Dust & Decay

32

AFTER TOM LEFT, LILAH TURNED TO BENNY AND NIX. “IF WE’RE GOING to spend the night here, let’s make this place secure.”

“Tell us what to do,” said Nix.

The first thing they did was find string and lengths of rope and construct a network of lines around the gas station. Lilah set Benny to work gathering cans from the rubbish heap out back and buckets full of small stones. Nix used a hammer and awl from Brother David’s tools to punch holes through the cans. Then Lilah strung the cans on the taut lines and filled each one with a few stones. She strung the lines at various heights so that any zom would walk right into them, and the sound of the stones rattling in the cans would be clear and loud. The strings of cans would also hopefully trip up a human sneaking up in the dark. There was some starlight but no moon, and the tripwires were virtually invisible once the sun was down.

They hung towels and sheets over the window to block out any light. Lilah gathered wood for the stove.

There wasn’t much else they could do, and so they settled down to wait.

At first it was merely tense. Benny worried about Chong and worried about Tom. But as time wore on he began to feel irritable and jumpy.

“I wish Tom was here,” he complained.

Lilah, who was cleaning her pistol again, shot him a look. “He would be if Chong had not been stupid.”

“Okay,” Benny snapped, “so Chong made a few mistakes… how about laying off him?”

“Why? He has caused every problem since we left town.”

“Chong’s just scared, okay? You going to tell me you never made any mistakes because you were scared?”

Something seemed to move behind Lilah’s eyes, but her voice was cold and steady. “Yes, I made mistakes. But they never put anyone else in danger.”

“That’s because you never had anyone else,” Benny said savagely, and immediately regretted his words as he saw the hurt register in Lilah’s eyes. “Oh, crap. Look, Lilah, I didn’t mean-”

She gave him a murderous look, flung open the door, and went outside. The sun was a fiery dragon’s eye peering through the trees.

Benny stared at the stiffness of her retreating back until Nix came and stood over him, blocking the view. The disapproval on her face was eloquent. Benny closed his eyes.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“I can’t believe I said that to her.”

Nix punched him in the chest. Not hard, but hard enough to make her point. She turned and walked away.

Benny’s inner voice said, Smooth.

“Shut up,” he muttered.

It was nearly full dark before Lilah came back into the house. She ignored Benny completely and went to the table and continued with the process of cleaning her gun as if nothing had happened. Nix locked the door and pulled the curtains over the window.

They built a small fire in the stove. They made and ate some food. They drank water from their canteens.

They slowly went crazy from waiting.

Lilah and Nix barely spoke to Benny. At first he felt bad about that, but as the evening wore on he began to resent them for it. An hour crawled by. Outside crickets pulsed in the grass, and a dry wind began to disturb the treetops.

They listened to it as they ate more of the beans and rice. Nix was the cook, and she added some onions, garlic, and spices from Brother David’s meager stores. Lilah could cook, but no one alive wanted to eat what she prepared; Benny could cook too, but he had no sense for seasoning. To him spices began and ended with salt and hot sauce.

Another half hour limped by them. Lilah gathered up every knife in the way station and began cleaning them. She placed them in a neat row.

“Are we just going to sit here?” Benny griped as he glared across the table at Lilah.

Nix gave him a cold look and flapped her hand. “There’s the door. No one’s forcing you to stay here.”

“Very funny.”

Lilah kicked the table very hard. “Nix is right. You are welcome to leave if you think you can do something useful.”

“Maybe I should.”

“Maybe you should,” Lilah agreed, getting in his face.

“Maybe you should,” Benny fired back. “We probably wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for you.”

Lilah looked totally perplexed. “What?”

“Oh, come on. You think this is all Chong’s fault, and maybe a lot of it is, but he wouldn’t even have come along on this dumb camping trip if it wasn’t for how he felt.”

Lilah blinked in surprise. “What?”

“You heard me. If you weren’t here, then there’s no way Chong would have come along. He’d be home safe.”

“Benny!” warned Nix, but Lilah cut in.

“Me? Why? What do I have to do with what he does?”

“Because he’s head-over-freaking-heels in love with you, Lilah. How can you be so freaking observant and not know-”

“Benny!” Nix jumped to her feet. “Cut it out.”

Shut up! snarled his inner voice. Benny ignored both warnings. “It’s the truth.”

Lilah stared at him with a mixture of confusion and anger. “You should shut up.”

He pointed a finger at her. “And you should open your damn eyes, Lilah. He’s been mooning over you since you moved in with him. He can’t take his eyes off you.”

“Shut up!”

“You talked with him back on the road. I’ll bet he told you how he feels and you just threw it back in his face.”

“Shut up!” Lilah yelled.

“Are you denying it? Didn’t he say anything back there?”

“Go away.”

“What did you two talk about?”

Lilah glowered. “He asked me if this was all his fault and I told him the truth. I told him that he was a town boy… he isn’t strong enough to be out here.”

“You told him that? Were you trying to make him run away?”

“No!”

“What did he say to you?”

“It’s none of your business, so shut up!” barked Lilah, banging her fist on the table hard enough to make one of the knives roll off and clatter to the floor. In the ensuing silence she bent and picked it up.

Benny knew that he should shut up, that he should leave this alone, but he couldn’t keep the words from spilling out. “What happens if I don’t shut up? You going to threaten me again? I’ll bet you can’t wait for the chance to quiet me. And Chong. And maybe Nix, too.”

Lilah’s face went dead pale. Tears, as small as chips of diamonds, glistened in the corners of her eyes. She opened her mouth to speak, but Nix beat her to it.

“Benny,” yelled Nix, “so help me God-”

THUD!

Something hit the front door. They froze, mouths open but silent, eyes staring at the door, ears straining to hear. The wind tossed the treetops. There was no other sound, not even the crickets.

“What was that?” demanded Benny.

Nix held a finger to her lips. Lilah tightened her grip on the knife.

Benny licked his lips. “Oh, crap,” he said softly.

Nix picked up both bokkens and handed one of the swords to Benny. They listened to the night. The crickets had stopped. They did that when they were startled, Benny knew. When they were afraid. When there was something there.

They waited, listening for sounds. Hoping to hear Tom call out. Or Chong.

Thud!

Another blow against the door. The sound was both heavy and soft. Muffled. Like a fist wrapped in a towel. Or…

Thud! Thud-thud!

Or a hand flung loosely, without purpose or conscious control.

Thud-thud-thud.

Whatever was beating on the door was not Tom. Or Chong. Or anyone alive.

Then they heard the moan.

33

“THERE’S A ZOMBIE OUT THERE,” WHISPERED BENNY.

“I know,” murmured Lilah is her ghostly voice. She used her free hand to wipe the tears from her eyes. “It must have heard you.”

“Heard us,” answered Benny, but his defense was weak and he knew it. Lilah snorted.

Thud.

“What’s it doing?” Nix asked in a horrified voice. “Is it knocking to get in?”

Lilah shook her head. “Not knocking. Pounding. It wants to get us… the door is in the way.”

Somehow that chilled Benny more than the thought that the creature was knocking. Even though he couldn’t see the zom, the thought of its limp, dead hand striking over and over again, following some impulse that existed in a brain that had otherwise died was intensely creepy. How could science ever explain that? How could anything make sense of it?

The pounding continued. There was no rhythm to it, but each blow carried the same dead-weight force.

“What should we do?” asked Nix.

Lilah’s answer was as cold as the flesh of the monster outside, and there was a weird light in her eyes. She looked more than a little crazy. “We kill it.”

They gaped at her.

Benny pointed at the door. “You want us to go out there? To open the door and actually go out?”

“If you’re afraid,” she sneered, “stay here.”

Benny suddenly felt like an idiot. “Look… about before-”

“Shut up,” warned Lilah. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Benny felt humiliated, so he tried to stand straighter, and he put what he hoped was a tough-guy, bounty-hunter, zombie-killer glare in his eye.

“What’s wrong with your face?” Lilah asked. “Are you going to throw up?”

“No, I-”

Lilah pushed him out of the way. “When you open the door, I’ll shove him back. Close the door behind me. When he’s quieted I’ll knock. Be ready to let me in.”

“We will,” promised Nix, “but shouldn’t you at least put on a carpet coat?”

Lilah sneered at the suggestion. “For one zom?”

Benny cleared his throat. “Look… Lilah… are you sure you want to do this?”

The Lost Girl gave him a funny look. “What does ‘want’ have to do with anything? The dead will keep trying to get us. Pounding can be heard.”

As if to punctuate her remark, the limp hand struck again. And again.

“Now,” she said softly. She held her knife with the easy competence that only came with years of practical experience.

“Now,” Lilah said again, and Benny jumped.

“Sorry,” he said, and reached for the handle. Lilah gave him a disgusted look.

“Wait!” snapped Nix. She looked at Lilah. “The cans.”

Lilah stiffened. “Oh,” she said softly.

“Oh, man…,” Benny breathed. “How could a zom get through them without…” He didn’t finish the sentence because there was nowhere to go with it.

“We’re in trouble,” whispered Nix. “Someone else is out there. Someone alive.”

“I know.” Lilah stepped back from the door.

Nix closed her eyes for a second. “Brother David and the Sisters didn’t just walk away.”

“I know,” Lilah said again. She slid the knife into its sheath and reached for her spear.

“Wait,” said Benny, shifting to block the door. “You’re not actually going out there, are you? Not now!”

“Yes.”

“Look… I’m sorry for what I said, but you don’t have to-”

She cut him off by suddenly leaning so close that they were nose to nose. Her golden eyes were fierce and hurt at the same time. “I want to throw you out there.”

That shut Benny up.

Thud! Thud!

“Right now, though,” Lilah said, turning away from him, “we need to stop the zom from making so much noise. Noise carries at night.”

“Lilah,” said Nix, “maybe you shouldn’t go out there. It could be something a lot more dangerous than a zom.”

Lilah’s voice was cold. “I’m a lot more dangerous than a zom. Open the door.”

“Lilah,” whispered Benny, “it could be Charlie Pink-eye out there.”

Lilah showed her teeth in a deadly smile. “That would be perfect.”

Outside, the zom continued to pound and pound and the endless wind blew like a black ocean. Nix closed the door on the stove and blew out the candles, plunging the room into total darkness except for a faint outline around the door etched by starlight. Benny fumbled for the door handle. He counted down from three and then pulled the door open as he leaped back out of the way.

The zombie was right there, framed by starlight. Tall, thin as a stick, and pale as wax, with black eyes and a gaping mouth. It lurched forward, reaching for Benny, but Lilah suddenly jump-kicked the zom in the chest, driving it backward out of the doorway. She went through the door like a flash of lightning. She caught up with the zom before it could fall, pivoted and slashed at the back of its knee with the bayonet at the end of her spear. It was her signature move, taught to her as a child by George, the man who had raised her after Lilah had been orphaned on First Night. With the tendon cut, the zom immediately dropped to its knees. Lilah kicked it between the shoulder blades, and as it fell face-forward onto the ground, she whirled her spear and bent forward in a powerful two-handed thrust that drove the spear point unerringly into the narrow opening at the base of the skull. The zombie instantly stopped thrashing and twisting and became completely still. Dead… for real and forever.

The whole process, from jumping kick to final thrust, had taken less than four seconds.

Benny and Nix crowded the doorway, stunned as always by how fast and efficient Lilah was. And how ruthless. They understood it, but it left them breathless.

“God…,” breathed Nix.

“I know,” said Benny.

“No,” Nix said, rising and pointing. “LOOK!”

Benny squinted to see what she meant. Lilah whirled, bringing her spear up as if expecting a sudden attack. She, too, stared in that direction.

There was plenty of starlight. More than enough to bathe the swaying trees in an eerie blue-white glow. Enough to see the lines of tin cans lying on the ground, the ropes cut and the cans carefully placed upright in neat rows. Somebody else was out here. Somebody smart and careful enough to disable the booby trap. But that was not the worst of it. Not by a long shot. What was truly eerie… no, truly terrifying… was how that cold moonlight reflected on the pale white faces of the living dead.

On the hundreds of living dead.

“God…” Benny’s mouth was too numb to say anything more. They were everywhere, an army of lifeless killers that shambled and limped and twitched as they emerged from the utter blackness of the forest. Benny spun and looked left and saw more of them, some walking, a few crawling, all of them moaning louder than the wind. He looked right, going as far as the edge of the station. He could see the long, pale line of tumbled glacial rocks. They were black with the crawling bodies of zombies. The closest of them was a hundred yards away, but they were advancing steadily toward the way station. Benny could not count the dead. They were coming. In minutes they would be here, and there was no way out.

“Please tell me I’m not seeing this,” said Benny. “This can’t be happening.”

“We’re dead,” whispered Nix. “Oh God… oh God…”

Lilah turned to them, and in the moonlight Benny and Nix could see that her iron self-confidence had crumbled to reveal a face as bloodless and empty of emotion as the monsters who closed in on all sides. She lowered her spear and it hung from her fingertips, ready to fall.

“We’re dead,” Nix said again, her voice rising to a hysterical pitch.

“Yes,” said the Lost Girl. “We’re dead.”

34

TOM IMURA WAS AT HOME IN THE ROT AND RUIN. HE LOVED THE WOODS, even as night came cascading down to turn the green world into an almost impenetrable black gloom. Ever since that terrible night fifteen years ago, Tom had spent nearly a third of his life in these woods. Unlike Mountainside, with its stifled boundaries and pervasive fear, the Ruin was a simpler place. You knew where you stood.

