Dust & Decay

68

CHONG REACHED UP FOR THE EDGE OF THE PIT. HIS LEGS TREMBLED AND threatened to collapse, his knees were like rubber, his muscle like jelly. People roared and applauded somewhere else, but he knew that it was only a matter of time before someone came back here. He was never a lucky person, so he had long ago learned to use what fragments of luck came his way.

He reached and reached, his fingers clawing at the edges of the pit, but the dirt there was looser, the edges scalloped from shovel blades and weakened by the weight of people leaning over to look at the pit fights. He dug his fingernails into the dirt, scrabbling, sending showers of soil down onto his face. He sputtered and coughed and spit it out; he shook his head like a dog to get the dirt out of his eyes.

Then something closed around his wrist. It was sudden, immediate, and as hard as iron. And abruptly he was being pulled out of the pit.

He opened his mouth to cry out, but a second hand clamped down over his mouth.

Chong was caught!

69

LILAH CROUCHED ON THE LIMB OF A TREE AND STARED AT THE STARLIT facade of Gameland. For two hours now she had watched people arriving on horseback and in armored trade wagons. Townsfolk and people who lived rough out in the Ruin. Coming for the Z-Games. Coming to wager on the lives and deaths of children in the zombie pits. She ached to run wild among them with her spear, to show them what it felt like to be hunted. All the way here she had hoped to come upon Benny and Nix, but all she’d found were their footprints… and later signs of a scuffle near the front of the hotel. She was sure they had been taken.

It hurt Lilah to know that this place had been taken over by bad people. Tom had been sure that it was a safe place for them to rest. To prepare for the road trip.

What would Tom do when he found out? Where was he?

And… Chong.

Back in the forest the Greenman had given her a map and pointed out the fastest way and led her to the edge of the field that ran along the road to Wawona, but he refused to go with her.

“There’s going to be a fight,” Lilah said. “Won’t you come with me?”

He smiled at her with eyes that seemed ancient and sad. “No. I’m done with fighting. It tore away too much of who I was. It took me a long time to find myself again. I made a choice never to fight again.”

“But-I need you.”

“No, honey, you need you. You were lost, but now I think you’ve found you again. If it’s your choice to go and help your friends, then that is your choice. Not mine.”

Then he had kissed her on the head and vanished into the woods. Lilah stood watching the trembling leaves, wondering if he was even real or if her visit with him had been part of some fantasy that she had pulled from one of her books. Then she’d turned and began hunting along the trail to Gameland. She evaded a dozen guards and slipped past ditches and over fences and finally found the tree that overlooked the hotel. This was a different Gameland from the one where she and Annie had been forced to fight. Different, but still the same.

For several painful minutes she thought about what she could do, weighing it against what the Greenman had told her, and what she had confessed to him. His words echoed in her head, not louder than the words of the madmen in the arena, but in gentle ways that she could hear with greater clarity and understanding.

Let me tell you a truth, little sister, the Greenman had said. No matter what choice you make, it doesn’t define you… what choice do you want to make now?

As she crouched there, Lilah looked into her own future. Without Benny and Nix, Chong and Tom, there was nothing. She could return to her cave and exist, but she now knew that such a life was no life at all. It was empty, and the thought of returning to that loneliness was beyond unbearable.

Somewhere down there were her friends.

“Friends” was such a strange word to her. She knew it on an intellectual level from a thousand books, but since Annie and George died, she had never experienced it. Then Benny had come looking for her. As had Tom. Benny and Nix accepted her, welcomed her into their lives. They had brought her to their home, their town. They had included her in everything. They had introduced her to Chong, and he had fallen in love with her. Fallen in love. With her.

Lilah brushed away a tear. How had she repaid such kindness, such generosity? With harsh words and threats. With bitterness and dismissal. And with inaction when she saw Preacher Jack follow Benny and Nix into the east. A word… a single word from her would have prevented this moment. A single action, a stroke of her spear, would have canceled out even the possibility of what was happening below. She had chosen to pull away, and now she saw the cost of that choice.

So, you tell me… what choice do you want to make now?

Lilah had thought about that for hours. The choice, her new choice, burned in her mind. She smiled… and climbed down from the tree and continued her hunt.

70

THE THUGS WALKED BENNY AND NIX OUTSIDE, AND AS THEY EXITED the hotel it was like stepping into a weird modern version of the ancient Roman circus. There had to be more than two hundred people gathered in the field behind the hotel. Bleachers made from planks and pipes had been erected, and these were completely packed by a laughing, yelling, jeering crowd. The scene was lit by dozens of torches set atop tall poles, and their light cast the whole scene into a fiery unreality, where every pair of eyes reflected flickering flames. The whole area was fenced in by three walls made of armored wagons that had been parked tightly together, and the front was the entire back wall of the Hotel Wawona. On the right-hand side, between sets of bleachers, was a huge circus tent whose flaps were closed. Guards stood in a long row in front of the flaps, and on the top of the tent, painted in huge red letters, was the word BELIEVE.

Benny saw that the amphitheater surrounded seven large pits dug into the bare earth. The crowd cheered and yelled and laughed and made obscene jokes as Benny and Nix were led to the edge of the first pit. The dozens of guards were armed with knives and swords and spears. No guns, Benny noticed, and he thought about that. Were they afraid of wild shots in so densely packed an area? Or was there some other concern?

“Where are all these people from?” whispered Nix as she bent close to him. “Who are they?”

Benny shook his head. “I don’t know. Other towns, maybe. Or settlements. Families of bounty hunters…” His voice trailed off as he realized that he knew a few of the faces in the crowd. Not bounty hunters, but people from Mountainside! Not forty feet in front of him was Mr. Tesh, who owned a stable near the reservoir; and over by the circus tent was Barbara Sultan and her husband. They were corn farmers. He saw his high school gym teacher making a bet with an oddsmaker; and a few yards away from him was the woman who owned the feed and grain store on Main Street. He pointed this out to Nix, and she gasped.

“That’s Mrs. Rosenbaum!”

When the woman saw them looking at her, the smile on her painted mouth flickered for a second; then the man next to her made a joke, and they both burst out laughing. It was madness. These weren’t just strangers, these were people they knew. People they saw every day. He wondered how they managed to come here. What excuses and lies had they told to hide the ugliness of their appetites?

“I hate them all!” snarled Nix with incredible viciousness. Ever since they had learned that they were in the power of Charlie Pink-eye’s brother and father, she seemed ready to explode. Her eyes were filled with a glaring brightness, and her hands were shaking badly.

Don’t go away from me now, he begged silently, but when he tried to take her hand, she snatched it angrily away and stared at him as if he were an alien from Mars.

The buzz of the crowd suddenly changed as Preacher Jack and White Bear walked with their heads up, proud as kings, into the center of the amphitheater. The audience erupted into thunderous applause. White Bear encouraged the applause with upward waves of his big arms.

Nix leaned close again. “Want to hear something funny?”

“Um… sure, Nix,” he said carefully. “Seems like a great time for a joke.”

Her eyes glittered like glass as she nodded toward White Bear. “I actually like his plan.”

Benny almost smiled. “Sure. Except for the slavery part.” He nodded toward the crowd. “I wonder how loud they’ll be cheering when White Bear’s goons are putting them to work herding zoms and building fences.”

“Shaddup!” growled Digger, cuffing them again.

Preacher Jack raised his arms, and the crowd instantly fell silent. It was so quiet that Benny could hear the crackling of the torches and the popping of the canvas on the circus tent.

“My brothers and sisters,” Preacher Jack began in a voice that was deep and strong, “thank you for coming here to share in this auspicious event on this glorious day. A day we will all remember for as long as God grants us breath. As they did in biblical times, we hold these games in celebration of an important event. We are about to begin writing a new chapter in the storied history of mankind. We will begin a new holy book chronicling the foundation and consecration of a new Eden.”

The crowd exchanged looks, surprised at what appeared to be a sermon and uncertain where it was going.

“I wanted to share this day, not only with my family and friends”-and here he gestured to White Bear and then to the audience-“but with my congregation as well.”

A ripple of hushed conversation whisked through the crowd.

“I asked my congregants to join us in celebrating a new era of peace and fellowship as we poor sinners prove ourselves worthy to share in this paradise. Join me in welcoming the members of the First Church of the New Eden!”

The crowd began to applaud, and the guards by the tent turned and began pulling back the canvas flaps. When the crowd saw that there were hundreds of people sitting in tightly packed rows of folding chairs, they applauded with greater enthusiasm, welcoming more folks to this party. Then one by one the people in the audience stopped applauding until there was only one person-a silly drunk in the far corner-clapping; and then he, too, stopped. There was a long pause in which silence reigned over the entire amphitheater, and Benny could feel Nix stiffen beside him. His own heart was hammering.

Suddenly a woman screamed, and the crowd surged to its feet. There was instant turmoil as people fought to move away from the congregation. The guards waded into the packed mass, shoving people, clubbing some, yelling at them. Preacher Jack still stood with his arms raised, a smile of great joy on his face.

Benny stared in total horror. There had to be five hundred folding chairs set in rows in the tent. Each chair was filled, but each congregant was lashed to the chair by strips of white cloth that were wrapped around their legs and chests. They all writhed and struggled against the bonds. Not just to escape… but to attack.

The entire congregation was zombies.

“Oh my God!” gasped Nix, and shrank back, but Digger grabbed her shoulder and kept her in place. Benny had been unable to move and stood stock-still.

White Bear reached under his cloak of bearskin and brought out a pump shotgun that hung concealed on a sling. He pointed it at the sky and pulled the trigger. There was a huge BOOM!

Everyone froze.

“Sit down!” he roared, and racked the slide on the shotgun. There was another moment of silent indecision, and then the crowd obeyed. In the stillness of that moment they could see that the zoms were unable to rise or attack. A few people crept back to their seats, then more, and within minutes the entire crowd was back in their places. Nobody was smiling except for Preacher Jack.

And Nix. “Did you see the looks on their faces?” She giggled. And that was when Benny realized that Nix had crossed over into some other place.

Preacher Jack raised his hands. “Be at peace! The Children of Lazarus are all bound… we are all safe from one another, and that is the way that harmony can grow.”

The audience buzzed with troubled chatter, but gradually they all stopped talking to one another and looked at him.

“This is still a night of sport and celebration. This is what you came for!” The preacher half turned and pointed one hand down at the pits and the other at Benny and Nix.

The crowd stared for a moment longer, and then they roared with cheers and applause.

“Ah, crap,” said Benny.

White Bear goosed the applause for a full minute and then gradually quieted everyone with downward waves of his hand. “In ancient times,” he said in a voice every bit as loud and booming as his father’s, “those who had committed terrible crimes would suffer public execution.”

A ripple of applause.

“Or public humiliation.”

Bigger applause.

“But we are a civilized people!”

Applause and expectant smiles. Everyone knew what was coming now; everyone was in on the joke.

“My father is a holy man, and he says that the world is both heaven and hell and Gameland is purgatory.”

Someone in the back of the crowd actually yelled, “Hallelujah!”

Benny felt outrage bubbling in his chest. He was not the most devout churchgoer, but even he knew that this was no kind of religion. Preacher Jack might be crazy enough to believe some of this, but for White Bear it was all about manipulation.

White Bear roared, “So here in purgatory sinners get a chance at redemption. They get a chance to earn the right to be part of New Eden.”

Someone-Benny thought it was a guard-began a chant of “New Eden!” and soon the whole crowd was shouting it out as if it was something they believed in already. Sheep, Benny thought. Just sheep.

Nix laughed aloud, but only Benny heard her. It scared him as much as what White Bear was saying.

“So, tonight my father and I are going to set an example. We are making a new law, and we will be the first to abide by it!”

“Tell us, White Bear!” someone shouted, and everyone clamored the same.

White Bear pointed to Benny and Nix. “We got two sinners here. Two murderers. They led an attack on the camp of Charlie Matthias. You all knew Charlie, and you knew him as a good and decent man.” If the applause was not as enthusiastic, Benny saw, it was at least very loud. “They murdered my brother. And a few days ago they participated in the murder of my other brother, Zak, and his son. The blood of my family is on their hands!”

The crowd booed and called for blood to pay for blood.

Here it comes, Benny thought, and braced himself.

White Bear quieted the crowd once more. “But hear me-these are no longer zombie pits. It is forbidden to call them that ever again. These are the Pits of Judgment. Sinners go in there to face their crimes. Heaven itself decides the truth. If the accused is innocent, or if there is true repentance in his heart, then he will emerge unharmed from the pit. And if not…”

The crowd waited for it.

“… then the Children of Lazarus will make a sacrament of their flesh!”

The crowd went wild. Benny stared. Maybe some of them had started to believe this nonsense, or maybe it was all just a new game to them. Either way, they were totally sold on it.

White Bear, as grand a showman as his father, held one hand aloft so that the audience held their breath, and with the other he pointed at Benny and Nix. “It is time!” he proclaimed. “Cast them into the Pit of Judgment.”

Benny’s last thought before Digger and Heap pushed him over the edge was, Oh, brother.

Then he and Nix were falling into darkness.

71

CHONG TRIED TO FIGHT THE HANDS THAT PULLED HIM FROM THE PIT, BUT his attacker bent close and in a fierce whisper said, “Chong-it’s me.”

Chong stopped struggling. The figure let go of him and moved into a patch of starlight.

“Tom!” Chong began to cry out, but Tom clamped a hand over his mouth.

“Shhhh!”

Chong nodded. “How’d you find me?” he whispered.

Tom quickly explained how he’d left Benny, Nix, and Lilah back at the way station, and about his encounter with Sally Two-Knives.

“I-I’m… Tom, I’m so sorry-”

“Save it. This is a lot more my fault than yours, kiddo. Even so,” Tom said, tapping him hard in the chest, “do not let it happen again. From here on out you follow orders exactly as given, understand?”

“Absolutely loud and clear.”

