“Tell me about her.”
Chong told Riot an abbreviated version of Lilah’s story.
Riot turned and stared at him. “The Lost Girl? You’re joshing me.”
“No . . . why? Don’t tell me you’ve heard of her?”
“Oh, dang, son, I heard ten different versions of that tall tale.” She laughed and shook her head. “Boys are funny. They’ll make up any dang story just to impress a gal.”
“You think I’m making this up?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. But when we’re done here I’ll introduce you to my uncle, Daniel Boone. He keeps a chupacabra for a pet and has a fresh-raised gray man as his personal butler.”
Chong tried to argue, to explain that Lilah was real and that he knew her, but Riot kept laughing and shaking her head. Finally he gave it up.
Riot gave him a wicked little grin and ticked her chin toward the arrow. “So, unless you got more tall tales to tell . . . let’s give ’er a go, shall we?”
47
BENNY AND NIX STARED AT THE ZOMBIES ON THE T-BARS. THE CREATURES twisted and reached for them, their moans softer than the desert breeze. Red streamers were tied around their ankles.
Around the neck of each was hung a small plank of whitewashed wood. The message on each was the same.
I DIED A SINNER
DARKNESS IS DENIED TO ME
“What’s it supposed to mean?” asked Nix in a hushed and frightened voice.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”
Nix nervously touched one of the streamers tied to the nearest zom’s ankle. “That looks like what Saint John was wearing.”
“Yeah. Let me rephrase what I said. I really do not freaking want to know what this means. Actually, this whole thing is really scaring the crap out of me. We need to find Lilah and—”
“We need to look inside that plane.”
He smiled at her. “You’re actually nuts, aren’t you? The desert sun’s baked your brains and—”
Nix just looked at him. Benny felt suddenly detached from the moment. Here was Nix, the girl he loved, the girl he’d risked his life for, the girl he’d left his home for. Nix, with her wild red hair and explosions of freckles and brilliant green eyes. Nix, who had a scar on her face that Benny actually thought looked sexy. Nix, who was everything to him. But she was also the Nix he did not know. The girl he’d come to know less and less ever since they’d seen that jet.
This Nix laughed less often. This Nix was less kind, less . . .
Soft?
He considered that word and its implications.
Soft could mean weak, or it could mean gentle, open, receptive. The Nix he’d known all his life was soft, but was she ever weak? No, absolutely not. Not before and not after the jet. Okay, then what about the other meaning of soft? Was this new Nix gentle?
Mostly no. Life had been so hard on her that she had become hardened.
Was she open?
Again, mostly no. Where once they could spend hours discussing or even debating points as trivial and varied as the species of a butterfly or the politics of the Nine Towns, this new Nix seldom let him inside her thoughts.
Was this Nix receptive?
That was the hardest call. She seemed open to new experiences, and would readily listen to advice or information about the best ways to do things, the best routes, safety in the Ruin, all sorts of things. But that was only receptivity along the lines of a file cabinet—information was stored, but Benny had no idea of how it was being processed.
Was this the Nix he’d fallen in love with?
No. That Nix was gone. If not forever, then at least for now. There was hardly any trace of her left.
That left a final and dreadful question. One that he had been debating for a couple of weeks now.
Was he in love with this Nix?
Benny searched and searched inside his head and heart, and he just simply did not know. The only consolation was that he didn’t understand this Nix. Maybe when he did, things would get better.
He knew that Nix had always wanted to leave Mountainside. He and Chong both considered her a visionary; she had big, but practical, dreams about going beyond the fence line to make a new home out here in the Ruin. But that was before her mother was murdered and Nix was abducted. It was before Nix had been forced to fight in the zombie pits at Gameland, where she’d encountered the reanimated zombie of Charlie Pink-eye. It was before Tom died.
After all those things, Nix had changed.
Now, standing in front of the crashed plane, with proof of ugliness and madness out here in the Ruin, Benny looked into those emerald eyes and did not see anyone he recognized.
