Dark of Night - Flesh and Fire

  Table of Contents

  DARK OF NIGHT ~1~

  ~2~

  ~3~

  ~4~

  ~5~

  ~6~

  ~7~

  ~8~

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  ~10~

  ~11~

  ~12~

  ~13~

  ~14~

  ~15~

  ~16~

  ~17~

  ~18~

  ~19~

  ~20~

  ~21~

  ~22~

  ~23~

  ~24~

  ~25~

  ~26~

  ~27~

  ~28~

  ~29~

  ~30~

  ~31~

  ~32~

  ~33~

  ~34~

  ~35~

  ~36~

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  ~38~

  ~39~

  ~40~

  ~41~

  ~42~

  ~43~

  ~44~

  ~45~

  ~46~

  ~47~

  ~48~

  ~49~

  ~50~

  FLESH AND FIRE ~1~

  ~2~

  ~3~

  ~4~

  DARK OF NIGHT AND FLESH AND FIRE

  JOURNALSTONE’S DOUBLEDOWN SERIES BOOK VIII

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Dark of Night

  A Story of Rot and Ruin

  JournalStone’s DoubleDown Series, Book VIII

  By

  Jonathan Maberry and Rachael Lavin

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Maberry and Rachael Lavin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

  JournalStone

  www.journalstone.com

  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-942712-91-6 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-942712-92-3 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933401

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: April 22, 2016

  Cover Art and Design: Robert Grom

  Author Photo: Sara Jo West

  Photo Credits: Blood splatter © Mrspopman1985/shuttstock, Hands in bus window © murengstockphoto/shuttstock, Bus door © Skodadad/istock

  Edited by: Aaron J. French

  Author’s Note

  This story is a collaboration on several fronts.

  It is first a collaboration between two writers, myself and talented newcomer Rachael Lavin.

  It is also a collaboration—or perhaps collision—of three of my fictional worlds. Story threads from my Zombie Apocalypse duology, Dead of Night and Fall of Night lead us into the tale, but that thread quickly becomes entangled with elements from my Rot & Ruin novels and also with the Joe Ledger thrillers. You do not need to read those books first, however, in order to read and—hopefully—enjoy this tale of survival in the days following the rise of the living dead.

  For those who have read some of all of those books, and for those who enjoy knowing where something falls in the proper chronology, this takes place fifteen years after the Joe Ledger books, and six months after ‘First Night’—the events described in Fall of Night. Those events took place fourteen years before Rot & Ruin.

  —Jonathan Maberry

  DARK OF NIGHT

  ~1~

  Dez Fox

  “They’re coming!”

  The child’s voice was too loud, too shrill and Desdemona Fox moved quickly to clamp a hand over the little boy’s mouth. The boy struggled, panicking because of what was outside—what was always outside—and because of Dez’s hold, her strength, the sharp stink of her unwashed body, the blood and dirt on her hands. The gun in her other hand.

  But Dez pulled the boy close, pressing him against her breasts, curving her shoulder around him as if that could keep him safe.

  Inside the bus the other children were frozen in postures of listening, their faces transformed into masks of fear and uncertainty. No one made a sound. Everyone held their breath as they listened and waited.

  The only sounds were outside.

  Those sounds.

  Those awful sounds.

  The slow, artless shuffle and thud of feet against the blacktop. The hiss of cloth as bodies brushed past the sides of the bus. The low, endlessly desperate moans that spoke of bottomless hungers.

  In the grass alongside this stretch of highway even the birds and crickets had fallen silent. It had been half a year since these moans began to fill the air, and the animals had learned their lessons. The incautious—insect, bird, and mammal—died. The cautious few who survived had learned to be quiet, to be still. To be unheard and unseen.

  The children inside the bus knew that lesson, too. Even the little boy who now clung to Dez, fearing her less than he feared the things passing by. He did not speak again. He barely breathed.

  The moment stretched and stretched, becoming excruciating. How long this time, wondered Dez. How many?

  And what was happening inside the other busses? She strained to hear, but there were only the dead sounds from outside. The wrong sounds.

  No screams. No gunfire.

  Thank god.

  For now…thank god.

  Then…

  Nothing.

  A silence that at first felt filled with promise like a cocked fist, and then emptier. Emptier and then finally empty.

  Dez sagged back, exhaling the air that had burned to poison in her lungs. The little boy looked up at her, his eyes huge and filled with ghosts.

  “Are they gone?” he said, more mouthing the words than speaking them aloud.

  She pushed him back gently, handing him off to one of the older children, a girl of eleven. Dez put a finger to her lips and turned so that everyone on the bus saw the gesture. They nodded. Those who could nod. Those whose minds could process the signal.

