Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire (11 page)

But so was the way of this world.

“But where’s Miss Dez?” was the question of the hour, the question that the kids kept trying to ask. Rachael didn’t have an answer.

Rachael didn’t have a lot of answers anymore.

So instead she sat with all of the children, telling them fairytales she’d been told as a child, silly nothings that take the mind away from reality. The world needed a lot of distractions now, people needed something to take their mind off of what they were living.

This was what she needed to do. Save people, yes, but keep their minds off reality. She would reject this reality and replace it with her own.

Sounds like something she was used to doing, she mused to herself with a smile, and it would be worth it to see people smile again.

But she wasn’t going to be able to do anything if she didn’t make it out of here alive.

And right now there was no guarantee.

The Ranger and the Cop

“No!” screamed Lindsey and threw her cup of hot tea at Ledger.

He saw it coming half a second too late and roared in pain as the scalding liquid splashed his hand and neck and face. Dez exploded into movement, spinning, chopping up and back with her elbow, catching Ledger’s wrist and knocking the pistol from his hand. The weapon went flying. Lindsey snatched up a heavy book and hurled it at Ledger, who ducked just as Dez came up off the chair, drove her shoulder into him and ran him backward. They crashed into the wall, knocking framed photographs off their nails. Dez tried to knee Ledger in the crotch and simultaneously head butt him.

He twisted and her head missed, but her knee caught his upper thigh. Not a full hit, but enough to send a wave of sick pain up through his groin and gut.

“Stop it!” he snarled, but Dez punched him in the face.

The damn woman knew how to hit. Ledger slammed back into the wall, but he rebounded with a two-handed shove that sent her staggering back. Lindsey grabbed Dez’s teacup and hurled it at the ranger’s face, but he ducked under it.

Just as Dez tried to kick him in the groin again. Her foot missed the intended target and instead hit Ledger in the chest as he ducked. She wore the steel-tipped shoes she’d worn as a cop, and it was felt like being shot. Ledger fell hard on his ass, then flung himself sideways to miss the vicious stamp that Dez launched to try and crush his kneecap.

“Get him!” screamed Lindsey, and she began plucking objects off the end tables to hurl. Empty coffee mugs, empty cans, a paperback, a box of shotgun shells. They rained down on Ledger as he rolled like a log away from Dez’s next stamp, and the next.

Ledger rolled onto his back and kicked up to intercept Dez’s next kick, jolted it to a stop in the air, then pivoted and swept her standing leg. She crashed to the floor. He scrambled to his feet, grabbed the corners of one of the overstuffed chairs and shoved it at Lindsey with all of his strength. It chunked into her and the girl went down with a yelp of pain. But Dez, on the floor, pulled out her blackjack and whipped it at Ledger. He danced backward but the heavy lead and leather caught him on the left heel hard enough to detonate white-hot pain through his foot and ankle. He staggered, and dropped, catching himself on his palms as Dez threw herself at him, trying for his head this time.

She almost had him.

He rolled sideways again, parrying her swing with one forearm and swinging a tight, hard palm-heel strike at her as she dropped onto him. His hand caught her right behind the ear and it rocked her. Hard. She crashed down onto the floorboards beside him, gasping and blinking and wincing.

Ledger got to his knees, grabbed her hair and pulled her head back as far as it would go, then whipped a rapid-release folding knife from its sheath inside his right front pants pocket, snapped the three-point-seven-five inch blade out, laid it against her windpipe and snarled at Lindsey, who was in the process of raising a heavy vase.

“
Stop! Right goddamn now!”

She stopped.

Right goddamned then.

“Put the fucking vase down,” he roared. “Do it.”

Lindsey took a step back and let the vase fall. It shattered at her feet. She looked absolutely terrified. At that moment, Ledger didn’t care.

“Put your hands in your front pockets. Deep as they’ll go. Good. Now, go sit down,” he told her. “No, not on the couch. On the floor over there, with your back to the wall and your legs straight out in front of you. Good. Stay there, kid. You move and this gets messy.”

Lindsey sat exactly as ordered, her face white with terror.

