Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry Read Free Book Online Page A

You’re Captain Ledger, for God’s sake. You’re a hero of First Night.”
    “Sure, kid, it says so on a Zombie Card. It must be true.”
    “My friend is dying ,” growled Benny. “We can’t give up.”
    “You think you’re the only person who can feel pain?” asked Joe, his eyes old and bleak. “Before this thing started, I had a wife and a six-month-old kid. I was overseas on a mission when the Reaper Plague got loose. I called my wife, told her to get the hell out, to go to my uncle’s farm near Robinwood, Maryland. It took me a week to get a flight back to the States. By the time I got to San Diego, the whole country was going nuts. No more commercial flights. The military bases were trashed too. When the people started panicking, everybody flocked to the closest base, but because so many of the refugees were already bitten and infected, those bases turned into killing fields. I stole a helicopter from a National Guard base that had become an all-you-can-eat buffet and made it halfway across the country before the army started dropping nukes on the zoms. The EMPs killed the engine, killed my cell phone and our satellite phone. Helicopter died, and we went downhard. There were ten of us on the bird. Four of us survived the landing. We split up and each tried to find our way home. It took me three weeks to make it all the way to my uncle Jack’s place. But . . . there was no one there. The place had burned to the ground, so there was no way for me to tell if my wife and kid ever made it there.”
    Benny stared at him.
    “So why am I telling you all this?” asked Joe. “I’m telling you this because everything in our world points to my family being dead. My wife, my son, my uncle. My brother, Sean, and his family in Baltimore. I never found any of them. Not a hint, not a sign in all these years. They probably are dead. They’re probably walking around as the living dead, just like everyone else. But you know what?”
    Benny said nothing. He doubted he could even speak.
    Joe laid his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. “If I believed that, if I actually got to the point where I believed that everyone I ever loved was dead, then I’d blow out all my own lights. But I don’t know that, kid. I don’t. I can’t. Not even now, not even after the setback with Doc McReady’s notes.” He sighed. “All I got left is one slim chance that the world isn’t totally broken. That’s what keeps me going, and that’s why I won’t lay down my arms.”
    Finally Benny said, “Then why get drunk?”
    The ranger shook his head. “Sometimes despair gets in a few good punches. Last night was a bad night. This morning sucks too. This afternoon I’ll map out a search grid, and first thing in the morning I’m going to start looking under every stone, inside every cave, and up the butt-hole of every lizard in the desert. If those records are there, I will find them.”
    “What if they’re not there?” asked Benny. “What if they’re somewhere else? What if the reapers took them?”
    “You ask very bad questions.” Joe sighed. “Go away.”
    “I can help.”
    “In ten seconds I’m going to tell Grimm to bite something valuable off of you. Ten, nine, two . . .”
    Benny left, but he wasn’t going to waste the rest of the day. Tomorrow was too late to start looking for something that Chong needed right now.
    He stole a quad, fired up the engine, and went rocketing toward the desert.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
    Yesterday Benny and I drove our quads along the inside of the perimeter fence here in Sanctuary. Only on this side of the trench, of course. Even so, it’s a total of fourteen miles of fence. There are two solders at the main gate and three two-man patrols on quads. Eight soldiers to guard all those miles of fence. We had more than that back in Mountainside.
    It makes me wonder if there’s a problem with the security.

14
    D R . M C R EADY ’ S TRANSPORT PLANE HAD crashed more than ten miles