Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry Page A

him every bit as diligently as he eluded the zombie.
    The zombie suddenly stopped, and its eyes flicked toward the forest. It took one lumbering step that way, then another, and another, heading away from Benny, heading toward the woods, following . . . who knew what. A sound, a smell?
    Benny watched the zom until it vanished into the shadows under the trees. Then he bent and picked up his katana , cleaned the blood from the blade, and resheathed it.
    The actions were performed almost without thought. His thoughts were elsewhere. They tumbled through a red awareness of what he had just done.
    He’d killed a man.
    A person.
    A small, strange part of his mind wanted to gloat—the attacker had been older, stronger, faster, and probably more experienced, a reaper of the Night Church. In a one-on-one duel, Benny should have lost, even with the better weapon. But that part of his mind was only a fragment, and Benny prayed that it never grew to become something bigger. That part of his mind was okay with killing. It wanted to kill. It liked the excitement of battle, the promise of bloodshed, the rush of adrenaline.
    Benny feared that part of himself. He tried to believe that it didn’t belong to him at all.
    Lies like that never work on your own mind, though.
    The rest of him was appalled by what he had just done. Benny had killed people before—at Charlie Pink-eye’s camp inthe mountains of central California, at Gameland in Yosemite, and here in the Mojave Desert when the reapers tried to send Benny and all his friends into the vast, eternal darkness.
    There were birds singing in the trees, and the air buzzed with insects. A small tan snake whipsawed through the brush, and off in the distance a pair of monkeys chattered as they chased each other through the boughs of a piñon tree. The desert was calm and beautiful. It was peaceful.
    Benny Imura sat down with his back against a rock, set his sword aside, bent, and buried his face in his palms.
    “I’m so sorry,” he said. Though whether his apology was to the day, to the man he’d been forced to kill, to the monster that man had become, to the forest, or to the distorted image of himself that capered like a bent reflection in a funhouse mirror, Benny could not say.

24
    C APTAIN L EDGER SQUATTED DOWN BESIDE the zom Lilah had killed. He no longer looked hungover. He merely looked old and tired. And deeply disturbed.
    Grimm stood nearby, looking up and down the slope at the bodies. Big and fierce as he was, the mastiff occasionally uttered a fearful whine.
    “You’re certain that all of them were fast?”
    “Three for sure,” said Nix. “The one whose head I cracked . . . I don’t know about that one.”
    “Still,” said Joe, “three out of four.”
    He pivoted on the balls of his feet to study the landscape. “This slope leads down to a T-road,” he mused aloud. “Go right to the hangars . . . go left and it becomes a deer path that goes nowhere but up into the mountains.”
    “I found the tracks,” Lilah told him. She nodded to the mountains. “They came from there.”
    “Does that make any sense?” asked Nix. “Why would zoms climb all the way over a mountain? I thought they didn’t go uphill unless they were following prey. That’s what Tom told us.”
    “Tom was right,” agreed Joe.
    “Could the sirens have called them here?” asked Lilah.
    “I don’t think so. Sanctuary sits in a kind of bowl of flatland surrounded by mountains. Once that wail hits those mountains it bounces all over the place, and it’s impossible to pinpoint the source unless you’re down here on the flatland. I don’t think we can sell that as the reason.” He paused, thinking, then said, “No,” again, very softly.
    When they’d told Joe about the attack, he’d fetched a small leather valise, which now stood open beside him. He spent several careful minutes collecting samples from the zoms. Tissue and fluids. Then he took a large magnifying glass and