Still of Night

by Jonathan Maberry

  Abdul finished. He used his own canteen to wash his hands. Thoroughly. And he dried them on the only clean part of his jacket. I came over and he held out his hand. He was infected but his hand wasn’t cut, he wasn’t bleeding. I shook his hand and we smiled at one another. Then he stepped back and began praying again in Arabic.

  “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un.”

  I’m good with languages. I knew the prayer. We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return.

  There was a flash of silver fire in the sunlight and then the silence seemed to stretch on forever.

  I cleaned my sword, put it away, sat down by the tree and did nothing at all until it was time to dig the grave.

  — 8 —

  DAHLIA AND THE PACK

  Dahlia liked to be able to move like a ninja. It was much better than the way she used to move, which was more like a sick bear or a beached whale. A little unfair, she knew, but self-loathing was a hard habit to shake.

  Nowadays, with all the practice of surviving out here, with actual things that want to kill you, every day was like a video game. Or VR. Or something. Seeing firsthand what happened to people who couldn’t move quietly was a pretty good incentive program. She’d seen cops and soldiers get eaten because they made too much noise and drew too much attention.

  So, for her it was ninja style.

  She practiced it a lot with Trash and some of the other fighters, and also with Neeko and the scouts. It was kind of scary and kind of fun, and she could feel how it increased her confidence while also giving her some muscle tone. And if she thought about being a badass ninja while she ran those drills, well . . . no one else had to know.

  Now it was critical for her to be truly as silent as one of those shadow warriors. Her gear was padded so nothing clanked or creaked. She and Trash took time moving through the forest, making sure not to step on twigs, watching for trip wires and booby traps as they got closer to where Neeko said the old fart was camped.

  The forest was oddly lovely today. Sunlight slanted down through the treetops and painted big swaths of foliage with gold. There were all kinds of birds out here, and their combined songs filled the air with the kind of beauty that survivors often forgot about, or ignored. Dahlia did not ignore it. Without beauty, what was survival even worth?

  Trash moved past her, angling down a slope toward the creek where Neeko got beaten up. For all his faults—and there were a lot of them—Trash knew how to move. His body was lean and muscular, and she loved to see him in action, even if it was just walking across a room. He looked pretty damn good naked, too, and that thought always gave her a flush. Trash was the first boy she’d ever slept with. She was moderately sure he didn’t know she was a virgin that first time, but he was as gentle in the sack as he was brutal in a fight. And on missions like this one, he always reminded her of a panther or tiger. There was a phrase she read once in a novel: “moving with oiled grace.” That was him. It was the kind of movement she aspired to, and seeing him glide past her and down the slope made her want him. Tonight was going to be one of the intense sessions, of that she had no doubt. He might have that oiled grace, but she had the stamina to wear him out.

  The others, Nathan, Jumper, Serena, and Slow Dog, were spread out in a line a hundred yards wide. All four of them were tough, but each in different ways. Nathan was a bull in both looks and mentality; he was strong enough to smash through just about anything and liked to try. Jumper was all about Parkour and free-running. He was nimble, fast, and weird; and he did not relate to other people very well, so Dahlia figured he was some kind of sociopath. Serena thought she was Lara Croft, and had the body for it, but her mind was more like a snake—cold and ruthless. Slow Dog was probably the sanest of the Pack’s fighters, but that was a pretty low bar. He was loyal to a fault and would do very bad things to anyone who messed with the Pack. He was a nice guy around camp but sometimes he totally lost it in a fight, going way over the top with the amount of damage he needed to inflict in order to win.

  Right now, though, Dahlia felt comforted to have all of them at her back. And Trash. Psycho or not, he was an incredible fighter. The old bastard was never going to know what hit him.

  Not that she wanted to hurt the guy necessarily, but she did want to take all of his stuff, and maybe let Trash give him a few dents because of what the man had done to the scouts.

  That was the thought going through Dahlia’s mind when every single thing went wrong.

