Dust & Decay

17

THEY RAN DEEP INTO THE WOODS, FOLLOWING A PATH THAT WAS ALWAYS kept clear for the traders who brought in wagons of goods scavenged from warehouses and small towns throughout that part of Mariposa County-or what had been Mariposa County before First Night had invalidated all the old maps. As the sun rose it was easier for Benny to avoid stepping in the wheel ruts. Chong, who was much less coordinated, tripped several times. Lilah helped him up each time, but instead of it being an act of kind assistance, she growled at him, and each time she shoved him forward a little harder. Nix caught up to run side by side with Benny, and they both grinned back at Chong. He mouthed some words at them that made them laugh and that would have shocked Chong’s parents and earned a sharp rebuke from Tom.

After a half mile Tom slowed from a full-out run to a light trot, and a mile later eased down to a walk; and finally stopped for a rest. Benny was winded and walked around with his hands over his head to open his lungs up. He was sweating, but the exertion felt good. Nix’s face glowed pink, and her skin gleamed with a fine film of perspiration, but she was smiling.

Chong went over to the side of the road and threw up.

Leaning on her spear, Lilah watched with unconcealed contempt.

It was not that Chong was frail-he had trained as hard as everyone else and his lean body was packed with wiry muscles-but he never reacted well to sustained exertion.

Benny patted Chong on the back, but as he did so he bent down and quietly said, “Dude, you’re completely embarrassing our gender here.”

Between gasps Chong gave Benny a thorough description of where to go and what to do when he got there.

“Okay,” said Benny, “I can see that you need some alone time. Good talk.”

He wandered off to stand with Nix, who was taking several small sips from her canteen. Tom came over to join them.

“Chong okay?” Tom asked.

“He’ll live,” Benny said. “He doesn’t like physical exertion.”

“No, really?” Tom grinned and gestured to a fork in the road. “Soon as everyone’s caught their breath, we’ll go that way. It’s high ground, so we’ll see fewer zoms today. Tomorrow we’ll see about going downland to where the dead are.”

“Why?” asked Nix. “Wouldn’t it be better to avoid them completely?”

“Can’t,” said Lilah, who had drifted silently up to join them. “Not forever. Dead are everywhere. Even up in the hills.”

Benny sighed. “Swell.”

“Are we going to hunt them?” asked Nix, her eyes wide.

Tom considered. “Hunt? Yes. Kill? No. I want you to be able to track them, but I mostly want you to be able to avoid them. We can go over theory from now until the cows come home, but that’s not the same as practical experience.”

“Sounds wonderful,” muttered Chong as he joined them. His color was bad, but better than it had been during the last quarter mile of their run.

“It won’t be,” Tom said seriously. “It’s going to scare the hell out of you, and maybe break your heart.”

They looked at him in surprise.

“What?” Tom said slowly. “Did you think this was going to be fun?”

They didn’t answer.

“You see, this is one of the reasons I wanted to bring you out here,” Tom said. “When everything is theoretical, when it’s all discussion rather than action, it’s easy to talk about zoms as if they’re not real. Like characters in a story.”

“They’re abstract,” Chong suggested, and Tom nodded approval.

“Right. But out here they’re real and tangible.”

Benny shifted uncomfortably. “And they’re people.”

Tom nodded. “Yes. That’s something we can’t ever forget. Every single zom, every man, woman, and child, no matter how decayed or how frightening they are, no matter how dangerous they are-they were all once real people. They had names, and lives, and personalities, and families. They had dreams and goals. They had pasts and they thought they had futures, but something came and took that away from them.”

“Which is another one of the mysteries,” said Nix under her breath.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Chong, and nudged her with his elbow. She grinned and nudged him back, harder.

Tom said, “We don’t know how far we’ll have to go to find the jet. If we find it. We saw it fly east, but it could have landed anywhere.”

Benny winced. “Ouch.”

“No, don’t worry about that part. We’ll find some clues. Other people will have seen it too, and there are people out here. We’ll ask everyone we see… but a lot of those folks live in the downlands, and there are large parts of the country that don’t have mountains. So it’s pretty likely we’ll be where the zoms are. No way to avoid it.”

“So learn how to be with the dead,” added Lilah. It wasn’t an eloquent statement, but they all understood her meaning.

Tom clapped Chong on the arm. “You ready to go? The next part is a leisurely walk in the country.”

“That’s better.”

“No, it’s not,” said Lilah, laying her spear over her shoulder. “Everything out here wants to kill you.”

She walked along the path, and Chong stared after her. “Honestly,” he said, “I already got the message. That last part? Not necessary.”

Nix was laughing as she followed Lilah. Benny laid his bokken across his shoulder, and in a fair imitation of Lilah’s whispery voice said, “Everything wants to kill out-of-shape monkey-bangers named Chong. Everything.”

He strolled off.

Chong took a deep breath and followed.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Tools of the Zombie Hunter Trade, Part Two

LILAH’S SPEAR. The shaft of the spear is made from a six-foot length of three-quarter-inch black pipe. There are brown doeskin leather bands around both ends and on two places in the middle where she usually holds it. The blade is from a Marine Corps bayonet. The blade is black and eight inches long.

She says this is the fourth spear she’s made. She lost one when she was first taken to Gameland (she was eleven, and that spear was five feet long). She lost the second one while running from the Motor City Hammer three years ago. The third one bent while she was breaking into an old library to get books. The fourth one is a year old.

18

BENNY WALKED ALONGSIDE TOM FOR A WHILE. “I OVERHEARD YOU talking with Basher yesterday.”

Tom gave him a brief look. “What did you hear?”

“Bunch of stuff. Mostly about trouble out here in the Ruin. About people coming in to take over Charlie Pink-eye’s territory.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So…?”

“What do you mean? So… what?”

“Well,” Benny said, “aren’t we going to do something about it?”

“‘We’?”

“Yes, ‘we.’ You, me, Lilah, Nix… I mean, before we leave the area?”

Tom shook his head. “No.”

“Why not? These are your woods, man. You spent years out here cleaning them up and stuff.”

“No, I spent years out here as a bounty hunter and closure specialist. It was never my job or my intention to ‘clean things up.’ Not then and definitely not now.” He paused and looked back at the others, who were a hundred yards down the road. Nix and Chong were talking together-probably continuing their argument about the mysteries of the zombie plague; Lilah was bringing up the rear, content to keep company with herself. “Look at them, Benny. Lilah’s not even seventeen. Nix just turned fifteen. You and Chong will be sixteen in a few months. You’re tough, but let’s face it… you’re not an army. I can’t even say with total conviction that you’re all tough enough to do what we’re attempting, and it scares me green to think that I might be leading you to your deaths. I’m not going to make that a certainty by taking you into a pitched battle with fifty or sixty armed bounty hunters.”

“But what about Gameland? If they’ve moved it somewhere closer to town, then they might be grabbing more kids from town. Like they tried to do with Nix. We can’t just-”

“I’ve been trying to get the town to do something for years.”

“I know. I also heard you talking to Mayor Kirsch and Captain Strunk.”

“What are you, the town snoop?”

“Dude, you were talking in the yard. My window’s right there.”

“Okay, okay. Point is, the town has to take responsibility for itself. I showed them that it could be done, and I did what I could for a while… but it’s not one man’s job. And it’s not the job of children.”

“Teenagers, thank you very much.”

“Teenagers. Fine. It’s not your job either.”

Benny looked hard into his brother’s eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not. This is our world too. We’re going to inherit it. What do you want us to do-wait until it gets worse, maybe totally out of control, before we do something about it? How’s that going to help us have a better future?”

Tom stared at him as they walked, and after a dozen steps his frown turned into a small smile. “I keep forgetting how smart you are, kiddo. And how mature.”

“Yeah, well, this last year hasn’t exactly been about kid stuff.”

“No, and I’m sorry about that… but in all seriousness, Benny, this is a conversation we should have had before we left.”

“So… it’s too late to make a difference?” Benny challenged.

Tom shook his head. “It’s not that… it’s just that this isn’t our town anymore. We’re moving on. Others will have to step up to take responsibility for Mountainside.” He pointed down the road. “Your future is somewhere out there, and no doubt there will be plenty of opportunities to make a difference, if that’s what you want to do.”

Benny glanced at him, then back the way they’d come, then up ahead. He sighed.

Tom clapped him on the shoulder, and they kept walking. Eventually Tom pulled ahead, and when Benny looked back, he saw that Nix was now with Lilah and Chong was alone, so he drifted back to walk beside Chong.

As they walked through the tall grass under the burning eye of the sun, Benny kept glancing at Chong. Without turning his head, Chong said, “What? Do I have a booger in my nose?”

“Huh?”

“You keep looking at me. What’s up?”

Benny shrugged.

“Quick! Tell me before I lose interest.” Chong said it with mock excitement.

Benny took a breath. “Nix.”

“What? The fight about science and religion?”

“No… it’s about us. You know… dating and stuff.”

“God!” Chong laughed. “The oath!”

When he and Chong were nine, they had sworn a blood oath that they would never date any of the girls they hung with. Since getting back from rescuing Nix last year, they had been together, and Benny had never asked Chong how he felt about it.

“Yeah… the oath,” Benny said. “I feel kind of bad about breaking it.”

Chong stopped and turned to him, his eyes roving over Benny’s face. “Wait… hold still.”

Benny froze. “What? What is it? Do I have something-”

Chong whacked him on the head with his open palm.

“Ow! What was it? Was it a bee?”

“No. I just wanted to see if I could slap some of the stupid out of you.”

“Hey!”

“Jeez, Benny, we made that oath when we were nine.”

“It was a blood oath.”

“We’d cut our fingers baiting fishhooks. That oath was spur of the moment, immature-and dumb. Mind you, we’ve both had dumber moments. You more than me, of course…”

“Hey!”

“But it didn’t really matter much then, and it doesn’t matter at all now.”

They walked about a hundred paces in silence. “We gave our words, Chong,” said Benny.

Chong grunted. “You never cease to amaze me,” he said. “Though seldom in a good way.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, if you’re so wise and insightful, O Mighty Chong, then how come you’ve never told Lilah that you have a crush on her?”

“Ah. I’m wise and insightful, but not brave.”

“Have you tried?”

Chong colored. “I… wrote a note.”

“What did it say?”

“It… um… had some poetry. And some other stuff,” Chong said evasively.

“Did she read it?”

“I left it where she could find it. Next day I found it in the trash.”

“Ouch.”

“Maybe she misunderstood. After all, it’s not like she’s been around the dating scene. All she knows about romance is what she’s read in books.”

“Maybe, but why not just cowboy up and ask her? Worst she can do is say no.”

Chong gave him a withering stare. “Really? That’s the worst you think she can do?” He sighed. “Besides, it doesn’t much matter anymore. You guys are leaving tomorrow and I’ll never see her again.”

“Yeah,” Benny said softly. “Sorry, man.”

They looked covertly over their shoulders to where Lilah padded along like a fierce hunting cat. She caught them looking at her and growled, “Pay attention to the woods before something bites you!”

They snapped their heads around forward, but Benny was laughing quietly. Chong made a pained face.

“You see what I mean? She lived with us. You should see her before she’s had her morning coffee.”

“Mmm… does that mean that if you two crazy kids had managed to make a go of it, you’d have been the girl in the relationship?”

“How about you go stick a baseball bat up your-”

“Freeze!”

Tom’s sharp whisper cut through the air and rooted everyone in place.

Thirty yards up the path Tom stood in a half crouch, his right hand raised to grip the handle of his katana. Fifty yards behind them Nix and Lilah were in the middle of the road. Nix had her bokken out; Lilah held her spear ready in a two-handed grip.

“What is it?” Benny whispered, but Tom held up a finger, cautioning him to be silent. On either side of them trees rose in dark columns to form a canopy that obscured most of the sunlight, allowing only stray beams to slant down. At ground level the shrubs and wild plant life clustered so densely around the tree trunks that they formed an impenetrable wall; Benny could see nothing of what might be coming toward them. He and Chong drew their bokkens and shifted to stand with their backs to each other, just as Tom had taught them.

Lilah came running along the path on silent cat feet, with Nix a few yards behind. The Lost Girl had a fierce light in her eyes as she slowed to a stop beside Tom, making sure to stand well clear of his sword arm.

“What is it?” she hissed. “The dead?”

Tom shook his head but said nothing.

Nix joined Benny and Chong, and the three of them shifted into a three-sided combat formation.

“You see anything?” Nix whispered.

“No,” said Chong. “Don’t hear anything either.”

It was true; the forest was as silent as the grave, an image that did not make Benny feel very good. He sniffed the air. The forest offered up a thousand scents. Flowers and tree bark and rich soil and…

And what?

There was a smell on the air. Faint but getting stronger.

“Can you guys smell that?” Benny murmured.

“Uh-huh,” said Nix. “Smells weird. Kind of familiar… but not really.”

Lilah raised her spear and pointed into the woods with the gleaming blade. “There,” she said. “It’s coming toward us.”

“What is it?” Nix asked in a frightened whisper.

Tom drew his katana. “Get ready.”

“To do what?” demanded Benny. “Fight or run?”

“We’re about to find out,” said Tom.

“Please,” murmured Chong, “don’t let it be zoms. Don’t let it be zoms.”

“No,” said Tom, “it’s not the dead. Whatever’s coming is very much alive.”

Benny and the others heard it then. A crunch as something heavy stepped down on fallen twigs, the sound muffled by the nearly decayed carpet of last year’s leaves. A moment later there was another sound, different, low and strange. Benny and Nix exchanged a look. She raised her eyebrows.

“Sounds like a bull,” she said.

Benny frowned. “Out here?”

