It was a freakish moment, as if there had been no disconnect in Lilah, as if she had been strong and in charge all the time. Benny and Nix shared a covert, worried look.
Don’t say anything, warned Benny’s inner voice. She’s ready to break. Push now and she’ll shatter.
Benny tossed his second bottle to Nix and dug the extras out of his pocket.
“Will it be enough?” Nix asked as she smeared the noxious chemical on her coat.
Benny didn’t answer. They each used a full bottle. The inside of the way station reeked as if it was stuffed to the rafters with rotting flesh.
“Weapons and water only,” said Benny.
“Good,” agreed Lilah.
Nix nodded, but she grabbed her journal off the table and stuffed it into a big pocket inside her vest. Then she belted the carpet coat tightly around her. The coat protected her body and arms and had a high, stiff collar to shield the throat, but it was not a suit of armor. Even the fence guards back home said that enough zoms could eventually chew through one.
Benny slung his canteen over his neck and pulled his bokken from its sheath.
At the door, Lilah paused, took a deep breath, and without turning said, “We go slow. Don’t fight unless you have to. Run only if you have to.”
“What if we get separated?” asked Nix.
There was only one answer to that question, and Benny’s inner voice whispered it to him. Anyone who gets lost in the dark … is dead. Aloud he said, “We won’t.”
It was somewhere between a lie and a gamble.
Thump! A dead fist struck the window, rattling it in its frame.
“Me, Nix, Benny,” whispered Lilah. “Ready?”
Nix and Benny both lied. They both said they were. Lilah opened the door.
A zombie stood there, arm raised to strike the glass. He was broad-shouldered, his once brown skin bleached to the color of milky tea. Most of his face was gone, and gnawed edges of white bone jutted from the bloodless flesh. The creature took a shambling step forward. It did not sniff the air—Benny had never seen zoms do that—yet through whatever senses it did possess, the creature took the measure of the pale girl with the white hair … and then shuffled past her into the room. For the moment it did not judge her as prey. She reeked of the dead, and the dead passed her by.
Benny could see that Lilah’s whole body was trembling. This wasn’t like that time when she’d freed the zoms in the Hungry Forest. Back then she was on her home turf, and she’d known a thousand paths through those woods. No … this was beyond Lilah’s experience, and maybe that was what crippled her. She had no plan and lacked either the imagination or optimism to believe that some line of escape would present itself.
Or maybe you screwed her up with what you said about Chong. Benny wished with all his strength that he could step back in time and unsay those cruel and stupid words.
Lilah drew a ragged breath and stepped cautiously outside. Nix went next, turning to squeeze by a lumbering fat man with bullet holes in his stomach. As Benny stepped into the doorway his shoe scuffed the floor, and the fat man turned sharply, gray lips pulling back from green teeth. The zom snarled at Benny, then just as suddenly, the look of hunger and menace dropped away as if a curtain had fallen. Its dusty eyes slid away from Benny, and the monster turned awkwardly and trundled inside, followed by another zom, and another.
Holding his bokken to his chest as if it was a magic charm, Benny slipped outside. Lilah had not waited for him. She was already thirty paces away, walking straight into the sea of shambling corpses. Nix was much closer, her steps slower and uncertain. Nix kept looking back for Benny. Lilah never looked back at all—she kept going. Did she see a way out? Benny wondered. She was moving faster and faster, and soon he couldn’t see her at all.
Move or die, growled his inner voice. Benny began walking, moving disjointedly, trying to imitate the artless shamble of the zoms so as not to attract attention.
Don’t stop.
He didn’t … until he reached the edge of the concrete pad by the gas pumps. From that angle he could see almost all the land around the way station. What he saw punched the air out of his lungs and nearly dropped him to his knees. There, in the thick of a seething mass of zoms—an army that numbered uncountable thousands—stood a tall figure with hair even whiter than Lilah’s, massive chest and shoulders, gun butts sprouting from holsters at hips and shoulder rigs, and a three-foot length of black pipe clutched in a nearly colorless hand. It was too far away to see his eyes, but Benny was sure—dead certain—that one would be blue and the other as red as flame.
