Fire & Ash by Jonathan Maberry

uniform like this. Benny had seen hundreds of other military clothes, from zoms killed during the battles after First Night. Some of the men in townhad camouflage jackets from the old world. The uniforms of the new American Nation were different. The camouflage was a different pattern, with bits of dusty red mixed in with the black, tan, brown, and gray.
    Then . . . something, some fragment of a memory went skittering across the back of Benny’s brain, triggered by Sergeant Ortega’s face and uniform. He went still, hoping to catch a glimpse of it, to discover what it wanted to tell him.
    But that fast it was there and gone, hiding in the shadows under a rock in his damaged memory.
    Benny flipped back through the book, this time looking at the small pieces of paper clipped to some of the pages. One note was written in round cursive by a decidedly feminine hand.
    Mutations reported in California.
    This needs to be checked out.
    Field Team Five?
    Mutations?
    And . . . what was Field Team Five?
    He searched the rest of the compartments and saddlebags on the quad, but there were no more notes or papers. He found some dried meat wrapped in palm leaves, but he distrusted what the reapers considered wholesome food, so he threw that away. He found an item that seemed totally out of place among the reaper’s possessions: an old, unopened package of brightly colored rubber balloons. Fifty of them. It seemed so bizarre and incongruous a thing for a killer to have. He wondered if they were used for some kind of silentsignaling. Benny almost tossed them away, then decided to keep them. Eve might like them. Anything that might put another smile on the little girl’s face was worth treasuring. He stuffed the package into his vest pocket.
    The only other thing of apparent importance he found was a small spiral-bound notebook. Every page was filled with small, crabbed handwriting. Most of what was written there were prayers and rituals of the reapers. Benny debated tossing it away, but decided to keep it. If the reapers were the enemy, then some of Tom’s advice applied: Know your enemy. The more you know about them, the less easily they can surprise you. And by studying them you might identify a weakness or vulnerability.
    And there was the phrase Lilah had learned from George, the man who’d raised her: Knowledge is power.
    The other reason he decided to keep the notebook was what the reaper had written on the last page. It was a kind of code:
    CA/R 1: 4,522
    Quad: 66
    CA/R 2: 19,200
    Quad: 452
    NV/R: 14,795
    Quad: 318
    WY/R: 8,371
    Quad: 19
    UT/R: 2,375
    Every instinct, every nerve he possessed screamed at him that this was important. This, the Teambook, and the urgent note Benny suspected had been written by Dr. McReady. Important . . . but in what way?
    How?
    No way to ask the reaper now, Benny thought, and he flinched at the memory of what he had been forced to do.
    He put the notebook in his pocket and the Teambook into the Honda’s storage bin. Then he used the rubber hose to siphon ethanol from his own crippled quad into the Honda’s tank. Benny replaced the gas cap, climbed into the saddle, started the engine, and drove thoughtfully back to Sanctuary.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
    The people I grew up with, the folks in Mountainside, call the start of the plague First Night. It’s kind of misleading, because it took weeks for civilization to break down.
    Riot and the people she was with call it the Fall.
    I’ve also heard people call it the End, the Gray Rapture, the Rising, Z-Day, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the Punishment, the Retribution, Plague Day, War Day One, and other stuff.

26
    R IOT WAS DOZING IN A straw basket-chair when one of the nuns came to find her. She opened her eyes to see the tight, unsmiling face of Sister Hannahlily, the head nun who oversaw the children during their afternoon nap.
    “You have to come at once,” said the nun.
    “What’s wrong?” Riot demanded. “Is something wrong with