“Lots of animals running wild out here,” said Tom. “This was farm country before First Night.”

The sound came again, deeper and louder.

“Awful big bull,” Chong said.

There was more of the twig crunching, and each time the sound was louder and closer.

“Shouldn’t we, um… run?” suggested Chong.

“Sounds like a plan to me,” said Benny.

Lilah hissed at them to be quiet, adding, “Running makes you prey. It’s better to fight than be hunted.”

Tom opened his mouth to say something, possibly to counter her absolute viewpoint, but then there was a loud snort and grunt as something gigantic crashed through the wall of shrubs and vines. Creeper vines snapped like spider-webs as it shouldered its way out of the forest and onto the road. It lumbered into the middle of the path not thirty feet from where Benny, Nix, and Chong stood, and it paused, sniffing the air.

It was a monster. Slate gray and black-eyed, standing on four short legs, each with a three-toed foot that was bigger than Benny’s head. Immense, with a massive chest and shoulders that were unlike anything Benny had seen in the flesh. In books, sure, but he had thought that creatures like this belonged to a different age of the world.

“Oh my God!” whispered Nix, then immediately clapped a hand to her mouth as the creature turned its enormous head toward her.

This was easily three times bigger than the largest bull in Mountainside. Benny remembered reading about it. The second largest land mammal in the world after the elephant. The whole thing had to be fourteen feet long and over six feet at the shoulders. Thick humps of muscle stood out on its neck to support the long head with a vast snout, from which sprouted two deadly horns, the longer of which was a thirty-inch spike that could have punched right through Benny’s body.

It stood its ground, ears swiveling independently to catch all sound, nostrils huffing to gather the smells of the five people crouched in the road.

Benny stared, eyes goggled wide, mouth open.

“Is that a… a… a…?” Nix tried to ask.

“Uh-huh,” said Chong.

The creature turned its head sharply toward them.

“I’m dreaming this, right?” asked Benny.

“Not a dream,” Lilah whispered, but even she looked rattled.

“It’s a white rhinoceros,” declared Chong, a little too loudly. “But how?”

“Shut up!” warned Tom, but it was too late.

The huge animal suddenly gave a loud, wet snort and took a challenging step toward Chong. The massive rhinoceros grunted, a deep sound that was full of meaning and menace. It pawed the ground and blew out its nostrils.

“Okay,” said Tom. “Run.”

There was a beat where they all looked at him.

“NOW!”

The rhino tilted its wicked horns toward them, bunched the gigantic muscles of its back and hindquarters… and charged.

19

“Go! Go… GO!” BELLOWED TOM AS HE GRABBED NIX AND BENNY and Chong and shoved them toward the forest wall. “Into the trees!”

“I’m sorry!” yelled Chong.

“Shut up and run!”

The ground shook as seven thousand pounds of furious muscle rumbled toward them. Despite its size, the animal was incredibly fast. Lilah flung her spear at it, but the blade merely slashed a red groove along its armored shoulder. It did nothing except make the rhino madder.

“Oh,” she said softly, and then she was running too.

Tom lingered a split second longer, sighting along the barrel of his gun at the rhino’s black eye. Then he whipped the gun away, shoved it into its holster, and ran as fast as his legs could carry him. He caught up with the others and yelled at them to cut left so that they were running almost parallel to the road.

The rhino tried to turn sharply to intercept, but the angle was too sharp. Its huge feet skidded on the dried mud of the road. Then, with a roar, it headed straight into the forest. The rhino’s shoulders slammed into a pair of slender pines, snapping them at the base.

“Use the trees,” yelled Tom. “Circle around the big ones.”

Nix was in the lead, and she shifted her angle to head toward a gnarled old sycamore. She dodged behind it, then spun and pulled Benny and Chong in behind her.

The rhino spotted them and charged. It veered at the last second, so instead of hitting the tree full on, its horns slashed a deep gouge in the wood and shook the old sycamore from roots to leaves. The rhino whirled and rammed the tree again, and Benny threw his arm up to shield his eyes from the spray of splinters the impact blew out of the gouge. The animal tried to chase them around the tree, but they were more agile. It snorted and trotted away, then cut left and rammed again, and this time there was a crack! and the sycamore canted sideways and crashed down on the grass with a huge leafy whumpf!

“Now what do we do?” whispered Chong in a strangled voice. Benny shot a look at him and saw that his friend’s eyes were wide and jumpy with fear that was very quickly going to overwhelm him.

The beast galloped forty feet away and then cut right into a tight circle. This time it didn’t attack the tree but instead began angling to come around the trunk and go straight for Chong. The rhino came at them like a thunderbolt.

“HEY!” Nix yelled as she stood up and waved her arms over her head. Instantly the rhino changed the angle of its charge and came straight for her. “Come on!” she cried to Benny, and then she was racing away from the fallen tree.

“What are you doing?” Benny yelled in panic, but as soon as he said it he understood. Nix tore across ten yards of open field toward a line of massive oaks. The rhino could never hope to knock one of them over.

Benny turned to pull Chong over the trunk so they could follow, but Chong was gone. Benny caught a glimpse of him running away from the oaks, heading toward a cluster of pines.

“Chong, no! Not that way!”

The rhino slowed to a trot and looked from Benny to Nix and then at Chong. Nix was vanishing behind the trunk of a monstrous oak. Benny was still partly covered by the huge bulk of dark roots from the overturned sycamore. Chong had a longer run ahead of him, and the only protection he had was a line of pines. Their bushy branches would hide him, but the soft pines offered no protection at all.

The rhino charged after Chong.

Benny broke from the side of the sycamore and began shouting as Nix had. “Hey! Big and ugly! Over here!”

But if the rhino heard him, it didn’t care. Chasing Chong was a straight run and an easy kill. It thundered after Chong, crushing huckleberry bushes and saplings under its ponderous bulk.

Benny made it to Nix’s oak and kept running. She was right with him, and they sprinted down the corridor of old oaks, heading for a gap that looked like it might have been either a country lane or a firebreak. Benny pointed as he ran, and Nix nodded. There was a chance they could turn left at the last oak, dash across the break, and enter the grove of pines. Benny figured they could come up behind Chong, pause long enough to beat some sense into him, then grab him and race back to the oaks.

At the break they paused for a moment, looking around for Tom and Lilah. Benny spotted them, but they were on the other side of the rhino. Lilah was climbing into a cottonwood tree. Tom was circling to try and cut the animal’s line of approach to the wall of pines.

“Hey!” Tom yelled. “Here!” He jumped up and down, waving his arms. When he got no reaction, he fired a shot into the air. That did it. The rhino skidded to a stop and turned its vicious eye on this new target. Benny was hoping that the animal would be getting tired by now, chasing one thing and then another. No such luck.

“It looks really, really mad,” said Nix.

The rhinoceros snorted a challenge, pawed the ground like a bull, tensed, and then launched itself straight for Tom.

“Oh, crap,” said Benny, but he wasn’t talking about the danger Tom was in. Tom apparently had a plan. Tom always had a plan. No, he caught movement from the pines and saw Chong break cover to watch what Tom and the rhino were doing. The rhino twitched its head as it noticed Chong.

“Oh for the love of-,” Benny began, then saved his breath for running.

Chong was smarter than Benny, but in his panic he wasn’t using that brain. Rhinos were not like people, cats, dogs, and hunting birds. They weren’t predators. Despite the creature’s formidable strength and size, it was built for protection. Predators have eyes that look forward. Prey animals have eyes on the sides of their head. Usually that was to allow them to see threats creeping up from all sides. In this case…

Once more the rhino wheeled and circled back toward Chong, who screeched, wheeled, and ran back toward the screen of pines.

“Why does it keep going after Chong?” asked Nix as they ran.

“’Cause he keeps heading for those pines,” grunted Benny.

“Yeah, but why?”

Tom fired another shot. The rhino ignored him this time and kept charging toward Chong. Tom yelled louder and jumped up and down, but the rhino had its eyes fixed on Chong. “Not that way!”

Chong either couldn’t hear or was too scared to pay attention.

Benny and Nix headed into the overgrown firebreak, crashing through the chest-high weeds, heading at a sharp angle to cut into the pines behind Chong so they could lead him out. The edge of the pine screen was fifty yards away. Benny saw that the shrubs and plants around here were already flattened down by the rhino’s massive feet, as if it had passed that way a hundred times.

Benny was only a half step behind Nix. Then she screamed and suddenly pitched forward into the grass five feet in front of him. Benny had no way of stopping himself in time, and his foot caught on something and he was falling too. He landed on her legs, the impact punching a yelp of pain out of her.

“Oooof! Sorry!” he said as he rolled quickly to his left.

And looked right into the eyes of a zom.

20

BENNY SCREAMED.

Nix looked up. She saw the zombie… and screamed.

The zom lay in the tall weeds inches from them. It did not scream. It snarled.

Then it lurched forward and tried to bite Benny’s face.

Nix grabbed his shoulder and hauled him back, and the creature’s teeth bit only empty air where Benny’s cheek had been. Benny flung himself backward, pushing Nix and himself away from the rotting teeth of the zom and the reaching white hands, but he wasn’t fast enough. One hand closed around his left sneaker, and the teeth chomped down on the rubber toe. Benny howled in agony as his toe was crunched between the zom’s jagged teeth.

God! Am I bit? Am I bit? Am I bit? The litany of dread played over and over in his head.

He swung his right foot and kicked the zom in the face, once, twice, again and again. The creature was dressed in farmer’s coveralls and had huge hands and shoulders. Even crippled and dead, it was immensely strong. Benny kept kicking, putting all his weight and fear into it, feeling the shock of each impact shoot like hot needles up his shin. Old bone cracked and rotted teeth snapped and then he was free.

He pushed Nix away from the monster. She got to her feet and started to run, and immediately she screamed and fell. Benny scrabbled backward and turned to see a sight that threatened to tear the soul out of him. A second zom had crawled out of the weeds and attacked Nix. It had once been a huge woman, and it wore the black-and-white rags of a nun’s habit. There were two bullet holes in its cheeks, but they were ancient and the bullets had missed spine or brain. The zom had Nix pinned to the ground by the shoulders and was bending to take a bite that would destroy everything good and wonderful in Benny’s world.

Nix’s face was covered in bright red blood. A black snake of terror reared up inside Benny’s chest. But his rage was bigger than his fear.

“NIX!”

He bellowed louder than a bull, louder than the rhino. He screamed a great unintelligible shriek of denial as he launched himself at the zom. His bokken lay forgotten in the weeds. He did not even think of pulling his knife. He crossed his arms over his face and slammed into the zom, hitting it like a thunderbolt.

“Get away from her!”

The impact knocked the zom backward, and they fell together in a hissing, snarling tangle, rolling over and over as Nix’s scream filled the air.

The creature was desiccated, however; its arms were strong, but as they rolled Benny felt the dead-weight thump of its torso and legs. The zom’s spine must have been shattered below the shoulder blades so that its legs truly were dead.

Its mouth, however, was not.

The zom moaned in desperate hunger as it snapped at him. Their roll ended with Benny on his back and the zom atop him-not at all the way he wanted this moment to end. He shoved a forearm under its chin to keep those teeth from his flesh. He saw movement over the zom’s shoulder and there was Nix, her face running with blood and her eyes wild with fear, but she had her bokken in her small, tanned fists.

“Now!” she screeched, and with a grunt of effort, Benny shoved his arms straight up, raising the snapping zom as Nix swung her wooden sword.

CRACK!

The top half of the zom’s head seemed to disintegrate, and the creature immediately went limp. With a snarl of disgust Benny threw it to one side.

“Thanks-,” he began, but then he felt Nix stiffen beside him.

“Oh my God!”

Benny scrambled to his feet and looked around, and he could feel the blood drain from his face as he beheld a scene out of his darkest nightmares.

The whole field of tall grass in which they stood was filled with zoms. Dozens of them. They lay between the weeds and snarls of wisteria, empty eyes fixed on them, hands reaching, mouths working. Their moans filled the air.

But they were all broken. Shattered legs and hips. Shattered spines. Missing limbs. Huge holes torn through their chests and stomachs. Benny and Nix were surrounded by a legion of crippled zombies. They wriggled forward on broken limbs or grabbed tufts of grass to haul their twisted wrecks of bodies toward the fresh meat.

“What is this?” Nix breathed, horrified.

Benny drew his bokken, and they stood back to back with no clear way out. There had to be two dozen of the monsters. No… more than that. Much more. Others were climbing like gray slugs over fallen logs or out of depressions in the ground. Fifty of them. Sixty. More. All those dusty eyes and black mouths and rotted teeth. The dead cried out in rusted voices as they pulled themselves toward the smell of fresh meat and flowing blood. The terrible need, the awful hunger in that moan made Benny’s blood turn to ice water in his veins. It was such an ancient sound, old as all the pain and misery in the world.

“We have to get out of here,” Benny whispered. He knew that the words were pointless, their meaning obvious, but there was a need in him to hear a human voice amid the dreadful wails of the dead.

A few hundred yards to their left, Benny and Nix could hear the shouts of Tom and Chong and the indignant snort of the huge animal that had chased them all from the road.

And then he understood. “God!” he gasped. “The rhino!”

“What?” Nix asked, and then she got it. “Oh!”

“Let’s get out of here.”

She dragged her forearm over her face to clear the blood from her eyes. “How?”

Benny licked his lips and took a firmer grip on his sword. “Fast and hard,” he said.

He swung his sword and smashed the closest of the zoms, cracking the hardwood edge of the bokken against its temple. It flopped to one side, and Benny jumped over it. A dozen withered hands grabbed at his sneakers and pants cuffs, but Benny kicked and stamped as if he was being swarmed by cockroaches.

