Rot & Ruin

30

A TALL, SLIM FIGURE STOOD IN THEIR PATH, AND AS THE BROTHERS JOGGED past, he turned and fell into step between them. They ran down the length of Main Street and then cut over toward the Red Zone, the wide, flat area that lay between the town proper and the fence line.

“I heard,” said Chong as he ran, and the shared awareness of what those two words meant carried them for a dozen yards. “I just came from the hospital. Morgie’s in bad shape, but Doc Gurijala says he’ll make it.”

“Thank God,” said Benny as he exhaled a knot of hot tension that had hung burning in his chest. “When you see him again, tell him we’re going to get Nix back.”

“I will. He’s going to need to know that.”

Despite the early hour-or perhaps because of everything that had happened-the streets were filled with people. The closer the brothers got to the Red Zone, the thicker the crowds. Eventually they had to slow to a walk. A lot of people stepped forward to offer condolences to Tom, and some school friends of Benny’s asked about Morgie. Tom said very little and kept moving, his face set and grim. Those people with common sense stepped back and gave him room when they saw the look in his eyes.

The crowd thinned abruptly once they crossed over into the Red Zone, and for the first time in his life, Benny realized this: On some level he’d always known that people avoided the Red Zone, but he’d always assumed that it was because they were afraid of zoms. Now he realized that they stayed on the far side of the line because in town, and away from the fence, it was easier to pretend that there was no wasteland of zombies outside. This realization made him feel both sad and disgusted.

When they were out of earshot of the other townsfolk, Chong said, “Tom, my dad was talking to Captain Strunk and Deputy Gorman. I heard them arguing about the coin they found at Nix’s house. The one Vin is always tossing and catching.”

Vin Trang was one of the two men known as the Mekong brothers. The other man, who was not even related to Vin, was Joey Duk. Despite their clear Vietnamese heritage, both of them had grown up in Los Angeles. The closest they’d ever been to Vietnam was selling ph and bánh cu n out of their food cart on the campus of UCLA before First Night.

“The captain said that Vin and Joey are the ones who attacked Nix and her mom. And probably that artist guy.” Chong looked at Benny. “Did Morgie say anything?”

“No,” Benny said. “All he said was that they took Nix. He didn’t give any names.”

Chong looked back at Tom. “Did… did Mrs. Riley say anything?”

Tom kept his eyes fixed on the fence as they walked through the Red Zone. “She only had the breath to say one thing.” He paused for so long, the boys thought he wasn’t going to finish, but then he said, “‘Save my little girl. Save Nix.’”

“I can’t believe this is happening.” Chong wiped tears from his eyes. “My dad said that the Mekong brothers sometimes work with Charlie Matthias.”

“I know,” said Tom.

“Dad told Captain Strunk to have Leroy Williams look at the footprints you found. I think he was going to.”

Tom nodded.

“What can he do?” Benny asked. He knew Williams as a farmer who had lost an arm in a car wreck while driving an SUV filled with refugees through the Ruin.

“Before First Night,” Tom said, “Leroy was a robbery detective in San Diego. He’d have been captain of the guard here if it hadn’t been for the arm.”

They reached the blockhouse that was used as a guard station. A pair of horses were tied up outside, and Leroy Williams and Captain Strunk stood near them. A knot of fence guards and deputies from the town watch were clustered behind them.

Leroy, dressed in denim coveralls and a white cotton T-shirt, came to meet them. He offered Tom his left hand, and they shook.

“Sorry about Jessie, Tom,” said Williams. He was a black man in his late sixties or early seventies. His dark skin was crisscrossed with terrible scars, but he had kind eyes. “This is a bad, bad business. Whole world gets wiped out, and people are still preying on one another. People just don’t learn.”

“No, they don’t,” agreed Tom bitterly.

Leroy glanced at Benny, sizing him up. “Maybe some of you kids will have better sense.”

“We will,” Benny said, although he wasn’t as sure as he sounded.

“Leroy,” Tom said, “Lou Chong here told me that you’re going to look at the crime scene at Jessie’s place.”

“We just got back,” said Strunk as he joined them.

“And…?”

“Well,” said Leroy, “the town watch pretty much walked over most of the footprints you found.” He shot a disapproving look at Strunk, who stared at the dirt between his booted toes. “But I found some useful footprints in Nix’s room… and Jessie’s. I took five or six sets of boot prints and took them with me over to that piece of crap shack where Joey Duk lives. I found shoe prints in his laundry room that matched. He was there, Tom. Vin Tran too. No doubt about it.”

“Don’t try to sell me on that bull, Leroy,” snapped Tom, but the big farmer held up a hand.

“Hush, son.” Leroy stepped closer, dropping his voice, so that Benny and Chong had to bend forward to hear him. Strunk did, too. “The Mekong brothers weren’t home, so I went over to the Matthias place. I asked Big Zak if I could look in Charlie’s room, but Zak told me to… Well, I won’t say what he suggested I do with myself. He said that Charlie was innocent of anything connected with what went on tonight, but I wasn’t buying that because Big Zak don’t open his mouth unless he wants to lie. He was also sweating and looking shifty. He tried to throw me off his porch. Me, an old cripple-man.”

“What happened?” Benny asked.

“What you think happened, young ’un? I put my foot up his fool ass and threw him off his damn porch, then I went through the house and kicked Charlie’s door off its hinges. Thought I was going to have some trouble with Big Zak’s boy, but once he saw his dad lying in the rose bushes, Young Zak decided that he liked hiding in his closet better than messing in matters beyond his years.”

“You find anything?” Tom asked. “Did you match the prints to Charlie’s shoes?”

“No. Charlie’s probably wearing those shoes right now, wherever he is. But that big ol’ white boy wears size fourteen triple-Es. How many people in Mountainside got kickers that big?”

“It’s circumstantial evidence,” muttered Strunk, but Benny could tell that there was no emphasis left in the captain’s voice. Benny realized that Strunk’s resistance had nothing to do with his personal beliefs, and certainly not his intelligence. Strunk was a smart, caring man, but the truth was that it was easier to accept that the Mekong brothers had done the killings, because they only rented a room in Mountainside. They lived in a smaller and rougher town a hundred miles south. Charlie, on the other hand, lived here. If he was guilty, then Strunk would have to gather a posse and track him out into the Ruin. It was fear that was going to let Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer get away with it.

Tom put his hand on the farmer’s good shoulder. “Thanks, Leroy.”

Pain and sadness showed on the big man’s face. “I wish like hell I could go with you boys.”

“I know, Leroy. But do me a favor.”

“Call it.”

“You can still shoot, can’t you?”

“Only with a pistol, but, sure, I generally hit what I’m aiming at.”

“Then if Charlie comes back here and we don’t…” He let it hang.

“Oh, hell, son, you don’t even have to ask. That pink-eyed gangster sets foot in this town again, he’s dead.”

“Wait a minute,” interrupted Strunk. “Hold on…”

Leroy wheeled on him. Strunk’s eyes came up to the middle of Leroy William’s broad chest. “You have something to say, Captain?” He loaded that last word with enough acid to eat through sun-baked concrete.

“Yes, I do,” Strunk said, not visibly deterred by the wall of pectoral muscles that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. “If Charlie Pink-eye or the Hammer comes back to Mountainside, then me and my men will arrest them. They’ll be properly arraigned on suspicion of murder, kidnapping, and a few hundred other charges I’ll figure out later, and they’ll stand a proper and legal trial.” Before anyone could reply, Strunk added, “Thing is, it’ll probably be hard as hell to find a jury of twelve totally impartial townsfolk. Jessie Riley had a lot more friends in town than Charlie ever did. Besides… there are only two crimes that carry a death sentence anymore. Murder and kidnapping.”

The meaning implied in his words hung burning like embers in the air. Tom and Leroy studied Strunk; Benny and Chong exchanged meaningful glances, eyebrows raised. Chong covertly drew a finger across his throat.

“No more talk,” said Tom. “We have a lot of miles to go, and they have a long lead.”

“So… let’s even things up,” said Strunk. He raised his hands and snapped his fingers, and immediately Deputy Gorman came toward them, leading the two horses by their reins. Benny could now see that both horses-an Appaloosa and a buckskin-were draped in coats made from tough, lightweight outdoor carpet. Strunk took the reins and handed one set to Tom and the other to Benny. Riding chaps made from durable carpet were hooked onto each saddle horn.

“The Appaloosa’s name is Chief; the buckskin is Apache. They’re fresh, fed, and fast,” he said. “Bring that girl home.”

Tom studied Strunk’s face for a long three-count, then nodded.

Dawn was a faint promise in the east. Two dozen guards with shotguns and torches met the brothers at the gate.

“My boys will go out as far as we can, Tom,” said Strunk. “We can help you get away, keep the zoms busy.”

“Thanks, Keith.” Then to Benny, Tom said, “You ready?”

“Yeah, but I feel like time’s flying.”

Tom gave him the first slice of smile he’d been able to dredge up all night. “They’re on foot.” He swung into the Appaloosa’s saddle. “Now we have a real chance.”

Benny scrambled up onto the buckskin’s saddle with less grace than his brother, with Chong pushing on his butt. He’d ridden before, but only ponies; this was a full-sized horse.

Strunk signaled to the gatekeepers to open up, and instantly all the guards ran out into the flat, open plain that stretched from the fence line to the foothills of the mountains. There were at least fifty zoms in the fields, some standing still, others wandering endlessly back and forth. The guards broke left, and when they were a hundred yards from the gate, they began shooting into the air and waving torches. As if cued by some shared inner compulsion, the dead turned toward the noise and motion, their mouths dropping open. Even through the noise of the shotguns, Benny could hear the low, plaintive moans of endless hunger as the zoms began shuffling through the grass toward the guards.

“It’s clear!” Leroy said in a fierce whisper. “Go! Go!”

Tom and Benny kicked their horses into canters, and once they were outside the gate, they turned to the south and kicked harder. The horses were young and strong, and they galloped away, bearing the brothers toward the narrow pass in the mountains that led to the great Rot and Ruin. Benny was a poor horseman, and pain lanced through his hips, stomach, and legs with each running step the horse took. But that pain was necessary, because they had to move fast. And really, he thought as he set his teeth against the discomfort and set his mind on the distant mountains, what did his pain matter? The pain Nix must be feeling had to be a million times worse. With that thought burning in his mind, he ignored his pain and kicked his horse into a faster gallop.

Chong climbed to the top of the tower and watched as Benny’s horse dwindled to a small black dot against the bloodred dawn, then vanished altogether.

31

THEY RODE HARD ALL MORNING, PUSHING THE HORSES TO THE EDGE OF endurance. Several times the thunder of their hooves attracted zoms, but all horses shied away from zoms and were trained to alert their riders. Besides, the shuffling zoms could not catch up to the fast mounts, and even if they did, the carpet coats each horse wore kept the animals safe while Tom and Benny used their swords to chop the monsters down.

It was all terrifying to Benny, but the dread of what could be happening to Nix was far worse, and he ground his teeth together and kept pace with Tom.

At first, in the coolness of dawn, the horses could manage the grueling pace, but as the sun rose, the temperature soared, and the horses began blowing and wheezing. Foam flecked their mouths, and under the lightweight carpet coats, their flanks were streaked with sweat. Finally Tom slowed their pace to a walk and then dismounted. Chief, the big Appaloosa, almost visibly sighed in relief.

“What are you doing?” demanded Benny. “We have to keep going.”