Tom reckoned that it was no different than the way the world had been before humans settled the first cities. Back then there had been predators of all kinds, and life was hardscrabble at best. Every day was a fight for survival, but it was that struggle that had inspired humans to become problem solvers. The inventiveness of the human race was one of the most crucial tools of survival, and it was the cornerstone of all civilization. Without it, man would never have turned fire into a tool, or carved a wheel from a piece of wood.

Tom knew that there were zoms out here, but didn’t fear them. He respected and accepted them as a physical threat the way he respected and accepted the bears and cougars and wolves that roamed these hills. His philosophy was based on the natural order of things. If a problem came up, he would use every resource to handle it. So far he’d been successful with that strategy, which included saving Benny during First Night, burning the first Gameland to the ground a few years ago, and giving closure to many hundreds of zoms. If, on the other hand, a problem arose that was beyond his mental and physical abilities, and if he died as a result of it, he was at peace with that. It was the way of things. Survival of the fittest, and no one was “the fittest” all the time.

He ran lightly, ducking under branches, leaping small gullies, running no faster than his ability to perceive what the forest had to tell him. Tom had stopped calling out Chong’s name. The boy had clearly wanted to run, and calling him might make him hide. In this gloom the best hunter in the world couldn’t find someone deliberately hiding. It was getting hard enough to follow Chong’s trail. Luckily, the boy had tried that old trick of using a piece of brush to wipe out his footprints. Sure, it wiped out the prints, but it left behind very distinct striations in the dirt and moss. Tom almost smiled when he saw it.

Eventually he reached the point where Chong had stopped trying to cover his trail and his distinctive waffle-soled shoe prints were clear in the fading light.

There were other prints along the path too. Most were animal tracks that were of no concern to Tom. He found some human-or perhaps zom-prints, but most of these were days old, and Chong’s tracks overlaid them. One set of tracks made him freeze in place and even touch the butt of his holstered pistol. Old-world hiking boots with worn treads and a crescent-shaped nick out of the right heel.

Tom bent low and studied the prints. Preacher Jack’s without doubt, but it was clear that these had been made on his way to the encounter that had happened a few hours ago.

Tom continued his hunt. The forest was growing quiet, and he moved only as fast as he could go silently. It was a tracker’s trick: Never make more noise than what you’re tracking.

Crack.

There was a sound, soft and close, and within three steps Tom slipped into the shadows between two ancient elms. He listened. Sound was deceptive. Without a second noise it was often difficult to reliably determine from which direction the sound had come. Ahead and to the left? Off the trail?

A rustle. Definitely off to the left. Tom peered through the gloom. The second sound had been like a foot moving through stiff brush. A long pause, and then another crunch.

Tom saw a piece of shadow detach itself and move from left to right through an open patch. It was a quick, furtive movement. Something that walked on two legs. Not a zom, though, he was sure about that.

Preacher Jack? If so, Tom was determined to have a different kind of chat with him than they’d had back on the road.

The figure was coming his way, but from the body language it was clear the person had not seen him. The head was turned more toward the north, looking farther along the game trail.

Judging where Tom should have been if he’d kept moving.

Tom nodded approval. A pretty good tracker, he guessed.

“Tom!” called a voice. A very familiar voice. “Tom Imura. I know you’re up there behind one of those trees. Don’t make me have to walk all the way up the slope.”

Tom stepped out from behind the tree with his pistol in his hand. The shadowy figure emerged into a slightly brighter spot of light. From the soles of her boots to the top of her orange Mohawk, the woman was tall and solidly built, with knife handles and pistol butts jutting out in all directions like an old-time pirate. In her right fist she carried a huge bowie knife with a wicked eighteen-inch blade.

Something black gleamed on the blade, and though it looked like oil in the bad light, Tom knew that it was blood. The woman’s face and clothes seemed to be smeared with it. She tottered into view, and Tom saw that her left arm hung limp and dead at her side.

Tom stepped out from behind the tree. “Sally?”

Sally Two-Knives grinned at him with bloody teeth. “You alone, Tom?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said, and pitched forward onto her face.

35

“BACK… BACK!” CRIED NIX IN A FIERCE WHISPER. AS SHE SAID IT she walked backward, herding Lilah and Benny toward the open door. Lilah stumbled along as if her brain had shut itself off. Benny had to push her into the way station. Nix was last in. She tossed down her bokken, grabbed Lilah’s pistol, and stood for a moment in the doorway, tracking the barrel left and right, but she did not fire. There was no point. If she had a barrel filled with bullets it would not be enough. Nix lowered the pistol and retreated inside.

“We’re dead,” Lilah said again, and her voice already sounded dead.

Benny closed and locked the door. “It won’t hold for long,” he said quietly. “Same with the windows. That glass is old. It might last if a couple of them beat on it… but there are hundreds of them out there.”

“Thousands,” said Nix. “There had to be five hundred of them just coming down over the rocks. It’s insane.”

It was insane. Last year Benny had seen three thousand of them in the Hungry Forest, but the seething mass of the living dead outside had to number twice that many. It was an army of rotting flesh-eaters. “Where did they come from?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” said Nix. “It doesn’t make sense. We weren’t that loud. And I don’t think they could see our cooking fire from outside. Not all the way into the forest and up the mountains.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” said Lilah in a hollow voice.

“What about the cans? Zoms couldn’t do that,” said Benny.

“I know, Benny,” said Nix. She scraped a match and lit the little oil lantern.

“Don’t!” gasped Benny.

“Why?” she said softly. The flaring match revealed a crooked smile. “Are you afraid it’ll attract zoms?”

Her voice was way too calm. Benny had heard people talk like that right before they went off the deep end. And yet, what could he say? He turned to Lilah for help, but the Lost Girl truly looked lost. She stared at the pistol and knife she still held and then numbly put them into their holsters.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Lilah said, repeating the phrase in a lost whisper.

Benny shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. If this was something normal, Tom would have told us about it. Besides, Brother David’s lived here for over a year, and he said there were never more than a few wandering zoms in the area. This is… this is insane.”

“Insane,” echoed Lilah.

Benny did not like what he was seeing in her face any more than he liked what he heard in Nix’s voice. Not one little bit. It made him wonder how crazy he looked and sounded.

Crazy or not, they had to do something. Benny looked at the three carpet coats that hung from pegs by the door. He grabbed the coats belonging to Sister Shanti and Sister Sarah and tossed them to the girls. “Put these on!”

Nix immediately slipped into hers, but Lilah let hers drop to the floor. Benny picked it up and pressed it to her.

“Put it on!” he yelled.

Lilah took it but did nothing with it. Finally Nix took it and put it on Lilah the way a mother dresses a child.

“We have to get out of here,” Benny said as he belted on Brother David’s coat. He lifted the blankets and peered outside. The closest of the zoms was still about fifty feet away. “We can still run.”

That made Lilah’s face twitch. “Run where?”

Nix said, “She’s right, Benny. They’re coming from every direction. We’re safer here.”

“This isn’t safety.” Benny waved his hands around at the way station. “This is a freaking lunch pail. They’re going to close in around us, open this place up, and-”

“Stop!” hissed Lilah, pressing her hands to her ears.

“If we run, at least we have some chance.” Benny fished in his pocket and pulled out the bottles of cadaverine. “We have these.”

Nix chewed her lip, caught in the terrible trap of indecision.

Then abruptly Lilah’s hand darted out fast as a snake and snatched a bottle out of Benny’s hand. She opened it and began dribbling the thick liquid onto her sleeves. When Benny and Nix simply stood there staring at her, Lilah growled, “Now!”

It was a freakish moment, as if there had been no disconnect in Lilah, as if she had been strong and in charge all the time. Benny and Nix shared a covert, worried look.

Don’t say anything, warned Benny’s inner voice. She’s ready to break. Push now and she’ll shatter.

Benny tossed his second bottle to Nix and dug the extras out of his pocket.

“Will it be enough?” Nix asked as she smeared the noxious chemical on her coat.

Benny didn’t answer. They each used a full bottle. The inside of the way station reeked as if it was stuffed to the rafters with rotting flesh.

“Weapons and water only,” said Benny.

“Good,” agreed Lilah.

Nix nodded, but she grabbed her journal off the table and stuffed it into a big pocket inside her vest. Then she belted the carpet coat tightly around her. The coat protected her body and arms and had a high, stiff collar to shield the throat, but it was not a suit of armor. Even the fence guards back home said that enough zoms could eventually chew through one.

Benny slung his canteen over his neck and pulled his bokken from its sheath.

At the door, Lilah paused, took a deep breath, and without turning said, “We go slow. Don’t fight unless you have to. Run only if you have to.”

“What if we get separated?” asked Nix.

There was only one answer to that question, and Benny’s inner voice whispered it to him. Anyone who gets lost in the dark… is dead. Aloud he said, “We won’t.”

It was somewhere between a lie and a gamble.

Thump! A dead fist struck the window, rattling it in its frame.

“Me, Nix, Benny,” whispered Lilah. “Ready?”

Nix and Benny both lied. They both said they were. Lilah opened the door.

A zombie stood there, arm raised to strike the glass. He was broad-shouldered, his once brown skin bleached to the color of milky tea. Most of his face was gone, and gnawed edges of white bone jutted from the bloodless flesh. The creature took a shambling step forward. It did not sniff the air-Benny had never seen zoms do that-yet through whatever senses it did possess, the creature took the measure of the pale girl with the white hair… and then shuffled past her into the room. For the moment it did not judge her as prey. She reeked of the dead, and the dead passed her by.

Benny could see that Lilah’s whole body was trembling. This wasn’t like that time when she’d freed the zoms in the Hungry Forest. Back then she was on her home turf, and she’d known a thousand paths through those woods. No… this was beyond Lilah’s experience, and maybe that was what crippled her. She had no plan and lacked either the imagination or optimism to believe that some line of escape would present itself.

Or maybe you screwed her up with what you said about Chong. Benny wished with all his strength that he could step back in time and unsay those cruel and stupid words.

Lilah drew a ragged breath and stepped cautiously outside. Nix went next, turning to squeeze by a lumbering fat man with bullet holes in his stomach. As Benny stepped into the doorway his shoe scuffed the floor, and the fat man turned sharply, gray lips pulling back from green teeth. The zom snarled at Benny, then just as suddenly, the look of hunger and menace dropped away as if a curtain had fallen. Its dusty eyes slid away from Benny, and the monster turned awkwardly and trundled inside, followed by another zom, and another.

Holding his bokken to his chest as if it was a magic charm, Benny slipped outside. Lilah had not waited for him. She was already thirty paces away, walking straight into the sea of shambling corpses. Nix was much closer, her steps slower and uncertain. Nix kept looking back for Benny. Lilah never looked back at all-she kept going. Did she see a way out? Benny wondered. She was moving faster and faster, and soon he couldn’t see her at all.

Move or die, growled his inner voice. Benny began walking, moving disjointedly, trying to imitate the artless shamble of the zoms so as not to attract attention.

Don’t stop.

He didn’t… until he reached the edge of the concrete pad by the gas pumps. From that angle he could see almost all the land around the way station. What he saw punched the air out of his lungs and nearly dropped him to his knees. There, in the thick of a seething mass of zoms-an army that numbered uncountable thousands-stood a tall figure with hair even whiter than Lilah’s, massive chest and shoulders, gun butts sprouting from holsters at hips and shoulder rigs, and a three-foot length of black pipe clutched in a nearly colorless hand. It was too far away to see his eyes, but Benny was sure-dead certain-that one would be blue and the other as red as flame.

The figure stared right at him. It was smiling.

The zoms shifted and shuffled around the figure. They did not attack him. They surged past him, heading toward the gas station, toward Lilah and Nix. Toward Benny. Then the sea of zoms closed around the figure, obscuring him from Benny’s sight.

It didn’t matter. Benny had seen it.

Seen him.

“No…,” he whispered to himself. “No.”

He turned and ran. Not walked, not shuffled like a zom. Benny Imura ran for all he was worth. He ran for his life. As he ran he could feel those eyes upon him, burning like cold fire into his back. God! Where was Tom? Benny thought he heard a sound threaded through the moan of the thousands of walking dead. He thought he heard the deep, rumbling, mocking laughter of the man he was positive he had just seen standing amid an army of the dead.

Charlie Pink-eye.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

When I was real little, Mom was having a hard time earning enough ration dollars. Before First Night she’d been a production assistant in Hollywood (a place where they made movies, back before they nuked Los Angeles). She didn’t know how to farm or build stuff, and she tried to make a living doing sewing and cleaning people’s houses. It was hard, but she never complained and she never let me know how hard she had to work. Then she was sick for a few weeks and fell behind on all the bills.

Then she met Charlie Matthias. He tried to get Mom to go out with him, but she wasn’t interested. AT ALL. Then Charlie told her there was a way for her to make a month’s worth of ration bucks in one day. It wasn’t sex stuff or anything like that. He said all she had to do was quiet a zom.

Of course, he didn’t tell her that she would be thrown into a big pit with a zom with only a broom handle as a weapon. It was at a place called Gameland, hidden up in the mountains. People came from all over to bet on what they called Z-Games. Zombie games.

Mom was desperate to earn the money, so she went into the pit.

