Still of Night

by Jonathan Maberry

  In one fast, fluid movement, Rachael whipped the knife from its sheath and flung it at Mark, then dove behind the lobby desk. He dropped his gun off the balcony and let loose a stream of curses. In the dim light of the unlit lobby she heard the echoes of the pistol clattering off the tiles.

  He yelled a command to his partners, and Rachael’s warriors sprang into action at the same moment, roaring out battle cries like a pack of marauding Vikings.

  Pulling the long knives out of the sheaths at her hips, she crouched, moving as silently as possible. Then she launched forward, propelling herself off the wall and diving over the counter toward Mark’s henchmen charging down the stairs. Swinging her knives in the half-light, she felt them sink into living flesh. Men screamed in shock and pain, and Rachael pulled her knives from their bodies, rolling through the dive to slide behind a pillar.

  Parkour and sneak attacks and fighting undead were one thing, but going up against trained men with knives was still far outside Rachael’s realm of expertise. This wasn’t LARP or tabletop or cosplay; this wasn’t make-believe. All of their lives were at stake, their home, everything they’d worked for.

  Rage surged through her, and she used it to throw herself against the closest man, the momentum driving him to the floor and knocking his knife out of his hand. She slammed her knife hilt against his head three times, knocking him out. A second man grabbed at her, swinging his knife at her face in retaliation. Ducking out of the way, she sunk her blade into the soft flesh on the inside of his thigh, causing him to collapse in a howl of pain.

  Rachael didn’t want to kill them. She didn’t like to kill; not people, not animals, not anything. She didn’t even like killing the undead orcs, though that was a survival necessity.

  It is, however, somewhat fuzzier on the subject of kneecaps, the Firefly quote popped into her fangirl brain. She scurried back to the shadows as more men streamed into the lobby. She was getting used to the near-darkness. Shapes were beginning to form, helping her make sense of what was going on around her. More fighting upstairs from the sound of it, shouting and screaming. No gunshots, but the grunting and thumping of bodies hitting the floor worried her.

  “Please let them not be mine,” she murmured to herself, creeping along the wall. Her whisper was louder than she intended, and two dark shapes in the center of the lobby turned, looking around for the source of the sound. At the same moment, a smaller, feminine shape appeared in the gloom by the front door. Maria.

  The men turned, raising their knives, only a few yards away from the young teen. Rachael stood, using that moment to slide across the tile and slash at the backs of one man’s ankles. He collapsed with a yell as Maria swung a wooden sword hard at the other man’s head, cracking the weapon down the middle with a sickening sound of breaking bone.

  After that, silence.

  Brian clicked on their electric lantern, restoring some light to the lobby. Better. Rachael climbed to her feet. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Is everyone okay?”

  “Th-they’re fine,” Maria replied, as the two came in for a hug. “I-I-I was worried, I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said, blinking back tears. She looked at the blood staining Rachael’s arm with concern.

  Rachael stroked the girl’s hair comfortingly. “It’s okay, I’m okay. But I need to check on everyone upstairs.”

  None of Mark’s men were still standing; most of them appeared to be either dead or unconscious. Mark, however, was nowhere to be seen.

  “Have you seen Mark?” she asked as her warriors secured the fallen men. They looked at her and shook their heads.

  “He must have taken off during the fight,” Alice suggested.

  Rachael didn’t feel so confident. She crept past the others, eyes darting around as she made her way cautiously down one hallway, then another in the dark. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She sensed the presence of another person, heard the quiet breathing of someone around a corner.

  Instinctively bringing her daggers up in front of her head, she blocked the machete that would have gouged a chunk out of her face, immediately throwing herself back from the onslaught of swings that Mark threw at her. Her adrenaline rush was fading; the strain in her arms aching as she attempted to parry his blows.

  With the last of her energy, she ducked a wild swing and darted past Mark, kicking out at his ribs as they passed. He lost his balance and she kicked again at his groin, letting out a yell that echoed through the darkened halls. Her kick missed, catching him instead in the hip. The hit sent him staggering back a few steps, but he caught himself, raised his machete overhead, and rushed her again.

