Still of Night

by Jonathan Maberry

  The warrior woman, Rachael Elle, went east. Dez went off to find Trout, using a map I gave her. And I kept wandering. Kept looking for the family I knew I’d never find.

  Days lost their meaning after a while. Most things did.

  I found some pockets of the NKK and vented on them in very bad ways. Found some wanderers and helped them out of some scrapes and sent them on toward Asheville. Stayed alone, for the most part. Me and Baskerville.

  One cold spring morning, though, I heard people. I heard screams and yells. And moans. It was a mélange of sounds I’d heard so often that even before I got there I could paint the picture—one or more of the living caught by a group of the dead. In a field or farmhouse, in a forest or on the banks of a stream. That kind of drama was probably playing out all over the country. Probably all of the world, in cities and in the woods, maybe even in the arctic and on remote islands. Wherever the disease was, and last I heard it was everywhere.

  The screams were male. Two or three voices. And a lot of moans. Baskerville froze and stared. His armor prevented me from seeing the hairs rise along his spine, but his body language told me.

  We broke into a run.

  Even though we are a formidable team—big SpecOps guy with guns and a damn samurai sword and a hundred-fifty pounds of armored killer dog—we never acted like we could just blunder in and solve everything. Caution kept us alive, so we only ran as fast as safety allowed.

  We stopped on the near side of a gully about a mile into some overgrown woods. All around us the birds had fallen silent. Never a good sign. The sounds of some kind of fight were coming from the other side of a thick stand of maple trees, with the gully in between. Baskerville wanted to run, his body quivered with that kind of excitement, but he wasn’t running yet. Not because I’d given him the command to stay, but because his instincts were at war with his desire to fight. This was a combination I’d seen in him time and again. It meant that there were living and dead threats.

  Before the run-in with the NKK goon squad, I’d go running in any time I thought a living person was fighting for his or her life. That’s when I naively thought that the worst things out here were the zombies. The sad truth is that the living dead have no choice in what they do; they’re driven by parasites and there is no human control left at all. No will, no choice, no animus. It’s totally different with the living. When they bring hurt and harm, when they rape and steal and beat and torture, it’s because they want to. People have always scared me more than any of the monsters I’ve ever fought.

  I clicked my tongue for him and we moved forward more slowly, going down one slope, stepping across the narrow trickle of runoff from yesterday’s rain, and then climbing the far side. An old oak climbed precariously to the edge with too many of its roots exposed by erosion. Worked for me, though, and I used the thickest ones as handholds. Baskerville ran slantwise up the slope and met me at the top, looking pleased with himself.

  I scrambled over the edge and we went off around the copse of trees, but we didn’t get far before the shape of things began to emerge. Bodies lay tangled in the tall grass and weeds. Some of them were pale and withered, gray-skinned and bearing the marks of the bites that had killed them the first time and the blunt-force trauma that had stilled them forever. Mixed in among them were bodies painted in blood, with throats torn out or such traumatic injuries that blood loss killed them. These bodies twitched and jerked as the parasites transferred into them from the bites sought to rewire the central nervous system. Soon all of them would rise and join the fight, changing sides from defenders to relentless attackers.

  That’s how we lost. Every one of us that died became one of them.

  There were no gunshots. Ammunition was rare. In the old monster movies, the heroes never seemed to run out unless it was for dramatic effect. In the real world, you could burn through three or four full mags in a minute or two.

  I heard grunts of desperation and whimpers of pain. I heard the moans. And I heard the heavy thud of something hitting flesh—crushing it, breaking bone. Hitting again.

  Baskerville moved into line-of-eyesight with me and I gave him two hand signals—a loose hand and then a cutting motion. The loose indicated that he was allowed to attack the zombies, and the cut was to remind him to use his body armor. We’d spent thousands of hours over the last six months on that. He was smart and experienced and he wanted to fight.

  He ran, and I ran.

  On the far side of the copse there were three living people and nine zombies. All three of the living were bleeding. All three had already been bitten.

