Lilah threw down her spear and grabbed his shoulder, using both hands to squeeze the edges of his bite until drops of blood popped up. “How long ago?” she yelled, and when he didn’t answer right away, she screeched at him. “How long ago?”
“Ten hours ago. Maybe twelve.”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” he said. “It could have been longer… .”
Lilah let go of his arm and jammed her fingers under his jaw to feel his glands, then pressed her hand to his forehead. There was a moan behind her as a zombie lumbered out of the smoke; and with a grunt of irritation at being disturbed, Lilah whirled, grabbed the creature by chin and hair, and snapped its neck with a vicious sideways twist. Then she turned back to Chong, grabbed his hair, and pulled him close so she could examine his eyes.
“Tell me what happened,” she screamed. “Exactly what happened.”
“What—now? There’s a big freaking fight going on and—”
“Now!”
Chong shook his head and told her in quick terms how the big zom had clamped teeth on his skin just as Chong hit him with a pipe. Lilah made him repeat that part.
Then she slapped him again. Harder than the first time. It rocked his head sideways, and he almost fell.
“OW! What the hell?” Chong demanded, reeling.
“You stupid town boy,” she said harshly. “You’re not dying.”
“Wait … what?”
“The zom had your skin pinched between his teeth but you fell away from him. It tore a flap of skin off. That’s all … the infection is in the zom’s mouth, not in its teeth … you did not get bitten!”
Chong stared at her.
“You aren’t allowed to die!” she growled, and her eyes seemed to radiate real heat.
Chong’s mouth opened and shut several times without sound. “I—I—” And then he suddenly dropped onto his knees. Lilah knelt in front of him and there were tears in her eyes, sparkling like diamonds in the firelight.
“I—,” Chong said. “God … I thought I was …”
She took his face in both her hands and stared at him with almost lethal intensity. “You are not allowed to die!” she said fiercely, growling the words with her graveyard voice. “Not now! Not ever! Promise me or I’ll kill you.”
Chong almost smiled. “I promise,” he said.
Then, despite fire and gunplay and screams and the living dead, Lilah did what she had never once done in her entire life. She kissed a boy.
“We have to get out here,” barked Tom as he raced to intercept Benny and Nix. “Right now!”
“How?” asked Benny, looking around. The zoms were everywhere. Before Tom could reply there was a huge explosion, and they turned to see several of the wagons that formed one of the walls of the arena disintegrate into a fireball that knocked down at least a third of the surviving people in the place. Zoms were flung halfway across the gaming floor, and a dozen spectators and guards fell screaming into the open pits.
“That’s our cue,” said Tom. “This whole place is about to blow itself into orbit. We have to go now!”
“But we can’t go! Chong …”
“Here,” came a painful reply, and they turned to see a bloody, limping Chong running alongside Lilah—who looked strangely distracted despite the carnage. Nix ran to embrace Chong and Lilah, but Benny looked from Tom to the burning wagons to the hotel.
Chong asked, “Did I hear something about this place blowing up?”
“All to hell and gone,” said Tom, grabbing them and shoving them toward the smoking hole in the wall of wagons. “There’s five hundred pounds of C4 in the hotel lobby, and I rigged it. MOVE!”
And they were running. As they raced Benny cut a last look around. Many of the bounty hunters were down; the rest were already leaping over flaming wreckage.
Tom yelled, “Go … GO!” They ran into the smoke and through flaming wreckage and out into the cool darkness of the big field. Behind them the last of the guards and spectators were still fighting the zoms. Benny wondered if they were all crazy. Did they think they could win? Or were they so locked into the moment that violence was the only response they were capable of? He hated them and pitied them and ran from them.
Benny ran with his arm wrapped around Nix. Lilah dragged Chong with her. Fluffy McTeague ran with Sally Two-Knives in his arms like a baby doll. J-Dog and Dr. Skillz were racing each other and laughing; and a whole phalanx of the surviving bounty hunters followed them off to the left, into the woods. Tom was heading right, straight for the hedgerows and the road.