“If we keep this pace, we’ll kill these animals and then where will we be? We have to give them some water and then walk them for a while. Then they’ll be ready for another run.”

It was maddening to Benny, but he knew Tom was right. He slid from Apache’s saddle, secretly grateful, because his legs felt like they were stretched out of shape. With every step it felt like there was sandpaper on the inside of his pants. Riding ponies around town was no kind of preparation for riding a big horse. His hips felt like his thighs had been forcibly unscrewed, and after all the awkward bouncing in the saddle, he was pretty sure there was no chance he’d ever father children. He tried not to squeak when he spoke.

They took a bowl from Tom’s pack, filled it from one of the canteens, and let the horses drink. Then they walked on, the horses following along as the sun became an inferno overhead.

On foot it was easier to follow the trail, too. At first the footprints were easy to spot, since they ran in a line from the gate into the foothills, but the higher they climbed, the more obscure the prints became. At one point Tom dropped prostrate on the hard ground, and peered sideways at some marks that didn’t look like they were anything at all-at least not to Benny. Tom kept frowning and squinting and grunting.

Benny stared at him, annoyed. He was exhausted from total lack of sleep, and flies were threatening to pick him up and carry him off. And every time the wind blew through the trees, he swore he could hear Nix calling out to him.

“Are you actually doing anything down there?” Benny asked.

“No,” Tom muttered. “I’m just screwing around to piss you off.”

Benny gave that a minute, then said, “Sorry.”

Tom said, “I’m looking at the footprints to see if there’s a clear direction.”

Footprints? Benny thought. All he could see was dried mud and bare patches of rock. He looked from the ground, off into the direction they had been following; a twisted course through empty foothills that wandered south by southeast. The heavy rains of the previous night had soaked all of the ground, and Tom had been able to follow the foot trails leading from Mountainside. But as the morning wore on, Tom became less certain.

Tom got to his feet and slapped dust from his clothes. Even after the rains, the top dirt had dried to powder in a matter of hours.

“What’s wrong?” Benny asked.

“Here’s the problem,” Tom said. “The rain last night was really heavy, and it came down too fast for the soil to absorb it all, which means that there was runoff. This pass was probably like a small river for a while, with all the water coming down these slopes. Whoever passed this way came through just after the storm, but while there was still some runoff, and that runoff smeared the boot prints pretty thoroughly.”

“What’s that mean for us?”

Tom took a hefty swig of his canteen. “This isn’t just an accident, either. Charlie’s one slick, sneaky son of a gun. So far he’s doubled back on his trail three times, used brush to try and wipe out his tracks, crossed water, and now has deliberately gone out of his way to cross hardpan, because this kind of terrain doesn’t hold a print very long or very well.”

“So are we catching up or chasing our butts out here?”

“Little of both.” Tom was smiling when he said it.

“So you didn’t lose the trail?”

“Sure, I lost it. Several times… but every time he shakes us off his trail, it’s just where you think it’ll be again. Charlie has no respect for anyone’s intelligence other than his own. He must think Captain Strunk is after him.”

“Isn’t the captain smart?”

“Huh? Oh, sure… But Strunk’s not a tracker. Charlie’s confusing the trail for someone who doesn’t know the same tricks. Maybe he’d play it differently if he knew another bounty hunter was tracking him.”

“Are you sure he doesn’t?” Benny said, and for a moment Tom’s smile flickered.

Tom looked at his brother for a second, pursed his lips, and then turned in a slow circle, re-examining the trails. “We have three possible routes through these hills that are safe. And by that I mean that the zoms have been pretty well cleared out. This pass has become a kind of trade route, and the armed guards the traders use usually go through here and chop down any of the dead they find. They’re quiet about it, too, so as not to draw more zoms into the area. Follow me?”

Benny nodded.

“So the footprints we’re seeing here are almost certainly human. Question is whether these are older prints that were mostly, but not entirely, erased by runoff, or prints left by men moving fast but not carrying heavy loads. The last of the runoff blurred the edges and in this area here, the topsoil is thinner, because we’re coming to some rocky areas.”

“Okay, but if people came through here recently, then it has to be Charlie and the Hammer, right?”

Tom didn’t answer right away. “What bothers me most about it is that I’m not seeing small footprints.”

“Nix’s?”

He nodded. “We saw her prints earlier, but I haven’t seen one in the last hour. Not one.”

“What if one of them’s carrying her?”

Tom considered. “If the ground was softer, we could make that call, because one of the male footprints would be deeper. You might be right, but I’m not sure, because the footprints I’m seeing here look like they’re from several different pairs of shoes.”

“More than Charlie and the Hammer?”

“Yes.”

“The Mekong brothers?”

“Could be them, which means we’re hunting four men rather than two.” Tom started to say something else, but stopped himself. Benny caught it, though.

“What?”

“There are a couple of other options, Benny, and we have to be ready for them.”

“What are they?”

“The option I like is that Nix somehow escaped. If that’s the case, her trail could have split off at any time. If she’s free, let’s hope she continues to head for high ground instead of trying to go back to town.”

“Because there aren’t as many zoms high up, right?”

“That, and higher up, there’s always the chance of finding food and shelter. There are some monks out here. If she runs into one of them, she’ll be fine. They’ll take care of her and get word to me.”

“What’s the other option? The one you don’t like.”

Tom met his eyes. “There are a lot of places out here to hide a body, Benny.”

There was nothing Benny wanted to say to that. On some superstitious level, he felt that to respond to it would be to increase the chances that it might be possible, and he could not allow that thought to take hold in either his heart or head. Nix’s notebook was still in his back pocket, and he touched it like it was a talisman, to ward off any evil possibility.

His throat was so dry that his voice was a dusty croak. “So what do we do now? What can we do?”

“If I was Charlie and I wanted to lay low… I’d either head for the trader’s compound on the eastern slopes, or…” He frowned.

“Or what?”

“Gameland.”

“Do you have any idea where the new location is?”

“No. But there’s an old fire access road that we can use to cut across country to a spot where they’d have to pass no matter where they’re going. It’s a pass through to areas that have more or less been cleared of zoms, and it’s the route all travelers take.”

As they walked, Tom said, “I never finished my story about how I found the Lost Girl. We’ll talk about it more at length later, but just in case we have to try and find Gameland, there are some things you should know. After finding the human that Lilah had killed, I was able to pick up her trail. It took about four days, but I finally tracked her to one of the mountains not too far from here. There was a ranger station up on stilts, built high on the mountain, and I climbed that and used my binoculars to scan the whole area. I guess I was up there for two or three hours when I saw her. She walked out from under some trees and stood in a clearing for a couple of minutes, eating an ear of raw corn. She was dressed like she was on the Zombie Card. Not the one you have, but the earlier one.”

“Earlier one? What do you mean? I have nearly the whole set…”

Tom shook his head. “You don’t understand, Benny, but the Zombie Cards weren’t intended for kids to collect. That came later, when the printers wanted to make some extra ration bucks. No, the original purpose of them was so that bounty hunters could carry pictures of the dead that had been reliably sighted, so that people could reach out to arrange for closure.” Still holding Chief’s reins, Tom reached into his pack, pulled out a soft leather pouch, and handed it to Benny.

Benny opened the pouch and removed a thick stack of the cards. He began riffling through them. “I never saw most of these. And… they’re different.” The cards didn’t have the Zombie Cards logo or the sensationalist writing on the back. The images were more like the standard erosion portraits that people put up on the walls near the Red Zone. On the backs were names, probable locations, and some brief biographical information. In the lower left corner was a price-the amount of ration dollars to be paid for a confirmed closure; and in the lower right corner on some of them was a date starting with either an S, L, SU, or Q.

“S for ‘spotted,’ L is for ‘living,’ but most people use it to designate ‘loners.’ Q for ‘quieted,’” Tom said. “SU means ‘status unknown.’ Lilah’s card is in there.”

Benny shuffled through until he found the card marked with both L and SU. The picture was that of an eleven-year-old girl with wild snow-white hair, wearing ratty jeans and a bulky UCLA men’s sweatshirt. She carried the same long spear she’d held in the more recent card. The Lost Girl. Benny turned the card over and silently read the back.

This apparently uninfected girl was

spotted in the mountains by Tom

Imura. If found, please contact Tom in

Mountainside, or pass word to “George

Goldman” via the way-station networks.

She may answer to the name Lilah or

Annie. Approach with caution, she is

considered dangerous and may suffer from

post traumatic stress disorder.

“Who’s George?”

“Remember the story Sacchetto told you?”

“Right! George was the guy who stayed behind with the girls… But I assumed he’d died.”

“After I spotted the girl, I climbed down from the guard station as fast as I could, but she was gone by the time I reached the clearing. I looked for a few more days, but found nothing. I don’t know whether she somehow spotted me and cleared out or just moved on. Next time I went out, I ran into George Goldman at the way station where we met Brother David. He was a nice guy, but he was just about used up and maybe more than a little crazy.”

“Didn’t he stay with the girls? Lilah and the baby?”

“Yes,” said Tom. “George was with them for years. They stayed at the cottage, surrounded by zombies, for almost two years. At first they had plenty of food, and George made sure the girls ate most of it. When it was about to run out completely, George made a very tough decision and went out. He locked the children in the bathroom, made sure they had the last of the food and some water. Then he imitated what Rob had done: He wrapped himself in torn strips of carpet, took the heaviest golf club he could find, and snuck out of the house. He was nearly killed a dozen times that night and the following day, but he managed to get to another farmhouse.

“The people who lived there were dead, and he had to fight his way through a few of them, but once he did, George was able to gather up a lot of food. He packed as much as he could into two big suitcases on wheels and pulled them down the road, back to the cottage. Getting through the zoms around the cottage was very hard, and it took him nearly a full day of trying one trick and then another, of running and hiding and sneaking around, before he was able to manage it. That became the pattern of their lives. About twice a month, George would go out, foraging for food, raiding all the places where people once lived, hoping to find help, hoping to find someone else alive. He didn’t see another living soul for years. Imagine that.” Tom shook his head. “Eventually George cleared out most of the zoms in the immediate area, and that allowed him a little more freedom. He would go foraging and bring back a wheelbarrow filled with books, clothes, toys-anything he could find to make the lives of the girls easier. He taught them how to read, schooled them the best he could. He wasn’t a teacher, wasn’t a scholar. He was a simple, middle-aged guy; an average and ordinary man.”

“He doesn’t sound ordinary,” Benny said. “He sounds like a hero.”

Tom smiled. “Yes, he does. I’ve heard a lot of survival stories about First Night and the times that followed, and even though a lot of people died, a lot of heroes were born. Often it was the most unlikely of people who found within themselves a spark of something greater. It was probably always there, but most people are never tested, and they go through their whole lives without ever knowing that when things are at their worst, they are at their best. George Goldman was one of those, and I doubt he would ever accept that anyone would think that he was a hero.”

“What happened to him?”

“As Lilah got older, he taught her how to take down zoms. She’s small and fast, so George taught her to come up behind them and cut their leg tendons to drop them, then spike them when they’re down. George worked it out for her, teaching her and practicing with her until she was faster than he was. He said that she had a natural talent for it.”

“That’s half cool and half sad,” Benny said. “Maybe more than half sad.”

“Yes, but it meant that she survived.”

“What about the baby?”

Tom’s face tightened. “This is where we get into the darkest part of the story. George had named the baby Annie, after his own sister who had been living in Philadelphia when the dead rose. He taught Annie the same way he taught Lilah, and the little girl grew up to be a lot like her sister. Strong, smart, and vicious when she had to be.”

