The Fire and the Free City

by Eric Wood

  Sam shrugged and did just as the bandit asked. He lowered his rifle slowly to the ground, holding it by the center of its black barrel, his eyes fixed on those of the bandit leader. "You boys seem to know your business," Sam said. "Maybe we can come to some understanding. None of us needs to die."

  A few of the bandits chuckled. "You just do everything I say, boy, and that just might happen," the leader said. He paused, obviously pleased with himself. "If you're lucky."

  Sam raised his hands slowly as he straightened back up, his rifle flat on the ground. He stood facing the leader, his open hands on either side of his head, his thumbs just below his ears. He stared at the bandit leader, expressionless.

  "Now," the leader continued, "the next thing that is going to happen is you two are going to take every last thing you're carrying, and you're going to pile it up right here at my feet. Then you're both going to take off those boots, and strip down to your skivvies, and put all that right on top of the pile. If you're offering is...substantial enough, we'll let you live. We might even decide not to take your little woman with us."

  Just the hint of a smirk formed on the edge of Sam's lips. "I think we've got a little misunderstanding here," he said, his hands still raised. "I was offering to let you guys leave here alive. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely you’ll accept my offer."

  The bandits laughed. Abigail knew what they were thinking. What possible threat could two small teenagers be to men like them? Men that had probably killed scores in their day — grown men and Infected, Ravagers even. But their laughter betrayed just how unprepared they were, and how poor this day was about to turn out for them. When they looked at Sam, they didn't see someone who had killed two Ravager snipers from a thousand yards out: someone who had marched unarmed into the heart of old Wyoming's toughest war leader's camp and survived, someone who had triumphed multiple times against odds far longer than these. And when they saw Abigail, they saw even less. They saw a small girl, a victim, a prize. A non-threat. They didn't see what she was, even if they might feel something off about her, in the deepest, most primal part of their lizard brains. They didn't see that she was the worst danger they could possibly face, in this world or any other. They didn't see what was right in front of their faces.

  A Reaper.

  "Last chance, guys, before things go bad. All I want from today is some damned gas," Sam said. He lowered his hands, very slowly, to the tops of his shoulders. And to the twin pistols strapped to his upper back.

  One of the bandits in front of Abigail, to his small credit, recognized the threat and raised his rifle toward Sam. Abigail moved in an instant, and before the man could take aim she had her knife free from its sheath. With a flick of her wrist she sent the weapon flying, faster than the strongest Uninfected could manage with even a full windup, and the blade buried itself just behind the man's ear. He died instantly, but some final autonomous nerve twitch fired off his weapon, just two shots, sailing up harmlessly into the sky. But that was all it took to shatter the calm, to turn standoff to full firefight.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Sam pull both of his pistols and begin to fire, throwing himself to the side as he did so. She heard the rolling firecracker burst of gunfire as the four bandits ahead of him opened up with their weapons. She smelled the sour odor of the bandit just in front of her as she dashed forward, felt the crack of his breaking ribs as she buried a fist into his side. She tasted the sharp tang of gunpowder as he fired his own weapon harmlessly above her head: she had already ducked and jumped to one side, far quicker than he could adjust for.

  A quick downward chop, aimed just below the base of his skull as she passed around him, finished him off. She contemplated, just for an instant, taking the opportunity to crack open his neck and sate herself on the spinal fluid that she unfortunately needed to survive. She stopped herself from indulging this instinct just as quickly. She was having a hard-enough time bridging the gap between Sam and herself as it was — blatantly and gorily reminding him of her true nature wouldn't exactly help her efforts.

  Instead, she turned her attention to the remaining bandits. One of them was down, lying on his back in a slowly expanding pool of blood. The other three had ducked down behind cover, as had Sam, maybe a half-dozen yards ahead of them.

  "Whoa!" the lead bandit screamed. "Whoa, whoa, whoa." The gunfire had stopped just as fast as it had begun. No more than fifteen seconds had passed. "Everyone just calm down. Calm. Down."