Benny opened his mouth to shout at Tom, to ask him if he was sure that he knew how to rig an explosion, when the world seemed to detonate around them and the entire Wawona Hotel leaped high into the night sky. A massive glowing fireball punched hundreds of feet into the air, igniting the surrounding trees, vaporizing the water in the ponds, and flinging the armored wagons far out into the fields. Benny and Nix zigged and zagged as flaming debris crashed down all around them with the force of a meteor shower. The grass caught fire and superheated winds pursued them like a host of demons.
Benny heard Tom cry out in pain and saw him stumble, but his brother picked himself up and staggered on. Debris struck the ground all around them.
“Go!” Tom growled through bared teeth.
They ran all the way to the gates and beyond, and down the road into darkness. Debris continued to fall for a full five minutes, as if the ghosts of Gameland were hurling artillery at them. They ran and ran until they could not run any more. They were all spread out across a mile of firelit landscape, Benny and his friends in the field, the bounty hunters deep in the forest.
80
TOM SLOWED TO A WALK AND THEN A SHAKY STAGGER AND FINALLY stopped, waving at the rest to stop. Chong and Lilah stumbled and collapsed to their knees, shocked that they were alive. Tom bent forward and rested his hands on his thighs. He looked totally spent. Benny sank to his knees and hugged Nix, and she clung to him. She smelled of smoke and blood. He kissed her face and hair and the tears on her cheeks.
Then Benny heard a sound and saw Tom walking slowly toward them.
“We made it!” said Benny, fighting a crazy laugh that threatened to break from his chest.
“Yes,” said Tom in a whisper of a voice. “We made it.”
“Benny …,” Nix said softly, and he turned as Chong and Lilah came walking toward him. They both looked like they’d been through a war, and Benny figured that was a pretty fair assessment. There was an awkward moment when the four of them stood and stared at one another. Everything that had happened since they’d left town—could it really only be two days ago?—floated like embers in the air between them.
Benny smiled first and punched Chong lightly in the chest. “You stupid monkey-banger!”
Chong grinned, and despite the dirt and blood on his face, it made him glow. He arched his eyebrows in best “wise sage” style and observed, “As usual, you opt for an erudite and insightful comment that is entirely appropriate to the moment.”
“Bite me.”
“Not even if I was a zom.”
They burst out laughing, and Benny grabbed his best friend and gave him a hug so fierce that it made them both yelp with pain, which made them laugh harder. Then Benny stopped and cut a look at Lilah. The moment stalled. His inner voice was trying to feed him clever lines, but he mentally told it to shut up. Aloud he said, “I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry.”
Lilah glared at him. Nix shifted to stand next to her, and took her hand.
“Yeah,” Benny said, “that’s cool. If you guys want to team up and beat the crap out of me, go for it. I deserve it after what I said.”
“Why? What did you say?” asked Chong, but no one answered him.
“It’s okay, Benny,” Lilah said in her icy whisper. “I’ll kill you later.”
Benny’s throat went dry. “Hey, wait… . I—I—”
Then Nix and Lilah burst out laughing. Chong, who had no idea what was going on, laughed anyway.
“God!” cried Nix. “Did you see the look on his face?”
“Wait,” Benny said again, “did you … just make a joke?” That made the others laugh harder.
“I can make jokes,” said Lilah, and then playfully punched him in the chest the same way Benny had to Chong. Except her playful punch was about fifty times harder.
“Ow!” he yelped. The others kept laughing, at him, at everything, at the realization that they had all survived. Rubbing the fiery bruise in his chest, Benny laughed too.
They turned to Tom, beckoning him over, wanting him to laugh, needing to see the grim sadness washed off his face. Benny hugged his brother. “We did it, man! Now can we finally get the heck out of this place. Ready for a road trip?”
Tom didn’t laugh. His eyes were fixed on the burning hotel. “Yes,” he said again, his voice even quieter. “I guess it’s time to leave… .”
“God, yes,” agreed Nix. “I think we just saw the last of our bad luck go up in smoke.”