The sounds of laughter and applause, the screams and jeers, were much louder. The noise was coming from behind the place, past the line of close-parked wagons. There were a few small zombie pits out here, but Tom suspected the real attraction was over there.

“Benny and Nix are here somewhere,” Tom said, “and I have a bad feeling about where they are.”

As if to counterpoint his comment, the crowd erupted into furious applause.

“What are we going to do?”

“First things first,” said Tom. “You look pretty banged up. Are you all right?”

When Chong took too long to answer Tom pulled him into a patch of light that was screened by hedges.

“Tell me,” he ordered.

Chong turned and showed him his shoulder. “I was bitten.”

Tom closed his eyes for a moment and sagged back against the edge of the porch. “Ah… kid… damn it…”

“In the pit. They made me fight. I won… both times, but I got bit.”

“How long ago was this?”

“I don’t know. Five, six hours. I can’t really tell.”

Tom gave him a puzzled frown. “How are you feeling? Have you been vomiting? Any double vision? Pain in your joints?”

“Just a little dizzy and nauseous.”

Tom looked at the bite again. “You should be showing symptoms by now.”

“H-how long do you think I have?”

“I don’t know,” said Tom. “It’s different for everyone.”

Chong knew that was true. Some people got sick right away; others took as long as a day before they felt it. In the end it was going to be the same. The plague had a 100 percent infection rate. No one ever survived it.

From behind the building they could hear Preacher Jack making a speech.

“Have you seen other prisoners?” asked Tom.

Chong shook his head. “No, but I heard people talking about them. There’s supposed to be a bunch of other kids here. In the hotel, I think.”

“Then that’s where Benny and Nix will be. Preacher Jack took them.”

Chong touched Tom’s arm. “There are things you need to know. While I was still in the pit, I heard White Bear talking to someone. I’m pretty sure it was Preacher Jack. White Bear is Charlie’s brother and he… he called Preacher Jack ‘Dad.’”

Tom grabbed Chong’s wrist. “Preacher Jack is Charlie Pink-eye’s father?”

“I know… it’s scary, but it makes sense.”

“Only to madmen, kiddo.”

Chong looked away to the west. “Tom, where’s Lilah?”

Tom shook his head. “I… don’t know where she is. She could be with Benny and Nix, or she could be out there somewhere.”

“Out there” was a vast and featureless black nothing.

Chong licked his lips. “What… what do we do now?”

Tom handed him a knife. “We go find Benny and Nix,” he said.

72

BENNY AND NIX FELL INTO DARKNESS. NEITHER OF THEM SCREAMED. Benny was too furious, and Nix… well, Benny didn’t know what Nix was feeling. He thought he heard her laugh as the darkness of the pit swallowed them. Benny waited for the crushing impact at the bottom of a long fall, but his feet struck something soft and yielded. He hit and bounced and spun, and only then did he crash to the dirt. Behind him he heard Nix rebound and then thud down.

There was enough light to see, and as Benny sat up painfully he saw that just below the hole was a sloppy stack of old mattresses, positioned to catch their fall and keep them from shattering their legs.

“Very considerate of them,” Nix muttered.

“I don’t think they care much about us.”

“No, really?” replied Nix sarcastically.

“I mean,” said Benny, “that it’s probably not as much fun to watch cripples fighting zoms.”

“Again… really?”

They got to their feet and looked around. No zoms and not much light. The pit wasn’t circular, and they could make out tunnels leading off in six separate directions.

White Bear squatted on the edge of the pit, grinning in a way that made his burned face look like a monster out of a nightmare. “Here are the rules,” he growled. “If you’re paying attention, you might already have guessed that this ain’t a straight pit-fight. There are tunnels and side passages and a few surprises cut every which way. Some of them are dead ends, and I do mean ‘dead.’”

“Ha, ha,” said Benny.

“You might also have guessed that you ain’t alone down there.”

Benny expected Nix to say “No, really?” again, but she held her tongue, so Benny supplied the sarcasm. “Well, we figured that… these being zom pits and all.”

“Watch your mouth, boy,” snapped White Bear.

“Really?” he said, and liked how it sounded. “What are you going to do? Beat us up and throw us in a pit full of the living dead?”

White Bear seemed to chew on that and apparently decided that Benny had a point.

“You were starting to tell us about rules,” prompted Nix.

“Yes indeed, little cutie. My dad placed a church bell down there. It ain’t easy to find, but it’s there. Find it and ring it and you get a free ticket out of there.”

“Until when?” demanded Nix. “Until tomorrow’s games? And then the next day and the next until we’re dead?”

“Nope. This is a real deal, straight up and hand to God. You ring that bell and we pull you out of there and put you on the road. No weapons or rations or none of that stuff, but you walk free.”

That seemed to catch Nix off guard, and she turned sharply to Benny. “Is he telling the truth?”

“I… think so,” Benny said quietly. “What’s he got to lose? If we die, then Preacher Jack proves to the crowd that we’re sinners. If we make it out and they let us go, Preacher Jack and White Bear prove that their word is good. Either way they win.”

Nix chewed her lip. He stepped closer and touched her cheek.

“Hey… are you okay? No, wait-that is the stupidest question ever asked. What I mean is-”

Nix blinked and smiled, and for a moment she was back. The old Nix. Strong and smart and sane. She grabbed Benny and gave him a fierce hug, and in a tiny whisper filled with enormous emotion said, “I don’t want to die down here, Benny.”

“Hey!” yelled White Bear. “When you two lovebirds are done making out, can we get a move on? Lot of people paid good money for this.”

Benny and Nix made the same obscene gesture at exactly the same moment. White Bear laughed out loud, and the audience applauded.

Before Benny released Nix he whispered, “We can do this. Find the bell, get out.”

“Warrior smart,” she said.

“Warrior smart,” he agreed.

“Hey!” yelled Nix. “Aren’t we supposed to have weapons or something?”

Preacher Jack leaned out over the edge. “The Children of Lazarus carry no weapons, and yet they strike with the power of the righteous. How would it be fair to arm you against them?”

“Okay,” said Benny, “then are we going to face two zom-I mean two Children-who are the same size and weight and age as us?”

The smile on Preacher Jack’s face was truly vile. It was filled with everything polluted and corrupt and unnatural that could show through smiling lips and twinkling blue eyes.

“Prayer and true repentance are your true weapons,” he said.

He stepped back, and other faces began filling the edge of the pit. Torches were placed in stands mounted on the rim, and their light turned the maze into a dim eternity of dirty yellow shadows.

Nix suddenly grabbed Benny’s arm, and he turned to see that the shadows were not empty. Things moved down the twisted tunnels. Stiff figures shuffled toward them through the gloom, and then they heard the low, hungry moan of the living dead.

73

CHONG STOOD IN THE SHADOWS AND WATCHED TOM IMURA WALK UP onto the hotel porch. There were two guards there, both of them armed with shotguns. They stiffened as Tom mounted the steps. One guard gestured for him to stop on the top step.

“If you’re here for the games,” he began, “you need to go around-”

Those were his last words. Chong never saw Tom’s hand move. All he saw was a flash of bright steel that seemed to whip one way and then the other, and suddenly both men were falling away from Tom. Blood painted the wall and door of the old hotel.

It was the fastest thing Chong had ever witnessed, and on a deep gut level he knew that it was necessary, but it was also wrong. These men were part of Gameland, they were forcing kids to fight in zombie pits, and yet their lives had ended in the blink of an eye. They were discarded. Tom used chiburi-a kenjutsu wrist-flick technique that whipped all the blood off his sword blade. The sword gleamed as if it had not just been used to take two human lives.

Tom turned as Chong crept up the porch steps. He looked sad. “Sorry you had to see this, Chong.”

“Me too,” said Chong sadly. “Guess we had no choice.”

“Not if we want to save Benny and Nix.”

“This is war,” said Chong. “And these people are monsters.”

Tom put his hand on Chong’s uninjured shoulder. “Listen to me. There are good people too. No matter how bad this gets, kiddo, never forget that. There are more good people than bad.”

Chong said nothing. He absently touched the bite on his other shoulder. “Aren’t you going to quiet them?” he asked.

“No. We need all the help we can get. Let them wander around and confuse things. I’ll take care of them later if there’s time. Right now we have to find Benny, Nix, and Lilah.”

Chong said, “I hope she’s okay.” He was aware that he’d said “she” rather than “them,” but Tom didn’t seem to mind.

“Sorry things didn’t work out with you two,” Tom said. “For what’s it worth… she couldn’t do any better.”

Chong didn’t reply.

Tom quietly opened the front door and stepped inside. And stopped dead. His eyes went wide, and when Chong followed him in, he also stared. On one side of the room, weapons, ammunition, and explosives were stacked from floor to ceiling; on the other were hundreds of smaller, more well-used guns and rifles, each of them hanging on a nail driven into the wall. Small paper tags hung from each trigger guard.

“What is all this?” asked Chong in a hushed voice.

Tom listened for sounds of other people, heard nothing. Then he touched the barrel of one of the new rifles. “Probably scavenged a military base.”

Chong pointed to the older weapons. “And these?”

“They probably collect firearms from everyone who comes to Gameland. They did that before. Keeps people from shooting each other over bets.” He bent and read several of the small tags. “Damn.”

“What’s wrong?”

Tom held out one of the pistols. “Read the tag.”

“Lucille Flax.” Chong looked up, confused. “I don’t understand. Mrs. Flax is my-”

“-math teacher. I know. There’s a shotgun here with Adrian Flax’s name on it. That’s her husband.”

“Wait,” said Chong, “are you trying to say that they’re here? That my math teacher and her husband come to Gameland?”

“How else would you read it?”

“It doesn’t make sense! They’re regular people… Mrs. Flax doesn’t come to places like this. She can’t!”

“Why not? Chong… no matter how often you see someone, you can’t ever say that you really know them. Everyone has secrets, everyone has parts of themselves that they hide from the world.”

“But… Mrs. Flax? She’s so… ordinary.”

“Well, kiddo, it’s not like people walk around with signs saying, ‘Hey, I’m actually a creep!’”

Chong kept shaking his head. “And I was running home to people like that?”

“Remember what I said. There are more good people than bad. Even so… you always have to pay attention.”

Chong sighed. “I guess this shouldn’t hit me so hard. After all Benny, Morgie, and I used to hang around Charlie and the Hammer all the time. We thought they were-”

“-cool. Yep, I know.”

“Still. My math teacher? Jeez… so much for civilized behavior.”

“Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn’t make us civilized, Chong. That’s organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn’t exist at all.”

Then Chong spotted something that made him yelp. He ran across the room to a big urn in which long-handled weapons stood like a bouquet of militant flowers. He slid two items from the urn: a pair of wooden swords.

Tom took the bokkens from him. “Son of a-”

They both froze as they heard a sound from somewhere else in the hotel. A sharp cry. A child’s yelp of pain.

Tom turned and looked at the broad staircase.

“That’s not Benny or Nix. Too young,” gasped Chong in a horrified voice.

“I know,” Tom said bitterly, and headed up the stairs. “Stay behind me and let me handle things.”

They moved up the stairs as quickly as they could, but the building was old and the stairs creaked. Luckily, the laughter from outside was so loud that most of the noise was hidden. However, when they were near the top step, one board creaked louder than all the others. The hallway was empty and poorly lit by lanterns set on shelves along the walls, with doors leading to rooms on both sides. One door stood ajar, and from that there was a sharp call.

“I’ll be right back,” said a man as he stepped into the hall. Chong estimated that he was at least twenty feet from where Tom crouched on the top step. It seemed like a mile. The man looked up and down the hall and was starting to turn back to the room when he saw the figures crouched in the shadows of the stairway.

“Hey,” he said, his voice rising an octave in alarm. It was the last thing he said. Tom surged forward, racing at full speed toward the man. His rush was so sudden that the twenty feet melted into nothing. Steel flashed and red sprayed and then the man was falling. Without a second’s pause, Tom kicked open the door and leaped into the room.

Chong was running now.

There were screams and the rasp of knives being drawn, then a single muffled gunshot. The bullet punched through the plaster wall a foot behind Chong, making him jump. He crouched low and peered inside the room. The sight was one that he knew he would never forget.

It was a big room, a suite. Along the far wall was an old iron radiator, and through its metal structure the guards had run three lines of chains. The chains were connected to iron rings that were bolted and locked around the necks of at least forty children. The oldest was Chong’s age, an Indian girl with one eye puffed shut and a split lip. The youngest was no older than six. All of the kids were bruised, and each one looked absolutely terrified. A smoking pistol lay on the floor with a man’s severed hand still attached to it.

The rest of the room was a slaughterhouse. Five men lay on the floor, or sprawled over furniture, or in a heap on the bed. Three men were still on their feet. Tom was one; the other two were guards. One of the guards was wandering away from the fight, hands clamped to a ruined throat, eyes already fading into emptiness. The remaining guard held a machete in his hands but he, too, was backing away from this man, this thing that had burst into the room in a storm of death. The machete dropped to the floor as he brought his hands up in total surrender.

The entire fight was over already.

Chong stared at Tom. Benny’s brother looked as cold and calm as if he was watering his rosebushes or cutting a slice of pie, even though his face was splashed with fresh blood.

“Is the hallway clear?” Tom asked in a disturbingly serene voice.

Chong stammered an affirmative.

Tom nodded. He extended his sword toward the remaining guard. “Are there any other guards on this floor?”

“N-n-no! Two on the porch and us… I mean me. God… don’t kill me, please… I got kids of my own.”

Tom stepped forward and touched the bloody sword tip to the guard’s cheek. “Do your kids have to fight in the pits?” The curl of his lip was the only clue to the emotion he was keeping in check behind his bland face.

The man flicked a guilty look at the children huddled by the wall.

“These kids… I mean… hey, man, I was just doing what I was told. White Bear and his old man call the shots around here.”

Tom flicked the blood off his sword, careful not to let a single drop go anywhere near the kids, all of whom were locked into a moment of traumatized silence. He resheathed his sword.