She never told me about this, and I don’t know the details. All I know is that Charlie kept Mom in the pit for a week. I was real little, and Benny’s aunt Cathy took care of me.

Then Tom brought Mom home. Tom was all cut up and burned, from what the neighbors told me later. He smelled of smoke and had bloodstains on his clothes. I learned a lot later that Tom had rescued Mom and destroyed Gameland. I think he had to hurt some people to do it. Maybe kill some people. Shame Charlie wasn’t one of them.

When Charlie Matthias killed my mom last year, he was going to take me to Gameland. The new Gameland.

God… how can people be so cruel?

36

TOM WAS FAST, BUT SALLY TWO-KNIVES WAS DOWN BEFORE HE GOT to her. He knelt beside her and checked her pulse, found a reassuring thump-thump-thump. Then he examined neck and spine before he gently eased her onto her back and brushed dirt and leaves from her face.

“Oh boy, Sally,” he said, “you’re a bit of a mess here.” Her eyelids slowly fluttered open. Even in the bad light Tom could see that her face was taut with great pain. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.

“Everywhere.”

“Can you pin it down for me or do I have to go looking?”

Sally snorted. “Since when did you become a prude?” Then she winced and touched her abdomen. “Stomach and arm.”

Tom opened the bottom buttons of her shirt, saw what was clearly a knife wound. She wasn’t coughing up blood, so he didn’t think she had any serious internal injuries. Or he hoped she didn’t. He removed a small bottle of antiseptic and some cotton pads from a vest pocket and gently cleaned the wound and applied a clean bandage. He used his knife and cut open her sleeve to reveal a ragged black hole. Tom gently raised her arm and leaned to take a look at the back of it, saw a second, slightly smaller hole.

“A through-and-through,” he concluded. “Bullet hit you in the back of the arm and punched out through the biceps. What they’d shoot you with?”

“Don’t know,” she said through gritted teeth. “Something small. Twenty-two or twenty-five caliber, though it felt pretty darn big going in and coming out.”

“Missed the arteries. Didn’t break the bone,” Tom said. “You always were a lucky one, Sally.”

“Lucky my ass. I got shot and stabbed. If that’s your idea of good luck, then give me the other kind.”

“Don’t even joke,” he chided as he cleaned the entry and exit wounds, placed sterile pads over them, and began wrapping a white bandage around her arm. “I’ve seen my share of bad luck already today.”

Tom tied the ends of the bandage with neat precision, but inside he was beginning to feel a slight edge of panic. It was now too dark to track Chong. Tom helped Sally sit up and let her drink from his canteen.

“Don’t suppose you saw my horse anywhere, did you?” she asked. “I left her tied to a tree, but she must have spooked.”

“No,” said Tom. “Look, Sal, what happened and who did this?”

“It’s complicated,” she said. “I ran into a couple of the White Bear crew. You know White Bear?”

He nodded. White Bear had once run with Charlie Pinkeye’s gang but had dropped out of sight years ago. “Heard of him but never met him. Big guy from Nevada. Used to be a bouncer at one of the Vegas casinos before First Night, right? Tells everyone that he’s the reincarnation of some great Indian medicine men, though from what I heard he doesn’t have a drop of Native American blood in him. What’s he doing here?”

She hissed in pain as Tom began stitching her stomach wound. He wished Lilah was here.

“OW-damn, son! You using a tree spike to sew that up?” she snarled.

“Don’t be a sissy.”

She cursed him and his entire lineage going back to the Stone Age. Tom endured it as he worked. Curses were better than screams.

“What about White Bear?” he prompted.

She took a breath. “Since Charlie’s gang got chomped by those zoms last year, there’s been a lot of talk about who was going to take over his territory. Charlie always had prime real estate. Mountainside, Fairview, couple of other towns, and the trade route all through these mountains. White Bear wants it all. Brought a bunch of his guys with him. Most of them are jokers who don’t know which end of a rifle goes bang! But he has a lot of them.”

“How many?”

“The two I saw tonight, and maybe twenty more. Maybe twice that number if the rumors are true… and he’ll probably try to scoop up any of Charlie’s guys who are still sucking air.”

Tom tied off the last stitch and began applying a fresh dressing. “Why’d they attack you?”

“They didn’t. I, um, kind of attacked them.” She touched Tom’s arm. “Tom… I think they have your brother, Benny.”

“What?”

“I saw them slapping the crap out of a Japanese-looking kid. Your brother’s, what, fifteen, sixteen?”

“Fifteen. What was this kid wearing?”

She thought about it. “Jeans. Dark shirt with red stripes and a vest with a lot of pockets.”

Tom exhaled a burning breath. “That’s not Benny. That’s his friend, Louis Chong. He’s Chinese, not Japanese. Besides, Benny’s half Irish American.”

“What do I know? It’s dark, he’s a kid, I’m shot for Pete’s sake.” She squinted at him. “That who you’re looking for? The Chinese kid?”

Tom filled her in on what he was doing.

“So… you’re really going to leave?” she asked.

“That’s the plan, but we seem to be off to a bad start.”

“So-asking me to meet you at Brother David’s… that was what? A good-bye?”

He nodded.

“Damn,” said Sally. “Things won’t be the same around here without our knight in shining armor.”

Tom snorted. “I’m a lot of things, Sally, but I’m no one’s idea of a shining knight.”

Sally didn’t laugh. “If that’s what you think, Tom, then you’re a bigger damn fool than I thought. There’s no one in this whole chain of mountains who doesn’t know who you are and what you do. And I mean before you served Charlie and the Hammer to the zoms on a silver plate.” She paused. “A lot of people look up to you. No… they look to you. For how to act. For how to be.”

“Come on, Sal, let’s not-”

“Listen to me, Tom. You matter to people. During First Night, and in the years after, a lot of us did some pretty wild things to survive. You don’t know. Or… maybe you do. Maybe you did some wild things too, but the thing is that since then you’ve been the kind of guy people can look at and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how people are supposed to act.’ There aren’t a lot of examples around since the zoms, man, but you…” She smiled and shook her head.

Tom cleared his throat. “Listen, Sally, I’m thinking that this is pain and shock talking here, so let’s get to the point. Where did they take Chong and how’d you get hurt?”

Sally laughed. “Modest, too. Real shame you’re leaving town. Jessie Riley was the luckiest woman in California, and strike me down if that’s a lie.”

“Chong…,” Tom prompted.

“Okay, okay. It was about two hours ago. I was heading to Brother David’s when I heard someone yelling. I snuck up and saw this kid trying to fight off a couple of goons. Kid was doing okay at first. Had a wooden version of that sword you carry. The goons were trying to take the sword away from him barehanded, making a game of it. Pretending they were zoms and that sort of stuff. You’ve seen it before.”

“Yes,” he said coldly, “I’ve seen it. What happened?”

“Kid managed to land a good one on one of the guys. Hit him on the shoulder, and I could hear the thwack all the way up the hill. Then the guys stopped playing and laid into the kid with a will. Whipped the sword out of his hands and beat the living crap out of him.”

“Damn.” Tom thought about the ascetic and intellectual Chong fighting for his life. How brave he must have been, and how terrified.

“By that time I’d had enough, and I’d pretty much figured that the kid must have been your brother. So I came down the hill with a war whoop and sliced myself a piece of those two butt-wipes. Wasn’t all girly about it either. Would have just messed them up some and let the pair of them limp out of here, but they tried to get all fancy on me. It didn’t end well for ’em, and no loss to the world.”

“Wait… you said you took them out?”

“Two freaks like them against me? I coulda done that back in my Roller Derby days, and that was before I learned how to ugly-fight.”

“No, I mean, if you nailed them, then who-?”

“Must have been a third guy. Never saw him coming. I was about to quiet the two freaks when suddenly something hit my arm from behind and knocked me into a tree. Tried to shake it off, but someone came at me from my blind side, spun me and stabbed me. All I saw was a big man with white hair, and then I blacked out.”

“White hair? Sally-could it have been Preacher Jack?”

“The loony-tune from Wawona?” She thought about it. “No, this guy was way bigger. Anyway… I passed out, and when I woke up, the kid was gone and so was the big guy.”

“What about the other two?”

“Still there. Whoever shot me must have quieted ’em and left ’em for the crows.”

Tom sat back and thought about it. “Could the big man have been White Bear?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. This guy was as big as Charlie Pink-eye and his face was all messed up. Burned and all nasty-lookin’.”

“Could it have been Charlie?”

Sally narrowed her eyes. “Charlie’s dead. You killed him.”

“Not exactly,” Tom said. He told her about what had happened after Benny hit Charlie with the Motor City Hammer’s pipe.

“Well, hell… that’s not the kind of news a gal wants to hear when she’s already feeling poorly. You think Charlie’s alive?”

“I don’t know. Did the guy who attacked you do it to avenge the men you killed, or was he after the boy?”

“I… don’t know. But wouldn’t Charlie know this kid’s not your brother?”

Tom nodded. “He knows Benny and Chong both.”

Sally took another swig from the canteen and chewed her lip for a moment. “Before I attacked them, I heard some of what the two punks said to the kid. I heard where they said they were taking him.”

Tom knew what she was going to say and he closed his eyes as if he, rather than she, was in physical pain. “Say it.”

“Gameland,” said Sally Two-Knives. “They were going to try and sell him to the people running that place. Put him in the zombie pits.”

“But you don’t know if the man who shot you is taking him there?”

“No idea.”

“Terrific,” Tom said sourly. “They’ve moved Gameland twice since we took down Charlie’s crew. I’ve been trying to find it… and I don’t have a damn clue where it is. It could be all the way over in Utah for all I know.”

“I don’t think so, Tom,” she said with a cold smile. “When those boys were taunting the kid, one of them told him that he’d be fighting in the pits by dawn’s early light. His words.”

Tom looked out at the darkness. “Damn,” he said softly.

37

BENNY RAN RIGHT INTO A ZOM. THE CREATURE TURNED WITH A SNARL, and white fingers scrabbled for his face. He could feel the edges of broken fingernails scratch him, the dry pads of dead fingers slide over his nose and mouth; and then Benny shoved the zom aside with a cry of disgust. It fell against a second zom and they went down. Others tumbled over them in what could have been comedy if the world was not broken and insane. Zoms snarled and bit at him as he ran.

Slow down, warned his inner voice. He tried to slow himself; he ordered his feet to walk instead of run, but they disobeyed. Nix was sixty paces ahead. Fifty.

Lilah was nowhere in sight. Had she run out on them? Had the zoms gotten her? No… there would have been screams if they’d attacked her. First her war cries, and then… other screams. These thoughts tumbled through his head as he ran. He ducked under white hands, jinked and dodged around zombies who tried to wrap their arms around him. The whole crowd of them was becoming agitated, their awareness drawn to the running meat.

Slow down!

Nix heard him coming and turned to see Benny collide with another zom and have to bash his way out of its embrace. Other zoms turned at the motion, their moans rising in pitch as their worm-white fingers clawed the air for him.

Slow DOWN!

“Benny!” cried Nix in a fierce whisper. “What are you doing?”

He jerked to a stop by the gas pump. The zoms that had been turning toward him suddenly turned to Nix as she began heading toward Benny. You’re going to get Nix killed. He didn’t need his inner voice to tell him that. The zoms nearest to her were already starting to close in. Nix tensed to run.

“Nix-stop!” Benny hissed. “Just stop. Stand still.”

Nix looked absolutely terrified as all around her hungry mouths worked as if already devouring her. “Benny…”

“Shhh,” he soothed, the sound as soft as a whisper, and then mouthed the words, “Keep perfectly still.” If she stopped moving, would the cadaverine do its job? Would the zoms closing in on her lose interest?

It’s not going to work. Milling zoms closed around her, the ragged shreds of their clothes brushing her like insect wings in the dark. Nix shivered. The wooden sword in her hands trembled. As the zombies came closer still, she began to raise the sword.

No! Benny almost screamed it aloud, but he clamped his control into place. It’s your fault she’s in trouble. Be smart… find a way.

Benny nodded, but in truth he was at the threshold of panic. One wild idea after another flashed through his mind, and he slapped each one away. Brash heroics, a suicidal charge… plans that were filled with romantic heroism or tragic sacrifice, but empty of practicality. Consider everything. The place. The time. The light. The breeze.

Benny edged toward Nix, moving with the breeze, swaying, becoming part of the movement of the crowd of dead. You have everything you need. You have tools. You have resources.

He wanted to tell the inner voice to shut the hell up and let him think. Charlie Pink-eye was back there somewhere. Maybe aiming a pistol at him right now. Or at Nix. Don’t make assumptions. See only what is there.

He took one hand off the bokken and slowly, lightly patted his pockets. His fingers touched the remaining bottles of cadaverine. Should he use those? Would more smell help?

No.

He touched a small oblong shape that rattled softly. Use what you have. Benny suddenly had an idea. It was a crazy, insanely dangerous idea. Around him a sea of zoms moaned as they shuffled toward the gas station, toward him, toward Nix.

He shot a look at Nix. She was trembling so badly that her bokken was visibly shaking. A couple of zoms pawed at it. One of them suddenly grabbed it and pulled. Nix began to resist, but Benny shook his head and mouthed, “Let it go.” Her eyes flared in horror at the suggestion, but her small hands opened and the zom tore the wooden sword away from her. It took the bokken in both hands, holding it like an ear of corn, and bit down on it. There was a crunch and a crack and the zombie snarled and cast the sword away, one of its teeth still buried in the hardwood.

