“Try me,” she said, and emphasized the request by pressing harder with her knife.
“We are reapers of the Night Church, faithful servants of the Lord Thanatos, all praise his darkness. We are the soldiers of our god. We are sent into the wasteland to find all those who defy our god’s will by clinging to the lie that is life.”
“What? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Not to the unenlightened.” The woman continued to smile. “When the old world ended, many people believed that it was the judgment of their god. And in a way it was, but the god of the old world, the god of the Christians and Jews and Muslims, and the heathen gods of the Hindus and all those other false idols were proven to be lies told by blasphemers. The truth is that Lord Thanatos—all praise to his darkness—is the one true god, and he has judged mankind and found it wanting. He raised the dead, his holy gray people, to open red mouths in the flesh of all who live in this world of sin. Through the sacred doorway of death the impure are made pure, and in the vast and formless darkness they know true peace and joy.”
Samantha almost smiled. “Wait, let me get this straight . . . you people believe that we have to die to be saved?”
“Of course.”
“And that’s why you’re killing everyone you meet?”
“We bring the blessings of Saint John of the Knife, the holy minister of our god. With the sacred blades we open the doorways to—”
“Paradise, right, I got it. But you guys have a weird double standard. You believe in death, but you’re still breathing and running around causing problems.”
“No,” said the woman, “we remain clothed in flesh only until the full will of god is completed. And then, with joy and songs on our lips, we will open the red mouths in each other’s—”
“Something’s coming,” said Heather, swinging around to aim her arrow into the woods.
“Zombies,” said Samantha. “I saw them a minute ago.”
“We have to go.”
“I know.”
The reaper said, “Why not stay and let the gray people send you into the blessed darkness?”
Samantha shook her head. “Thanks, but I think we’ll pass.”
She closed her hand around the silver dog whistle that hung around the woman’s neck. “You use this to control the zombies?”
“Yes. It is a gift from Lord Thanatos, all praise his—”
“Darkness, right.” With a grunt she yanked the whistle hard enough to snap the chain, looked at it for a moment, then stuffed it into a pocket. “Heather, get the other whistles.”
The younger girl hesitated, casting a nervous eye at the woods, then nodded and ran to comply.
“Get those red streamers, too.”
“They stink!”
“They smell like death,” said Samantha. “Kind of useful, don’t you think?”
Heather thought about it for a moment, then gave a small smile of understanding. She drew a knife and began sawing at the tassels on the two dead men. They could hear the zombies thrashing through the brush as they came.
Time was just about up.
Samantha looked at the woman.
“What you’re doing is wrong.”
“It is the will of god.”
“Not a chance. No god would want his people to do this much harm. If someone told you that, they were either lying to you or they’re crazy. Either way, what you’re doing is wrong.”
She removed the edge of the spear blade and stepped back.
“It is the will of god,” growled the reaper, her smile gone now.
Samantha shook her head.
“Go ahead, then,” said the reaper. “Kill me. Use your weapon and open the red doors in my flesh. You’ll see the joy on my face as I cross into the darkness.”
The zombies were less than a hundred feet way now, and they were closing in from all sides. Heather whimpered softly and restrung her arrow.
Samantha holstered her spear and drew one of the knives she’d taken from the reaper. The woman smiled again as if in welcome of what she thought was coming. But behind that smile, Samantha thought she detected a flicker of something else.
Doubt, maybe.
Or fear.
With a flash of silver, Samantha crouched and slashed away the red tassels the woman wore, then quickly gathered them up and stuffed them into her pocket. Then she backed away from the reaper. The zombies were entering the small clearing. A circle of them, their gray faces slack, their eyes empty, their mouths working as if biting the air.
Samantha began backing away, pushing Heather as she did so.
“You have those tassels?” she asked.
“Y-yes,” stammered Heather.
“Then let’s go. No! Don’t run . . . follow me and we walk out of here.”
The reaper woman looked at them in horror.
“Wait—you can’t leave me here.”
“Why not?” asked Samantha.
“Give me my tassels back.”
“Not a chance.”
The zombies were a dozen feet away now, reaching with pale hands.
“My whistle . . .”
“No.”
“But . . . but . . .”
Samantha could feel the coldness of her own expression. “You said that the dead were here to complete your god’s will. Who am I to interfere?”
“Please!” begged the woman.
Samantha pushed Heather backward, and then the girls turned as two zombies closed in on them. Heather still had her arrow ready, and Samantha once more held her spear.
The zombies sniffed the air and their fingers grasped in their direction, but then they moved around the girls, indifferent to them, and shambled toward the woman who knelt on the ground.
“Please . . . god, please . . .”
“Don’t look,” said Samantha. “Just go and don’t look.”
Together they fled the scene, first walking, and then running, pursued only by the echo of the woman’s dreadful screams.
The last cry of “Please!” sounded like it had been torn from her throat.
Serves you right, thought Samantha coldly.