“Come on!” he shouted, but Nix was already running past him. Her sword swished down and cracked and another zombie spun away, its jaw crushed.

They ran and struck and ran. The blood on Nix’s face scared Benny so much his heart felt like ice.

Had she been bitten?

His toe hurt terribly.

Are we bitten?

Are we dead? “Benny!” Nix screamed. “Fight!”

He bit down on his fear and swung the sword. It cracked against a reaching hand and shattered the wrist. He swung again and a zom who looked like he might have been a soldier flopped over on his back, his neck knocked askew. Benny swung and hit; Nix swung and hit; and all the time they screamed and moved and fought.

“That way!” cried Nix, shoving him with her shoulder. Benny pivoted to see a narrow gap in the sea of crawling monsters. He pushed her in front of him.

“Go!”

She went, running and jumping, her sword flashing in a brown blur, the crack! against old bone sounding like gunshots.

A pair of zoms-a grocery store clerk and a man in the tattered remains of a business suit-grabbed at him at the same time, each one clamping on to one of his ankles.

Benny staggered and fell. But as he landed he twisted as Tom had shown him, rotating his shins so that the angles of his bones exerted leverage on the thumbs of the grabbing hands. The businessman lost his grip, and Benny pivoted hard to shake loose the clerk, emphasizing his need with a crushing downward blow with the flat end of the sword handle. The zom’s skull shattered, and his hand opened with a dying twitch.

Benny scrambled to his feet and ran. Nix was fifty yards ahead of him, but he ran so fast that he’d nearly caught up by the time she reached the narrow gap.

“Go! Go!” he yelled, and together they crashed through the circle of broken zombies and into the trampled area where Chong had run. It felt like escaping from the arms of Death itself.

But the problem was far from over.

There was still the rhinoceros.

Chong was there, dodging in and around a stand of oaks as the rhino lunged between the trunks, trying to gore him with its horns. Only the lucky chance of the trees having grown so close together was keeping Chong alive.

Then they saw Tom standing with his pistol in a two-handed shooter’s grip.

“Shoot it in the eye!” Benny yelled as they closed in on where he stood.

Tom ignored him and called out to Chong, “I’m going to fire twice, and then I want you to run behind the trees. Head to your left and go as deep into the forest as you can.”

“No!” cried Nix.

Tom cut her a sharp look. “Why not?”

“We just came from there,” she panted. “Zoms!”

“Damn.”

“Tom! I need to get out of here!” begged Chong as he twisted away from the horn. This time it missed him by inches.

“Benny, Nix… head back to the road. Cross it and go into the other side. Find a tree you can climb and wait for me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just do it!”

Benny and Nix obeyed, but they ran only a dozen yards and then slowed to watch as Tom took a few steps toward the enraged rhino and aimed his gun.

“Sorry about this, old girl,” Tom said aloud.

The sound of the shot was strangely hollow. A pok! Benny expected it to be louder. The bullet hit the rhino in the shoulder. The creature howled, more in anger than in pain, but a second later it lunged at Chong.

Tom fired again, aiming at the creature’s muscular haunch. The rhino shrieked, and this time there was pain in its cry.

It turned with mad fury in its eyes… and charged Tom.

“Why doesn’t he shoot it in the eye?” demanded Nix, but Benny shook his head.

As the rhino rumbled past where they stood, Benny and Nix waved with silent urgency at Chong. He saw them, hesitated, looked at the retreating back of the rhino, and did nothing.

“Crap!” growled Benny. “He’s too scared to move.”

Then something pale rose up out of the weeds behind Chong.

“Lilah!” gasped Nix.

“Why didn’t you idiots climb a tree?” she demanded. “What was all that running around?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, and instead grabbed Chong’s shoulder and fairly dragged him along behind her. The four of them ran through the grass and shrubs toward the trees and then out onto the road.

“In here,” Lilah commanded, pointing, and the four of them plunged into the woods on the far side of the road. They ran through sticker bushes and hanging vines and leaped a gully and then broke into another clearing. At the far side was a squat and solid tree with a stout limb that dipped low. “Go!”

They raced to it and one by one jumped for the limb. Lilah shoved their butts upward, and when it was her turn she crouched and sprang, caught the limb as nimbly as a monkey, and climbed to safety.

Far away they heard two more hollow gunshots.

And then nothing except the triumphant roar of the rhinoceros.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Tools of the Zombie Hunter Trade, Part Three

Tom Imura’s sword is a katana. That kind of sword was developed in ancient Japan by the samurai-the elite warrior class. The katana originated in Japan’s Muromachi period (1392-1573). Samurai sometimes wore a second, shorter sword called a wakizashi with it, but that one was used for committing suicide if the samurai felt his honor had been lost.

(When I asked Tom why he doesn’t carry the short sword, he said, “I believe in survival, not suicide. Besides, aren’t there already enough dead people in the world?”)

The katana is known to be the sharpest sword in the world.

His sword is called a kami katana. He says it means “spirit sword” or “demon sword.” Kind of cool, but a little freaky, too.

His kami katana has a twenty-nine-inch blade and a ten-and-three-quarters-inch handle. The handle was originally wrapped in black silk, but when that wore down, my mom covered it in silk and leather with some Celtic knots worked into the design.

(Mom really loved Tom.) I miss her. So does Tom.

21

THEY CROUCHED LIKE FRIGHTENED BIRDS IN THE TREE, WATCHING THE forest and seeing only trees. There was no sign of Tom or the rhinoceros. Benny peered at Nix. Her red hair was pasted to the right side of her face by a film of drying blood. Her cheek was bruised, and she didn’t meet Benny’s eyes. When he reached out to push her hair from her face, she batted his hand away. “Don’t.”

“I want to see how bad it is.”

“It’s not bad. Don’t worry about it.”

The others went instantly silent. Nix looked at them and then glared at Benny.

“It’s not a bite,” she said. “I hit my head on something when I fell.”

“Show us,” demanded Lilah, and when Nix hesitated, she snapped, “Now.”

With a trembling hand, Nix touched her forehead, and then slowly pushed the hair back. It wasn’t nothing, and it was still bleeding… but it wasn’t a bite, and Benny breathed a vast sigh of relief. Then his face clouded with concern. There was a jagged cut that ran from Nix’s hairline down her cheek almost to her jaw. It wasn’t bone deep, but like most head wounds it had bled furiously.

“Oh, man.” Benny hastily dug some clean cotton squares from his first aid kit. He tried to apply them, but Nix snatched them from him and pressed them in place.

“I know,” she snarled. “It’s ugly.”

Benny smiled at her. “No,” he said, “it’s not that. I’m just sorry you got hurt.”

Her eyes were hard to read in the shadows under the leaves. She turned away without saying anything.

“We have to go find Tom,” whispered Benny.

Nix touched her face. “When he sees this, he’s going to make us go back home.”

“That doesn’t matter, Nix. Right now we have to find him and-”

“He said to stay here,” she insisted. “If he’s looking for us and we’re looking for him, we might never find each other.”

“Yes,” agreed Chong hastily. He was green with sick fear and sweating badly. He clutched the trunk of the tree as if it was trying to pull away from him. “Staying here is good.”

Lilah nodded. “Tom is a good hunter. He’ll find us.”

“But what if he doesn’t?” demanded Benny.

“He will.”

“What if he can’t?”

“He will.”

A voice said, “He has.”

Benny whipped his head around so fast that he nearly fell out of the tree. “Tom!”

Tom Imura stood in the waist-high grass at the base of the tree. He was covered with mud and streaked with grass stains. His black hair hung in sweaty rattails, but he didn’t even look out of breath, and he held Lilah’s spear in his hands.

“Come on down,” he suggested with a grin.

One by one they crawled down to the lowest limb and then dropped. Chong was last, and his legs were visibly trembling.

Benny ran over to Tom. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, and then gave his brother a quick, fierce hug. He abruptly let Tom go and pushed him back like he was radioactive. “Okay, we’re done.”

Nix came in for a hug too.

“Heck of a start,” Tom said. It was meant as a joke, but Nix’s eyes flashed with concern.

“Tom… I don’t want to go back!”

“I do,” said Chong.

She wheeled around, and Benny saw that she was about to fry the flesh from Chong’s bones with an acid comment, but then she saw the look of complete despair on his face. Her own expression softened and she left her comment unspoken. Instead she turned back to Tom and reinforced her earlier comment. “I do not want to go back.”

“We’ll talk about that in a minute,” Tom said gently. “Let’s catch our breath first.”

“The animal?” asked Lilah, accepting her spear back from Tom. There was no blood on it. “Didn’t even pierce the skin.”

“Yeah, well, for what it’s worth, my bullets didn’t seem to do her much harm either.”

“You could have shot it in the eye,” said Benny.

“I would have if I couldn’t get Chong and the rest of you out of there. Otherwise it would have been wrong to kill her.”

Lilah grunted and then nodded. Nix was less certain. “Will it come after us?”

“It won’t. This is her territory. She has a calf hidden back beyond the clearing.”

“A calf?” Benny asked. “That thing’s a mother rhino?”

“So she was just protecting her baby?” asked Nix.

“Seems so.”

“And you never saw it before? I thought you were up in these mountains all the time.”

“I haven’t been in this particular pass for a while. That calf can’t be more than three or four months old. I don’t know much about rhinos, but my guess is that Big Mama came looking for a quiet place to have her baby and settled here. Nobody else lives on this side of the mountain.”

“Where’d she come from?” asked Benny.

“A zoo, I guess, or a circus. People used to have private collections, too. And animals were used in the film industry. Must be a lot of wild animals out in the Ruin. My friend Solomon Jones saw a dead bear over in Yosemite that looked like it had been mauled by something that had big teeth and claws. And there’s that guy lives out at Wawona-Preacher Jack-who swears he’s seen tigers. If the zoo animals got out, it could have been anything. Lion or tiger…”

“Maybe they’ll be cowardly lions,” said Lilah under her breath.

Benny laughed. It was the first time he’d ever heard her make any kind of joke.

Tom nodded back the way he’d come. “Before First Night, there were more tigers in America-in zoos, circuses, and private collections-than in all of Asia. As for Big Mama, she was simply doing what any mother does. Protecting her young.”

“Not just from us,” said Nix.

Tom nodded. “I know. I saw all the zoms. Bottom line… don’t mess with Big Mama.”

Benny nodded and told the others about it. “It was really weird,” he concluded. “All those crawling zoms. Scarier than the walking ones.”

“No,” said Lilah, “it’s not. You haven’t faced enough of the walkers.”

Benny thought back to Zak and Big Zak, and to the zoms he’d faced last year while looking for Nix. “I’ve had my moments.”

Chong cleared his throat. “Zoms couldn’t hurt that rhino, could they?”

“Not a chance.” Tom laughed. “Maybe the baby, though. I didn’t get a good look at it, but if it is still vulnerable, it won’t be for long. Those things are like tanks.”

He saw the blood on Nix’s face and brushed her hair back to examine her. She nodded and pulled her face away from his touch.

“That looks nasty. It needs to be cleaned off.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“That isn’t a request, Nix. Out here we don’t have Doc Gurijala and we don’t have antibiotics. Infection is as much our enemy as the zoms. So, you’ll clean that off now, and then I’ll take a closer look at it. You might even need stitches. If so, either I’ll do it or we’ll go back to town. Either way, all wounds will be tended to with the utmost care. End of discussion.”

Nix heaved a great sigh, made a big show of pulling out her first aid kit and canteen, and trudged away to sit on a fallen tree and do as she was told.

“I’ll help,” Benny said, and limped after her, but Tom snaked out a hand and caught his shoulder.

“Whoa, hold on, sport… you’re limping and there’s blood on your shoe. Where are you hurt?”

Benny swallowed, shooting a wary look at Lilah, whose attention had sharpened and was now focused on him. Her fingers tightened on the haft of her spear.

“Hey-don’t even think about it,” Benny said, pointing a finger at her. “One of the zoms tried to bite through my sneaker, but he-”

“Take your shoe off.” Lilah and Tom said it at the same time.

“I-”

“Now,” said Tom. His voice was heavy with quiet command. Benny looked at Nix, who had paused in the act of sponging blood from her face. Her eyes flashed with sudden concern.

“Crap,” Benny said acidly, and sat down on the grass to pull his shoe off. His sock was soaked with blood.

“Oh no,” breathed Chong. “This is all my fault.”

Benny made a face. “Oh, please. You didn’t bite me.”

“The rhino chased us because I startled it. Then I ran the wrong way and made everything worse.”

Tom started to say something but Lilah cut in. “Yes. You were stupid.”

“She’s got your number,” said Benny with a grin.

Chong gave him an evil stare. “You’re the one whose toe got bitten off by a zom.”

Benny muttered under his breath as he pulled his sock off. His big toenail was cracked and bleeding, and the toe was swollen, but there was no bite. Lilah snatched up his shoe to examine it, but Tom took it out of her hands and peered at the toe.

“It’s a pressure injury.” He blew out his cheeks and handed the shoe back to Benny. “That’s twice you dodged the bullet.”

“That’s a metaphor, right?”

Tom’s smile was less reassuring than it could have been.

“Right?” insisted Benny.

“Rinse your sock out,” said Tom as he turned away.

“Hey… right?”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Some of the traders and bounty hunters claim that the zoms on the other side of the Rocky Mountains are faster than the zoms we have here. There’s a girl in my grade-Carmen-who says that her uncle, who is a trader, saw zombies running after people during First Night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A couple of other people from back east said the same thing, but most people don’t believe them.

I hope this is not true!!!

22

“WELL… GO AHEAD AND SAY IT,” NIX DEMANDED.