They stopped for a few minutes to let the horses drink from a stream. Normally Tom would have steered well clear of the running water, but now they were forced to follow the trail. Even though the forest was quiet, Tom’s eyes never stopped roving over the terrain as they continued their hunt. The horses’ ears constantly shifted around, and both of them pranced nervously. Chief, though bigger, was more skittish, and he kept jerking his head up to look off into the woods, although each time the movement he tracked was a rabbit or a bird. Apache looked around slowly, but his whole body rippled with tension.

“Let’s keep moving,” he said. “Another ten minutes, and we’ll be able to ride again.”

Benny nodded, although again he touched Nix’s book in his pocket to ward off bad luck.

Tom picked up the thread of his story. “It was about eight years after First Night when George first found a living person. It was a man walking through the woods near where we are now. The man was dressed like a hunter and smelled like a corpse, and George nearly attacked him, thinking he was a zom.”

“The guy was wearing cadaverine?”

Tom nodded. “George followed him and watched him make a kill with a pistol, and then he knew the man was alive. For George it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt. He started yelling and ran down the hill toward the man, crying and babbling because he thought that the presence of this man meant that the long nightmare was over. The man spun and fired a shot at George, almost hitting him, but George hid behind a tree and yelled, telling him that he wasn’t a ghoul.”

Benny grunted at the word “ghoul.” It was what some of the older people called the zoms.

“The hunter, realizing that George wasn’t one of the dead, told him it was safe to come out. George ran to him and hugged him and shook his hand and-as he put it to me-‘acted like a total damn fool.’ The hunter was pleasant and kind. He gave George some food and told him that there was a whole town full of people not too far away, who were alive and thriving, and there were other towns all up and down this part of California. He offered to take him back to his own camp, saying he was part of a group of a dozen men who were clearing the zoms out of this region in order to allow people to reclaim it and rebuild.”

“But I thought-?”

“Wait, hear the rest of it. George told them about the two little girls, and the hunter got excited, saying that it was God’s own miracle that two children had survived for so long. He encouraged George to take him to where the girls were, so they could all go to the camp where it was completely safe. George agreed, of course. After all, this was the answer to years and years of prayers. They hurried through the woods to a farmhouse where George had been living with the girls for the last year. At first, the girls were terrified of the man. Lilah hadn’t seen another living adult since she was two, and Annie had never seen one. Lilah almost attacked the man, but George restrained her and took her weapons away. It took a long time to cajole and convince the girls that it was safe, and all the time the hunter sat on the floor and smiled and waited patiently, making sure to do nothing threatening.”

“He sounds like a good guy,” said Benny.

“Does he? Yes… I suppose that from this part of the story he does. Anyway, the hunter told George to gather up anything valuable and go with him to his camp. George brought the wheelbarrow filled with food, books, and other things that were useful or precious to them. It took four hours to follow the winding country roads to the camp, which had been set up in a big cornfield. The men in the camp all looked very hard, and everyone had weapons-and that much was okay, because of the nature of the world and what they were doing-but he didn’t like the way they smiled at him and his wheelbarrow or the way they looked at the girls. Even though he was delighted to see so many people, George began to get suspicious.”

“Wait. Were these guys bounty hunters?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?” Benny asked with a sinking feeling.

“Things went wrong pretty much right away. The hunter made some remark about the girls looking tough, and when George explained they had both hunted and killed zoms, the hunter really perked up. He said that the girls were worth their weight in gold for ‘the games,’ and when George turned to him to ask what that remark meant, someone hit him from behind. George woke up hours later, but the cornfield was empty and everyone was gone. He had no weapons or food and no idea what had happened to the girls. He searched every inch of that field and the woods beyond, but the girls were gone.

“He found horse tracks and footprints, but the best he could determine was that when the camp broke up, the men went in different directions. He said he went a little insane, and I can’t blame him. His whole life had been built around protecting those girls, and at the moment when he thought that they were really and truly saved from the monsters, it was people who took them away. It turned his whole world inside out. George staggered away and finally found a deserted house where he found some old cans of food. At first light he started searching for the girls. It became his obsession, and it consumed every waking second of every day.”

“What happened to the girls?”

“George looked everywhere, and along the way he met more and more people. He met the way-station monks and told them what had happened, and they started spreading the word. He started to hear rumors. One set of rumors talked about a place called Gameland that a bunch of bounty hunters and travelers had built in the mountains. The things people said about that place really tore George apart. When he described the girls and the men who had taken them, a lot of people suddenly stopped talking to him. Their fear of the men who ran Gameland was greater even than their compassion for a couple of lost children. Soon people were actively shunning George. Only the monks tried to help him, and some of those who went out to try to find the girls went missing.”

“And you don’t think it was zoms who got them?”

“Do you?”

Benny shook his head.

“By the time I ran into George, he was worn out. I told him that I’d spotted one girl, and when I described her, he said that it was Lilah. He begged me to say that I’d also seen Annie, but I didn’t… And when I found the spot where I’d seen the girl standing, there was only one set of prints.”

“What happened to Annie?”

“I don’t know for sure. Some of the travelers I met were more willing to talk to me than they were to George. A few of them told me that there was an old rumor about a couple of girls who had been taken to Gameland and that something bad had happened and only one little girl escaped.”

“No…,” Benny said softly. “Were Charlie and the Hammer involved?”

“George gave me pretty good descriptions of several of the men in the camp. He wasn’t clear about which one hit him or who actually took the girls, but Charlie and the Hammer were definitely there.”

Benny nodded. The respect he once had for Charlie had transformed into a murderous hatred.

“What happened to George?”

“I don’t know. Brother David said there was a rumor that George had hanged himself, but I don’t believe that. George might be dead, and he might have hanged, but I don’t believe for a minute that he would have killed himself. Not as long as Lilah was still out there.”

“Somebody killed him?”

“Murder is easy out here.”

They walked on. The horses were looking better, less haggard, and Benny hoped that they’d be able to ride them again and make up the distance he felt they were losing with every minute they stayed on foot. “If we find Lilah… what do we do?”

“Try to get her to come to Mountainside with us. The kid needs a life, needs people.”

Benny took the card out of his pocket and stared at it, trying to imagine that wild creature going to school, being normal. His mind wouldn’t fit around the concept.

“Come on,” Tom said tersely. “The horses are rested enough. Let’s ride… Let’s see if we can catch those animals.”

32

BOTH HORSES WERE SPITTING FOAM AGAIN BY THE TIME THEY REACHED the top of the mountain; then the ground leveled out, and they found the fire access road. Like all roads in the Ruin, it was badly overgrown, but Benny could see footprints, wheel ruts, and dried horse dung that looked recent.

“Is this the route the traders take?”

“Yes. This is the same area where I first saw the Lost Girl,” Tom said. “This is where I found the first couple of zoms that Lilah killed. I told you they were all similar in size and look.”

“Yeah,” Benny said. “Like she was hunting one person over and over again. Hard to believe that a little girl could do that.”

“What, kill a full-grown man? All it takes is stealth and the right weapons.”

“No,” said Benny. “It’s hard to believe that a little girl could kill anyone. I mean, sure, zoms… but how does a kid get to the point where they want to take a life?”

“Fair question, Ben, but let me ask you one in turn. If Charlie Pink-eye was in front of you, right now this minute, would you want to kill him?”

Benny nodded. “In a heartbeat.”

“You’re sure?”

“After what he did?”

“Even if we get Nix back unharmed?”

“No question about it, Tom.”

Tom studied him for a while before he said, “Couple things about that. I hear you when you say you’d kill Charlie, and for the most part I believe you, but there’s a little hesitation in your voice. If I’d have asked the same question last night, you’d have said yes without the slightest hesitation, because the hurt was immediate. It was right there in your face. But this is hours later. The blood cools, and the more distance you put between the heat of passion and any act of commission makes something like killing much harder to do. When people talk about killing in cold blood, they’re referring to something someone does even after they’ve calmed down and had time to think. If it takes us a month to find Charlie, you might not want him dead at all. You might want to see him put on trial, you might want to see the system work instead of getting blood on your own hands.”

“Okay, okay, I get the idea. You said there was a couple of things. What’s the other?”

“Why do you want Charlie dead?”

“Is that a real question?”

“Sure. I mean, he didn’t physically hurt you. He didn’t kill anyone in your family. He didn’t kill Nix, at least as far as we know… And I don’t think he has, even now.”

“He…,” Benny began, but faltered. “Because of Mr. Sacchetto and Nix’s mom. Because of what he might be doing to Nix. What kind of question is that?”

“So, you want to kill him for revenge?”

Benny didn’t answer. Apache blew loudly, scaring some robins from the grass.

“Will that bring Rob Sacchetto or Jessie Riley back from the dead? Will it fix Morgie’s head or guarantee that we’ll find Nix safe and unharmed?”

“No, but-”

“So, why do you want Charlie dead? What good will it do?”

“Why do you want him dead?” Benny snapped, frustrated by Tom’s questions.

“We’re not discussing me,” said Tom. “We can, but we’re not right now.”

Benny said, “Charlie’s hurting people that I care about, and last night we agreed that Charlie’s going to come after us. To shut us up or whatever. He knows that we know, and he knows that we’re not going to let it go, even if the court clears him.”

“Right,” said Tom. “Charlie’s smart enough to have figured that out. So… you want to kill him to prevent him from killing you?”

“Us, not just me. But, yeah. That makes sense, man. Doesn’t it?”

“Sadly, yes, it does.”

“Why sadly?”

“Because it’s the way things still seem to be among us humans. Like Leroy Williams said, we never seem to learn.”

“What’s the alternative? Do nothing and let Charlie kill us?”

“No. I’m a pacifist by inclination, but I have my limits. And on top of that I’m not a martyr.”

“So, you intend to kill Charlie?”

Tom’s eyes were black ice. “Yes.”

“So why are you grilling me on this stuff, Tom?”

“Because the things that happened yesterday just kicked you into the same world as the Lost Girl. There’s some logic to it, even some justice in it, but the more you walk in that world, the more damage it’s going to do. And I don’t think there’s a way for us to turn back. Not anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“The bodies that I found. The girl wasn’t just trying to kill a certain person or a certain type of person. She was trying to punish the image of that person that existed in her mind. Something had been done to her that was so bad, so tragic, that it changed her-maybe forever. Revenge isn’t really enough of a word to explain what she’s feeling and why she’s doing what she’s doing. It’s more like an infection of the spirit, and it distorts everything she sees and everything she does.”

“So,” Benny said, sorting through it, “she’s trying to kill the idea of this guy? That she’s trying to kill the infection by killing what caused it?”

Tom cut a sharp look at Benny.

“What?” asked Benny.

“That may have been the smartest thing you ever said, kiddo. It shows that you have insight. Yes, that’s exactly what Lilah is doing.”

“So… who’s the guy she’s trying to kill?”

“Maybe one of the bounty hunters killed Annie, or maybe she died in the Z-Games and Lilah’s fixated on the image of the man who put her into one of the pits. Finding that out is one of the reasons I want to find her.”

Benny digested this as they came out from under the shade of the trees into a gorgeous field in which wildflowers ran rampant and proclaimed their freedom in shouts of colors. The sky was a distant blue, and massive white clouds sailed across it. The image was so lovely that Benny’s mind saw but discounted the abandoned cars that were covered with weeds and probably filled with old bones.

