Free Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry

of the rail. The reaper’s face was dead pale and his mouth dark with blood. He turned toward the movement of the newcomers and immediately crouched like a cat ready to spring. He bared his teeth and snarled. A black, viscous goo, thick as motor oil, dribbled over his teeth and down his chin. Small white worms writhed in the muck.
    It was clear that Brother Victor had become one of the gray people.
    The dead thing suddenly hurled himself at Saint John.
    Four muscular Red Brothers leaped to intercept the rush, and they forced Victor back with wooden poles. The reaperretreated, but he began pacing back and forth, occasionally lunging at the rail with cat quickness.
    Saint John frowned. “I don’t understand this. Is he dead?”
    “He is,” said Sister Sun.
    “But he’s so fast.”
    “Yes. Fast and smart. Look.”
    The dead reaper attacked the rail over and over again, hitting different points, trying to squeeze between the guards, snarling all the while. He was so fast that once he nearly got across the rail before the men with the poles battered him back.
    “He keeps trying the rail at different points,” observed Sister Sun. “He’s trying to find a weakness.”
    “You examined him? He has no pulse, no—”
    “He’s dead,” said Sister Sun. She leaned close. “This is the mutation we’ve been hearing about. Now it’s happened to one of our own. Honored One . . . if this spreads . . .”
    Saint John said nothing. He could almost taste the fear in Sister Sun’s voice, and he could see it in the eyes of the Red Brothers.
    However, in his own heart, deep down in that velvety darkness, he felt quite a different emotion. And it made him smile.

20
    U P AHEAD B ENNY SAW A hazy stretch of green floating inside a mirage.
    The forest.
    The very fact of the forest out here in the dry vastness of Nevada was bizarre. Before First Night, some real estate developers had come out into the hottest part of the desert and decided that this would be a wonderful place to put a golf course. They built row after row of tall wind turbines to generate electricity and pump water to irrigate the landscape, and planted trees, grass, and decorative shrubs in what was otherwise an inhospitable environment. In doing so they created the illusion of a lush forest cut with wide green lawns. The wind turbines hadn’t been knocked out by First Night; however, heat and blowing sand had stilled most of them. Only a few still channeled sluggish water into the soil. Most of the exotic foliage was now dead, coarse weeds and bare dirt having replaced most of the lush grass. Lovely shrubs had been replaced by uglier, hardier foliage. When the last of the turbines quit working, the desert would kill the remaining imported trees and reclaim the land. Benny figured that within ten years there would be no trace of the golf course, noevidence that man had ever tried to impose his whims and his will on the fierce Mojave.
    The four fat tires rumbled effortlessly over the rocky ground. Ahead he could see flashes of white through the green. The plane. As he drove toward it, Benny’s mind churned on so many different things that he never heard the second quad come tearing toward him from behind a stand of trees. His only warning was when the other quad’s engine roared to full throttle as the driver slammed into Benny’s machine.
    Suddenly Benny was flying into the air, arms pinwheeling, legs kicking. He landed with a thud that jolted every muscle and bone in his body. His katana went slithering out of its scabbard onto sandy ground. But Tom had taught him to react rather than allow himself to gape in surprise. He scrambled around, got to his feet, and came up into a crouch, confused, scared, and angry. His quad lay on its side near the transport plane, its wheels still turning, a second machine jammed hard against it, blue ethanol fumes chugging from both tailpipes.
    He heard a crunch of a footfall, turned fast, and saw a glittering knife slash