“Keys,” he said. The man very carefully dug into his pocket and then gingerly held out a ring of keys. Tom snatched them from him and tossed the ring to Chong. “Get them into the hall.”

While Chong rushed to free the captives, Tom walked forward, making the guard stumble backward until the man’s back hit the wall. Tom stopped, his face an inch from the terrified guard’s. “You know who I am?”

“Yes… oh God… please don’t… I know who you are… don’t…”

Tom bared his teeth. “Where’s my brother?”

74

BENNY PRESSED NIX BACK AGAINST THE WALL AS THE FIRST OF THE DARK shapes moved toward them. The pit they were in was thirty feet across, with large blank sections of wall interspersed with side tunnels. The torches were too high to reach.

“Mattress!” Nix blurted, and they rushed over to the stack of rotten old mattresses and began dragging them toward the tunnel with the zoms.

Benny squatted and upended one and used it to block them from view. “Might not stop them,” he warned. “And my cadaverine’s worn off.”

“Better than nothing,” she grunted as she dragged another one over and pulled it upright. There were only three mattresses, but they nicely blocked half the tunnels. “Maybe it’ll confuse them, slow them down.”

Benny jerked his head toward one of the open tunnels. There was no movement in that one, but torchlight spilled down from another opening around the far bend. Benny pulled Nix inside, and they peered up to see if White Bear or the crowd could see them. The crowd booed and yelled for the dead to go fetch their dinner.

“I think we’re good,” whispered Nix. Immediately she pulled out the tails of her shirt and reached inside her clothes. Benny did the same, and they knelt down and placed several hidden items on the ground. When the guards had locked them in the empty hotel room, they had thought that the two teenagers were helpless; but Tom had spent the last seven months teaching them to never be helpless. He said that in ancient times a samurai warrior was never unarmed, even if he had no sword, knives, or spear.

“All weapons are made,” he once told them. “They’re fabricated from the things we find: wood, metal, rope, leather, stone. Nature always provides, but only a smart warrior can look at what circumstance offers and see the potential.”

While waiting for White Bear to come and take them to the pits, Benny and Nix had looked at what the room had to offer: an old light fixture, crumbling plaster walls, dry laths, a window. Now on the ground in front of them they examined what circumstance had provided. They had several lengths of broken lath-thin, narrow strips of some straight-grained wood; several yards of copper-cored electrical wire; and long pieces of jagged window glass wrapped in torn strips from their shirts-strips whose absence was hidden by their vests. All their pockets were filled with plaster dust.

There was a loud moan from around the bend. One of the zoms had reached the end of the first tunnel. The crowd began cheering. Benny hoped the wall of mattresses would confuse the zoms. Every second mattered to Benny and Nix.

“Hurry,” breathed Nix.

They worked as fast as they could. They placed layers of jagged glass between strips of lath and used the wire to bind it in place. Benny wrapped the wire around and around as tightly as he could. While he did that, Nix used another piece of glass to slash strips from their pant legs and then poured the white plaster powder into pouches made from those strips. When she was done, she and Benny swapped jobs. She took the makeshift glass-bladed hatchets and used more strips of their jeans to bind the laths from end to end, wrapping them the way an ancient weapons maker would wrap the haft of a war ax. Benny took the pouches and tied loose knots in them and began stuffing them in his pockets.

There was a soft thud as one of the mattresses fell into the main pit. A second later a white hand grabbed the corner of the mattress wall, and then a lifeless face moved into view. Black eyed and black mouthed, it moved past the temporary obstruction, then turned toward them and moaned. The sound was answered by other moans behind it.

Benny and Nix snatched up their weapons and began backing away. There was another chorus of moans. This time the sounds were behind them, coming from another tunnel. Benny turned sharply and saw three zombies stagger around the far bend, their dead faces painted yellow by torchlight.

Far above the crowd howled, and a commentator began calling out what was happening to those members of the crowd who couldn’t see. “Looks like we’re coming up on round one, folks,” he yelled in a fast-paced, high-pitched voice. “And oh! Here’s a twist: Somehow our two competitors have managed to sneak in some weapons.”

There were eight zoms shuffling through the main pit now, and more coming out of the side tunnel; but still only three in front of them blocking their easiest line of flight.

“Benny,” Nix whispered, “we have to try.”

“Okay,” he said, but his throat was dry. “Let’s go!”

Hatchets in hand, they raced forward, screaming at the top of their lungs. There were two men and a woman in the first pack. The closest one was a wild-looking man wearing the bullet-pocked remains of a carpet coat. He bared his teeth and lunged at Benny, but just as the white hands were about to close on him, Benny jagged right, parrying the grab with his left hand; then he pivoted and chopped down on the back of the zom’s head with the hatchet. The layered chunks of glass bit deep into the weak area at the base of the monster’s skull. It was a good hit, a solid hit, and for once Benny’s aim was right on the money. The zombie pitched forward.

At the same time, Nix broke left from behind Benny and threw herself into a tight shoulder roll right under the reaching arms of the second zom. She came straight up out of the roll, pivoted on the balls of her feet, and slashed her hatchet across the back of the zom’s knee. It was one of Lilah’s favorite combat tricks. The withered tendon parted like bad string, and the zom started to fall. Nix rammed it with her shoulder, and the creature crashed sideways into the third zom so that the two of them fell.

“Go!” Benny yelled, grabbing the shoulder of her vest and pulling her. One zom was down for good, one was crippled, and one would be able to get back up; but the most important thing was that for a moment the three of them sprawled in the middle of the tunnel, creating a temporary roadblock.

Above them the commentator was fumbling to explain this to the crowd, and his words were met by a mixed chorus of boos and applause.

“Freaks!” snarled Nix.

Benny saved his breath for running. They rounded the bend and skidded to a halt as two more zoms lumbered toward them. A side tunnel broke right, and Nix started to go that way, but Benny didn’t like it. There was no light at all down there.

The closest zom was an enormous fat man in the shreds of a blue hospital gown. He had almost no face left. Nix tried to dodge and kick, hoping to break the man’s knee, but her aim was off and her foot rebounded from the monster’s fat thigh. It swiped at her and she had to leap backward to keep from being caught. Benny tried the same kick attack and hit the knee, but the fat man’s leg wouldn’t break. As it wheeled on this new attacker, the second zom-a prissy-looking woman with gray hair in a bun and her intestines hanging out-threw herself on Nix.

Nix screamed and brought her feet up just in time, catching the zom on the chest and in the gooey mass of its entrails. The zombie scrabbled at Nix’s vest with white fingers and kept darting forward to try to bite.

Benny was too busy to help. The fat zom shambled toward him, its bulk blocking the narrow tunnel. It pawed at him as Benny chopped at it with the hatchet, knocking bloodless chunks of flesh from its face and chest.

With a final scream of wild rage, Nix swung her hatchet and buried the long glass spike in the zombie’s eye socket. The monster reeled back, shuddered, and then fell, tearing the handle out of Nix’s hand.

Benny stopped trying to get away and instead put one foot on the wall and used it to launch himself at the zom, hitting it high on the chest and driving it backward with both hands. The monster’s heels hit the other zom and he toppled backward, with Benny holding onto its shirt all the way to the massive thump! The zombie never stopped grabbing for him, and the creature was immune to the shock of the impact beyond a shudder that rippled through its layers of dead fat. The creature bit down on Benny’s ragged shirtsleeve and began shaking it the way a terrier shakes a rat. Benny hammered at it with the hatchet until he tore through the remaining tendons of the zom’s face and the lower jaw simply fell off.

Benny gaped at the monster for a moment, then threw his weight sideways and went into a sloppy roll that nonetheless brought him to his feet. As he turned he saw Nix working her hatchet back and forth to free it from the dead zom’s eye socket. It came free with a dry glup sound, and then the two of them were running again.

Nix threw him a single, crazy smile of triumph as they ran.

Is she… enjoying this? The impossible thought banged around inside Benny’s head.

The crowd was going crazy up there, but mostly applauding now. People threw stuff down at them-unshelled peanuts, cigarette butts, balled-up betting slips. White Bear was laughing with a deep-chested rumble, thoroughly enjoying the show. As they ran past another opening, Benny shot a quick look up and saw Preacher Jack. He did not know the man well enough to be able to read the subtleties of his expressions, but what Benny saw at that moment required no interpretation. It was a look of pure, malicious joy.

Why? Benny wondered. We’re winning.

When they rounded the next bend, that question was answered in the most horrible possible way. The next corridor was a dead end that ran twenty feet into a blank wall.

There were at least a dozen zoms in there. But that wasn’t what made Benny slam to a halt and stare in abject terror. It wasn’t what pulled a scream from the deepest pit of Nix’s soul.

The thing that plunged the world into absolute nightmare was the huge creature that rose up before them in the dark. A great and terrible zombie. Bigger than any they had faced. It was massive, corded with muscle and covered with scars from countless battles as a human. It wore a leather vest from which the tips of hundreds of sharp steel nails jutted out like a terrible cactus. Iron bands studded with steel points circled its neck and wrists, and a skullcap of gleaming steel covered its head and tapered down the neck to prevent any injury to the brain stem. When its lips curled back, Benny and Nix could see that someone-some madman-had filed its teeth to razor spikes.

Even all that, from its size to its fearsome armament, was not the worst thing about it. It was Nix who spoke the word that made it all beyond horrifying.

She spoke its name.

“Charlie…”

75

OUTSIDE THE HOTEL…

Lilah found a shed filled with old sporting equipment. Deflated balls, old fishing rods, Frisbees. She stared at the junk… and smiled.

Yes, she thought, this is perfect.

Inside the hotel…

“Tom!” Chong called from the hallway. He had just come back from escorting all the captive children into another room.

“I told you to stay with the kids,” barked Tom.

“Um… the kids are fine. Really.” Chong wore a quirky and bemused smile. “But… there’s something else. You’d better come.”

Tom turned from the guard. The man had collapsed into a weeping, cringing pile, and looking at him disgusted Tom. He jabbed the guard with a toe. “Stay!”

The man nodded and held his hands up, palms out.

Tom crossed to the door and stepped out into the hall. His hand flashed toward his sword, and a war cry almost tore itself from his throat. Then he froze in total shock.

The hall was full of people. All of them were heavily armed. Tom’s mouth hung open. One of the people reached out a hand and gently pushed on Tom’s chin to close his mouth.

“You’re going to catch flies with that,” said Sally Two-Knives with a wicked grin.

Tom looked around, seeing faces that could not be here. “I don’t-I mean-”

“You owe me two ration dollars,” said Fluffy McTeague to Basher. “I told you he wouldn’t know what to say.”

Farther down the hall, J-Dog and Dr. Skillz were removing the dog collars from the kids. They looked up and grinned.

“Kahuna!” said J-Dog.

“Yo, brah!” said Dr. Skillz.

“How are you here?” exclaimed Tom.

Sally and Solomon filled him in on the discussion they’d had in the woods. “We started gathering everyone up,” said Solomon, shaking Tom’s hand. “You’re a popular guy, brother. Everybody’s either looking to warn you or looking to trade you to White Bear for serious cash money.”

“I saw the bounty sheet. Not just me… they want my brother and his friends. Dead or alive.”

“Worth more alive,” said Hector Mexico. “Dead? Eh, not so much.”

“We don’t want you to leave, boss. End of an era,” said Basher. “No way we were going to let White Bear write the last chapter of Fast Tommy’s story.”

Tom frowned. “So… this is a rescue party?”

“Par-teeee!” chanted J-Dog and Dr. Skillz.

“But this isn’t even your fight.”

Solomon Jones answered that. “It’s always been our fight, Tom. And with you gone-dead or gone east-then it’s going to be our war.”

Tom shook his head.

“Son,” Solomon said with a smile, “don’t you know when the universe cuts you a break?”

“Not lately, no.”

“Well, get used to it, ’cause the cavalry has arrived.”

“Only downside,” said Sally, “is that there are twenty of us and about four hundred of them. And I’m not going to be much good in a fight once I run out of bullets.”

Now it was Tom’s turn to smile. “Are you kidding? Didn’t you guys see what was in the front room?”

Basher shook his head. “No, we climbed in through a ground-floor guest bedroom all ninja-like. Snuck up the back stairs.”

“Then you may be the cavalry,” said Tom, “but I’m Santa Claus. Let’s go downstairs and open some presents.”

76

CHARLIE PINK-EYE LOOMED IN FRONT OF BENNY AND NIX. SIX FEET SIX inches of him. One eye was a milky pink, the other one-once as blue as his father’s-was black and dead. His skin, once the creamy white of an albino, had turned the color of a mushroom: gray-white and blotched with fungus and decay. Flies buzzed around him, and maggots wriggled through flaps of his dead flesh. He snarled and took a lumbering step forward. And now Benny understood what he had seen out in the field by the way station. It hadn’t been Charlie leading an attack of zoms… Charlie had been a zom himself, part of a swarm led there by Preacher Jack. Led there… and led away before the fire could consume him. When Benny had seen Charlie smile, it wasn’t a smile at all but the snarl of a hungry zombie.

It was grotesque. It was bad enough that Charlie had not fallen a thousand feet to smash himself to ruin at the base of the mountain. It was worse still that he had become one of the monsters that he and the Motor City Hammer used to hunt. What was far, far worse was that Charlie’s own father and brother had kept him alive as a zom, armored him like a gladiator, and put him down here in the shadows to be their pet monster. Their Angel of Death for a new and corrupt Eden. Even though Benny understood few of the mysteries of any religion, he knew with perfect clarity that this was a sin that could never be forgiven. This was blasphemy.

“Nix,” Benny whispered, “run!”

But Nix did not run. She couldn’t. She was rooted to the spot, staring with horror at a nightmare monster version of the thing that had murdered her mother.

“Charlie,” Nix murmured again. Benny looked at her, and his heart sank to see that the madness that had swirled in her eyes now owned her. This was what she had feared. Charlie, the monster who had murdered her mother. Charlie, alive or undead, but still moving through her world. Still hunting her. On some level Nix had come to believe that this would happen. This very thing.