  There was the briefest moment of silence before she heard the sound.

  Click.

  Click-Click-Click.

  The low moans came a few heartbeats later, from the edge of the woods just south of the ruined gas station.

  "Son of a..." Abigail muttered, pulling her knife free from the bandit she had killed.

  Sam had been right, despite himself.

  Plague-Heads.

  Three of them stumbled out of the woods, followed shortly by about fifteen more. Attracted by gunfire, they lurched drunkenly from side to side as they moved forward, their progress deceptively fast. Shots erupted again as the bandits saw the new threat, bullet holes riddling the Plague-Heads’ mottled green flesh.

  They kept coming, undeterred by the gunfire, seemingly unaffected by their new wounds. Still more were emerging from the forest, and for the first time Abigail felt the tiniest pangs of worry.

  Plague-Heads were the simplest of the four strains of Infected, and unarguably the least human. They still looked more or less human, with the exception of their green-tinged skin and their overly large mouths; you would never mistake them for an Uninfected, of course, but compared to the oversized and misshapen forms of Ravagers and Howlers, they were positively nondescript. Their behavior, however, was on the far side of the spectrum. Anything that once made them human had been stripped away, replaced by a single desire: the spreading of the Horsemen Virus, which grew and survived in their stomachs, waiting to be projectile vomited onto new, Uninfected hosts. Her mentor — her father, in many ways — had told her all about the Old World’s many zombie stories. In truth, little beyond a taste for flesh separated the very real Plague-Heads from the fictional monsters of yesteryear. The tendency to feed on flesh, to her endless horror, was the exclusive domain of Reapers.

  The horde, now numbering at least two dozen, was nearly on them. A handful had gone down, having caught enough bullets to terminate essential motor functions, but the rest trudged on. As a Reaper already, Abigail had nothing to fear from their infectious vomit, and for reasons she still didn't fully understand, Sam was also immune. That didn't mean the Plague-Heads weren't dangerous, however. They might not infect either of them, but with their mindless, unrelenting strength, they could tear even Abigail apart if enough converged on her.

  She flipped her knife in the air and caught it; took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. Twenty-some Plague-Heads was a quite a number, but then again, she had always been something of an overachiever. She gripped the knife tight and ran into the middle of the horde.

  Everyone knew that Plague-Heads were constitutionally incapable of feeling fear, but if they had even the slightest ghost of the ability left within them, this horde should have been terrified. Abigail moved within their midst like a tempest; like a hurricane of blades. She cut one Plague-Head's neck to the bone, another two she decapitated, all in an instant, all without stopping. She smashed one with a fist, another with an elbow, and a third with her forehead. Cold, slimy hands grabbed at her from all angles, but she was too fast for most to grab, too strong for the rest to hold. She was grim, unrelenting death, a reaper of the horde as apt as the name her kind had been given.

  Bullets flew all around her. Most she simply heard: the far away ones snapped past, the nearer buzzed and roared. She caught a snippet of their origins: two of the remaining bandits seemed to be aiming at her, Sam at the few Plague-Heads still behind her. While most of her focus was concentrated on killing and staying alive, she couldn't help but scowl. Thanks fo
r the help, Sam, but maybe your attention would be better concentrated on the assholes shooting at me.

  She heard a tight, cut-off cry of pain just behind her. As she turned toward the source of the shout — confusing, as Plague-Heads neither felt pain nor expressed alarm — she saw that Sam indeed had turned on the bandits. She saw one go down as she killed yet another Plague-Head, and then she saw the bandit leader follow a moment later.

  She lifted her arm to slay the final standing ghoul and noticed something odd. For some reason, her arm didn't follow her command; instead, it remained limp at her side. Also strange was just how dizzy she had become, all of a sudden, and how tired. She shouldn't have even begun to tire at this point, and her damn arm certainly shouldn't feel as numb as it now did.