  She was looking for trip wires and saw one. She was even smiling as she lifted her foot and stepped over it. Dahlia had no idea what a pressure-sensitive field trap was until she heard the faint click. Then the tough, flexible pine bough that had been curved back, taught as a longbow, was released by the ground trigger hidden under dry leaves. The bough caught her in the stomach and folded her in half, lifting her completely off the ground, and swatting her backward into a tangle of berry bushes. The air was smashed from her lungs, but she managed a high, shrill, single-note wail of shock and pain. When she crashed down in the shrubs, Dahlia felt like she had been shot. She briefly thought that’s what had happened.

  She lay there, punched deep into the shrubs, splayed like a starfish, gasping for air that seemed to have been sucked out of the whole world.

  Nathan rushed over, pulling a heavy-bladed meat cleaver from a leather belt pouch, crying a warning to the others. Dahlia stared, confused, as the forest itself seemed to come alive and consume him. She saw leaves and branches move and fold around him, but there were sounds like knuckles on flesh, and then Nathan was falling, his eyes going high and white, his knees buckling, the cleaver gone from his big fist.

  “There!” cried Jumper. “He’s right there.”

  Dahlia forced her head to turn a half inch—an effort that seemed impossibly difficult—and saw Jumper leap toward a tree, step off the side of it, pivot in mid-air and drill a devasting punch toward a shadowy figure who moved away from Nathan. Dahlia knew what Jumper’s leaping punches could do. They were bone breakers, neck-sprainers, teeth snappers. Except they needed to land in order to do damage. The figure—and she realized now it was someone wearing forest camo and foliage as a disguise—shifted away from the punch, allowing it to miss by an inch. Then a stiff forearm chopped laterally across Jumper’s upper chest. The impact turned the arm into an axle and Jumper’s body into the wheel; he rotated in midair and then fell hard on his face. The figure squatted and drove a two-knuckled punch into the base of Jumper’s skull and the free-runner flattened out and did not move again.

  Then Trash, Serena, and Slow Dog were there, crashing through the brush, each of them swinging weapons.

  The moment seemed to slow down, almost to freeze, as Dahlia got a clear look at the face of the man in the camo. He was tall and blocky, with big shoulders and a barrel chest. He wore one of those full ski-masks on his head—a balaclava, Dahlia thought it was called—but she could see his eyes. They were dark and surrounded by crow’s feet. For one fragment of a moment those eyes looked into hers and she couldn’t read the emotions that should have been there. No anger, no fear, no hatred. Instead she saw disappointment and annoyance. As if her whole strike team was nothing more than an inconvenience.

  Time speeded up all at once. The figure—the old man, she was sure of it—suddenly seemed to lose substance, to blur as he moved. Or maybe it was simply that he was so fast that she could not track him.

  Serena tried to stab him and he punched her forearm, her bicep, her deltoid and the side of her jaw. Bam, bam, bam, bam. The knife fell; the arm itself seemed to die and flop down, and then the lights in Serena’s eyes flickered and went out. She dropped in place.

  Slow Dog wore brass knuckles on both of his huge fists and he swung a one-two combination that was as fast as it was brutal. The old man did not evade but instead stepped into the swings so that Slow Dog’s huge arms wrapped around him and rebounded. Dahlia did not see what the old man actually did, but Slow Dog shrieked and staggered backward, blood spurting
from his nose and mouth. He dropped to his knees and then fell over sideways.

  Then Trash, faster than the others, grabbed the old man by the shoulder, spun him and drove a knife into his guts.

  Except that’s not what happened.

  The knife was suddenly gone from Trash’s hand and it struck the tree and buried itself in the bark, quivering with the impact. Trash himself seemed to leap into the air, twisting and turning. He hit the tree just inches below the knife, slamming shoulders and the back of his head into it.

  The old man stepped back and let him fall.

  Dahlia managed to pull her pistol out, even as her oxygen starved lungs clawed in a single breath. She raised the pistol and pointed it at him.

  The man stopped. He looked at the gun. Then he reached up and removed his balaclava, revealing a weathered face and graying hair. His eyes were calm, without trace of fear or surprise. He did not look at the gun. Instead he looked directly into Dahlia’s eyes.

