Fire and Ash

“Shoot it,” urged Lilah. “Joe . . . shoot it!”



When Joe didn’t pull the trigger, Lilah raised her spear and tensed to spring, ready for the kill.



“No,” Nix said slowly, “don’t . . .”



Benny glanced at her. She wore a puzzled expression, and she slowly lowered her sword.



They froze in place, watching in mingled horror and anticipation as the thing shambled toward the open doorway. It paused, still within the bank of shadows inside the kitchen. Joe slipped his finger inside the trigger guard.



Benny felt sweat run down his cheeks.



Then the thing in the shadows stepped into the light.



“Oh my God,” said Nix.



It was not a monster.



It was not a zom.



It was a person, covered head to toe in a wrinkled, many-times-patched, white hazmat suit.



The figure took a trembling step forward and then dragged its leg. Benny could see now that the leg of the suit was stretched around something—a cast or brace.



But what truly caught his eye, what stopped his breath and jolted his mind, was the name stenciled on the front of the hazmat suit. His lips formed the three syllables, though it was Lilah who actually spoke the name aloud.



“McReady.”



She flinched at the sound of Lilah’s voice, or perhaps at her own name. Then she looked at Joe Ledger—at his gun and his murderous armored hound.



“Have you come to kill me?” asked Dr. Monica McReady, her voice muffled by the suit.



The ranger’s mouth hung open.



Dr. McReady nodded as if in answer to her own question. “It’s about time.”



68



“WHAT’S THAT?” ASKED BROTHER ALBERT.



His teacup was halfway to his lips when he froze, head raised to listen. Across the table from him, Sister Hannahlily was buttering a piece of bread.



“What’s what?” she said absently.



“There!” said Albert. “Did you hear it?”



“I didn’t hear . . . ” Hannahlily’s voice trailed off as she suddenly did hear something.



A faint pop. Then a few seconds later, another.



“What is that?”



“It’s coming from outside,” said the nun. She rose and crossed to the doorway. Other monks and nuns were rising too.



Pop!



Pop-pop!



Albert joined her as she stepped out into the lurid redness of the sunset.



Pop!



“I don’t see anything,” he said. But then he did, and in his total surprise he forgot his manners, his vows, and his decorum. “What the hell?”



He stared, goggle-eyed, at a sight that made absolutely no sense. It was weird, impossible. Surreal in a way that teetered on the thin edge between comedy and unpleasantness.



The sky was filled with balloons.



They bounced along the ground, skittering between the legs of the dead, riding puffs of air above them. The Children of Lazarus were drawn to the color and movement. Dead-white hands reached for them. Grabbed them. Jagged fingernails tore through the thin rubber. Broken teeth bit into the glistening toys.



Pop-pop-pop-pop . . .



69



JOE SHOVED HIS GUN INTO its holster and stepped toward Dr. McReady, but the scientist recoiled from him.



“Monica!” he cried. “Good God, Monica . . . it’s me—it’s Joe.”



“I know who you are,” she snapped in a voice that sounded rusty from disuse. “Of course it’s you. Who else would they send but their number one killer?”



That stopped Joe in his tracks.



Ouch, thought Benny.



All they could see of McReady was her eyes. They were filled with suspicion and more than a little wild.



Joe held his hands up in a no-threat gesture. “Monica . . . nobody sent me to hurt you. We’ve been looking for you for months.”



“Eighteen months, one week, six days,” corrected McReady. “And I’ve been here all that time, haven’t I? How hard have you been looking?” The bitterness in her voice was filled with jagged edges.



“We didn’t know where you were,” insisted Joe.



McReady’s laugh was short and harsh. “Oh, I’m quite sure. There was a planeload of people who knew where I was. I hand-wrote the coordinates and put them into Luis Ortega’s hand myself. Are you say he didn’t—”



“Dr. McReady,” said Benny, taking a half step forward, “you don’t understand.”