  They were dying; they were lost. I saw one of them, a medium-sized guy with brown skin and an Arab face. He saw me and hope flared for one terrible moment before it was replaced by a clear awareness that we weren’t going to be able to save him.

  Baskerville and I attacked anyway.

  — 5 —

  DAHLIA AND THE PACK

  Dahlia liked being the queen. She deserved to be the queen. Not that she called herself that, or required any of the members of the Pack to call her that, but it’s how she thought of herself. Queen of the Apocalypse.

  Besides, probably everyone who was an actual queen was dead. Ditto for kings, princes and princesses, dukes, earls, and all of those royals. The same was likely true of presidents and prime ministers. Dead. If any of them were alive, they were keeping a low freaking profile about it. The news reporters said that the President of the United States was going to give a speech one night, but that never happened. Air Force One went down somewhere. Nevada, maybe, if the reporters were right; but you couldn’t ask them, because they were dead, too. She’d actually watched MSNBC the night Rachel Maddow bit the throat out of that guy with the glasses and bowtie. The news went off the air after that, and nothing came back on. Not even the Emergency Broadcast thing, and that’s what it was supposed to be for. Times like this.

  Except, there really weren’t times like this, were there? Never before, and definitely not now. Or ever.

  The world was dead. Mostly.

  Practically everyone she knew was dead. There were a couple of people in her Pack who’d been kids in her own school, but they weren’t friends. Not family either.

  All dead. All eaten down to the bone or walking around looking for warm meals. Not her family, though. She’d seen to that. Knife to the head. Mom, aunts, all of them. Knife, knife, knife. The actual mechanics of it had been easy. After the first time it was rinse and repeat.

  But the mechanics were the smallest part. It was Mom. It was her family. Dahlia had screamed and screamed and screamed. And thrown up. And gone black inside. For days. Curled up on the floor of her living room, surrounded by dead things that she used to love.

  It was her own hunger that brought her back. Not hunger for flesh, but a raw hunger for anything. She woke up, covered in sweat and dried blood, smeared with her own piss and shit, trembling and alone. For a while all she could do was lie there and watch the flies as they flew in endless patterns through the broken front window, crawled over the faces of her family, and flew out through the open front door. Like a machine. Like a video on some kind of loop.

  Then Dahlia heard voices and when she got up, she saw that the kids she’d saved at school—the ones who followed her here—were sitting around the table in the kitchen. They’d eaten their way through most of the food in the cabinets. They were drunk off the bottles from the upper shelves. They hadn’t gone away, but they hadn’t helped her, either. They waited like idiots for her to snap out of it and tell them what to do.

  Weak, trembling, faint with hunger and dehydration, Dahlia had nevertheless beaten the shit out of all of them. Five of them. They didn’t even try to fight back. They screamed and wept and cowered, but they didn’t fight back. She kicked their asses and left them all bleeding on the floor. Then she staggered upstairs, found that the water—against all expectations—was still on. No heat, though. She took a cold shower, screaming into the stinging spray. The water washe
d away the filth and the blood and the acid stains of her own tears.

  Later, dressed in clean clothes, she went downstairs to find the five of them sitting at the table. Wounds dressed, eyes crusted with dried tears, faces turned toward hers like kicked dogs hoping for a forgiving pat.

  That’s when Dahlia understood that she had to be a queen. Their queen. She had to keep them alive because left to themselves they were going to die. Three girls, two boys—both of who towered over her. None of whom had ever been nice to her in school. Maybe that’s why they took their beatings. Maybe they knew it was their due.

  Whatever.

  That was then.

  Now she had the Pack.

  Sixty-seven in all. Most of them kids. A few lost adults. No one over twenty-four, though. A lot of them were tough as fuck. Trash was twice her size and could probably bench press her entire weight. But the one time he tried something, Dahlia had gotten a lucky shot in and damn near kicked his nuts off. The weird thing was that he seemed almost relieved. It meant that he didn’t have to make any real decisions. Not for himself or the few people he’d been leading when he met her. He was happy to be her muscle, her enforcer. The knight to her queen.