  The final Plague-Head lurched toward her, and it was all she could do to stab it with her working arm before she collapsed to her knees. The Plague-Head, undeterred, grabbed her by the shoulders and began to twist her apart, one shoulder forward, and the other back. She didn't have the strength to resist it, and she didn't seem to care as much as she probably should have. Really, she just wanted to sleep.

  The ghoul's grip relaxed as its head came apart. She heard the gunshot that saved her a millisecond later. She lay down on the ground, and as her head lolled to the side, she saw her numb arm and everything made sense. She had apparently caught a bullet, square in the bone just above the elbow, and it had nearly taken the lower half of her arm clean off. There was blood, a lot of it. That can't be good, she thought idly. She mostly just wanted to shut her eyes, but she knew she shouldn't, even if she wasn't sure why not.

  Just before she finally lost consciousness, she saw Sam leaning over her.

  "You're going to be just fine, Abby," he said. "You're going to be fine, dammit. You have to be."

  The last thought she had was the regret that their quarry had probably heard the gunshots, and now it was going to be that much harder to find her. And they still didn't have any gas for the bikes.

  3

  Thunder, rolling in the distance. No, wait, she thought, as the last happy traces of unconsciousness faded away and the pain of the real world returned, that wasn't thunder at all.

  That was gunfire.

  Roach sat up, grinding her teeth together as fresh spasms of pain coursed through her muscles, through her bones. After a moment or two the waves of agony calmed, and the electric whiteness that always accompanied the pain receded from her vision. In its place was the world around her.

  The same world, for all she could tell; and yet, every last thing about it felt different. But she knew, in now familiar patterns of thought, that a week ago all of this would have been as alien to her as the taste of the moon. Only one thing had changed, though, and that was her.

  Without thinking, she raised a hand to scratch at the tiny lump on the side of her neck. The spot where Deacon had stuck her with whatever it had been in that vial. The serum that came from one of those sheep-men who had come down from the Colony to the north. The serum Deacon kept calling ‘phase two,’ or simply ‘the future.’

  She remembered every detail of it. How could she forget, when the nightmare that had come of it greeted her every time she had managed to sleep since?

  But that was enough time wallowing in the past. She had plenty to worry about still in front of her, starting with just what those gunshots meant. It meant they were getting close.

  Or not. Roach shrugged and reached for her pack, which she had been using as a pillow. Those gunshots could have been anything or anyone. It wasn't like her pursuers had any kind of monopoly on firearm-based violence out here in the Wilds. Feral sheep-men, some of the smarter Howlers, a War Band of Ravagers — it could be anyone. She hesitated for a moment, her pack half-open, her hand frozen around the tiny drawstring, stopped short at the thought of Ravagers — and at the very fact she thought of them as 'Ravagers' at all. Before that damned needle — before Deacon had turned on her — they had always just been people. Her people. And somehow now she knew that was no longer true. They were no longer her people. She wasn't what she once was; she knew she was no longer a Ravager.

  Whatever else I am, she thought, I'm someone that still has time. Those shots couldn't have been closer than a mile; they were probably further than that. She would have to keep moving, she knew that, but she still needed time to eat some breakfast. To regain some strength.

  Her campsite, in the hollowed-out center of a thick briar patch a few feet away from a slowly moving creek, was well hidden, and even if the blood eater and her trigger-happy friend had caught her trail, they were still a good bit behind her. She could take a moment yet to marshal her strength, to brace against the pain of whatever changes were violently rearranging her body, and then she'd be able to walk.

  Maybe, if I'm really feeling lucky, I could take a tiny bit of time and figure out where the hell I'm going.

  She stood up, gritting her teeth as the expected wave of pain rushed down from head to toe. With a sigh she walked over to the creek, her pack in tow. Her mouth sticky and her throat parched, she fished a half-numb hand through her pack until her fingers touched on her dented metal canteen. She ripped it free and, distracted by thirst and pain and a thousand half-formed worries, managed to accidentally dump out half the pack's contents — half of her remaining possessions — all along the dark mud of the creek bank.