Moving in ultra slow-motion, Benny slid his free hand into the front pocket of his jeans. The cadaverine bottles clinked, and then he found the oblong box he was looking for. It was made of stiff paper, and it rattled dryly as he removed it.

The zom closest to him turned sharply and peered at him with dust-covered eyes. Benny wondered how it could see with dead eyes. Another mystery that he thought would never be solved. Don’t waste time sightseeing.

The zom moaned.

Benny moaned back and shuffled a few feet to the left. The zom stood there and watched him go. The dead could not show confusion on their slack faces, but Benny could almost feel the creature’s conflict. The impulse to hunt only the living was at war with the stench of decay. It swayed there in indecision as Benny took another shuffling sideways step. The gray eyes never left Benny’s face.

Hurry. Moving with infinite slowness, Benny thumbed open the little cardboard box. Twenty-five pale stick matches lay in tight rows. He used his thumbnail to separate one of them. He was about to close the box when his inner voice hissed at him to make a smarter choice.

The zom was still watching him. So were two others. Watching? Or just standing?

The carpet coat was hot, but ice-cold sweat ran in rivulets down the back of Benny’s shirt. His heart was pounding so hard he could not understand why it didn’t sound like a bass drum. He turned his head slightly and saw that Nix was still there, and he wondered how much time had just passed. Was it three seconds? Ten? An hour? Or no time at all? He couldn’t tell. Nothing felt real.

Hurry!

He paused, then placed the first match between his teeth and removed another. He thumbed the box closed and turned it between his fingers, exposing a dark strip on one side. The matches were of the “storm” kind, coated with wax to keep them waterproof, with a chemical mix that would keep them burning in rain or wind.

“God… let this work!” He said it aloud, and he said it too loud. The watching zom suddenly lurched forward, its rubbery lips twitching. The abruptness of its movements made the creatures around it twitch and turn and move in Benny’s direction. Had they focused on him, or were the others following the first one?

There was no time to sort it out. Benny put the white tip of the match against the strike board and flicked his wrist. The fire was small, but in the darkness of the field it flared like a tiny sun. The snap of ignition and the hiss as the flames consumed the chemicals were shockingly loud.

“No!” Nix cried, and some of the zoms turned toward her.

But many, many more of them were entirely focused on Benny. Holding the match out in front of him, he stared for a moment in nearly brainless shock as the light revealed the full horror of the moment. Hundreds of white faces had turned toward the sound and the flare of light. Their awful moan split the air. The closest zom grabbed his arm, and before Benny could pull away it bit down with savage force on his wrist. Two others closed on him and grabbed at his other arm. Teeth closed around his forearm. The pain was instant and terrible.

Benny bit down on a scream, praying that the carpet coat was protecting him from the disease carried by the bites of the living dead. He kicked out with all his force, catching the closest zom with a flat-footed thrust to the thigh that sent it lurching away. It lost its hold on his wrist, but immediately another zom lumbered past it, reaching for the prize.

Now! NOW!

Benny tore himself free of the other zoms and darted forward as the zom closed on him. He prayed with all his might that the match wouldn’t go out. It puffed and flickered in the breeze. He had the stick of the other clamped between his teeth just in case. The zom reached for him, and Benny ducked under the pale hands, thrusting the match into the tattered folds of its clothes. In a flash the dry shreds of tie and suit jacket caught and flames shot up into the night. With a grunt of effort powered by rage and fear, Benny shoved the burning zom into the other creatures who had been closing in. They were all dry as kindling, and fire leaped from one to the other with frightening speed, sparks carried by the night wind.

Within seconds a half-dozen zombies were burning like giant candles. They did not beat at the flames, they did not scream… and that was deeply disturbing to Benny. Somehow it was worse that they were so ignorant of pain than if they shrieked and howled, though he could not grasp why. It was unnatural and wrong in more ways that he could count.

He whipped the other match from between his teeth and lit it as another wave of zoms closed in on him from behind. He used his forearm to bash aside the grasping hands and jabbed the match into the lace of a wedding gown, the folds of a loose cardigan, the ripped streamers of a halter top, the coattails of a waiter’s jacket. The match burned his fingers, and he dropped it.

“BENNY!” He heard Nix’s piercing cry and whirled to see flames shoot up behind him. It took him a numb second to understand how the fire could have jumped that far, and then he realized. Nix had seen what he was doing, and she-beautiful, brilliant, and brave as he knew she was-had done the same. He almost laughed out loud. She ducked and snatched up her fallen sword and used it to fend off a burning zom.

Then Benny drew his bokken and swung with all the force he possessed, hitting a burning zom on the side of the neck so hard that he felt the shock through his wrist as the creature’s neck snapped. The zom fell hard into two others, and they immediately caught fire. A wall of heat slammed into him, and the laugh died in his throat.

“Uh-oh,” he said aloud. The sound of his voice didn’t matter now. The roar of the fire was immense, the heat like an open furnace.

“BENNY!”

He turned and had to squint through the yellow glare to see Nix moving at a dead run toward the southeast. Something touched his shoulder, and Benny screamed.

The first zom-the one he’d kicked-had just grabbed him with a burning hand. Intense white-hot agony shot through Benny’s shoulder as the fiery fingers ignited the fabric of the carpet coat.

Benny shrieked in pain and swung the bokken with all his force. The zom’s head exploded into thick flaming pieces and the creature fell away. But its hand still clutched the fabric of Benny’s coat. Benny kicked and slapped and hammered at the zom’s arm until the blackened fingers fell away. He slapped at the flames on his shoulder. The carpet coat was old but not as sun-dried as the rags the zoms wore, but as he beat out the last dancing fingers of fire, he could feel burns on the skin of his shoulder and upper arm. If it hadn’t been for the thick fabric of the coat…

Then another hand grabbed him and he whirled, raising the sword to strike, but it was Nix. Her face was black from smoke, and her eyes were wild.

“COME ON!” she screeched, and dragged him away. Heat pounded them like fists on all sides, and the air itself was becoming too hot to breathe.

“Where’s Lilah?” he yelled.

“I don’t know. God-we have to go!”

They ran. The zoms were drawn to the massive flames, and as they crowded toward the commotion, more and more of them caught fire. The breeze caught pieces of burning cloth and burning flesh and whipped them across the field, setting new blazes here and there and soon… everywhere. As they ran it seemed as if the whole world had suddenly caught fire.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

(Benny: If you are reading my journal, STOP. This part is private. If I find out that you read this, so help me I’ll beat you to death and then when you reanimate I’ll beat you to death all over again.)

Dear Future Nix:

I haven’t written for a while. I’ve been too busy collecting zombie information. I tried to talk to Lilah about this, but she doesn’t understand boys. At all. Not even a little bit.

Benny keeps wanting me to act like we’re a couple. And we ARE a couple, but sometimes I just can’t do the lovey-dovey stuff. It feels weird. I never had a boyfriend before, and even though I’ve liked Benny since-what? Since we were six?-I’m not sure if I want to get totally wrapped up. Not that there’s anyone else. We’re out in the Ruin and there really is NO ONE ELSE. It’s just that ever since last year it feels like there’s stuff wrapped around my emotions. Nothing feels really real. Except being scared. That’s always real. And being angry. I’m ALWAYS angry. Even when we’re all joking, I’m always angry. Benny doesn’t know about that. I’m good at hiding it, and boys aren’t so good at seeing it.

It’s really confusing. Benny and I are never going back home. We may not meet other kids our age. Do I want to be with him because we don’t have a choice or because that was our choice?

You’re reading this in the future. You know how it all worked out. I don’t.

I do like Benny. I probably love him, but it’s hard to tell the difference between the crush I’ve had all these years and real love.

What does that feel like? Will I ever know?

38

WHEN LOU CHONG WOKE UP THE FIRST TIME, HE THOUGHT HE WAS in hell.

When he woke up the second time, he knew he was.

The first thing he was aware of was pain. The bones of his face ached so deeply that his gums hurt. When he tried to move his head, the strained muscles in his neck flared with darts of searing pain that lanced through him. He tried to touch his face, to see how bad he was hurt, but his hands would not move. Which was when he felt the pain in his wrists and ankles.

“W-what?” he asked. Except that he could not speak. A thick and noxious rag was tied around his head, a knot of it shoved between his teeth. All he could do was groan. Like a zom.

He blinked his eyes, trying to clear them. Vision returned very slowly. At first all he saw was dirt and some clumps of crooked grass. At least that helped him orient himself. He was on his side, on the ground.

And he was bound and gagged. Panic was a trembling thing that fluttered inside the walls of his chest. He wanted to scream out, to attract attention, to be able to say, reasonably and calmly, that this was all a mistake. He wanted to apologize for whatever he must have done to have made someone this mad at him. Had Captain Strunk thrown him in jail? Had he and Benny and Morgie broken someone’s window? Had they been caught stealing eggs from the Lamba Farm again? Or had one of the town watch caught them throwing the eggs at the old Pettit place?

Pain rolled up and down him like a tide, never pausing, missing nothing. He could not believe that he was capable of hurting in so many places at once.

“Help!” It came out as a weak grunt of meaningless noise.

“Well, well,” said a voice. “Look who’s awake.” A booted foot stepped down inches from Chong’s nose. “You was out so long I thought I was going to have to quiet you.” The man had a deep voice that was strangely familiar and at the same time alien. Chong’s head hurt too much to make logical sense of it.

He tried to crane his neck to look up, but he couldn’t move his head far enough. It felt as if the gag was tied in some way to whatever had been used to bind his ankles and wrists.

“Please…” It was just noise, but the man chuckled as if he understood.

“You trying to say something, little man?”

There was a flash of silver and then the pressure of cold steel against his cheek… and then the ends of the gag dropped away, the tough cloth parting like gossamer as the wicked blade slashed through them.

Free from the pressure, Chong coughed and spat to force the dirty rag out of his mouth. The corners of his mouth felt stretched, his cheeks were raw and abraded. His arms and legs were still firmly tied and he wriggled around, trying to work free of them, but the knots were too tight.

“Don’t worry, little man, I’ll cut you loose. In my own time, of course.”

Chong started to look up, but the man stepped so close that the sour stink of his boot leather filled Chong’s eyes and nose.

He tried to speak, but his throat was dry as paste. “W-why?” he croaked. “Who are you?”

The man chuckled again. It was a friendly sound, totally at odds with what was happening. And it was maddeningly familiar. It almost sounded like…

But… no… that was impossible.

The man lifted the booted foot and brought it down on the side of Chong’s face. Not a kick… no, the man placed the sole on Chong’s cheek and slowly applied weight and pressure.

“Shhhh, now. I cut the gag so you could breathe. Wasn’t no invitation to ask a bunch of questions you already know the answer to.”

Chong frowned and tried to tell him that he was wrong, that Chong didn’t know the answers to anything, that this was all some kind of mistake. The force behind the boot increased bit by bit. At first it was only pressure, but soon there was enough weight to make Chong’s jaw creak. Then more, and more, and Chong started to cry out. More and more until he thought he would pass out.

“I can keep this up all night,” said the man as casually as if he was discussing the weather. “I’ll stop when I don’t hear any more noise coming out of your mouth. Chew on this thought for a minute, little man. A gag ain’t the only way to keep you from talking. I can cut your tongue out too, and nail it to a tree. Don’t think for a moment that I’m joking, ’cause I done it before, and to tougher specimens than you.”

Chong wanted to scream. Instead he clamped his mouth shut tighter than the gag had been.

The pressure continued. Chong squeezed his eyes shut and tried to find a place inside his head where he could go and hide. He wanted to be home, up in his room, surrounded by the stacks of his beloved books. Back there, if a monster became too terrifying Chong could always close the book. Not here. Not in the dark with the pain and the ropes and the gag.

The pressure stopped increasing as the man listened for sounds from Chong.

“That’s the ticket,” he said, and removed his foot… but not before giving it a last little extra pressure. Somehow that made Chong feel more frightened, that last little bit of pressure. It was unnecessary. The man had already defeated Chong, already proved his power and dominance. That last twist spoke of a deeper, less evolved kind of evil. A sneaky pettiness. Sly and dirty. It made Chong very, very afraid.

For several long minutes there was nothing. No new pain, no sign of the man, no sound of him moving around. Was he standing there, out of sight? Just watching? Chong knew that he was. And that made him even more afraid.

Then the man spoke. “I’ll bet your mommy and daddy told you that there are bad people out here in the badlands. People who will do bad things to you. Bad things to stupid little boys running around in the great Rot and Ruin. Bad men doing bad, bad things.”

There was a rush of sound and suddenly the man was on his hands and knees, bending low so that his face was inches from Chong’s. It was a face out of a nightmare. The skin was a horror show. Every inch of that face was twisted and melted. One eye was completely gone, just a black pit in the lumpy pink and red moonscape. Hair as white as snow framed the man’s terrible face. He whispered four words.

“I’m the bad man.” Then he laughed and stood up. “You know what we’re going to do now?”

Chong did not dare answer. He closed his eyes, not wanting this to be real. Begging the universe to make this a dream.

“I’m going to cut your feet loose so you can walk, and by God you will walk. We got miles and miles to walk, halfway into the night. You’re going to walk every inch of it, and you’re not going to say anything. Not a word, and by God not a whimper. If you so much as cut a fart I’m going to cut pieces offa you. Nod if you believe me.”