When Benny had struck Charlie on the ridge and sent him tumbling into the darkness, Nix had not been a part of it. Charlie had overpowered her and Lilah; and it was a combination of dumb luck and warrior rage that had guided Benny’s hand as he swung the Motor City Hammer’s iron club. Charlie had fallen, but they hadn’t found his body. He was never quieted. For Nix, there was no closure. In some twisted way Charlie had escaped. And that had broken something inside Nix’s head. Maybe in her soul, as well. And with a flash of insight Benny realized that Nix’s desire to leave Mountainside was as much about running away from the possibility of facing Charlie, alive or dead, as it was about finding a new life.

Charlie Pink-eye took a lumbering step toward them. Benny snarled and pushed Nix back.

“God…” Nix’s voice was small and fragile.

Benny let out a bellow of fury and swung his hatchet, trying for a killing shot through the eye socket. Instead the glass blade dug into the front of Charlie’s cheek, punching through the sinus. The zoms in the dead-end tunnel moaned with raw hunger and shuffled forward, but Charlie’s massive body blocked the way. With a feral growl Charlie lashed out and knocked Benny sideways into the wall. The glass blade of the hatchet snapped, and the handle fell from Benny’s fingers. The blow was so fast and strong that for an insane moment Benny wondered if Charlie was somehow still alive. It was impossible, though. No… no, this thing was dead. Still… it was fast. Too fast. And so powerful!

Benny slid to the floor. Charlie bent down, grabbed Benny’s vest, and pulled him off the floor. Razor teeth gleamed like daggers in the torchlight. As Charlie pulled him close, Benny could see the gleaming tips of the nails that covered the monster’s body like a porcupine. Benny raised a knee and managed to get the flat of his shoe against the zom’s lower stomach-the only area not covered by the nail vest. He kicked out, trying to squirm out of the grip with leverage, aiming blows to dislocate the jaw or break the neck. He tried every trick of combat and physics Tom had taught him. The nail heads scratched him, and soon Benny was bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts. Then two dozen. Blood flew from the injuries, and though none of them were serious, the smell of fresh blood in the air seemed to drive Charlie and the other zombies wild. They snarled and moaned and bit the air.

Charlie’s big head darted forward, and his razor teeth bit down with devastating force-but not on Benny’s flesh.

Suddenly Nix was there, squeezing in between Benny and the monster, and she rammed her hatchet up into its mouth. The rows of filed teeth chomped down on the weapon and crunched on glass and wood. Nail tips pressed into Nix’s vest. The canvas was sturdy, but it wasn’t designed for this kind of protection. Not even a carpet coat would work if she didn’t get out of there soon.

Charlie flung Benny away and grabbed Nix instead. Benny crashed to the ground again. Pain exploded in his shoulder, numbing him all the way to his fingertips. The other zoms tried to reach past Charlie to get to Nix. Wax-white hands poked through the crooks of Charlie’s elbows and reached over his shoulders and around his sides, clawing at Nix’s vest and hair. In their attempts to grab her, they were also pulling her into the nail vest.

Benny hauled himself to his feet, saw his broken hatchet, dove for it, and came up with the splintered wood in his right hand. Nix still had her hatchet buried in Charlie’s mouth, and he was actually trying to chew his way through it to get to her. Benny rushed to Nix and looped his bad left arm around her waist while he chopped and pounded at the white hands with the hatchet handle. He broke fingers and wrists and some of the white hands flopped away, useless to their owners. One creature had a solid handful of Nix’s hair, and Benny could not shatter its wrist, so he did the only other thing he could do: He used the remaining bits of glass still tied to the hatchet and sawed through her hair. She sagged forward, but Charlie still had her.

Benny rammed the sharp end of his hatchet handle up under Charlie’s chin. He drove it with such force that it punched through into the zom’s mouth and pinned his jaws shut. At least for the moment. Immediately, Nix brought her knees up and aimed her feet just below the nail vest, then kicked out with all her force as Benny pulled with all of his. They burst free from Charlie’s grasp and fell backward; Benny hit the ground first, and Nix landed hard on top of him, driving most of the air from his lungs.

For the moment Charlie ignored them and clawed at the wooden spike that sealed his jaws shut. The other zoms pushed forward to get past him.

“Dust!” Benny croaked, and Nix tore a pouch of plaster dust from her vest and flung it at them. The dust exploded into a white cloud that swirled thickly around the zoms.

Benny didn’t know if the powder would do anything more than distract them for a moment. They had thought to use it against Digger and Heap, but for now it gave them a slender doorway of time. Nix grabbed Benny’s wrists and hauled him to his feet, slapped his shoulders to spin him, and then shoved him forward, keeping her hands on his back as he stumbled away from the zoms.

“Nix-are you okay?”

She gave him a wild-eyed stare. “I need to kill him,” she answered in a fierce whisper.

“I know,” he said, though they both knew that it was virtually impossible, and it was suicide to try. “Come on, let’s go.”

During this brief but awful fight they had been only dimly aware of the shouts and laughter from above. There were plenty of boos now. Defeating Charlie, however briefly, seemed to have turned the crowd against them. That or maybe the sheep were too afraid of Preacher Jack and White Bear to show any other reaction.

White Bear bent down into one of the pit openings, grinning like a ghoul. “Run as fast as you want, but there’s no way out.”

Nix pivoted and flung one of the pouches at him. White Bear got his hand up to block it, but the pouch flapped open and he was showered with white plaster dust. He reeled back, coughing and gagging and cursing. There was a quick ripple of surprised laughter, but it died down immediately as White Bear wheeled on Benny and Nix with a murderous glare.

They ran from under the pit opening, vanishing into the shadows. They heard zoms ahead of them, and they realized they were running back toward the main pit. They scrambled into a turn. Behind them Charlie Pink-eye was shambling toward them, the spike of wood no longer pinning his jaws shut.

That left the dark side tunnel. “No lights,” Benny said.

Nix chewed her lip, looking up and down the corridor. The front of her vest was dotted with drops of blood from where the tips of the nails had cut through her clothes and into her skin. Pain twisted her mouth as she said, “No choice.”

They ran into the darkness. Above them the crowd became suddenly silent.

“God!” panted Nix. “What now?”

77

PREACHER JACK STOOD NEXT TO WHITE BEAR, BOTH OF THEM SCOWLING down into the pits. “This is taking too long,” said the old man.

“Kids are pretty good,” replied White Bear. “I’m actually starting to enjoy this.”

Preacher Jack snarled, “They should be dead by now.”

“Lighten up, Dad… Charlie’s got their number. Those kids are Happy Meals, you’ll see.”

Preacher Jack leaned closer still. “You listen to me, boy, if they find that bell and we have to let them go, then-”

White Bear laughed deep in his chest. “Dad, for a man of faith you could use some more for your own kin. I got everything under control, and…”

His words trickled down and stopped as he realized that the crowd had suddenly fallen silent. The people weren’t looking into the Pits of Judgment. They were staring in shock at the back of the hotel. Preacher Jack and White Bear whipped their heads around to see a figure standing on the porch. He had a pistol in a belt holster and a long Japanese sword slung over his back.

“Imura,” murmured Preacher Jack; then he threw back his head and bellowed the name. It echoed all around the arena. “Imura!”

Beside him, White Bear grinned like a happy ghoul. He stepped forward and pitched his voice for all to hear. “Well, ain’t this just a treat? Come to watch the fun and games, Tom?” He laughed, but only the guards laughed with him. The people in the bleachers shifted in shocked and uncomfortable silence. Preacher Jack held up his hand, and every face turned toward him.

“Why am I here?” answered Tom with a faint smile. He spoke loud enough for the crowd to hear him. He held out a copy of the bounty sheet and showed it to everyone. “It’s pretty clear that you wanted me here.”

“That’s true enough,” answered Preacher Jack. “You and your little pack of sinners and murderers.”

“By that you mean my brother, Benny? And Nix Riley, Louis Chong, and Lilah?”

“Sinners all.” Preacher Jack nodded.

“Where are they, Matthias?” Tom demanded.

“Oh,” said Preacher Jack, not looking at the pits, “they’re waiting for their chance at redemption.”

Tom crumpled up the bounty sheet and dropped it off the porch into the dust. “This is between you and me. Leave the kids out of it.”

The preacher spat on the ground. “This is between your family and mine. You killed two of my sons and my grandson. Don’t pretend you don’t understand that, Tom Imura. It was you who made it about families. You owe me a blood debt.”

Tom ignored the jeering catcalls of the guards and the nervous buzz of the crowd. He locked eyes with Preacher Jack. “Charlie dealt the cards, Matthias, don’t you pretend he didn’t. He ran these hills like they were his personal kingdom, and he didn’t care who got hurt as long as he got what he wanted. He was a parasite, a thief, a murderer, and an abuser of children.”

“You don’t dare-,” began White Bear, but his father touched his arm.

“Let the man have his say. Then we’ll see what justice wants from this moment.”

As he said it, he let his eyes flick toward the pits.

Down below, completely hidden in the shadows, Benny and Nix stared upward as if they could see what was happening. The voices were muffled. Benny’s heart beat like a drum, and in the dark Nix grabbed his hand to give it a powerful squeeze.

“Nix,” Benny breathed, “is that Tom?”

Tom walked to the edge of the porch so everyone could see him. “Years ago Charlie and his thugs tried to raid Sunset Hollow. That was my home, my family’s home. I marked the place as off-limits. Everyone respected that except Charlie. He never respected anything… but things didn’t work out so well for him. I gave him and his men a chance to walk away. They didn’t take it. Later, when it was just Charlie kneeling in the dirt begging for his life, I let him live because he swore to me-swore to God above-that he’d change his ways, that he wouldn’t do this sort of thing again. That he wouldn’t hurt people again. I let him live, Matthias. I showed him mercy, but as soon as he slunk away he started back up worse than ever.”

“I’ve heard that story before,” said Preacher Jack. “It was a lie then and it’s a lie now. No one ever beat Charlie in a fair fight.”

Tom ignored that. “Last year Charlie opened a new Gameland, and he went hunting for the one person who might tell me where it was. Lilah. The Lost Girl. To find her he broke into Jessie Riley’s house. He beat that good woman to death and kidnapped her daughter, Nix. You know what happened then.”

“Yes, I know. You laid false charges on Charlie, then you and yours went out and ambushed him in the woods and killed him when he wasn’t looking.”

“False charges? I was there, Matthias. I held Jessie Riley in my arms when she died. I know what happened. Charlie asked for what he got, and my only regret is that it wasn’t from my own hand.”

“Yes… that hell-spawn brother of yours, that devil’s imp, managed some trickster ambush and killed my firstborn son.”

The crowd buzz intensified. There were dozens of versions of the battle at Charlie’s camp, and small arguments broke out as facts and suppositions were thrown out.

White Bear spun around and roared, “SHUT UP!” His bellow echoed off the walls of the Wawona Hotel. The crowd cowered into silence.

Preacher Jack took a threatening step toward Tom. “You had your say, such as it was. Now hear me on this, Tom Imura. Your time is over. Your reign of corruption, bullying, terrorism, and murder is done. I call a blood debt on you and yours, and like a farmer who burns a whole field to kill an encroaching blight, I will burn the name of Imura from this world. Your sins against my family are uncountable, and so I curse you and yours for all generations.” As he spoke he turned in a slow circle to likewise address the shocked and silent crowd. “Anyone who stands with you falls with you. So say I and so say mine.”

Silence owned the moment except for the constant low moans of the dead strapped to the chairs under the circus tent.

Down in the Pits of Judgment, Benny whispered, “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” said Nix. “We have to let Tom know we’re here!”

Behind them the shadows were filled with hungry moans.

“Don’t make a sound,” Benny whispered. Calling out to Tom was a good plan, but not at the moment. Not unless Tom was right there with a ladder ready to let them climb out, and from what Benny heard, that wasn’t the case. If they called to him now, it might be a fatal distraction for Tom.

Benny and Nix felt their way along the walls of the tunnel. It was absolutely pitch black. Even the torchlight from the main corridor faded and died within a few yards. They fought to keep their breathing as silent as possible, listening for the scuff of a shuffling dead foot or the soft moan of hunger. Except for the powder, they had no weapons left, and Charlie was still out there along with at least fifteen zombies. Maybe more. Time was running out.

Tom Imura sighed. “I tried,” he said, shaking his head. He reached over his shoulder and slowly drew his sword. All around the arena the guards, already alert, raised their weapons, edged forward, and pointed guns at Tom’s heart. He ignored them as he straightened his arm and pointed the tip of his sword at Preacher Jack and White Bear. Firelight gleamed along the smooth steel and sparkled on the wicked edge. “Hear me on this,” Tom said, his voice clear and strong. “You’ve spoken your piece and you’ve laid your curse, Matthias. Now hear mine. Not a curse… but a promise. I speak to everyone here, so listen to what I have to say.” He paused and surveyed the crowd. “Walk away,” he said. “Lay down your weapons, throw away your betting slips, and walk away. Gameland is closed. Walk away.”

White Bear stared at him. “Says who?”

“Says the law.”

“This is the Ruin! There is no law.”

Tom’s sword pointed at him, the tip as unwavering as if Tom was a statue made of steel. His eyes were fixed on White Bear. “There is now.”

Preacher Jack snorted. “You have no right. You have no power. The Matthias clan is the only power in the Ruin… now and forever.”

“Walk away,” Tom said again, turning now to the crowd. “Last chance. Everyone here gets a pass if you walk away. Everyone except Preacher Jack and White Bear. To use their words: If you stand with them, you fall with them. Walk away.”

“You’re a fool and a madman,” declared White Bear. “You come here alone and make some kind of brainless grandstand play.” He gestured to one of his guards, a beefy man who had been a running back for the Oilers before First Night. “Take that stupid sword away from him and drag his ass over here.”

The guard racked the slide on his pump shotgun and grinned. “Absolutely, boss.”