  “No!”

  The scream was nearly as deafening as the gunshot that followed, and Mark staggered, arms still raised, before he collapsed to the ground, unmoving.

  Maria stood behind him, her arm out, frozen, before dropping the gun with a clatter. She let out a sob and fell to the floor. Dropping her own weapon, Rachael gathered the girl into her arms.

  “I . . . I wanted to . . . to be brave.” Rachael could make out the words between Maria’s broken sobs, and she hugged the girl against her, holding her tightly.

  “You are brave,” Rachael countered quietly. “Even the brave can be afraid or sad. But your mom and Eden would want you to keep going. They would be so proud of you. You are the real hero. You are the real Wonder Woman.”

  Maria didn’t speak, but her sobs shook her body as she cried for her mom, and Eden, and for herself. For everything she’d lost, the life she’d had before. A life with cellphones and friends and crushes and school. For the lost innocence of a teen forced to grow up before her time.

  This was their world now, Rachael realized. They all had to grow up too fast. But, she would do everything she could to change this world, to make it a place where children could be children. Where heroes could exist and bring hope.

  — 6 —

  “What next?” Brett asked quietly. They sat on the edge of the low roof of one of the hospital buildings, under the late summer full moon. Rachael leaned her head against his shoulder, her fingers entwined with his, watching her fighters, her warriors, her army, practicing in the moonlight. “We took back our home . . . so, seriously, Rachael, what’s next?”

  She was silent for a moment, considering, weighing her options.

  “Next? We take back our world.”

  PART FOUR

  STILL OF NIGHT

  JONATHAN MABERRY AND RACHAEL LAVIN

  SIX MONTHS AFTER THE OUTBREAK

  — 1 —

  THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG

  The dead rose. We fell. That’s the short version of current events.

  Well . . . not so current. We’re still falling. It’s a long damn way down to nowhere.

  I’ve spent months going from one side of the country to the other. Me and my dog, Baskerville. There are no planes, no trains, no automobiles. At least none that work. Some geniuses in the military decided that nukes were the only proportional response to the armies of the dead. They dropped a lot of them. Huge sections of North America are gone, buried under ash that glows in the dark. The radiation is probably going to kill more people than the zombies will. And the electromagnetic pulses fried all of the electronics. Which means any chance there was of driving somewhere safe is gone. The power is out, taking with it the controls for water, sewage, and every other damn useful thing.

  Oh, yeah, and don’t get me started on radioactive walking corpses. If I ever find anyone alive who was party to the decision to try nukes, I’m going to fucking kill them and when they wake up as zoms, I’m going to kill them again.

  If I could fly or drive I might have gotten home in time. If the phones worked I could have called.

  Instead it took weeks to go from California to Maryland. A lot of weeks, because I had to fight my way through some places, and circle way the hell out of my way to avoid others. When I got to my uncle’s farm in Robinwood, Maryland, I found nothing but ashes and bones. I don’t know if a
ny of those bones belonged to my wife. The fact that I didn’t find the charred bones of an infant gives me hope. A slender needle of hope that is buried all the way into the center of my broken heart. That’s not poetry. It’s a fucking tragedy.

  I think I went a little crazy.

  I mean, I guess I had to.

  Days are gone. Maybe weeks. Time stopped having any meaning for me. There are days when all I have left are fragments. Shivering in a rainy ditch near the farm, covered in vomit and rainwater. Kneeling in the ashes, screaming, punching the ground, punching my own face. Wandering down roads I no longer recognized.

  One day I woke up naked and covered in scratches, in a creek miles and miles away from anywhere. I had a dog leash clutched in one hand and when I could focus my eyes I read the name on the heavy steel tag: Baskerville. I knew that dog. He belonged to a neighbor and was one of the many descendants of my old combat dog, Ghost, and an Irish wolfhound named Banshee. I think he was Ghost’s grandson, out of a litter of seven. We’d gifted the dog to the teenage girl, Sandra, daughter of a neighbor, a lovely girl with Down syndrome.