Tom squatted in front of her, gently touching the edges of the long gash on her face. His lips were pursed, and he made a small downbeat grunting noise. “You’re going to need stitches.”

“I know. Go ahead.”

He shook his head. “No… I can stitch a wound well enough, but this needs fine work. Otherwise-”

“I’ll look like a hag.”

“I wouldn’t go that far… but a deft hand with a needle will reduce the scar to a pencil-thin line. Doc Gara-”

“No!” She brushed his hand away. “I’m not going back to town.”

“Nix, c’mon,” prodded Benny, who hovered over Tom’s shoulder like a worried aunt.

She gave him two seconds of a lethal green stare and then refocused on Tom. “You’re not my dad, Tom, and I-”

Tom made a face. “Oh, please, Nix. You’re not a petulant little kid, so don’t try that act on me. Benny still tries it and it never works.”

“It works sometimes,” Benny said. They ignored him.

“We can be home in four hours,” Tom said. “The doc can stitch you up, we rest up a day or two, and-”

“No.”

“Would you rather have a bad scar?”

“If it’s a choice between going back and that, then I’ll take the scar.”

“Why?”

It was Chong who asked the question, and they turned to look at him. He was pale and still looked badly shaken by what had happened. His eyes were dark and filled with guilt.

“Look,” Nix said slowly, “if we go back because of this, then what will be the next thing that takes us back? I know how things work with people. If something stops us this soon, then all we’ll find out here are reasons to stop and start over.”

“No way,” said Benny.

“No,” agreed Tom.

She picked up the first aid kit and thrust it toward Tom. “You do it.”

“Please,” whispered Chong. “Don’t. This is my fault. I… I can’t be responsible for you being all messed up.”

“Let’s not add more drama,” said Tom. “I’m not that bad with a needle.”

“Nix is beautiful,” said Chong. “She should always be beautiful.”

Benny held up a hand. “Um… going out on a philosophical limb here, but scar or no scar, Nix is always going to be beautiful.”

“No doubt,” agreed Tom.

Nix flushed, but her expression was still hard.

Chong gave a stubborn shake. “Please. I can’t deal with it knowing that it’s my-”

“As God is my witness,” snarled Nix, “if you say it’s your fault one more time, Chong, I will beat you unconscious and leave you for the zoms.”

Chong’s mouth remained open, the sentence half said but now dead on his tongue.

He turned away and stalked to the edge of the clearing, then squatted down in the grass and laced his fingers over his bowed head.

The first aid kit was still in Nix’s hand. Tom hesitated, but then Lilah suddenly leaned in to snatch up the kit.

“She will die of old age before you make up your mind,” she said coldly. “I’ll do it.”

“Whoa,” yelped Benny, making a grab for the kit. “Do you even know how?”

Instead of answering, Lilah pulled up her shirt to show her midriff. There were three healed-over scars, one at least nine inches long. The scars were as thin as threads. Benny stared. Lilah had a flat, tanned stomach and the curved lines of superbly toned muscles. She was also holding the shirt a little too high for comfort, and Benny could feel his hair starting to sweat.

Tom, quietly amused, reached up and pushed Lilah’s hand down a few inches.

Nix gave Benny another of those deadly green stares and fired one at Lilah, who was oblivious to it. Her understanding of personal modesty was entirely from books and not at all from practical experience.

“You stitched those?” Tom asked.

“Who else?” She dropped the hem of her shirt and turned to show other scars on her legs. Benny hoped that an asteroid would fall on his head at the moment. It wasn’t that he wanted to look, but he didn’t know how not to look, because he thought that would be even more obvious.

“That’s very good work,” said Tom. “Better than I can do.”

“I know,” Lilah said bluntly. She squinted up at the sun. “Better to do it now. Light’s good but careful takes time.”

Nix turned to Tom. “If she can do it, then can we stay out here?”

Tom sighed and stood. “One step at a time. Let’s see how you feel when she’s done.”

“I feel fine.”

“We don’t have anesthesia, Nix,” Tom murmured. “It’s going to hurt. A lot.”

“I know.” Her eyes were hard.

Benny tried to read her expression and all the unspoken things it conveyed. Over the last year Nix had learned nearly every kind of hurt there was. Or at least every kind of hurt Benny could imagine.

Without saying another word to Tom, Nix turned to Lilah.

“Do it,” she said.

23

BENNY COULDN’T BEAR TO WATCH, BUT HE COULDN’T LEAVE NIX ALONE, either. However, she threatened him if he didn’t leave, so he slunk away to stand in the shade of a tree with Tom.

“Heck of a start,” Tom said softly.

“I’d say ‘could be worse,’ but I’m kinda thinking that it couldn’t. So… basically this blows,” observed Benny.

“Yes it does,” agreed Tom.

They stared out at the endless green of the forest.

“She’s strong,” said Tom after a while.

“Nix? Yeah.”

Minutes passed, and Benny tried to think about anything instead of how it must feel to have a curved needle-like one of Morgie’s fishhooks-passed through the skin of your face, followed by the slow pull of surgical thread. The tug at the end to pull the stitch tight. The tremble in the flesh as it waited for the next stitch. And the next.

Benny was pretty sure he was going to go stark raving mad. He kept listening for Nix’s scream. And with each second he could not understand why she didn’t scream. He would have, and he made no apologies for it. Screaming seemed like a pretty good response to what Nix was going through.

There were no screams.

After what seemed like five hundred years, Tom repeated what he’d said.

“She’s strong.”

“Yeah,” Benny said again.

His fingernails were buried into his palms hard enough to gouge crescent-shaped divots.

“Girls are stronger than boys,” Tom said.

“Not a news flash,” Benny said.

“I’m just saying.”

They watched the forest.

“If this goes on any longer, Tom?”

“Yeah?”

“Shoot me.”

Tom smiled.

Benny looked at him and then over to where Chong still sat in the tall grass.

“Is this all really Chong’s fault?”

Tom shrugged.

“No, tell me.”

“If you really want an honest answer,” Tom said quietly, “then… yes. Chong didn’t listen when he was told to be quiet, and he didn’t listen when he was told what to do when the rhino was chasing us.”

“He’s scared.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Sure,” Benny said grudgingly, “but I’ve been out here before.”

“Don’t make excuses for him. You listened to me the first time we came out here,” Tom reminded him. “And that was back when you couldn’t stand me.”

“I know.”

“Not everyone is built to be tough,” said Tom. “Sad fact of life. Chong is one of the nicest people I know. His folks, too. If our species is going to make it back from the brink and build something better than what we had, then we need to breed more people like them. It would be a saner, smarter, and far more civilized world.”

“But…?”

“But I don’t think he’s cut out for this.”

“I guess.”

“It’s better that he’s not coming with us.”

Benny said nothing.

“Do you agree, kiddo?”

“I don’t know.” Benny sighed. “Chong’s my best friend.”

“That’s why he’s here. He only came out here because he’s your friend, and because he doesn’t quite know how to say good-bye,” said Tom. “Saying good-bye is one of the hardest things people ever have to do. Back before First Night, I remember how hard it was just to say good-bye to my friends when I was done with high school. We wrote a lot of promises in each other’s yearbooks about how we’d always stay in touch, but even then we knew that for the most part they were lies. Well-intentioned and hopeful lies, but still lies.”

“That was different.”

“Sure, but things are relative. Just like pain. What Nix is going through is not the worst pain she’s ever felt, which is why she can deal with it. For me, saying good-bye to my friends from high school was terrible. We all were going off to colleges in different parts of the country. The old gang I grew up with was falling apart. It felt like dying. It was grief.”

Benny thought about the way he had left things with Morgie. He nodded.

“I guess I’m having a hard time adjusting to the fact that leaving is so final.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” said Tom.

“For Nix it does.”

Tom nodded.

“What are we going to do about Chong?” asked Benny.

Tom ticked his chin toward the southeast. “There’s a back road to Brother David’s way station. My friend Sally Two-Knives will be coming through here today or tomorrow. I’m going to wait at the way station until she shows, and then I’ll ask her to take Chong back home.”

Benny had the Zombie Card for Sally Two-Knives. She was a bounty hunter who worked mostly out of the towns farther north. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman with a Mohawk and a matched pair of army bayonets strapped to her thighs. The text on the back of her Zombie Card read:

Card No. 239: Sally Two-Knives. This former Roller-Derby queen has become one of the toughest and most reliable bounty hunters and guides in the Ruin. Don’t cross her or you’ll find out just how good she is with her two razor-sharp knives!

Like most of the Zombie Cards, it didn’t give a lot of information, but Benny always liked the fierce woman’s smiling face. She wasn’t pretty, but there was humor in her brown eyes.

Brother David, on the other hand, was a way-station monk, one of the Children of God who lived out in the Ruin and did what he could to tend to the living dead. Brother David and the others of his order called the zombies the Children of Lazarus and believed them to be the “meek” who were meant to inherit the earth. Benny couldn’t quite grasp the concept, especially after what he and Nix had encountered in the field.

“You and Chong can say your good-byes in the morning.”

“Will Chong be safe? I mean… will Sally Two-Knives be enough protection for him?”

Tom laughed. “More than enough. She doesn’t like killing zoms, so she knows all the routes that are clear and safe.”

They were silent for a while, each cutting looks over at Lilah, who was still working on Nix.

When Tom next spoke he deliberately made his tone light. “If we’re lucky we’ll catch up with Greenman, maybe stay a couple days at his place.”

“Greenman, really? Cool! I can’t wait to meet him,” said Benny. He had the Greenman card too. The image on the card was that of a tall, thin man wearing clothes entirely covered in green leaves, berries, and pinecones. The artist had depicted him wearing a mask made from oak leaves and acorns. The card read:

Card No. 172: The Greenman. Little is known about this mysterious figure seen haunting the forests between Magoon Hill and Yosemite. Is he a myth? A ghost? Or is he a dangerous madman waiting to pounce on unwary travelers? Beware the Greenman!

“Sounds like someone from a story.”

“He’s real enough,” said Tom, “but he is a bit of a character. His real name’s Artie Mensch. Used to be a forest ranger over in Yosemite, but since First Night the Ruin has become a real home to him. Never comes into town, doesn’t talk to too many people. Prefers to be alone.”

“Does he really dress like that?”

“Sometimes. When he has his camouflage on you can walk right past him and not see him. Fools the zoms, too. And he’s been experimenting with mixtures of herbs to get the same effect as cadaverine. Not sure if he’s worked it out yet.”

“The Zombie Card says that he might be crazy,” Benny said.

Tom shrugged. “Most people are a little crazy, especially since First Night, and doubly so if they live out here. But Greenman’s a good man, and he’s a friend to the right kind of traveler.”

“What’s the right kind?”

“Let’s just say that Greenman wouldn’t have invited Charlie or the Hammer in for tea.” Tom stared into the distance as if looking into his own thoughts. “I’ve spent many a long night with him. Talking about the old days, and learning what he has to teach.”

“You learned from him?”

“Sure. He might be the wisest person left alive. Certainly the wisest I know.”

A few minutes later, Benny nodded toward the forest. “How far have you been?”

“Since First Night? All the way to the far side of Yosemite, but I rarely go that deep. Once we pass through the park, it’ll be as new to me as it is to you guys.”

“And we’ll be roughing it all the way?”

“Nah. I dropped off some supplies at Brother David’s a few weeks ago. Carpet coats, more cadaverine, some weapons, tents, other stuff. Anything else we need we can get from the traders over in Wawona. Roughing it was just for tonight. For the real trip I want us to be as well supplied as we can be.”

Benny looked over and saw that Lilah was applying a bandage. The stitchery was done and Nix still hadn’t made a sound.

“Speaking of crazy,” Benny murmured.

Tom glanced over. “Nix or Lilah?”

“Take your pick.”

Tom snorted. “You ever try to imagine what it’s like being inside Nix’s head?”

“All the time.” Benny shook his head. “I’ve known her my whole life, and we’ve talked about everything… but then I catch a look in her eye when we’re training, or she’ll say something odd, and then I wonder if I really know her at all.”

“How’s that make her crazy?”

“I don’t know. I… can’t quite put it into words. Since last year she’s different. She’s obsessed about this trip. When we talk about it, most of the time she’s really focused and logical, but if I bring up any reservations about it… she either bites my head or acts as if I didn’t say anything.” He looked at Tom. “I know you’ve seen it too.”

“I have,” Tom admitted, “but I don’t know if it makes her crazy. Her last blood ties are gone, Benny. In a lot of ways she feels that she’s all alone.”

“She isn’t!”

“Sure she is. We’re each alone inside our heads, some more so than others. Lilah’s been alone inside her head for years, and she may never come completely out.”

“So you’re saying that Nix is just obsessed and lonely?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m agreeing with you that there are forces at work in her life. I don’t know if she’s truly crazy-as in a danger to herself and others-but I suspect that her sanity is a work in process. Keep your eye on her.”

He clapped Benny on the shoulder, and they walked over to see how Nix was doing. She was pale, almost green, and her face-what Benny could see of it under the bandages-ran with sweat. Lilah sat on a tree stump, carefully cleaning the needle with alcohol.

“World’s dumbest question,” Benny said to Nix, “but how do you feel?”

“Like I was attacked by Mrs. Lafferty’s quilting circle.” Nix’s face was puffy, and she barely moved her lips when she spoke. Her eyes were glassy with pain and the fatigue that comes from enduring pain. “Thanks,” she said to Lilah.

“I don’t want to go back to that town either,” Lilah said, and walked away.

Benny and Nix looked up at Tom.

He sighed, then said, “Okay. We keep going.”

24

THEY RESTED FOR ANOTHER HOUR, AND THEN TOM TOLD EVERYONE TO get ready.

