Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire (3 page)

The ranger said nothing for a long time, watching the bus. If it had been empty and derelict the dog would not have hung back out of sight of the road. Something was in there. Alive or dead, but unseen.

A sound. Muffled, a furtive metallic creak.

Someone was opening a door on the far side of the bus. In the still air the creak sounded loud and alien. The hinges needed grease and whoever was on that bus needed his ass kicked. Might as well ring the damn dinner bell.

The dog stiffened and the ranger’s hand slid to his hip and drew the long knife from its sheath. It was a Marine Corps Ka-Bar fighting and utility knife with a seven-inch straight blade with a clip point. The knife, like the man and the dog, was no virgin.

There was another sound. Very soft this time. A faint scuff of a shoe on the blacktop. The man and dog remained absolutely still.

A figure stepped out from the other side of the bus, moving with caution, creeping around the end of the bus, looking right and left, up and down the empty road. The figure was slim, dressed in filthy ragged clothes.

A girl.

The ranger guessed her as thirteen or fourteen. Young, but with visible swell of breasts and hips. Maybe pretty in a different version of the world. Now she merely looked young, and lost, ragged, and absolutely terrified. He could read that in her jerky, uncertain movements, in the birdlike jerk of her head as she tried to look in every direction at once.

Scared.

The dog uttered the smallest of whines, only loud enough for the man to hear. There was blood on the girl’s face, and her shirt was torn, revealing the strap and part of a cup of a functional bra. The ranger tried not to read an even worse story into the state of her clothes. There were a lot of ways in which someone’s clothes could get torn out here. Snagging it on a crooked branch, evading the clutching fingers of the dead. Lots of ways.

He did not want to calculate all of them. His heart was scarred enough already.

The girl looked over her shoulder, back at the bus, then with a small cry she broke and ran. Running across the road, away from the bus. Not running toward safety. No. She was fleeing from that bus.

“Shit,” growled the big man.

And then he was up and running.

The girl was headed almost toward him, though he was sure she hadn’t seen him or the dog. She was bolting for cover and a second later it was apparent why.

A man’s voice punched its way through the still air.

“The bitch is getting away. Get her!”

The bus rocked on its springs as heavy bodies moved within it, and then four men came running around the end of the bus.

“There!” cried one, pointing, and they tore after the fleeing girl. The men were even filthier than their quarry, each of them dressed in soiled jeans, grimy t-shirts, sneakers. One wore a John Deere billed can swung backward on his tangled black hair. They had knives on their belts, and one had a machete in his hand. He was the one who’d spotted the girl and he waved his buddies on with the big, flat blade.

The girl shrieked and ran faster, veering away from the forest now to try and gain speed on the flat road. It was a bad choice, but then there seemed to have been a lot of bad choices in this kid’s life. All of the good choices had been taken away from her by circumstances, bad luck, and men like these.

All the hair stood up along the dog’s back and he bared his fangs. His powerful body trembled with savage need.

“Baskerville—
go
,” snapped the ranger. “Hit, hit, hit!”

The dog burst from the woods onto the road and galloped toward the closest of the men. Not barking, not howling. Making no sounds but the clicking of its nails on the hardtop. The four men did not see the dog until it was almost on them. Then the last man in the string jerked around, seeing the gray monster bearing down on him. He screamed a warning as he tore a hunting knife from his belt.

The scream was too late. The knife, too small.

Baskerville struck the man like a missile, crushing him backward, slamming him down, tearing at him, tearing new screams from him.

The other men whirled, seeing the dog and then seeing the figure that was running directly toward them. The man with the machete slapped one of the others on the shoulder.

“Joey, get the bitch,” he snarled, unimpressed by the middle-aged man. “Zucco and me’ll dance this motherfucker.”

Joey, a twenty-something with fresh scratch marks on his cheeks, pointed to the dog and its victim. “Holy shit, Bob, lookit Hank!”

“Screw Hank,” growled the leader. “He was never worth shit anyway.”

He used his machete to point to the girl, who was running up a hill two hundred yards down the road.

“Go drag that slut back here. We ain’t even had a chance to break her in yet. Now git!”

