“It was the dead who gave us the idea,” said White Bear. “’Bout a year ago they started moving in packs. Swarming, you might say.”
Nix frowned. “Flocking?”
“We call it swarming, but yes,” said the preacher. “It’s one of God’s mysteries.”
White Bear nodded. “It started down in Mexico and in some of the Nevada towns. Masses of the dead who had been standing around doing nothing for years just up and moved. Scared the stuffing out of some people. Bunch of settlements were completely overrun. Every week it gets worse. Or better, depending on how you see it. Something causes a couple of the dead to start walking, and soon all the others in the area do the same thing, hundreds—sometimes thousands of them—all shuffling in the same direction. Weird.” He chuckled. “The thing that’s going to make this work, kids, is that we figured out how to steer the swarms.”
Benny stiffened. “You led a swarm to Brother David’s last night!”
“I did that,” admitted Preacher Jack. “White Bear’s scouts said that Tom was heading there, so I sent some of my lay-preachers out to gather some swarms. It was wonderful, wasn’t it? I counted seven thousand of them.” His smiling face turned dark. “And then you burned them.”
Uh-oh, said Benny’s inner voice. “You, um, saw that, huh?” he asked, trying on a smile that didn’t fit.
“I saw everything.” Preacher Jack’s eyes were filled with dangerous light.
“I didn’t see you.”
“That’s because you did not look up.”
“Huh?”
“Until the fire reached me I was sitting very comfortably on a folding chair on top of the way station. A grand view to watch the Children of Lazarus come down the mountain slopes. It would have been a grand view to watch them drag you and this slut and the white-haired witch out of the station. I wanted to see them feast on your bones.”
“You really blame me for defending myself?” Benny said, standing straight. “You claim to respect Tom for being a warrior, and you blame me for defending myself when you attack me? I mean … what did we ever do to you?”
White Bear smiled at him with burned lips. “See this face? Tom did this when he set fire to Gameland. Nearly killed me.”
“Tom was—”
“Hush, boy,” snapped Preacher Jack. His smile had not returned, and the unsmiling version of him was even more frightening. “White Bear’s face is his face. Warriors have scars, and his scars are between him and Tom. That’s not the reason you owe us a blood debt. No … the reason you two and Tom and that witch Lilah are going to pay, indeed must pay, is because you tricked the Children of Lazarus—God’s own sacred swarm—into attacking Charlie and his men. That alone is crime enough to flay the flesh from your bones.”
“But he—”
White Bear suddenly stepped forward and grabbed a fistful of Benny’s vest and with a flex of his huge biceps lifted him completely off the floorboards. He breathed right into Benny’s face. “You killed Charlie. I don’t understand it, because Charlie was a powerful man and a great warrior, but somehow you blindsided him and you killed him. You!” He spat full in Benny’s face. “You killed my brother.”
Benny stared in absolute shock. “I—I—”
White Bear swung around and slammed Benny against the wall. Nix screamed and rushed the big man, tried to claw his face, but Heap and Digger each grabbed an arm and pulled her back.
“And then two days ago we get news from town,” said White Bear in a deadly whisper, “that my other brother, Zak, and his boy are dead … and guess who was involved in that?” He pulled Benny off the wall and slammed him into it again. The thin laths cracked as Benny’s shoulders and head crunched through the plaster. “Both of my brothers are dead because of you and your puke brother and your puke friends. My only nephew is dead! Zak Junior is dead. Killed by you and this redheaded daughter of Judas!”
With that he flung Benny across the room so that he crashed into the far wall and slid down into a heap. Nix tore free of the bounty hunters and ran to him. Benny coughed and moaned softly. Blood trickled from his hairline and left ear.
White Bear stood above them, his chest heaving, his face alight with hatred. Worse still was the look on Preacher Jack’s face. It was as if his features were lit from within; his eyes burned with fire and an absolute madness that was more frightening than anything Benny had ever seen. He and Nix huddled together and stared up at the preacher as he stalked across the room and bent over them.