  I made my stumbling way to the farm where Sandra and her folks lived, but there was only heartbreak waiting for me. All the sweet gentleness that was Sandra was gone from the thing I had to fight in the living room of the old house. I buried her and five other members of her family, stole her uncle’s clothes, and began drifting along the Maryland back roads. Finding no one alive.

  Not. One. Person. There are some blank spots in my memory there, too. There is absolutely nothing in my brain to fill in those blanks. Even now, months later. My voice was gone, though. Raw. I spat blood onto my hands. Screaming can do that, if you do it long enough and put your heart into it.

  The leash stayed with me, wrapped around my waist. Don’t ask me why. I was wearing it when I became aware of who I was again. Days blurred by. I had the sense that I was being hunted, and gradually my old skills came back to me. Not on a conscious level at first, but instinctually. The lizard brain working toward its goal of survival while the monkey brain still went mad at times.

  It was maybe a week before I even organized my brain enough to wonder how Top and Bunny were doing. After the cluster fuck that was our so-called “mission to rescue the president” and the subsequent helicopter crash, we split up. Bunny had a lot of family in Orange County; Top had people in Georgia. We each wanted to be there for the others, but we couldn’t. We parted ways with an agreement to meet at an off-the-books base we all knew of in Nevada. It was fortified and had a hardened facility with a full laboratory, hospital, and room for hundreds of refugees. We’d each try to bring our families there. Parting was tough, though. It was a bitch, and we held each other and wept because none of us had much hope left. Not much at all. The thing driving us was fear. And need. But not hope.

  Robinwood nearly destroyed me. Sandra’s farm pushed me all the way to the edge and the only thing in the world that looked like it would offer a shred of comfort was the big fall into the welcoming black.

  I wandered like a ghost, haunting a dead landscape, waiting until I dropped my body and drifted on as a spirit. Then, maybe, dissolve like mist and become nothing. If that meant there were no more memories, then I wanted it. Craved it. Needed it to be true.

  Then something changed one day, and maybe changed me. Like a slap when you’re on the edge of hysteria.

  It was a dog barking.

  Terrified, angry. A deep-chested sound. It reminded me of Ghost, though he was long dead. Old age. He’d run through hell with me all over the world. Wish to fuck I’d had him with me now. He could track anyone or anything. Ghost could have found my family. One way or another, he would have found them. Given me an answer. Not closure, though, because the mouths of some wounds stay open so they can scream at you day and night.

  This dog wasn’t Ghost. I knew that.

  But it was alive. The first living thing other than squirrels and birds that I’d seen since I reached my uncle’s farm.

  And so I ran toward the sound of the barking. Blocks away. I was dressed in farmer’s coveralls and a Pittsburgh Penguins T-shirt that was several sizes too small, and boat shoes that were too big. No weapons at all. My mind hadn’t recovered enough for that to have been a thing. Barehanded. Stupid with shock. Running toward the sound of a frightened dog and endless hungry moans.

  When I rounded a corner by the Antietam Tractor and Equipment store in Hagerstown, I nearly ran into a shambler. In life this person had been a cop of some kind—deputy or state trooper—but now there were only rags left of a tan uniform. He wore a gunbelt, though, but no gun. A rubber baton, the kind with the handle jutting out at a right angle, based on the old Okinawan tonfa, was looped through his belt. I skidded to a stop. Beyond him was a throng of dead ones all clustered around an overturned Ram Mega-cab four-wheel-drive pickup. The dog stood on the top, on the passenger door, just out of reach of the grasping hands.

  He was a brute. A monstrous mix of white shepherd and Irish wolfhound. One hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and fang.

  I stood there and stared.

  It was Baskerville.