McReady’s head swiveled toward him. “And who are you? Is Jane Reid recruiting kids now?”



“Dr. McReady,” Benny said calmly, “my name is Benjamin Imura. These girls—Phoenix Riley and Lilah—are my friends. We found your plane.”



Her eyes narrowed with instant suspicion. “What do you mean, ‘found’?”



“It crashed. We found it.”



It took McReady a three-count to respond to that. “W-what?”



“He’s telling the truth, Monica,” said Joe. “It crashed in the desert ten miles short of Sanctuary. Luis Ortega’s dead and so’s the flight crew. These kids found the wreckage and told me. I got your research to Sanctuary, but there was nothing on the plane to indicate where you’d gone. Then Benny and his friends found Sergeant Ortega. He was infected, but they managed to search him and get the coordinates for this place. All that happened today, and we came out here right away.”



“The plane. . . . crashed?” McReady was clearly having a hard time processing this news. She slumped and sat down heavily on the edge of the destroyed air lock. “It never reached Sanctuary?”



“No.”



“My God . . .” McReady began absently to undo the Velcro seals of her hazmat suit. Her hands shook visibly. She pulled off the hood to reveal a face that looked considerably thinner and older than the picture Benny had seen in the Teambook. Monica McReady’s chocolate-colored skin had faded to a dusty gray. Her eyes still retained their intelligence, but there was a deep and comprehensive weariness in them, tinged by sadness as she thought about the plane. Her hair was clipped very short and it was a bad job, as if she’d done it herself.



Then she stiffened and demanded, “Did they get it all done? The mass production and distribution? Has the mutation worked its way through the population . . . ?”



Her voice trailed off. She looked from face to face, and when no one answered, McReady began to visibly shake.



“Tell me Jane Reid’s team got this out to the whole damn world!”



Joe knelt in front of McReady. “She couldn’t, Monica. Reid’s people weren’t able to pick up where you left off. They need those last notes.”



She stared blankly at him. “Which last notes?”



“The last stuff. The D-series material. Without that—”



McReady suddenly shoved Joe, knocking him right onto his butt. Grimm barked in alarm. “What are you talking about?” she screamed. “Everything was on that transport. Every scrap of research. All the field notes, our clinical studies, the mutation projections. The complete formula for Archangel. All of it.”



Benny helped Joe to his feet.



“The D-series notes weren’t there,” said Nix. “We thought you took them with you.”



“Why would I take them with me? I sent it all back to Sanctuary so Reid could start production.”



“Production of what?” asked Lilah.



McReady looked puzzled. “Of the cure. What do you think I mean?”



“Wait, wait, hold on,” said Benny. “You’re saying that you cured this thing? Is that what Archangel is?”



“Of course,” snapped McReady. “Why do you think we left Hope One?”



Lilah shook her head. “Joe told us that you wanted to evacuate because the dead were becoming too active.”



“Exactly,” said McReady flatly. “That was the whole point. We developed a metabolic stabilizer first, and then we figured out the cure. Archangel. It was radical, sure, but it worked.”



“But—but—” Lilah looked around in confusion.



“Monica . . . this isn’t making sense,” said Joe. “We’re talking in circles. We thought that Hope One was being overrun. That’s what Colonel Reid told me. The walkers were getting too frisky, and you wanted to get your team back to Sanctuary.”



Before he even finished, McReady was shaking her head. “We knew exactly how active the walkers were. We’d already rounded up the random ones to send back to Sanctuary, so Jane Reid’s team could study the range of mutations. The rest were our own test subjects. We released them into the wild near Hope One to see if they’d contaminate others with the mutagen. They did. Very, very quickly, too. Once we saw how that worked, I told Jane I wanted to bring my team back to Sanctuary to get the real ball rolling.”



“Wait,” said Benny, “you’re still not making sense. Start at the beginning.”



“Listen, Monica,” insisted Joe, “the D-series records either weren’t on the transport or someone took them off the wreck.”