  Dez rose and moved toward the back of the bus. The creatures had been going that way, past them, heading south along the highway. All of the windows on the bus were blocked out, covered with pieces of cloth or cardboard held in place with duct tape. Sloppy but effective. She waved the kids away who crouched on the rear bench seat and they moved without comment, casting frightened looks at the opaque window behind them. The only other adult on the bus, Biel, a former math teacher with a pinched face and a bruised cheek that was fading from purple to yellow, also moved away from Dez. Biel’s eyes met hers and immediately flicked away. He was silent. The bruise on his face was a reminder of the least of things that could happen to noisy people. He’d seen Dez kill someone who couldn’t keep quiet. Not a kid, though; it had been an adult who they’d picked up along the way but who was a noisy troublemaker, whiner and complainer. The kind of person who couldn’t hold his tongue even when it meant drawing the attention of the dead. Dez Fox had warned him twice. On that third time she hadn’t said a
word but had dragged the man to the door of the bus, drove a Buck hunting knife into his heart and threw him out into the road. The following morning, when the caravan had started up, they’d driven over what was left of his bones.

  Dez moved past the math teacher and knelt on the bench seat. The thick cardboard covering the glass was loose at one corner, held in place with a tiny square of weak Velcro. She peeled it back, careful to minimize the sound, and then peered out.

  There were at least forty of them.

  Mostly men, a few women. All clad in the bloodstained shreds of forest camouflage battle dress uniforms. Their weapons and gear hung from belts and harnesses, or trailed behind them on straps. A few still wore helmets. They all wore the traces of the wounds that had killed them. Savage bites that had stolen their lives and futures away along with flesh and bone.

  Every single one of them was a soldier.

  National Guard, thought Dez. Coming from the north.

  Her heart had long since broken, but now the pieces sank to a lower place in her chest. She resealed the window, turned and sat heavily on the bench, lowering her gun. Dez rubbed her tired eyes and felt the wetness of tears. She looked at her fingertips. Then she felt the weight of other eyes and looked up to see so many pale faces staring at her. A few were empty of anything except a lingering and vacuous shock, but most of them held some sparks of hope in their fearful expressions. No one spoke but those expressions asked the questions.

  Are they gone?

  Are we safe?

  How could she answer? How could she even speak?

  Dez felt immensely weary. She’d been at the heart of this thing, there from the very first bite. She and her partner, JT Hammond, had been the officers responding to the first attack. They’d tried to contain it, but even then, even when it was small, it was already racing out of control.

  When everything fell apart, Dez and a handful of adult survivors had bundled a couple of hundred kids into a convoy of school busses and lit out for Asheville, North Carolina, where there was a rumor of a safe zone. But they’d had to detour time and time again, losing days, then weeks, and finally months. Jammed roads, forest fires, destroyed bridges, washouts, floods, and massive swarms of the hungry dead had forced them to find alternate routes. And then there were the nuclear wastelands created when the military dropped bombs to try and contain the spread. Dumb fucks, thought Dez. All they’d accomplished was to kill the last of the living in those cities and turn them into more of the dead, except now they were radioactive zombies. It only reinforced Dez’s belief that humans were too goddam stupid to survive.

  She’d lived this long because she was too mad at God to lay down and die. And because there was hope. Thin and threadbare, but there.

  Now this.

  This…

  Dez knew where those soldiers had come from; knew it as surely as if they had spoken to her with their dead voices. The Appomattox River rescue station was twenty miles up this road. Dez didn’t want to look at the skeletons of the four horses and six cows they’d used to pull the bus all these months. The animals had made it to within an easy day’s walk of the rescue station and then a swarm of the dead had come out of the woods. Dez and Biel had fought them, but only for a while. They’d killed thirty-six of the dead, but as that day wore on more than two hundred zombies were drawn to the sound of gunfire.

  They didn’t have enough bullets to win that kind of fight. The horses and cows all died.

  So, during a lull, Dez and Biel dragged the corpses of the ones she’d killed over to the bus and did her best to stack them around the vehicle. Then they wrapped rags around their own mouths, used bunches of weeds as paintbrushes, and painted the sides of the bus in the black worm-infested blood of the zombies. They were careful not to get any on their skin. It was horrible work and then only abandoned it after a fresh wave of the dead came staggering out of the woods.

  The presence of the rotting corpses and the stink from the tainted blood kept the fresh waves of dead away from the bus. Those creatures were not attracted to putrescence. They only hungered for warm, living flesh.

  Dez kept her kids safe in the bus and the nights and days passed in silent horror. They lived in that bus—stretching out their food, trying to ignore the stink of all those kids using buckets for toilets. Enduring. Weeping silently. Screaming into bunched-up jackets so as not to draw down death.