All this, all these jumbled thoughts, crashed through his mind in the space of a second or two. Most of the thoughts were rehashes of issues that had been hanging unresolved on the walls of his brain.
Benny turned away from her stare, unable to look into her eyes any longer. The Nix he knew was not there, and he didn’t want this new Nix to see the agony that must be in his own eyes.
He walked to the base of the T-bars and looked up at the zoms.
He cleared his throat. “I think they were the pilots,” he said.
“Why?”
“The uniforms. There were pictures in some of the books.”
“Should we . . . quiet them?”
Benny looked up at the dead, who looked down at him with empty eyes and hungry mouths. Their hands pawed at the air, gray hands opening and closing on nothing.
“No,” he said. “They’re not hurting anyone.”
Benny felt her come to stand beside him.
“I’m going to climb up into the plane,” she said.
Benny cleared his throat. “It’s not safe.”
“Safe?” Nix echoed faintly. “When are we ever going to be safe?”
“I—”“I’m serious, Benny. Unless we find where this plane came from, all we’re ever going to do is keep running for our lives. Is that what you want? Is that why you came out here?”
He looked up at the cloudless blue sky and did not look at her. “Nix, you know exactly why I came out here.”
“Look, Benny . . . ,” she said in the softest voice he’d heard her use in weeks. “I know things have been bad.”
He dared not turn. This was hardly the first time she’d tuned into what he was thinking, or perhaps what he was feeling. Nix was always empathic. Benny said nothing.
“Give me time,” she said.
She did not wait for him to answer. She turned away and walked down the slope to the piece of plastic sheeting that hung from the open hatch. Benny turned his head ever so slightly and watched as she began to climb.
48
LILAH DID NOT SCREAM A WAR CRY AS SHE JUMPED DOWN TO FACE THE boars. She did not need to hype herself up for the fight; every nerve in her body was already blazing with the anticipation of battle and pain.
The pain in her side was a searing white-hot inferno, but she swallowed it, using the pain as fuel, knowing it would shotgun adrenaline into her system. It would make her faster, more aggressive, more vicious. It would keep the fear under control. And there was a lot of fear. She never pretended to be fearless, not to others and never to herself.
She did not fear her own death. Not really.
She feared not living, and to her that wasn’t the same thing.
Death ended thought, ended knowing.
Not living meant that she would never see Chong’s face again. She would never see the exasperation he tried so hard to hide whenever she did or said something that wasn’t “acceptable” to the people in town. She would never hear his soft voice as he recited poetry. Dickinson, Rossetti, Keats. She would never feel the warmth of his hand in hers. Chong’s hands were always warm, even when it was snowing outside.
She would never kiss him again.
She would never get to say the words that she ached to say.
So she said them now, just in case. Just to have them out there, to put them on the wind. To make them real.
“Chong,” she murmured quietly, “I love you.”
It was unlikely that he would ever get to hear her say those words. The thought of these monsters taking all that away from her made Lilah mad.
Very mad.
Killing mad.
With a feral snarl that would probably have scared the life out of Chong, Lilah dropped from the branch.
She fell with all the silence and speed of gravity. Her snow-white hair whipped away from her face as she plummeted.
She struck the closest boar feetfirst with a dead-weight impact that staggered the beast even though it was nearly five times her weight and mass. The heels of her shoes struck it on the right shoulder, and the impact sent shock waves through her shins and through the gash in her side. However, Lilah bent her knees as she struck, letting the big muscles of her thighs absorb the shock rather than her fragile knee joints.
The impact knocked the boar sideways into a second animal, and Lilah fell backward away from the pack. Despite the pain, she hit the ground the right way, tucked, rolled, and came up onto the balls of her feet.
All the boars squealed in a killing frenzy. Lilah wasted no time; there was none to waste. She rushed in and swung her ax in a high overhand blow that whistled through the air. The blade smashed into the first hog’s skull and punched through right into its brain. The creature cried out and then instantly collapsed, dead for gone and forever.