Chong nodded. Emphatically.

“Then, oh say round about midnight-the witching hour, as they useta call it back before the zoms-we’re going to get somewhere. You know where that is, little man?”

Chong shook his head. Just a tentative little shake. The man knelt again, and his breath was hot and whiskey soaked against Chong’s ear.

“I’m taking your skinny ass to Gameland, little man. Now… ain’t that a world of fun?”

Chong did not dare scream. But oh, how he needed to.

39

THE WORLD SEEMED TO BE MADE OF FLAME AND WHITE FACES AND DEATH. Benny and Nix ran into the night, pursued by inferno heat. They had no clear direction, but there were too many zoms to allow them a straight line of flight.

“How many are there?” Benny gasped. However, it was the last thing he said aloud for a long time, because those four words nearly got him killed. The fire down on the field drew the attention of most of the zoms, but his voice came out unnaturally loud. All the pale death-mask faces around them turned suddenly toward them.

Benny and Nix stopped, shifting to stand back-to-back, swords ready.

I killed us, Benny thought; but immediately his inner voice retorted, No. Think your way through it. What resources do you still have?

Benny thought about the matches and almost laughed. If he had, it would have been his last laugh, and it would have been an insane cackle. The fire had saved them in the short term, but if the winds veered, then the blaze would chase them up the mountain-and fire burns upward. There was no lowland path open to them.

Nix took a slow sideways step, and Benny shifted with her. The zoms came closer, but their dark eyes shifted back and forth between them and the blaze. Without more sound to attract them, they were losing interest.

But not quickly enough. Soon some of them would be within grabbing distance. Benny could already smell their dead, dusty, decayed stench…

And that fast he had it. He shifted his bokken to a one-handed grip and slid his hand slowly into his pocket. Not for the matches, though. Instead he pulled out one of his remaining bottles of cadaverine. It was a risk. If they survived this terrible moment, then they would need the chemical to help them get to…

To where? Home? Back to the burning way station? Into the endless forest to look for Tom and Chong? East toward Yosemite and wherever the jet went?

Solve one problem at a time, warned his inner voice.

Nix took another step, going slowly so that Benny could keep pace. He didn’t dare take the time to look to see if she was merely moving or if she saw a way out. Benny put the cap between his teeth to hold it steady while he unscrewed the bottle. Instantly the sickly sweet stink of rotting meat filled the air. It wasn’t until that moment that he realized how much the smoke had blocked the cadaverine smell.

A distant part of him wondered if the zoms would attack one another in the smoke. If they couldn’t smell the odor of death, would they attack anything? There was no way to know, and he wasn’t about to go back and turn this into a science experiment.

“Benny,” murmured Nix in a voice so soft that it was a shadow of a sound.

He didn’t answer. Instead he sprinkled some of the cadaverine on his chest and hair. The first of the zoms were within arm’s length now, the hands lifting, reaching. And pausing.

Benny jerked the open bottle over his shoulder, splashing Nix’s red curls.

“Wait,” he whispered. “Give it a sec.”

“Benny…”

“Shhh.”

“No,” she insisted. “Look.”

He turned the wrong way first, and then faced her and followed the line she indicated with her outstretched bokken.

They were on a slope that led up to a shadowy mass of trees that he could barely see by starlight. There were far fewer zoms up there, the lines of them visibly thinning. However, that was not what Nix was pointing to. A figure stood at the top of the path. Benny had to blink the stinging smoke out of his eyes to make it out. At first it looked like a tall shrubbery, but then it moved to stand more fully in the starlight, and Benny gasped.

From the height, he judged the figure to be a man, but otherwise it was impossible to tell. It seemed like he was wearing a small tree, but then Benny realized that the man wore a long coat onto which leaves and pinecones had been sewn. His face was entirely covered by a round mask made up of oak leaves. Benny knew who it was, even in the dark. He knew him from Tom’s description and from his own Zombie Cards.

It was the Greenman. Zoms walked past him, staggering out of the forest; a few even bumped into him as they stumbled down the grassy path. The Greenman did not move except to raise a slender finger to the “lips” of his mask.

Benny and Nix fell silent and stood as still as statues. Below them the wind was blowing the fire toward the fall of rocks. It was not spreading into the hills, and Benny was grateful for small mercies. He didn’t want to cause even more problems for Tom, and he certainly didn’t want to start a forest fire.

It took a long time for the zoms to pass. Benny tried to count off the seconds and minutes just to keep from going crazy. He wanted to gather Nix in his arms and hug her hard enough to make them both scream. He wanted noise and peace at the same time. Anything but what was all around them.

Then it was over. The last of the zoms-a sad-faced man wearing the stained rags of a house painter’s coveralls-tottered past. He had a butcher knife buried in his chest, but the blade was pitted with rust. The creature turned an empty face toward Benny for a long moment, and despite all the terror that still crouched in his chest, Benny felt sorry for him. He almost said as much. Then the zombie vanished into the smoke and gloom down on the field.

Nix tugged his sleeve, and Benny looked up to see that the Greenman was beckoning them with slow movements of his hand. Then he turned and walked toward the woods without waiting to see if Benny and Nix were following.

“Who is that?” Nix asked. “Is that Lilah? What’s she wearing?”

Benny shook his head. “It’s the Greenman.”

“Why’s he dressed like that?”

“Tom says that he found some way to blend into the forest. Even the zoms don’t see him.” He lowered his sword and reached out his hand. “Come on.”

Nix sniffed back tears and took his hand, giving him one of her fierce squeezes. “Where’s Lilah?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I saw her run… but then I lost her.”

“Do-do you think she got out?”

“Absolutely,” he said carefully. “Lilah’s used to taking care of herself.” Though as he said it he was remembering the mad, desperate look in her eyes. He wondered about his own sanity. After all, he had just set an enormous fire and was pretty sure he had seen Charlie Pink-eye standing alive but unharmed in the middle of a field of zoms. Benny debated for less than half a millisecond about whether to tell Nix about this now, and realized that it was something best saved for daylight. At the moment they needed safety and time to check for injuries. The burn on Benny’s shoulder felt white hot, and he was not 100 percent positive that the carpet coats had saved them from the teeth of the living dead. They could both be infected, and that thought nearly dropped Benny in his tracks.

Nix grabbed his arm and pulled him. “Come on,” she said, and they hurried up the hill after the Greenman. However, when they got to the top of the hill and entered the forest path, the strange figure was gone.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Zombies and fire

When some people tell stories of First Night, they say that they used fire to scare off the zoms. They say that zoms won’t cross a line of fire, that they’ll retreat from a torch. They say that if a zom catches fire, it will run away. Tom says this is wrong.

He says that a zom will walk through fire. He says that they are attracted to its light and movement. He says that he’s seen burning zoms walk as far as a hundred yards before the heat did so much damage to muscles and tendons that they couldn’t walk anymore.

And he says that when the army nuked the big cities, waves of radioactive zoms kept coming, and people sometimes died from the intense radioactivity before the zoms could bite them.

What ARE they?

40

“SOMETHING’S COMING!” WHISPERED SALLY TWO-KNIVES.

Tom Imura got quickly to his feet, his fingers curled around the handle of his sword. They were huddled together under the eaves of an olive tree that grew amid a cluster of tall boulders. As he crept to the edge of the largest boulder, Tom heard the soft hiss of Sally drawing one of her knives. He tuned that out and focused on the darkened woods beyond. Before setting up their temporary camp, Tom had gathered armloads of frail twigs and scattered them along any likely path of approach. The snap of a twig had brought them both to full alertness.

There was a second snap. And a third. Whoever was out there didn’t care about making sound. In this world that meant one of two things. Either the person was traveling with a party that was so heavily armed that he had no fear of attracting the attention of the living dead; or they were the living dead. Tom edged farther out and let himself go still, becoming part of the rock, the shadows, and the forest. He had reluctantly accepted some of Sally’s cadaverine only because it would have been virtually impossible to get her up into a tree for the night. With one injured arm and a bad stab wound, Sally would be lucky if she could walk. Forget climbing.

A moment later a figure stepped out from behind a bushy rhododendron. It was a boy, a teenager, possibly thirteen when he died. Now immortal in the cruelest sense of the word. His eyes roved across the gap between the boulders and the olive tree but did not linger on Tom. The creature’s mouth hung slack, the lips were rubbery. The boy wore a grimy and faded Los Angeles Lakers T-shirt and what looked like swim trunks with a pattern of flaming skulls. The teenager’s feet were bare, and the bloodless skin was so badly torn that Tom could see tendons and bones. He wanted to close his eyes or look away, but the boy was still a zom and he was still a threat.

Tom remained still as the dead teenager staggered along the trail and vanished into the gloom. He was about to go back inside the circle of rocks when he paused and straightened. Was the southeastern sky… red? The canopy of leaves was too thick to allow more than a glimpse of the sky, but it seemed to Tom that there was a reddish glow. Was it a trick of the light? He couldn’t tell.

Tom relaxed and moved back into the protection of the rocks.

“Zom?” asked Sally.

“Zom,” agreed Tom.

“You quiet him?”

“No.”

She chuckled. “Mr. Softy.”

He shrugged. Everyone who knew Tom was aware that he wouldn’t kill a zom unless it was part of a closure job or self-defense. This zom had not been aware of him or Sally and was therefore no immediate threat.

Tom settled down and passed her his canteen. She drank and handed it back.

“Been a lot more zoms in these woods lately,” she said. “Last week, ten days. Getting so you can’t take two steps without tripping over one.”

“Really?” Tom said, surprised. “This was always a quiet section. It’s why I brought the kids up here. What’s drawing the zoms here?”

“Not sure, but there’s lots of stuff coming out of the east lately. Weird stuff. I saw a small herd of zebras running along the same game trail as some elk. Bunch of monkeys, too. Haven’t seen a monkey since I took my kids to the San Diego Zoo a million years ago, but I’ve seen a slew of them lately.”

“I saw a rhinoceros,” Tom said, and told her about the encounter.

“Wow. A lot of these critters are coming out of the denser parts of Yosemite, but even more are coming from farther east. Don’t know why. Something out there is scaring wild animals enough to drive them here, and maybe the zoms are following the animals.”

Tom chewed his lip for a moment. “Y’know, Sal, I saw something today that really rattled me.” He told her about the man who had been tied to the truck and left for the zoms.

“Damn,” she said. “That’s one of Charlie’s old tricks, Tom, but you’ve seen that before. Maybe somebody’s copying Charlie’s act. White Bear or-”

“It’s worse than that,” Tom said, and told her the rest.

Sally gaped at him. “Are you sure about that? He didn’t have a broken neck? You’re positive no one quieted him?”

“Positive.”

“So what the hell does that mean?” she demanded.

“I have no idea,” Tom said. “Part of me hopes that it’s real, that it’s true… that maybe whatever this is… this plague… is finally coming to an end.”

“Yeah, and I keep hoping I’ll wake up and First Night never happened.”

He nodded. “The other part of me is scared by it, Sal.”

“You? Scared? Why?”

“Because right now I know how things are. A zom is a zom, and I know the rules of that. But if the game has changed, then nothing I know is certain.” He paused. “I’ve been teaching Benny the way things work… but what if everything I’m teaching him is wrong? What if he-”

“Stop,” she said, touching her fingers to his lips. “You’re talking like a parent now, and that’s my territory. Tom… the world is always changing. Always. We can’t give the next generation a set of guarantees. Best we can do is help them be smart enough and tough enough to deal with whatever comes. You know as well as I do that we’re not going to be there forever for them.”

“I know, but things are changing just when we’re leaving home.” Tom gave a moody grunt and sipped from his canteen. “I’m worried about Chong, too. At least Benny’s been out here before. Chong hasn’t. I have to find him.”

“You will,” she assured him, then added, “I wish I could go with you. But at least I can get to Brother David’s and tell Benny and the girls how things are. If I see J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, I’ll draw them a map so they can find you.”

“Why?”

“Backup. They’d like to see Gameland burn down as much as I would.”

Tom shook his head. “This is just a rescue mission, Sally. A snatch and grab, and then I’m out of there. I’m not going out there to assault Gameland.”

“Again,” she said with a wicked grin.

“Again. I burned it down once and Charlie rebuilt it. Now someone else is running it. Maybe White Bear… maybe Charlie, if he’s still alive. If I burn it down again, they’ll simply keep rebuilding it. There are too many corrupt people out here and in the towns to expect a moneymaker like that to stay closed. I can’t spend my life burning it down.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“I’m serious. I have kids to protect. Soon as there’s enough morning light to see, I have to find Chong and get him home, and then I’m going east with my brother and his friends.”

“Whatever you say, Tom.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I’m sure you’re going to do whatever you think is best.”

“That’s right, and right now that means getting Chong back from whoever took him.”

Sally kept smiling. “And God help anyone who gets in your way.”

Tom Imura said nothing.

41

NIX AND BENNY WERE EXHAUSTED, SCARED, HUNGRY, AND HEARTSICK. The forest was too vast and too dark for them to mount a search for the Greenman.

Behind them, far below on the field, the fire was burning itself out. They were too far away to see much, though. Had the zoms all burned? Had the fire killed them, or would there be a legion of charred zombies haunting this mountain pass forever? It was a grotesque thought.