Tom lowered his sword and raised his empty left hand, pointing his index finger like a gun at the approaching guard. He raised his thumb as if it was a pistol’s hammer.

“Last chance,” he said to the man.

“You’re freaking crazy, Imura,” said the guard. “You always were.”

“Your call.” Tom dropped his thumb and said, “Bang.”

There was a sharp crack and the guard was plucked off the ground and flung backward. He landed on his back, gasping, eyes wide, blood pumping from a dime-size hole in the center of his chest. Tom blew across the tip of his finger as if he had really shot the man. The crowd sat stunned, unsure how to even react. Even Preacher Jack and White Bear were frozen in place.

“I warned you,” Tom said, his smile gone now, his voice suddenly harsh and bitter. “You should have listened.”

And then the killing began.

78

“BENNY!” CALLED NIX SUDDENLY. SHE SPOKE IN A WHISPER, BUT IT seemed dangerously loud. “I think I found something.”

“What is it?” he said, fumbling blindly in the dark to try and cross to her side of the tunnel. Then he heard her cry out in revulsion at the same moment that he caught the smell. The stink of rotting flesh. They had worn cadaverine so long that they had become used to it, but their cadaverine was gone and this stink had not come from a bottle. “Nix…?”

She pulled him down to where she knelt and pressed something hard and round into his hand. Benny knew at once what it was. A bone. He felt around and discovered other bones. Bones that had been completely cleaned of flesh, and some that the zoms had not finished stripping.

“God!” Benny said, and almost dropped it.

“Benny,” Nix whispered, her lips right against his ear. “It’s heavy…”

He grunted as he got her meaning, but it still disgusted him. He felt the shape and length of the bone. A heavy thigh bone. About eighteen inches long, with bulbed heads at both ends; one end much bigger where it hinged into the hip. He weighed it in his hand.

There was an awful sound behind them. They had made too much noise. The zoms were coming.

“Hurry!” Benny said, and they clattered among the bones and found another thigh bone for him and a pair of stout shinbones for Nix. The darkness was filled with moans and the shuffle of slow feet. Time was up.

“At least we’ll go out fighting,” Benny said.

Nix jabbed him sharply with the bone. “Don’t give me a hero speech, Benny Imura. I want to get out of this.”

Even though she couldn’t see it, Benny grinned in the dark. Crazy, brave, unpredictable, wonderful Nix Riley. He loved her so much that he wanted to shout. So he did shout. He gave a huge, wild war whoop as he raised his grisly weapons and charged down the tunnel to meet the living dead. Nix gave a weird, high, ululating cry and followed him.

The arena guards bellowed in fury and raced toward Tom.

“NOW!” bellowed Tom, and gunfire erupted from four windows in the hotel, and the front rank of guards went down in a bloody tangle. Hector Mexico leaned out of a second-floor window and lobbed a pair of fragmentation grenades into the stands. The crowd started to scatter, but some were too slow. The explosions were enormous. Then there was a chorus of screams from the guards over by the tent, and immediately the screams were drowned out by the moans of the living dead as dozens of zoms swarmed over them. The crowd did not immediately understand what was happening even as the dead shambled out into the arena; then they saw the two men in carpet coats and football helmets hacking and slashing at the cloth strips that held the zoms in their chairs. The men were laughing as they worked.

Then the back doors of the hotel burst open, and Solomon Jones led the team of free and unaffiliated bounty hunters out into the fray. Magic Mike, LaDonna Willis and her twin sons, Vegas Pete, the hulking Fluffy McTeague in his pink carpet coat, Basher with his baseball bats, and all the rest.

Tom leaped from the porch and slammed into the stalled and shocked guards, his sword mirror-bright for a moment longer-and then it was laced with red.

Lilah stared in shock from the top of the left-hand bleachers.

Tom!

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Tom Imura, against all odds, leading a charge of armed fighters against Preacher Jack and the crowds at Gameland. It was insane. It was impossible. And yet it was real.

She stared past the panicked spectators. She had all the items she had taken from the sports shed, along with a bucket of pitch and a lantern. Wasting no time, Lilah used a fishing hook on a line to snag a deflated soccer ball, dipped it in the pitch bucket, set it ablaze with the lantern, and hurled it far over the crowd. It splatted against the back of one of the guards, who was immediately wreathed in yellow and orange flames. The man’s shrieks rose into the air louder than any other sound. Immediately the row of spectators in front of Lilah spun around, their faces showing a mixture of fear, shock, and anger.

Lilah gave them a wicked smile as she pelted them with burning balls. The screams of the spectators drowned out those coming from below, and now the entire set of bleachers was in full panic. Was Chong here too? She looked around but could not see him. Lilah bared her teeth in a feral grin, lit another ball, and threw it.

Sally Two-Knives was in no condition for hand-to-hand combat, but she could pull a trigger. She stared down the barrel of an army sniper rifle, laid the crosshairs on one of the Gameland guards, squeezed the trigger, and grinned like a harpy.

Crack! The kick of the gun hurt her, but she took that pain and turned it to bitter ice inside her heart. Sally had lost her children to the zoms during First Night. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, and every night she dreamed about what it must have been like for April and Toby as the monsters came for them. The people here made the horrors of the zombie plague into a game. They forced children to fight for their lives. Children.

She squeezed the trigger again. Crack! There was no trace of remorse in her eyes. Not so much as a flicker. The heavy kick of the gun hurt, but she used that pain to fuel her rage. Sally found another target and fired. Crack. And another.

Benny and Nix crashed into the first of the zoms. It was too small to be Charlie Pink-eye, which meant that it didn’t have a nail vest or an armored skullcap. Benny rebounded from it and swung first one thigh bone and then the other at his own head height. There was a light crack as the first club hit something-an outstretched hand, perhaps-and then a much heavier CRACK as the second one slammed into something too solid to be a head. A shoulder? Benny raised both clubs and brought them down above the shoulder level, and there was a wet crunch. Then the zom was falling, brushing past Benny as it collapsed.

“On your left,” Nix said from that side, and he heard the whoosh and crunch of her clubs. Bone-club met lifeless skin and shattered the undead bones beneath it. Fighting wild and blind, they pushed forward, taking turns to smash one-two, one-two, breaking arms and wrists and fingers in order to reach skulls and necks. Benny’s arms ached, particularly his bruised left arm, but he kept going, kept swinging. Nix was growling like a hunting cat, grunting with each hit.

Then there was light! Not the reflected glow of the torches at the edges of the pit, but huge yellow light. A ball of fire came bounding into the tunnel. Literally a ball of fire. Benny saw that it was some old sports ball, a cricket ball or a softball, that burned with intense flames as it rolled. Benny could smell smoke and the stink of pitch.

The flames illuminated the T juncture of the tunnels, and Benny’s heart sank as he saw that there were zombies in every direction. At least twenty of them, and five rows back on his left was the towering form of Charlie Pink-eye.

A second flaming ball dropped through the ceiling twenty yards down, and it landed on the back of a zombie in a business suit. The creature caught fire almost at once.

Benny shot Nix a quick look. Was this some new twist on the game? Did Preacher Jack want to burn them or kill them with smoke if the zoms couldn’t do the trick? Or was Tom trying to help in some way they didn’t understand? Either way it didn’t matter; there was no way to fight past all the dead who clogged the tunnels.

White Bear shoved his father out of the way as Magic Mike charged at him, firing shot after shot from a nine-millimeter pistol. A round plucked at the bearskin cloak, and White Bear grabbed a mortally wounded spectator and shoved him in the direction of the shooter. Magic Mike tried to dodge, but the startled spectator slammed into him and then both went down.

White Bear leaped over the dying man and landed hard atop Magic Mike. He grabbed the bounty hunter’s hair and chin and snapped his neck with a vicious twist. He was grinning as he heard the bones break.

Chong crouched inside the hotel, safe behind the bricks of the rear entrance foyer. He wanted to see Nix, Benny, and Lilah emerge safe from the pits or wherever they were, but he had no desire at all to join this fight. He wanted to be back in Mountainside, safe in his room with his stacks of books. Or maybe fishing in the creek with Morgie.

Lilah.

You’re a town boy, she had said back on the road. You’re useless out here.

There was a flash, and Chong watched as fireballs suddenly arced over the field and dropped into the sea of battle on the field. At first he was alarmed, thinking that this was another trick of White Bear; but then he saw the figure that rose above the row of burning corpses at the top of the bleachers. A magical figure out of some ancient myth. Gorgeous, long-limbed, incredibly lovely, and totally alien.

Lilah!

There was a sudden ripple of gunfire-the harsh chatter of an automatic rifle and the single pops of handguns-and then Chong saw the Lost Girl spin away, the last flaming ball dropping from her hands as she plummeted limply away into the darkness.

Chong screamed her name. “Lilah!”

“No…,” he whispered a moment later. They had just shot her. He had just watched her die. Chong grabbed his bokken and ran screaming into the madness.

Tom began cutting his way through the crowd toward White Bear. He wanted that man. And his psychotic father. Tom wanted to destroy the Matthias plague for good. His sword was like a living thing in his hand, moving without conscious thought. A man rushed at him with an ax, and suddenly the man was falling, his face gone. Another man raised a pistol, but hand and pistol suddenly flew away amid a piercing shriek. Three zoms came at him-two shambling slowly and one moving with unnatural speed. Then they were gone, falling in pieces. The sword sculpted a crooked path through the melee and nothing, alive or dead, could stand before him.

Four guards rushed up to shield Preacher Jack with their own bodies, and in a tight knot they ran from the center of the arena to the protection of a far corner. There was a crack, and one of the guards fell, half his face shot away. “Go… GO!” growled Preacher Jack, and the others did not hesitate or falter. They ran. Crack and another went down, his thigh pumping blood. Then they were in a cleft formed by the edge of the bleachers and a wagon. There was no angle for gunfire from the hotel.

Preacher Jack breathed in and out through his nose like a furious dragon. He was seeing everything he and his sons had built being torn down-again. By Tom Imura-again!

He wanted Tom dead so badly it was like acid in his throat. Preacher Jack grabbed the shoulder of his closest guard and spun him toward the aluminum siding that covered the wagon.

“Tear this off,” he ordered. The guards set to work to open a doorway out of the kill zone.

It was madness. Zombies staggered out from the circus tent. They had no mind, no loyalties, no ability to discern Preacher Jack’s enemies from his allies. They attacked everyone. J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, both of them drenched in the last of their personal stock of cadaverine, cut the dead free-all of them, Preacher Jack’s entire congregation.

As the zoms shambled out into the arena, J-Dog wiped sweat out of his eyes. “Dude, that old preacher’s gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissed.”

“Totally, brah,” agreed Dr. Skillz. He bent and picked up two objects Tom had given him. A pair of bokkens. “Let’s boogie!”

They ran toward the pits.

As he ran, Chong smashed and struck and bashed and broke, and even big guards fell to his assault. Before that moment, before Lilah fell, Chong had never hurt another person or raised his hand in anger to anyone but a zom. Now he saw faces break as he swung his sword; he felt arms shatter.

He knew that they would kill him. There was no way out of this except through death’s doorway, but he didn’t care. He was already bitten. But he had seen Lilah die… he had nothing left to lose. So Chong ran forward into his last moment, accepting death because it had already accepted him, wanting to follow Lilah down into the darkness so that she would never again be lost and alone.

On the other side of the hotel, Carrie Singleton and Foxhound Jeffries, respectively the youngest and the oldest of the bounty hunters who had come with Sally and Solomon, led a string of children into the woods at a fast run. Carrie had a crossbow and picked out a path that made maximum use of the trees and hedges to hide their escape. Foxhound had cross-belts of throwing knives. Once upon a time he had been a circus performer, a knife thrower who could put a blade through a playing card tossed into the air. Twice guards tried to stop them; each time they learned the error of that choice.

“What’s going on up there?” Benny demanded. Everything above them was a single wave of confused noise: shrieks and gunfire and the clash of steel on steel. “How could Tom be doing all this?”

Before Nix could say anything there was a different cry-a weird whoop of what sounded like pure joy-and then a figure dropped down through the pit opening. Tall, thin, wearing a football helmet and a carpet coat covered in pieces of license plates. He landed feetfirst on the shoulders of a zom, and the impact snapped the creature almost in two. He clutched three items in his hands: a spear that was almost identical to Lilah’s, and two curved wooden swords. The man pivoted and grinned at Benny.

“Hey! Little samurai dudes!” shouted Dr. Skillz.

“How…?” demanded Nix.

“Where…,” began Benny.

Dr. Skillz tossed one of the swords to him. He dropped the thighbone and caught it. Nix dropped her shinbone and caught the other.

“Surf’s up!” yelled the bounty hunter as he swung his broad-bladed spear over their heads. He spun in place like a dancer, and suddenly two zoms were falling sideways while their heads fell in the opposite direction.

A thousand questions burned on Benny’s tongue, but more zoms closed in and there was no time to do anything but fight.

Two of Solomon’s friends, Vegas Pete and Little Bigg, trade guards from Haven, saw Preacher Jack and his men go running for cover behind the corner of the bleachers.

“Let’s get that son of a hound,” grumbled Bigg.

“Go for it,” agreed Pete, and they ran a zigzag across the field, smashing zoms out of the way and shoving panicked spectators into the open pits. Pete fired a Winchester rifle from the hip, and Little swung an old-fashioned cavalry saber he’d long ago scavenged from a museum. Guards and spectators fell before them. Preacher Jack’s two remaining guards rushed them. Vegas Pete missed with his last shot and broke the rifle over one guard’s head. The second guard snatched up a pitchfork and ran at Little Bigg, but Little parried the thrust and ran the man through.

That left Preacher Jack stuck in the corner with the two trade guards grinning at him.

“Now ain’t this a pickle?” asked Preacher Jack mildly. He should have been cowering. He should have been looking desperately for a way out. He was fifteen years older than these men, and where they were packed with muscle, he was a stick figure.

“Call off your goons, old man,” said Vegas Pete, “and you might walk out of this with a whole skin.”