“It’s hard to imagine that there is so much hurt and harm out here, isn’t it?” said Tom softly.

All Benny could do was nod. He took the Lost Girl card out of his pocket and stared at it. Such a beautiful, proud, tragic face. “Lilah,” he murmured, but the breeze through the tall grass answered him in Nix’s voice.

They reached the creek and turned north; riding in silence for several miles till Tom swung out of the saddle and squatted down by a rusted metal footbridge. Benny watched his brother’s face as he examined a series of overlapping footprints and turned his head to see which direction their prey went.

33

THEY CAME DOWN ANOTHER SLOPE AND THERE, NESTLED BETWEEN A LONG tumble of boulders left over from a glacier thousands of years ago, was a stream that glimmered like a blue ribbon through the forest. They dismounted and led the horses as they followed a crooked path that kept trees between them and whoever might be down there-bounty hunters or zoms. Chief clearly did not want to go that way and tugged on the reins; Apache looked equally nervous.

Tom picked up some loose bits of dirt and leaf debris and threw it into the air, watching where the wind took it. “Wind’s blowing toward us. If we stay on this side of the creek, we should be okay. But we’ll need to keep our voices low.”

The path along the creek had once been a scenic country road, and it was wide enough for them to walk side-by-side, leading the horses.

“Tom?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re going to find her, aren’t we?”

“Lilah? I-”

“No,” Benny said, “Nix. We’re going to find her, right?”

“We’re going to try.”

“That’s not good enough, man. We’ve got to find her. She’s lost everything. Everyone. We can’t… abandon her.”

“We won’t.”

“Swear it.”

Tom looked at him.

“Swear that no matter what happens, we’ll find her. That we’ll never stop looking for her.”

In another place, under other circumstances, what Tom did next might have seemed silly or corny, but out here in the Rot and Ruin it had a strange sense of grandeur, perhaps of nobility. Tom placed his hand over his heart.

“I swear to you, my brother, that we will find Nix Riley. I swear that we will never stop looking for her.”

Benny nodded.

They walked on, entering the thickest part of the forest that ran alongside the creek. Under the roof of leaves the air was cooler, but it was as damp as a cave. There were so many songbirds singing in the branches that it was impossible to pick out a particular voice.

Half a mile in, Tom knelt and ran his fingers over the damp grass. “Got you, you bastard!”

“What is it?”

“Footprints. Big, have to be Charlie’s. Grass hasn’t even had time to unbend all the way.”

“How long?”

“Half an hour. We’re close now, kiddo. Time to move quick and quiet.”

“The horses make a lot of noise.”

“I know, but it’s what we have, so we’ll need to be twice as vigilant.”

They remounted, and Tom led the way down the grassy lane. The soft green of the grass as it ran along the glistening blue water, and the constant birdsong all around them, gave the moment a fairy tale feeling that Benny found hard to shake. It was unreal, even surreal in its gentle, unhurried beauty. So at odds with everything that was real in their immediate world of hurt and harm and hurry.

“Tom? About Gameland. Do you know for sure that they rebuilt it?”

“Not firsthand, but from people whose word I believe. People who said that Lilah’s been there. Even if we don’t find it today, I’ll keep looking for it.”

“Why? No one in town even cares about it. They won’t do anything about it.”

“I know. But I care.” Tom sighed. “We lost the world, Benny. That should have taught us something about the value of human life. Gameland shouldn’t be allowed to exist. It needs to be taken down.”

“They rebuilt it once, wouldn’t they do it again?”

“Maybe. And if they did, then someone should always be ready to burn it down again.”

“Who?” Benny asked. “You?”

Benny was suddenly aware that too much of his skepticism about his brother’s abilities showed through in his tone. He immediately regretted his words. They were part of an old reflex, and he didn’t actually hate Tom anymore. In fact, after everything that had happened last night, on top of what they had experienced together that first time in the Ruin, Benny was seeing Tom in a different light.

But the words were said, and Benny didn’t know how to unsay them.

Tom squinted into the sun. Small muscles bunched and flexed at the corners of his jaws. “Some of the travelers and traders I’ve talked to say that certain bounty hunters that they declined to name have been gathering kids-girls and boys-to take to Gameland.”

“Kids from where? I haven’t heard about any kids from town going missing.”

“There are other towns, Benny. And there are kids living with some of the way-station monks. Some of the loners have kids, too. None of these kids would be missed, not by the people in Mountainside. The bounty hunters prey on them because of that, and there’s nobody out here to protect them. No one to stand up for them or speak for them. It’s a bad, bad world out here.”

“All of it?” Benny asked. “Is that all there is? Fear back in town and evil out here?”

“I hope not.”

The path rounded a bend and then moved sharply away from the water and eventually left the shelter of the trees to run through a series of low, rocky hills. Without the canopy of cool leaves, the heat returned like a curse. Even through his shirt, Benny’s shoulders and back felt charbroiled. His forearms glowed with sunburn, and sweat boiled from his pores and evaporated at once without any perceptible cooling of his skin.

Tom studied the landscape and slowed to a stop, looking concerned.

“What is it?”

“Something doesn’t make sense,” Tom whispered. He pointed to where their path curved around between two walls of rock. The red-rusted span of a train bridge arched over the path.

“There’s a spot down there that everyone avoids. It’s thick with zoms, one of the natural lowland points where the nomad zoms gather. Last time I came this way, there were a few hundred of them.”

“Hundred?”

“Yep, some of them had probably been there since First Night. Others just kind of wandered in.”

“Pulled by gravity, right? Following any downsloping path.”

“Exactly. There’s a crossroads down there. A highway intersects with two farm roads and this road we’re on. Big intersection.”

“So… why don’t we just go around?”

“We can, but the trail we’re following goes straight along this road.” He pointed to visible footprints in the soft clay beside the road.

“That doesn’t make sense. Why would Charlie go right into a nest of zoms? Isn’t he supposed to know the Ruin as well as you?”

“He knows it better than me. He spends more time out here.”

“Okay, look… I may only be your little brother, and I know I’m not a bounty hunter and all that, but doesn’t this have ‘trap’ written all over it in bright red paint?”

Tom almost smiled. “You think?”

“So you know it’s a trap?”

“Benny, this whole thing is a trap. Everything Charlie’s done since he attacked Rob Sacchetto has been a trap.”

Tom stopped and suddenly pointed to the trail of footprints that led off around the bend. The prints were mostly those of a man with big feet. Charlie. However, at one point, another set of prints suddenly appeared beside his. Small bare feet.

“Nix?” Benny asked.

Tom put a finger to his lips and whispered, “It looks like Charlie was carrying her and set her down here. See? Their prints go all the way around the bend. Right toward the crossroads.”

“Maybe they don’t know how close we are,” Benny suggested. He looked for confirmation in Tom’s face, but didn’t see any. Benny started to draw his knife, but Tom shook his head.

“Wait until you need to,” Tom cautioned. “Steel reflects sunlight, and that’ll attract zoms as much as movement. Now, I need you to stay steady, kiddo. Once we round this bend, it’s going to get weird. Maybe it’s a trap, maybe not; but even if it isn’t, this is one of the most dangerous spots out here. You’ll see why.”

“Great pep talk, coach.”

Tom grinned.

Moving very slowly, careful not to make a sound, they rounded the bend in the road, hugging close to the wall and staying in the shade of the rocks. Apache and Chief were trained for this, and they moved only when and where they were steered.

Around the bend, the view opened up, and Benny saw the roads that wandered from all directions over hills down to the crossroads.

“God!” Benny gasped, but immediately clamped a hand over his mouth.

It was neither the beauty of the vista of endless mountains nor the tens of thousands of silent cars crowding the road that tore a gasp from him. The crossroads and the fields surrounding it were crowded with the living dead. There were at least a thousand of them. Benny stared, searching for movement, waiting for the sea of monsters to turn and begin shambling toward them. But they did not. The zombies just stood there in one crowded mass. Others, alone or in small groups, stood along the roads or in the fields. All still, all silent.

The horses now showed their training, and in the actual presence of the dead, they made no sound, but Apache’s trembling terror vibrated through his entire body and up into Benny’s.

Benny tried to understand what he was seeing. He didn’t believe that all of them had just wandered here because the roads sloped down and they followed the unrelenting pull of gravity. There were too many for that. Maybe they chased some people down here and after the kills, they had nowhere to go and nothing to distract them. Some of the zoms were probably the people from the cars, who had been killed there and reanimated with no direction or purpose. The tough grass covered them to the waist, and some of them were completely wrapped in ivy and twists of wisteria and trumpet vines. There were soldiers, nurses, kids his own age, ordinary people, old people, many of them showing signs of the terrible bites that had killed them. Just standing there in the midday sunlight. It was such a strange sight-all these dead standing there like statues.

No… that wasn’t it. They were like gravestones, using their own flesh to mark where they had died and where they would spend eternity. Not buried in a box but trapped in decaying tissue that could move, that would hunt and attack, but that, in the absence of something to attract it, would remain in place forever. The thought was as horrible as it was sad. Suddenly, Benny could feel something deep inside of him begin to undergo a process of change. His fear, which had been as big as the whole Rot and Ruin, seemed to shrink. Not completely, but enough so that he was consciously aware of it. He thought he understood why.

On their first trip into the Ruin, Tom had said that fear makes you smart, but Benny understood now that his brother had been talking about caution rather than fear. These zoms, every last one of them-even the smallest child-would kill him if they could, but not one of them meant him harm. Meaning, intention, will… None of that was part of their makeup. There was no more malice there than in a lightning strike or bacteria on a rusted nail, and as he sat there, he felt his terror of them give way to an awareness of them as something merely dangerous. The intense hatred of the dead he had once harbored was gone completely; burned out of him in Harold Simmons’s house. Only the fear had remained, and now that, too, was wavering in its intensity.

Charlie, on the other hand, was something still to be feared. Charlie was far more dangerous than any single zombie on the planet because his malice was deliberate.

Understanding the difference between these two types of dangers-unthinking and deliberate-felt like a huge revelation, and Benny wanted to tell Tom about this, but he said nothing. Now was definitely not the time.

Tom turned sharply in his saddle, staring behind them. Benny saw a few of the zoms catch the movement and raise their withered faces.

“What?”

“Something’s burning,” Tom said, and that fast, Benny caught it, too. A sulfur stink that he knew very well. He’d smelled it a hundred times at the pit on the days when they set off dynamite to drop a layer of shale and loose rock down on the ashes and partly burned bones.

“Fuse!” Benny shouted. Or… thought he did. Anything he might actually have said was erased by an immense blast that tore half a million pounds of sandstone from the cliff walls. Fiery clouds of jagged debris burst from both walls, exploding into the pass from ground level and above. Apache screamed and reared and then bolted away from the tons of rock that smashed down all around them.

Benny kept screaming as the horse galloped at full speed, away from the collapsing walls… right toward the sea of zombies. Every single one of them turned toward him, a thousand black mouths opened, two thousand wax white hands reached for him as he raced without control toward them.

34

THERE ARE MOMENTS THAT DEFINE A PERSON’S WHOLE LIFE. MOMENTS IN which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.