Now that the fire was fading, the sky was less intensely red. Benny wondered if Tom had seen the blaze. If so, what would he do? Was he already on his way back to the way station, or was he on the far side of the mountain with the massive forest and tall hills acting as a screen? The wind was blowing to the south, so Tom could not have smelled the smoke. He might not even know.

“Tomorrow,” said Benny, loosening the belt of the carpet coat to allow cool air to soothe him, “we’re going to have to try and go back. Tom will come back to the way station looking for us.”

Nix didn’t answer that. Even if Tom returned to the way station, the ashes of a zom and the ashes of two teenagers would look about the same.

“There’s a good tree,” said Nix, pointing to a crooked cottonwood. It had very strong lower branches and lots of other stout limbs reaching out in all directions. Benny scrambled up first to test it. Tom had taught him how to pick the right tree. The rule of thumb was that if a branch was as thick as your bicep then it should be able to take your weight. Benny had tested this on dozens of trees and found it to be a reliable guide. Tom had cautioned against some trees, such as sycamores, because they had a nasty tendency to split; and dead trees were to be avoided at all costs.

Benny shimmied up the trunk, letting his legs do the work and saving his arm muscles until he reached the lowest limb. After he tested the limbs and found a couple of good resting spots, he paused to catch his breath and control the impulse to scream. The burn on his shoulder hurt so bad it felt like he was still on fire. But every time he felt that he could not keep the screams inside, he thought of Nix sitting in silence on the tree stump as Lilah stitched her face. He decided that he would die before he dishonored her by caving into his own pain.

Once he had found a measure of self-control, he scrambled down and helped Nix. Though she was a good climber, her injuries had taken a toll on her, and the horror and stress of the past hour had drained her last reserves. It took a lot for her to climb up, and she was totally spent when she finally reached the spot Benny had picked-a nook formed by four limbs growing outward from almost the same point.

Benny crawled down to the lower branch for a last comprehensive observation of the surrounding forest. There were no zoms, which was a huge relief; but also no sign of Lilah or the Greenman.

He removed his carpet coat and threaded his bokken through one of the sleeves and Nix’s through the other. The effect was to create a kind of sling that, while probably not strong enough to serve as a hammock, would at least give them some protection if they started to fall. He and Nix positioned it under them, and they settled back against the trunk of the tree. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it was safe, and that was all that it needed to be to get them through this night.

They drank greedily from their canteens. Benny asked how Nix’s face was, and she said that it was okay; however, when he held his wrist to the line of stitches, he thought he could feel some heat. Was it from exertion or the fire? Or was the ugly monster of infection coming to haunt them?

He took his little bottle of antiseptic and a cloth and dabbed at her stitches as gently as he could. He knew that he was clumsy, but Nix endured it. Then he soaked a piece of clean bandage in water and placed it inside his shirt over the burn. It was too dark to see how bad it was, but it hurt worse than anything he could remember. When she asked how it was, he lied and said that it was nothing.

Gradually their panic seeped away. As it left, it was replaced by a wave of deep exhaustion. Nix leaned her head on Benny’s good shoulder and said, “How ridiculous is it that after everything that’s happened, we can actually say that this wasn’t the worst day of our lives?”

Benny knew that she was thinking of those three terrible days last year. The day her mother had been murdered, and the following days when Nix had first been a captive of Charlie and his men, and then had helped Benny, Lilah, and Tom lead an attack on the bounty hunters’ camp. Nix and Benny had both killed people that day. Even though there had been no choice at all, those dreadful actions haunted both of them. It had marked them, scarred them inside and out.

“I know,” Benny murmured, trying to keep the sadness out of his voice.

Nix found his hand in the dark and laced her fingers through his. “I guess,” she said, “that this does qualify as the worst camping trip in history, though.”

He laughed. “No question.”

They sat and listened to the woods. There was a constant and comforting trill of crickets.

“Lilah’s out there,” Nix said. “She’s somewhere safe. Right?”

“Absolutely,” said Benny.

“Tom, too. I’ll bet he found Chong and they’re in a tree somewhere up the mountains, waiting for dawn.”

“Yup.” The forest pulsed with the crickets and the soft swish of branches in the breeze. “Look, Nix,” Benny said, “I’m sorry about how I acted back at the way station. I guess I was freaking out, you know?”

“No kidding.”

“I was being a total jerk.”

“Yes you were.”

“And a major butt-wipe.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jump in any time now and stop agreeing with me.”

“Ha!” she snorted. “You ought to have your butt royally kicked.”

He sighed. Then Nix nudged him with her shoulder. “You’re pretty good in a crisis, Benny,” she said, “but you can’t take waiting at all, can you?”

“It’s not the waiting, Nix… it’s the not knowing. Drives me buggy.”

“Me too.”

“Doesn’t show,” he said. “You and Lilah were doing pretty good until I opened my big fat mouth.”

“You’re going to need to make it up to Lilah,” she said.

Nix was kind. She didn’t point out how easy a target Lilah was or how much Benny had probably hurt her. Somehow her kindness made Benny feel even more like a creep.

Sometime later Nix said, “It’s not how it’s always going to be.”

Benny wasn’t sure if that was a statement or a question. Either way, his answer was the same. “No.”

She squeezed his fingers. He squeezed back. Then her hand relaxed, and Benny realized that Nix had drifted off to sleep. Just like that. Even though he could not see her in the dark, he listened to the slow, deep rhythm of her breathing. He settled back and listened to the night and began to deconstruct the day in order to make a plan for tomorrow, but three seconds later he was asleep too. Above and around them the night spun its web of darkness as the world ground on its axis toward dawn.

42

LOU CHONG WOKE UP.

He was still in hell… though he was immediately certain that he was now in one of the darkest rings of hell. They had taken his vest and shirt and shoes, leaving him shivering only in jeans. The ground on which he lay was hard-packed dirt. Cold and damp and smelling of decay. Chong sat up and wrapped his arms around his body. He had a lot of wiry muscle but no body fat at all, nothing to keep him warm down here in the clammy darkness.

There was enough light to see, but it was shadowy and gloomy. The walls were also made from dirt that had been pounded smooth. Chong raised his head and saw that the walls rose twenty feet above him, with no ladder, handholds, or rope.

He started to get to his feet but immediately cried out in pain and dropped to his knees. His whole body seemed to be composed of different kinds of aches stitched together into a tapestry of searing pain. The worst hurts were where he had been punched in the jaw, rammed in the stomach with the wooden stock of a shotgun, and kicked in the groin while he lay gasping on the ground. Chong tried not to cry.

Even as he huddled there, fighting the tears and fighting the pain, Chong’s mind was working. He knew where he was. Gameland. In a zombie pit.

He had never been here before, nor had he ever seen a zom pit before. It didn’t matter. Tom had described them to him and Benny and Morgie many times over the last few months. Tom had used the zom pit scenario as part of their training. One of Tom’s many worst-case scenarios. Part of the process of being warrior smart.

“So be warrior smart,” he told himself, speaking the words in a fierce whisper through gritted teeth. “What would Tom do? What would Lilah do?”

They wouldn’t take whatever was coming on their knees, he was certain of that. He thought about Nix having her face stitched without painkillers and without screams. Nix had to have dug deep to find the strength to deal with that. Just as she, Benny, and Lilah had found the courage to attack Charlie’s camp last year, even when they thought Tom was dead.

“Get up,” he snarled at himself.

The pain was enormous, and he dropped back onto his knees. A sob broke from his chest. Then another. While he knelt there, his mind did terrible things to him. It conjured images of Lilah standing over him, watching him kneel in sobbing defeat, and laughing.

Laughing at the weak, skinny kid. At the “town boy” who thought he could be a warrior.

At the fool who dared to think that he could ever in a million years win the love of someone as magical and powerful as the legendary Lost Girl. At the loser who had endangered the lives of his friends. At the coward who had run away. The images and the implications were like nails driven into his flesh.

But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace. He bit down on the pain, devouring it, accepting the hurt as something he deserved, and fueled by its energy he planted a foot flat on the ground, pressed the knuckles of his two balled fists into the cold dirt, and pushed himself up off his knees. It took a million years to get all the way to his feet. Straightening his body made it feel like every bruise was being stretched to the ripping point, but the shame would not let him stop until he was up and straight and at his full height.

“Warrior smart,” he said, but he loaded the words with scorn.

“Now ain’t that just a stirring sight?”

The words were like a bucket of cold water over Chong’s head. He jerked backward as if pushed, and he snapped his head upward to see three men looking down at him from the lip of the pit. One was the big one-eyed man with the flowing white hair who had brought him here. The man whose face was a melted ruin. The other two were strangers. They were smiling in ways that leached all the strength from Chong’s limbs.

“Who are you?” Chong demanded. It would have sounded better if his voice hadn’t cracked.

“’Who are you?’” mocked the big man. His voice made Chong’s skin crawl. It almost sounded like Charlie Pink-eye.

Could this be Charlie? When Benny had hit Charlie, had the bounty hunter survived and gone back into the burning camp? Or had the fires from that battle caught up to Charlie as he tried to crawl away? Was this Charlie Matthias? Or had some other monster descended into this already troubled and dying world?

“I’ll bet you have a lot of questions, little man,” said the Burned Man, as if reading Chong’s thoughts. “Well, think on this.”

He tossed something down into the pit that struck the dirt between Chong’s bare feet. It was a length of black pipe. One end was wrapped with black leather. There was old blood caked on the whole length of the weapon. Chong bent and gingerly picked it up.

“That there used to belong to a friend of mine,” said the Burned Man. “He used that there club to kill a thousand zoms. And near half that many folks who wasn’t zoms. Yeah… that piece of pipe’s got some history. It made my buddy famous all across the Ruin and in every town from Freehold to Sanctuary.”

The other two men laughed at this, giving each other high fives.

Chong gripped the object that had given the Motor City Hammer his nickname.

“My friend’s long since dead,” said the Burned Man, “but he’d be right pleased to know that his legend lives on.”

“I didn’t kill him,” said Chong, and then cursed himself for how cowardly and defensive that sounded.

“Maybe not,” conceded the Burned Man. “And then again, maybe you did. Or maybe you’re friends with those who did. Tiny Hank Wilson was one of the few who survived what happened at the camp last year. He said he saw what happened to the Hammer. Said it was a girl who killed him. That white-haired slut who’s been running these hills the last few years. But I don’t believe a little girl could take down the Hammer. No sir, I do not believe that. But a strapping kid like you, sneaking up behind him? Maybe clubbing him down when he wasn’t looking? That I can believe.”

Chong wanted to throw the club at him, but he held on to it. It was all he had.

“So, I think it’d please the Hammer all to hell to know that his favorite little toy wasn’t going to be forgotten. That it was still doing some killing.” The big man squatted down. “It won’t matter to him, or to me, if you live or die, little man. You live and you get to hold on to the hammer. Maybe one day you’ll be the Hammer. Wouldn’t that be something?”

Chong shook his head but said nothing.

“On t’other hand, if you die… well then, we got lots and lots of other kids who’d kill to have something like a nice piece of black pipe for when it comes to be their turn.”

Chong finally managed to squeeze three words through his gritted teeth. “Go to hell.”

The men all laughed, and the big man hardest of all. “Hell? Boy-ain’t you been paying attention? We’re already in hell. The whole world’s been in hell since First Night.”

He stood up and nodded to the other men. They vanished, but almost immediately other faces appeared around the edges of the pit. Men and women. Hard faces with hard eyes and mouths that smiled with icy cruelty. A small rat-faced man and a boy who was clearly his son shoved their way to the edge of the pit and started calling numbers and taking money.

Bets, Chong knew with growing horror. God… they’re taking bets.

The crowd fell into an expectant hush, and every eye turned in the direction where the two companions of the Burned Man had disappeared. When they came back, both of them were wearing carpet coats and football helmets with plastic visors. Between them was a pale figure that snarled and twisted and tried to bite the air.

“Welcome to Gameland,” said the Burned Man.

And then they pushed the zom into the pit with Chong.

43

BENNY WAS CHASED OUT OF HIS DREAMS BY MONSTERS.

From the moment he’d fallen asleep, he had gone running through a nightmare landscape where gigantic trees rose on black trunks that towered a thousand feet above him, their leaves burning with intense yellow fire. Benny ran through a field of blackened grass, and with every step a withered white hand would shoot up through the soil to grab him. He dodged and jagged and stumbled as hand after hand burst through the charred topsoil to claw at him.

No zoms emerged… just the reaching hands with their broken nails and bloodless skin.

As he ran he called Nix’s name, but the hot wind snatched her name away and tore it to soundless fragments. He could not see her anywhere. He ran and ran.

He saw Tom walking slowly away from him among the sea of clutching hands. Benny ran to him and grabbed his arm and spun him around. Tom stared at him with dusty black eyes. Tom’s face was the color of old wax, and his teeth were broken stumps. When Tom opened his mouth to speak, all that escaped was the starving moan of a zombie.

“NO!” Benny yelled, and backed away. Pale hands grabbed his ankles and held him as Tom took one unsteady step toward him, and then another. And another. Benny screamed again and kicked his way free just as Tom’s dry fingers brushed his face. Benny ran as ash drifted down from the burning trees.

“NIX!” he cried, but still his voice had no volume. No power.

There was movement and color off to his left, a flash of red, and Benny cut that way. He saw Morgie Mitchell sitting cross-legged on the hood of a burned-out car, his face screwed up with concentration as he tried to repair the broken pieces of his father’s fishing rod. Lying slumped against the side of the car was a slender figure covered with bright red blood.

