She studied him warily. He was a big man, lean but muscular, with blond hair shot through with gray and a face that was cut by laugh lines and scars. Deep blue eyes and very white teeth. He wore jeans and a camouflage T-shirt. There was an automatic pistol holstered on his right hip and a sheathed katana placed within easy reach on the ground.
“You’re not Tom Imura.”
“Ah,” he said. “That’s what you meant.”
“What?”
“Before you passed out, you called me Tom.”
Lilah said nothing. Instead she appraised the dog. She had seen mastiffs before—they were popular among the bounty hunters. The dogs were fierce, powerful, and able to take down anyone—man, zom, or apparently, a full grown wild boar. This dog was one of the biggest she’d ever seen. Easily two hundred fifty pounds. Probably more. His body was wrapped in a coat of light chain mail, and long bands of segmented metal ran from shoulders to flanks. Metal spikes stood up along the bands. A horned war helmet sat unbuckled by the dog’s feet.
The dog had dark eyes that were filled with intelligence and controlled hostility.
“Who are you?” Lilah demanded again as she shifted her aim from heart to head.
“Before you pull that trigger, let me ask you something,” said the stranger casually. “Does that gun feel right to you? I mean, does it feel like it’s fully loaded? ’Cause I’m thinking it doesn’t.” He held up the slender magazine. “Bullets are kind of heavy, don’t you think?”
Lilah glared at him and then turned the pistol over. The slot at the base of the grip was empty.
“I may be getting old,” mused the man, “but I’m not senile. Not yet, at least.”
She cursed.
“Jeez, they teach you those words in school? What is the world coming to?”
He balanced the magazine atop a small rock that lay between them. Lilah knew that even without her injuries she could never get it, slap it into place, rack the slide, and fire before the man and the dog were on her.
She lowered the gun.
The man smiled and picked up a metal spoon to stir a small pot of soup that hung over a tiny fire. The soup smelled wonderful.
“Who are you?” she asked again.
“Well, I’m not Tom Imura, that’s for sure, I think we can both agree on that. Maybe you don’t know the man, but he’s Japanese and I’m a blond-haired, blue-eyed all-American boy from Baltimore.”
“When I first saw you . . . you were in shadows,” she said. “And you have the same sword.”
The man nodded at the sword slung on the ground. “Similar sword,” he corrected. “Tom carries a Paul Chen kami katana, or he did last time I saw him. And he slings his over his shoulder.”
Lilah said nothing.
“My name’s Joe,” he said, then jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the dog. “That’s Grimm. He’s the brains of this outfit, and he’s made it pretty clear that I exist to fetch and carry for him.”
Grimm made a wet, glopping sound with his mouth. Perhaps it was an agreement.
“We’re in a safe place,” Joe continued. “No bad guys, no walkers.”
Lilah looked around. They were in a natural shelter formed by two massive red boulders. A quad motorcycle was parked in the shade. Joe noticed her looking at it.
“Before you ask,” he said, “no—I’m not a reaper.”
“Then who are you?” she said once more. “And why did you help me back there?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Of course.”
“Well, let’s see. Girl. Hurt girl, actually. Bunch of freaking zombie pigs that want to eat hurt girl. Hmmm, why’d I step in? Truth is, I slept badly last night, woke with a kink in my shoulder, and as everyone knows, there’s no better way to loosen up old joints than to go chop-socky on a couple of zombie pigs. Well-known fact.”
She glowered at him. “That’s a stupid answer.”
“No,” he corrected, “it’s a silly answer. The question was pretty silly too, don’t you think?” Before Lilah could organize a comeback, Joe dipped a tin cup into the steaming pot. “Have some soup.”
She tried to think of a really good reason to refuse his offer. She wanted to smash it out of his hand and use the confusion to run, but she was positive that her injuries would slow her down. The dog would catch her and tear her apart.
Joe smiled at her as if reading her thoughts.
So Lilah took the cup. While Joe watched, she sniffed it suspiciously and finally took an experimental sip. She waited to see if there was any ill effect.
“It’s chicken soup,” explained Joe. “For some reason there’s a lot of wild chickens out here. Wacky postapocalyptic landscape, right? Threw a few herbs in. Might be a little spicy.”
Joe handed her a piece of clean cloth to use as a napkin.
Lilah noticed that he made no attempt to touch her. She knew that she was more than a little naive when it came to people, but at the same time she knew a lot about men. Or rather, about some kinds of men. She and Annie had been treated roughly at Gameland. Even though none of the bounty hunters had ever sexually abused them, Lilah had heard their rough jokes, and she believed that if they had stayed at that horrible place the jokes might have changed into something far worse.
During their Warrior Smart training, Tom had been very frank with them about the realities of the world. Death was not the only harm that could come to a person out in the Ruin. Especially a girl. Tom warned about strangers. The truth was often ugly, he said, and predators preyed on the unaware and uninformed.