The echo of that last cry seemed to hang in the air, refusing to faded into nothingness.
Samantha tried to feel good about what she’d just done. She wanted to feel smug about how she’d spun the situation on the reaper. She tried, but by the time they reached the barn and the other girls, she was sobbing so hard she could barely run.
“I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry.”
Heather told the other girls what happened, and they in turn tried to tell Samantha that she had done the right thing. That it was justice. That it was okay.
But they all knew they were lying.
Please . . .
Without another word, they headed off to the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court to pack what few things they needed. The woods were full of reapers and zombies. The day was closing like a fist around them.
14
South Fork Wildlife Area
Southern California
As the reapers marched away into the hills, Brother Marty found himself unable to stop thinking about the big man Saint John had killed. The one who must have said something that had ignited fear in the saint’s eyes—a thing Marty did not think was possible.
Who was Iron Mike Sweeney?
There was something about the man.
Something very wrong.
Something weirdly wrong.
Although Marty had accepted the path of the darkness and the way of the knife, part of him was still an ordinary man. A pre–First Night man. He’d been raised in a Jewish household, but not a strict one, and over the years agnosticism had drawn him away from his faith and his traditions. He was, however, always a very superstitious man, though
he ascribed that to working in Hollywood. The movie business seemed to swing between the poles of very good or very bad luck. The superstitions that became part of him were in no way tied to his previous faith—or any faith. Luck was luck, and the world was always a little weird to him. The angels he sometimes prayed to never appeared in anyone’s holy books. Then or now.
As the reaper army marched on, he sat on his quad and rumbled down the center of the road behind Saint John, who was flanked by his personal guard, the Red Brotherhood.
Marty tried to shake his weird feeling and simply could not.
Finally he peeled off from the procession and signaled for four of the Red Brothers, and with them in tow he made a U-turn and headed back down the road to the place where the trade wagon had been ambushed. They reached the spot in less than thirty minutes. Marty pulled to a stop in the woods where he had a good view of the scene of slaughter. Most of the dead had risen and wandered off. A few—those with traumatic head wounds—lay where they’d fallen. The wagon stood there. Saint John had ordered the quartermasters of his army to take the uninjured horses and to slaughter the rest. The massive Percheron lay sprawled and dead beneath a crowd of vultures. Up the slope loomed the place where Iron Mike Sweeney had been executed by Saint John.
The two trees that had held him stood as silent as mourners. Ragged ends of rope hung from each, flapping weakly in the breeze.
But the man was gone.
Brother Marty sat immobile for a long moment. Then he signaled to one of the Red Brothers.
“Come on, guys. I want to know who cut him down and what happened to his body.”
The four Red Brothers dismounted and followed Marty up the slope. They stayed off the path to prevent any useful footprints from being obscured by their own shoes. When they reached the two trees, one of them—Brother Zeke—crept forward, knees bent, body bowed low to read the tale of the ground. Brother Marty followed close behind.
Zeke suddenly stopped, and from his posture it was clear there was something puzzling about the scene. He squatted down and poked at the ground, then picked up the pieces of rope that had been used to tie Mike Sweeney to the tree. Frowning, he turned to Marty.
“What is it?”
“Something’s weird about this, boss,” said Zeke.
“Don’t talk to me about weird,” said Marty. “We don’t want weird. We don’t like weird. This Iron Mike fellow is dead, and either he’s dead dead and some maniac body-snatched him, or he’s walking around dead-ish looking for a hot meal. That’s ordinary, that’s what I want to hear. So, tell me what I want to hear.”
The reaper’s expression was difficult to read beneath the flaring red of the hand tattooed across his face, but even so the lift of his eyebrow and the tilt of his head conveyed plenty of meaning. He held out the ropes. They were torn apart, shredded. It was clear even to Marty that it hadn’t been done with a knife, either.
The rope ends looked gnawed.
Zeke squatted down and touched the dirt at the base of the trees, where deep marks were cut into the ground. Footprints.
But they were not made by human feet.
Each print was huge, bare of shoes, with wide-splayed toes. The tip of each toe print was gouged deep into the dirt as if by a savage claw. The reaper placed one palm over the clearest of the prints. It was bigger than his whole hand.
“That ain’t no dog,” muttered Zeke. He looked genuinely frightened. Sweat beaded on the red ink tattooed across his face. “And it’s too big to be a wolf. Or . . . at least not any kind of wolf I ever want to see. Except . . .”
“What?” asked Brother Marty.
“I don’t know. Something my granddad told me once. Some old legends from the deep woods in Canada where I grew up.” He half smiled, then shook his head. “No, that’s stupid stuff. That’s fairy-tale crap. Forget I said anything.”
“No, I want you to tell me,” insisted Brother Marty. “What exactly are you saying here?”
Zeke looked at him for a long five count, then down at the prints, then off into the woods. Finally he shook his head.
“I’m not saying anything, brother,” he said in a wooden voice.