Joey, his face ashen as he stared at Baskerville and the red thing on the ground, backpedaled a few paces, then turned and ran off. He was very fast.

The ranger slowed to a cautious walk, and one of the other two men tapped the leader.

“I got this, Bob,” said Zucco. He was a bull of a man with heavy shoulders, tattooed arms and a heavy red beard. “Whyn’t you go see about that damn mutt.”

The ranger smiled. He had thick blond hair, blue eyes, and a smile that made him look like the guy who used to play Captain America. “This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you to lay down your weapons,” he said as if this was a reasonable conversation. “This is the part where I’m supposed to appeal to your human decency and try to talk you off the ledge so you can reclaim your humanity.”

Zucco said, “What…?

“But here’s the thing,” said the ranger, “I already used up today’s whole ration of ‘give a shit’. So…basically it sucks to be you.”

“You crazy or something?” growled Zucco.

“It’s come up in therapy.” The ranger stopped and glanced up the road. Joey was gaining on the girl. “Shit.” He clicked his tongue and the dog suddenly raised his head from what was left of Hank’s throat. The ranger pointed with his Ka-Bar. “Save.”

It was all he said.

The dog barked once and then leapt over the corpse and ran. Bob tried to chop him with the machete, but the dog jagged sideways to avoid the blade and tore past him, racing to catch up with the man and the girl.

The ranger turned back to face the remaining men. Zucco was on his left and Bob on his right. Both men were big and strong, both were decades younger, both were armed with heavy blades.

The ranger was still smiling. “You put your hands on that girl?” he asked. “You rape that kid?”

“Not yet,” said Bob, grinning to show yellow teeth, “but the day’s young.”

“Just caught her,” agreed Zucco. “Still fresh off the shelf.”

“You her old man?” asked Bob. “Or you looking to tear off a piece for yourself?”

The ranger’s smile, bright as it was, did not reach as far as his eyes. They were cold, blue stones in his weathered face. He nodded toward the bus. “You have any other kids in there?”

“What’s it to you?” demanded Bob.

“Where’d you get that bus? It has Pennsylvania plates.”

Zucco shook his head and took a threatening step toward the ranger, who did not flinch or even move. “Why are we talking to this dickhead?”

The ranger ignored him and addressed Bob. “You boys running with the NKK?”

“We’re not with them,” said Bob quickly.

“Really?”

“Bob,” warned Zucco, “look at him, he’s military. He’s with that team out of Farmville. Those Free Scouts.”

“Not exactly,” said the ranger. “But they’re stand-up guys. Met a bunch of them last week and they said there were two or three teams of NKK dickheads working this stretch of highway.”

Bob said nothing, but Zucco actually put his left hand behind his hip. It was a bit late, though. The words NU KLUX KLAN had been visible through the dirt on his skin.

“For the record,” said the ranger, “’Nu’ Klux Klan is probably the stupidest name I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard some real corkers.”

“Yeah? Well kiss my ass,” snapped Bob. “It
means
something.”

“It means what, exactly? Please, tell me, I’m fascinated.”

Bob sneered. “People think the world went all to hell because of some plague or bioweapon, but that ain’t it. This is God testing us. He saw us fuck everything up by letting kikes and niggers and wetbacks take over, and this is how He’s going to set it all right. He shook things up, just like when that flood thing happened. When this is all over, there ain’t going to be nothing but pure whites running this world and we’ll live like kings.”

The ranger burst out laughing. “Holy shit. Seriously? You
believe
that shit or are you messing with me?”

“It’s the way it is,” growled Zucco. “It’s the way it should be.”

“You’re saying that inbred mouth breathers are the meek who are supposed to inherit the Earth?”

“We ain’t meek. We’re the chosen people.”

“Oh, so you’re Jews?”

“What?”

“Jews. They’re the chosen people. I seem to have read that somewhere in a book.” He snapped his fingers. “What was it called now? Oh yeah, the Bible.”

“You mocking us?” asked Bob, brandishing his machete.

“Um…yes? I thought that was clear,” said the ranger. “What with my mocking tone and all.”

