Still of Night

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Not looking for trouble,” I called. “Captain Ledger, U.S. army. Looking for my unit.” Again, a useful lie.

  “Lose the hardware,” called the old lady.

  “Not a chance,” I said, “but we can talk from here if you like.” We were about seventy feet apart.

  “What do you want?” she demanded. “We got no rations to share.”

  “Don’t need any,” I said, “but tell you what—how ’bout I go into those woods and come back with dinner? Then maybe we can we have a conversation that doesn’t involve yelling or gratuitious violence?”

  They cut looks at the surrounding woods. The old lady nodded. “Roger here is a darn fine shot. You try anything and he will put you and your dog down.”

  The guy with the bow stood rock steady and the arrow was aimed at my chest. I did not doubt what the old lady said. So, I walked backward a dozen paces, then turned my back to them and angled toward the woods. Baskerville lingered for a moment, maybe daring the archer to shoot. Have to admit I was sweating it a bit because getting an arrow in the back is a lot less fun than it sounds.

  The area I’d come through was farmland and there were plenty of animals out there. I’d seen sheep grazing on wildflowers and clover about a mile to the east, and I went that way. These animals were born and bred on these farms and even though they were destined for somebody’s plate before the dead rose, they weren’t able to grasp the concept of freedom. Half the milk cows out here had already died because they’d been bred to be totally dependent on humans to feed and tend them. Sure, some of the bulls had taken down a fair number of zombies, but they’d fallen, too.

  Not that sheep were smarter, but they didn’t need to be milked. They simply grazed, pooped, fucked, slept, and did the same day after day. They weren’t hard to find. I picked one that was about a hundred and fifty pounds and literally walked right up to it and killed the animal with my sword. It barely even noticed me. Made me wonder how they had not been eaten already by the dead, but maybe they—like Baskerville—could smell them and move away. Not sure; didn’t care.

  I popped my knife, bled it to reduce the weight, and then hoisted it across my shoulders and humped it back. That wasn’t easy and I could feel every one of my years and every inch of scar tissue by the time I found the road. The small caravan had moved on, but I figured they would and picked a spot ahead of where they might be. Picked well, too, because I stepped out of the woods less than a quarter mile ahead of them on a straight patch of road.

  They stopped and gaped at me. I grinned back, and Baskerville gave a snooty little whuff. No one shot me with an arrow.

  — 11 —

  DAHLIA AND THE PACK

  Dahlia lowered her gun.

  The old man gave a single nod of approval. He walked over to her and held out his hand, and Dahlia gave him the gun. He removed the magazine, ejected the shell, caught it, returned it to the mag, replaced the magazine itself, and put the pistol in his pocket. She watched with a strange fascination.

  Around them, the strike team groaned their way back to awareness. The old man moved through the small clearing where the fight took place. He gathered up weapons, patted everyone down, placed the weapons out of sight behind a fallen log, and then did a second check on each. He helped them sit up, felt pulses and looked into eyes. He flicked a knife out of somewhere—Dahlia never saw where—and cut a strip from Slow Dog’s sleeve, folded it into a compress, and showed the big young man how to hold it to stanch the bleeding. Then he went to Trash, who was blinking in stupid uncertainty as to what had happened, pulled him to his feet and probed the fighter’s skull.

  “It’s not broken,” said the old man, “but you’ll be sick for a bit.”

  “I—” began Trash, then he whirled and vomited. The old man sighed and patted his back.

  The others sat like naughty school kids on the ground, their backs to trees, while the old man went over and lowered himself onto the log. Dahlia heard the creak and pop of old tendons and joints.

  “I thought I was past all of this nonsense,” he said. He removed a cloth from a pocket and began sponging the greasepaint from his cheeks. He nodded to Dahlia. “You’re the leader,” he said, not making it a question. “What’s your name?”

  “Hey, fuck you,” gasped Trash, but the man put a finger to his lips.

  “Shhhh,” he advised. “And sit down before you fall down.”