Benny came over to check on Chong, but his friend didn’t want to talk. Chong put his pack on, adjusted the straps, and didn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

“Let’s go,” said Tom. “I want to make the way station while it’s still light. Nix… we’ll only go as fast as you can manage.”

“I’m fine.”

“No you’re not. You’re hurt, and even though it’s not as serious as it looks, your body has gone through trauma. Be smart about how you feel. Push too hard and you’ll collapse, and then I swear to God I will carry you back to town. Is that clear?”

“Fine.”

Tom adjusted the strap that held his sword. “We’re going to be going down the mountain, and that means every step brings us deeper into zombie-infested lands. Everyone keep your eyes open, and everyone follow orders.” He looked hard at Chong, who gave a single tight nod.

They set out. Tom led the way, and for a few minutes Benny walked beside him. A mile into the hike, Benny said, “We screwed it up pretty bad in just a few hours.”

Tom grunted, but aloud he said, “Despite what I said earlier-and despite a legendary series of screwups-this day could actually have been worse. Not much worse… but worse.”

“So Lilah keeps reminding me,” said Benny quietly. “I think she’d enjoy quieting me.”

“I doubt it, but I agree that she can be a bit intense.”

“Is ‘intense’ really a strong enough word?”

“Give her time, kiddo. She’s-”

“Lived alone for six years, yeah, I know. I’m not criticizing her for being weird, Tom. It’s just a little freaky when someone keeps threatening to kill you.”

Tom nodded, but repeated, “Give her time.”

Benny let Tom move ahead of him, and he slowed until Nix caught up, but from the stiff set of her bandaged face, Benny knew that she was in no mood for companionship or conversation. He walked with her for a while, but when he noticed that she kept trying to walk faster, he lagged again to let her pull ahead.

He sighed.

He turned and looked back and saw that Lilah was walking side by side with Chong, and they were talking in quiet voices. He grunted in surprise. Lilah was weird at the best of times, and she was usually so unemotional that he wondered what really went on inside her head. When he’d first learned about her from a picture on a Zombie Card, he’d been briefly and intensely infatuated. Now he was just afraid of her. And maybe sorry for her too… though he’d feel much more compassion if she wasn’t so damn fast whipping out her knife every time he got a hangnail.

The forest path wound around and began sloping down toward a road that had once been blacktop and was now cracked and torn by the unstoppable roots of trees. Young trees, some of them a dozen years old, stood in the middle of lanes where once cars had driven.

“Careful now,” Tom cautioned. “Weapons out, eyes and ears open.”

Benny drew his bokken and moved closer to Nix.

They walked through the knee-high weeds, stepping over old bones that might have been human, though Benny didn’t want to stop to examine them. Ahead a brown truck lay on its side. Benny could read the letters “UPS” on the rusted back door. The moldering remains of old boxes tumbled out of the back, and what little cardboard remained was bleached white by fourteen years of rain and snow.

Tom held up a clenched fist, the sign to stop. Everyone froze in place.

He gestured for them to stay where they were, then he silently drew his sword and crept toward the truck on the balls of his feet. The woods were alive with birdsong and the buzz of bees. Benny licked his dry lips, waiting for the moment when everything would suddenly go silent. Would there be another animal like the rhino, or would it be zoms?

Tom came up on the truck at an angle that reduced the likelihood of anyone on the far side seeing him. When he wanted to move quietly, he was silent as a shadow. He slid along the top of the overturned truck, took a brief peek around the end, and then vanished behind the vehicle.

Nix drifted to Benny’s side. She looked scared, and he realized that with her injury and the bandages she was probably feeling pretty vulnerable.

Benny mouthed the words, “It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t. When Tom stepped out from behind the truck, his sword was held loosely in one hand, the blade angled down toward the weeds. Even from thirty feet away Benny could see that Tom’s face was drawn and pale, and his lip was curled in disgust.

Everyone moved forward at once.

“What is it?” Nix asked.

“Was somebody attacked by zoms?” asked Benny.

Tom gave them a bleak stare. “Worse,” he said. He looked old and sad, and he turned away to look at the waving treetops down the road.

Nix, Chong, and Benny exchanged frowns of puzzlement, and as a group they walked around to the far side of the truck. The buzzing was louder, and Benny realized that it wasn’t bees hunting for nectar in the spring flowers.

It was flies. Black blowflies that swirled in a thick cloud around something on the other side of the overturned truck.

It was a man. Or, it had been a man. He stood straight, arms out to his sides and secured by ropes to the axles of the truck. The man wore only torn jeans and nothing else. Not even skin. Most of him was gone. Torn away. Consumed.

Chong spun away and threw up into the bushes.

Nix was a statue beside Benny, her eyes huge and unblinking, and from where her arm touched his he could feel her skin turn cold as ice.

Benny wasn’t sure if he was still standing or sitting. Or dreaming. The world spun drunkenly around him, filling him with sickness, making him want to scream.

This man had not been attacked by zoms.

He had been fed to them.

25

“WHY?”

It was the fourth time Chong had asked the question. Maybe the fifth. Benny couldn’t quite remember. Chong kept walking away and coming back and walking away. Each time he came back he demanded an answer. As if there was one that could explain this.

Benny felt totally numb, but he could not make himself look away. Something deep inside demanded that he stand there and look at every inch of the dead man. It made him count the bites. It made him catalog all the things that had been taken from this man.

No. Within his mind a voice that did not feel like his own rebelled at the use of so weak and inaccurate a word as “taken.” The cold detachment required honesty in evaluation. No, the voice said, don’t lie to yourself. If you hide from the truth behind soft words, then you’ll be soft. Then you’ll be dead.

Nothing had been taken. Parts of this man had been consumed. Eaten.

That’s the truth of what you are seeing. That’s the truth of what zoms do.

As he listened to the voice, he also heard a sound. A sob. He blinked and looked around. Chong had walked away again and now he squatted down by the side of the road, arms crossed over his head, his whole body trembling.

Benny glanced again at the dead man, and then turned to go over to Chong, grateful to have a reason to turn away. It wouldn’t feel like cowardice if he was going to help Chong instead of looking at the corpse.

Be strong, whispered his inner voice, then faded into silence.

Benny sat down next to Chong and put his arm around his friend’s shoulders. He wanted to say something, but his inner vocabulary did not include any words that would make sense out of this moment.

“I-I’m sorry,” murmured Chong. He lifted his head and stared straight ahead. His face was streaked with tears and his nose was running. “I don’t-I mean, I can’t-”

“No,” said a low rasp of a voice, and they both turned to see Lilah standing there. The breeze blew her snow-white hair like streamers of pale smoke. “Tears don’t mean you’re weak.”

Chong sniffed and wiped his nose and said nothing.

Lilah sat down in front of Chong, laying her spear in the dusty weeds. “Benny,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Go away.”

Benny started to say something, but he did not. Instead he nodded and got to his feet. He had no idea what Lilah was going to say, or what she could say. Compassion, tenderness, and most other human emotions seemed to be beyond her. Or was he wrong about that?

Benny nodded to himself and walked back to where Nix and Tom stood.

“Tom… do you know what happened? Who did this?”

“No,” Tom said, but there was something in his tone that made Nix give him a sharp look.

“What?” she asked.

He hesitated.

“Come on, Tom,” Benny insisted. “If we’re going to be traveling out here, then you can’t treat us like this. You can’t protect us from stuff.”

“It’s not that,” Tom said slowly. “But… tell me something first.”

“Okay,” said Benny.

“That night last year, when we rescued the kids from the bounty hunters… how sure are you that you killed Charlie Pink-eye?”

If Tom had punched Benny straight in the face he could not have stunned him more.

“W-what?” he gasped.

“What are you saying?” demanded Nix.

“I’m not saying anything yet. Answer the question, Benny.”

Benny closed his eyes and the memory of that terrible fight was right there. Believing that Tom was dead, Nix, Benny, and Lilah had taken it upon themselves to rescue a group of children who had been kidnapped by Charlie Matthias and his bounty hunter cronies. It had been a foolishly risky plan, with more ways it could have gone wrong than right. The skies had opened and lashed Charlie’s mountaintop camp with heavy rains and shocking lightning. At Benny’s suggestion, Lilah had freed hundreds of the zoms that Charlie had tied to trees in the Hungry Forest. Using her own living flesh as bait, the ghost-voiced Lost Girl had enticed the legions of dead to follow her up the mountain and into the bounty hunters’ camp. Tom had showed up around the same time, having escaped a terrible death by a stroke of luck. During the ensuing battle, all the bounty hunters had died. Lilah had killed the Motor City Hammer-a cold revenge she had ached for since that horrible day years ago when her sister, little Annie, had died trying to escape from Gameland.

Charlie Matthias had slipped away from the slaughter in his camp and had come upon the fleeing children. He’d beaten Lilah and Nix to the ground and was seconds away from killing them all. Benny had managed to recover the length of black pipe that the Hammer had used to bash in Morgie’s head-and that Charlie and the Hammer had used to beat Nix’s mother to the point of death.

As Charlie went for him, Benny had faked him out and hit him with the pipe. The image, even the feel of the blow, were scorched into his memory. Benny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“He fell all the way down the mountain, Tom.”

“But you never saw him land? Or heard him land?”

“No…,” Benny said dubiously.

“Damn.”

Nix grabbed Tom’s sleeve. “Why, Tom?”

Tom sighed. “I’ve seen two other men killed like this. Years ago, over by Hogan Mountain. Both of them were bounty hunters who tried to cut a slice of this territory.” He walked over to the dead man and looked at his bloodless face. “I never knew for sure who did it, but rumor had it that both men had been killed by Charlie Pink-eye.”

26

“THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!” BENNY AND NIX SAID IT AT THE SAME TIME.

“I hope you’re right,” said Tom.

“Charlie’s dead,” insisted Benny. “Unless he broke his neck when he fell, he’s a zom. He can’t be alive.”

Tom said nothing. He drew his knife and began cutting the corpse down.

“Tom,” said Nix, “Charlie’s dead. I know he is.”

“Okay,” said Tom. He slashed the ropes that held the man’s arms in place and let the body slide to the ground.

“Tom!” snapped Nix. “He’s dead.”

Tom pulled the man’s torso away from the truck and laid him out straight. “I’m not arguing with you, Nix.”

“But you believe us, don’t you? We saw him fall.”

“I believe you.”

“Then…”

“But you didn’t see him land.” He folded the man’s hands together over his stomach, then straightened and went to peer inside the truck. He rummaged for a moment and came back with a large piece of stained plastic sheeting. Without comment he wrapped the body in it and used rocks to weight down the corners.

“Tom!” barked Benny.

Tom turned angrily. “What do you want me to say, Benny? We didn’t stop to examine that side of the mountain. There could have been a slope or a ledge. There might have been enough thick brush to have slowed his fall. Or he could have fallen a hundred feet and been smashed to junk. I don’t know. We don’t know, and that’s the point. I’ve lived this long without giving in to assumptions.”

“But-,” Nix began, but Tom cut her off.

“No.” He sighed. “Now listen to me, both of you. You want to keep going, right? You don’t want to go back to town.”

“No!” snapped Nix. Benny, less sure about that, shook his head slowly.

“Okay,” said Tom, “then you have to learn to keep an open mind. Assumptions will get you killed. If Charlie is dead, then he’s dead. If he’s alive, then he’s alive. We don’t know for sure, but if we don’t allow the possibility of it, then we could get blindsided. Would either of you like it if Charlie was alive and got the drop on us? If he was willing to torture people and feed them to zoms just for cutting into his trade routes, try to imagine what he’d be willing to do to us. We killed his best friend, we led a zombie army against his crew, we made him an outlaw all through this part of the Ruin, he can’t ever come back to town… and you, Benny, beat him in a fight. You really want to wake up and find him grinning at you in the dark? Do you, Nix?”

They said nothing. Neither was able to.

“I’ve managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I’m a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.” He waved his hand at the forest. “This might as well be hell itself out here. That line about everything out here wanting to kill you? It’s true.”

They kept silent. Nix grabbed Benny’s hand and was squeezing it harder than she had during Zak’s funeral.

“I want you both to learn to think and act-and react-the way I do. I want you to survive. You have to be ready for this to be your world too. You’re teenagers now, but out here you’re going to grow up fast. That’s only going to happen, though, if you’re smart and careful and honest with yourself.”

Nix said, “Tom… do you think there might be other people out here like Charlie?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “Or worse.”

“Worse?” She shuddered. “God.”

Benny nodded. “Then I guess we have to be realistic about that, too.”

“I wish I could say otherwise.” He looked up at the sun. “We need to move. I don’t want to sleep outside tonight. Not after a day like this. Brother David will let us bunk down with him, but we have miles to go and…” His words slowed and stopped and for a moment he seemed to stare into the empty air. Then he wheeled around toward the dead man. “Damn! You idiot!”

“What is it?” Nix asked.

Tom didn’t answer. Instead he jerked the sheeting back from the dead man and bent close and examined the corpse’s neck. He rolled him onto his side and peered close at the skull from all angles. Then he sat back on the ground. “Huh…,” he said, looking perplexed.

“What is it?” Nix asked again.

He’s been dead for days, whispered Benny’s inner voice. “Days,” he said aloud.

Tom gave him a sharp look, and then nodded.

Nix still didn’t get it.

“His neck isn’t broken, is it?” Benny asked.

Tom shook his head.

“No bullet in the head?”

Another shake.

“No sliver?”

Nix caught up with what they were saying, and her eyes were wide. “No one quieted him,” she said softly.

“No,” murmured Tom.

“So why didn’t he… come back?”