  Ignoring the mess, she collapsed to her knees at the water’s edge and filled her canteen. She brought it up to her lips, sighing in some small bit of satisfaction as she drank down the icy cool liquid. Her relief was short-lived, however, as the familiar pulses of nausea came a second later, and it took all her effort not to puke the creek water right back up. She hadn't been able to eat or drink even the smallest amount without feeling like she was going to die.

  Not since that syringe, she thought. Not since Deacon's mysterious formula.

  At least I kept the water down this time. For a few days, after she had been unwillingly changed by the mysterious 'phase two', she had felt like a damned Plague-Head, spraying puke all around her every time she ate or drank.

  The nausea calmed down, and she worked to steady her breath. While she was doing that she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the slowly moving water. The face staring back at her was a stranger's: the bright red hair that covered the left side of her head lay lank, the braids on the side broken and mostly undone, the stubble on the right side barely covering the angry patches of rash and scabs. Her face-paint was long gone — blotchy pale skin surrounded her ice-blue eyes. Every morning, the first thing she would do upon waking would be to run two fingers of black grease-paint over each eye; now, her naked face looked more like a frightened, sickly ghost than a badass Ravager skull-cracker, and for the ten-thousandth time she remembered that her old life was over. For the ten-thousandth time, she felt like breaking down and crying.

  This time, at least, she resisted that shameful, weak urge. For the first few days she had been unable to, and nothing made her feel less like the person she was than the fits of curled-up, shaking, uncontrollable weeping. She had never cried a day in her life, before the needle. Not when she was a toddler learning to fight, not when they fished two rifle rounds out of her belly, and not when the rocket launched from the Colony wall had hit the truck carrying her mother and turned the whole thing into a fiery ball of metal and meat. Ravagers didn't cry. Crying was weakness, and Ravagers were not weak.

  But she was now, and she cried.

  She sat back, looking away from the face of the weakling in the water, and began to re-gather her things. It was an odd collection, what she had taken with her. What she considered important. Some of the things made sense — a box of bullets, always useful, and her favorite knife, with its curved, talon-like blade. Other things were more...sentimental, that’s the word Deacon would use. A word she would have never used herself, before, but one that now seemed right. The things she had always kept hidden, things just for her. Things she had always
liked, without really knowing why. There was the magazine, that half-torn, moldy thing with the pictures of pretty dresses and the ladies wearing pretty face paint.

  Then there was the doll. The one her mother had made her. She pulled the thing out of the black muck and rubbed it clean with her thumb and forefinger. It was a simple stick figure, six smooth white segments — two arms and legs, a torso, and a head — attached to one another with string. She had never really considered that it was a bit creepy that each segment was a human finger bone until just then. She had merely liked it. She still did, because it reminded her of her mother. That was kind of odd because she didn't really remember what her mother looked like, even if she did remember watching her die. She hadn't even really thought of her as family, any more so than the rest of the War Band: she just remembered that her mother was tough. A true Ravager. What would her mother think of her now? Roach didn't care to linger on that thought.

  Her old friends would have never let her hear the end of it if they’d found out she had the thing. A sheep-men set of pretty pictures from the Old World. Girly things. Maybe she had never been as much of a true Ravager as they had been — Torq and Raliegh and DeeJ and the rest — and maybe that was why she had always worked hard to be the craziest, the most violent, the most hard. But she knew just as quickly that wasn't true. She really had been like that; she had loved being like that. And now, she was different, and it scared her.

  At least she didn't have to worry about what her father thought, because she had never known him. Or, she probably had known him, but neither knew what they were to one another. It was like that with all Ravagers. There were a half-dozen older Ravagers that could have been her father. Hell, Deacon could have been her father, for all she knew.