  In the darkest parts of the night, as wave after wave of zombies passed by, Dez wondered—as she always did—about the other busses. Had any survived? If so, how many?

  Had Billy survived?

  Her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Billy Trout, had been in one of the other busses during the storm. She hadn’t seen him in more than five months. Three times wandering refugees had told her about seeing groups of children walking with adults along the road. Or about busses blackened by fire or splattered with blood. She had no idea if the refugees were mad or accurate, or if these were even the children from Stebbins. Everyone who was alive was fleeing, and a lot of people were headed to Asheville.

  If the safe zone there was even real.

  If any of it was real.

  The Appomattox River rescue station was supposed to be real, though. Too many people swore to it. There were signs, freshly painted, all along this road.

  But now this.

  The National Guard station had been their only beacon of hope. It was supposed to be maintained by a strong unit of soldiers who had food, shelter and medical care, and all of it under the protection of tanks and heavy weapons. A fortress that not even the dead could overwhelm.

  It was up this road.

  It was in the direction where this pack of zombies had come from.

  Dez saw the hope in all of those young eyes.

  She wanted so badly to scream.

  ~2~

  Rachael Elle

  It was quiet.

  If there was one thing that Rachael had to identify as the part about the end of the world that she didn’t expect, it was the silence. In video games and horror movies there was always music to announce something bad was going to happen. Bad guys had theme songs, and ambient music to build anxiety to big climaxes. She didn’t realize how much background noise existed in real life until it was all gone.

  She didn’t realize how alone she was.

  Now she eagerly waited for the scarce sounds of birds and other animals, anything to keep her company as she walked silently down the freeway. Anything to fill the silence.

  Anything but the moans of the dead.

  Those were the sounds she heard in her nightmares. Those were the sounds she heard while she was awake.

  Nervously checking her weapons again, she scanned around. The road she was walking down was empty on her side for a while, with abandoned cars stacked up bumper to bumper across the median. Wrecked cars, smashed and burned out in some cases, littered the edges of the road. The wind whistled through the metal, rattling car doors left ajar and fluttering scraps of paper and plastic like leaves.

  And bodies.

  There were more bodies than she could bear to count. She avoided getting to close to any of the clusters of cars, the piles of dead. She didn’t want to deal with something grabbing her when she wasn’t expecting it. It was harder traveling in this world without someone having her back.

  Rachael wished she’d asked someone to come with her, but she couldn’t risk any of them on this trip. They were safe in the hospital. It was probably only going to be a temporary shelter for her group, but it would do. For now, at least. They had the supplies they needed, people around, a defense system. Plus, when she came back she needed a definitive place to meet them. A rally point. If they were wandering, she’d never find them again.

  Brett wasn’t happy she was leaving. In the two months it took them to get to out of New York and make their careful way south they’d taken on being co-leaders for the group. They weren’t voted in or anything as formal as that; it was just something that had happened naturally. Th
ey’d been friends for so long, they were in sync. Even when fighting they had each other’s backs.

  But she couldn’t ask him to leave the group. The group needed him to be there. He was big and powerful, he looked like a hero, and that calmed everyone else. It made them feel safe. Without Brett, Rachael knew, there would be panic and chaos. He would keep the group safe; he would keep them all together.

  However Rachael knew that Brett was as terrified as everyone else, but she also knew that he was trying to act brave for her. She also knew that acting brave was sometimes enough. Fake it ‘til you make it. She hoped that by leaving him in charge he would man up, get more confident, become tougher. Like her and some of the others, Brett still wore the hero costume he’d made for Comic Con. Thor, prince of Asgard. All leather and lightweight chainmail. Rachael wore her warrior woman costume, also made of leather reinforced with metal. At first they kept their costumes because it was nearly impossible to bite through those materials, but now they made a statement. To the others in their party and to each of them.

  “Stay alive.”

  That’s what Brett had said to her before she left, hugging her tightly as if he’d never see her again. She promised him she’d come back alive and in one piece.

  Nice promise, easily said.

  Rachael’s hands nervously traced the ridges in her sword as she cast around, walking quickly and silently. In the last months, her sword hadn’t left her side. It wasn’t the one that had been part of her costume. This one had been scavenged from the hotel room of one of the event’s vendors. He’d been a knife smith who sold everything from Klingon bat’leth to steel katanas to perfect replicas of the swords from each of the Lord of the Rings movies. The vendor hadn’t been in his room and Rachael had no idea what happened to him. When she and Brett had begun to raid the other hotel rooms for supplies and food, they’d found the cache of weapons. It had been a godsend. Truly. Rachael had collapsed on the floor, clutching an armful of sheathed swords to her chest, and wept.