Tom sighed, and then he suddenly dropped to his knees. The others stared at him in surprise.
“Tom?” asked Lilah.
Tom gingerly opened the flaps of his vest. “Damn,” he murmured.
Nix screamed.
Benny saw it then. Blood. So much blood. He screamed too.
Tom coughed and slumped forward. Nix and Benny caught him and lowered him carefully to the ground. Benny ripped open Tom’s shirt. What they saw tore a sharper cry from Benny and another scream from Nix. When Tom had stumbled during the flight from the hotel, Benny thought he had been hit by a piece of flaming debris. But that wasn’t it … it was a thousand times worse than that.
Tom had been shot.
“We have to stop the bleeding!” Nix cried. She no longer had her first aid kit, so she dug through Tom’s vest pockets and grabbed rolls of bandages to uses as compresses.
“What happened?” demanded Chong.
“Benny,” Nix said urgently as she worked, “this is bad. I can’t stop the bleeding.”
“Let me help,” said Lilah as she pulled the first aid kit from Tom’s vest and removed several cotton squares.
“IMURA!”
The voice that roared out of the darkness seemed to belong to a monster, a demon from out of hell itself. They all turned to see a tall figure emerge from the smoke, with fires burning the world behind him.
Preacher Jack.
He held an old-fashioned six-shot pistol in one hand and the curved cavalry saber in the other. His black coat was streaked with soot and blood and his face was pale madness in the starlight. “Imura!” he shouted. “Did I kill you? Did I kill the son of a bitch who murdered my sons?”
“Benny, Nix …,” wheezed Tom, grabbing Benny’s sleeve. “Run!”
Benny peeled Tom’s hand away. “No,” he said fiercely. “We have to stop him.”
“You can’t stop him,” gasped Tom. “He’s too fast … too strong. He’ll kill us all.”
As he spoke, Tom tried to get to his feet, but a furious wave of pain crashed him back down onto his knees. Nix tried to help him up, but her hands slipped on the blood.
“Keep the compresses in place,” warned Lilah.
Benny got to his feet and watched Preacher Jack stalk toward him. He knew that Tom was right. None of them were a match for this madman, old as he was. Preacher Jack had been a soldier and killer his whole life, and the hard years since First Night had only made him tougher. There was no way Benny could beat him, but maybe he could stall the old mercenary long enough for Lilah or Chong to wound him. Or kill him. Even if it meant sacrificing himself to make that possible. Benny looked at Tom, injured and helpless. And at Nix. And Lilah and Chong. He would die for any one of them. He might have to die for all of them.
Benny turned back to the preacher and raised the jagged stump of Nix’s bokken. It was the only weapon he had left. It was broken, but the end was sharp. Maybe that would be enough.
Or would it? Preacher Jack stopped ten paces away and raised the pistol.
Damn, Benny thought. So much for heroic last stands.
Then he felt something move behind him and there was Chong, coming up to stand at his side, his bokken in his hands. He smiled at Benny and took another step forward, putting himself between Benny and the pistol.
“What are you doing?” Benny whispered, but Chong ignored him.
Preacher Jack sneered. “Out of the way, rat meat.”
“Bite me,” said Chong, and his voice quavered only a little. “You want Tom, you’ll have to shoot me first.”
Preacher Jack grinned, and his teeth were bloody. “Hell, boy … I’m going to shoot all of you.”
“You won’t have time. One of us will get you,” Benny said, not sure if it was true. Preacher Jack also had the sword.
Lilah snatched up her spear and stood on Chong’s other side. She pointed the broken blade at the preacher. “You’re mine, old man.”
“No!” cried Tom weakly. “No … all of you—run!”
“Not going to happen,” said Chong firmly. “I’ll die before I let him win.”
“This ain’t about winning, boy,” Preacher Jack said with a laugh. “This is about justice. You killed my sons! You killed my whole family. Don’t you understand the full weight of your sin? You did what First Night and three hundred million dead could not do! You killed the House of Matthias!”