Still of Night

by Jonathan Maberry

  His answer was a low, soft growl.

  I trained my glasses on the vista, scanning the walls of the town, the open space between that and the woods, and then the tree-line itself.

  That’s when I saw them.

  Four men knelt in shadows very much as I was. They were rough-looking characters dressed in leather and denim, with lots of knives and guns at their hips or slung across their backs. Two of them had binoculars and were intently studying Happy Valley.

  I made a small hand sign to Baskerville, telling him to scout quietly. He was off in a flash, but for all his bulk and armor, he knew how to move like a ghost when he wanted to. I put my binoculars away, loosened my sword in its sheath, checked the magazine in my sidearm, and followed.

  The watchers were pretty intent on studying the town, but it didn’t mean they were oblivious to everything else. Caution has kept me alive all these years. Knowledge of how to move through the woods the right way has always been key. There’s a way to do it right. You listen to the woods. They’re never actually silent, and quiet is relative.

  Once you open up your senses to the life of a forest, you begin a conversation. You listen in order to learn and form opinion, but you have to be careful not to allow assumption or judgment. Truth is absolute in the natural world. However, you need to interpret the truth and understand it. There is no guile in the way tall grass or leaves move in a breeze; there’s no lie to the way mud dries around a footprint or how crickets react to the presence of things that frighten them. If you are experienced and passive, you can hear sounds that don’t belong and see things that are out of place.

  The reverse of that is to move in ways that are in harmony with the natural world. If you don’t want to be seen, move in the way the forest moves. Walk no faster than the breeze and when it stops, you stop. Find places to step that won’t easily take a footprint. Look for things on the ground that will crack under your weight. Consider how well your clothing and face and equipment will blend into the existing landscape.

  I knew how to do this. It’s kept me alive, allowed me to hunt, kept the dead ones from spotting me, and brought grief to people I don’t like.

  The four men watching Happy Valley did not hear me. They didn’t see me. I stood beside a tree ten feet from them and they had no idea. Baskerville lay in the tall weeds eighteen feet behind me, and they had no idea. The wind was blowing the wrong way for them to hear us approach or smell us.

  I watched them. Learning them.

  Two of them were twenty-somethings with lots of colorful tattoos. Naked women, monsters, cartoon characters. One guy was in his thirties and was obviously a hardass biker type. Less expensive tattoos, including some amateur shit. Symbolic more than decorative. Scars and hard hands. But it was the fourth guy who interested me most. He was late forties and had a body that looked like it was made from bundles of piano cable and roughly smoothed rock. His face was like an eroded wall. Some Native American blood, I think. Or Russian. Mongol eyes in either case. A long beard that was prematurely white. Prison tats everywhere, and tear drops on his cheek. I could only see him in profile when he turned to talk to the others. That was enough to let me know a few things. He was the leader of this crew and he was the most dangerous. If it came to a fight, I’d kill him first, and kill him quick, because guys like that are dangerous as long as they can still draw breath.

  Not that the others were sissies. Even the younger guys looked like they knew how to dance.

  What troubled me most was what they were wearing. Not the clothes, which were somewhere between de rigueur biker gear and retro Mad Max stuff. That was fine. When so many things want to bite you, leather was a smart choice. No, what drew my eye were the necklaces they wore. The younger guys each wore human fingers strung on leather. The thirty-something had noses on his. And the older guy had scalps on his. Yeah. Actual scalps. Maybe fifteen or twenty of them. Strung with beads and a few feathers.

  Holy shit.

  They spoke together in low tones. The younger guys whispered, which is stupid. Whispers carry because of the sibilant “ess” sounds. The older guy was smarter and spoke quietly.

  “Four per shift,” he said. “Three shifts a day.”

  “They’re keeping watch,” said one of the younger guys.

  “They’re being stupid,” said the older guy. “They got all those people and they have the guards working full eight-hour shifts. Use your damn brain, Chickie. They don’t know we’re coming, so they’re probably bored as fuck by now. Two, three hours into each shift and they’re getting distracted. Five or six hours in and they’re either not paying attention at all or out on their feet. That’s when we move.”

  “Why not wait until, like, seven hours in?” asked Chickie. “Won’t they be more tired?”

  I expected the older guy to give a harsh answer, but he fooled me. It was obvious he was schooling the younger guys. “Nah,” he said, “seven hours in and they’re starting to count down to end of shift. And they wouldn’t want to risk dozing off then because they’d get in the shit with whoever their boss is.”

  The others nodded. I had to agree. That was a reasonable assessment.

  What I couldn’t see yet was where these guards were that they were discussing. Then I saw it when one of them moved. High on the corner of a wall was a small shed-like guard tower mostly hidden behind the leaves of a big sycamore. The tree blocked the tower from sight until one of the men inside opened a kind of hatch and poured a bucket of water over the edge. Probably from a chemical toilet. The grass below the tower was all withered and dead.

  With the hatch open I could just about make out other figures in the shed. Three of them. Two men and a woman, sitting on folding chairs. Pretty sure they were playing cards.

  “Fucking clown college,” said the older man. “Their line of sight’s for shit and they got Dumb and Dumber standing guard.”

