Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

The blade was painted with red.

She opened her hand and let the blade fall. It struck the ground at her feet and lay there. The cold and silent steel screamed unspeakable things at them.

Or was it Riot screaming? Benny wondered.

Or Nix?

Or all of them?

90

BENNY WENT INSIDE.

He found the body. Riot had washed the little girl’s face and smoothed out her clothes as best she could. Eve lay on a cot, wrists and ankles tied. There was a bite mark on her arm. It was small, and Benny wondered if it had been another child who’d bitten her.

Riot had gotten her away from the slaughter. At what point had she become aware that Eve was already lost? Before the mad drive out here on a quad? After the door was barred? During the long hours of the night? Had it been quick, or had fate been crueler still and made Riot wait, hour after hour, as the disease consumed the child?

And, oh God, he thought, how can we ever tell her that the cure for the bite was inside the blockhouse all the time? Two pills—or maybe one for a little girl—and the night would not have ended with the worst nightmare any of them could imagine.

How could they ever tell Riot that?

How close to the edge did the former reaper already stand? Was she looking into the abyss, or was the abyss already in possession of her mind? Did her soul float in that vast darkness?

Rage trembled inside Benny’s body. He could feel the exact moment when it ignited, and as he stood there over Eve’s body, that rage spread all through him. His hands curled into fists that were clenched so hard his knuckles hurt. His jaws ground together to hold back—what? A scream? A roar? Whatever it was, if he let it out it would tear his throat raw and bloody. Black poppies seemed to bloom and burst apart in front of his eyes.

It was as if this small death was all the proof of evil that anyone would ever need. Proof that the “holy” mission of S

aint John was corrupt to its core—even if that madman believed he had heard the voice of god. No god could ever want this. No god would encourage the kind of harm that had been visited upon this child. The destruction of her town. The slaughter of her parents before her eyes. The disintegration of her sanity. And now the defilement through disease of her body and the ultimate theft of her life. A theft that robbed her of more than the moment, but stole every hour and day and week and year of a life that should have been lived long and to its fullest.

This was the actual cost of war, right here, written with perfect clarity in the blood of the innocent.

He heard a sound in the doorway, and Joe was there. Sweating, worn thin by pain, somehow on his own feet. The ranger shambled over to stand beside Benny. They stood there for a long time looking down at the body, perhaps thinking the same thoughts.

Finally Benny said, “I want to kill them.”

Joe sighed.

“I want to kill them all,” said Benny. “I want to wipe them from the face of the earth.”

“I know,” said Joe Ledger. His voice was heavy with sadness.

Outside they could hear Riot, Nix, Lilah, and Chong.

They were weeping. And sometimes they were screaming.

91

THEY TURNED THE SIRENS ON.

Chong came in before they flicked the switch. He did not look at the body on the bed. “Do you know the legend of the banshee?” he asked.

Benny shook his head. “A ghost of some kind?”

“It’s an old Gaelic legend,” said Chong. “The bean sídhe—woman of the fairy mounds. It’s a female spirit who begins to wail when someone is about to die. In Scottish mythology, the bean síth is sometimes seen as a woman washing the bloodstained armor of those who are about to die in battle.”

Joe did not comment as he flicked the switch and the unnatural wail of the sirens rose like the screams of the damned.

They closed the door as they left. Across the airfield the R3’s were already flooding across the bridge from the other side of the trench and running toward the bunker. A million running feet kicked up a dust cloud that blocked out the lingering fires in the hangars and rose to challenge the pillars of smoke for dominance of the morning sky.