Chong!

Benny hurried to him and knelt down, trying to figure out where his friend was hurt. “Chong! Chong… can you hear me? C’mon, talk to me, you skinny monkey-banger.”

Chong’s eyelids fluttered and slowly opened. There was still life in his eyes, a wet glimmer deep in the brown irises. Chong tried to smile. He began speaking very slowly and softly, and Benny had to bend close to hear.

“Everything out here wants to kill you, Benny,” Chong said.

“Chong! Where are you hurt?”

Chong lifted a hand, and with one bloody finger he tapped his temple. “It hurts in here, Benny. Nothing in here works anymore.” Then the hand fell limply away, and Chong slumped over sideways, his last breath rattling from his throat.

Benny fell backward, kicking himself away from Chong. More hands burst through the dirt and clamped around his wrists.

“No!” Benny bellowed, and he twisted and kicked and bit the fingers until they broke apart and became hot ash. He spat out the ashes and scrambled to his feet. Tom was still coming toward him.

“You should have stayed home,” Morgie said without looking up from what he was doing. “’Cause you know that you’re all gonna die out here.”

“Where’s Nix?” Benny demanded.

Morgie looked up. Instead of eyes he had two empty black holes in his face.

“She’s gonna die too, Benny… and it’s your fault.”

Anger and revulsion warred in Benny’s heart, but he backed away. Suddenly hands grabbed him. Not the cold hands of the buried dead, but two small, warm hands. They touched his back, then his shoulders, and finally the sides of his face. Benny turned slowly, gratitude and relief flooding his heart.

“Nix… God! Where were you?”

His voice trailed away. Nix Riley was a withered thing. Her red hair hung like limp red strings from a scalp that was patchy and blotched. Her skin was leached of color and there were clear signs of bites on her cheeks and shoulders and arms. Worst of all, her eyes… her beautiful green eyes… were wrong. They were a diseased confusion of green and gold and black. The effect was dreadful, the eyes of a thing rather than a girl.

“Benny,” she said, and then she smiled. Rotting lips peeled back from jagged teeth. “Kiss me.”

• • •

Benny screamed himself awake.

He sat up, gasping, heart pounding, his body drenched in sweat. Cold starlight filtered through the leaves, casting the world into a blue-white strangeness, as alien as the dreams-cape from which he’d just escaped.

Benny turned to Nix, surprised that his scream hadn’t startled her awake. Or had the scream been part of the dream too? He touched her arm to gently shake her.

But her skin was as cold as ice.

“W-what…?” Benny’s voice was hollow and brittle.

He turned her over and she moved stiffly, her limbs already freezing into the rigidity of rigor mortis.

“No!” He fumbled at her throat, trying to find her pulse, needing to find at least the thread of it. All he found was slack skin beneath which nothing moved. “NO!”

Benny grabbed her and pulled her to him, a new scream rising like volcanic lava in his chest. How could this be? How was it possible? Was it the cut on her face? No… that was just a cut. Had she been bitten? Where? When?

And that fast he knew the answer. On the field. In the dark. As the fire raged and the smoke obscured everything, one of the shambling monsters had bitten her. In their panic and flight, maybe Nix hadn’t known. Or maybe she had and didn’t dare tell him.

She was like a block of ice in his arms, and Benny cried out her name over and over again. It was impossible. The world could not allow this. It could not be true.

Nix stayed cold and dead in his arms.

Until she moved.

Benny recoiled from her, staring at her, his splintering mind scrabbling for that last bit of hope. Please… let her be okay! Maybe she’s just sick. Please… please… please!

Nix Riley opened her eyes.

They were the green and gold diseased eyes of a zom.

With a snarl of impossible hunger, she lunged at him.

44

AND HE WOKE UP.

The forest was as black as death. The crickets pulsed and the night owls hooted. The girl in his arms was a soft, warm reality.

Benny Imura held her. His heart hammered and hammered. Sweat poured down his face, mingling with his tears.

“Nix,” he said gently. She moaned softly in her sleep, lost in her own dreams, and snuggled against him. He held her as tightly as he could without waking her. Benny did not sleep again the rest of the night.

He did not dare.

45

TOM IMURA WAS UP LONG BEFORE DAWN. HE FIXED A QUICK MEAL FOR himself and Sally, refilled their canteens from a small stream, and was ready to go by the time there was enough light to be able to distinguish shadows from substance.

It took Sally Two-Knives a little longer to climb out of the well of sleep, but after she’d eaten something and had her fill of water, she looked and sounded much better than she had the night before. “You’ll live,” Tom said with gentle humor.

“I’ve actually had worse,” she said, carefully probing the knife wound beneath the bandage. “So have you.”

He shrugged. “Fact of life.”

Sally reached out a hand. “Help me up.”

He did. They were both very careful about it, and Sally micromanaged the process with a lot of curses and complaints until she was on her feet and leaning against one of the rocks that formed their shelter. “Well,” she said, “that was interesting.”

“You shouldn’t be up.”

“Can’t stay here. Besides, my horse is out there somewhere. I find her, I’ll be okay.”

“Riding a horse with a stab wound is-”

“-going to hurt, no kidding. Better than walking.”

“You should try and rest for most of the-”

“Don’t even try, Tom. It’s kind of you to be nice to a lady-if we can suspend disbelief long enough to use that word for me-but you need to go find that boy, and I need to go find your brother and the girls.”

Tom had no argument for that. “Thanks, Sally. Can I do anything for-”

“Get your ass in gear, boy. You’re burning daylight.”

He smiled. It was only barely bright enough to see the path. Tom nodded and was about to step back when Sally grabbed him by the front of the shirt with her good hand and pulled him in for a whopper of a kiss. When she finally pushed him back, he gasped and blinked like a trout on a riverbank.

“Wow!”

“In case I don’t ever see you again, Tom,” she said, giving him a wicked little smile. “I don’t want you to forget me.”

“Um… not a chance. Wow.” He gave her a last smile, turned, and vanished into the forest.

Sally watched him go. In the brief moment between his smile and his departure, as he turned away, she saw the smile fall away from his handsome face to be replaced by the face of the hunter. She repeated what she’d said the night before.

“God help anyone who gets in your way.”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Zom 101

Zom: What just about everyone calls the living dead.

Zom: Nomadic zoms. Ones that walk around but aren’t actually following prey. (Most zoms don’t move unless they are following something.)

Walker: Another name for a Nom, though some people call all zoms walkers.

Sliver: A thin piece of metal with a sharpened tip used to “quiet” a zom. It’s inserted at the base of the skill in order to sever the spinal cord.

Quieting: What people call it when a zom is “killed” permanently.

46

BENNY LET NIX SLEEP UNTIL THE WHOLE FOREST WAS INFUSED WITH A pink light. He studied the woods, looking for any signs of zoms. Or of Lilah. Or Tom. No sign of the Greenman, either. For the moment it appeared as if they had the forest all to themselves.

Benny touched Nix’s face with his thumb, caressing her cheek very gently. He lifted the edge of the bandage and studied the long cut and the delicate stitchery. The wound was a little red and puffy, but it wasn’t bad.

Nix made a soft sound and opened her eyes. Green eyes. Not green and gold and black.

“Hey,” she said almost shyly, smiling up at him.

“Hey yourself.”

“What time is it?”

“Half hour past dawn.”

Nix stretched against him and then sat up and yawned so hard her jaws creaked. Then she held her palm up and breathed against it. “Gak! I have monkey breath.”

“Mine’s closer to one of the great apes,” he said.

Their backpacks and gear were back at the way station.

Or in the ashes of it. All they had was what they’d carried in their vests and jeans pockets. Matches, first aid kit, sewing kit, knives, cadaverine. No toothbrushes. Nothing to eat.

Benny handed her his canteen and she rinsed and spat. Then she told him to take off his vest and open his shirt. He was shy about it-not from modesty but because he didn’t really want to know how bad the burn was. It hurt less this morning, but his mind conjured images of charred ends of bone sticking out of gangrenous flesh.

The actual wound was almost disappointing. Three lines of blistered skin, each no wider than a pencil and each less than an inch long. The skin around the burns was puffy, but there was no sign of infection.

“You’ll live,” Nix declared as she finished cleaning the burns with a piece of bandage.

“Doesn’t even hurt,” he said, but he was sure she didn’t believe him.

His stomach suddenly growled as loud as a hungry zom. “We need to find some food.”

They removed the bokkens from Benny’s carpet coat and climbed carefully down from the tree. It was a slow and painful process; they were both stiff and sore. As they dropped to the grass they both froze.

There was something at the base of the tree. Someone had placed several fist-size stones in a tight circle to act as a base on which was placed a large hand-carved wooden tray. Large, clean leaves covered the tray, and a wonderful aroma drifted out from beneath them. Nix lifted the leaves and gasped. Benny’s mouth fell open. The wooden plate was piled high with fat yellow mounds of scrambled eggs, thick fried potatoes, and a mound of fresh strawberries.

“What?” Benny asked, looking around. “Who-?”

“Who cares?” Nix said as she scooped a handful of eggs off the plate. “God… there’s enough here for ten people.”

“We are awake, right?”

Nix laughed and shoved eggs into his mouth. He chewed. It was cold but delicious.

“Does this make any sense?” he asked as scooped up more eggs with his fingers.

Nix shook her head, then shrugged. “Maybe. Possible sense, anyway. Think about it.”

It took two mouthfuls of eggs and three potatoes before he caught up with her. “Man, I’m slow!”

“Gee, that’s a news flash,” she said, her cheeks filled like a squirrel.

“The Greenman!”

“Question is,” Nix said, swallowing, “why?”

“He’s a friend of Tom’s.”

She nodded. “Wonder why he didn’t hang around to say hi?”

“No idea. Wish I knew where he lived. Tom said it’s around here somewhere. Probably pretty well hidden, though. Guy’s not supposed to be very social.”

They ate for a while, then Nix said, “God… there are so many questions. What’s happening with Tom and Chong? Where’s Lilah? Who took the cans down last night? Why did all those zoms attack us? And what’s with that freak Preacher Jack?”

Benny smiled. “Since when did you think I knew what the heck was going on?”

“Always a first time.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but today isn’t that day.” He rubbed his hands briskly over his face. “Okay… so, what’s the plan?”

“Plan?” she replied. “Don’t you have one?”

“Um… what makes you think the ‘no answer’ guy is the ‘I have a plan’ guy?”

“’Cause I don’t have a plan either,” she said.

“Ah.” They looked around, watching the woods as if answers would magically appear. “We could wait here and see if the Greenman comes back.”

Benny shook his head. “I don’t think he will. He didn’t wait for us last night, and he didn’t stick around to have breakfast with us this morning.”

Nix sighed. “Maybe we should go back and take a look at the field and the way station. From a distance, I mean. See what’s what.”

“Sure,” he said, brightening. “That’s very plan-like.”

They shared the last of the eggs and potatoes and stuffed their pockets with the strawberries. They wiped the plate clean with leaves and left it at the base of the tree. Benny wrote “Thanks!” in big letters in the dirt.

He turned and caught her watching him, her smile faint and her eyes distant.

“What?” Benny asked.

She blinked, and he thought he saw shutters close behind her eyes. “Nothing.”

Back in town Benny would have let that go, but in a lot of ways he felt like he had left behind the version of himself who was afraid to ask these kinds of questions. So he said, “No… there was something. The way you were looking at me. What is it?”

Birds sang in trees for almost five seconds before she answered. “Back in town… on your roof… I asked you if you loved me. Did you mean it?”

Benny’s mouth went dry. “Yes.”

“You haven’t said it since.”

A defensive reply leaped to his lips, but instead he said, “Neither have you.”

“No,” she admitted, her voice small. She squinted into the morning sunlight. “Maybe… maybe if leaving town had been easier…”

He waited.

“… it would be easier to say,” Nix finished. “But out here…”

“I know,” he said. “I feel it too.”

“Do you understand it?” she pleaded. “I’ve been trying to, but I can’t put it into the right words.”

Go for it, whispered the inner voice. Tell her the truth.

Benny nodded. “I think so. At least… I understand why I haven’t said it. Since we left town, we’ve been in trouble. Our ‘road trip’ hasn’t exactly been a load of fun. Saying ‘I love you’ out here… don’t laugh, but it would feel like taking off my carpet coat and walking out into a crowd of zoms. Saying it out loud just makes me feel vulnerable. Is that stupid?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s not stupid.”

“My turn to ask a question,” Benny said, and even though Nix stiffened, he plowed ahead. “Do you wish I hadn’t said it? At all, I mean?”

Strange lights flickered in the green depths of her eyes. “When you think the time is right,” she said, “try it again and see what happens.”

Benny’s insecurities wanted to read her comment in all the wrong ways, but his inner voice whispered a different suggestion to him. He said, “Count on it.”

She held out her hand. “So… want to go for a walk?”

“Well… it’s that or clean my room, but since my room is a tree…”

He took her hand, and they walked under the canopy of cool green leaves. Birds sang in the trees, and the grass beneath their feet glistened with morning dew. The first of the day’s bees buzzed softly among the flowers, going about their ancient and important work, collecting nectar and taking pollen from one flower to another. Cyclones of gnats spiraled up from the grass and swirled through the slanting sunlight. The loveliness of the forest was magical and fresh, but it was also immense. Neither of them spoke, unable to phrase their reactions to the rampant beauty and unwilling to trouble the air with the horrors that haunted their hearts.