“You killed Charlie Matthias and you killed Zachary Matthias,” whispered Preacher Jack. And then the man whispered four words that made the whole world spin into red lunacy.
“You killed my sons.”
The words hit Benny harder than the battering White Bear had given him.
“W-what … ?” he stammered.
“How would justice survive in the world if I let you go unpunished?” said Preacher Jack icily. “How would that make the world right again?”
Benny tried to say something, anything that would make those words untrue; but then Preacher Jack straightened and turned away.
“Enough,” he said. “Take them to the pits.”
PART FIVE
FUN AND GAMES
Understand death? Sure.
That was when the monsters got you.
—STEPHEN KING, ’SALE M’S LOT
68CHONG REACHED UP FOR THE EDGE OF THE PIT. HIS LEGS TREMBLED AND threatened to collapse, his knees were like rubber, his muscle like jelly. People roared and applauded somewhere else, but he knew that it was only a matter of time before someone came back here. He was never a lucky person, so he had long ago learned to use what fragments of luck came his way.
He reached and reached, his fingers clawing at the edges of the pit, but the dirt there was looser, the edges scalloped from shovel blades and weakened by the weight of people leaning over to look at the pit fights. He dug his fingernails into the dirt, scrabbling, sending showers of soil down onto his face. He sputtered and coughed and spit it out; he shook his head like a dog to get the dirt out of his eyes.
Then something closed around his wrist. It was sudden, immediate, and as hard as iron. And abruptly he was being pulled out of the pit.
He opened his mouth to cry out, but a second hand clamped down over his mouth.
Chong was caught!
69
LILAH CROUCHED ON THE LIMB OF A TREE AND STARED AT THE STARLIT facade of Gameland. For two hours now she had watched people arriving on horseback and in armored trade wagons. Townsfolk and people who lived rough out in the Ruin. Coming for the Z-Games. Coming to wager on the lives and deaths of children in the zombie pits. She ached to run wild among them with her spear, to show them what it felt like to be hunted. All the way here she had hoped to come upon Benny and Nix, but all she’d found were their footprints … and later signs of a scuffle near the front of the hotel. She was sure they had been taken.
It hurt Lilah to know that this place had been taken over by bad people. Tom had been sure that it was a safe place for them to rest. To prepare for the road trip.
What would Tom do when he found out? Where was he?
And … Chong.
Back in the forest the Greenman had given her a map and pointed out the fastest way and led her to the edge of the field that ran along the road to Wawona, but he refused to go with her.
“There’s going to be a fight,” Lilah said. “Won’t you come with me?”
He smiled at her with eyes that seemed ancient and sad. “No. I’m done with fighting. It tore away too much of who I was. It took me a long time to find myself again. I made a choice never to fight again.”
“But—I need you.”
“No, honey, you need you. You were lost, but now I think you’ve found you again. If it’s your choice to go and help your friends, then that is your choice. Not mine.”
Then he had kissed her on the head and vanished into the woods. Lilah stood watching the trembling leaves, wondering if he was even real or if her visit with him had been part of some fantasy that she had pulled from one of her books. Then she’d turned and began hunting along the trail to Gameland. She evaded a dozen guards and slipped past ditches and over fences and finally found the tree that overlooked the hotel. This was a different Gameland from the one where she and Annie had been forced to fight. Different, but still the same.
For several painful minutes she thought about what she could do, weighing it against what the Greenman had told her, and what she had confessed to him. His words echoed in her head, not louder than the words of the madmen in the arena, but in gentle ways that she could hear with greater clarity and understanding.
Let me tell you a truth, little sister, the Greenman had said. No matter what choice you make, it doesn’t define you… . what choice do you want to make now?
As she crouched there, Lilah looked into her own future. Without Benny and Nix, Chong and Tom, there was nothing. She could return to her cave and exist, but she now knew that such a life was no life at all. It was empty, and the thought of returning to that loneliness was beyond unbearable.
Somewhere down there were her friends.