Benny Imura’s horse galloped toward death as certainly as if the path was marked with signs. If he did nothing, his crazed and panicked horse would crash into the sea of zombies, and Benny would die. If he tried to slow Apache down, the zoms would surround him and drag him out of the saddle. If he dismounted and ran, they would close around him and he would be lost. There was only one possible choice left, and it was as improbable as it was insane. The Benny Imura who had gone reluctantly out with his brother ten days ago could not have made that choice. The Benny Imura who had faced the reanimated corpse of the artist Sacchetto but had not yet faced the other horrors that last night had forced upon him would not have made that choice.

As Apache bore him toward the hungry mouths, Benny’s lips spoke a single word. It was not a cry for help. It was not his brother’s name. It was not a prayer. In his mind there was only one thing larger than his own death, only one thing more powerful than his fear of the living dead.

He screamed, “Nix!”

And he drew his wooden sword, kicked Apache’s flanks as hard as he could, and charged into the monsters.

35

THE HORSE RESPONDED TO THE KICK AND TO THE CONTROL THAT POWERED that kick. Within three galloping steps his flight straightened from wobbling panic to determined attack. Benny screamed as Apache’s broad chest slammed into the front rank of the zombies. Benny’s right arm rose and fell, rose and fell, slamming the brutal edge of the hardwood sword down onto faces and hands and necks and shoulders. The dead reached for him, but he kicked with both feet, and struck and struck and struck. Apache, covered in his carpet coat, felt only the muffled pain of bites that could not tear through the carpet and did no harm. Instead it drove him into a towering fury. He reared up and lashed out with steel-shod hooves. Jaws shattered, skulls cracked, and then they were through the front rank and racing toward the line of stalled cars. The zoms turned and followed, and those in front of them shambled toward the horse.

Benny wheeled Apache around and tugged back on the reins to encourage him to rear up again and again. The hooves were backed with all the power and terror in the half-ton animal, and withered bodies crumpled before him. Benny’s carpet chaps protected his legs, but he wasn’t wearing his carpet coat. If he fell, or if the creatures grabbed a wrist, then only the last bits of the cadaverine would protect him. At the speed with which things were happening, they did not seem to have the time to react to the presence of the noxious chemical, and if any of them were repelled by it, Benny could not tell.

“Go! Go!” Benny yelled, and Apache surged forward toward another line of the dead. Beyond that was open ground. The sword rose and fell, and Benny felt the shock tremble up his arm, but he used the pain to fuel his rage. He drew his hunting knife with his left hand and used it to stab and slash as the hands tried to drag him down, screaming inarticulate bellows that filled the air. But the blade hit bone, and the impact wrenched it from his hand, and he lost the knife.

They slammed through the second line, and one hand snagged in his pants cuff and nearly tore him from the saddle. Benny slewed halfway around and slashed backward at the clutching hand, feeling the forearm bones break as he struck down.

Where the hell is Tom? When the walls had exploded, Benny had lost all sight of his brother, and he risked a single backward glance and saw nothing but brown smoke that obscured the entire cliff wall.

Panic flared for a moment in his chest, threatening to dampen the fires of his anger, but as the white hands reached for him again, his fury swelled, and he raised the sword and brought it down, again and again.

Something flashed blue and bright. The creek! It had wound around the far side of the cliffs and here it was, running within a hundred yards of the crowded road. Benny jerked the reins to one side and kicked again, and the horse cried out in an almost human voice. The muscles in its thick haunches bunched, and the animal leaped forward, smashing aside more of the dead. Benny flattened himself against Apache’s neck, and together they raced across the field toward the water. There were dips and small valleys hidden by the tall grass, and Benny realized that it was a longer, harder run that he thought, and there were at least fifty zoms between him and the safety of the fast blue water.

He caught movement to one side and saw a man-a man, not a zombie-entering the treeline on the far side of the field.

The Motor City Hammer.

It had to be the Hammer who’d set off the dynamite. A second sooner, and the blast would have dropped half the mountain on Benny. And on Tom.

Tom.

Benny knew he was trapped on this side of the cliff wall. There was no way back, and he didn’t dare race for the treeline. If the Hammer was there, then so was Charlie. Maybe the Mekong brothers, too, and they all had guns. Nix was there, too, but she might as well be on the far side of the moon for all that Benny could do about it right now. His-and her- only hope lay in his survival. And the only route to safety lay on the far side of Coldwater Creek. Zoms don’t have the coordination to wade through fast water. That’s what Tom had told him.

A zom lurched into his path, and Apache had no time to swerve, so he ran the creature down. Brittle bones made a sickening sound as the horse crushed them into the grass.

Two others, a fireman and a man wearing only boxer shorts, closed in on him, blocking their way. Benny steered with his knees, and the horse angled just slightly to the left as Benny slashed down to the right, hitting the fireman on the side of the head and knocking him into the other man. They fell in a tangle of pale limbs.

As they crested the last of a series of rolling hills, Benny felt his blood freeze. The valley beyond was shallow, no more than a dozen feet deep at the end of a long, gradual slope. The horse could easily make the run, but the valley was thick with the living dead. Zoms that Benny hadn’t even seen. Maybe a hundred of them, and half of them were children.

Children.

The kids were dressed in school uniforms, and there was a male zom in the middle of them who still wore the rags of a school bus driver. He looked like a shepherd in the midst of a flock of grotesque sheep. Some of the children’s faces were wrinkled and blackened. Had their school bus crashed and burned? Benny gagged at the thought, and again his resolve wavered. Sweat weakened his grip on the sword. He knew that these creatures were dead, that they were reanimated echoes who wore the disguise of the people they had once been, but Tom’s words rang in his mind.

They used to be people.

How could he strike them? How could he hurt them?

Children, women, old people. Lost souls.

Apache pounded down the slope; the blue water beckoned.

Something burned through the air an inch from his nose, and for a moment he had the crazy notion that it was a bee or wasp. Then, almost like an afterthought, the crack of a gunshot echoed across the plain.

And then he heard a girl scream.

“BENNY!”

Benny turned toward the sound and saw a tiny figure break from the trees and run out into the field. She was too far away to be sure, but Benny was sure.

“Nix!” he yelled.

Nix jumped over a fallen tree, stopped, snatched up a thick branch, and as one of the men leaped over the tree after her, she swung so hard that Benny could hear the crack all the way across the field. But then three more men ran after her, and she fled and then was out of sight behind a cluster of trees. A fifth man stepped to the top of a small ridge and aimed something at Benny that glinted with blue fire in the sunlight. Without realizing that he was going to do it, Benny ducked down, and he felt the bullet sear the air just above the back of his neck. The sharp bang of the shot chased the bullet through the empty air. There was another shot, and another. Something plucked at his pack, and he waited, listening inside his body for the pain, but there was nothing. Fifty feet away a zom spun and fell, a black hole punched through its stomach, but even as the horse raced past, the zombie was struggling back to its feet.

The water was there, the crowd of dead school children spread out before him.

Which would kill him, he wondered. The zombies or the bullets of the bounty hunters?

“BENNY!” Nix’s voice carried as clear as a bell over the hills. He turned to see her running toward him with five men only yards behind her. “RUN!”

He was running. Thirty yards now. Twenty.

He heard Nix scream once more, and when he turned again, he saw that the largest of the men had grabbed her, snatching her up as if she were a toddler. The five men immediately turned and ran back toward the trees as a wave of zoms shambled after them.

“NO!” Benny yelled, reaching one hand impotently toward the retreating figures.

And then something flashed past him and slammed into the wall of zoms. Benny saw silver fire dancing in the sunlight, and the zoms fell away, coming apart in desiccated sections, arms and heads flying away from the screaming thing that plowed through them.

“Benny!” Tom bellowed. “Follow me!”

It was impossible, but there he was. Covered in blood and dust, his sword glittering like flowing mercury, Chief’s eyes rolling with insane fear as Tom smashed aside the living dead and splashed into the blue water.

Benny’s horse leaped over the last of the dead, his hooves caving in the head of the bus driver, and then they were in the water. The cold current struck them, and Apache neighed and blew, and Benny gasped as icy water bit his ribs and chest. Forty or more of the zoms followed them into the water, but the powerful current plucked them up and swept them away.

Benny turned and looked toward the treeline. There was no sign of Nix, but for a moment-perhaps it was his imagination or the shimmer of the heat or even a wandering zom-but Benny thought he saw another small figure moving across the field toward the treeline, heading in the same direction that the men had taken Nix. She ran fast, bent low, and she carried something in her hands that glinted like steel. Benny blinked sweat out of his eyes, and when he looked again, the small running figure was gone.

The treeline was an unbroken line of oaks and maples, with no sign of human life. The field was covered with the living dead-thousands upon thousands of them-and that way was as blocked and useless as the collapsed pass through the cliff. Their horses clambered up onto the far bank.

They were safe.

But Nix was gone.

And they could not follow.

36

BITTER, EXHAUSTED, AND ANGRY, THEY MOVED AWAY FROM THE CREEK as fast as their horses could go, heading into the hills, seeking the safety of the high ground. When they were safe in a thick copse of trees, and when Tom was convinced that there were no zoms nearby, they slid from the saddles and collapsed onto the thick grass. For several long minutes they lay there, unable to move, gasping like beached fish, running with sweat, barely able to think. Apache and Chief stood nearby, their legs trembling with tension and fear.

“Are you okay?” Tom asked when he had the breath.

“No.” Benny groaned.

Tom turned his head so sharply that it looked like it was unscrewing from his shoulders. “Where are you hurt? Are you bit-?”

“No… it’s not me. It’s Nix!”

“At least we know she’s alive, Benny. That’s something. Hold on to that.”

“They also know we’re coming.”

Tom managed to sit up. He was bleeding from a dozen small cuts, but he assured Benny they were from the sharp fragments of stone that pelted him when the cliffs blew. He crawled over and pulled the canteen from his saddle, drank deeply, and then handed it to Benny. “They knew long before now,” he said. “You can’t rig charges like that and bring down that much stone without taking time to set it up. No, kiddo… They knew we were onto them, and they set a very smart trap.”

The water opened up Benny’s parched throat, but he coughed and gagged on it.

“You sure you’re okay?” Tom asked, peering curiously at him, his eyes darting to Benny’s arms and legs. “You’re positive you didn’t-”

“I’m not bit,” snapped Benny. “I want to go find Nix.”

“We will,” Tom promised. “But the horses are a step away from dead. Unless you want to chase them on foot, we have to rest.”

“How long?”

“At least an hour. Two would be better.”

“Two hours!”

“Shhh… keep your voice down. Listen to me, Ben,” Tom said, and his face was tight. “If we rest for two hours, we can catch up with them in maybe two more hours. If we don’t rest, it’ll take all day, if we catch up at all. This is a situation where slow is faster.”

Benny glared at him, but then he growled and turned away. He knew that Tom was right, but every second they sat there felt like it was one less second for Nix. Seconds burned away into minutes, and it took centuries for enough minutes to gather into an hour, and then two. By the time Tom said that they were ready to go, Benny was a half tick away from screaming insanity.

“How come Charlie and the others didn’t just hide behind rocks and shoot us?”

Tom busied himself by putting the carpet coats back onto the horses.

“Tom?”

“I guess they didn’t like their chances in a shoot-out,” Tom said.

“Are you kidding? Six or seven against one?”

All Tom gave as a reply was a shrug, and Benny stared at his brother. What the hell did that mean?

“Besides,” Tom said as he tightened the last of the straps, “the dynamite was a big bang, big enough to draw most of the dead toward the pass, which meant that it drew them away from the forest. If we’d been killed, they would never have risked shooting at us. It was a stupid risk even if he’d hit us, because it drew some of the zoms toward them. I expect Charlie’s going to be pretty upset with the shooter.”