Despite the warm reality of each other’s hands, they felt incredibly alone. Desolate. Even though they knew that Tom and Lilah and Chong were somewhere in this same forest, it was as if everyone else was on a different planet. Mountainside-home-was a million miles away. The jumbo jet could well have been on the far side of the world, or something from an old dream.

The rocky path wound down among trees and shrubs, and most of the way there was no evidence of what had happened last night except the smell of ash on the breeze. Then they rounded a bend, and all that changed.

“God…,” Nix said in a hollow whisper.

The field was a massive ruin. Trees had burned to stumps, bushes had been reduced to ash. The way station was nothing more than a blackened shell.

However, that was not the worst of it. Not by a long shot. Everywhere-on the field, collapsed over the glacial boulders, twisted into bony knots on the concrete slab by the station-were corpses. Last night they had been the living dead; now they were merely dead, the life force burned out of them by the conflagration Benny had set loose with a tiny match.

It was all so still. A blasted expanse of ash and cracked bones. Nix turned away.

Benny lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Nix touched his arm. “This isn’t your fault. You didn’t mean-”

“Yes I did, Nix.” He turned to her and brushed a strand of curly red hair away from her face. “I started the fire because I didn’t know what else to do. I killed all those…”

“Zoms, Benny. They’re zoms. You can’t kill them.”

“I know… but…”

She looked puzzled. “What?”

“They were people once.”

“I know.”

“What if…” He stopped and took a breath, thinking of the terrible heat and of the flames spreading so rapidly on dry skin and old clothes. “What if they could feel it?”

“They can’t, Benny,” said Nix softly. “They’re dead.”

“We don’t know what they are. The dead are dead, they don’t move, they rot and turn to dust. The zoms… they move around. Sure, they attack people, but that’s the point. Dead people can’t do that… so what are they really? Why do they moan? Are they trying to communicate somehow? Are they trying to say something? Or… does being a zom hurt?”

“Hurt?”

“From what’s happened to them, and what’s still happening. The wounds that killed them, the decay… can they feel it?”

“They’re rotting, Benny. Their bodies move around, but there’s no intelligence.”

He shook his head. “We don’t really know that, Nix, and don’t pretend we do. Tom’s seen them turn door handles and climb steps. He says that some of them pick up stuff to use as weapons. Sticks and stones. The one last night beat on the door. That says something. That says there’s something going on inside.”

“Benny, a squirrel will pick stuff up. A cat will swat at stuff. It doesn’t mean-”

“That’s just it!” he cried. “Even if they’re only like a squirrel or a cat, or even if they’re only as smart as a bug, Nix… even bugs feel pain.”

She shook her head and looked at the twisted wreckage of zombie corpses lying in the ash. “No,” she said. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy thinking like that. Tom’s quieted thousands of zoms. He never said anything about them feeling pain.”

“How would he know?”

“Tom would know,” she said firmly. Benny listened to her words, but he also heard something in her voice. A tremor of doubt.

Let it be, whispered his inner voice. Now’s not the time.

He nodded and Nix looked relieved, thinking that he was agreeing with her. Benny stepped onto the ash and walked slowly over to the way station. The building was a total loss. Only the front wall still stood; the rest lay in heaps. Benny touched a finger to the outside wall. It was almost cool and covered with a thin film of soot. He nodded again, considering things very carefully, and then used his finger to write a message.

T / L / C

WE’RE FINE. HOPE YOU ARE TOO.

HEADING ON. YOU KNOW WHERE TO

LOOK FOR US.

W.S.

B / N

“W.S.?” Nix murmured. “Warrior smart?”

“Yeah. I want him to know we’re using what he taught us.”

“So… we’re heading east?”

“I guess,” he said. “To Yosemite. It’s that or go back to town. I sure don’t want to wait around here. I don’t know what drove all those zoms down here last night, and I don’t want to find out.”

He hadn’t yet told her about the man he’d seen standing among the zoms. The man he was pretty sure was Charlie Pink-eye. How could he tell Nix that her mother’s murderer was still out here, still roaming the world free?

Benny knew he would have to tell her soon. But not here and not now.

Nix touched the wall below the first line. T for Tom. L for Lilah. C for Chong. “It’s funny, but Mom used those letters to mean ‘tender loving care.’” She turned away. “That was a different world.”

“Yes, it was,” he agreed.

“We don’t belong there anymore.”

“No.”

She narrowed her eyes and surveyed the way ahead. Past the blackened ruins, toward the green expanse of the forest and the mountains in the east. “It’s funny,” she said. “I actually thought this part-getting started, I mean-would be the easy part. I expected it to get harder later, but I thought that this would be… I don’t know… kind of ordinary. We’ve been out to Brother David’s a million times… but we’re not even twenty miles from home.”

“I don’t know if anything’s going to be easy, Nix.”

She glanced at him, her lip caught between her even white teeth. She said, “Benny… if you say, ‘Let’s go back,’ I will. Right now. So help me, God… I’ll go back.”

He looked into her eyes and then turned and stared across the charred field of bones to the path that led up into the northwestern slopes. Then he drew a breath and let it out before he turned back. “You already said it, Nix,” he said. “We don’t belong there anymore.”

Doubt darkened her face. “Do we belong here?”

“I don’t know.” He knelt and used a handful of withered grass to wipe the soot from his finger. “Maybe we don’t belong anywhere. But I got to tell you, Nix, it cost us too much to get this far to go back now. We have to keep going.”

“We don’t have to prove anything, Benny.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I kind of think we do.” Then he smiled. The first real smile he’d worn since they left the tree. “Don’t ask me what it is, though.”

Then he kissed her. First, very lightly on the line of stitches that crossed her brow, and then more firmly on the lips.

She kissed him back, and it wasn’t merely reflex. She kissed him like she meant it. Then she stepped back and looked him with green eyes that were filled with a thousand mysteries. For once Benny felt like he understood some of them.

He smiled and held out his hand, and Nix took it. Together they turned away from the charred graveyard of the dead and headed east. The road before them was tangled in weeds, but the sun glimmered like a promise on every blade of grass.

As they walked away they did not see the figure that stepped from behind a stand of fire-blackened pines. It was a tall man. Thin as a scarecrow in a black coat, with white hair that fluttered in the hot wind. He watched the two teenagers as they walked along the road.

The man moved as silently as a shadow as he crossed the field to the way station. He stopped and those cold eyes read the message written in the soot. His lips moved as he read the words, and then he chuckled softly to himself.

He stood for a long time with his lips pursed, considering the words. Then he used the hard, flat palm of his hand to wipe them out. All that remained was a smear of soot. The figure turned and looked at the road. Nix and Benny were tiny dots now, and as he watched they vanished into the far woods.

The man smiled and, quiet as death, followed.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Tom on Quieting Zoms

Tom Imura: “Put a bullet through the brain stem and you switch off your zombie. The same holds for a sword or ax cut, or sufficient blunt force trauma. However, if you inflict minor damage to the brain stem, you may remove some of the zombie’s functions… he might be unable to bite or unable to maintain balance. The bottom line here is that the real off buttons for a zombie are the brain stem and the motor cortex.”

47

LILAH CROUCHED BENEATH THE SHELTERING ARMS OF A MASSIVE OAK TREE. Cool green darkness wrapped around her. Her white hair was tangled with moss and bits of leaves. There were long rips in her shirt. She had no memory of what had torn the fabric. Sharp branches or broken fingernails. Her pistol was gone. Her knife was gone. She’d left her spear buried in the chest of a zom back at the edge of the burned field. It was hours before she realized that she was no longer carrying it.

She had no memory of most of the night. Her head felt broken. As broken as her heart. When she touched her face she was surprised to find fresh tears, but an hour later the surprise turned to panic when she realized that she was still crying. That she could not stop crying. There were no sobs. Just tears. Cold against the fevered heat of her skin.

From where she crouched she could see Benny and Nix enter the field. She saw what Benny wrote on the wall, and she watched them walk away to the east. She saw the tall man with the snow-white hair follow them. Three times she almost rose to her feet, almost waved. Almost called out their names.

Each time she did not. Each time she felt that her whole body was one lump of useless muscle. Nothing seemed to work, none of the muscle and bone seemed to be connected to her brain. Her body squatted there under the tree, and her mind merely looked out through the prison windows of her eyes.

Tears broke and rolled and fell in a terrible silence.

Lilah had barely known her mother. She had been a toddler on First Night. She remembered screams and pain. She remembered being carried. Sometimes by a woman-probably her mother-and sometimes by other people. She remembered her mother dying as she gave birth to Annie, Lilah’s sister. Those memories were a million years ago. Lifetimes ago.

It had not been her mother who raised Lilah and Annie. It had been George Goldman. He wasn’t her father. Lilah never knew who her father was. George was another survivor of the zombie plague, the last of the adults to survive out of a group that had fled from Los Angeles. George hadn’t known Lilah’s mother except for a few desperate hours. They hadn’t swapped life stories. Lilah’s mother had died, and then she’d come back. As everyone came back. George and the other survivors had done what was necessary.

Lilah remembered that. She’d seen it, and she’d screamed and screamed and screamed until her throat had been torn raw, leaving her with a whisper of a voice.

For years after that George had been the only adult Lilah and Annie knew. He raised them. Taught them to read. Fed them, and protected them, and taught them to fight. Then Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer had found them. They beat George and took the girls to Gameland.

Lilah never saw George again. He had looked for the girls. Looked everywhere he could. He went a little crazy, Tom said; and somewhere out in the Ruin, Charlie or the Hammer had murdered him and made it look like suicide.

In the fighting pits at Gameland, Lilah and Annie had been forced to fight for their survival. Annie was little, but she was tough. Lilah had been older. On one rainy night she had escaped from the locked cabin where they kept her. She stole some weapons and came back to the camp to find Annie, to free her so they could both escape. But Annie had also tried to escape, and the Hammer had chased her. Annie fell, hit her head, and died; and she’d been left there in the mud like trash.

When Lilah found her, little Annie was just coming back from that dark place where the dead go and from which only zoms return. Lilah almost let Annie bite her. Almost.

It had come down to that, to a moment when the only pathway that seemed to lead out of hell was the one where she would become a thing like her sister. It seemed so easy. To simply stop fighting, stop struggling, and give in. Then she looked into Annie’s eyes… and Annie was not there. Her eyes were not windows into her sister’s soul. They were dusty glass through which the only thing that could be seen was the emptiness where Annie had once been.

Lilah had done what she had to do. She had quieted little Annie.

For years she lived alone in the woods. She had no conversations. She spoke to no one. She didn’t even speak aloud to herself. She found books and read them. She learned the art of making weapons. She became a hunter and a killer.

Then she met Benny and Nix, and the world changed for her.

Together they destroyed Charlie and the Hammer. Together they saved other children, kids who would not die in the rain like Annie, or be left to grow strange and wild like herself. Nix, Benny, and Tom took her in, took her to their home. The Chongs welcomed her into their family, treating her like one of their own.

Now Chong was gone. Lost and probably dead in the woods. And maybe that was her fault. The thought was like a knife in her own head.

Benny and Nix walked into the east, their bodies seeming to glow with reflected sunlight.

Lilah thought about what Benny had said, and about her own words-to Benny, and to Chong. The tears would not stop.

Time rolled on, losing meaning and dimension to her. Then… there was a rustling sound behind her. A day ago she would have turned cat-quick, her senses as sharp as the blades she carried. Now she ignored it-aware but uncaring. If it was a zom, then it was a zom. The most it could do was kill her. Worse had been done to her over the years.

A figure moved from behind her and walked slowly around her.

Not a zom. Not Chong or Benny. Not Charlie.

This figure was dressed all in green. Leaves and sprigs of flowers were stitched onto his clothes. She looked up at him, seeing him indistinctly through the glaze of tears. His face was made of leaves too.

She knew the face and the clothing. She had seen them a dozen times over the years, though always at a distance. Benny had a Zombie Card with his picture on it. The Greenman.

Sunlight glittered on the hard length of something the Greenman held in both hands. Her spear. She said nothing.

The Greenman let it fall to the ground, where it almost vanished amid tall grass and shadows. Then the man removed his mask. It was really a piece of camouflage netting hung from the brim of a green cloth hat. Beneath the mask was a face that was seamed and suntanned. Bald on top and bearded below, the hair as white as Lilah’s. Laugh lines were etched around sad eyes.

Lilah stared at the man’s face. There were scars, old and new. The Greenman bent and touched the tear tracks on her cheeks. She almost flinched. She could feel it begin inside her muscles, but she didn’t. Maybe because she was too tired from lack of sleep, panic, terror and a night of running. Or maybe because this man did not seem to want to do her harm.

He rubbed his fingertips together, feeling her tears, working the moisture into his skin.

“I… I’m sorry,” she said in a pale whisper.

He smiled at her. “No.”

Then he crossed his legs and lowered himself down to the grass. He did not ask her to stop crying. He did not ask her any questions. He sat in front of her, the sunlight making his white beard glow, and he smiled. At her. At the birds in the trees and the first dragonflies of spring. Lilah caved forward onto her knees and crawled toward him. She collapsed a few inches away. The Greenman did not touch her. He did not try to pull her out of what she was feeling.

He allowed, and that was enough.