  Trash looked like he wanted to make a fight of it, to try and reclaim the moment and take back some shred of his personal power, but instead he lost his balance and thumped down on his ass.

  “You blindsided us,” he muttered.

  “Of course I did,” said the old man. “You came in force. What would you expect me to do?”

  “You attacked two of our scouts.”

  “I counter-attacked. They made the first move.”

  Dahlia groaned as she tried to sit up. Her stomach felt like it was filled with hot splinters. She looked at the bough that had struck her. It was wrapped with thick pads of green leaves. When she glanced at the old man, he nodded.

  “I could have just as easily sharpened the branches to spikes and positioned it at face height.”

  No one said a word.

  “I could have dug pits lined with punji sticks and covered with infected blood,” said the old man. “Or I could have positioned myself in an elevated shooting position and killed you all when you walked through the big clearing two klicks from here. Take a moment to consider that. Add to that math the fact that it would have been very easy to cut your throats while you were down here, or shoot you with this young lady’s gun. Ponder that. Ask yourself why I would do things the way I did rather than the way that would have been easier and less dangerous for me. Go ahead. Take a few minutes with that.”

  No one spoke.

  The old man sighed.

  “I made the young lady here an offer, and I’ll share it with all of you. You can run away and not come back. I don’t hold grudges, but I am not particularly tolerant when it comes to recidivism. Or you could do something stupid now and then I will bury all of you. Or,” he said, “you can listen to what I have to say.”

  Serena and Slow Dog exchanged a look. Jumper was still in a semi-daze and Nathan merely looked scared and confused. Only Trash sat there with a face that was a mask of belligerence.

  “What is it you want to say?” asked Dahlia.

  The old man nodded approval, as if that was the right question. “If I was another kind of person I might be motivated to judge you solely on your actions. Based on that, I might regard you as below average in terms of intelligence gathering and mission planning. Your actual skill level, as measured by your attempt to execute your plan, leaves quite a lot to be desired. It’s amateurish and naïve. Also, it speaks to a neo-militancy likely borne from fear and lack of any kind of long-term strategic thinking. Nod if you’re following me.”

  After a moment Dahlia nodded. Slow Dog did, too. None of the others responded.

  “Had you been better at this, you would likely be more seriously injured or possibly dead. Depending on how difficult you made it.”

  “Fuck you,” grumbled Trash, but there was very little power in it.

  “Shut up, Trash,” said Dahlia quickly. Anger flared in his eyes, but he didn’t say anything.

  “What you should have done was try to parlay first,” said the old man. “You could have come here under some kind of flag of truce, and even perhaps offered an apology—though for the record, I don’t require them.”

  Dahlia licked her dry lips, tasted blood and dirt and dragged a forearm across her mouth.

  “You could have had your fighters in reserve if the parlay went south on you. That’s sensible. I could have admired that, and I would have responded to courtesy.”

  “How do we know we could trust you?” asked Serena.

  “Because I did not kill the two scouts. It would have been easy. They were children. It’s obvious you did not know I was here, so you w
ouldn’t have known where to look if they simply failed to return. It would have been nothing to me to kill them and either make it look like a zombie attack, or make them vanish entirely.”

  The certainty with which he said it scared Dahlia. The look in his eyes told her that he wasn’t bullshitting. Those eyes told her that he had done that sort of thing before. Maybe many times. He had to be some kind of ex-military. Maybe special ops. He’d taken on the whole strike team without so much as being touched. That was freaky scary.

  “How many of you are there?” asked the old man. “In your camp. How many?” When no one answered, he smiled and nodded. “Sensible not to share your numbers. But, for the sake of discussion, let’s say the number is sixty-seven.”

  That jolted everyone. Despite the pain in her stomach, Dahlia shot to her feet.

  “How . . . how . . . ?” It was all she could manage.

  “Intelligence gathering is the most important component of any mission. Remember that.”

  “Who told you?” demanded Nathan.

