Still of Night

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Start here,” he said. “Up on the catwalks. Walk the walls in pairs. Scout the woods.”

  “Shouldn’t we be back at the gate where the fight is?” asked Bree.

  “No,” said Church. “We should not.”

  ***

  Dahlia reached the rear wall in time to see Yuki pitched backward as the sharp crack of a heavy rifle bounced off the walls. Tammy-Ducks lay in a heap along with two others. Tammy-Ducks would never rise, but the other two were already beginning to twitch as the parasites in their blood reanimated them.

  “I got this,” yelled Jumper and he quickly quieted each with dagger thrusts to the backs of their necks. It was horrible, and she could see how this cost the young man.

  Dahlia looked up at the wall and took a breath.

  “You can’t go up there,” said one of the gymnasts, who’d leapt down and was forcing words out through terrible sobs. “He’ll kill you, too.”

  Dahlia went up anyway, though she kept low and only took tiny, brief looks over the wall. On the third try a shot chipped out a piece of masonry four inches from her head. A single shot.

  She closed her eyes and tried to replay what she’d seen in those brief glances. Trees, a slope. People running. Heading to the western side of town. That’s where Church was. Dahlia came down and sent a runner to warn him.

  “Aren’t we going, too?” asked Jumper.

  “No,” she said. “It won’t be here.”

  “What won’t?”

  “The real attack. This isn’t where they’re going to come over the wall. There’s not enough room for them. The hill’s too close. And I don’t think it’s going to be the west wall either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re letting us see them carrying ladders that way.”

  Without another word, she wheeled around and ran along the wall, heading east.

  ***

  I stopped Rachael and Baskerville at the edge of the woods on the east side of the town, and it’s a damn good thing I did. The forest beyond where we stood ran up and over a rocky ridge. There were several Rovers on our side of the ridge and no one out in the field, but there was a weird vibe to the air. Call it a sense of expectant dread. Whatever. Or maybe it was a case of the willies.

  “What is it?” asked Rachael as we hunkered down behind a boulder.

  “Listen,” I said, pulling off the white hood.

  She glanced at me for a moment, then did the same. She cocked her head toward the west. At first she frowned and shook her head, then she went still and I saw it on her face. She heard it, too.

  “People,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper. “A lot of them.”

  “Yeah.”

  Rachael looked over her shoulder the way we’d come. “No orcs over here.”

  “Nope.”

  I studied the open space and saw something else. I touched her arm and pointed.

  “What . . . ?”

  I handed her my binoculars. “See the grass there? Right there, at the base of the wall? Tell me if it looks right to you.”

  She used the glasses to study where I’d indicated. Another frown. “The grass looks torn up. Kind of clumped.”

  “Uh huh. Want to take a guess what’s under those clumps?”

  She thought about it, glancing back to the ridge a few times.

  “If that’s where most of the Rovers are,” she said slowly, “and if all that stuff going on out front is a big distraction, then . . . ”

  “Keep going,” I said, “you’re doing good.”

  “Then how are they going to get over the wall here?”

  “How indeed?”

  She lowered the glasses. “You think they have ladders hidden under the grass?”

  “I’d actually be kind of disappointed if they didn’t. All things considered it’s a pretty snazzy plan. Good chance it’s going to work, too.”

  “Can we do anything? I mean . . . there’s a lot of them, right? What can we possibly do now?”

  I grinned and pulled the hood over my face. “Not sure about you, kiddo, but I intend to misbehave.”

  “‘Aim to misbehave,’” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a quote from Serenity,” she said. “The old movie. The spinoff of Firefly . . . ?”

  I patted her shoulder. “You may very well be the toughest absolute nerd girl left on Earth.”

  “Thanks,” she said. And meant it.

  We got up and, yes, we misbehaved.

  ***

  Dahlia found Church and told him what she thought.

  “Go back to the main gate,” he said. “It may be a dodge, and I rather think it is, but it’s still a major threat. We need to change the dynamic there. Your original plan is still a good one, but the mission has changed. Adapt to that. We need to shift the swarm. Do you understand?”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “I’ll leave Jumper and some people here and take the rest to the east wall.”

  “What about the sniper out back?”

  “Let him stay in place for now,” said Church. “We can deal with him later. We have a war to fight.”

  ***

  Dahlia returned to the front wall and when she climbed up again she looked out on a scene from hell itself. There were no longer hundreds of the living dead out there.

  Now there were thousands of them. Seething masses of the dead, boiling out of the woods like cockroaches from a collapsing building. The Rovers in their white garments beat and shoved them into the corridor of flame that led to the front gate. The archers were nearly out of arrows and some had taken to simply throwing river stones at the zombies. The mountain of corpses was now higher than the broken wall and Dahlia saw it tremble as more of the dead slammed against it from behind or writhed, still in their parody of life, within it. It was going to fall soon. There was no doubt of that. Once it did, there would be a highway of rotting bodies high enough to allow the living dead to enter Happy Valley.