“Well,” said Little Bigg as he pulled his saber free, “I wouldn’t say a whole skin.”

Preacher Jack’s lips twitched and writhed.

“Glad you think this is funny,” said Pete, “’cause we’re gonna-”

Preacher Jack kicked Pete under the kneecap and simultaneously chopped him across the throat with the stiffened edge of his hand. There was a sound like an eggshell cracking and Pete was backpedaling, fingers clawing at his throat as he tried to drag in air. His face turned red and then purple and he fell.

Little Bigg wasted no time gaping. He slashed a killing blow at Preacher Jack, but the old man leaped forward inside the swing. He head-butted Little, punched him in the chest and bicep, and snatched the saber out of his hand. There was a flash of silver and then Little Bigg was falling, his eyes wide with total incomprehension. It was all over in three seconds.

“Amateurs,” sneered Preacher Jack. He laid the saber within easy reach on the bleachers and set to work pulling at the aluminum siding.

Chong reached the bleachers where he had seen Lilah fall. He swore to himself that he would defend her body until this was over, and then-Oh God, he thought, then what?

He would have to quiet her. But… could he do it? The thought of it made him crazier still. He slashed at the legs of a man who stood on the bleachers trying to reload a pistol. The man fell, and Chong thrust the blunt point of the sword into a guard’s groin. The guard screamed and doubled over, and Chong knocked him flying into a line of five zoms. The creatures were already covered with blood, and two of them had been spectators themselves less than three minutes ago.

Chong kept swinging and swinging. At one point he found himself fighting almost side by side with Solomon Jones. The bounty hunter had a machete in each hand, and they whirled like windmill blades. Zoms and humans fell around him like harvested wheat.

“Get to cover, kid!” yelled Solomon, but Chong ignored him, and then a surge of battle swept him and Solomon apart.

“Lilah,” Chong said, mouthing her name like a battle chant. “Lilah!”

Benny and Nix fought back-to-back, swinging their swords at legs and necks and heads. Dr. Skillz worked the other tunnel, and despite the young bounty hunter’s laid-back persona, he fought with the speed and precision of an experienced killer. He shattered bone with the reinforced butt of the spear and cut off hands and heads with the blade.

The burning zombie had crumpled to the ground, but not before two others bumped into it and caught fire. Heat and smoke were becoming a real problem.

“We have to get out of here!” Benny yelled, then broke into a fit of coughing.

“Waiting for a ride,” Dr. Skillz shouted back.

“What?”

As if in answer, a length of knotted rope flopped over the edge of the pit, and J-Dog poked his head in. “Um… dudes? Stop screwing around. It’s getting gnarly out here.” Then he was gone; a second later someone screamed, and one of White Bear’s guards dropped bonelessly into the pit.

“You climb,” Dr. Skillz yelled. “I’ll hold ’em off!”

Benny backed away from the press of zoms. There were four of them between him and Charlie. “Nix, c’mon!”

She half turned to look at the rope, but then she shook her head. With renewed fury she wheeled back and kept hammering at the zoms.

“What are you doing?” Benny demanded, but then he understood. He had been defending himself against the zoms, but Nix had been attacking them, chopping at them to fight her way toward Charlie. “God! Nix-don’t!”

Nix rammed a zom in the throat and knocked it down with a foot-sweep.

“Hey! Kids!” growled Dr. Skillz. “The rope… not a freakin’ request here!”

Benny took and grabbed the dangling rope, but Nix was still cutting her way toward Charlie. Four zoms stood in her way now, and Charlie was clawing at them to get to her.

“I’m going to regret this,” muttered Benny, and he flung the rope toward Dr. Skillz.

“What the hell?” the bounty hunter demanded, but then two zoms rushed him and he had no time for anything except fighting.

Benny jumped over a fallen zom to where Nix fought. As she cut down another zombie, one of them lunged for her blind side. Benny swung his bokken like a baseball bat inches above Nix’s head and hit the zom across the face. The blow snapped its head back, and the creature fell against Charlie with such force that its head and back struck the vest of nails and drove Charlie back a full step.

Nix finished another zom with the same ruthless precision. Her face was flushed with exertion and panic and rage, and her freckles stood out like a brown constellation on her skin. Charlie lumbered forward, his white hands barely two yards from Nix.

The remaining zom was nearly as tall as Charlie but only half as wide. He had a face like a quiet schoolteacher, but when he snarled, his jagged yellow teeth said all that needed to be said about the dreadful gulf between what he had been in life and what he had become in death.

Benny mouthed the word “Sorry” as he swung his sword. The blade hit the man on the crown of the head, and the zom instantly collapsed to its knees. Benny raised his arms to swing again, but the zom fell limply against him, and they both toppled back.

In the few seconds before Benny could crawl out from beneath the corpse, he witnessed something that was as awe-inspiring and magnificent as it was heartbreaking and terrifying. Nix Riley stood in front of Charlie Pink-eye. He was six and a half feet tall; she was barely five feet. He weighed three hundred pounds; she was less than a third of that. He was covered in spikes and armor, and he wore an invulnerability to pain that was a dark gift of the zombie plague; Nix wore a vest and shirt and jeans and did not even have a carpet coat to protect her.

Benny struggled against the zom’s limp body, but his own leg was folded under him, and there were bodies heaped everywhere. “NIX!” he screamed.

Nix Riley looked at him for a brief second. The crazy look burned in her eyes and a weird, terrible smile played on her lips. Then she turned back just as Charlie reached for her.

It was all over so fast…

Her bokken snapped out and slammed Charlie’s hands aside. Finger bones cracked and twisted out of joint. Without pausing, Nix shifted and swung the sword around and down and cracked it across Charlie’s left knee, and the impact knocked sweat from her face and arms. Plaster powder erupted from her pockets and filled the corridor with a pall like a graveyard mist. Charlie charged toward her, but his knee buckled and his leg crumpled sideways and crashed down onto the shattered knee. Nix’s sword swept through the cloud of powder, a ghostly image that was strangely beautiful. The tapered hardwood blade caught Charlie across the side of the mouth so hard that broken fragments of teeth struck the wall and stuck there, buried to half their length. Nix reversed her angle and struck the other side of Charlie’s mouth, destroying his jaw and shattering the last of his razor-toothed grin.

Still the zombie reached for her. Crippled and with shattered bones, it could still drag her down and kill her.

Nix stepped backward with the delicate grace of a dancer so that Charlie’s reaching hand lunged too far and the monster fell forward onto its face. Nix kicked at the steel helmet, once, twice, and then it went skittering off into the dark.

“This is for my mother, you son of a bitch!” she whispered, and she brought the bokken up and down with every ounce of strength and hatred and love that she owned. The blade struck the base of Charlie’s skull-and both blade and bone shattered. The big man, the monster of all their nightmares, collapsed down and lay utterly still.

Benny finally tore his leg from under the corpse. He struggled to his feet, then paused, staring at the damage. Staring at Nix.

She looked down at what she had done, and at what it meant… then suddenly her face screwed up and she began to cry. Benny rushed to her, grabbed her, and held her, and she clung to him. Her tears were like boiling water on the side of Benny’s neck. The fires of madness that had burned in her eyes for so long… flickered once more and went out, and her face wrinkled into a mask of bottomless pain and release.

“I k-ki-killed him!” she wailed.

“Yes, you did,” he murmured into the foamy red tangles of her hair. “You killed the monster.”

Benny looked over to see what was happening with Dr. Skillz, but just as he looked up he saw J-Dog leaning into the pit again. “Dudes? If you’re done goofing off down there, we could use a little help up here.”

79

DR. SKILLZ HELD THE ZOMS OFF AS NIX AND BENNY CLIMBED OUT OF the pit. Dr. Skillz came up after them. Benny and Nix stared around them at the absolute carnage. Scores of people lay dead, and some were already starting to reanimate. Hundreds of zoms filled the arena, and hundreds of people fought them and fought one another. There didn’t seem to be any sense to it. No battle lines.

“Where’s Tom?” yelled Nix.

Benny shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Then Benny saw something that twisted his mind into a weird new shape. He suddenly recognized some of the fighters. Not the ones attacking him, but the people fighting White Bear’s men. These were faces he knew from Zombie Cards. It was a surreal moment.

“S-S-Solomon Jones?” Benny stammered. Nix whipped around to see where Benny was pointing, and sure enough, the legendary bounty hunter with the twin machetes was carving a path along the bleachers. A dozen yards away Hector Mexico stood on the top step of one set of bleachers, firing blast after blast from his shotgun into anyone who came at him. He was surrounded by heaps of the dead. Across the arena Basher Bashman had a baseball bat in each hand and was using them to block people from entering the hotel-which was the only exit, unless people wanted to jump from the top of the bleachers, and that was a forty-foot drop. J-Dog now guarded the other door, and his double-bladed ax was painted bright red with blood. Others from the Zombie Cards were peppered throughout the battle.

“I don’t understand,” said Benny, but Nix just shook her head.

White Bear’s guards, the ones who still had guns, kept trying to shoot their way into the hotel, but there were sharp cracks from one of the upper hotel windows, and one by one the armed guards pitched backward, dead before they hit the ground. Benny craned his neck to see who was firing and had a brief glimpse of the Mohawk and intense face of Sally Two-Knives peering along the barrel of a high-powered sniper rifle.

“Where’s Tom?” asked Nix again. Then she grabbed Benny’s arm and pointed. “There!”

“TOM!” Benny whirled and yelled, but if Tom heard him, he had no time to respond. A wave of guards and bounty hunters were closing in on him. They were armed with spears and swords and knives and pitchforks. Benny saw Tom smile.

Benny had seen his brother fight before, back in Charlie’s camp seven months ago, but even that battle was tiny compared to this. At least a dozen men closed in on Tom, and he smiled. Then his body became a blur of movement. As a man with a reaper’s scythe came at him, Tom lunged in and down and his blade whipped a silver line across the man’s midsection. Without even watching to see the effect, Tom rose and parried a pitchfork thrust and cut the man through arms and throat in a single move. A burly bounty hunter ran at him with two yard-long blades, but Tom darted forward between the weapons, and his blade rose through chest and chin and skull. The cuts were fast and elegant, worlds away from the awkward hacks and slashes of Benny’s moves with the bokken, but Benny knew the cuts. He practiced them every day. Benny was very good, but Tom was a master.

Tom moved like a dancer, seeming to skim along the surface of the ground, turning gracefully to evade, using each turn to put incredible power into his cuts. It was ugly and beautiful at the same time, a ballet of destruction that pitted Tom’s lifetime of dedication to swordplay against brute strength and seemingly overwhelming odds. Yet with each flickering second of time the odds became less and less, as it seemed that Tom was building around himself a castle of corpses.

Then a shout tore Benny away from the scene. He turned to see Heap charging toward him, but then a monstrous pink shape stepped into his path. Benny almost laughed at the sight of Fluffy McTeague in a pink carpet coat with a multicolored ruff and dangling diamond earrings. He looked silly, but he grabbed Heap by the throat and belt and heaved him all the way over his head, and with a bull roar threw him into a knot of the living dead. The big thug was instantly swamped by white hands and yellow teeth, and Benny could find no splinter of sympathy in his heart.

“Saves me the trouble,” Benny said to himself.

Fluffy caught him watching and gave Benny and Nix a charming smile and a comical wink. Then he reached inside his voluminous coat and produced two sets of brass knuckles. He was still smiling as he plowed into the melee.

“This is nuts,” Benny said. Nix simply shook her head and then looked past him and screamed. Benny whirled and saw Preacher Jack pulling off aluminum siding on one of the wagons. He was seconds away from escaping. Without even thinking what they were doing, Benny and Nix launched themselves that way. Nix held Benny’s sword; Benny had the jagged stump of hers. Would that be enough against one old man?

It was one of the living dead who changed everything.

Had Preacher Jack’s own men not reanimated, he might never have seen Benny and Nix, and everything would have ended there. But just as the preacher tore off the last piece of siding, a hand clamped around his ankle. The old man looked down in mild surprise and irritation. He jerked his foot free, turned to reach for his saber, and saw the two teenagers running straight at him. He picked up the saber and quieted his guards with two quick thrusts. Vegas Pete began to twitch a moment later, and Preacher Jack finished him. Little Bigg, however, sprawled there in the dust and did not move. Preacher Jack grunted. It was not the first time he had seen this. He shrugged, turned, and strode forward to slaughter Tom’s brother and the Riley girl.

Chong got to the top of the bleachers by leaping over the people who had been burned by Lilah’s attack. He stepped through the screen of smoke. And Lilah’s body was not there. He looked over the edge to see where she had fallen. But she was nowhere.

Then something hit him on the side of the head with such shocking force that he sagged to his knees and tumbled onto the burning bodies. He screamed and twisted away from the flames and went rolling onto the next bleacher with a jarring thump.

Chong felt warmth on his face, and when he touched the side of his head, his fingers came away red with blood. He lifted his aching head to see a massive form come lumbering toward him. It wasn’t a zom or a guard.

It was White Bear.

“Well, well, little man,” grumbled the man with the melted face. “If it ain’t dead man walking.” White Bear was splashed with blood, though Chong didn’t think that any of it was his, and he carried two improbable weapons: a heavy wrench in his left hand and a crowbar in his right. Behind him was a trail of destruction-crushed and broken bodies, human and zom. “Get up, boy… at least have the stones to die on your feet.”

Chong tried to rise, but the blow he’d taken to the head made the whole world spin sickeningly. His knees buckled. Blood ran down his face and into his mouth.

“Then take it on your knees, boy,” seethed White Bear. “I’m going to wear your skull on a chain around my neck so everyone will know you don’t mess with White Bear.”

Chong fumbled for his fallen bokken. “Tom will kill you,” he said with a bloody smile.

“Not a chance.”

Chong shook his head. “No… Tom will kill you. You’re going to die out here tonight, and the best you can hope for is to come back as a zom. You and your fruitcake of a father.”

“Watch your mouth, little man.”

