Tooth & Nail

3

A big man with a bowie knife tried very hard to kill Benny Imura.

Benny yelled something loud and inarticulate as he flung himself out of the way of the slashing blade. He could feel the steel whistle past his ear. As he turned his panicked dive into a roll, he bumped and bounced to minimum safe distance, losing his sword in the process. The katana—Tom’s sword — lay in the dirt between Benny and his attacker.

The man with the knife straightened and gave Benny a long, cold, harsh stare of contempt.

“I thought you said you could fight.”

Benny spat dust out of his mouth and unloaded a string of comments that could have burned the paint off a steel drum.

“Nice,” said the big man. “You kiss your mama with that mouth?”

“My mother’s dead,” Benny snarled. “Don’t you—”

“Everybody’s mother’s dead, Sherlock. It’s the apocalypse.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Benny climbed to his feet, eyeing the fallen sword. “Don’t look so smug… you missed me.”

“Sure, and missing you took some effort. It was all I could do to keep from carving a few pounds of stupid off you.”

Benny laughed. “Oh, yeah, that’s what happened. You missing had nothing to do with me dodging and evading and doing a combat roll. Yeah, you missed on purpose.”

Suddenly everything seemed to blur. The big man threw the knife with incredible, insane speed. One moment it was in his hand, and the next instant the knife was buried three inches into the hard desert sand exactly between Benny’s feet. But before it even stopped quivering the man hooked the toe of his boot under the sword, kicked it into the air, caught it one-handed, leaped forward, swung the sword, and then froze with the razor edge less than a hairbreadth from Benny’s throat.

“Yeah,” said the big man, “I did.”

The world was frozen into a moment of impossibility. Benny tried to look down at the blade without daring to move his head.

He said, “Um… urk…”

Behind him three pairs of hands began a slow, ironic round of applause.

The big man smiled — all white teeth and blue eyes in a seamed and scarred face — and stepped back half a pace. He reversed the sword in his grip and offered the handle to Benny.

Benny had to take a moment to remember how to breathe before he dared raise his hand to accept the weapon. His hand was shaking so badly he almost dropped it.

The audience was three girls — Nix Riley, Lilah the Lost Girl, and a former reaper named Riot. Nix and Riot were smiling, Lilah — typically — was not. The big man gestured for them to stop the applause and waved them over.

The four of them stood in a loose half circle around Captain Joe Ledger. The ranger’s dog, Grimm, a massive American mastiff who usually wore armor fitted with blades and had been trained to hack zombies rather than bite them, sat nearby, watching Benny with undisguised dislike.

The ranger’s own emotions were impossible to read. He had a sunbaked, scarred face that generally wore either a fake smile or a disapproving scowl. The man was still a bit unreal to Benny. He’d first read about him on a Zombie Card; Ledger was a hero of First Night, a former Special Operator. He had led a crew of world-class soldiers against terrorists who were armed with exotic bioweapons. In the weeks following First Night, Ledger was supposed to have saved thousands of people by organizing them, helping them find shelter, teaching them how to fight the limitless armies of the dead. He’d even fought alongside Solomon Jones, Fluffy McTeague, Hector Mexico, and Tom.

This man had known Tom.

The man had once been a great hero.

He was still fighting the zoms and leading the fight against the reapers. Without him, Benny and all his friends would have died in the Nevada desert.

He was a living legend.

And Benny wished he could bury the man up to his chin in an anthill and pour honey over him.

The feeling was clearly mutual.

“You know what your problem is?” asked Ledger.

“I’m standing too close to a jerk who thinks he’s Captain Wonderful?”

“Cute. But no… the problem is that you have some skills. For the amount of training you say you’ve had, you’re actually pretty good. And that’s what’s going to get you killed.”

Grimm looked at Benny the way a hungry wolf might look at a limping gazelle. Drool hung from his rubbery jowls.

Benny waited for the other shoe to drop, and it hit with a thud.

Ledger said, “What you are is an arrogant little…”

There was more, a lot more, but Benny stopped listening. He turned and began walking away. He got a dozen steps before a strong hand grabbed him and whirled him around.

It wasn’t Joe.

It was Nix.

She was beautiful even when she was furious, and right now she was absolutely furious. Her freckles glowed like hot embers and her green eyes were lethal. She pitched her voice into a low, fierce whisper that only he could hear.

“You listen to me, Benjamin Imura,” she snapped. “Captain Ledger is trying to help us.”

“I don’t want his help.”

“Don’t be stupid. We need his help. We need to keep training.”

“Tom trained us,” he fired back, his voice rising. “Tom was the best, and he trained us and we’ve been warrior smart. We survived everything because of Tom.”

Nix got right up in his face.

“Survived everything? Really? Why don’t you go tell that to Chong.”

It was worse than a slap across the face.

Chong.

God…

Benny tried to say something back, something witty and full of thorns, but the words caught in his throat; he couldn’t spit them out. Instead he turned, slammed his sword into its sheath, and stalked away.

Nix Riley watched Benny go. She was angry and hurt and sorry for what she’d said. Tears began burning the corners of her eyes. When she turned away from him, Captain Ledger was right there. She hadn’t heard him approach.

“He — he had to go and—” she began, but he stopped her with a smile and a shake of his head.

“Don’t make excuses for him.”

“He’s been through a lot,” she said quickly. “He’s not usually like this. It’s not his fault.”

“Fault?” he echoed as they rejoined the others. “No. But it is his responsibility. We’re at war, and we don’t have the luxury of letting our emotions get in the way of preparing for the fight.”

“No,” agreed Lilah, and Riot nodded too.

“Besides,” said Riot, “Benny don’t hold the only license on pain and grief.”

It was true enough. Each of them had suffered terrible losses.

And Lilah… she’d lost more than all of them. Lilah’s pregnant mother had died in an old farmhouse and Lilah, two years old at the time, had watched first her natural death during childbirth and then a second and more brutal death as the survivors defended themselves after she resurrected as a zom. A man named George became Lilah’s protector and guardian because he was the last survivor of that group of refugees in the farmhouse; but some years later he was murdered and his death made to look like a suicide. Around that time, Lilah and her little sister had been forced to fight in the zombie pits at Charlie Pink-eye’s Gameland. During an abortive escape, little Annie was mortally wounded and left to die on a desolate rain-swept road. Lilah found her just as Annie reanimated. And the Lost Girl did what had to be done. After that, Lilah lived alone in the wilds of the Rot and Ruin, fending for herself and killing zombies and bounty hunters and in the process becoming remote and strange. And perhaps a little crazy. She’d begun to come out of that shell after she’d been rescued by Benny, Nix, and Tom, and more so when she and Chong had fallen in love.

Now Chong was lost. Dying or dead. Or maybe a monster.

The people in the blockhouse on the far side of the trench wouldn’t tell them.

Benny had lost Tom. And that was hard enough. Tom was a bit larger than life, a man of great gentleness, wisdom, and power who ultimately saved the Nine Towns from the evil of Charlie Pink-eye and his family.

Nix cut a sideways glance at Captain Ledger, wondering what — and who — he’d lost; but the big ranger never spoke about himself. He didn’t even comment on the things he was said to have done to earn himself a place on the Heroes of First Night subset of the Zombie Cards.

Ledger caught her looking at him. “He’ll be back,” he said, misreading her thought.

Nix shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

The ranger smiled. “He’ll be back.”

The day burned away and Benny did not come back.