  If they got into the town, then it would be carnage. Maybe—just maybe—the Pack and the helpers and the few allied residents could fight the zombies. But not the dead and the Rovers. Happy Valley was too spread out inside and too poorly prepared for attack outside.

  Dahlia wished that the plan had been to lure the Rovers in and then let them have the damn place while her Pack and the other survivors snuck out and faded into the woods. She’d even proposed that to Church early on. But now she understood why Church had turned it down. She’d seen proof of why. The Rovers were attacking on all sides. Even though the groups to the rear and west were smaller distraction forces, they were there. They were armed. They could possibly stall the Pack long enough to draw the whole Rover force in for the kill.

  No. The only real way to win this was to use the town itself as a weapon.

  And so she rallied her people. The supplies brought from the houses were there and she climbed down and began distributing them. There was no good plan. Only plans marginally less suicidal than others.

  She recalled a snatch of conversation she’d had with Church about this as they drew near to Happy Valley.

  “Some of the members of the Pack want to know why we’re bothering,” she said to him. “Those aren’t our people in there. We don’t even know how many slaves are inside the walls. Or how many Rovers are out here.”

  “That is the kind of question soldiers often ask on the eve of battle,” he had answered. “In World War II, in Iraq, in other wars, soldiers were often asked to go fight and possibly die for people they didn’t know, people they would not otherwise have met. We are not a conquering army, Dahlia. We are not the ones who start a war. We don’t get to choose whether war happens. What’s left to us is to decide is whether the people caught in the path of a war deserve our commitment to try and save them. Or free them. Or even avenge them. No one fights alongside us because of coercion. You don’t.”

  “No,” she’d admitted.

  “No one is forced to go with us to
free the slaves in Happy Valley. Not one member of this Pack is required to do that.”

  “No.”

  “So, tell me,” he asked gently, “why are we going to fight this war?”

  She thought about it for miles of that walk.

  “Because no one else will,” she said, then paused and amended that statement. “Because no one else will bother.”

  He nodded. “Give me more.”

  “Because . . . if we walk away, if we let what they’re doing to people in there stand, then we are allowing it. We’re . . . what’s the word? Complicit.”

  Church took her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it. There was nothing remotely romantic or sexual about it. He held it for a moment and then let it go. He said no more to her about it. Now, maybe there would be no time to ever finish that discussion.

  All there was left, was the war.

  — 49 —

  THE WAR

  Big Elroy had ridden with the Rovers for years before the dead rose, but not his whole life. Before he was a biker he’d been a soldier. A sergeant in the army who’d served with distinction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then was brought up on charges of rape. The victim, a thirteen-year-old girl, ignored threats against her own life and those of her family to testify. The army believed her and Big Elroy was stripped of rank, given a dishonorable discharge, and barely avoided jail time. If the girl had been white, he knew he’d have served time.

  He wasn’t out of work long before receiving a job offer from Blue Diamond, a security firm that provided, among other things, military contractors. No one called them mercenaries anymore.

  Big Elroy spent eight wonderful years on gigs in the Middle East, Africa, and Central America. He did not much care who cut the checks to Blue Diamond. What mattered was that he was having fun and getting paid well. Blue Diamond respected his skill set and his understanding of tactics and strategy. By his eighth year, Big Elroy was running his own team and designing complex mission plans.

  Then he got shot. For a soldier it would have been called a million-dollar wound; the kind of injury that insures you’ll never have to see the hell of combat again. For a contractor like him, it was like being pissed on. He had a limp he’d never shake and some nerve damage in his left hand. He lost more than seventy percent of the sight in his right eye. They gave him a severance package and a swift kick in the ass. Within six months he was riding with the Rovers.

  Now he was the Rovers. He’d been on the rise within the club before things went to shit, and when the dead rose and the top tier management of the Rovers club began eating each other, Big Elroy stepped in to fill a critical vacancy.

  Now he had two hundred and twenty soldiers in this region and another two hundred out in scavenging teams throughout Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. By tomorrow, he’d even have his own kingdom.

  Happy fucking Valley.

  Maybe he’d call it Rovertown. Maybe he’d call it Elroytown.

  Either way, it was his. All he had to do was take it.

  He stood like a general from some old Napoleonic war painting, sitting astride a horse on a hill that commanded a wide view of the valley. There were fires burning out front. There were fake-out teams and snipers on the east and in back.

  And the main force of his army was ready to rock and roll.

  Waiting for his word. He wished he had one of those cavalry sabers so he could hold it high and slash it down to signal the charge. Fuck, he should have thought of that. Ah well, a fire axe would work. He raised his. The lines of Rovers on the far side of the ridge tensed. The east was as pure and untouched as that girl in Iraq had been. Ready for the big meat.

  He raised his axe and then paused with it over his head. There was something weird down there on the field. Two of the Rovers in white hazmat suits were walking along the base of the wall, doing something he couldn’t quite see. The distance was too great.

  “Jesus Christ,” he roared, and turned to one of his lieutenants, “what the fuck are those two jerkoffs doing down there? They’re going to be seen.”

  “I . . . ” began the lieutenant. “It, um, looks like they’re checking on the ladders.”

