Now she carried one of those swords, an exact but functional replica of the sword carried by the elf lady Arwen in The Fellowship of the Ring. It was a real weapon with a razor-sharp edge, and she had the matching daggers as well. She kept them oiled and honed and ready, and those weapons had saved her life too many times to count. She was not an expert fencer, but that didn’t matter. When you’re fighting Orcs you don’t need finesse and fancy footwork. Rachael favored slashing and working fast, taking them out with shots to the head as quickly as possible. Or chopping through their legs and letting the less skilled members of their team finish them with blunt force trauma to the head.
Orcs. That’s what her group called the hungry dead. Easier to think of them as movie monsters, because the heroes could always cut their way through armies of Orcs. Heroes always won.
Right?
Yeah…maybe. But not always. They’d lost most of their friends in the first day. The rest didn’t make it out of New York. There were other cosplayers that had made it out of the Avengers Tower—the hotel where they’d barricaded themselves the first few weeks—and civilians. Lots of civilians. Besides the group of thirty-two they’d gotten out of the hotel at New York Comic Con, they’d picked up more and more survivors as they took the trek to New Jersey.
But there were more people out there. There had to be. For the few months that they had been at the hospital they’d sent out small groups, looking for survivors, trying to bring them to safety. After the fall, civilizations had scattered. Cities were dangerous, and from what they could tell any survivors had vanished into the countryside.
There were rumors that there were camps of survivors further out, that the government had safe places they’d set up that hadn’t fallen. Survivors meant more people. But no one could give her a definitive answer on where.
That’s why Rachael had left Brett, had left the group behind at the hospital. It was safe there, hopefully. There was food and power, enough beds for her people, and they’d managed to clear out all of the Orcs. It was their haven, at least for now.
And she’d send people back. With the world in chaos, there needed to be a safe place for survivors.
But she couldn’t make this trip with all of them. It would have taken them too long to try to find any survivors and get back, and she couldn’t risk their lives. They weren’t warriors, the people that they’d saved. They were scared. They would slow her down, and the more people there were, the larger the chances that they would lose some of them. Better she went out alone, find the camps, see if she could find any refugees that she could bring back to the safety of the hospital or, in turn, make sure there was a safe place that her and her group could stand a chance of starting their lives over again.
For someone who never played as a lawful good character, she really cared too much about saving people.
The sound of her boots was muffled against the pavement, and she was keeping a quick pace. Moving alone meant she could travel quickly, rest for shorter times, and hide easily, and since she’d left the hospital she’d covered a lot of ground. There were roaming hordes of Orcs on the road, though whether they were migrating somewhere together like geese or just happened to find each other when the world ended Rachael didn’t know. All Rachael knew was that she wasn’t taking on a horde alone.
So now she was traveling south as quickly as she could, on a fool’s errand. She could tell that’s what Brett had thought, though he never said it. Why should she go south, to the unknown, and leave their safe place behind? They had plenty of people here, plenty of food and supplies. How would she ever get back? Would she come back?
He didn’t say it, but she could see the pain in his eyes. They’d lost everyone else. Now he could lose her too.
The wind carried the faint sound of a groan and the smell of death, and Rachael cast around, drawing her sword from the scabbard on her belt. She squinted into the sunlight ahead, eying the hazy silhouette, the hunched shape of a broken body that limped along the cracked pavement. She only saw one, though that didn’t mean more weren’t out of sight.
One she could take. She couldn’t let these Orcs roam, hurt people, so she cleared them as she could.
Rachael walked towards the figure calmly, sword out and ready. It was a solo Orc, with tangled hair and half of her face tattered to shreds, which lunged at her the moment she got close, a bone chilling, inhuman sound escaping its throat the moments before Rachael sliced her sword through its head.
And then she was alone again in silence.
She couldn’t think of those Orcs as what they’d been before. Rachael was not a killer. Rachael was a survivor, and she was doing what she had to do, but the moment she thought of these things as human beings she knew she would hesitate. And hesitation would be her death.
They were not human. They were monsters, like a video game villain’s minions of darkness.
Except real.
That was the hardest part about all of this. After a life spent role-playing heroes and aliens, after years of live-action role-playing against Orcs, monsters, mutants and bands of killers in handmade costumes, this was real.
Real.
God.
Real.
~3~
The Ranger and the Dog
“What is it, boy?” murmured the big man.
He came to the edge of forest wall and squatted down next to where a huge dog stood. The animal was a mix of white shepherd and Irish wolfhound. One hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and fang, wrapped in strips of leather that were studded with heavy metal washers. Bite proof. The leather was oiled and worked to make it as silent as possible, and the dog—like the man—knew how to move without a sound. A helmet of thick iron-studded leather was buckled onto the dog’s head. It made the animal look like one of the fighting dogs from ancient times.
The man was tall, in his fifties but muscular, with coarse blond hair that was going gray and blue eyes surrounded by crow’s feet. He wore combat fatigue pants and a utility vest over a black t-shirt. The logo of the Army Rangers peeked above the vee of the vest.