  “The day is going badly for you, little sister,” he said. “You are not as good at this as you think. I’m going to give you a chance.”

  The gun trembled in Dahlia’s hand.

  “You can listen,” said the old man. “You can run away. Or you can die.”

  “I . . . I have the gun,” wheezed Dahlia. “I . . . ”

  He shook his head, the way a teacher would during a difficult lesson. Patient, but not infinitely so.

  “Listen, run, or die,” he repeated. “Those are the only three possible outcomes. Take a moment. Make a careful choice.”

  — 9 —

  THE WARRIOR WOMAN

  “Drop the knife or I’ll shoot.”

  Rachael considered her options, hyper aware of the gun pressed against her back. She didn’t think she’d be able to get the drop on him with her dagger or jump to the side fast enough before he pulled the trigger. She needed to put them off guard first, make them think she’d surrendered.

  “Drop it.”

  Opening her hand slowly, she obeyed the command., the Elven dagger hitting the dirt path with a soft thump. Other than that, she stayed perfectly still, eyes trained on Alice and Jason, who both watched her intently, ready to go for their weapons on her signal.

  She counted at least ten people. Didn’t mean there weren’t more out there. Most of them carried machetes or axes or hammers; only the guy behind her had a firearm.

  Scratch that. A man carrying a shotgun stepped into her line of sight.

  Overall, Rachael had never been great at math—her grades at school had only been average—but she was good at calculating combat situations, thanks to LARPing. Larger numbers of enemies didn’t necessarily mean a disadvantage, but it did mean they needed to work smarter.

  Disable the enemies with the guns first; ranged weapons would put them at a serious risk. Machetes and hammers next; they were one-handed weapons that could be swung fast, and cause more potential damage. Shovels and axes last; they usually required two hands to wield, had lousy balance and a slower hit rate. They would, however, do more damage if they did land a strike.

  The other man with a gun had it pointed directly at Jason’s chest. Her friend’s gaze didn’t leave hers, and she darted her eyes at the man holding the weapon. She hoped he got her meaning . . . and that their enemies didn’t.

  Jason give an infinitesimal nod and she looked over at Alice, who’d faded back into the trees, Tommy clung to her legs like a baby koala, his face buried against her stomach. “Stay back,” she mouthed.

  “Stand up, I don’t want you getting any ideas about that knife of yours.” The man behind her spoke again, accenting his words with another jab of the gun barrel. Rachael stood slowly, hands out in front, making sure not to make a move for her knife and sword—both within her reach.

  She was going to have to do this on hard mode apparently. But that was their life now. Hard mode.

  Without warning, she crouched and swung her leg around, hooking an ankle behind the man’s knee and yanking hard before rolling to the side, dagger back in her hand. Unprepared, the man lost his balance, falling backward with a shout. He hit the ground hard, gun falling off to the side and into the brush. He lay there, the wind knocked out of him.

  “Go!” she shouted to her team. Without waiting to see if they obeyed, she moved on to the next man, landing a strong kick to his chest as he swung his machete. He stumbled backward. Rachael pressed her advantage, slammed the pommel of her dagger against his wrist. He screamed and dropped the machete and she kicked him again, this time in the balls. He toppled over, hands folded over his groin.

  She heard the sounds of combat behind her, punctuated by Tommy’s screams. She turned and immediately ducked under the vicious swing of a shovel that would have taken her head off. Rachael grabbed the long handle and gave it a violent twist so that the attacker’s wrist was bent at an extreme angle. The leverage snapped his thumb with a sound like a heel stepping on a green twig. The man shrieked and Rachael doubled him over with a kick to the groin as she tore the shovel from him. She whirled and swung the flat of the blade against the ankles of a woman rushing at her, sending the attacker flying forward into a bad fall. The woman hit the bent-over man and the two of them fell into a sloppy heap.

