eyes glittered with tears. “We’re so close,” she said. “We can cure this. We’re going to cure it. Please . . . just give us time. We can save everyone . . . please believe me.”

  “Believe you?” mused the reaper. “My sister, I do believe you. I believe with all my heart that you can cure the plague that has come so close to destroying all human life.”

  Her expression softened from abject horror to one of surprised hope. “Then you’ll leave us alone? You won’t hurt us? You won’t wreck everything?”

  He set one of his knives down and used that hand to caress her face. It was an act of such gentleness, such tenderness, that the woman actually closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against his rough palm.

  “I said that I believed you, my sister,” said Brother Peter as he leaned close and rested his cheek on the top of her head. “And may god have mercy on you for the sins you have committed here in this place of blasphemy.”

  Her eyes snapped wide.

  Not because of his words.

  They opened with shock because of the pain. She sagged back from him and looked down at the knife that Peter had buried in her chest.

  “May you find forgiveness in the formless eternity of the darkness.”

  “All praise to his darkness,” said the others.

  Peter looked around at the reapers and then at the machines that filled the room.

  “Destroy everything,” he said.

  80

  THE HORROR AND SADNESS OF what surrounded them was awful. On some level Benny had feared that the answer to the mystery of Sanctuary might be something like this, but he’d never allowed that thought to fully form. Now it was incontrovertible.

  “Can you do anything for them?” asked Nix as she shrugged out of her pack.

  “We can try,” said McReady, “but some of them . . . I think some of them have already gone too far over the line.”

  However, she stood frozen, as if shocked by her own words and all that they implied.

  Benny understood what she meant; he could see it. Some of the infected looked different from the majority of the poor people in the beds. The different ones had paler, grayer skin, and there was a quality missing from their eyes. All the infected had rage and hunger burning in their eyes, but for some that was all there was. Beyond those two things there was a blackness, like the empty shadows at the bottom of a ditch. Whatever indefinable quality that separated infected person from infected zom was gone, consumed by the insatiable appetites of the Reaper Plague.

  For the rest, though . . .

  The spark of humanity was still there. Flickering in a dark wind, but there nonetheless.

  McReady still stood unmoving.

  Then Lilah crossed to her in two quick strides, spun the woman, and slapped her across the face with shocking force. “Do something. Test the drug. Show me that it works before I give it to my town boy. Show me now or I’ll feed you to them.”

  It was a vicious threat, and Benny had no doubts at all that Lilah meant it. Joe took a step toward the doctor, and Benny and Nix moved in the same instant and put the tips of their swords against his chest.

  “Don’t,” warned Benny.

  Joe gently pushed the sword blades aside. “And don’t you forget who your friends are.” To McReady he said, “Lilah gave you an order, Monica—not a request.”

  McReady glared hot death at him, but then she snatched the backpack from Nix and hurried over to the bed of a woman who still had the spark of humanity.

  “Help me,” said McReady, and Lilah was right there. “Hold her head steady, yes, just like that. I need her mouth open. Good . . .”

  As Lilah followed the directions, McReady took two capsules from the bag and unscrewed them.

  “Normally we’d let her swallow the capsules and wait for digestion and absorption through the stomach mucosa . . . but we don’t have that time. Hold her—she’ll buck. The first dose is painful. The parasites in the body will fight it.”

  Lilah’s muscles bunched and flexed, and the woman’s head did not budge at all. McReady poured the powder into the gaping mouth.

  “Water,” she called, and Nix was there with a canteen. She dribbled some of the water into the woman’s mouth and then directed Lilah to force the jaws shut.

  Immediately the woman began thrashing ten times more frantically than before. Her muscles went rigid as iron, and her body arched and bucked with such force that Lilah had to lie across her to keep her from breaking her own bones. The screams were terrible, the worst Benny had ever heard. High, plaintive, piercing.

  “It’s not working,” said Nix. “God, it’s not . . .”

  Suddenly the woman went limp.

  It was as quick as a heartbeat. Her body flopped back against the bed and she lay there, staring blindly at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling with alarming rapidity as air puffed in and out between gritted teeth.

  They gathered around her bed, fists balled in tension, held breath burning in their chests.

  “Come on,” McReady muttered. “Come on . . . come on . . .”

  Then someone said, “God . . .”

  They all stared.

  The voice spoke again.

  “God . . . help me . . .”

  It was the woman.

  Wasted, drenched with sweat, covered with her own filth, ragged, and worn to a skeletal thinness.

  But it was a person who spoke.

  Not a monster.