  It did look like that. The pair of Rovers were moving from one concealed ladder to the next and bending over them for a moment each.

  “Get them the hell out of there, for Christ’s sake. They’re going to screw up the charge.”

  “Wait,” said the lieutenant, “they’re moving off. Maybe they were just checking to make sure the stuff was good.”

  “Why in the hell would they do something like that?”

  “I . . . ”

  “Never mind. Find out who they are,” said Big Elroy with a snarl. “I’m going to hang them by their balls.”

  “Yeah, you got it,” said the lieutenant. “It looks clear.”

  “Okay,” said Big Elroy. “Signal the teams. Light it all up.”

  The lieutenant ran back to the edge of the woods where a runner was waiting. He waved his arms and them gave a fist-pump signal. Within seconds whistles began blowing in the woods. Not the same patterns as before, but a strident and sustained three-note signal.

  ***

  The herding team outside of the front gate heard the whistle signal and everything went into high gear. They relayed the signals around the whole perimeter.

  In the back, the sniper kept up continuous fire.

  To the west, a team of Rovers rushed the wall with ladders while others fired guns and lobbed Molotov cocktails to give them cover. The attack had to look real, and so Big Elroy had picked forty Rovers who were too stupid to understand the concept of “cannon fodder.” They were given promises about first picks among any women captured inside, and other incentives; and they were amped up with amphetamines and cocaine, so they were wired to the gills. Like Viking berserkers, they bellowed and roared as they rushed the walls, throwing their ladders against the peach stucco and scrambling up.

  Slow Dog was in charge of the west wall defense. He smiled as the berserkers rushed the wall. Five ladders with eight men per.

  He raised the first bucket of gasoline and waited until the topmost man was almost up, then he poured it over him and let the rest splash down over the other seven. Then he scraped a kitchen match on the top of the wall and let it drop.

  The others manning the wall did exactly the same.

  The screams were terrible.

  ***

  Mr. Church and his team knelt out of sight on the catwalk at the top of the east wall. He had sixty fighters and hoped that would be enough.

  “Look,” said Bree, “what’s that?”

  Church looked over the edge and saw two Rovers in white hazmat suits go running from a place of cover and bend over a piece of torn lawn. One of the Rovers was tall, the other shorter and clearly female.

  “What are they doing?” whispered Thomas.

  That was a good question. The Rovers had bottles tucked under their arms and seemed to be pouring the contents over sections of grass. Church studied the lawn out there and after a moment grunted.

  Zack had his gun out. “I can take them both. From this distance it would be easy.”

  But Church shook his head. “No. Pass the word. Leave them be.”

  “Why?”

  “Call it a hunch.”

  As he said it he saw a movement in the woods nearby. An animal. When he shaded his eyes, he saw that it was a very large dog dressed in armor that was set with spikes.

  “Now isn’t that interesting,” he murmured.

  Dahlia worked furiously, mixing chemical fertilizer and soap flakes and gasoline in the exact amounts Mr. Church had taught her. ANFO, it was called, short for ammonium nitrate/fuel oil. A simple but powerful explosive. As she completed one batch she handed it to Neeko, who filled metal gasoline cans with it and then poured in handfuls of nails and screws. Another Pack member sealed each can and attached a fuse. They had seven of the little bombs and enough cans to make six more. Other Pack members filled gl
ass containers with any kind of flammable material they could find. The younger ones sealed them and carried them in batches to helpers on the wall.

  Dahlia was sweating heavily, heavily, her brain swirling with a cocktail of adrenaline, fear, and fatigue.

  “Let them come,” she said to herself as she worked. “Let them come.”

  ***

  They came.

  With a howl that shook the sky, the Rovers and their legion of the undead assaulted the front gate. The intention was clearly to create a ramp of the dead all the way to the breech and then let as many zombies inside the walls as could manage the climb. It did not matter to Big Elroy if the living dead got into the town. He had enough people to clear it all out, and the zombies would do a lot of the killing for them. Shock troops in the truest sense of the word.

  The handlers in the field blew their whistles and used their poles and lit their fires exactly as they’d drilled a hundred times. It worked perfectly. The dead, drawn from all over this part of the county, followed the noise and avoided the flames and went for the living people they could see and smell on the walls.

  The defenders on the wall had no arrows left and were throwing rocks. Rocks, for god’s sake. That’s all they had to fight with. The Rover handlers, emboldened, walked right up to within thirty feet of the wall. Outside of the effective range of a heavy stone. Fearless in their sure knowledge that the people inside were all going to die.

  Gutter, the head of the field team, stood closer than anyone. He was laughing as the mound of dead finally fell forward, filling the trench and bridging the gap between them and the shattered wall. The dead surged forward. A huge cheer went up from the Rovers all across the field, and they ran in close to be ready to follow the zombies into the doomed town.

  ***

  “Now,” yelled Dahlia as she grabbed a red gasoline can by the handle, lit the fuse with a Zippo lighter, shot to her feet and hurled it over the wall. She’d risked a short fuse because she didn’t want to give it time to land.