Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

The water slowed and stopped. Nix heard a soft sound as Lilah leaned against the door from the other side.

“Nix—?”

“Y-yes.”

“Are you . . . ?”

“I’m fine. I didn’t get any in my mouth or eyes or anything.”

“We have to tell them,” said Lilah. “Four of them . . . four fast ones. We have to tell Joe.”

“I know.”

Nix leaned her cheek against the grainy wooden door and listened to the sound of Lilah’s voice. It was rare to hear the Lost Girl sound so scared.

“What does it mean?” asked Lilah in her ghostly whisper of a voice.

“I don’t know.”

23

BENNY STEPPED AWAY FROM THE man he’d just killed.

Overhead the first vultures were beginning to circle. Benny studied the dead man, wondering if he would rise from the dead—as nearly everyone did who’d died since the plague began on First Night—or if he would stay dead. Lately more and more people seemed to stay dead. No one knew why.

Stay dead, Benny silently told him.

Seconds blew past him like bits of debris on a hot wind. The reaper’s fingers twitched. Then his foot. Suddenly his eyes snapped open, his lips parted, and he uttered that long, low, terrible moan of hunger that marked him as one of the living dead. It was an eternal hunger, a hunger that made no sense. The dead did not need to feed, they required no nourishment.

So why were they so hungry? Why did they kill and devour human flesh?

Why?

“Why?” demanded Benny.

The sound of his voice made the zom turn his head. The thing sat up slowly, empty eyes turning toward the sound, nose sniffing the air. Benny’s cadaverine would keep him safe. He could let this one go.

The monks back at Sanctuary did not permit any of the zoms there to be killed.

This, however, was not Sanctuary. This was the Rot and Ruin.

Benny brought his sword up into a high guard, backing away slowly as the zom got clumsily to his feet. It stood for a moment, swaying as if taking a second to get used to what it was and how it felt about this new type of existence. That was wrong, though, and Benny knew it. The dead did not think, did not feel.

They simply were.

The creature moaned again. Benny listened to it, searching inside the sound for some trace, however small, of meaning, of humanity. Of anything.

All he heard was hunger. Vast, hollow, eternal.

The zombie looked at Benny and shuffled uncertainly toward him.

“Don’t,” said Benny, and the single word caused the zombie’s head to jerk up. The glazed eyes shifted up to look directly at him. It took another step.

Benny retreated a pace, and the zom took two more steps. It was close now; one more step and it would be close enough to make a grab. Its hands rose and reached for Benny.

“Don’t.”

Benny slowly, numbly reached over his shoulder and slid the katana into its scabbard. Then his hands flopped down at his sides, hanging slack and purposeless. The zombie took another step, and now it pawed at Benny with clumsy fingers that twitched and jerked as if trying to remember their lost dexterity. Benny batted the hands aside.