“It wasn’t the Hammer?”

“No. Too skinny. Probably one of the Mekong brothers. Whoever it is, though, I want to have a chat with him.”

“A ‘chat’?” Benny said, grinning for the first time in hours.

“A meaningful chat,” Tom agreed. “C’mon, mount up. We’ll stay under the trees for a while. This side of the creek is all farms, so we can cut through and then cross the water a couple of miles upstream. If we’re lucky, we’ll hit the highway and cross that before they can reach it, and then we can see about laying our own trap. The highway’s the tough part, and I want to have time to figure it out, so let’s make tracks.”

“Good,” Benny said, reaching for the saddle horn and pulling himself up.

“This is probably the last leg of this chase, Ben,” said Tom. “I know what we just went through was rough, but there’s a big difference between fighting zoms and fighting people. When we find Nix, I’ll try to draw Charlie and the others off, and I want you to grab Nix and make a run for it. Don’t worry about where you go, I’ll find you. If you can, get to the water and wade as far south as you can before you come out on the bank. Try to leave no trail.”

“How will you find us then?”

“Don’t worry, kiddo. I’ve got a whole lot of sneaky I haven’t even used yet.” He gave Benny a reassuring smile as he swung back into the saddle. “Let’s go.”

They headed northeast, following a series of farm roads that were almost completely reclaimed by the relentless forest. As they rode, Tom pulled a bottle of cadaverine from his pocket, dabbed some onto his clothes, and then handed the bottle to Benny. Apache nickered irritably from the stench. Benny considered the bottle for a moment.

“Tom… do you think this is why we got away?”

“It helped. It made the zoms hesitate. Remember, they won’t bite something that already smells dead.”

“I don’t understand that,” Benny said as he sprinkled some of the foul-smelling liquid onto his jeans.

“No one does. It’s another of the mysteries associated with the living dead. Just be glad it works. Hey-not so much. Save some for later. We only have two bottles.”

Benny put the cap back on and tossed the bottle to Tom, but the cap was still loose, and as Tom caught the bottle, the liquid splashed out and splattered his shirt.

“Oh, crap, man,” Benny cried. “Sorry!”

Wincing at the odor rising from his clothes, Tom fitted the cap back on. “Well… that ought to about do it. I could probably square dance with a zom and not get bitten right now.” He leaned over and handed the bottle back to Benny. “There’s still half a bottle left. Keep it. I’ll hold on to the other.”

“What if we run out?”

“Let’s hope we don’t.”

The last of the farm roads ended by a curve in the creek, and they splashed across, moving slow to keep the noise down, each of them scanning the terrain. Everything was still. They came up from the stream bed and found a highway that was entirely blocked by cars. Four lanes and both shoulders, stretching away around a bend in the road a mile to their right and off into the misty horizon to their left. An army helicopter that Tom identified as a UH-60 Black Hawk lay crashed in the meadow that ran along the road, the huge propeller blades broken and twisted and hung with creeper vines. Benny wondered how the chopper had come to crash. Had one of the crew been infected? Were they airlifting victims and took the wrong kind? Or had they run out of fuel and were too far from home? Maybe it had been caught by the EMP. There was no way to know, and no matter what had brought the powerful machine down, it stood as a monument to a war in which technology and sophistication had served no purpose, had ultimately accomplished nothing.

They rode their horses to the outside edge of the shoulder and stopped. The animals did not like the endless line of cars, although Benny didn’t see any zoms hiding among the dead machines.

Bones, however… There were plenty of those. Skeletons-long since picked clean by zoms, scavengers, and the elements-were scattered everywhere. Thousands upon thousands of skulls and rib cages, leg and arm bones, bleached white by the merci-less California sun. The cars themselves were slammed and smashed together. Some had burned, some were skewed sideways or overturned. A few had rolled off the highway and lay half hidden in the tall grass beside the road. Benny could see that the windows of all the cars were broken. Some had been smashed out by people escaping-or trying to-and some were smashed in by fresh zoms who still had enough of a functioning brain to pick up stones. There were plenty of stones. The roadbed was edged with countless white plum-sized rocks, placed for drainage, Benny knew, but used as weapons.

Benny nudged a cracked thigh bone with his toe. “Tom, how come there are so many bones? Didn’t most people turn into zoms?”

“Most did, sure, but there were still hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who died fighting. Died in ways that kept them from rising. Broken necks, crushed skulls, bullets in the brain. Arms and legs torn off. It’s not like back in town where we bury the dead. Here… Those that truly die just rot away until bones are all that’s left.”

Hundreds of the cars were pocked with bullet holes, and it was clear that at one point the helicopter had fired on the stalled vehicles. Tom saw where Benny was looking, and he pointed out a black shape rising from the side door of the crashed Black Hawk.

“They used their minigun. It’s a 7.62 mm, multibarrel machine gun that could fire three thousand rounds per minute.”

“Wasn’t enough,” Benny said.

“No,” Tom agreed.

On the far side of the line of vehicles was a vast meadow of tall grass and wild wheat that stretched into green and brown forever. Scattered here and there were hundreds of young trees-scrub pines, oaks, poplars, maples-rising above the sea of waving grass. The trees made it impossible to tell if the meadow was free of zoms, an assessment further spoiled by the constant breeze that made everything sway and shift.

A bird cawed, and Benny turned to see a threadbare crow perched on the broken vane of the downed helicopter.

“Which way do we go?”

“That’s the problem,” said Tom. “We need to cut across this road if we’re going to catch them before they reach their camp. God knows how many of their cronies they have there. If we cut the road here and then cross that big meadow, we can get ahead of them. On horseback… Yeah, we can get ahead of them.” He nodded toward the northeast corner of the big meadow where a mountain rose, green and gray. “Charlie’s camp is on the other side of that mountain. There’s half a dozen trails-man-made and game trails. I’m pretty sure I know which one they’d take. You know, the second time I saw Lilah was right over there. Halfway up the mountain. Rob Sacchetto and I were out here together. I wanted him to do sketches of some zoms I thought might be related to folks in town. We were up on the catwalk of that old ranger station, and I had a big high-powered telescope with me this time. I’d picked up Lilah’s trail that morning, and I left him there and went through the woods. I found her, and it took me half the day to first convince her that I didn’t want to hurt her and the rest of the afternoon convincing her that she didn’t want to hurt me.”

“You talked with her?”

“I talked. She didn’t say much, and just when I thought that she was going to open up, something spooked her and she vanished. God only knows where she went, because I lost her trail.”

“You found her twice around here,” Benny said. “She must live near here.”

“Maybe. She might have moved on since then. But let’s deal with first things first. We have to get the horses across this road.”

“But how?” Benny walked up and down the row of cars. There were some spots where he could squeeze through, and certainly he and Tom could climb over the vehicles… but he did not see one spot where a horse could pass. “Can we go around?”

“We’d lose half a day.” There was an overturned panel truck jammed at a right-angle to a big car that was riddled with bullet holes. “Escalade” was written on the fender in tarnished silver letters.

In the cleft formed by the two vehicles, there was a shaded spot big enough for the Imura brothers and their horses. They dismounted, and Tom looped the reins around the rear axle of the truck. “Stay here. I’m going to find us a way through. Keep your eyes and ears open. Watch for zoms, but more importantly, watch for Charlie Pink-eye and his crew.”

But Tom hadn’t gone a dozen steps before he suddenly stopped and crouched.

“Benny!” he hissed, and Benny ran over to see what Tom had found. On the blacktop, drying in the hot sun, was a small puddle of water. It was no larger than a dinner plate, but it was clear from the faded edges that it had been bigger and was shrinking in the heat. Tom touched it, sniffed his fingers.

“It’s not rainwater. Last night’s rain had a bit of a saltwater smell. This doesn’t smell at all. I think this is filtered drinking water.”

Benny could see it now-someone stopping in the sweltering afternoon to gulp down some water, letting the cold liquid splash on his throat and chest and fall to the ground. Tom stood and held his own canteen out at about six feet, tilted it, and let a little fall. The splash pattern was just about the same, even to how far the rebounding drops fell from the main impact point.

“Tall man. Charlie or the Hammer,” said Tom. “The Mekong brothers are both short.”

Benny was impressed, and he looked around for other evidence and immediately saw something that snapped wide his eyes. “Tom!”

On the ground ten feet away, there was half of a wet footprint, drying quickly under the sun’s glare. Not a man’s foot. This print was made by a small, delicate foot that wore no shoe.

“Nix,” Benny said.

“Has to be,” Tom confirmed, but he looked uneasily from the print back to the puddle.

“What’s wrong?”

“Distance is too far. If she stepped in the water, there should be a print closer to the puddle.” He quickly paced it off, shortening his stride to approximate that of a girl who stood barely five-two. “This is wrong. Even if she stepped in the puddle with only one foot, the distance is too far. The wet print should be here.” He tapped a spot on the blacktop with his toe.

“What’s that mean?”

Tom suddenly grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him back into the shadows of the overturned truck.

“No one else but Charlie and his crew comes out this way, so I think it means that they somehow managed to get ahead of us. Charlie knows these hills better than me. He must have a pass or route that I don’t know about.”

“You mean… we missed them?”

“We have to get the horses through these cars. We’re falling behind again, and I don’t know how many more breaks we’re going to get.”

“Breaks? What breaks have we gotten so far?”

“Stay here,” Tom ordered, and he ran out in a low crouch, moving fast along the line of cars until he disappeared around some wreckage. He was gone for almost three minutes, during which Benny was ready to drag Apache and Chief up and over the vehicles. Tom returned but said nothing, and took off running in the opposite direction, heading down the line of cars. Benny watched him run, saw him stop every few hundred feet and use his arms to measure a gap, saw his shoulders sag a little more each time the gap wasn’t wide enough to allow a horse to squeeze through. He went almost half a mile, then turned in defeat and ran back. His face was set, jaw clamped hard around his disappointment.

“Nothing?”

“No. We’re going to have to do this the hard way. Rig towlines and use the horses to pull one of the cars enough to make a gap. Horses are half dead as it is.” He swore under his breath.

He went past Benny and looked at the puddle and Nix’s single footprint. Both had almost entirely evaporated. Benny saw something register on Tom’s face as he calculated the time that must have passed since the bounty hunters had come through here, based on the rate of evaporation. Benny couldn’t do the same calculation, but he didn’t have to. Tom snapped erect, and in a blur he drew his pistol.

At that same moment, Benny heard a strange sound behind and above him, and he turned and looked up as something weirdly disconnected to their present circumstances sailed through the hot air and landed on the blacktop just outside their shelter of wrecked vehicles. The thing looked like a great red snake but with many stubby legs; or like a gigantic centipede. It struck the ground and lay there, twisting and hissing and smoking. Benny stood with his mouth open, unable to process it. This was something from summer celebrations, from garden parties and New Year’s Eve.

“Firecrackers,” he said in a strangely conversational voice. Benny turned to see the look of concern on Tom’s face turn to a mask of absolute horror. He slammed his pistol into his holster and whipped out his sword.

As the first of the firecrackers began to explode, Benny’s surprise evaporated, and he caught up with everything. The puddle, the carefully placed footprint. They weren’t accidents, they weren’t clues. They were put there deliberately. To stall them, to draw their focus.

The firecrackers banged and banged, and the echoes bounced off every car and rolled out into the field of tall grass and the forest behind them. The barrage of bangs was so incredibly loud in the still air. Loud enough to wake the dead. Or at least call them.