Tom shook his head slowly. He considered for a moment and then called Lilah to come and examine the body. She stalked over with a pale and silent Chong in her wake.

“Look at this man, Lilah,” Tom said. “Tell me how he died.”

He didn’t explain. Lilah studied Tom’s eyes for a moment, then shrugged and knelt by the corpse. Benny noticed that her examination was almost identical, step by step, with Tom’s. Her reaction, however, was different. She hissed and whipped out her knife and without a moment’s pause drove it into the base of the dead man’s skull.

“Yeow!” cried Benny, lurching backward from the flashing blade.

“Whoa now!” said an unfamiliar voice. They all whirled as a stranger stepped out of the woods right behind Lilah.

27

“LITTLE GAL’S FAST WITH A PIGSTICKER.”

The stranger seemed to have stepped out of nowhere and was in the gap between the rear bumper of the truck and a game trail that vanished into the shadowy woods. He was a tall, broad-shouldered but very thin man in a dusty black coat and wide-brimmed black hat. Long white hair hung like strands of spiderweb from under the brim of his hat, and he wore a smile that twitched and writhed on his thin lips like worms on a hot griddle.

Lilah was so startled that out of pure reflex she snatched up her spear and swung the blunt end toward him. The man was at least sixty, and he looked dried up from the hot sun and bitter winters of the Sierras, but he moved like greased lightning. He tilted out of the swing of the spear, snaked out his left hand in a movement that was so fast Benny could not follow, snatched the spear from her hand, and flung it into the woods. Without pausing, the man shoved Lilah on the shoulder with the flat of his palm and sent her crashing into Nix and Chong. Before Benny could even grab the handle of his bokken, Tom was up from where he had been kneeling, and his glittering katana was in his hand. But then the man did something Benny would have thought to be completely impossible. Before Tom could complete his cut, the man in the black hat had stepped into the arc of his swing, blocked the elbow of Tom’s sword arm, and put the wicked edge of his own knife against the bulge of Tom’s Adam’s apple.

“My, my, my,” said the man softly, his smile never wavering, “ain’t we all in a pickle?”

Instantly Tom pivoted, slapped the knife away from his throat, spun like a dancer, and swung the blade in a lightning-fast circle that stopped a hairbreadth from the man’s nose.

The man looked cross-eyed at the tip of the blade and gave a comical chuckle. He slowly raised his knife and gave the sword a small tap. The ping! of metal against metal lingered in the still air.

“Let’s call it one-all and say the rest of the game was rained out,” suggested the stranger. Without waiting to see if Tom agreed, the man rolled the handle of his knife through his fingers like a magician and slid the ten-inch blade into a sheath that hung from his belt.

Tom did not lower his sword. He cut his eyes left and right to check the woods, then said to Lilah, “You okay?”

She snarled something low and unintelligible and got to her feet, placing her fist threateningly on the butt of her holstered pistol. Nix helped Chong up, and they looked scared and uncertain. Benny had his sword out now, and he shifted to Tom’s right to prepare for a flanking attack.

“Okay,” said Tom, still holding his sword out, “who are you?”

“Would you mind lowering your katana, brother?” The white-haired man held his hands up and kept smiling. The smile did not quite reach the man’s ice-blue eyes. “We’re all friends here.”

Benny noticed that not only had the man avoided Tom’s question, but he knew what a katana was. Interesting.

Tom said, “‘Friend’ is a funny word for someone who attacks a teenage girl.”

The man looked-or pretended to look-shocked. “As I recall it, brother, she tried to rearrange my dentures with the butt end of yonder spear. I gave her a little shove by way of increasing our distance and decreasing the likelihood of my having to eat my dinner without teeth henceforth. Then you and t’other youngster here set to drawing swords on me. I drew my knife only to calm things down.” His look of shock gradually drained away, and his mouth again wore that twitchy smile. He patted his sheathed knife. “And see… I stood down.”

Tom did not lower his sword. Not one inch.

“I asked you your name,” he said quietly.

“These days people seem to have a bunch of names, don’t they?”

Tom said nothing.

“Okay, okay.” The man chuckled. “You’re being serious here ’cause you’re the grown-up and there are kids watching. I respect that. Like a shepherd with his little flock.”

“Name,” prompted Tom.

“When I came yowling into the world I was called John. Biblical name. Means ‘God’s grace,’ which is a kindly thing to name a babe who ain’t yet done a thing worth being remembered for.” He removed his black hat and looked at Nix and Lilah. “I’m happy to make your acquaintance, ladies, and at the same time I beg forgiveness for my rudeness and gruff ways. Please accept my apology, which is earnestly and humbly given.” He bowed low, almost sweeping the ground with his hat. As he rose, he caught Tom with a grin and a wink. “You look like a traveling man, and that sword of yours marks you as a trade guard or a bounty hunter. So you’ve probably heard the name I go by.”

“Which is?”

The man straightened and opened the flap of his coat to reveal the worn black cover of a Bible tucked halfway into an inner pocket. “Preacher Jack.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re Preacher Jack?”

“Yes sir, I am, in both flesh and spirit. You have heard of me, then?”

“We know some of the same people,” murmured Tom. “J-Dog, Solomon Jones, Dr. Skillz. Lot of people in my trade pass through Wawona.”

A light suddenly seemed to ignite in Preacher Jack’s blue eyes, and it seemed to Benny as if the man went pale. The preacher looked at Tom, giving him a thorough up-and-down appraisal, and then turned to look at Benny, Lilah, and Nix. Each time his eyes shifted to another person, Benny thought he could see that strange light flicker in the old man’s eyes. All of this happened in the space of a few seconds, but the whole temperature of the day seemed to change. The only thing that stayed the same was the preacher’s wriggling smile.

“Well, well, well. What a blessed day, sir, and if you ever put that meat skewer down I’d like to shake your hand, because I do believe I know who you are. Yes, sir. Tough-looking man, early thirties with black hair and black eyes. Japanese sword and Japanese face to go with it. I would bet my last ration dollar that you are none other than Tom Imura. Tom the Swordsman. Tom of the Woods. Fast Tommy. Tom the Killer.”

Tom slowly lowered his sword. “I don’t use nicknames,” he said softly.

“No, not like most folks,” said Preacher Jack, pushing a strand of white hair from his face. “After First Night, most of the folks who live out here were more than happy to shed their family names the way a serpent will shed its skin. Gave them a chance to stop being who they were. Gave them a chance to be reborn as different people. Sometimes much better people. Sometimes not, but you’d know all about that, Brother Tom.”

Tom merely grunted as he resheathed his sword. Everyone else seemed to let out a breath at the same time, and Benny lowered his bokken. Not that he could have done much. It still amazed and baffled him how this grizzled old man could be as lightning fast as Tom. And besides that, why was a preacher able to handle a knife like a professional fighter?

“Most of those nicknames,” Tom said, “were hung on me by people who don’t really know me.”

Benny caught the careful way his brother was speaking. Tom may have put his sword away, but he was still on guard.

“I’ll call you whatever name pleases you, brother,” said Preacher Jack, holding out his hand. “I’ve heard so many interesting and fabulous things about you that I would like to shake you by the hand, yes sir I would.”

Tom ignored the hand and used his chin to point to the dead man. “You know anything about this?”

Preacher Jack looked at his own hand as if surprised to find it hanging out there in the air. He gave a rueful shrug and used that hand to adjust his broad-brimmed hat. The preacher walked slowly past Benny and looked down at the corpse. Nix and Lilah stood on the other side of him, giving him guarded glares. Chong had his hands dug into his pockets and was staring at the dirt between his shoes.

“The Children have been at him?” said Preacher Jack.

“Children?” Nix blurted. “We didn’t-”

“No,” Benny said, “he means the Children of Lazarus. Zoms.”

Preacher Jack winced as if Benny had squirted him with lemon juice.

“Ooooh… you’re right and you’re wrong, young sir. Right, in that it was the Children of Lazarus who did for this poor man; but wrong in that ‘zom’ is an ugly word that decent folk won’t use.”

“It’s just short for zombie,” said Benny.

“I know what it’s short for, little brother,” said Preacher Jack, “but no part of that word should be bandied about. The word comes from Nzambi, the name of a West African snake god. Do you say that you speak that word to worship a pagan animal spirit? Or do you use it as a twist on sombra, the Louisiana Creole word for ghost? Because that would be like acknowledging the power of the devil himself here on earth.”

Benny was confused. Preacher Jack’s voice was as charming as an ice cream seller, but his eyes were as cold as winter frost.

“I-,” Benny began, but Nix cut him off.

“My mother taught me that words only mean what we want them to mean, mister.” Her voice was cold and precise.

“Oh, that’s a nice sentiment, but it’s a crooked mile from the truth. Reality is that words are full of power. The good clean power of the Lord and dark, twisted magic.”

“Everybody uses the word ‘zom,’” said Benny, though he knew that wasn’t true. Brother David never used it and didn’t like to hear it, and Benny had no problem editing himself around the monk… but now he felt like yelling “Zom-zomzom!” at the top of his lungs.

Preacher Jack’s dark eyes twinkled. “The word is offensive to many, and to the-”

Tom cut him off. “No offense is intended. We can’t speak for anyone else, but if offense is taken from what my brother and his friends say, then that burden is on the listener.”

“Is it indeed?” Preacher Jack’s smile never wavered. “That’s a no harm, no foul way of seeing things, Brother Tom, and I respect it. However, it is in the nature of free will that we can agree to disagree.”

Tom ignored that, and instead said, “Do you know anything about what happened to this man?”

The preacher knelt beside the dead man. He made some indistinct humming sounds for a moment, then cocked an eye up at Tom. “What in particular do you want to know, Brother Tom? The man has received the ministrations of the Children of Lazarus and has gone to his maker. He’s been quieted courtesy of the white-haired young miss’s knife. I’m not sure there’s more of this story to tell.”

“Lilah didn’t quiet him,” blurted Nix. “He never reanimated.”

Preacher Jack swiveled his head like a praying mantis to look at her. “Now is that a fact, girlie-girl?”

“Don’t call me that,” Nix snapped.

“Oh, I am sorry. Is that phrase offensive to you?”

Oh boy, thought Benny. He wanted to brain this guy with his bokken.

Before Nix could serve up an acid reply, Tom said, “When we found this man, it was clear he’d been dead for at least a day, and he did not reanimate. I’m asking if you know anything about that.”

“No, Brother Tom,” said Preacher Jack as he stood, “I can’t say as I do.”

“Any idea who fed him to the dead?”

Benny noted that Tom used “dead” instead of “zoms.”

“That is also a mystery to me,” said Preacher Jack. “Why on earth would anyone do such a thing?”

“Any idea who he was?” Tom asked. “I hear you’re living out at Wawona. Did he come through there?”

“I never laid eyes on this poor sinner before.”

Tom almost smiled. “Sinner? If you haven’t seen him before, then how do you know he was a sinner?”

“We’re all sinners, Brother Tom. Each and every living, breathing resident of this purgatory. Even humble men of the cloth such as my own self. Sinners all. Only the Children of Lazarus are pure of heart and immaculate of soul.”

“How’s that work?” asked Benny skeptically. “They eat people.”

“They are the meek raised up from death to inherit this new Garden of Eden.” He opened his arms wide to include the green and overgrown expanse of the Rot and Ruin. “They have been reborn in the blood of the old world, washed clean of their sins, and they now walk in the light of redemption. It is only us, the dwindling few, who cling to old ways of sin and heresy and godlessness.”

“Um…,” Benny began, but realized that he was no candidate for a religious debate.

Lilah stepped forward. Her eyes looked a bit jumpy, and Benny realized that she was probably unnerved by having her weapon taken away from her so easily. The only other person who had defeated her was Charlie Pink-eye. “You are saying that we are all sinners? That we deserve whatever happens to us?”

“It’s not what I am saying, little miss; it’s what the Good Book says.”

“Being eaten by zoms is in the Bible?” Nix asked, giving him a frank stare; and Benny liked that she leaned on the word “zoms.”

“Not in words that crude.” He patted the book inside his coat. “But yes… the fate of all mankind is laid out in chapter and verse.”

“Where?” demanded Lilah. “Where does it say that in the Bible?”

Something shifted in the preacher’s eyes. Benny thought it was like a snake looking out through the eyeholes of a mask.

“It’s in there for those who read the scriptures,” the preacher answered quietly. “But I bet that you’ve never taken the time to-”

“You’d lose that bet, mister.”

Everyone turned. It was Chong who had spoken up. He had retrieved Lilah’s spear from the bushes and handed it to her. She accepted it without glancing at him.

Preacher Jack gave Chong an up-and-down evaluation with his eyes and dismissed him with a twitch of his smiling mouth. “I doubt that, son. From what I heard, this young lady’s been living hard and wild in these mountains, far from any church or congregation.”

“How does that matter? Does a sheepdog stop being a sheepdog if there’s no herd or shepherd?” Chong gave his dry lips a nervous lick. “Don’t raise theological questions unless you’re prepared to debate them.”

Preacher Jack’s smile still did not dim. “Well, well, well… what have you stumbled upon, Jack? A Sunday School class trip all the way out here in the Rot and Ruin?”

“Hardly that,” said Tom quietly.

“Then what?”

Chong, Lilah, Nix, and Benny all started to speak, but Tom snapped his fingers, a sound as sharp and urgent as a pistol shot. He gave a hand gesture, a palms-down press as if he was patting the air. It was one of the warrior hand signals he had taught them over the last seven months. Be silent but be ready.

“We’re out here on personal business,” said Tom mildly. “Family business. We don’t discuss that business with strangers.”

“Is that what we are, Brother Tom?” asked Preacher Jack with a hint of reproach in his voice. “Are we strangers?”

