Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire (7 page)

As he ran, a handful of the Orcs turned to follow, giving Rachael the time to slice and stab, dropping their bodies and turning her attention to the next ones that came through.

There were five down now, but the horde kept coming.

Rachael was losing track, she felt like she had already killed more than a dozen, but there never seemed to be an end to this mass of bodies. She had no idea how many she had actually killed, all she knew was that she needed to keep going. Her arm hurt, and her hand was slippery from the sticky black blood of the dead. She clenched her fingers tighter around the hilt of the dagger. Any mistake meant her death. She knew that.

An Orc grabbed onto her leg, teeth attaching to her boot as she tried to kick them away, dragging her out of the saddle as it pulled her down. She yelled, whether from fear or surprise or as a war cry she wasn’t sure, driving the dagger down through its skull with such force that she fell as the body crumpled, carrying her blade and her with it as another Orc latched its teeth onto Pablo, ripping a gash into his side as the horse let out something akin to a scream, more Orcs diving for his legs, teeth driving into the soft flesh they found there.

She hit the ground hard as Pablo fell, the air driving from her lungs as she rolled, trying to jump back up to her feet. The horde was split, half of the Orcs still continuing their assault on the bus, the others stumbling towards her, yellow teeth gnashing. One grabbed onto her forearm, teeth sinking into the thick leather. She swung her sword jerkily, ribs protesting, and she missed the skull, sinking her sword into the base of the neck. Wincing, she let go of the sword, using the hand to grab a dagger out of her belt and sinking that into the weak part of the skull at the top of the head of the Orc, which dropped hard.

Okay, this was bad. This was so very, very bad.

Pablo’s panicked cries continued, but Rachael couldn’t look at him, so instead her eyes fixed on the next body that lunged at her. Her eyes tracked the bodies, trying to figure out the best way to clear them without backing herself into a corner she couldn’t get out of.

There wasn’t time to try to retrieve her sword so instead she turned to face the next Orc in a half crouch, jumping to the side as it tried to lunge at her, turning in midair to drive the knife into the back of the head at the base of the skull. There were only three left coming, and she backed up a few steps, trying to judge which to take first. One came at her from the side and she dodged it, shoving its shoulder and using its stumble to grab onto the shirt and drive the blade between the eyes. Using a well-placed kick to the chest to knock the next one to the ground, she dispatched it with a quick stab. The last one’s hands tried to grab hold of her, clumsy fingers attaching to a loop on her armor and pulling her towards its teeth.

With a cry she switched hands on the knife, driving it hard into the side of the Orc’s forehead.

Her chest was heaving, ribs sending sharp warning pains as she moved. She ached everywhere already, but there was no time to wait.

Pablo had fallen silent, and Rachael didn’t want to look. She couldn’t look, she would have been able to handle it if she did. Squeezing her eyes shut for a moment, she swallowed down her emotions.

Heroes couldn’t cry. Not when there were people to save.

Another gunshot rang out across the road, followed by the agonized screaming that Rachael had come to associate with death. Her heart sunk, and, using her foot as leverage, she pulled the sword out of the Orc’s neck from where it had lodged, ignoring the protests in her side. Sprinting forward, she sliced through the back of the head of an Orc that had turned to follow the screaming, and kept going. She couldn’t see anything from this side of the bus, and she ducked around the back of the bus, hoping that most of the dead would be on the other end.

Slicing her sword through the side of the head of another Orc, she rushed towards the man that was laying at the foot of the door of the bus, still screaming as two Orcs dug their teeth and nails into him. The blood was everywhere. Rachael felt nauseous, but she swallowed it down, driving her dagger into the heads of the Orcs one by one, shoving their bodies to the side.

The man wouldn’t stop screaming, clawing at the bites on his neck, and Rachael knew what she had to do.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, before driving the knife up through the side of his skull.

Then it was silent.

Rachael had the unnerving feeling tickling on the back of her neck that she was being watched.