“Friends” was such a strange word to her. She knew it on an intellectual level from a thousand books, but since Annie and George died, she had never experienced it. Then Benny had come looking for her. As had Tom. Benny and Nix accepted her, welcomed her into their lives. They had brought her to their home, their town. They had included her in everything. They had introduced her to Chong, and he had fallen in love with her. Fallen in love. With her.
Lilah brushed away a tear. How had she repaid such kindness, such generosity? With harsh words and threats. With bitterness and dismissal. And with inaction when she saw Preacher Jack follow Benny and Nix into the east. A word … a single word from her would have prevented this moment. A single action, a stroke of her spear, would have canceled out even the possibility of what was happening below. She had chosen to pull away, and now she saw the cost of that choice.
So, you tell me … what choice do you want to make now?
Lilah had thought about that for hours. The choice, her new choice, burned in her mind. She smiled … and climbed down from the tree and continued her hunt.
70
THE THUGS WALKED BENNY AND NIX OUTSIDE, AND AS THEY EXITED the hotel it was like stepping into a weird modern version of the ancient Roman circus. There had to be more than two hundred people gathered in the field behind the hotel. Bleachers made from planks and pipes had been erected, and these were completely packed by a laughing, yelling, jeering crowd. The scene was lit by dozens of torches set atop tall poles, and their light cast the whole scene into a fiery unreality, where every pair of eyes reflected flickering flames. The whole area was fenced in by three walls made of armored wagons that had been parked tightly together, and the front was the entire back wall of the Hotel Wawona. On the right-hand side, between sets of bleachers, was a huge circus tent whose flaps were closed. Guards stood in a long row in front of the flaps, and on the top of the tent, painted in huge red letters, was the word BELIEVE.
Benny saw that the amphitheater surrounded seven large pits dug into the bare earth. The crowd cheered and yelled and laughed and made obscene jokes as Benny and Nix were led to the edge of the first pit. The dozens of guards were armed with knives and swords and spears. No guns, Benny noticed, and he thought about that. Were they afraid of wild shots in so densely packed an area? Or was there some other concern?
“Where are all these people from?” whispered Nix as she bent close to him. “Who are they?”
Benny shook his head. “I don’t know. Other towns, maybe. Or settlements. Families of bounty hunters …” His voice trailed off as he realized that he knew a few of the faces in the crowd. Not bounty hunters, but people from Mountainside! Not forty feet in front of him was Mr. Tesh, who owned a stable near the reservoir; and over by the circus tent was Barbara Sultan and her husband. They were corn farmers. He saw his high school gym teacher making a bet with an oddsmaker; and a few yards away from him was the woman who owned the feed and grain store on Main Street. He pointed this out to Nix, and she gasped.
“That’s Mrs. Rosenbaum!”
When the woman saw them looking at her, the smile on her painted mouth flickered for a second; then the man next to her made a joke, and they both burst out laughing. It was madness. These weren’t just strangers, these were people they knew. People they saw every day. He wondered how they managed to come here. What excuses and lies had they told to hide the ugliness of their appetites?
“I hate them all!” snarled Nix with incredible viciousness. Ever since they had learned that they were in the power of Charlie Pink-eye’s brother and father, she seemed ready to explode. Her eyes were filled with a glaring brightness, and her hands were shaking badly.
Don’t go away from me now, he begged silently, but when he tried to take her hand, she snatched it angrily away and stared at him as if he were an alien from Mars.
The buzz of the crowd suddenly changed as Preacher Jack and White Bear walked with their heads up, proud as kings, into the center of the amphitheater. The audience erupted into thunderous applause. White Bear encouraged the applause with upward waves of his big arms.
Nix leaned close again. “Want to hear something funny?”
“Um … sure, Nix,” he said carefully. “Seems like a great time for a joke.”
Her eyes glittered like glass as she nodded toward White Bear. “I actually like his plan.”
Benny almost smiled. “Sure. Except for the slavery part.” He nodded toward the crowd. “I wonder how loud they’ll be cheering when White Bear’s goons are putting them to work herding zoms and building fences.”