Lilah went with its fall, letting the creature’s own weight tear the blade free.
She’d timed it right. The first boar was down between her and the others. That bought her two seconds of time. She needed one.
Lilah whipped the ax over and around her head just as a second boar scrabbled over the dead one, and the blade struck it square in the eye socket. The steel stabbed through one eye and out the other side.
But the boar kept charging.
The puncture had missed the brain.
What had been perfect timing a moment ago was now fatal. The boar tossed its head and tore the ax handle from her hands as easily as she could have taken a toy away from little Eve. Lilah staggered back and nearly fell. Her ax went flying into the weeds on the far side of the clearing. It might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the good it would do her now.
The boars that had fallen were back on their feet, and the whole pack charged at her.
Lilah screamed and dove away, rolling again, feeling more of her wound open up as she rose once more to her feet. She ran, and the pain chased her as surely as did the pack of boars.
The clearing was covered in short, dry grass that had withered to a lusterless brown. As Lilah ran across it, heading for the shelter of a boulder, she saw a darker brown amid the grass, and a half pace later the gleam of steel.
Her torn gun belt and the big Sig Sauer pistol were right there!
But the boars were too close.
Lilah ran past her gun and reached the boulder a split second before the pigs caught up. She slapped the curve of the rock and launched her body onto it and then over it. The boars slammed into the stone, one after another, their dead brains too damaged to correct the angle of their charge. They rebounded from the impact, and as Lilah ran around the far side of the rock, she saw that one of them had shattered its big front tusks. Far from reducing it as a threat, the damage resulted in dagger-sharp jagged stumps.
She piled on the speed, bent almost double even though her whole left side burned with fresh blood, then scooped up the holster, grabbed the butt of the pistol, racked the slide, skidded to a stop, whirled, and brought the gun up as the boars barreled straight toward her.
And then everything went a little crazy.
As she pulled the trigger there were two blasts.
Not one.
The lead boar pitched down and tumbled over and over, its head blown to fragments. The boars behind it squealed and stumbled, colliding with their fellows, crashing into and over one another in a massive pile. Only one boar remained on its feet, and it drove straight at Lilah.
Then something huge and gray came flying out of the woods and struck the third boar like a missile, knocking it sideways and down. The new creature rattled with the sound of metal, and Lilah had a surreal glimpse of spiked steel bands, chain mail, and a great horned helmet. It was a dog, but it was like nothing Lilah had ever seen. A monstrous mastiff, armored like a tank. It dragged down the much heavier boar and began systematically slashing the undead creature to pieces. It did not bite at all but instead smashed and tore with the blades welded to its armor.
The last three boars rose from where they had fallen over the one Lilah had shot. One took a single lurching step toward her, paused for a moment, and then fell over dead.
As it landed, Lilah saw the black dime-size bullet hole in its temple.
The two others glared at her. They grunted with awful hunger and charged.
Lilah brought her gun up, but a voice yelled, “No!”
And a second figure came rushing from the woods. Not a dog this time, but a man.
He leaped over the dead hogs and landed right in the path of the charging boars. The pale sunlight that slanted down through the trees glittered on the edge of a long sword the man raised above his head.
Not just any kind of sword.
A katana.
The man stepped into the charge of the hogs and slashed low, left and right, and suddenly the animals were falling forward, one leg on each sheared clean away. The man spun and slashed, the blade moving with incredible speed and precision so that it appeared as if the boars merely disintegrated. Then he pivoted and made two massive downward stabs, ramming the point of his sword through the weakest parts of the creatures’ skulls and destroying the spark of unnatural life that burned in their zombie brains.
Behind him, the dog rose from the destroyed hulk of the other boar.
Lilah froze, her pistol clamped in hands that now trembled. The pain in her side was screaming through her nerve endings, and shadows were piling up inside her mind.