The dog leaned slightly toward the road. His way of pointing. And the ranger narrowed his eyes to peer through the gloom of the woods and the bright sunlight of the midday road. The landscape was in a thousand shades of leaf green, bark brown, shadow gray and macadam black. But there in the middle of it was a bright yellow bus. Filthy, streaked with mud or possibly dried blood.
The ranger said nothing for a long time, watching the bus. If it had been empty and derelict the dog would not have hung back out of sight of the road. Something was in there. Alive or dead, but unseen.
A sound. Muffled, a furtive metallic creak.
Someone was opening a door on the far side of the bus. In the still air the creak sounded loud and alien. The hinges needed grease and whoever was on that bus needed his ass kicked. Might as well ring the damn dinner bell.
The dog stiffened and the ranger’s hand slid to his hip and drew the long knife from its sheath. It was a Marine Corps Ka-Bar fighting and utility knife with a seven-inch straight blade with a clip point. The knife, like the man and the dog, was no virgin.
There was another sound. Very soft this time. A faint scuff of a shoe on the blacktop. The man and dog remained absolutely still.
A figure stepped out from the other side of the bus, moving with caution, creeping around the end of the bus, looking right and left, up and down the empty road. The figure was slim, dressed in filthy ragged clothes.
A girl.
The ranger guessed her as thirteen or fourteen. Young, but with visible swell of breasts and hips. Maybe pretty in a different version of the world. Now she merely looked young, and lost, ragged, and absolutely terrified. He could read that in her jerky, uncertain movements, in the birdlike jerk of her head as she tried to look in every direction at once.
Scared.
The dog uttered the smallest of whines, only loud enough for the man to hear. There was blood on the girl’s face, and her sh
irt was torn, revealing the strap and part of a cup of a functional bra. The ranger tried not to read an even worse story into the state of her clothes. There were a lot of ways in which someone’s clothes could get torn out here. Snagging it on a crooked branch, evading the clutching fingers of the dead. Lots of ways.
He did not want to calculate all of them. His heart was scarred enough already.
The girl looked over her shoulder, back at the bus, then with a small cry she broke and ran. Running across the road, away from the bus. Not running toward safety. No. She was fleeing from that bus.
“Shit,” growled the big man.
And then he was up and running.
The girl was headed almost toward him, though he was sure she hadn’t seen him or the dog. She was bolting for cover and a second later it was apparent why.
A man’s voice punched its way through the still air.
“The bitch is getting away. Get her!”
The bus rocked on its springs as heavy bodies moved within it, and then four men came running around the end of the bus.
“There!” cried one, pointing, and they tore after the fleeing girl. The men were even filthier than their quarry, each of them dressed in soiled jeans, grimy t-shirts, sneakers. One wore a John Deere billed can swung backward on his tangled black hair. They had knives on their belts, and one had a machete in his hand. He was the one who’d spotted the girl and he waved his buddies on with the big, flat blade.
The girl shrieked and ran faster, veering away from the forest now to try and gain speed on the flat road. It was a bad choice, but then there seemed to have been a lot of bad choices in this kid’s life. All of the good choices had been taken away from her by circumstances, bad luck, and men like these.
All the hair stood up along the dog’s back and he bared his fangs. His powerful body trembled with savage need.
“Baskerville—go,” snapped the ranger. “Hit, hit, hit!”
The dog burst from the woods onto the road and galloped toward the closest of the men. Not barking, not howling. Making no sounds but the clicking of its nails on the hardtop. The four men did not see the dog until it was almost on them. Then the last man in the string jerked around, seeing the gray monster bearing down on him. He screamed a warning as he tore a hunting knife from his belt.
The scream was too late. The knife, too small.
Baskerville struck the man like a missile, crushing him backward, slamming him down, tearing at him, tearing new screams from him.
The other men whirled, seeing the dog and then seeing the figure that was running directly toward them. The man with the machete slapped one of the others on the shoulder.
“Joey, get the bitch,” he snarled, unimpressed by the middle-aged man. “Zucco and me’ll dance this motherfucker.”
Joey, a twenty-something with fresh scratch marks on his cheeks, pointed to the dog and its victim. “Holy shit, Bob, lookit Hank!”
“Screw Hank,” growled the leader. “He was never worth shit anyway.”
He used his machete to point to the girl, who was running up a hill two hundred yards down the road.
“Go drag that slut back here. We ain’t even had a chance to break her in yet. Now git!”
Joey, his face ashen as he stared at Baskerville and the red thing on the ground, backpedaled a few paces, then turned and ran off. He was very fast.
The ranger slowed to a cautious walk, and one of the other two men tapped the leader.
“I got this, Bob,” said Zucco. He was a bull of a man with heavy shoulders, tattooed arms and a heavy red beard. “Whyn’t you go see about that damn mutt.”
The ranger smiled. He had thick blond hair, blue eyes, and a smile that made him look like the guy who used to play Captain America. “This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you to lay down your weapons,” he said as if this was a reasonable conversation. “This is the part where I’m supposed to appeal to your human decency and try to talk you off the ledge so you can reclaim your humanity.”