  “You got that right, Snail,” said the thirty-something. “They might as well just hang out a welcome sign for us.”

  “Pretty much what they’re doing,” said the older man, Snail. He looked up at the sun. “Getting late. Let’s boogie.”

  They backed into the shadows before they stood up. I stayed right where I was and they passed within five feet of me. I could have taken them right there. Hit them hard from one side and let Baskerville close the trap from the other side. And maybe I should have. The nature of gathering intelligence is that you have to understand the larger picture and I didn’t want to fall into the assumption trap. Sure, they were hardcases and their necklaces were not the post-apocalyptic version of Boy Scout merit badges. That said, it didn’t mean they were actually evil. Maybe the trophies came from zombies they’d killed. I couldn’t tell without a closer examination. For all I knew, they could be rough-edged good guys working to protect a group of travelers. Hell, from any distance I looked like rough trade myself.

  Add to that math the bodies in the clearing. I couldn’t easily concoct a scenario where these guys were responsible for that. Some of those people had been there for a long time, and if these men were just now assessing the sentry patterns, then it seemed likely they were newcomers. Which meant that the people on the other side of that wall could be bad guys.

  Maybe, maybe not. They could have put those poor bastards in the clearing as a warning. Each of those zombies could have been a scavenger or some other kind of bad guy, and the clearing could be a place of public execution. Harsh, sure, but these were End Times. Harsh seemed kind of ordinary.

  In either case, I didn’t know enough to warrant action. I won’t take a life based on an assumption. So, I let them pass.

  When they were gone I walked over to where they’d been and stood for a while in the cool shadows. Baskerville came over and sat nearby, watching the path the men had taken. He didn’t like them worth a damn, that was obvious.

  One thing occurred to me. Something that the librarian, Abigail, said. I couldn’t recall the exact words, but she’d mentioned gangs of rovers.
That clicked with a bit of information from way back before the End, when I was a cop in Baltimore. There was a biker gang known as the Rovers. They were a real bad bunch, too. Well known for violence and brutality on a scale that made other gangs steer clear. There was even a case once where seven members of the Warriors, another biker gang, had been murdered in a drug deal gone bad. The right hand of each of the murdered bikers was missing and never found. The detectives working that case concluded the hands were taken as trophies.

  Trophies. Like ears, noses, and scalps?

  Could Abigail have been referring to a specific group rather than making a general comment? If so, were these boys part of that old gang? Too many things lined up all at once for me to dismiss the possibility, and that included my own gut instinct.

  Which meant they were probably bad guys after all.

  Even so, they hadn’t killed those people in the clearing. So . . . what in the wide blue fuck was going on out here? I glanced at the peach-stuccoed walls, with the incompetent security and the strange goings on in the nearby clearing. I did not believe for one second that Mr. Church was in Happy Valley.

  All sorts of emotions warred inside my head and heart.

  I clicked my tongue for Baskerville and together we faded into the woods. We’d found people. Now we wanted answers. And maybe we both wanted some blood, too. Seemed about the right time for that.

  — 23 —

  DAHLIA AND THE PACK

  Dahlia found Church cleaning up the equipment after a training session. Neeko and some of the others were limping off to recover from a grueling combat drill. Church turned before she could call his name and stood waiting, frowning as she came close.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Dahlia was winded and had to take a moment to catch her breath. The extra weight she carried helped her in fighting, but it was not her friend in a flat run through the woods. Sweat streamed down her face and throat, and her clothes were pasted to her.

  “Tra—Trash,” she gasped.

  Church glanced around to make sure no one else was close, then guided her to a pair of camp chairs. She thumped down in hers and gratefully accepted a canteen. After three gulps her throat felt less raw.

  “Tell me,” said Church, and she did. The frown he wore deepened as she described the men Trash was with. When she was done he had her go through it again, slowing down, describing everything in minute detail. By now she was used to this. Church was all about the details. What he called “deep intelligence.”

  When she was done he sat back in his chair and was quiet for a moment, then he nodded slowly. “I expected them to come this way soon, but I thought we’d have at least another month.”

  “Wait . . . you know those guys?”

  “Not specifically,” said Church, “but I know of them. They called themselves the Rovers. The core group used to be a biker gang.”

  “Sure,” she said, “I heard about them. On the news, I mean . . . before. They were always in trouble for something. Drugs, I think.”

  “Drugs were a big part of their activities,” agreed Church. “They also trafficked in arms. Gun, explosives. Civilian and military grade. Selling to other gangs, to organized crime outfits, and to militia groups from Pennsylvania to Mississippi.”

  “They sound like a bunch of assholes.”

  “What they are,” said Church, “are extremely dangerous. They are organized, ruthless, and efficient. The fact that they don’t have working motorcycles anymore does not decrease the threat they pose. If anything, it increases it because it makes them more localized. And it has turned them into scavengers as well as predators. Call it a locust mentality. They have been attacking settlements, camps, and refugee centers. I’ve seen what they leave behind.” He paused and looked into the forest as if he could see the Rovers. “They are the reason I’ve been training the Pack so aggressively. Fighting the dead is bad, but doing so requires a smaller skill set and it is, as you often put it, ‘rinse and repeat.’ The dead don’t learn from experience. The Rovers do. And they are both merciless and unforgiving.”

