Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

All around the building there were bunches of flowers, han

dmade corn dolls of a black-haired man with a toy sword, notes pinned to the ground by sharp sticks. A post had been hammered into the ground, and it had a portrait of Tom fixed to it. Benny did not know the artist, but the likeness was excellent. Tom, a faint smile on his face, a look of distant sadness in his eyes. A red sash was draped over the post. Benny raised the cloth to read what was stitched on it: FREEDOM RIDERS.

He had no idea what that was.

Benny felt tears in his eyes, but he was smiling.

He pressed his palm flat against the wall for a full minute. The others did too. Even Riot.

Then they got back on their quads.

They did not stop again until they reached the hill that looked down on Haven, the southernmost of the Nine Towns. They killed their engines, dismounted, and stood there, hidden by the trees.

Below them was a sea of movement and color.

Thousands upon thousands of reapers and R3 zoms flooded through the streets of Haven, while all around them the town of Haven burned.

94

CHONG EXHALED A LONG, TIRED breath of defeat and sat down on the bare ground.

“I can’t deal with this,” he said. “That’s what they’re going to do to Mountainside. That’s what they’re going to do to my family.”

He put his face in his hands. Lilah squatted down beside him and laid her cheek on his head. It was clear she had no idea what to say, and the frustration of that was evident in every taut line of her body.

Riot closed her eyes and did not move. Orange shadows flickered across her face.

Only Benny and Nix stood watching the massacre.

“Maybe if we’d gotten here sooner,” said Nix softly. She tugged her journal from her pack. “I have so much information in here. There are things we could have done.”

“Against forty thousand reapers?” asked Riot without opening her eyes.

“No army is invincible,” said Nix. Then she thought about it and phrased it differently. “Any army can be defeated.”

Benny nodded. “Absolutely.”

“How?” asked Chong. “The reapers have too many people. They can call as many fast zoms as they want.”

“C’mon, man,” said Benny, “we had a high-tech army, navy, marine corps, air force, National Guard, and police, and we still lost to the zombies.”

“That’s because they didn’t understand what they were fighting until it was too late.”

“Kind of my point,” said Benny. “If we could be defeated, then so can they.”

Chong just shook his head.

“Maybe we could do a raid,” said Nix. “With all those zoms there, they have to keep putting on the chemical—the stuff that’s like our cadaverine. If we—I don’t know, sabotage it. They couldn’t make more of it way out here, could they?”

“Spilling won’t do no good,” said Riot. “They’d roll around on the ground and get it all over ’em. You’d have to burn it.”

“Will it burn?” asked Benny.

“Sure. Burns like all get-out. Saint John lost a mess of reapers that way. Some of ’em get too cocky with torches. Maybe they think fire only burns the heretics.” She shook her head. “I saw some of ’em burn last night. You can’t tell a reaper’s scream from a heretic’s, not when they’re burning.”

“Look, Riot,” began Benny, “if we’d known what was going to happen, we’d never have left to—”

Riot shook her head. “Don’t,” she said, and left it there.