  He caught sight of me and for a moment we gaped at each other across a sea of the dead. His pale coat was crisscrossed with cuts and crusted with blood and dirt, but he looked strong. Terrified, too, because there was no way for him to get down from his perch without being torn to pieces. Against a pack of living people, he might actually have stood a chance because they bleed, they feel pain, and they would be individually terrified of the dog. The dead have none of those vulnerabilities. They are simply driven by an all-consuming need to feast on the flesh of the living. Human, animal, insect. Anything except plants. They don’t tire and they don’t fear anything at all. Given time, they would pull Baskerville down and eat him.

  Like I said, I was unarmed and more than half out of my mind.

  But something in me was awake now. I am not a normal person. I’m not nice and I’m not sane. Even before all this shit. At best I’m usefully batshit crazy, and I have done awful things more times than I could count. Not to the innocent. No. My kind of crazy edges a different way. If you’re a bad guy? Different story.

  I could feel something shift inside my skull and inside my chest. Here was an animal I knew. A dog. Alive. More than that, he was the grandson of the best dog I ever had. Ghost. A true hero dog.

  All of this was processed in my brain in less than a microsecond. The dead cop was still turning toward me, just beginning his reach for my throat when I went from shock to action. I bashed his arms aside, spun him, grabbed his chin and the back of his hair and gave his head a vicious sideways twist. In the movies everyone seems able to do this, to break a neck. It’s actually extremely hard because the neck muscles don’t want to turn that far, and the bones don’t want to break. You have to know how to do it, and you have to put real speed and muscle into it. Which I did.

  I let go and snatched the baton from his belt loop as he puddled down.

  Then I was moving.

  I am over six feet tall and over two hundred pounds. Even with days of hysterical madness, dehydration and starvation, I was fit and fast and strong. They had no consciousness, no understanding of how to fight. They turned toward noise and movement; they howled out their hunger; they surged toward me.

  A fool rushes into the center of a crowd. I fought the edges of it, moving, moving, moving. Turning and deflecting, knocking them into one another, never remaining still and so never getting caught. I used the club to smash arms and break knees. Even the living dead need their bones intact in order to stand, walk, grab, hold. I smashed skulls, aiming as often as I could for the base of the skull, working to damage the nerve conduction down the brain stem. They stumbled and fell. Some of them died.

  It was brutal work. I don’t know how many there were. Fifteen? Twenty?

  I had so much rage in me. Grief is a terrible fuel because it burns hot and never seems to burn out. Frustration stokes that fire. Desp
eration pours gasoline on it. And yet beneath all that were skills honed over a lifetime in jujutsu, the police, the army and then Special Forces. I am a killer, and I proved it right there, witnessed only by a dog and the milky eyes of the undead.

  I killed them all.

  Every single one.

  There was a strange time of stillness afterward. The dog stood on the overturned truck and stared at me. I stood and looked up at him. Maybe neither of us was all that sure we recognized the other. It was that kind of world. Birds sat in rows on telephone wires and the edges of roofs and watched us.

  I cleared my throat and then spat dust and fear onto the ground.

  “Baskerville,” I said. Not a question. Saying his name. Letting him hear it and know it. Then he did something that absolutely broke my heart.

  He wagged his tail.

  That was six months ago. That was when he didn’t die, and I no longer wanted to.

  — 2 —

  THE WARRIOR WOMAN

  The night air was still, quiet. Too quiet. It made Rachael uneasy, raising the hair along her arms and the back of her neck. Too quiet meant nothing nearby trying to survive—no animals or birds or humans. Too quiet meant nothing living.

  Too quiet meant dead.

  Holding up one hand, she signaled the four young people behind her—two women and two men—to stop. Then she crouched down, moving quietly through the brush, pushing aside the thorny branches that plucked at her clothes, snagging on her leather armor. She didn’t make a sound beyond a slight rustle of leaves and the creak of well-oiled leather as she unsheathed an elvish style dagger strapped to her belt, holding it at the ready.

  For a moment all she heard was the rhythmic pounding of her own heartbeat. Then the sound of something shuffling along the ground with an uneven gait. First a crunching noise, then a swoosh. Maybe someone limping, dragging an injured limb behind. The smell of rotting flesh settled any doubt of whether it was human or orc.