  Joe snapped, “Everyone—two teams. Go.”

  It was impossible. It was a task assigned in hell. It was the hardest thing Benny had ever done. But as Joe went through the room and quieted those whose life spark had burned out, the rest of them worked in pairs—Lilah holding patients for McReady, Benny holding for Nix.

  It took forever.

  Forever . . . And with every second Benny thought about Chong.

  But they got two capsules into the mouths of every remaining person in the room.

  Soldiers.

  Scientists.

  Support sta
ff.

  Flight crew.

  One hundred and sixty-two people.

  It took forever.

  But they did it. Lilah kept saying to herself, It works. We can save my town boy. Over and over.

  By the time they were finished, Benny could hardly stand. Nix was weeping openly. So were many of the patients.

  Archangel was a miracle drug, they all knew that; but Benny had read too many science fiction novels where miraculous cures are instantaneous. He willed the infected to all suddenly snap out of it, for their eyes to clear, and for the thing that dwelled inside them to flee. Not all of them did. For some it was fast, for others amazingly slow. Reality is often harsher than fiction. Slower, and far less satisfying.

  For most of the infected the Archangel pills triggered shrieks and convulsions, and it filled their eyes with screaming madness.

  “You’re killing them!” Benny yelled.

  “Shut up,” said McReady. “It’s the parasites—they are programmed to defend themselves.”

  A few of the patients sagged back into panting semiconsciousness. Some turned aside and wept into their pillows, as if ashamed of the dark thoughts that had set up court in their heads. Some stared fixedly at the ceiling as if frozen in time.

  Some died.

  Benny began to untie one of the treated patients, but McReady stopped him, warning that a relapse, though unlikely, was possible. Observation for several hours would be needed.

  They gathered around the bed of one of the worst cases. A soldier who screamed and thrashed and finally collapsed back, his eyes and mouth open, his chest suddenly silent. McReady snatched up a medical chart that hung on a hook at the end of his bed. “This soldier was bitten on patrol. Looks like he was already pretty far gone when they gave him the metabolic stabilizer.”

  “Is he dead?” asked Lilah in a frightened voice.

  “Yes.”

  “We killed him,” breathed Nix.

  McReady looked sad. “He had almost transitioned to a reanimate. All the parasitic eggs in his system must have hatched. The strain . . . it was simply too much for him, and his heart gave out.”

  She examined the other fatalities.

  “This one had a preexisting heart condition,” she said, reading another chart. “And this one looks like she had a stroke.”

  Lilah said, “What about Chong? Will this . . . I mean will Archangel . . . ?”

  The doctor shook her head. “There’s no way to tell. It’s going to be different for every infected person. There will always be a risk.”

  She sighed and rubbed her tired eyes.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said. “I need to sit down and—”

  “No!” growled Lilah as she grabbed a bag of capsules and glared at McReady. “We have to find my town boy. Right now.”

  81

  BROTHER PETER ENTERED A LONG, dismal chamber lined on both sides with iron-barred cells. All the cells were empty save one. The thing in the cage glared out at him from behind strings of matted black hair. His eyes were dark and bottomless. Pale lips curled back to reveal wet teeth.

  “Hello, little brother,” he said. “Why do they have you in here? What sin have you committed that they’ve locked you away like an animal?”

  The thing in the cage growled. It was an animal sound with no trace of humanity. There were gnawed bones on the floor, and its metal water dish was battered and twisted.

  “Looks like he’s about to cross over,” observed one of the Red Brothers. “You want to leave him or let him go?”

  The creature in the cage murmured a single word. “Hungry . . .”

  “Still alive,” said the Red Brother.

  “Then he’s still a sinner,” said Brother Peter as he turned to leave. “Send him into the darkness. Do it quickly, then bring the rest of the Red Brothers. I want to make sure that the sinners in the medical center have been dealt with.”

  The reaper nodded and bowed as Brother Peter left.

  There was a ring of keys on the wall, and the reaper fetched them and tried several before finding the one that unlocked the right cell. He drew a long knife and opened the cell door.

  “Best to just let it happen, little brother,” said the reaper. “All your pain will be over soon.”

  Screams filled the whole cell block.

  82

  “THE HOLDING CELLS ARE RIGHT through here,” said Joe as he led the way.

  “Why’d they put the boy in the cells?” asked McReady. “There were three or four beds left upstairs.”

  “They didn’t want us to see that the whole staff was infected,” said Nix.

  Joe nodded. “You know Jane Reid, Monica. She’s addicted to secrets.”