“You’re going to laugh out of the other side of your face,” began Bob, but his words were cut off by the sound of a terrible high-pitched scream that came rolling at them down the road, it was chased by the echo of a deep-chested howl of red triumph.

“Oh, Jesus…,” murmured Zucco. “Joey…”

“Personally,” said the ranger, “I doubt you cats have Jesus on speed-dial.”

He moved into them. The Ka-Bar rose, blurred, became fluid, moved like light as it knocked aside the other blades and filled the air with glittering rubies. Bob and Zucco simply ended. One moment they were there, big, deadly, feral, and the next they were disconnected pieces of meat that no longer looked human.

The smile never left the ranger’s face. And it never reached his cold, blue eyes.

He stepped back and went still, listening to the air. The echo of Baskerville’s howl had not even finished bouncing off the trees. The killing of these two men was nothing, a moment out of his life, and he turned away from them without further thought.

He ran to the bus, circled it, saw the open door, and went inside.

There was no one else in there.

However there was a line of eighteen human scalps hung above the driver’s seat. Some of the hair was fine, the way a child’s hair is.

The smile leaked away from his face and he sagged against the dashboard.

“Ah, Christ,” he breathed.

Then he backed off the bus, turned and ran up the road to find Baskerville. And to find the girl.

Dez Fox

Dez heard Biel step down from the bus.

“Were they…?” began the math teacher, then he faltered. Dez turned to watch him as he looked at the retreating backs of the dead soldiers and then looked the other way, toward the Appomattox River rescue station. Dez waited for him to say something else, but all she heard was a tiny noise that might have been a whimper.

She scanned the woods. Route 625 ran through dense woods but the last six months without road crews cutting back the weeds had resulted in a riot of growth. Weeds, creeper vines, kudzu, and tall grasses grew all the way to the edge of the blacktop, and sprouted up in every crack. If things didn’t turn around then this road would vanish completely in ten years. Mother Nature was a hungry and relentless bitch, she knew. Then she wondered if that would be a good thing or bad. Ever since the fucking brain trust in the military dropped all those nukes, which in turned hit everything with electromagnetic pulses, none of the vehicles worked. The fleet of busses she’d taken out of Stebbins were dead. One here, and the others God knew where. They’d been separated during a bad, bad night long ago. A storm raged throughout this part of the state, and the bombs—nuclear and fuel-air had chased tens of thousands of people into their path. The drivers of the other busses had panicked as rivers of people and zombies swept toward them. Some of them took side roads, some just disappeared…and then all the engines died as the EMPs played their dirty backstabbing trick.

The zombies were gone now and the road was clear. The woods were still, too. If it wasn’t for all the rotting corpses it would be a pretty day in the country, she thought. Blue sky, sunshine, a few puffy white clouds.

Appomattox was twenty miles from here. She could make it in less than six hours. Dez was leaned down to rawhide and whipcord. She could haul ass and even dumb as he was, Biel could defend a closed bus for a day. There were smart kids on that bus, and they’d learned how to be quiet. Could she risk leaving them for half a day? That had been her plan, to button up the bus and head out alone, find some buff young guardsmen and get them to come back with lots of balls and bullets to rescue the kids and save the day.

“Shit,” she said.

Biel came and stood next to her. “What do we do now?”

Dez sighed. It was noon or a little after. Lots of daylight left. She could make it to the rescue station long before dark.

But why bother?

Why frigging bother?

“Dez…?” prodded Biel.

She wanted to slap him. Not because he was speaking out of turn—he wasn’t, it was a reasonable question—but because it might make her feel better.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“We have to do something.”

“Let me think,” she said quietly.

But before she could come up with anything resembling a plan there was a sound off to her left. She and Biel turned. It was there, deep in the woods, still hidden by the tall weeds.

Even unseen, though, they knew what it was. They heard it. The crashing of heavy bodies moving clumsily through the overgrown foliage, and the moans.

Those terrible moans, lifted from a dozen dead throats.

No…more than that.

Dozens.

Or…hundreds.

Dez closed her eyes. If the kids weren’t in the bus, if they didn’t need her, there were ways to shut off those sounds. Rush into them and tear down as many as she could before there was nothing left of her. Or ride a bullet into the big black.