Dez Fox

Dez had spent a lot of time hunting the forests of western Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. She understood the woods as well as any experienced hunter. She’d also hunted men in Afghanistan during the war. Being a soldier, a hunter and a cop had taught her a lot about how to read what the land wanted to share. In a police academy forensics class she’d also learned that contact always leaves a mark. Tracking, then, was looking for marks. Mankind itself made marks on the world—roads, buildings, cultivated fields, and more. These impositions on the land were mostly overgrown and eventually would fade, but that created a different kind of pattern, a different kind of trail. Where weeds and new growth grew it spoke to a lack of use, and in some places it was crystal clear to Dez that no foot—living or dead—had come this way in months. Elsewhere the weeds were bent and broken, or pushed aside. The passage of random passage suggested a single person using that route infrequently. Crushed foliage told a story of heavier and more frequent use.

Dez could read the stories of each. A careful living person, even one trying not to be seen and making maximum use of natural cover, still left tracks that showed they were in control of their bodies. The steps were more orderly, more evenly spaced. Dead feet tended to wander, to drag, to ignore cover and follow the path of least resistance. There was evidence of both kinds of travelers in the woods.

Twice she spotted zombies standing in the forests doing nothing. It was a phenomena she’d begun to realize was a thing. Unless drawn by scent, sight or sound, the dead would often slow to a stop and simply stand there. When the dead moved in packs the movement of the whole tended to draw the others, but Dez figured that even these groups would eventually slow down when the ones out front had nothing new to chase. It made a weird sense to her. After all, why would they just keep moving? Zombies were opportunistic hunters. They attacked and devoured life—animals, humans, birds—and they had already begun stripping areas of everything that could feed them. In the absence of prey, they stopped, no longer pulled by their senses.

That created a new kind of danger. The motionless zombies were like landmines and IEDs. They could be anywhere and because they remained so still and so quiet it was easy to walk right past one and accidentally trigger its appetite and aggression.

Dez paused in her search long enough to cut a green branch from a tree. She used a knife to strip the leaves and bark from it and to trim it down to a twenty-inch length with a sturdy Y at one end. She held that in her left hand and carried her blackjack in the other. That gave her a formidable set of tools for a technique she wished she could patent and sell. She’d be a millionaire with the first post-apocalypse must-have invention. Great for Christmas, perfect for stocking stuffers, she mused.

She had to use it less than two miles from the bus.

As she cut along an overgrown fire access road a solo zombie suddenly lurched toward her from the shade of an oak. One moment it was invisible, merely part of the landscape, and then next it snarled and lunged at her, gray fingers clawing at her shirt and hair.

Dez backpedaled to get her footing, set her weight on the balls of her feet, and as the creature shambled forward she used both weapons to slap its reaching arms down and then thrust the Y-stick hard against its throat. The mouth of the Y snugged in tight under the chin of that snapping mouth, and Dez quickly moved close and brought the blackjack down on the crown of the monster’s head. The blackjack was made from a heavy pellet of lead wrapped in leather. The weapon’s neck was flexible, which allowed for a lot of snapping speed. Handled one way and it would deliver a soft, penetrating blow that would render a criminal dazed or unconscious, often with a mild concussion. Used any other way it crushed bone and drove splinters through dura-matter and into the brain. There was a reason it had been outlawed by police forces across America. Just as there was a reason Dez Fox had taken it out of the box of weapons she’d kept in her trailer home when everything was falling apart. She’d nearly lost her job for using it once while busting up a biker gang brawl, now she was glad she hadn’t thrown it away.

The blackjack whipped through the air and hit the zombie on the crown with enough force to send a shockwave up Dez’s arm. She knew from hard, bad experience that it wasn’t any trauma to the brain that stopped one of the dead. The blow had to do significant damage to the motor cortex or the brainstem. So, as the creature dropped to its knees, Dez used the Y-stick to set it for the killing blow. Another swing, another crunch, and then the zombie was a ragdoll. Dead for sure and forever.