Tom said, “If we’d met in town or at Wawona, or in the sanctuary of one of the way stations, then I suppose I’d feel comfortable enough to swap stories. That’s not the case. I find a man tortured and fed to the dead. That’s suspicious. Then you step out of nowhere.”

“I-”

Tom stopped him with a raised hand. “Let me finish. I offer no hostility and mean no disrespect, but I am not in a position to trust a stranger.” He nodded toward Benny and the others. “Manners are going to have to take a backseat to common sense and safety.”

“So I see.”

“I’m going to ask one more time… do you know anything about who this man is, why he was killed, or why he didn’t reanimate?”

Preacher Jack hooked his thumbs into his belt, and Benny noted that this put the heel of his right hand on the pommel of his knife. Having seen how fast the man could draw that knife, Benny had no illusions that the gesture was accidental. He carefully tightened his grip on the bokken.

“I don’t believe that I have any of the answers you seek,” murmured the man in the dusty coat.

“Then I think we’re done here.”

“Done with me or done with this poor sinner?”

“With both.” Tom took a small step back.

Preacher Jack nodded. “Perhaps we’ll meet again under more pleasant circumstances, Brother Tom.”

“That would be nice, sir, but unlikely. You see, we’re heading east.”

For the first time Preacher Jack’s smile flickered. “What? You’re leaving these mountains? When will you be coming back?”

“I don’t expect that we will.”

That wiped the smile completely from the preacher’s face. He looked disappointed and even a little bit angry at this news, and Benny watched Tom as his brother watched the change in Preacher Jack’s expression.

“Something wrong?” asked Tom, his own face and voice neutral.

The smile returned, tentatively at first and then with all its twitchy vibrancy. “Wrong? Why, no, except that it would surely have been a blessing to sit down, break bread, and try this whole meeting again in a more civilized way. I fear we got ourselves off on the wrong foot here. Knives and hard words and all.”

Now Tom smiled, and it looked genuine, at least to Benny.

“Yeah.” Tom laughed. “I guess this wasn’t the most genial encounter.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, it could have been worse.”

“Yes,” said Preacher Jack with a glitter in his eyes, “it surely could have.”

They stood there, eight feet apart with a dead man lying on the ground between them, and Benny had the impression that there were all sorts of conversations going on at the same time. Words that were not being spoken but that were mutually understood. Except to Benny and, from the look on her face, Nix as well.

Preacher Jack bowed to Nix and Lilah. “If by word or deed I have done anything to offend you fine ladies,” he said, removing his hat and bowing low once more, “then I am truly sorry and most humbly beg forgiveness. The Ruin is not a charm school, and in hard times we often forget who we are and where we came from.”

Lilah said nothing, but her honey-colored eyes lost some of their intensity. Nix gave a single curt bob of her head.

Preacher Jack turned to Benny. “Peace to you, little brother.”

“Um… yeah, sure. Back atcha.”

Preacher Jack ignored Chong altogether, but he fixed Tom with a knowing smile. “I won’t offer my hand again, Brother Tom, for fear that it will once more be left hanging in the wind. So I’ll tip my hat and bid you all a farewell. May the Good Lord keep you from snakes and snares and the evil that men do.”

With that the preacher replaced his hat, tugged his lapels to adjust the hang of his jacket, and walked back into the woods, where he vanished so quickly into the shadows that the whole encounter might have been a dream. Tom and the others stood where they were for a full five minutes, listening first for Preacher Jack’s soft footfalls and then to the forest as the ordinary sounds one by one returned.

Benny let out a chestful of air and turned to Tom. “What was that all about?”

“I really don’t know,” said Tom.

Benny could see that Tom was troubled. He followed his brother over to the edge of the road, and they both squatted to study the dirt of the game trail along which Preacher Jack had gone. Benny watched as Tom used a twig to measure the man’s shoe impressions. “Good-quality hiking shoes,” murmured Tom. “Pre-First Night, which means they’re either scavenged or purchased for a tidy stack of ration dollars.”

Benny nodded and bent low to study the pattern of the shoes, just as Tom had taught him. The tread was pretty well worn, and there was a crescent-shaped nick out of the right heel.

“That nick is pretty distinctive,” Benny said, earning him an approving nod from Tom.

“It’s as good as a fingerprint. Remember it.” Then Tom called the others over to look at it too, pointing out the unique elements of each sole.

“Why bother?” asked Chong. “Is he our enemy?”

“I don’t know what he is,” admitted Tom, “but out here it’s a good idea to observe as many details as you can. You never know what’s going to be useful.”

“Was that really Preacher Jack?” asked Nix.

Tom rose and squinted down the game trail. “Well… he fits the description Dr. Skillz gave me. At least physically.”

“Is it okay if I say that he was the single creepiest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been face-to-face with decaying zoms?”

Tom nodded. “Yeah, Nix, you can say that and mean it.”

“I don’t like him,” growled Lilah, her fists clenched tightly around the shaft of her spear. “If I see him again…” She let the rest hang in the air.

“I think it’s a good idea if we all watch our backs,” suggested Tom.

“Are you sure he’s really a preacher?” asked Chong.

Tom shook his head. “I’m not sure of anything about him. Not one thing.”

He looked up at the sky.

Benny started to ask something, but Tom shook his head.

“We’re burning daylight,” Tom said. “We need to get to the way station, and I need to think while we’re doing it. We’ll talk then. For now, we’ll go at Scout pace. That means we walk two hundred paces, run three hundred, walk two hundred. It’ll chew up the miles.”

And it’ll keep us too busy to ask questions, whispered Benny’s inner voice. Smart.

“Nix-this is up to you. Can you handle the pace? No screwing around: yes or no?”

“Yes,” she said with real fire. “And I promise to tell you if I can’t keep up.”

Without another word, Tom turned toward the southeast and set off.

The others followed. Running and walking and running. They didn’t have time to ask questions, but about ten thousand of them occurred to Benny, and he knew that the same questions would be occurring to Nix.

Who was Preacher Jack?

Was he connected to the dead man? Who had killed the man? And why? Could Charlie Pink-eye still be alive? Was he out in these same hills? Did he know they were out here?

And, maybe more important than any of those questions: How come the dead man had not reanimated? Since First Night, everyone who died, no matter how they died, came back to life.

Why hadn’t he?

What did it mean?

The questions burned in Benny’s mind as he ran.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

How many people are still alive out there?

Tom says that there’s a network of about five hundred bounty hunters, traders, way-station monks, and scavengers in central California. And maybe as many as two hundred loners living in isolated and remote spots. Sounds like a lot, but it’s not. Our history teacher said that California used to be the most populous state and that there used to be almost forty million people living here.

28

THEY LEFT THE OLD ROAD AND FOUND WHAT USED TO BE A HIGHWAY, so they turned and followed that. Despite the fact that his toe was hurting like crazy and his clothes were thoroughly soaked with sweat, Benny still mustered the energy to look left and right, left and right, checking every shadow under every tree for some sign of movement that could be either zoms or worse.

Charlie’s dead, he told himself, but his inner voice-the less emotional and more rational aspect of his mind-replied, You don’t know that.

He cut looks at Nix, who was also sweating heavily and yet seemed able to keep going, despite the pain and the injury. It wasn’t the first time that her strength amazed and humbled him.

They ran and walked, ran and walked.

During one of the walking times, Benny leaned to Nix. “What the heck was that?”

“Preacher Jack,” she said, and shivered. “I feel like I need a bath.”

Benny counted on his fingers. “We know-what-seven religious people? I mean people in the business.”

“You mean clerics? There’s the four in town, Pastor Kellogg, Father Shannon, Rabbi Rosemann, and Imam Murad…”

“… and the monks at the way station: Brother David, Sister Shanti, and Sister Sarah. Seven,” finished Benny. “Except for the monks, who are a little, y’know…” He tapped his temple and rolled his eyes.

“Touched by God,” Nix said. “Isn’t that the phrase Tom uses?”

“Right, except for them, everyone else is pretty okay. I mean the monks are okay too, but they’re loopy from living out here in the Ruin. But even with different religions, different churches, they’re all pretty much the kind of people you want to hang with during a real wrath-of-God moment.”

“Not him, though,” said Nix, nodding along with where Benny was going with this. “He’s scarier than the zoms.”

“‘Zoms’ is a bad word, girlie-girl,” Benny said in a fair imitation of Preacher Jack’s oily voice.

“Eww… don’t!” Nix punched him on the arm.

They walked another few paces as the road bent around a hill.

“Weird day,” Benny said.

“Weird day,” Nix agreed.

Around the bend were dozens of cars and trucks that had been pushed to the side of the main road, which left a clear path down the center. Some of the cars had tumbled into the drainage ditch that ran along one side. Others were smashed together. There were skeletons in a few of them.

“Who pushed the cars out of the way?” asked Chong.

“Probably a tank,” said Tom. “Or a bulldozer. Before they nuked the cities, back when they thought this was a winnable war.” He gestured to the line of broken cars, many of them nearly invisible behind clumps of shrubbery. “This is a well-traveled route. Traders and other people out here. All these cars have been checked for zoms a hundred times.”

Nix wasn’t fooled, and she gave Tom a sly smile. “Which doesn’t mean they’re safe. We have to check them every time, don’t we?”

Tom gave her an approving nod. “That’s the kind of thinking-”

“-that’s going to keep us alive,” finished Benny irritably. “Yeah, we pretty much get that.”

To Tom, Nix said, “He’s cranky because he didn’t think of it first.”

“Yes, I did,” Benny lied.

They moved on.

As the sun began edging toward the western tree line, they crested a hill and looked down a long dirt side road to where an old gas station sat beneath a weeping willow.

“Take a closer look,” suggested Tom, handing Benny a pair of high-power binoculars.

Benny focused the lenses and studied the scene. The surrounding vegetation was dense with overgrowth, but there was a broad concrete pad around the cluster of small buildings. An ancient billboard stood against the wall of trees. It had long ago been whitewashed, and someone had written hundreds of lines of scripture on it. Rain had faded the words so that only a few were readable.

“This is Brother David’s place?” asked Chong in a leaden voice. Between the catastrophe with the rhino and finding the dead man, and then the weird encounter with Preacher Jack, Chong seemed to have lost his humor and virtually all trace of emotion. He barely spoke, and when he did his voice lacked inflection. It was like listening to a sleepwalker.

Tom caught the sound and cut a look at Benny, who nodded.

Tom mouthed the words, “Keep your eye on him,” and Benny nodded again.

“Yup,” said Benny. “He was the first monk I ever met out here. It’s him and two girls. Sister Sarah and Sister Shanti.”

“And Old Roger,” added Nix.

“Who?” Chong asked.

“He’s a zom they take care of. Remember I told you?”

Chong nodded but didn’t comment.

They descended along a path that ran beside a mammoth line of white boulders dumped there ages ago by a glacier. A thin stream of water trickled between the rocks, but it was so small that it made no sound. Chong lagged behind the rest, and Benny slowed to keep pace with him. When Benny caught a look at Chong’s face, he almost missed his step.

There were tears at the corners of Chong’s dark eyes.

“Hey, dude. What’s-?”

Chong touched Benny’s arm. “I’m really sorry, man.”

Benny shook his head and started to protest.

“No,” Chong interrupted, “I should never have come. You guys are better off without me.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Benny said, though his voice lacked total conviction. “Besides, this way you get to spend a couple of days with Lilah-”

Chong dismissed that with a derisive snort. “Ever since the rhino thing, I’m less than dog crap to her.”

“C’mon, dude, she’s like that with everyone. I mean, she’s been trying to quiet me for a coupla days now.”

Chong merely shook his head. “I spoiled everything.”

“No way. Don’t even go there.”

“I’m sorry I came,” Chong insisted, but this time he said it more to himself. Benny was fishing for something encouraging to say when Tom stopped them all with a raised fist.

He scanned the terrain for a moment, then waved everyone over.

“Is everything okay?” Benny asked.

“Let’s find out,” Tom said guardedly.

Tom headed down the slope and the others followed. For Benny this was the first moment today that wasn’t wrapped in tension. He thought Brother David was halfway to being crazy, but he was one of the nicest people Benny had ever met, and the two girls with him were sweet-natured and pretty. All three of them were good cooks, too, and even after everything he’d seen, Benny was sure he could eat a full-size rhinoceros.

They came down onto the concrete pad, on which the single gas pump stood like a great rusted tombstone to a dead culture. Tom knocked loudly on the pump’s metal casing. The echoes bounced off the hills and came faintly back to them before melting into silence.

There was no response. Tom narrowed his eyes. “Stay here.” He walked carefully to the front door of the station and knocked. Nothing. “Brother David?” he called.

Absolutely nothing.

Scowling, Tom waved the others over and they approached with great caution, their weapons in their hands.

“Be ready,” Tom said as he reached for the door handle. It turned easily, and the door swung inward. Tom drew his pistol and moved silently inside. The others crept after him. Lilah broke to Tom’s right. Benny slipped in next, with Nix at his back, and they shifted to Tom’s left.

However, there was no need of caution.

“Where is everyone?” whispered Nix.

Tom shook his head and took a few tentative steps into the room.

Most of the front part of the station was set up for trading and an attempt at comfort. There were folding chairs, a wood-stove, and a table for meals. Benny, Tom, and Nix had stayed here several times and eaten the modest but well-cooked food offered by the Children of God; and Tom always brought some supplies as gifts.

The rest of the way station had been converted into living quarters for the monk and the two female disciples. There were bedrolls and plastic milk crates that served as bureaus and night tables. Sheets were strung on clothesline to provide marginal privacy. Garlands of flowers and herbs were hung from pegs set into the walls.