Almost at once Benny saw movement in the trees and in the tall grass. Dark, slow shapes detached themselves from crevices between smashed cars or tottered out from the dappled depths of the woods. Behind Benny, the horses screamed.

They’d walked into another trap.

37

THE LAST FIRECRACKER POPPED AND A SEMI-SILENCE FELL. ALL BENNY COULD hear were the slow, scuffling steps of the zoms. The closest was still a quarter mile away, but they were coming from all directions. The path back to the creek was totally blocked.

“Tom Imura!” called a voice, and Benny and Tom turned to see Vin Trang step out of the tall grass on the far side of the road. He stood in the one spot that was farthest from the living dead, although a few turned stiffly toward him. Vin held a pistol in one hand and several thick strings of firecrackers in the other.

Tom’s lip curled, but when he spoke he sounded almost casual. “Where’s the girl, Vin?”

“Girl?” Vin laughed. “What girl?”

“Let’s not play games.”

There was a hissing sound to their left, and they saw a second string of firecrackers come arching out of the woods behind them. It landed on the blacktop and began popping. The zoms that were coming out of the cars began to moan.

“Tom,” Benny whispered.

“I know,” said Tom without moving his lips. He pitched his voice louder. “The girl!”

“She’s dead!” Vin yelled back. “Zoms got her.”

Benny almost cried out, but Tom gave him a fierce single shake of his head. “I’m looking at her footprint, Vin. Hasn’t even had time to dry yet.”

“What can I tell you?”

“Nice trap. Who thought of it?”

“I did.”

“You couldn’t zipper your pants without instructions, Vin. This has Charlie Pink-eye all over it.”

Vin barked out a short laugh. “What’s the girl to you? I thought you had the hots for Jessie. Granted, that little girlie has some potential, but she ain’t her mama yet.”

Benny ground his teeth and started to say something, but Tom touched him, gave him another shake of the head. He bent close and whispered. “Don’t let him get inside your head.”

“I want to tear his-”

“Me too, kiddo. But let me play this my way. You keep your eye on the zoms. Let me know when they get to within a hundred feet. That’s our red zone.”

Tom yelled, “Were you at Jessie’s last night, Vin? Isn’t that where you took the girl?”

“Jessie’s? I never been to Jessie’s place-although I wouldn’t mind paying a call. But Charlie’s the one with a sweet spot for Jessie.”

“You’re saying you weren’t at her place last night? That’s funny, Vin, ’cause Captain Strunk found your lucky charm there last night.”

“My lucky…? What are you talking about? I lost that weeks ago.”

“You lost it at Jessie’s.”

“I was never at Jessie’s.”

“Then how come Captain Strunk found it on the floor?”

“Four hundred feet,” Benny whispered.

Another string of firecrackers began popping behind them, and Vin yelled something in Vietnamese. No more firecrackers came flying out of the woods.

Under his breath Tom said, “He just told Joey Duk to cut it out for a minute. I think I rattled him a little.”

“What was Strunk doing at Jessie’s place?” yelled Vin. “And what do you mean that he found my coin on the floor?”

“Mighty bad luck for you to drop your lucky coin at a crime scene, Vin.”

“Crime scene? But… hey, man… What crime? Joey and I don’t do crimes in town. You know that.”

“Tell that to the town watch. They want your head on a pole, Vin. Joey’s too.”

“For what?” Vin demanded, and Benny thought he sounded genuinely outraged.

“For what you did to Jessie Riley.”

Silence. Then, “You’re jerking us around, Tom. We didn’t do anything to Jessie.”

“Evidence says different.”

“Well, then ask Jessie. She’ll tell you.”

Tom’s face wore a twisted smile. Hard and predatory. “Jessie’s dead, Vin. You and your ‘brother’ beat her so bad that she died.”

The ensuing silence was broken only by the low moans of the dead.

“Three hundred yards,” said Benny.

“You’re trying some kind of sick con on me, Tom,” protested Vin.

“Not much in the mood for games, Vin. Jessie died in my arms, and your coin was on the floor. You’re a wanted man, Vin. You and Joey. Do you know what the people in town will do to you if they catch you? When they catch you?”

“No way, man… no way in hell.” Vin’s voice was filled with doubt now. And fear. “You gotta believe me here, Tom.”

“Why should I believe you about anything? You’re trying to feed me and my brother to the zoms. That doesn’t build a good case for innocence.”

“Almost two hundred feet, Tom.”

The closest zoms were a mix of ordinary people in everyday clothes and soldiers in the burned remains of their uniforms. One wore the black slicker and helmet of a firefighter.

“That’s your brother?” Vin called. “That’s little Benny. Oh… hell, man.”

“Yeah, you’re really racking up the points, Vin. Beating on women, kidnapping little girls, and now you’re thinking about murdering a teenager. Yeah, you’re innocent, Vin. You’re a real saint.”

“You got it wrong, Tom. This stuff out here… This is just business. You, me, Joey-we’re pros. We know the risks, we know how it works out in the Ruin. No rules, no slack. It’s all part of the job.”

“Is murder part of the job?”

“Out here? Hell, you know it is.”

“Tom,” Benny said urgently. Tom turned and saw more zoms emerging from the forest. The terrified horses nickered and tossed their heads, pulling at the tethers that held them to the axle.

“Okay, Vin, but how’s the girl fit into all of this?”

“She’s Charlie’s niece. Or cousin. Something like that. He said so.”

“And you believed him?”

No answer. Even Benny knew that Vin probably didn’t believe that story, but like most people, Vin Trang was not in the habit of calling Charlie Matthias a liar.

“Didn’t you think it was strange that he should take his niece away from her mom by force and in the middle of the night?”

No answer.

“The coin, Vin… what about the coin?”

“Someone must have put it there.”

“Why?”

“To frame me.”

Tom smiled and winked at Benny. “And why would they do that, Vin? Who would want to go those lengths to throw suspicion on you?”

It was a long and ugly silence. The zoms were almost at the hundred-foot line. Benny counted sixteen of them in the first wave. Cold sweat ran down his face and back, and pooled like slush at the base of his spine. He had his bokken in his hands, but the hard wood felt like a toothpick against what was coming for them.

“Charlie wouldn’t do that,” Vin protested. “He’d know that we’d clear our names once we got back.”

“You mean if you got back. You said it yourself, Vin. No rules out here in the Ruin.”

“Hundred feet,” Benny said, and edged backward, raising the sword in both hands. “We have to go!”

“Vin,” called Tom. “I have to get Benny out of here. You let us walk, and I promise to help you with Captain Strunk and the court.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your word?” Vin said after a pause.

“Because you know what my word’s worth,” said Tom.

The moans of the dead were as loud as the shouting men. Tom whirled and saw that the firefighter and one other zom were out in front of the pack. With a snarl he leaped toward them, and the silver blade of his katana flashed in the sunlight. Tom backpedaled as the zoms fell one way and their heads crunched and rolled the other.

“Clock’s ticking on that offer, Vin.”

“I could just let the zoms have you and take my chances with the court. Joey and I never broke no laws in town. We have a clean record.”

“Tell that to the court when Strunk gives them the only piece of evidence found at the scene. They’ll hang you just to have someone to vent on.”

The fourteen remaining zoms were now only fifty feet away. Tom stared at them and then at the horses. “Damn it!” he said with a growl, and with a flick of his wrist, he cut the reins that held the horses to the overturned truck. With his free hand he slapped their rumps and yelled at them. Chief needed no urging and was already racing away. Apache ran a few steps, then stopped and looked back at Benny. He was just starting to turn to come back when a zom made a grab for him. Apache reared up and kicked the corpse in the face, then with a whinny of protest he wheeled around and galloped after Chief. They headed for the trees, but Benny saw that the woods were filled with the hungry dead. Even with the carpet coats, how could the horses hope to survive?

And how could he and Tom survive without them?

“Benny!” Tom snapped. “Climb!” He pushed Benny toward the Escalade, and Benny scrambled up onto the hood and then turned and scaled the mangled front of the panel truck. Tom pivoted in place and hacked at the zoms who were closing in on them now. Hands and parts of arms and heads flew, but there were far too many of them. Tom slammed his sword into its sheath and jumped onto the Escalade, just as the living dead reached for him. He kicked backward and then Benny was there, reaching down a hand to pull his brother to safety.

They crouched on the overturned truck, completely exposed. On the far side of the road, Vin Trang stood with his pistol raised.

Tom slowly straightened, and in a movement so smooth that it looked like flowing water, Tom pulled his pistol and pointed it at Vin. The range was too great for accurate handgun shooting, but Tom’s hand was rock steady. Even from that distance Benny could see that Vin’s whole arm trembled.

“If you take a shot, Vin,” Tom warned, “you’d better pray you kill me with the first round.”

Vin tried to meet Tom’s stare, tried to man it out, but after a few seconds he lowered his gun.

“Where’s Charlie taking the girl, Vin?” Tom asked.

But Vin shook his head. His will was broken enough to refuse to fight, but his fear of Charlie was greater than his fear of Tom. Still shaking his head, he backed away and then turned and ran full-tilt into the deep grass. Benny could hear him yelling in Vietnamese to Joey, and soon Joey Duk broke from the woods and ran in Vin’s wake.

“Shouldn’t we follow?” Benny asked, but he didn’t need an answer. Between them and the fleeing Mekong brothers were at least a hundred zoms. And more came shuffling out of the woods. Not just hundreds but thousands.

All around the truck, white hands reached up toward them. They were safe only as long as they stood in the center of the truck’s overturned side. But they couldn’t stay there forever. Tom looked up and down the row.

“What do we do?” Benny whispered, although in truth there was no longer any reason for silence. Every zom in the region knew where they were. For once Tom did not have a ready answer. His face was almost as pale as the monsters that reached and moaned for their flesh.

“We have no choice,” Tom said. “We have to run down the tops of the cars, as far and as fast as we can. We have to get to a point where the zoms are thin on the ground and then make a break for the meadow. I think I know where Vin and Joey are going. Charlie’s camp is up on that mountain.” He pointed to a craggy lump of granite in the distance.

Benny looked at the row of cars. Some of them were compact cars that were so low to the ground that even standing on the roof, they’d be within grabbing range.

“We’ll never make it,” he said.

Tom shook his head. “We have to try, Ben. No other choice. You go first. It’ll be easier if I’m behind you, in case you get into trouble. Run fast; plan your jumps to land in the widest, flattest places; and keep moving.” He drew his sword. “I’ll be right behind you.”

A cold hand closed around his ankle, and Benny screamed and kicked his foot loose. It was all the incentive he needed. He looked down the row. Past the Escalade there was a mix of sedans and SUVs. They looked like a miniature mountain range. There were zoms on both sides of the outer row of cars, but fewer on the inner rows. He pointed this out to Tom, who nodded.

“Good call, kiddo. Now, go, go, GO!”

Benny took two running steps and jumped over a sea of reaching hands. He heard and felt the dry rasp of desiccated fingers brushing against his ankles and shoes. He landed with a thump on the hood of the Escalade, barely remembering to bend his knees to absorb the shock. Zoms lunged over the hood at him, but Benny swatted their hands away with a fierce slash of his bokken and ran up the windshield, along the roof, and then jumped onto a burned-out shell of a Subaru. Then onto a boxy Scion that was high enough to keep the hands away from him, but the next three cars were compacts. He ran and slashed, ran and slashed, feeling the shock as his sword connected with dried tendon and brittle bone. One zom rose up in front of him, its mouth open to reveal two rows of broken and jagged teeth. Benny swung the bokken, and the mouth disintegrated into white chips of bone. He had a lingering image of empty black eyes glaring at him as the zombie fell away into the hands of its fellow inmates of the living hell to which they belonged.