  The old man shook his head. “No one told me. I observed. I know that you sleep in the seventh tent from the edge of the woods.” He pointed at Serena. “You have the blue bedroll. Should I go on? No. The point is made. As a group of survivors you are all managing things just above the subsistence level. Not bad, considering how many other groups, including better-armed groups, have fallen. You get points for that. However, you are acting like a gang, and you are not very good at it.”

  “We do all right,” sneered Trash.

  “You just got your clocks cleaned by a very old man who took you all on without weapons. You, on the other hand, had youth, numbers and were all heavily armed. Explain to me how that supports your claim that you’re doing ‘all right.’”

  Trash’s face colored and he looked away.

  “You’re spying on us?” asked Dahlia.

  “Yes.”

  “Why? If you know all this about us, why not just leave before we came out here?”

  “That,” said the old man, “is a very intelligent question, and it deserves a straight answer. Pay attention.” He leaned his forearms on his thighs. “Before the outbreak I spent quite a long time running teams of special operators. Sadly, the nature of the outbreak disrupted my lines of communication with any who may have survived.”

  “The EMPs,” said Dahlia.

  “Yes. An ill-advised voice of action, and one which most likely crippled any chance of an effective response.” He laced his fingers together, and Dahlia saw that the dark gloves he wore were very thin. More like silk than canvas. “Since the collapse of the infrastructure I have been endeavoring to do what I could to help people get to places of shelter, and to organize so that they can survive in community form. We need to build our numbers because survival of the species requires a deep gene pool. Do you understand that?”

  Dahlia nodded. A few others did, too.

  “Being out here in the same woods as your group is not an accident. I became aware of you a few weeks ago and positioned myself where I was likely to be found. Your scouts work in a grid pattern, so I made sure that they would find me on a day when it was convenient for me. I made the same offer to the scouts that I have made to you. They chose to run. Fair enough. They aren’t on the policy level. They reported back and you came to find me. It was unfortunate and disappointing, though not particularly surprising, that you came to attack me. That could have worked out very badly for you. None of the injuries I inflicted are serious. All of you will be able to defend yourself if attacked by the living dead. That fact should be suggestive.”

  Dahlia nodded again.

  But Slow Dog asked, “Why? Why not just fuck us up and let us rot?”

  “Or turn into walkers?” asked Serena.

  “I’m not a fan of killing unless there is a tactical or strategic win involved. You are not formidable enough for that level of response from me.”

  “Ouch,” said Nathan.

  “And,” continued the old man, “you are potentially more useful to me, and by extension the world, if you’re alive.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Dahlia.

  “You are not good at what you do, but you could be. You’re all very young, very strong, and you have some experience with combat. I could bring you to a higher level of efficiency. I could train you to become a much more powerful and useful team.”

  “Why the hell would you want to do that?” asked Jumper, finally able to join the conversation.

  “Because the war that we’re fighting should only have two sides,” said the old man. “Us—the living—versus them—the dead. The nature and severity of this crisis should have been an eloquent statement about the folly of warfare as we’ve always known it. Lucifer 113, after all, was created as a bioweapon. With the death of billions of people, do we really need more of a lesson?”

  No one spoke.

  “You are operating out here as if aggression and preying on each other is the only path to survival. It isn’t. It is a self-tightening knot around your own necks. You will lose numbers through attrition and then you will be gone. Other, stronger gangs will overwhelm you. Or you will simply erode your own ability to want to live in a world that is defined by a constant struggle against extermination. You would, in a sense, be fighting on the side of living dead. And even if you managed to survive, your group is too small to survive in any generational way. You would pollute your DNA within a few generations and what is left to survive would be warped by genetical damage. Hardly a long game worth playing.”

  The old man stood up and walked over to Dahlia and stood looking down at her. She was tall, but he was taller and seemed to fill the whole clearing with his power.