  Yeah, the world was that broken.

  Sometimes Trash shared her tent and they filled the night air with growls and cries and screams and sighs. Most times she slept alone. There was a seventeen-year old black girl, though . . . and Dahlia spent a lot of time wondering how to open the right kind of conversation with her. Not as queen, but girl to girl.

  Sex was one problem. Love was another. Most of the time, though, it was all about survival. Staying away from the biters, feeding her people, finding a good place, knowing when to fight, knowing when to run.

  Dahlia kept it all running right. And she still carried the knife she’d used to escape the outbreak at her high school. The same knife she’d used to hush her family. It was sheathed on her thigh, the handle angled to where her hand fell. Ready. Always ready.

  Each time she picked a camp for the Pack, she walked the area to look at how it could be defended, and how they could escape if a swarm of the dead came out of nowhere. There were sentries in the trees, trip wires and weapons stashed along escape routes. Her tent was always positioned against a wall, a wrecked car, or some other structure so that threats could only come at her along her line of sight. None of the Pack asked where she’d learned all that, which is good because didn’t want to admit it was all from video games and those doomsday prepper shows on cable. Who knew those bearded fuckers would be right?

  She sat on a folding chair next to an overturned equipment box, halfway through a game of solitaire when Trash brought Neeko to her to give a report on the failed scouting run. Neeko was young and skinny and scared of his own shadow. He was also scared of Trash, who liked to hit things. The dead, people—whatever.

  “Go ahead, Neeks,” said Dahlia, “tell me what happened.”

  Neeko licked his lips—a flicker of a tongue, fast as a lizard. He told her what he’d told Trash, though he stuttered, skipped words out of nervousness, and made a mess of it.

  Dahlia listened with patience and without emotion. She was not the kind to fly off the handle. Never. Impulse control was key to survival. She didn’t jump into any fight just because she could. She didn’t run away just to be safe. For her, everything she did needed to have a reason. It had to be weighed for risks and rewards, but also for lessons. There was no Google anymore, no one she could call, no authorities to solve problems. She needed to be smart and practical, and to use those qualities to lead her people. To provide for them and keep them safe and even help them be happy. That was all part of the code she now lived by, and it informed the code that kept the Pack alive when everything else was dying.

  “Get the shit out of your mouth and tell it right,” growled Trash, taking a swat at Neeko, who cringed and shied away.

  “Let him talk,” she said, pulling a disgusted grunt from the enforcer. Then, to Neeko, she added, “I need to hear every last bit. We need to know every detail so we can figure out our play. You were telling me about how this old guy fought . . . ?”

  Neeko licked his lips again and shifted a few inches sideways, as if trying to be out of Trash’s swatting distance.

  “He was fast,” he said. “Fast as you.” He flinched, but when no one chastised him for that, he continued. “I don’t know what kind of stuff he knows. Karate or something. I can’t tell. Didn’t kick us. But he wasn’t exactly boxing.”

  “Were his hands open or closed?” asked Dahlia. She’d taken some martial arts, but since the End had read up on it. There were a lot of books around that no one seemed to need, and if she picked the right one there was good advice. She’d even found some police hand-to-hand combat manuals and had pored over every page.

  “Kind of both,” said Neeko after a moment’s thought. “He used his fingertips and punched us with one knuckle, but not the big knuckle. He stuck his first finger out so the second knuckle was what he hit us with.”

  Dahlia nodded. “And you say he took your hatchets away? How?”

  “I . . . I don’t know. He just took them. Twisted them, like. My wrist still hurts.”

  Neeko went through all of it. The camper, the food supplies, the comments about how they could have had supplies if they asked nice. Neeko gave her a lot of details but he wasn’t very sharp about people.

  “Thanks, Neeks,” she said. “Do me a favor, okay? Draw me a map of exactly where this guy’s camper is parked. Make sure you include as much information as you can about trees, that stream, the position of his camper, anything else in the area. Do that right now.”

  “Sure,” said Neeko quickly. “No problem.” He turned to go and then paused, looking back at her. “He could have killed us, Dahlia. I mean easy. We were nothing to him.”