Ledger bent close to Dez. “Listen to me,” he said in a quieter but no less threatening tone. “Listen to me and understand. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. I could have killed you when I came in. Here’s a news flash—I
don’t
want you dead. I am Captain Joe Ledger. I was with the Department of Military Sciences before everything went to shit. I am one of the actual good guys. You, however, are a psycho bitch who shot my dog. The fact that you are still breathing is because you didn’t kill my dog. He’s hurt and he needs help. Tell me you understand?”

He had the woman’s head pulled back too far for her to talk, so he eased the pressure by one half an inch. His knife didn’t move.

“Yes…,” she hissed.

“You’re wearing a police uniform,” said Ledger. “Or part of one. Are you a cop?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Stebbins County.”

Ledger grunted. “That’s where all this shit started.”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

He couldn’t see her face very well, just her eyes as she looked up and back at him. Those eyes were filled with incredible hatred and fury. And shame, too, because she’d tried and failed to protect the girl. Ledger could sympathize, but he wasn’t yet ready to let her go.

“Fox,” she snapped. “Desdemona Fox.”

Ledger said, “Wait…
what
? You’re Dez Fox?”

He felt her stiffen, but it was Lindsey who spoke. “You
know
her?”

Ledger removed the knife, let go of her hair and stepped quickly back. Dez turned, fast as a snake, but he was well out of range.

“Everyone knows her,” he said. “Everyone who watched the news when this shit started. The standoff at Stebbins Little School will have its own chapter in the history books…if anyone survives this, I mean. Dez Fox, JT Hammond, and Billy Trout holding off the National Guard who wanted to wipe the town off the map to try and stop the infection. Not that it would have worked because it was already outside the Q-zone, but…damn, you’re really her. You’re Dez Fox.”

“So what?” said Dez as she got slowly to her feet. She rubbed her throat and seemed surprised not to find a drop of blood.

“Two things,” said Ledger, “first, I had the blunt edge against your throat. You couldn’t tell, but there it is. I just wanted to calm this crap down.”

She glared at him.

“Second, you’re supposed to be dead,” he told her.

“Says who?” she demanded.

“Says Billy Trout. Or, that’s what he thought last time I saw him.”

Dez Fox took a step toward him, but then her legs buckled and she dropped to her knees, her eyes wide, mouth working, hands balled into fists. “Billy…?” she said in a tiny voice. “Billy? You
saw
him? You really saw him? Oh my god…is he alive?”

Ledger smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “And so are a whole bunch of kids who all think you’re dead.”

Dez fell sideways and barely caught herself on one hand. She looked like she was going to pass out and she swayed, dizzy and gasping. “Wh-where?” she stammered. “Oh my Christ—
where are they
?”

Ledger opened his mouth to answer but his words were instantly drowned out by a long, terrible howl of animal pain from outside. Dez and Ledger raced over to the windows and stared out. Lindsey got up and joined them.

Outside, deep in the tobacco field but clearly defined by cold moonlight, figures were moving. They did not lumber like the ungainly dead. Instead they moved with the quick, furtive and deliberate movements of the living. Of hunters.

Of killers.

And they were closing in on the spot where Ledger had left Baskrville, drawn by the animal’s terrible howls of pain.

Rachael Elle

Rachael sat in in the driver’s seat, foot propped up on the dash, biting her lip, weighing her options. She did not want to be here much longer, but she knew the children were going to fight her about staying there as long as they could. The sun was almost down, there was no sign of this Dez woman, and then what? The men would probably be coming soon, and she couldn’t risk any of them being there when they arrive. That would spell certain death for them, or worse, judging by the vibes she got from that man.

But alone in the woods? At night? In darkness, with scared, unarmed children with no means of defense? That would leave them open to attacks from animals, humans, and Orcs. That wasn’t a good option either.

She needed to figure out a plan. The kids were resting wearily, some of the older ones watching her while the rest slept. They would be safe here as long as she didn’t go too far out of sight.