  He turned the last corner and suddenly stopped dead as if he’d struck a wall. Then he took two clumsy steps backward.

  Benny and Nix stared in abject horror. They all stared at Joe.

  At his stomach.

  “No . . . ,” whispered McReady.

  A knife was buried nearly to the hilt in Joe Ledger’s stomach. Blood pumped out of the wound and poured down the front of the ranger’s body.

  A figure stepped out of the side passage.

  Grimm barked in fear and surprise.

  Nix screamed.

  It was Brother Peter.

  The right hand of Saint John.

  Except for the saint himself, he was the most dangerous of the Night Church’s army of killers. An unsmiling monster with the face of an angel. A master killer.

  The hallway behind him was crowded with reapers, who each had red handprints tattooed on their faces.

  “R-run . . . ,” cried Joe in a voice that was little more than a whisper. He dropped to his knees and his rifle clattered to the ground. “For God’s sake . . . run. . . .”

  83

  GRIMM TENSED TO LUNGE, BUT Joe snaked out a restraining hand and clung to the dog. There were too many of the reapers. They would butcher the mastiff. But Grimm snarled and thrashed, incensed by the smell of fresh blood, craving carnage and revenge.

  Brother Peter looked at them all and nodded to himself.

  “I saw you little birds fly away in that big black machine,” he said softly. “Then I heard you come back. I thought my trick hadn’t worked.”

  “What trick?” demanded Benny. Then he got it. “Your ultimatum . . . that was fake?”

  “A necessary lie. I wanted you to take this sinner away from here.” He spat on Ledger, who huddled groaning and bleeding on the floor. “We didn’t want him here when we moved on Sanctuary. We knew what he was searching for and how desperately he wanted to find it. So we gave him a few useful little clues.” He pointed a finger at McReady. “But we did want her. We wanted you and this sinner to go find her and bring her back. You’ve been so resourceful that I had no doubt at all that you’d rescue the doctor and bring her—and her blasphemous cures—to me. And you have.”

  He did not smile, but cruel lights danced in his eyes. He was enjoying this.

  Benny looked past him. The men with him were huge, and they were all armed. Lilah and Nix’s guns were still in their holsters. The only way they’d have time and a chance to draw those guns was if he used himself as a shield to buy them two seconds. Would he last that long?

  Benny was sure that Brother Peter would cut him down. He had no illusions about being able to beat this man. Would dying to slow Peter down be worth the sacrifice?

  If Nix and Lilah couldn’t kill Peter and at least half the big reapers with bullets, then they would have no chance at all with their blades. It was a terrible moment, and Benny racked his mind to find some way out of it. What would a samurai do in this situation? What was the warrior-smart thing to do?

  Joe coughed and rolled away from them, curling his body into a ball, face to the wall. Blood pooled under him.

  “Odd,” said Brother Peter to the fallen ranger, “but we were all so frightened of you. You are the closest thing to a boogeyman that we reapers have.”

  Joe said nothing.
His body twitched and shuddered.

  “Turn him over,” said Brother Peter to his men. “It’s fitting that he see how futile are the sins he has committed.”

  Grimm lowered his head and kept uttering a menacing growl.

  “Why can’t you leave us alone?” asked Nix. “Why is it that people like you always think they can force everyone to do what they want?”

  Brother Peter placed one hand on his chest, fingers splayed. “I am a servant of god,” he said. “I do his will. I don’t want you to do anything.”

  “Then let us go.”

  A few of the reapers chuckled, but Brother Peter snapped at them. “No, my brothers. Don’t mock her—she’s young and doesn’t understand. None of them do—except for this fallen sinner and that great blasphemer there.” He pointed to Dr. McReady. “She understands.”

  “How do you even know who she is?” asked Benny.

  “I met her in the same way you did, little brother,” said Peter. “As a picture in a book. A book you stole from one of my reapers.”

  “The Teambook . . .”

  “My reaper was on the way to the wreck to plant it near the plane, where Ledger could find it, but instead he met you. That was a very fortunate encounter, and my reaper had been given several contingencies. Either plant the evidence for Ledger to find; or kill anyone from Sanctuary who comes near the shrine and plant the book among their possessions. You provided another alternative—killing the reaper, and that only made the story more plausible. You took the book back to Sanctuary. How perfect. It couldn’t have worked better if you’d rehearsed it. Then that bit of staged drama by the ravine. If you hadn’t gone after Sergeant Ortega, you would eventually have found another set of those coordinates. There are four sets, all carefully planted. It was inevitable that you find one, so we watched and waited and adapted our plan to what you sinners did.”