Chong spat blood on White Bear’s shoes. “Or what? You’ll kill me?” He turned to show his injured shoulder. “I’m already dead, remember? I got bitten in the pit. You killed me, and if I can’t kill you, then Tom will. Or Solomon Jones or Sally. You and your father are vermin… and your time is over.”

“Go to hell,” growled White Bear as he raised his crowbar high over his head. Chong raised his bokken, but they both knew how this moment was going to end.

“Lilah,” Chong said, and he wanted it to be the last word he ever spoke.

As White Bear’s arm reached the top of its lift there was a loud, wet whack! White Bear paused, crowbar still held high, but now his eyes were open too wide, as if his eyelids were glued to his forehead. He suddenly coughed, and dark blood bubbled over his lips and down his chin.

“What?” said Chong.

But White Bear had no answer. He shuddered and abruptly dropped to one knee, the crowbar falling harmlessly to the dirt. Then a slender figure rose up behind him. The figure was wild-eyed and covered with soot and blood and sweat. She had hair as white as snow and eyes the color of honey, and in her strong brown hands she held a spear made from black pipe, the blade buried to the hilt between White Bear’s shoulders.

Lilah placed her foot on White Bear’s back, and with a snarl of disgust she kicked him face-forward into the dirt and tore her blade free. Chong, who had spoken her name a hundred times in the last few minutes, could not make a single sound.

• • •

Tom Imura saw White Bear fall, and a tiny smile touched his mouth. He would rather have handled that maniac himself, but there was justice in what had just happened.

The fight was going both well and badly. The good news was that Gameland was disintegrating around him. At least half of White Bear’s men were down, and an equal number of spectators. The bad news was that when he’d told J-Dog and Dr. Skillz to let a few zoms loose to liven things up and provide a distraction, he had meant just that: a few. Not all of them. The zoms were like a tidal surge that was gradually pushing the living across the arena. People were falling into the pits, and so were zoms, and at this point Tom didn’t think anyone was coming back out of those holes alive. At this rate the zoms were going to turn this whole place into an all-you-can-eat buffet, and that was definitely not part of Tom’s plan.

A pair of guards rushed at him, both armed with woodsmen’s axes. Tom parried one ax swing and slashed high, ducked under another and cut low, and the two men were down. Behind them were six zoms, and Tom realized that he was caught with an open pit to one side and the dead on the other. He’d have to fight. He did. But this kind of slaughter burned layers off his soul. He knew that. Why hadn’t the people here in the arena taken his offer and walked away? Not one of them had gone. Why?

He cut at the arms and legs of the zoms, and kicked the limbless torsos into the pit. This was blunt butchery, nothing more.

In a moment’s respite he turned and waved at Sally. When she spotted him, Sally gave a thumbs-up and abruptly vanished from the window. Tom whirled. Now he had to find Benny and Nix, and then get everyone out of the place while there was still a chance.

Across the field, Preacher Jack strode forward with his stolen saber in his bloody hand. He slashed left and right, cutting down anyone who stood between his fury and the two teenagers who had just escaped from his Pits of Judgment. A hard-faced young man with a Chinese broadsword suddenly appeared and used his free hand to push Benny and Nix back. Benny recognized him as Dieter Willis, one of the twin sons of the famous LaDonna Willis who had been a hero of First Night. Dieter was wiry and strong and was known to be one of the best swordsmen in the Ruin.

“Get back,” he growled. “I got this.”

Dieter rushed at Preacher Jack, feinting high and then attacking low in a blinding assault. Preacher Jack caught the blow on the edge of his sword and riposted with a counterattack that was too fast to follow. Dieter staggered back and brought his sword up again, but then faltered, his eyes registering total surprise. The broadsword tumbled from his fist, and he clamped his hands to his throat, but it was too little and too late to staunch the spray of blood that erupted from the savage wound. The preacher didn’t even bother to watch him fall. He stepped aside to avoid the spray of blood and kept walking toward Benny and Nix. He had barely broken stride to cut down one of the Ruin’s most feared fighters.

There was a scream, and LaDonna herself came charging out of the crowd, a heavy cleaver in each hand. Preacher Jack turned to her and let her come to him. Then he parried her cleavers one-two and whipped his sword across her throat. She fell without a word onto the limp body of her son. Nix howled in fury, and Preacher Jack turned to her and smiled.

“Come and get yours, girl,” he taunted.

“No!” Benny yelled, and snaked out a hand to grab her. He caught the hem of her vest and yanked her backward just as Preacher Jack lunged forward to try and drive his sword into her chest. The tip of the blade missed Nix by an inch, and Benny hauled her over him as he did a desperate back-roll. He heard the whoosh of the sword and felt the thud of the blade as Preacher Jack tried to chop them as they rolled. Two zoms rushed at the preacher from his right.

From the tangled heap where he and Nix landed, Benny saw Preacher Jack’s moment of indecision as he was faced with the choice: Cut down the zoms in front of everyone and prove that his so-called “religion” was nothing more than a sham and a con game in which he had no genuine belief; or let the Children of Lazarus use his flesh as a sacrament. Benny had no doubt how Brother David would have handled this same challenge.

Preacher Jack was no Brother David, and Benny doubted that the “preacher” was even from the same species as the gentle way-station monk. With a growl of annoyance, Preacher Jack stepped into the rushing zoms-and cut them down.

“Hypocrite,” jeered Nix, yelling the word as loud as she could. Even through the din of the battle, Preacher Jack heard her. He wheeled on them, his face almost purple with wrath.

“I’m going to enjoy strapping you down and letting the Children feast on-”

Nix threw a pouch of powder in his face. The old man tried to slash it out of the air, but his blade merely cut it open, and that made it worse. A cloud of plaster powder enveloped Preacher Jack. He spun away, coughing and gagging, and that fast Benny was up and running. He drove his shoulder into Preacher Jack’s side and sent the man sprawling.

Right into one of the zombie pits. Into the Pits of Judgment.

Benny saw the white faces and white hands reaching up for the man as he pinwheeled down toward them, his sword slashing uselessly at empty air.

“I saw you get shot!” Chong exclaimed. “I saw you fall.”

Lilah held up the spear. A big chunk of the blade was missing, and the remaining portion was twisted at a weird angle.

“They shot this. It knocked me down.”

“Thank God!” Chong said. He wanted to grab her and hug her, but instead Lilah grabbed him, and for a delicious moment he thought she was going to kiss him. Instead she slapped him across the face. Hard.

“Ow!” he cried, staggering back. “What was that for?”

Her face was an almost inhuman mask of fury. “I heard what you said,” she yelled as loud as she could with her raspy voice. “I heard! You were bitten?”

Chong turned his shoulder away and put his hand over the bite, not wanting her to see it. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay?” she demanded. “How is it okay?”

Chong wanted to run and hide, but he held his ground. “I… it’s my fault.”

“Did you let yourself get bitten?”

“No… I mean-everything. All of it, since we left town. It’s my fault. You were right. I’m a town boy. I have no business being out here.” He sighed and let his hand fall away from the bite. “And I guess this is proof. I’m no good out here.”

Lilah threw down her spear and grabbed his shoulder, using both hands to squeeze the edges of his bite until drops of blood popped up. “How long ago?” she yelled, and when he didn’t answer right away, she screeched at him. “How long ago?”

“Ten hours ago. Maybe twelve.”

“Are you sure?”

“No,” he said. “It could have been longer…”

Lilah let go of his arm and jammed her fingers under his jaw to feel his glands, then pressed her hand to his forehead. There was a moan behind her as a zombie lumbered out of the smoke; and with a grunt of irritation at being disturbed, Lilah whirled, grabbed the creature by chin and hair, and snapped its neck with a vicious sideways twist. Then she turned back to Chong, grabbed his hair, and pulled him close so she could examine his eyes.

“Tell me what happened,” she screamed. “Exactly what happened.”

“What-now? There’s a big freaking fight going on and-”

“Now!”

Chong shook his head and told her in quick terms how the big zom had clamped teeth on his skin just as Chong hit him with a pipe. Lilah made him repeat that part.

Then she slapped him again. Harder than the first time. It rocked his head sideways, and he almost fell.

“OW! What the hell?” Chong demanded, reeling.

“You stupid town boy,” she said harshly. “You’re not dying.”

“Wait… what?”

“The zom had your skin pinched between his teeth but you fell away from him. It tore a flap of skin off. That’s all… the infection is in the zom’s mouth, not in its teeth… you did not get bitten!”

Chong stared at her.

“You aren’t allowed to die!” she growled, and her eyes seemed to radiate real heat.

Chong’s mouth opened and shut several times without sound. “I-I-” And then he suddenly dropped onto his knees. Lilah knelt in front of him and there were tears in her eyes, sparkling like diamonds in the firelight.

“I-,” Chong said. “God… I thought I was…”

She took his face in both her hands and stared at him with almost lethal intensity. “You are not allowed to die!” she said fiercely, growling the words with her graveyard voice. “Not now! Not ever! Promise me or I’ll kill you.”

Chong almost smiled. “I promise,” he said.

Then, despite fire and gunplay and screams and the living dead, Lilah did what she had never once done in her entire life. She kissed a boy.

“We have to get out here,” barked Tom as he raced to intercept Benny and Nix. “Right now!”

“How?” asked Benny, looking around. The zoms were everywhere. Before Tom could reply there was a huge explosion, and they turned to see several of the wagons that formed one of the walls of the arena disintegrate into a fireball that knocked down at least a third of the surviving people in the place. Zoms were flung halfway across the gaming floor, and a dozen spectators and guards fell screaming into the open pits.

“That’s our cue,” said Tom. “This whole place is about to blow itself into orbit. We have to go now!”

“But we can’t go! Chong…”

“Here,” came a painful reply, and they turned to see a bloody, limping Chong running alongside Lilah-who looked strangely distracted despite the carnage. Nix ran to embrace Chong and Lilah, but Benny looked from Tom to the burning wagons to the hotel.

Chong asked, “Did I hear something about this place blowing up?”

“All to hell and gone,” said Tom, grabbing them and shoving them toward the smoking hole in the wall of wagons. “There’s five hundred pounds of C4 in the hotel lobby, and I rigged it. MOVE!”

And they were running. As they raced Benny cut a last look around. Many of the bounty hunters were down; the rest were already leaping over flaming wreckage.

Tom yelled, “Go… GO!” They ran into the smoke and through flaming wreckage and out into the cool darkness of the big field. Behind them the last of the guards and spectators were still fighting the zoms. Benny wondered if they were all crazy. Did they think they could win? Or were they so locked into the moment that violence was the only response they were capable of? He hated them and pitied them and ran from them.

Benny ran with his arm wrapped around Nix. Lilah dragged Chong with her. Fluffy McTeague ran with Sally Two-Knives in his arms like a baby doll. J-Dog and Dr. Skillz were racing each other and laughing; and a whole phalanx of the surviving bounty hunters followed them off to the left, into the woods. Tom was heading right, straight for the hedgerows and the road.

Benny opened his mouth to shout at Tom, to ask him if he was sure that he knew how to rig an explosion, when the world seemed to detonate around them and the entire Wawona Hotel leaped high into the night sky. A massive glowing fireball punched hundreds of feet into the air, igniting the surrounding trees, vaporizing the water in the ponds, and flinging the armored wagons far out into the fields. Benny and Nix zigged and zagged as flaming debris crashed down all around them with the force of a meteor shower. The grass caught fire and superheated winds pursued them like a host of demons.

Benny heard Tom cry out in pain and saw him stumble, but his brother picked himself up and staggered on. Debris struck the ground all around them.

“Go!” Tom growled through bared teeth.

They ran all the way to the gates and beyond, and down the road into darkness. Debris continued to fall for a full five minutes, as if the ghosts of Gameland were hurling artillery at them. They ran and ran until they could not run any more. They were all spread out across a mile of firelit landscape, Benny and his friends in the field, the bounty hunters deep in the forest.

80

TOM SLOWED TO A WALK AND THEN A SHAKY STAGGER AND FINALLY stopped, waving at the rest to stop. Chong and Lilah stumbled and collapsed to their knees, shocked that they were alive. Tom bent forward and rested his hands on his thighs. He looked totally spent. Benny sank to his knees and hugged Nix, and she clung to him. She smelled of smoke and blood. He kissed her face and hair and the tears on her cheeks.

Then Benny heard a sound and saw Tom walking slowly toward them.

“We made it!” said Benny, fighting a crazy laugh that threatened to break from his chest.

“Yes,” said Tom in a whisper of a voice. “We made it.”

“Benny…,” Nix said softly, and he turned as Chong and Lilah came walking toward him. They both looked like they’d been through a war, and Benny figured that was a pretty fair assessment. There was an awkward moment when the four of them stood and stared at one another. Everything that had happened since they’d left town-could it really only be two days ago?-floated like embers in the air between them.

Benny smiled first and punched Chong lightly in the chest. “You stupid monkey-banger!”

Chong grinned, and despite the dirt and blood on his face, it made him glow. He arched his eyebrows in best “wise sage” style and observed, “As usual, you opt for an erudite and insightful comment that is entirely appropriate to the moment.”

“Bite me.”

“Not even if I was a zom.”

They burst out laughing, and Benny grabbed his best friend and gave him a hug so fierce that it made them both yelp with pain, which made them laugh harder. Then Benny stopped and cut a look at Lilah. The moment stalled. His inner voice was trying to feed him clever lines, but he mentally told it to shut up. Aloud he said, “I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry.”

Lilah glared at him. Nix shifted to stand next to her, and took her hand.

“Yeah,” Benny said, “that’s cool. If you guys want to team up and beat the crap out of me, go for it. I deserve it after what I said.”

“Why? What did you say?” asked Chong, but no one answered him.

“It’s okay, Benny,” Lilah said in her icy whisper. “I’ll kill you later.”

Benny’s throat went dry. “Hey, wait… I-I-”

Then Nix and Lilah burst out laughing. Chong, who had no idea what was going on, laughed anyway.

