Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry

beginning to circle. Benny studied the dead man, wondering if he would rise from the dead—as nearly everyone did who’d died since the plague began on First Night—or if he would stay dead. Lately more and more people seemed to stay dead. No one knew why.
    Stay dead, Benny silently told him.
    Seconds blew past him like bits of debris on a hot wind. The reaper’s fingers twitched. Then his foot. Suddenly his eyes snapped open, his lips parted, and he uttered that long, low, terrible moan of hunger that marked him as one of the living dead. It was an eternal hunger, a hunger that made no sense. The dead did not need to feed, they required no nourishment.
    So why were they so hungry? Why did they kill and devour human flesh?
    Why?
    “ Why? ” demanded Benny.
    The sound of his voice made the zom turn his head. The thing sat up slowly, empty eyes turning toward the sound,nose sniffing the air. Benny’s cadaverine would keep him safe. He could let this one go.
    The monks back at Sanctuary did not permit any of the zoms there to be killed.
    This, however, was not Sanctuary. This was the Rot and Ruin.
    Benny brought his sword up into a high guard, backing away slowly as the zom got clumsily to his feet. It stood for a moment, swaying as if taking a second to get used to what it was and how it felt about this new type of existence. That was wrong, though, and Benny knew it. The dead did not think, did not feel.
    They simply were .
    The creature moaned again. Benny listened to it, searching inside the sound for some trace, however small, of meaning, of humanity. Of anything.
    All he heard was hunger. Vast, hollow, eternal.
    The zombie looked at Benny and shuffled uncertainly toward him.
    “Don’t,” said Benny, and the single word caused the zombie’s head to jerk up. The glazed eyes shifted up to look directly at him. It took another step.
    Benny retreated a pace, and the zom took two more steps. It was close now; one more step and it would be close enough to make a grab. Its hands rose and reached for Benny.
    “Don’t.”
    Benny slowly, numbly reached over his shoulder and slid the katana into its scabbard. Then his hands flopped down at his sides, hanging slack and purposeless. The zombie took another step, and now it pawed at Benny with clumsy fingersthat twitched and jerked as if trying to remember their lost dexterity. Benny batted the hands aside.
    The zom reached again.
    Benny knew that he should end this. Here and now, quick and clean. It would be easy. After everything he’d been through, a single zombie no longer frightened him. He was sure he could break its neck with his bare hands, or easily cripple it with a kick to the knee.
    He could. He probably should. As long as the plane was here, a wandering zom was a potential threat. Even to someone like Joe.
    But Benny didn’t attack. He backed away again, unwilling to inflict harm on this thing, even though a few moments ago it was a killer who wanted to murder him. That was different, and he knew it was different. Now everything about this creature, this thing  . . . this former person, was different. Benny felt his heart hammering in his chest, and he wanted to do something. Scream, or throw up, or cry. Or run away.
    Or die.
    The zom reached again and again, and each time Benny slapped its fumbling hands away.
    “C’mon, man,” pleaded Benny, “ don’t .”
    It kept coming. A step, a reach. Benny slapped the cooling hands away. The thing recovered its balance, brought its hands back, stepped, reached. The whole encounter was becoming a sick and sad ballet, a dance for two of the strangest kind. The moment had lost its veneer of horror for Benny and had become something else, something indefinable and surreal. It was terrifying in a nonphysical way. He felt that he teetered on the edge of some action that would damage hisown soul far more than this monster could harm his body. His racing mind sought to understand it, but the truth, the insight, eluded