  Dahlia said nothing, and Neeko left.

  She indicated the other folding chair with an uptick of her chin, and Trash sat.

  “What’s your read on this?” she asked.

  The truth was that she could have predicted Trash’s exact words. He was useful but predictable. His strengths were all about his abilities as a fighter, as a leader during kill raids, as an enforcer, and as a strangely sensitive lover in the sack. But he was not a thinker or strategic planner. Emotions rather than careful thought. And almost no education at all. In another life, if Trash hadn’t grown up poor and in a nobody-gives-a-shit school district, he might have really been something. Now, she wasn’t sure if he could grow past where he was at the moment. The End did that, she knew. It kind of froze people into who they were at the moment. Like they were playing roles in a movie and that’s all they were allowed to do. Trash was tough-guy muscle. That was his role.

  Trash, true to the script he lived, said, “Neeko’s a pussy. He and Andy should have been able to fuck that old guy up and then we’d have had all that stuff. Now the cocksucker’s been warned, he’s going to be expecting something. If he’s that tough, he could pop caps in some of our boys when we raid him. Mind you, if he does, I’m going to cut his balls off and make Neeko wear them as a necklace.”

  Dahlia wanted very much to roll her eyes like a teenager and say “what-ev-errr.” Would have been funny to do that. She didn’t. Partly because Trash might actually do something that nasty, and partly because she might have to let him. Maintaining discipline in the Pack was accomplished partly through good leadership and partly through fear.

  “Let’s think it through, Trash,” she said. “This guy could have killed our boys, but he didn’t, so he earns a couple of points.”

  “You and your points,” grumbled Trash. “Why is it always points?”

  “Because that gives us perspective. You know what a meritocracy is?”

  “Sure.” He was lying, Dahlia knew, but that was okay. He always lied, and he was bad at it. Made thinks easy.

  “It’s a system where people are judged according to standards. Not looks or who your family is or how much mon
ey you have in the bank. Actions, words, whatever, that’s what should matter. Before things fell apart, do you think I was the popular girl in school? Give me a break. No. Out here we have to go on what people do. So, I give points out and take points away so we can all get a good read on someone or something. It’s how it works.”

  Saying “it’s how it works” was one of those phrases that somehow made sense to Trash, Dahlia knew. He accepted it. Many of the Pack did. As if knowing it was a rule made it something they had to abide. Dahlia found it useful, but also a little sad. And a little scary. She tried to use it to help her people, to keep them from turning into a gang that just killed and took. While she was okay with theft, she had rules for that, too. Even killing had to have rules.

  That, for her, was how it worked.

  “Pick four fighters,” she said firmly. “Maybe Nathan and Jumper, because they know how to move quiet. A couple others. Light kits, blades and handguns. One long gun. Soon as Neeko’s done with the map, we’re going to see about this tough old guy.”

  “We . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” said Dahlia, “I think I need to see him for myself.”

  “And what if he’s some kind of old retired soldier or cop or maybe a wiseguy from some old mob?”

  “Then,” she said, “I guess we’ll have to kill him and take all his stuff.”

  Trash grinned, happy as a kid on Christmas morning. “Now you’re talking.”

  — 6 —

  THE WARRIOR WOMAN

  “What we going to do with the kid?”

  Jason adjusted the lacing on his bracer as he eyed Tommy with suspicion. He, Claudia, and Peter were hanging back, talking amongst themselves while Rachael and Alice tried to find out more about Happy Valley.

  Pulling his shoulder-length dreads back into a thick rubber band, Jason added, “He don’t look like he belongs out here, he’s way too clean. Do you think that maybe there’s a safe zone around?”

  “Maybe,” Claudia replied, watching Tommy curiously. She brushed a lock of dark, curly hair out of her face. “But I kinda think we would have heard about any actual surviving communities in the area before now. I mean, he’s obviously well-fed and well-kept, so wherever he’s from, they’re well-stocked. His parents have to be missing him. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’re out looking for him.”