“God!” cried Nix. “Did you see the look on his face?”

“Wait,” Benny said again, “did you… just make a joke?” That made the others laugh harder.

“I can make jokes,” said Lilah, and then playfully punched him in the chest the same way Benny had to Chong. Except her playful punch was about fifty times harder.

“Ow!” he yelped. The others kept laughing, at him, at everything, at the realization that they had all survived. Rubbing the fiery bruise in his chest, Benny laughed too.

They turned to Tom, beckoning him over, wanting him to laugh, needing to see the grim sadness washed off his face. Benny hugged his brother. “We did it, man! Now can we finally get the heck out of this place. Ready for a road trip?”

Tom didn’t laugh. His eyes were fixed on the burning hotel. “Yes,” he said again, his voice even quieter. “I guess it’s time to leave…”

“God, yes,” agreed Nix. “I think we just saw the last of our bad luck go up in smoke.”

Tom sighed, and then he suddenly dropped to his knees. The others stared at him in surprise.

“Tom?” asked Lilah.

Tom gingerly opened the flaps of his vest. “Damn,” he murmured.

Nix screamed.

Benny saw it then. Blood. So much blood. He screamed too.

Tom coughed and slumped forward. Nix and Benny caught him and lowered him carefully to the ground. Benny ripped open Tom’s shirt. What they saw tore a sharper cry from Benny and another scream from Nix. When Tom had stumbled during the flight from the hotel, Benny thought he had been hit by a piece of flaming debris. But that wasn’t it… it was a thousand times worse than that.

Tom had been shot.

“We have to stop the bleeding!” Nix cried. She no longer had her first aid kit, so she dug through Tom’s vest pockets and grabbed rolls of bandages to uses as compresses.

“What happened?” demanded Chong.

“Benny,” Nix said urgently as she worked, “this is bad. I can’t stop the bleeding.”

“Let me help,” said Lilah as she pulled the first aid kit from Tom’s vest and removed several cotton squares.

“IMURA!”

The voice that roared out of the darkness seemed to belong to a monster, a demon from out of hell itself. They all turned to see a tall figure emerge from the smoke, with fires burning the world behind him.

Preacher Jack.

He held an old-fashioned six-shot pistol in one hand and the curved cavalry saber in the other. His black coat was streaked with soot and blood and his face was pale madness in the starlight. “Imura!” he shouted. “Did I kill you? Did I kill the son of a bitch who murdered my sons?”

“Benny, Nix…,” wheezed Tom, grabbing Benny’s sleeve. “Run!”

Benny peeled Tom’s hand away. “No,” he said fiercely. “We have to stop him.”

“You can’t stop him,” gasped Tom. “He’s too fast… too strong. He’ll kill us all.”

As he spoke, Tom tried to get to his feet, but a furious wave of pain crashed him back down onto his knees. Nix tried to help him up, but her hands slipped on the blood.

“Keep the compresses in place,” warned Lilah.

Benny got to his feet and watched Preacher Jack stalk toward him. He knew that Tom was right. None of them were a match for this madman, old as he was. Preacher Jack had been a soldier and killer his whole life, and the hard years since First Night had only made him tougher. There was no way Benny could beat him, but maybe he could stall the old mercenary long enough for Lilah or Chong to wound him. Or kill him. Even if it meant sacrificing himself to make that possible. Benny looked at Tom, injured and helpless. And at Nix. And Lilah and Chong. He would die for any one of them. He might have to die for all of them.

Benny turned back to the preacher and raised the jagged stump of Nix’s bokken. It was the only weapon he had left. It was broken, but the end was sharp. Maybe that would be enough.

Or would it? Preacher Jack stopped ten paces away and raised the pistol.

Damn, Benny thought. So much for heroic last stands.

Then he felt something move behind him and there was Chong, coming up to stand at his side, his bokken in his hands. He smiled at Benny and took another step forward, putting himself between Benny and the pistol.

“What are you doing?” Benny whispered, but Chong ignored him.

Preacher Jack sneered. “Out of the way, rat meat.”

“Bite me,” said Chong, and his voice quavered only a little. “You want Tom, you’ll have to shoot me first.”

Preacher Jack grinned, and his teeth were bloody. “Hell, boy… I’m going to shoot all of you.”

“You won’t have time. One of us will get you,” Benny said, not sure if it was true. Preacher Jack also had the sword.

Lilah snatched up her spear and stood on Chong’s other side. She pointed the broken blade at the preacher. “You’re mine, old man.”

“No!” cried Tom weakly. “No… all of you-run!”

“Not going to happen,” said Chong firmly. “I’ll die before I let him win.”

“This ain’t about winning, boy,” Preacher Jack said with a laugh. “This is about justice. You killed my sons! You killed my whole family. Don’t you understand the full weight of your sin? You did what First Night and three hundred million dead could not do! You killed the House of Matthias!”

“Your sons were trash,” said Benny, his voice heavy with contempt. “Your whole family is nothing but trash. You’re everything that was wrong with the old world, and you want to rebuild that world and make it in your image. You want the world to be about pain and suffering and hurt. How can you pretend to be a preacher, a man of God, and do the things you do?”

Preacher Jack eyed him with burning hatred. “You don’t speak to me like that, boy. You don’t dare.”

And he pulled the trigger.

Click!

The hammer fell on a spent cartridge. Preacher Jack pulled the trigger again and again and then, with a snarl, he threw the empty pistol at Benny.

Benny ducked.

Suddenly Lilah was running at Preacher Jack, driving her spear toward his chest and screaming like a banshee. The blade was an inch away when he suddenly pivoted and let it slice through his lapels; he kept turning in a circle and drove his elbow into the back of her head as she passed. Lilah pitched forward onto the ground. Preacher Jack pivoted toward her, raising his foot for a kick that would have shattered her face-but Chong was up and moving faster than Benny had ever seen his friend move. He dove at Preacher Jack and tried to tackle him.

The attack made the kick miss, but it did not take the preacher down. Preacher Jack caught Chong as he flew at him, and with a snap of his hip sent his attacker pitching off into the grass. Chong landed hard. Preacher Jack stamped down, but Chong rolled desperately away.

Benny was up now, clutching the broken bokken as he closed in on Preacher Jack’s blind side. He jumped forward, stabbing at the man’s unprotected back, but the man shifted as quick as lightning and flashed out with a backward kick that caught Benny in the chest. Benny flew backward, landing in a heap.

Lilah climbed to her feet and rushed the preacher, faking high and low, and aimed a vicious cut at the man’s knee, but Preacher Jack blocked the cut with his sword. Lilah rebounded from the cut and slashed again and again and again, and for a moment her attack was so ferocious that the preacher gave ground, backing away and parrying the blows as fast as he could, his sword flashing in the moonlight. For a few golden seconds Benny thought that Lilah was going to do it, that she was going to kill the man; but then he sideslipped the spear and caught the shaft with his free hand. He instantly chopped down with the sword, and Lilah was forced to let go to save her hands. He kicked her and sent her tumbling to the ground, then flung her spear out into the smoke and shadows.

Benny and Chong climbed painfully to their feet and spread out to flank Preacher Jack. The old man smiled at the tactic, shaking his head in amusement. “Children’s games,” he said. “If that’s the way it has to be, then let the lesson begin.”

They rushed him, but Preacher Jack was too fast. He stepped into Chong’s sword thrust, parried it, and whipped his blade across Chong’s body. Blood exploded out from Chong’s bare chest and he was suddenly staggering back, his sword dropping to the grass, his hands clamped to his body to staunch the bleeding.

That left Benny on his feet.

“Now you, boy,” said Preacher Jack. “I’ll cut you some and then let you watch what I do to the others. When you beg me for death, I’ll show you how merciful I can be.”

Benny had no quip, no smart retort. He knew that he was doomed. He had twenty inches of burned and broken wooden sword to try and stop a man who had killed untold numbers of people. A soldier. A warrior. A killer, and a man who was the architect of all the pain in Benny’s world.

With all that, Benny still had to ask the question that had been burning in him since they had first met this man.

“Mr. Matthias,” Benny said, “do you… do you even believe in God?”

Preacher Jack’s smile flickered and then intensified, the original secretive grin replaced by a goblin’s leer. “There is no God,” whispered the old man. “There’s just the devil and me and the Rot and Ruin.”

The sword glittered as Preacher Jack suddenly faked a few cuts at him, taunting and playing with him. The tip of the sword was a silver blur, and Benny felt a burn on his cheek and knew that he had just been cut too fast to even see.

“Drop the weapon, boy,” demanded the preacher. “Put it down and I really will show you mercy. I’ll let you and these other pukes walk out of here. But I want Tom. I want his head and by God I’ll have it.”

“Never!” declared Nix, clutching Tom to her.

“Don’t…,” Tom said weakly as he fought to get to his knees. His eyes were burning and his sweating face was bright with fever.

“Why don’t you just give up?” snapped Benny as he backed away. “Your crew is dead. Gameland is destroyed. Why are you still-”

“I am Gameland, boy! Don’t you get that? While I’m alive, it’s alive, and I’m going to build it back, bigger and better than ever. I’ll build it in the center of Mountainside if I have to… and there won’t be anyone left to stop me. Not you and not your brother. Look at him! He’s halfway to dead already. He just needs a little push.”

Benny saw the future. It was as if the whole world had become bright and clear, and in that clarity he saw how this was going to play out. With sinking horror and grief he knew that there was only one path to walk, and that path was a red one. Preacher Jack began to raise his sword for the final cut. It was all spiraling down.

Benny had backed away as far as he could. Tom was beside him, on his knees, blood spilling down his stomach and thighs. With painful slowness Tom reached over his shoulder to grasp the handle of his sword.

“Gameland is closed,” he whispered. “That is the law.”

“There is no law,” snarled Preacher Jack as he lunged forward. Benny turned away from the cut, his hand moving toward Tom. Tom began to pull his sword, but there was not enough strength left in him. He knew it. Preacher Jack knew it. Benny and Nix knew it. The sword came only partway out of the sheath, and Tom’s hand began to open as his strength failed.

Then Benny’s hand closed around the handle, just below Tom’s. It was a sloppy grip, awkwardly placed, but it had power in it, and Benny turned and the sword ripped itself free from the scabbard as Benny turned and Preacher Jack’s sword whistled through the air and Benny turned… and turned…

And the moment froze.

Preacher Jack stood there, tall and triumphant, his lips curled into his crooked smile.

Tom Imura knelt, head bowed, hands empty.

Benny stood between Tom and Preacher Jack, his right hand extended all the way out to one side, the sword-Tom’s kami katana, the demon blade-extended far into the night. All along the silvery edge of the blade there were threads that glistened like black oil.

Preacher Jack spoke first.

He said, “No.”

Quietly. Wetly.

Then his sword dropped from his hand, and with infinite slowness he leaned backward and fell onto the grass. There was a line of black wetness stretched across his throat from side to side.

Nix looked up at Benny and saw that his arm was starting to tremble. Then his mouth. She got quickly to her feet and pulled him to her, pushing his arm down. The demon sword fell, and drops of blood flew from it.

Chong staggered to his feet and put a toe under Preacher Jack’s shoulder and rolled him over. He bent and slid a knife from the old man’s belt, placed the tip at the sweet spot, and shoved. Tears gleamed like molten silver on his cheeks, but his eyes were as hard as pebbles.

He turned to look at Benny, who gave a single distant nod of approval. Lilah staggered to her feet, and the four of them closed in around Tom. Tears rolled down their faces as they worked, pressing bandages in place, propping Tom’s head in Benny’s lap. From the forest the bounty hunters came running. Solomon Jones and Sally were first. J-Dog and the others followed. They lit torches and sorted through their medical kits.

“Oh God,” cried Sally as she studied the wound in Tom’s chest. “Get me a needle and thread!”

Tom smiled and shook his head. A small movement. “No,” he said. “No…”

Nix looked around at the bounty hunters, panic and fury in her face. “We have to do something!”

Sally Two-Knives pulled Nix to her, and despite the pain it must have caused her, she held Nix to her bosom.

Solomon knelt and touched Tom’s arm. “We’ll take care of them, Tom,” he promised. “We’ll get them all back home-”

“No, Solomon,” Tom whispered. “No… that’s up to… them. It’s their lives… their choice.”

Solomon nodded and sat down, his eyes filled with sadness and tears.

“Benny,” Tom said, so softly that only his brother heard him. Benny bent close.

“I’m here, Tom.”

“Benny… I… I want you to give me your word.”

“Anything, Tom… just please… tell me what to do.”

Tom’s other hand lifted a couple of inches, and he pointed to the east, where the false dawn was teasing the edges of morning. “Keep going,” he whispered. “Keep going until you find what you’re looking for. You and Nix. Lilah, too.”

“I will,” Benny promised him. “I’ll find somewhere we can be safe.”

“No,” said Tom firmly. “No… find somewhere you can be free. Alive… and free.”

Nix began to cry. She picked up Tom’s hand and held it to her cheek.

“Be strong,” Tom whispered. “I… wish that I could go with you. To see you grow up. To see who you’ll become.” He smiled. “But I guess I have… and I’m so proud of you. Of all of you.”

Benny caved in over his hurt until his forehead rested on Tom’s. Benny’s tears fell like rain.

Tom raised a finger and wiped away one tear. “Funny… all I wanted to do… was get out of… that damn town.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and his breath was very shallow. Lilah and Chong huddled close to Nix. They were all crying, broken sobs that drove jagged cracks in their chests. Lilah took Tom’s other hand and held it to her chest as if the beating of her heart could encourage his to keep going. Tom opened his eyes again, and it seemed as if he was looking at something far away, over the horizon, far beyond what any of them could see.

“Benny…”

“Yes,” said Benny, his voice nearly shattering on that single word.

“I… I’m going to try not to come back.”

Then Tom Imura closed his eyes.

A terrible sob broke from Benny’s chest. Nix leaned toward him and held him, and Lilah and Chong crawled over too. They held one another as dawn tore open the morning.