“Where’s the body? Who took it? What’d they do with it?”
“It’s gone.”
“I can see that it’s gone, genius. I’m asking you to tell me what you’re suggesting?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, brother,” said Zeke. He paused, and in a more confidential tone said, “Look, Marty, all kidding aside here, you know me. I can track pretty much anything. My dad and granddad took me hunting soon as I could walk. They taught me how to track like a pro. I can read signs. I can do that like you read a book. But I got to tell you, man, I don’t want no part of this. No sir. Tell on me to the Honored One if you got to, but I’ve said all I’m going to say.” He got to his feet and pointed into the woods. “And I will not go looking for whatever made those tracks. Not for anything.”
Brother Marty glared at him, but Zeke shook his head. He dropped the pieces of chewed rope and backed away from the paw prints. Then he turned and stalked back to his quad, muttering, “This is too weird for me, man. This is way too weird for me.”
Then he stopped and came back to Marty. “I’m just a grunt, brother,” he said quietly, “and you’re on the Council of Sorrows, so my opinion doesn’t mean either jack or squat. But we’ve been friends ever since we got scooped up by the Night Church. I thought we could, you know, talk to each other.”
“Say what you want to say, Zeke,” said Marty irritably.
Zeke pointed to the place of execution. “I think we should bug the heck out of here and not tell anyone about this. Not Saint John, not the Council . . . not anyone.”
“Why?”
“Because this spooks me, man.” The big reaper actually shivered. “Whatever this is . . . it’s wrong. Wrong in ways I can’t put into words. It’s creeping me out. I say we bug out and write this off.”
Marty studied him. Before he knelt to kiss the knife, Brother Zeke had been an enforcer for a group of road pirates working the Dakota badlands. Before that he’d run with a biker gang. He was not an imaginative or fanciful person. He was also not stupid. If he was scared—and that was evident from the man’s tight face, nervous glances, and twitchy eyes—then Marty did not want to stick around to try to prove that this was all nonsense.
Not for one second longer.
“Okay. We’re out of here right now,” Marty told the reaper. They exchanged a look that was equal parts understanding and agreement and moved quickly down the slope to their quads.
They fired up the quads and roared away at full speed.
It was a very large, very strange world, and not all of that strangeness belonged to the plague. Marty wondered if they had just cruised the edge of something older and less defined even than the dead rising to eat the living.
They never once looked back.
Marty was afraid that something would be watching them go.
15
Sanctuary
Area 51
Tom Imura had taught Benny and his friends to be warrior smart.
It was all about a way of thinking. A way of acting and reacting to the world. A way of working with the world in the way that it actually was rather than in the way one assumed it was.
Tom was a practical man. That he had died was no fault of his own.
Benny was seldom practical, but he was working it. Flexing that muscle. If he lived long enough, he figured he’d get there.
The current odds on that, however, were pretty crappy.
He dodged under the whooshing swing of the wicked scythe and tried to cut the leader of the reapers down, but he missed. The force of his swing sent him sprawling on his face, and for a moment all the reapers had a perfect chance to slaughter him.
If any one or two of them
had tried, Benny would have died right there.
As it was, all of them attacked at once, each of them so eager and desperate to make the kill that they gave absolutely no thought to themselves or one another.
They crowded in, and stabbing knives met reaper flesh, shoulders collided with shoulders, heads cracked together. Like a clown act from a May Day festival, the reapers reeled back from one another. Not one blade had touched him.
With a whimper of mingled joy and shame, he quickly rolled sideways and scrambled to his feet. His mind burned with the thought that the only reason he was still alive was because he’d been so incredibly clumsy that he’d somehow infected the reapers with stupidity.
He knew, however, that it was going to be a momentary thing.
“Come on, Tom,” he said under his breath, “some Zen wisdom would be good right about now.”
Tom did not say a word, and Benny could imagine his brother doing a face-palm and walking away in embarrassed disgust.
“Thanks,” muttered Benny.
Three of the reapers were hurt, two badly. They reeled away from their fellows, one clutching an arm that had been laid open from biceps to wrist, the other clamping hands over a chest wound that pumped bright blood.
That left five, one of whom had a deep cut on his forearm, but that didn’t seem to keep him from gripping his ax with fierce intent.
Benny’s mind raced through the countless hours of warrior-smart training, the endless scenarios Tom had drilled into Benny, Nix, Lilah, Chong, and Morgie. Solo attacks, group attacks, all sorts of variations.
One of Tom’s most important rules started shouting at him inside his head.
Stay in motion.
Suddenly Benny felt himself move, felt his arms lift, felt the sword come alive in his hands. It was an illusion, of course; it was the training kicking in, those hours of repetition. It was muscle memory and reflex and his deepest need to survive.
Fight a single enemy, never a group.
He rushed at the closest reaper and battered aside the fall of a butcher knife that was aimed for his heart. As he parried it, Benny stepped to the side so that for a moment the reaper was between him and the others.