Tooth & Nail

1

Benny Imura stood at the edge of a concrete trench that was all that separated him from the reaching hands and hungry mouths of half a million zoms.

Half a million.

The dead stood there, pale and silent, most of them as unmoving as statues. They looked like tombstones to Benny, their moldering flesh marking the only grave the wandering dead would ever know.

None of the creatures could reach him; the trench was too wide. Those that tried fell down to the concrete floor and could never hope to climb up the sheer sides. Benny was safe.

Safe.

Such a weak and stupid word.

A year ago that word actually meant something to him. Safe was a concept he could grasp. Safe was his town of Mountainside. Safe was the chain-link fence, the tower guards, the armed men of the town watch. Safe was a sturdy oak door and good locks. Safe was shutters on the windows.

Safe was an illusion.

That illusion had been shattered when death came to town on a stormy night as a lightning-struck tree smashed part of the fence down. The concept of safety was battered by a zombie coming for him inside his own house.

The last fragments of the lie of safety had been ground to dust by the heavy boots of evil men — living men, not zoms — who’d brutalized Morgie Mitchell, one of Benny’s best friends, when he tried to protect Nix Riley and her mother.

The men had killed Mrs. Riley and kidnapped Nix.

Benny and his brother, Tom, had gotten her back, but not easily. Not in any way that rebuilt the walls of safety, or that put a fresh coat of paint on the illusion that everything would be okay again.

It wouldn’t be okay again.

It couldn’t be.

Mrs. Riley was dead.

Morgie was gone too. In a way. He and Benny had traded hard words on the day Tom had left town. Benny and Nix had gone with him, along with Lou Chong and Lilah, the Lost Girl. All of Morgie’s friends left town, and Morgie sent Benny on the road with a wish that they’d all die out here in the great Rot and Ruin.

Benny knew that Morgie was talking from a hurt place, not from his heart. But it was the last thing that had been said; it was the last memory.

Not even lifelong friendships were safe.

Not in the real world.

Not anymore.

Nothing was safe.

Tom was gone now too. Gone forever and for good.

His smile, his wisdom, his power.

Gone.

Benny looked beyond the closest ranks of zoms to a squat white blockhouse of a building that rose into the hot Nevada air. In there, behind those featureless walls, another of his friends was gone too.

Chong.

Infected, dying. Maybe already dead.

Maybe already returned from death as something inhuman. Something that, despite all their years of friendship, would try to kill Benny.

Try to eat his flesh.

No, he thought as tears burned in his eyes, nothing is safe.

He felt the weight of the sword he wore slung across his back. It was Tom’s kami katana, a perfectly balanced weapon. It had been Tom’s.

Had been.

Then, in a moment that was unavoidable and terrible and wild, Tom had used the last of his strength to try to draw that sword in order to stop a madman from slaughtering everyone. But Tom was already dying, and his strength failed him at last — but in that instant Benny reached for the handle, taking it from Tom, brushing his brother’s fingers, drawing the weapon, completing the action. Doing what had to be done. Fighting the monster.

Saving Nix and Chong and Lilah.

Losing Tom.

And, in the act of killing to save lives — even with all the moral and cosmic justification that carried — Benny lost a little of himself. That blade cut more than the flesh of an evil man. It sliced away a piece of Benny’s childhood and left it to die in the bloody grass around where Tom knelt.

Benny squatted down on the edge of the trench, took a handful of hot sand, and let it pour slowly out of his fist. The wind whipped it away from him.

Some of the zoms across the trench were dressed in black clothes with red tassels tied around their wrists and ankles, with white angel wings sewn onto the front of their shirts. Their shaved heads were elaborately tattooed with images of flowers, thorny vines, insects, and writhing snakes.

Reapers of the Night Church.

Because of them, no one was safe.

They were worse than the zombies. The dead meant no harm; they were driven by some impulse of their destroyed nature.

The reapers?

They actually believed that everyone — every man, woman, and child left alive — should die. They were converts to a new religion based on an ancient Greek god of death. Thanatos. And their leader, the cold and deadly madman Saint John, had trained them to be an army of superb and relentless killers.

Saint John believed that Thanatos had sent the zombie plague to eradicate the “infection” of humanity and thereby cleanse the world. Anyone who survived the plague and struggled to stay alive was going in direct defiance of Saint John’s god. It made them heretics and blasphemers. They were like weeds in a bizarre version of the Garden of Eden, and Saint John used his reapers to mow them down.

Then, when the last of the heretics were gone, Saint John planned to lead his own people into an orgy of mass suicide.

The insanity of it was scary enough. The fact that so many people joined the Night Church was insane. It was terrifying.

Benny and his friends had become embroiled in that unholy war.

Now they were injured, sick at heart, trapped, and dying.

And yet…

And yet.

Another emotion warred inside Benny’s heart and mind, fighting back the terror, shoving back the despair over all that he’d lost.

Rage.

It burned inside him with a fire that was as cold as it was intense.

The thought that someone like Saint John would want to end life after all the years of struggle, of working together to overcome hardships, of finding a way to preserve the spark of life after plague and famine tried to blow it out… it made Benny burn.

He thought of everyone he knew who’d died, who’d sacrificed so much so that others — many others — could live.

Mrs. Riley, dying to try to protect her daughter.

Tom. Saving so many.

Maybe Chong, saving a little girl from reapers.

So many.

Too many.

If the reapers had their way, all of these deaths would be meaningless. To Benny, that was obscene.

Benny reached over his shoulder and touched the handle of his sword. He could feel his lips curl back in a feral snarl of hate. He imagined Saint John in front of him, within reaching, within cutting distance.

“No,” Benny said.

It was all he said.

It was enough.

Because, with everything he had and everything he was, he absolutely meant it.

No.