She stepped aside and let it fall.

The creature had been a forest ranger once, she could see that from his pants and shoes and the few remaining tatters of shirt that clung to the destroyed body.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured as she stepped away.

And she was sorry. Hard and brutal as she was—as she’d become—Dez Fox was not a monster. She mourned this nameless man, this victim of horror. As Billy Trout once told her, “There was a story in every single one of these poor sons of bitches.”

A story. Sure, thought Dez as she moved off. A frigging tragedy.

Forty minutes later she found a dirt road that was overgrown but showed signs of frequent passage. Some of the wandering steps of the dead, but mostly human footprints. She squatted down to study them. There were at least seventeen different and distinct sets of prints along a stretch where rainwater had softened the ground. Several from big shoes that had to be men’s, but there were smaller prints. Women’s sneakers, or maybe from one or more teenage girls. She followed the smaller prints and it was soon apparent that a group composed of one adult male, two adult females, and a mix of children. A family, she wondered, or a group of survivors. Dez touched the edge of one print and the ground yielded, showing that it was moderately fresh. The last rain was a week and a half ago, and these prints had been made since then.

Dez’s heart leaped in her chest. She knew that the odds of this being Billy Trout or even anyone from the busses was astronomical. You could sell a coincidence like that in a Lifetime TV schmaltz-fest of a movie.

But these were the prints of adults and kids. Living people.

Dez kept moving, following the tracks until they suddenly stopped. The tracks went a mile down the road and then there was nothing but blank dirt before her.

Except that wasn’t what it was. Not really.

She dropped down onto hands and knees so she could study the dirt from a worm’s eye level. Then she grunted and straightened, wiping soil from her palms. The road was not blank. No road ever is. The dirt, however, had been swept smooth. Dez moved to the shoulder of the road and prowled forward through the weeds, her eyes clicking back and forth between the shoulder and the smoothed dirt. She found what she was looking for nearly a hundred feet farther. It was a leafy branch that had been cut from a roadside tree, lying five feet off the road where it had been thrown. Dez picked it up, saw the traces of dirt that still clung to the leaves, and let it fall.

This was an old trick. Using those leaves like a broom to wipe out the signs of human passage. Old as time. But what concerned her was that it was poorly managed. Whoever had erased the footprints had only gone so far back and simply began at that point. They hadn’t thought it through. Anyone with half a brain would do what she had just done…kept looking for when the footprints started again. It would have been far smarter to have the family walk off the road so that their prints vanished into the weeds, fallen leaves, and debris in the forest, and then, even if they had to return to the easier passage of the road later on, a tracker might have been thrown by the deception. Instead it was clumsy.

“Damn,” she said, immediately concerned for this little family.

She quickened her pace, moving alongside the road until she found the point where the family had, indeed, come out of the forest.

Stupid.

It was stupid. No hunter or tracker would have been fooled long enough to simply give up. There was a logic to everything that happened in the woods. Everything made sense.

It was only human choice that made senseless decisions.

She followed the tracks all the way to the small side road that wound like a serpent’s tail through fields of tobacco that had run wild with weeds.

The farmhouse was there.

The sight of it froze Dez’s heart for a moment. It stood on a slight rise, its walls painted a smoky blue with shutters of a darker blue. A red barn, a tractor and harvester visible through the open doors. It looked at perfect and picturesque as something from a painting or a calendar. Or a dream.

Dez began running.

She did not intend to run. In was a rookie thing to do. Incautious and ill advised, but she did it anyway.

Because there was a curl of smoke coming from the chimney.

Because it looked like people were home.

Because it looked like the living still owned this small patch of the world.

And because the yard was full of zombies.

The Ranger and the Dog

The girl ran fast but not well. She was nimble enough but she wasn’t skilled at flight through the woods. Not an overgrown forest like this. Catching her was going to be easy. Frustrating, mused Ledger as he set off, and actually a pain in the ass…but easy.