He heard Tom’s feet pounding behind him and the occasional clean whoosh of the katana as it did its deadly work.

Then three things happened all at the same time that changed everything in Benny’s life, then and forever.

First, out of the corner of his eye, he saw two shapes break from the cover of the fields to his left. One was huge and burly, with skin as pale as any zom and one eye that burned with red fire. Charlie Pink-eye. And the other was slim and sun-freckled, with masses of red curls and bare feet that slapped the ground, heedless of rocks and nettles.

“NIX!” Benny yelled and at the same time she screamed his name.

“BENNY!” she cried. “IT’S A TRAP!”

It was such an absurd thing to say, because he already knew that this was a trap.

The second thing that happened proved to him how little he knew about the evil and devious twists of Charlie Pink-eye’s mind, because the Motor City Hammer rose up out of the side window of an overturned police cruiser and pointed a shotgun at him. Two other men-bounty hunters Benny recognized as Turk and Skins Harris; friends of Charlie’s-stood up from behind cars farther down the road. They also had shotguns.

Nix’s voice was one long continuous scream that blended with Benny’s as he twisted out of the way as the Hammer pulled the trigger. Benny dove for the second lane of cars, leaping across a gap that was filled with the undead. He made a jump he would never have believed possible for him, landing on the hood of a Ford pickup truck, tucking, rolling, falling into the back bed, and twisting around to look at where he’d been.

The third thing that happened in that same splintered second was the sight of Tom twisting away in a spray of blood. The echo of the shotgun was as loud as thunder, but Benny’s scream was louder as Tom pitched off of the roof of the car and fell out of sight, right into the hands of the living dead.

“TOM!”

Benny got to his feet as a zombie crawled over the tailgate of the truck, and he swung the bokken with so much force that it tore the creature’s head half off. Benny was still screaming Tom’s name.

“BENNY!”

He whirled, and there was Nix, running over the tops of the cars on the next lane. Her clothes were torn, and there was blood on her face. Benny jumped over the gap just as she reached him, and for a moment everything stopped as he pulled her into his arms. They hugged with such force that it crushed the breath from both of them.

The sound of the Hammer racking the pump of the shotgun snapped them both back to their senses, and they spun and ran back the way Benny had come, dipping and dodging as they ran up windshields and leaped from hood to trunk.

“Get them!” bellowed Charlie, and the Hammer fired shot after shot. Turk and Skins began firing, and even though they were too far away for accuracy, the buckshot they fired filled the air with broken glass and metal splinters. The Hammer was closer, and his next shot exploded car windows all around them. But Benny and Nix were running toward the setting sun, and the Hammer was firing into the glare. There were several sharper cracks as Charlie emptied his pistol at them, but Benny pulled Nix down behind a tall flower delivery van. Bullets pinged and whanged, but none of the shots found them.

“We have to go back for Tom!” Nix said.

Benny looked back to the spot where Tom had fallen. There were at least fifty zoms clustered there, and his heart plummeted in his chest.

“He’s gone,” he said in a desolated voice.

“Benny,” she said, tears boiling from her eyes, “I’m so sorry.”

The truck canted slightly to one side, and Benny peered around to see five zoms awkwardly climbing up the side. “We have to go. Now!”

She looked and saw and nodded. Although it broke their hearts to do it, they turned and ran down the long line of cars. Charlie and the Hammer kept firing, but soon they had to turn their guns on the zoms who staggered toward them. Benny and Nix ran and jumped, climbed and dodged. The sun was a great glaring eye that stared accusingly at Benny, condemning him for failing his brother, for running… as his brother had once run. But he could not go back. Not with Nix here. He had to save her… and it was already too late to save Tom.

Pain was sewn through the fabric of his heart and stitched deep into his sides as they ran and ran and ran.

38

BENNY HAD NO IDEA HOW LONG THEY RAN. A MILE, MAYBE TWO. His legs felt like lead and his chest burned, but he held onto Nix’s hand on every jump and never once let her fall. With every step, his heart lifted with the knowledge that Nix was alive and safe. And then it fell as he thought of Tom.

“Look!” Nix said, pulling him to a stop on the roof of a Chevy Suburban. She pointed to a path that wound like a snake and vanished into the tall grass. “It’s empty.”

She was right. The last of the zoms were hundreds of yards behind them. In their panic they’d far outrun the immediate threat.

“What about Charlie?” Benny stood on his toes and looked back the way they’d come, but the bounty hunters were nowhere to be seen.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But let’s get off these cars.”

They jumped down to the ground and froze there for a moment, checking forward and backward for any sign of movement or for zombies standing still, whose appetites would be triggered by their own movement. They saw nothing but empty cars, carrion birds, the waving grass, and the bones of a thousand dead people.

Benny dragged a forearm across his eyes, although he didn’t know if he was wiping away sweat or tears.

“Let’s go,” he whispered. “Move slowly. Follow me, do what I do, move when I move, stop when I stop.”

They were Tom’s words on his lips, and it hurt him to say them, but he knew that he had to draw on everything his brother had showed him if he and Nix were going to survive.

Together, still holding hands, they moved slowly from the shelter of the endless line of cars. Benny waited for the wind to stir the grass and tall stalks of wild wheat, and when they bent to the left, he moved that way. When the wind stopped, so did he. When the grasses stood back up again, he moved to the right. Stop and start, taking his time. Doing it right. It took them five minutes to move from the highway to the path and then they were inside the tall grass. The shadows of early twilight cast the trail in shades of purple, and in that velvet gloom Benny and Nix vanished entirely.

They lost track of how long or how far they ran. Benny took every upward sloping road, remembering what Tom said about there being fewer zombies in the high mountain passes. They passed burned-out houses and houses where zombies stood in the yard, but when Nix and Benny saw them, they slipped into the deepest foliage and moved without a sound. Terror made them cautious, and with each encounter, they refined the skills of not being seen and not being hunted.

By the time the last of the day’s light was melting into shadows, Benny realized that it had been more than an hour since the last time they’d see a zom.

“How did you get away from them?” he asked Nix.

“I kicked one of the other bounty hunters in the groin and ran.”

Benny grinned at her. “You are one tough chick.”

“Call me a chick again and I’ll show you how tough I am.” It was meant as a joke, but it was weak. Even so, Benny gave her a big grin, and they headed higher up the mountain slope.

Then Nix grabbed his arm and pointed to something. Benny looked up. Just ahead was a building on stilts that rose a hundred feet above a steep rocky slope. Sunlight still touched its eaves. They raced to the foot of the ladder.

“Can you climb?” he asked. Nix didn’t have the breath to answer, but she nodded and they grabbed the rusted rungs and began to ascend. After the long uphill run it was torture to scale the ladder. Their muscles burned and their limbs trembled, but they never stopped, never faltered.

The ladder rose to a narrow catwalk that surrounded the boxy wooden structure of the ranger outpost. The catwalk was red with rust and littered with old birds nests and animal droppings. The windows were white with dust and grime, and Benny couldn’t see in. He pulled his bokken out of his belt,

“Stay here,” he told Nix, and she crouched down at the top of the ladder. She had no weapon, and Benny thought that her eyes looked terrified and maybe a little crazy. He couldn’t blame her. How could she not be whacked out after everything she’d been through?

With the bokken poised to thrust or strike, he moved slowly and quietly along the catwalk. Darkness was closing its hands around them, and the last golden touch of sunlight was melting from the peaked roof of the tower. The walls and windows were pitted from weather, and none of it looked safe, and here and there were smudges that might have been old mud. Or it might have been something else.

At the corner he paused and looked around the edge, but the catwalk was empty and the door to the station stood ajar.

Was that a good thing or a bad thing? He didn’t know.

He crept forward, breathing shallowly, sweat running down his hot face.

Three soft steps took him to the door, and he paused, drew a breath, and then kicked the door open. The ancient hinges squealed, as if they were in pain, and the door swung inward and stopped, jammed against something soft that crunched like leaves. Benny waited for an attack, for movement. Saw nothing.

He moved inside and looked quickly around… and then lowered his sword.

Except for leaves and branches from some creature that had long ago made a nest in the corner behind the door, and a few rotting sticks of furniture, the place was empty. There was a door set in the back wall with a sign marked RESTROOM, and Benny moved to it and gingerly opened it. The light was so bad that he couldn’t see a thing, so he took a match from his pocket and scraped the sulfur on the doorframe. In the sudden glow, Benny saw that the tiny cubicle held only a toilet and sink, but the water had long ago evaporated, and the corners were filled with trash and rags.

Benny froze. He held the flickering match out to take a second, longer look at the pile of rags. It was crammed into the corner between the wall and the toilet. Leaves and other debris covered it, and the chitinous carcasses of dead bugs were littered around.

The match flame gleamed dully from the barrel of a pistol that lay on the floor in a tangle of old twigs.

No… not twigs. Bones.

He set his sword down and used his thumb and fore-finger to lift a bit of the fabric, and as he did, he understood what this was. The rags were the remnants of clothes-a brown uniform trimmed with gold cord. An old flat-brimmed hat lay under the remains. A tarnished badge was pinned to the crown. Benny had never met one, but he’d seen pictures of forest rangers in books. This was the ranger. Had he been bitten and crawled in here to die? No… that made no sense. He’d have turned. Then Benny considered the pistol, and he understood. The man had been bitten, and he’d come in here to do what was necessary to keep himself from becoming a monster. Even though Benny knew this sort of thing had probably happened hundreds of thousands of times around the world, seeing it here, firsthand, made it almost unbearably sad.

Benny’s match was burning down, but he had enough light left to poke among the rags and find the ranger’s name tag.

M. Horwitz.

“I’m sorry,” Benny said.

Was this the same ranger station where Tom and Mr. Sacchetto had come with their telescope? If so, there was no sign of it, and Benny guessed there were probably several similar towers scattered throughout the mountains.

He straightened and stepped out of the bathroom and then hurried through the station and around the corner to where Nix still crouched. Despite the heat she was shivering, and Benny felt a knife of panic stab him. He’d learned about shock in the Scouts, and he knew it could be as dangerous as a bullet.

“Come on,” he said, holding out his hands. Nix hesitated for a moment, her eyes unfocused, as if she didn’t quite recognize him. She reached for him, and he pulled her against his chest. Nix wrapped strong arms around him and clung to him, and after only a sliver of a second, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and back, and squeezed her with all his strength.

Together, still holding onto each other and moving in an awkward ballet, they stumbled back to the door and shambled inside. Benny kicked the door closed and leaned back against it, sliding down to the floor, taking Nix with him.

She whispered a single, heartbroken and heartbreaking word.

“Mom!”

Benny clutched her to him, sharing his heat with her.

“I know,” he said. It was all he had to say, all she needed to hear. That he knew, that he understood, was as necessary to her as it was terrible, and she disintegrated into tears that burned against his face and throat. Benny held her, and his grief for her, for her mother, for Mr. Sacchetto… and for Tom was a vast and unbearable ache that filled every inch of him.

They held each other and wept as the night closed its fist around their tiny shelter, and the world below them seethed with killers both living and dead.