The figure stared right at him. It was smiling.
The zoms shifted and shuffled around the figure. They did not attack him. They surged past him, heading toward the gas station, toward Lilah and Nix. Toward Benny. Then the sea of zoms closed around the figure, obscuring him from Benny’s sight.
It didn’t matter. Benny had seen it.
Seen him.
“No …,” he whispered to himself. “No.”
He turned and ran. Not walked, not shuffled like a zom. Benny Imura ran for all he was worth. He ran for his life. As he ran he could feel those eyes upon him, burning like cold fire into his back. God! Where was Tom? Benny thought he heard a sound threaded through the moan of the thousands of walking dead. He thought he heard the deep, rumbling, mocking laughter of the man he was positive he had just seen standing amid an army of the dead.
Charlie Pink-eye.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
When I was real little, Mom was having a hard time earning enough ration dollars. Before First Night she’d been a production assistant in Hollywood (a place where they made movies, back before they nuked Los Angeles). She didn’t know how to farm or build stuff, and she tried to make a living doing sewing and cleaning people’s houses. It was hard, but she never complained and she never let me know how hard she had to work. Then she was sick for a few weeks and fell behind on all the bills.
Then she met Charlie Matthias. He tried to get Mom to go out with him, but she wasn’t interested. AT ALL. Then Charlie told her there was a way for her to make a month’s worth of ration bucks in one day. It wasn’t sex stuff or anything like that. He said all she had to do was quiet a zom.
Of course, he didn’t tell her that she would be thrown into a big pit with a zom with only a broom handle as a weapon. It was at a place called Gameland, hidden up in the mountains. People came from all over to bet on what they called Z-Games. Zombie games.
Mom was desperate to earn the money, so she went into the pit.
She never told me about this, and I don’t know the details. All I know is that Charlie kept Mom in the pit for a week. I was real little, and Benny’s aunt Cathy took care of me.
Then Tom brought Mom home. Tom was all cut up and burned, from what the neighbors told me later. He smelled of smoke and had bloodstains on his clothes. I learned a lot later that Tom had rescued Mom and destroyed Gameland. I think he had to hurt some people to do it. Maybe kill some people. Shame Charlie wasn’t one of them.
When Charlie Matthias killed my mom last year, he was going to take me to Gameland. The new Gameland.
God … how can people be so cruel?
36TOM WAS FAST, BUT SALLY TWO-KNIVES WAS DOWN BEFORE HE GOT to her. He knelt beside her and checked her pulse, found a reassuring thump-thump-thump. Then he examined neck and spine before he gently eased her onto her back and brushed dirt and leaves from her face.
“Oh boy, Sally,” he said, “you’re a bit of a mess here.” Her eyelids slowly fluttered open. Even in the bad light Tom could see that her face was taut with great pain. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.
“Everywhere.”
“Can you pin it down for me or do I have to go looking?”
Sally snorted. “Since when did you become a prude?” Then she winced and touched her abdomen. “Stomach and arm.”
Tom opened the bottom buttons of her shirt, saw what was clearly a knife wound. She wasn’t coughing up blood, so he didn’t think she had any serious internal injuries. Or he hoped she didn’t. He removed a small bottle of antiseptic and some cotton pads from a vest pocket and gently cleaned the wound and applied a clean bandage. He used his knife and cut open her sleeve to reveal a ragged black hole. Tom gently raised her arm and leaned to take a look at the back of it, saw a second, slightly smaller hole.
“A through-and-through,” he concluded. “Bullet hit you in the back of the arm and punched out through the biceps. What they’d shoot you with?”
“Don’t know,” she said through gritted teeth. “Something small. Twenty-two or twenty-five caliber, though it felt pretty darn big going in and coming out.”
“Missed the arteries. Didn’t break the bone,” Tom said. “You always were a lucky one, Sally.”
“Lucky my ass. I got shot and stabbed. If that’s your idea of good luck, then give me the other kind.”