  “Or, you could let me train you to be better advocates for your own right to survive as well as soldiers in a very real fight to preserve humanity. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people left in North America. Maybe even millions. Globally, probably ten or twenty times that many. They will tear themselves apart if they follow the kind of mindset you clearly have embraced. And they have other dangers to face. The rise of diseases that were kept in check by the medical infrastructure and which will now return with a vengeance.”

  “Why us?”

  “Because you’re young,” he said. “Because you have made mistakes but you haven’t corrupted yourselves so thoroughly that you’re beyond saving. Because you care for the people in your group, which means you still have compassion. Because I would rather take a risk on you than bury you.”

  Trash got to his feet. “Fuck this and fuck you, you old fuck. You can make all the bullshit threats you want, and maybe it’ll work on some assholes, but not me. You’re some kind of psycho motherfucker and we’re out of here.”

  He looked around, clearly waiting for the others to join him. Nathan and Serena rose and moved to stand with him. Jumper and Slow Dog stayed where they were. So did Dahlia. She saw the surprise and hurt bloom on Trash’s face.

  “Dahlia . . . come on . . . ”

  “Trash,” she said quickly, “maybe he’s right.”

  “What? You’re buying this shit? He’s conning you, D. He’s conning all of us. He’s running some kind of game.”

  She walked over to him. “Is he? He could have straight up killed us. All of us. If he was running a game, then explain to me why he didn’t.”

  “I don’t know why,” yelled Trash. “He’s fucked in the head. Who knows? All I know is I’m not going to start following some Obi-Wan Kenobi-acting motherfucker. If you do, then you’re as crazy as he is.”

  They stood staring at each other and Dahlia could feel the air all around her crackling with tension. It hurt her heart. But at the same time the things the old man said sent a thrill through her, and a wattage she did not yet understand. And she wanted to understand.

  She took a small step backward. “Then I guess I’m crazy.”

  The pain in Trash’s eyes made them wet and glassy. “Dahlia . . . what about the Pack? Wh
at about us?”

  “The Pack is mine,” she said. “They’ll do what I tell them to do.”

  “Fuck they will. I’m going to tell them to pack their shit and we are so out of here.”

  “No,” she snapped, “don’t you dare.”

  He got up in her face. “Just watch me. You think the Pack has your back more than mine? Let’s see.”

  Dahlia suddenly shoved him with both hands. She had no idea she was even going to do it until it was done. Trash was too sharp, though. He swatted her hands to one side and raised his hand to slap her hard across the face. Suddenly Slow Dog was there, pushing himself between Trash and Dahlia, puffing out his chest, pushing it against Trash.

  “You want to hit someone, bro, hit me.”

  A meaty hand dropped on Slow Dog’s shoulder and Nathan stepped to him. “You better settle down, hoss. You don’t want to—”

  And Jumper shoved him sideways. Nathan nearly fell but Serena caught him. Trash pointed a finger at Dahlia. “This how you want it? You want to bust up your own family, D? All we been through and this is what you want?”

  “I want us to survive,” she yelled. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

  Trash nodded. “Oh, I get it, you think because this old fuck has some moves that he’s going to have a bigger dick and teach you to like it. Some kind of Lolita bullshit and—”

  Dahlia slapped him across the face. It was a hard slap and it knocked his head to one side and tore a corner of his lip open, pulling thick beads of red from his skin. Slow Dog and Jumper flanked her, ready for what was coming, but Trash just shook his head. He touched his fingers to the cut, looking at the bright red, then reached out and wiped the finger on Dahlia’s sleeve.

  “You picked your side, D. You going to have to live with how this plays out.” He pointed his fingers like a gun at the old man and dropped the hammer. “Next time I see you, motherfucker, you’re going to need more than some kung-fu bullshit.”

  With that he turned and walked off. Serena and Nathan exchanged a long look, and Dahlia saw that they weren’t sure about which side they were on. But Nathan tapped Serena’s shoulder, nudging her in Trash’s direction. They both glanced at their friends, but then turned and vanished into the forest. The others stood listening to the sound of their passage fade, fade, and then vanish.