  And Trash is with them . . . ” breathed Dahlia. “Oh, god . . . ”

  “You said that he pointed in the direction of this camp?”

  She nodded. Tears stung her eyes, but she tried not to let them fall. She didn’t want to cry. Not for Trash. Not if he had joined a group like that. And yet . . . maybe he didn’t know who they were. Or how bad they were. Maybe they tricked him somehow.

  “Dahlia,” said Church, and she looked at him. His eyes, even mostly hidden behind the tinted lenses, were intense. “Listen to me,” he said in a voice that was kind but not soft. “I know you love Trash. You’ve never said as much, but trust me when I say that I know the look of heartbreak. You’ve been very brave because you’re the leader of your Pack, but I know that you’re hurting. And I know that you’re holding hope inside. You want Trash and the others to come back to the Pack. To come back to you.”

  She brushed at her eyes but did not trust herself to actually reply. He nodded anyway.

  “Trash made his choice. He could have stayed with you and with the Pack. He could have joined what we’re building here, but he chose not to do that. If he has thrown in with the Rovers, then you have to accept the possibility that he is lost.”

  “No . . . ”

  Church took both of her hands in his. The silk gloves he wore were cool and the fingers beneath them as hard as iron. “A war is coming. I’ve been preparing for it since I first learned about the Rovers. I’ve fought a lot of wars in my life. I will fight this one and I intend to win. I am going to tear the Rovers down. I intend to end them. Do you understand what that means? It means I’m going to war under a black flag. With people like them there is no chance of a reconciliation.”

  “Doesn’t that make you just as bad as them?”

  Church’s mouth hardened. “Does it? By what logic? No, I want an actual answer. How does killing a monster make you a monster?”

  “There was that old saying, from . . . Nietzsche, I think. Something about ‘If you fight monsters you become one.’”

  Church sniffed. “Nietzsche is often misquoted and nearly always misunderstood. What he said was: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster . . . for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’ His words were a caution, but he wasn’t speaking in absolutes. The logic many people infer from that quote is that if you do monstrous things you will inevitably become a monster, but that isn’t so. Are you so close-minded that you think every soldier who has ever killed for his or her country immediately and irrevocably became a monster? That the act of killing makes everyone irredeemable?”

  “No . . . that’s not what I . . . ”

  “You’re a very smart young woman, Dahlia, but even smart people can be lazy in thinking. You are speaking from a place of hurt and fear, not from a distance that allows for insight and understanding. Consider . . . when this war happens, Neeko will likely have to fight and he may have to kill. Will that condemn him to a changed nature where he will be defined only by what he had to do? Shouldn’t he be viewed through the lens of context? If he kills to prevent the Rovers from raping, brutalizing, and killing many others, does that truly make him as bad as them?”

  Now she was crying. Slow tears fell crookedly down her cheeks as she shook her head.

  “Wars are fought by people,” said Church. “Some of those people become monsters. A few. Not all. Not most. The rest . . . ? If they’re lucky, they go home to be with the people they fought for. They find a way to lay down their weapons and most of them manage it. And although they carry some scars, in flesh and soul, they are allowed to stop being soldiers.” He paused and tilted his head to appraise her. “Tell me . . . do you want to go to war with the Rovers?”

  “God, no!”

  “Will you if they attack this camp?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Would you step in to fight them i
f you saw them raiding one of those caravans we sent to Asheville? The one last week, for example. There were sixteen children under ten, and eight people over seventy. If the Rovers were trying to murder them and the only thing you could to do stop them was to kill them all . . . would you?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Of course it’s not. Answer the question, though.”

  “Yes,” she snapped. “Yes, I’d kill them. To save all those little kids, of course I would, but that’s my point. It makes me a killer.”

  “Ah,” he said, smiling sadly, “that is where you’re wrong, Dahlia. The killers are the ones who choose to do that. If you chose to stand between the helpless and people who wanted to harm them, even if you were forced to kill, it doesn’t define you as a killer.”

  “Yeah? Then what the fuck does it make me?”

  “It makes you a warrior.”

  She stared at him, and the word seemed to burn in the air.

  “Warrior . . . ?”

  “Oh yes. A soldier follows orders, right or wrong. A warrior, a true warrior, steps into harm’s way to save the lives of those who cannot defend themselves.” He released her hands. “I’m teaching you how to fight, how to kill, but I have no intentions at all of turning you into a killer. Even if you kill a hundred of the enemy. I want you to live, Dahlia. When I’m gone you will need to lead your Pack, and you will need to transform it into a community. Maybe into a nation. But before we can rebuild the world we have to preserve it.”

  He stood.

  “The Rovers are coming for us,” said Mr. Church. “The difference between them and you is that they want a war. They want to kill.”

  Dahlia got to her feet. The tears were hot on her cheeks but she didn’t wipe them away. “What . . . what do you want me to do?”

  Her voice was shaky, her heart was breaking, but she stood firm.

  “Gather the pack,” said Church. “Call in the scouts. We need to find out how many are coming.”