“Don’t even joke,” he chided as he cleaned the entry and exit wounds, placed sterile pads over them, and began wrapping a white bandage around her arm. “I’ve seen my share of bad luck already today.”
Tom tied the ends of the bandage with neat precision, but inside he was beginning to feel a slight edge of panic. It was now too dark to track Chong. Tom helped Sally sit up and let her drink from his canteen.
“Don’t suppose you saw my horse anywhere, did you?” she asked. “I left her tied to a tree, but she must have spooked.”
“No,” said Tom. “Look, Sal, what happened and who did this?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “I ran into a couple of the White Bear crew. You know White Bear?”
He nodded. White Bear had once run with Charlie Pinkeye’s gang but had dropped out of sight years ago. “Heard of him but never met him. Big guy from Nevada. Used to be a bouncer at one of the Vegas casinos before First Night, right? Tells everyone that he’s the reincarnation of some great Indian medicine men, though from what I heard he doesn’t have a drop of Native American blood in him. What’s he doing here?”
She hissed in pain as Tom began stitching her stomach wound. He wished Lilah was here.
“OW—damn, son! You using a tree spike to sew that up?” she snarled.
“Don’t be a sissy.”
She cursed him and his entire lineage going back to the Stone Age. Tom endured it as he worked. Curses were better than screams.
“What about White Bear?” he prompted.
She took a breath. “Since Charlie’s gang got chomped by those zoms last year, there’s been a lot of talk about who was going to take over his territory. Charlie always had prime real estate. Mountainside, Fairview, couple of other towns, and the trade route all through these mountains. White Bear wants it all. Brought a bunch of his guys with him. Most of them are jokers who don’t know which end of a rifle goes bang! But he has a lot of them.”
“How many?”
“The two I saw tonight, and maybe twenty more. Maybe twice that number if the rumors are true … and he’ll probably try to scoop up any of Charlie’s guys who are still sucking air.”
Tom tied off the last stitch and began applying a fresh dressing. “Why’d they attack you?”
“They didn’t. I, um, kind of attacked them.” She touched Tom’s arm. “Tom … I think they have your brother, Benny.”
“What?”
“I saw them slapping the crap out of a Japanese-looking kid. Your brother’s, what, fifteen, sixteen?”
“Fifteen. What was this kid wearing?”
She thought about it. “Jeans. Dark shirt with red stripes and a vest with a lot of pockets.”
Tom exhaled a burning breath. “That’s not Benny. That’s his friend, Louis Chong. He’s Chinese, not Japanese. Besides, Benny’s half Irish American.”
“What do I know? It’s dark, he’s a kid, I’m shot for Pete’s sake.” She squinted at him. “That who you’re looking for? The Chinese kid?”
Tom filled her in on what he was doing.
“So … you’re really going to leave?” she asked.
“That’s the plan, but we seem to be off to a bad start.”
“So—asking me to meet you at Brother David’s … that was what? A good-bye?”
He nodded.
“Damn,” said Sally. “Things won’t be the same around here without our knight in shining armor.”
Tom snorted. “I’m a lot of things, Sally, but I’m no one’s idea of a shining knight.”
Sally didn’t laugh. “If that’s what you think, Tom, then you’re a bigger damn fool than I thought. There’s no one in this whole chain of mountains who doesn’t know who you are and what you do. And I mean before you served Charlie and the Hammer to the zoms on a silver plate.” She paused. “A lot of people look up to you. No … they look to you. For how to act. For how to be.”
“Come on, Sal, let’s not—”
“Listen to me, Tom. You matter to people. During First Night, and in the years after, a lot of us did some pretty wild things to survive. You don’t know. Or … maybe you do. Maybe you did some wild things too, but the thing is that since then you’ve been the kind of guy people can look at and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how people are supposed to act.’ There aren’t a lot of examples around since the zoms, man, but you …” She smiled and shook her head.
Tom cleared his throat. “Listen, Sally, I’m thinking that this is pain and shock talking here, so let’s get to the point. Where did they take Chong and how’d you get hurt?”