“They were on the damn plane,” growled McReady.



“Then they’ve been taken. We can’t find them, and the records we could find suggest that you took them with you.”



Benny asked, “Do you think someone messed with them? Left a deliberately false trail?”



“Beginning to look that way, doesn’t it?”



“Why?”



“To be determined.” To McReady he said, “Is there any way to duplicate Archangel without those notes?”



She considered. “Without the D-series notes? No. With those notes, sure. All you need is some basic chemicals, some minerals, a pig, and a walker. Anyone can make Archangel. The only trick is reducing it to a powdered form, but there was a paper on how to do that, too. I prepared that so Reid could transmit it to every lab in the Nation.” She stopped and sagged a bit as the full weight of it hit her. “God, we lost eighteen months. This thing should have been over by now. All the walkers should have been dead by now.”



70



“LOOK AT ALL THE BALLOONS!” said Eve, and her face was sun-bright with joy.



Riot rose from where she’d been sitting on the sand with the little girl. People were coming out of all the hangars and the dormitory and mess hall to stare at the weird spectacle. Thousands of colored balloons bobbed among the dead, and the crowd of zombies was quickly becoming agitated as they lunged and grabbed and bit at the things.



This was something totally outside of Riot’s experience. It was so absurd, so bizarre, that she found herself smiling.



Had the monks done this?



No, that was ridiculous.



The soldiers at the hangar?



As if in answer to that thought, the sirens abruptly began their banshee wail. The dead paused, and many of them turned toward the sound. A few even lumbered that way, drawn by sound or some rudimentary habit of the limbs and nerves. But the others did not follow.



The sirens were far away. The balloons were right there.



“Stay here,” Riot said to Eve, and she slipped out of the play area and ran to the edge of the trench. Her pulse was already fluttering in her chest.



One by one the dead turned away from the sirens. They grabbed the nearest balloons, growling when they popped. Riot saw a flash of color. Not the bright yellows and blues and greens of the rubber, but a bright red that puffed into the air as each balloon burst. Was it dust?



Or . . . powder?



It clung to the skin of the zoms. It fell on their eyes and into their open mouths, propelled by the explosion of the balloons.



“What in tarnation?” she said aloud.



Some of the dead stopped where they were, their bodies shuddering and trembling as if they stood on ground troubled by an earthquake. However, the cause of their agitation came from no external force that Riot could see. It had to be something inside them. Something that rippled under the surface of their withered skin.



Then the world was rocked by a series of explosions. Not close—they were to the east, beyond the distant fence. Riot squinted through heat haze as fireballs leaped up from the fields.



There was a rumor among the monks and nuns that the army had laid mines out in those fields. Until now Riot hadn’t believed it.



There was movement out there, and Riot, long practiced at telling the difference between the living and the dead, saw masses of zoms running across the minefield. Running and then flying apart as the mines exploded. More came behind. And more. The mines detonated, and the zoms kept coming, running as if they had a purpose.



Running as if driven.



Behind them, Riot saw a wave of reapers on quads.



As they drew closer, she could see that they wore scarves wrapped around their heads and old-fashioned swimmers’ goggles over their eyes. Each of them had a silver dog whistle clamped between his teeth. They drove a flock of zoms across the minefield, clearing it by exploding it. Opening the way for the mass of reapers who followed.



And here, closer, the balloons bounced along. The dead caught them, bit them, exploded them, and were doused by red powder.



Riot had been trained as a warrior and a leader of warriors. She understood what was happening. She turned and looked at the blank and unresponsive wall of the blockhouse, at the closed doors of the hangar. At the helpless masses of monks and the dying people they tended.



She turned slowly back to watch the oncoming tide of death.



“God,” she breathed.



71



THIS THING SHOULD HAVE BEEN over by now.



All the walkers should have been dead by now.



Benny actually felt as if Dr. McReady’s words were physical blows that pounded him in the heart and over the head.



“Are you . . . serious?” asked Nix.