Fire and Ash (Benny Imura 4)

“Well, isn’t that comforting?” said Nix sourly.

They went back to the hallway. The corridor they’d been following ended at a blank wall, but on the far side of the blasted entrance was a much longer hallway that stretched off into shadows. Some residual smoke hung in the air, shifting like ghosts in the breeze. It obscured the hallway like fog in an alley on a humid night.

“I lead,” said Joe, “you follow. Lilah, you watch our backs.”

A month ago—or perhaps a few hours ago—Benny knew that he might resent Lilah being picked out for the more important job; but his mind was running in a different gear now and he knew it. Lilah was the better fighter, and she was far more experienced with being alert and moving with caution. Of course she was the better choice. He also knew that if Riot were here, she would have made a good alternate choice.

There was a certain comfort in accepting these things. It touched on an old lesson Tom had given him, about seeing things as they are without being filtered through anticipation, expectation, or assumption. There was something liberating in seeing things with that clarity.

I’m not who I was, thought Benny as he fell into step behind Nix. This is who I am. I’m not Tom and I’m not little Benny anymore.

I’m me.

Despite everything Benny smiled to himself.

He wanted to tell Nix about this. He knew she would understand, and thinking that made something else click into place in his mind. He and Nix had fought a lot since leaving Mountainside; their relationship had eroded to more of a friendship than romantic love. He thought he understood why. The two people who’d fallen in love were naive and innocent kids back in a secluded town hidden behind a fence. Those kids didn’t exist anymore. For Benny the separation from naive child to aware teen had started the first time Tom took him out into the Ruin and he saw the realities and brutality of the world outside. The real world in no way resembled the version he’d constructed in his head. Even the things like combat and adventure were different beyond the gates. They weren’t fun, they weren’t part of a game. People got hurt and they died and there wasn’t always a happy ending and you couldn’t just clear the pieces off the game board and start again. For Benny, it began with that, but the process of change included fighting for his life, killing to save his life and the lives of others, seeing people die, seeing Tom die, and then leaving the place where Tom was buried and traveling farther out into the Ruin, past all known places and all chance of safety. Out here, where every day was a hardship and every choice was a hard one, something had happened to the old Benny. It wasn’t that he died, but the child in him stepped back and something else emerged. Not an adult—but an older teenager who was in charge of his own life.

A similar process must have been going on in Nix. She wasn’t the funny, happy, easygoing girl Benny had first fallen in love with. Life since then hadn’t given her many reasons to laugh, and happiness was hard to maintain under the brutal sun of a wasteland. And who was easygoing out here in the Ruin? Joe pretended to be, but Benny knew now that the old ranger was playing a role. In truth, he was a heartbroken man who’d spent his entire life trying

to save the world while constantly being disappointed in some of the people he should have been able to trust. His banter and jokes were probably the only props that kept him on his feet.

Nix must have felt his thoughts, as she so often did. She turned and looked at him. Benny gave her a small nod and a brief but genuine smile. Nix’s brow furrowed for just a moment, and then he could see the exact moment when she understood that he understood. She was already there.

That was when Benny saw something in Nix’s eyes that he hadn’t seen since before her mother died.

Joy.

Only a spark of it. But proof that her fire hadn’t gone out any more than his had.

It made him want to laugh out loud, to shout, to hug her.

But Nix turned around and followed the ranger and his dog. He followed her through smoke and shadows in a place of mystery and death, but Benny Imura was truly happy and content for the first time in his life.

Yeah, he thought, this is who I am.

67

THEY MOVED THROUGH THE BUILDING. There were storerooms filled with scientific equipment, offices whose only occupants were spiders in dusty old webs, and some rooms in which they found dead bodies. A few had been left to rot, but most were wrapped neatly in plastic. Once they were past the damaged entrance, they found that the electricity was still working. They passed through a generator room where a big unit encased in metal hummed with patient diligence.

They entered a room marked MESS HALL. It was big, with two other doors leading out; one that bore the sign STAFF QUARTERS, and the other that led to the kitchens. The kitchen doors were propped open, but the room beyond was in total darkness. The whole mess hall was lit by only two functioning overhead lights. All the tables had been pushed back to make room for stacks upon stacks of plastic boxes. Five boxes to a stack, five stacks to a row. They stretched from just inside the door almost to the far wall. Beside the containers were waist-high heaps of large clear-plastic bags. Each bag was in turn filled with smaller bags crammed with clear capsules filled with a bright red powder. Benny guessed that there were at least a thousand of these big bags, and countless hundreds of thousands of the capsules.

When Joe Ledger saw those bags, he stopped dead in his tracks.

“That powder,” said Nix in a hushed voice. “Is it the same stuff that was on the fast zoms?”

“I think so,” said the ranger. “Color’s a little different, though. The stuff I took off the zoms was paler.”

Benny reached out to pick up one of the bags, but Joe caught his wrist. “No. Not without gloves.”

“Why? What is this stuff?”

“I think it’s Archangel.”

“Is that a poison?” asked Lilah.

“No . . . not poison,” said Joe, but before he could finish, Grimm suddenly turned toward the open kitchen doorway at the far side of the room, uttering a low and very menacing growl.

All four of them spun around and brought their weapons up. Joe moved quickly to the front, his right index finger stretched along the outside curve of his pistol’s trigger guard, barrel aimed at the center of the doors.