  Another man rose up with a woodsman’s axe and chopped down at her, but Rachael brought the shovel up in both hands, blocked the axe handle at an angle that sloughed off the brute force. Even so, the shock of it vibrated through her wrists like a thousand needles.

  The axe man pulled back and tried a second and even more powerful blow, but Rachael was in motion, too. She darted sideways, reversed the shovel on her hands and rammed the blunt end of the handle into his solar plexus. He let out every molecule of air in his lungs and the axe chunked down into the dirt. Rachael spun the handle again and hit him in the back of the head with the flat of the shovel with such force that the man dove face-forward into the dirt.

  A knife whipped past her head and thunked into a tree behind her, startling her so badly she dropped the shovel. Rachael turned, looking for whoever threw it, and her heart jumped painfully in her chest as another attacker burst from the woods with a knife in his hand identical to the one he’d just thrown. She backpedaled and tore the knife from the tree, did a pivot that was more like a choreographed pirouette and used the momentum to give her power for a throw of her own. It caught him four steps away and buried itself in the meat of his thigh. The leg buckled and the man screeched as he fell, dropping his own knife to try and stanch the sudden explosion of blood.

  Rachael heard a cry and saw that Jason was fighting another attacker armed with another damn axe. Before she could take a step to help him, Alice rose up behind the killer and smashed him in the back of the head with the butt of her sword. The man’s eyes rolled high and he dropped senseless to the dirt.

  Rachael could see the first man she disarmed scrambling to find his gun. She snarled aloud as she ran toward him, snatched up his fallen machete and skidded to a stop with the blade pressed hard to the side of his throat. He froze, his fingers on the handle of the gun.

  “You can be stupid or you can be alive,” she said.

  He stared at her.

  “Right now none of your friends are dead,” said Rachael, pressing the edge into his skin with such force that a bead of blood broke from his skin and rolled along the steel. “It’s totally on you if you want to change that.”

  Behind her, she heard someone rack a shotgun. “On your six,” said Jason.

  The man on the ground drew his fingers away from the pistol.

  “Good choice,” said Rachael.

  — 10 —

  THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG

  Baskerville and I went looking for Old Man Church.

  Hope is such a fragile and dangerous thing, and I almost did not want to have it rekindled in my chest. I’d hoped to find Junie and Ethan at the farm. Top and Bunny had hoped to find their families, too. I don’t know if they ever did, or if they ever made it to the base in Neva
da. If so, they probably thought I was dead after all these months. They’d have given up hope on me.

  Now there was the chance, however slim or unlikely, that Mr. Church was alive and somewhere near here. Alive and doing what he did, which was to impose order on chaos.

  Once upon a time Church had been a field operator like me. Well, if any of the many tall tales about him were true, then not really like me. He was stranger, smarter, more dangerous—and more capable. He had been the adult in any room, the alpha of any gathering, even when he was among a few dozen SpecOps jocks. You couldn’t really imagine him as a child any more than you could imagine him dead. He was more like a force of nature than a person.

  Am I exaggerating? No, I really don’t think so. The phrase “larger than life” kind of defines him. Christ knows how many times I’d wondered what he’d been doing when Lucifer 113 got loose. If he hadn’t been infected, then it was no surprise at all that he was still working to save the world. Or at least as much of it as he could. Who knows, maybe he’s the one who decided that Asheville was the rally point. That wouldn’t surprise me even a little bit.

  The thing is, he actually was old. He was sixty-something when I met him, and I was in my early thirties at the time. Now he had to be pushing eighty. How much fight could there be left in him?

  I had to find out.

  So, with my dog running beside me, we followed trail after trail, mostly following the path Abdul’s team had taken. It was clear enough because of the tread-marks from their shoes. Abdul’s Doc Marten’s, and a mix of combat soles and Timberlands worn by his guys. Easy.

  By noon the next day I found a small pack of travelers walking down the center of a blacktop that was cracked and choked with weeds. Eleven of them, ranging from a woman of seventy down to a toddler in a stroller. They saw me coming and one of them pulled out a hunting bow and goddamn near killed me, but I stopped and put my hands up.