“Where are they?” Nix asked again.

“Lilah,” Tom said, “check the sheds.”

She nodded and slipped out the door without a word. It annoyed Benny a bit that Tom never asked him to do something like that, but this wasn’t the time to start an argument.

Nix crossed to the stove and looked into the pots, then held her hand above the burners. “It’s cold, but there’s food in the pots. Hasn’t gone bad yet.”

“Teacups on the table, too,” said Benny. “And it looks like all their stuff’s back there. That’s Sister Shanti’s traveling bag on her bed. Think they went out for a walk? A day trip or something?”

Tom shook his head. “No… looks like they just got up and walked out.” He knelt and picked up a pair of reading glasses. One of the lenses was cracked from side to side. “Brother David’s.” He frowned. “And there’s more. I sent a load of supplies here. Carpet coats, tents, cooking gear, extra rations, and some weapons. I don’t see any of it here.”

The door opened and Lilah came in. “Someone broke the lock on Old Roger’s shed. He’s gone… tracks lead east.”

“How long?” asked Tom.

“Late morning.”

Tom nodded again. “I think that’s when everyone left.”

They stood in the dusty sunlight, thinking that through, silently letting the implications shout at them.

“Okay… we don’t have enough daylight left to get back to town,” said Tom, “and I sure as hell don’t want to sleep up in the hills tonight. Too many weird things going on.”

“I’ll second that,” mumbled Benny.

“So we have two choices. We hole up here and fortify this place, or we push on to Sunset Hollow. If we run most of the way, we can make it by full dark.”

Benny was already shaking his head. Sunset Hollow was where he and Tom had lived before First Night. It was where the zombies of their parents had been kept by Tom for fourteen years; and it was where they were buried now. On one hand it had a high wall and a fence they could lock; on the other hand, Benny was sure that if he went back there he would go totally ape crazy.

“Nix can’t do all that running,” he said, fishing for a reasonable excuse. “And Chong has to go home tomorrow.”

“Don’t make this about me,” said Nix defiantly. “I’ll outrun your narrow butt any day of the week, Benny Imura.”

Benny winced.

“Stay here,” voted Lilah. “Five of us can hold this place.”

“There’s no back exit,” Tom replied.

Lilah considered that and said nothing. She turned and looked at the others, then frowned. “Where is Chong?”

They all turned to the door, each of them realizing that Chong had not come inside with them.

“Was he outside when you checked around back?”

She nodded but immediately rushed outside. Tom was a half step behind her.

Chong was nowhere in sight.

29

“THIS DAY CANNOT GET ANY WORSE,” TOM SAID UNDER HIS BREATH.

Benny shot him a look. It was the kind of statement that he would never dare make because the universe always seemed to take it as a challenge. He cupped his hands and called Chong’s name.

The echoes bounced around and came back empty.

“Oh, come on,” growled Tom with mounting frustration. “Somebody that smart can’t possibly be this dumb.”

“Maybe he went somewhere to go to the bathroom,” suggested Benny. “Chong’s pretty shy about that stuff… so maybe he-”

“Went to the bathroom where? In his damn parents’ house? There’s an outhouse twenty feet away, and there are bushes everywhere he could squat behind.”

“He was pretty upset,” said Nix. “Maybe he just wanted to be alone.”

Tom turned to her and gave her a long, withering stare. “Alone? In the Rot and bloody Ruin?”

She flushed bright red and immediately started calling Chong’s name again. Tom did too. Only Lilah stayed silent. Her damaged larynx made it impossible for her to shout loud enough to do any good; but her honey-colored eyes missed nothing as she turned in a full circle and surveyed the surrounding forest.

Lilah shot Nix an evil look. “Are all boys this stupid?”

“Hey!” said Benny.

Nix didn’t answer. She called Chong’s name again, shouting it as loud as she could, even though it hurt her injury to do it. If he could hear the shouts, Chong did not answer.

Tom cursed with great vehemence for several seconds. “I am so going to kill him. I’m going to drag him back to town and chain him to his own front porch.”

“I’ll help,” offered Benny, who was as angry as he was scared.

Tom looked from the tree line to the sun and back again. “Damn it.” He turned to the others. “Okay, everyone spread out. Find Chong’s footprints. He has those wedge-soled boots. Keep your weapons in hand and stay in sight with at least one other person. You find anything, call out. Go!”

The four of them moved away from the front of the station as if they were propelled outward by an explosion.

He’s gone, whispered Benny’s inner voice. Be prepared for that.

Benny didn’t want to believe it, but his mind was replaying his last conversation with Chong, and Chong’s last words: “I should never have come.”

“Come on, you monkey-banger,” Benny muttered aloud as he scanned the dusty ground and picked his way through the broken concrete. “Stop screwing around.”

Then he found something that froze the blood in his veins. He straightened and yelled as loud as he could.

“HERE!”

Everyone came running. Benny saw the flash of sunlight on Tom’s sword as his brother ran up from his left, and the glitter on the wicked edge of Lilah’s spear as she closed in from the right. Nix came puffing up behind him. They all stopped and stared. No one said a word. The words had already been said.

They were scraped onto the side of a slab of concrete pushed almost vertical by tree roots. Chong had left them a message. Two words.

I’M SORRY.

Benny looked at what lay beyond the slab of concrete. Miles of white rock left by a glacier. White rock baking in the sunlight. The row of rocks split off into five separate threads that led high into the mountains and vanished into the gloom gathering under the forest canopy.

Benny remembered a basic fact of tracking that Tom had taught him: Rubber-soled shoes don’t leave tracks on rock.

There were five possible trails, and there were four of them. The sun was already behind the treetops, and it would be dark in two hours.

With a feeling of sinking horror, Benny realized that Chong, smart as ever, had picked a path away from them that was impossible to follow. In grief and shame, he had run away.

And there was nothing they could do about it.

30

LOU CHONG RAN AS FAST AS HE COULD OVER THE ROCKS. HIS HEART pounded, but it also ached. Benny would hate him for this. So would Nix and Tom. Lilah, however… well, Chong figured that Lilah would be happy to have him gone. Lilah despised weakness, and Chong felt that “weak” had quickly become his defining characteristic. At least out here in the Ruin.

He felt stupid and ashamed. He should never have agreed to come, and though he briefly thought that Tom was just as much to blame for even suggesting this trip, Chong believed the stuff that had gone wrong was all his own fault. He was fairly certain that Tom was on the verge of turning back, which meant that Chong would be responsible for screwing up what Nix and Benny really wanted. And for denying Lilah the freedom that she craved.

That was the process of logic that had spurred him to run, though now, deep in the woods, he could see that the logic was as thin as tissue paper and filled with holes. He remembered one of his father’s countless lessons about logical thinking: “When you add emotion to any equation, you can’t trust the results.” Shame and guilt were emotions, and the sum at the end of his logical calculations was as untrustworthy as his actions back on the road when the rhino first appeared.

“I’m not cut out for the Ruin,” he told himself as he ran. “I’m nobody’s idea of Mr. Adventure.” His words were pitched to sound funny, but his heart was breaking.

As he ran he made himself remember everything that Mr. Feeney had taught them in the Scouts and what he had read in books about the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. All the tricks about tracking and stalking. And about how to foil pursuit. There was a lot of that in books. The Leatherstocking Tales and old Louis L’Amour novels from long before First Night.

Chong knew about doubling back and leaving false trails. He knew how to circle around and cut his own trail. He knew how to keep from scuffing the rocks. Several times he jumped down from the rocks and ran into the tall grass, then carefully walked backward in his own footprints so that anyone following would think he ran into the field. When he reached the forest, he found a broken branch that still had some leaves on it, and as he ran he whisked the ground behind him to wipe out his trail.

Maybe Tom or Lilah could find him, but he didn’t think so. If they were alone and had all the time in the world, sure… but they had to watch out for Benny and Nix.

Chong even smiled to himself with how clever he was being. It felt good to do something right, even if the others would hate him for it. Better that than having them hurt again because of him. Especially if Charlie Pink-eye was still alive. It would be better for Benny and the others to keep going east, to get far beyond the reach of that maniac.

Chong knew enough about orienteering to know which way was northwest. And even though he hated physical exertion, he could climb a tree and lash himself to the trunk to wait out the night.

As it grew dark he slowed to a walk. The canopy of leaves was so dense he could catch only glimpses of the sky. Sunset couldn’t be more than an hour and a half away. It was time to find shelter.

He saw an upslope and took that, reasoning that high ground would give him a better view to help him pick a likely tree for the night, and allow him to see if he was indeed alone in this section of the forest. Chong was sure he could outrun a zom, but if one came after him, the creature would simply follow him to whatever tree he chose and stand there until the world ended. It could outwait him.

“No thanks,” he told himself, and almost jumped at the sound of his own voice. He drew his bokken. He was not as strong a swordsman as Benny, or as fast as Nix, but Chong knew that he was far from helpless, and holding the weapon recharged his confidence.

At the top of the hill he turned in a full circle. Shadows clustered around the base of each tree, and every time the wind blew Chong imagined he could see a ghastly shape lumbering his way. But he saw no zoms.

He spotted a stately cottonwood tree with a couple of branches low enough to grab and many more high up among the leaves. He ran down the hill and began climbing the slope atop of which was the cottonwood. He looked left and right, checking his surroundings, filling his mind with data, being smart and careful.

But he walked right past the two figures standing in the dense shadows beneath a massive old spruce. They, however, saw him.

Tom, Lilah, Nix, and Benny were miles away. Much too far away to hear Lou Chong’s screams.

31

BENNY STOPPED AS MOVEMENT CAUGHT HIS EYE FAR TO THE NORTH. A flock of birds leaped out of the distant trees like a cloud of locusts. They swirled and eddied in the air and then gradually settled back down among the dark green leaves.

“What was that?” asked Nix, catching the sudden jerk of Benny’s head but missing what he was looking at. She was kneeling among the rocks sixty yards from the way station, trying to determine if a smudge could be one of Chong’s footprints.

“Just some birds,” he said. Even so, Benny continued to stare.

Lilah climbed up on the rocks from the other side. “Where?”

Benny pointed. The trees were still for a five count, and then the birds jumped up again. As a swarm they moved a hundred yards south and settled in different trees.

“Lilah,” Benny asked, “d’you think-?”

Before he could finish, Lilah turned and clapped her hands over her head several times to attract Tom’s attention. He was on the far side of the station, but he came at a run.

“What is it?”

Benny described what they’d seen. Tom didn’t immediately reply. He looked at the sun again and the long shadows cast by the western line of trees, then he turned and studied the area where Lilah had pointed.

“It’s got to be Chong,” decided Tom. “Direction’s right. Could be heading for the northern trade route.”

“Yeah,” Benny agreed. Tom had made them study every route and path in the Ruin.

Nix chewed her lip. “Tom, do you think Chong’s trying to go back home?”

“Sure. Where else would he go? The question has always been how. There are fifty ways to get to Mountainside from here, and all we know for sure is that he isn’t going the way we came.”

“Preacher Jack’s out there too,” said Nix.

Tom didn’t reply, but the muscles at the corners of his jaw bunched and flexed.

“C’mon,” cried Benny, grabbing at his bokken. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

“Sorry, kiddo,” said Tom, “but you and Nix would slow me down too much. It’s going to be dark soon, and I’m a lot faster alone.”

It was true, but Benny tried to come up with an argument to get around it.

“I’ll go,” said Lilah.

Tom shook his head. “No. You’re tough, Lilah, but I can’t allow it.” Lilah stiffened at the word “allow,” but Tom didn’t back down. “I admit that you’re good. You survived out here for years… but I’m still better at this. I’m bigger and faster, and I’ve been hunting these mountains for fourteen years. Besides, the Chongs left their son in my care. This is my fault, and it’s mine to make right. I also don’t want to argue about this. I want you to stay here with Nix and Benny. You can help them fortify this place. Remember, Sally Two-Knives is due through here tonight, and J-Dog and Dr. Skillz are in the area. Wait for them. Are we agreed?”

Nix, Benny, and Lilah all began yelling at once, telling Tom why they thought the plan was bad, arguing why they should all go, and growling at him for treating them like they were helpless. Tom took about five seconds of it before his face darkened.

“Okay-enough!”

Silence dropped over them like a net.

“This isn’t a debate. The three of you will damn well stay here and do as you’re told. That means you, too, Lilah.”

Three sets of hostile eyes glared raw heat at him. However, what Tom said next changed their looks from hostility to fear.

“If I’m not back in twenty-four hours, Lilah… I want you to take Benny and Nix back home.”

“What?” demanded Nix.

“Hold on a frickin’ minute,” snapped Benny.

“Okay,” said Lilah.

Benny and Nix whipped their heads around and looked at her liked she’d just betrayed them. Lilah’s face was a mask of stone.

Into the silence, Tom said, “Good.” He patted his pockets to reassure himself that he had everything he needed, then fished out two of his three bottles of cadaverine and handed them to Benny.

“I don’t plan to be gone long enough to need this much,” said Tom. “You might.”

“Tom, I-,” Benny began, but Tom cupped him around the back of the neck and pulled him forward. He kissed Benny on the forehead.

“Stand tough, little brother. You’ve learned a lot in the last seven months. Use it. Be warrior smart.”

Benny nodded. “Warrior smart.”

Tom hugged Nix and patted Lilah’s cheek. “All of you,” he said, “warrior smart.”

They nodded.

Tom turned and began running along the line of glacial rocks. He moved with an oiled grace that was deceptively fast. Within seconds he was nearly to the tree line; within minutes he was gone, swallowed up by the darkening forest as the sun tumbled over the edge of the world.