Zucco said, “What…?
“But here’s the thing,” said the ranger, “I already used up today’s whole ration of ‘give a shit’. So…basically it sucks to be you.”
“You crazy or something?” growled Zucco.
“It’s come up in therapy.” The ranger stopped and glanced up the road. Joey was gaining on the girl. “Shit.” He clicked his tongue and the dog suddenly raised his head from what was left of Hank’s throat. The ranger pointed with his Ka-Bar. “Save.”
It was all he said.
The dog barked once and then leapt over the corpse and ran. Bob tried to chop him with the machete, but the dog jagged sideways to avoid the blade and tore past him, racing to catch up with the man and the girl.
The ranger turned back to face the remaining men. Zucco was on his left and Bob on his right. Both men were big and strong, both were decades younger, both were armed with heavy blades.
The ranger was still smiling. “You put your hands on that girl?” he asked. “You rape that kid?”
“Not yet,” said Bob, grinning to show yellow teeth, “but the day’s young.”
“Just caught her,” agreed Zucco. “Still fresh off the shelf.”
“You her old man?” asked Bob. “Or you looking to tear off a piece for yourself?”
The ranger’s smile, bright as it was, did not reach as far as his eyes. They were cold, blue stones in his weathered face. He nodded toward the bus. “You have any other kids in there?”
“What’s it to you?” demanded Bob.
“Where’d you get that bus? It has Pennsylvania plates.”
Zucco shook his head and took a threatening step toward the ranger, who did not flinch or even move. “Why are we talking to this dickhead?”
The ranger ignored him and addressed Bob. “You boys running with the NKK?”
“We’re not with them,” said Bob quickly.
“Really?”
“Bob,” warned Zucco, “look at him, he’s military. He’s with that team out of Farmville. Those Free Scouts.”
“Not exactly,” said the ranger. “But they’re stand-up guys. Met a bunch of them last week and they said there were two or three teams of NKK dickheads working this stretch of highway.”
Bob said nothing, but Zucco actually put his left hand behind his hip. It was a bit late, though. The words NU KLUX KLAN had been visible through the dirt on his skin.
“For the record,” said the ranger, “’Nu’ Klux Klan is probably the stupidest name I’ve ever heard, and I’ve heard some real corkers.”
“Yeah? Well kiss my ass,” snapped Bob. “It means something.”
“It means what, exactly? Please, tell me, I’m fascinated.”
Bob sneered. “People think the world went all to hell because of some plague or bioweapon, but that ain’t it. This is God testing us. He saw us fuck everything up by letting kikes and niggers and wetbacks take over, and this is how He’s going to set it all right. He shook things up, just like when that flood thing happened. When this is all over, there ain’t going to be nothing but pure whites running this world and we’ll live like kings.”
The ranger burst out laughing. “Holy shit. Seriously? You believe that shit or are you messing with me?”
“It’s the way it is,” growled Zucco. “It’s the way it should be.”
“You’re saying that inbred mouth breathers are the meek who are supposed to inherit the Earth?”
“We ain’t meek. We’re the chosen people.”
“Oh, so you’re Jews?”
“What?”
“Jews. They’re the chosen people. I seem to have read that somewhere in a book.” He snapped his fingers. “What was it called now? Oh yeah, the Bible.”
“You mocking us?” asked Bob, brandishing his machete.
“Um…yes? I thought that was clear,” said the ranger. “What with my mocking tone and all.”
“You’re going to laugh out of the other side of your face,” began Bob, but
his words were cut off by the sound of a terrible high-pitched scream that came rolling at them down the road, it was chased by the echo of a deep-chested howl of red triumph.
“Oh, Jesus…,” murmured Zucco. “Joey…”
“Personally,” said the ranger, “I doubt you cats have Jesus on speed-dial.”
He moved into them. The Ka-Bar rose, blurred, became fluid, moved like light as it knocked aside the other blades and filled the air with glittering rubies. Bob and Zucco simply ended. One moment they were there, big, deadly, feral, and the next they were disconnected pieces of meat that no longer looked human.
The smile never left the ranger’s face. And it never reached his cold, blue eyes.
He stepped back and went still, listening to the air. The echo of Baskerville’s howl had not even finished bouncing off the trees. The killing of these two men was nothing, a moment out of his life, and he turned away from them without further thought.
He ran to the bus, circled it, saw the open door, and went inside.
There was no one else in there.
However there was a line of eighteen human scalps hung above the driver’s seat. Some of the hair was fine, the way a child’s hair is.
The smile leaked away from his face and he sagged against the dashboard.
“Ah, Christ,” he breathed.
Then he backed off the bus, turned and ran up the road to find Baskerville. And to find the girl.
~4~
Dez Fox
Dez heard Biel step down from the bus.
“Were they…?” began the math teacher, then he faltered. Dez turned to watch him as he looked at the retreating backs of the dead soldiers and then looked the other way, toward the Appomattox River rescue station. Dez waited for him to say something else, but all she heard was a tiny noise that might have been a whimper.