“I’m going to go see if maybe Miss Dez is around here somewhere. I’m not going far, just up the road a little. If you need me, I’ll be able to hear you,” Rachael said to one of the older boys, and he nodded as she strapped her swords back into place and headed out of the bus.

She first stopped by the other side of the bus, dreading what she was going to see as she approached the body of her companion. She choked back bile and tears as she looked down at his body, but didn’t let herself look long.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to him, reaching down to stroke his forelock one last time, before unhooking her packs she could reach from the saddle. She checked the supplies, which seemed a bit crushed but not damaged, and then reached to check for her cellphone. It wasn’t in its usual pocket, and Rachael sighed, missing it, feeling it’s loss.

And yet....

It was an artifact from the world before. That was not this world anymore. That was not her world anymore.

So she turned away, shouldering her bag and continuing down the road away from the bus, looking for any signs of people, good or bad, living or dead.

But there was nothing. The sun was low in the sky, casting a bloody haze over the horizon.

Appropriate,
Rachael mused to herself.
Ominous
.

“A little obvious, though
,
don’t you think?” she asked the sunset. It ignored her and continued to bleed colors across the horizon.

Suddenly the distant crack of a gunshot startled Rachael back into focus. She froze, listening to the echoes, trying to source the sound. It wasn’t nearby. No. A few miles away at least, but it was there. She strained to listen for more. And they followed, the repetitive popping of distant gunfire.

It had to be the men coming for them. The panic rose in her heart.

She needed to move the group, get them to safety. They were her problem now; she needed to make sure they survived.

Be the hero they need.

It was now or never.

The Ranger and the Cop

Ledger ran across the room, scooped up his fallen gun, then kept moving through the house.

“Where are you going?” demanded Dez.

“Back door,” he said as he ran. “Stay with the girl.”

He opened the back door, checked the yard, and went out quickly and silently. There had been five men in the field and there had been the glint of metal in the moonlight. Guns or blades. Probably both.

Baskerville’s howls filled the air, hiding what few sounds Ledger made. The dog sounded angry as well as hurt, and that was a good sign. If the poor bastard was simply dying there would be only the wail of despair that Ledger had heard too many times before from mortally wounded animals. But there was still fight in Baskerville’s voice.

He heard men’s laughter, though, and that was a bad sign. It meant that they weren’t afraid of the dog.

Ledger ran low and fast. Once upon a time he’d been an army ranger, and then he’d been a cop in Baltimore, and for years and years after that he’d been the senior field agent for Echo Team. He’d led the best of the best into combat all over the world, facing all manner of terrors. He’d learned the habits of stealth from necessity. Haste not only made waste, it made corpses. Sometimes it was better to move slower in order to get all the way to the enemy’s door without him knowing it. There would be time for speed soon enough.

He heard a man say, “Leave it. Stupid mutt’s not worth a bullet.”

The voice floated to him through the dark and it lit a match to the gasoline in Ledger’s heart. He quickened his pace and brought his pistol up.

Five men painted silver by the moon. Black eyes and black mouths, and the black mouths of gun barrels. Were these men with the Nu Klux Klan, or just another pack of human predators hunting the wild? Ledger didn’t know and at the moment he did not much care. The men were closing in around the depression in which Baskerville lay. One of them held a pitchfork, and as Ledger watched the man raised it to strike.

Ledger was thirty feet from them when he opened fire.

The first bullet took the man with the pitchfork in the chest and staggered him, but before the man could fall Ledger put two into a hulking figure beside him. The center-mass shots knocked a wet cough out of the bigger man’s throat and he sat down hard on the ground.

Then everything went crazy.

The other three men began firing and trying to swing weapons and stab all at the same time. A small man with a big automatic began firing wildly and his first three rounds hit the wounded man with the pitchfork, blowing away jaw and teeth. Ledger ducked under the swing of a double-headed logging axe and then rammed the attacker backward into the line of fire. The axe man’s body juddered as five rounds blew the blood and life out of him. Ledger whirled again and used his free hand to parry a slash with a hunting knife, then he buried the barrel of his buried under the knife-man’s chin and blew off the top of his head.