Even so, this man seemed different. He appeared to be considerate and was making an exaggerated show of propriety. Why? To lull her off guard, or to allay her fears?
She brooded on that as she drank the soup. It was very spicy, but it was delicious.
If this man had wanted to assault her, he could have done it while she was unconscious. If he had, then dog or no, she would have found a way to make him pay. But she knew her own body. The only pain was from her wounds. She could feel the familiar tightness of stitches along her hip and thigh, but she still wore her clothes. When she probed the area, she saw that he’d cut slits in the side of her pants in order to dress the wounds. He had not removed her pants.
She eyed him over the rim of the cup.
Joe was a strange man; and once again Lilah had the sense that she was looking at Tom, even though this man was bigger, older, and of an entirely different ethnicity. There was a sameness, a kinship between him and Tom that she could not yet identify. She had seen similar qualities in Sally Two-Knives, Solomon Jones, and a few of the other bounty hunters who had fought alongside Tom at Gameland. She wasn’t sure if it was a sign of moral goodness or merely a lack of obvious corruption. It was too soon to tell.
Joe watched her as she studied him, and he allowed it. He even gave what appeared to be an encouraging nod. Strange, strange man.
The dog, Grimm, suddenly got up and walked over to sniff her. Before he actually did so, he cut a look at Joe. The man gave a small gesture with one finger. A signal of some kind. The dog whuffed and bent close to sniff Lilah.
“Is he safe?” she asked.
“Safe as I want him to be,” said Joe. “Pet him if you want.”
As he said that, Joe made a small clicking sound with his tongue. Another signal.
Lilah tentatively reached out and touched the dog’s head. His fur was dark and coarse, but very soft. She ran her fingers along the top of his head, tracing the skull, and then gently rubbed one of his ears between thumb and forefinger.
Grimm turned his head and licked her fingers.
“You made a friend,” said Joe. “Grimm’s not easy to charm.”
“He’s a war dog,” she said, intending that to explain why the dog would understand her. Joe nodded and sipped his soup. Grimm flopped down next to Lilah, and she continued to stroke his head. The dog’s eyes rolled up as if he was in heaven.
“Who are you?” Lilah asked again. “I mean . . . what are you?”
“I’m a ranger,” he said after a short pause. “It’s a group of scouts. Most of us are former soldiers or SpecOps and—”
“SpecOps?”
“Special Operators,” he explained. “Soldiers who did special missions.”
“Oh,” she said, “like Delta Force and the SEALs. I read about them in books. Novels, mostly.”
“Like that. Our outfit’s been around for a few years now, working the southern states mostly, but a couple of us started going north and west to see how things had fallen out. I even spent a little time up your way.”
“My way? How do you know—?”
“You mentioned Tom Imura.”
“You knew him?”
There was the slightest pause before the man said, “Once upon a time.”
They sipped their soup and studied each other.
“Why are you here?” she said, indicating the forest.
He shrugged. “I poke my nose in here and there. Guess you could call me a professional troublemaker.”
As Lilah set her cup down, the injury throbbed and she hissed between clenched teeth. “How badly am I hurt?”
“Nothing that won’t heal if you take care of yourself,” he said. “You have a world-class collection of bruises and scrapes, and your left knee is puffy, so we might be looking at a sprain. You got thirty stitches down your side. Looks like you got clipped by the boar’s tusk. Wound’s clean, though, no sign of infection.”
Lilah chewed on a word for a few moments before she said it. “Thanks.”
“My pleasure. And I saw the way you handled yourself out there. You are one tough kid.”
“I’m not a kid,” she said.
“Fair enough. No offense meant.”
She let it go and changed subjects. “That boar was a zom.”
“Yup,” agreed Joe.
“How?”
“Darned if I know,” he admitted. “Only seen a few of those critters around these last few months, and I don’t mind saying that it scares the bejesus out of me.”
“You’ve seen this before?”
“Yup. First one I saw was around Jericho Junction over in Utah. Then last week I saw a small pack of them chasing a bunch of other hogs. There’s been a population explosion of wild boars down south, all uninfected, at least as far as I know; but these were definitely walkers. Haven’t had a really good night’s sleep since. The thought that this plague has crossed the species barrier is . . . ” He shook his head, unable or unwilling to quantify the potential danger.
Lilah nodded. “It doesn’t make sense. Zoms are zoms. They’re people. The plague was never in the animals.”
“It is now.” He rubbed his eyes. “The plague’s been changing. Diseases do that. They’ve always done that. Before First Night there were new viruses every year, some of which were new strains of diseases we thought we’d beaten. It was simply good luck that most of the diseases of animals didn’t jump to humans, and that most human diseases didn’t jump to animals. That’s all past tense, though. The zombie plague, whatever it was, wiped out humanity, and now it’s moving into animals.”
“Other animals?”
He shrugged. “Let’s hope not. So far it’s only a small percentage of the boar population, and pig biology is pretty close to humans. That might account for it. If it gets into flies or insects, or birds, then we’re really screwed. We can’t build a fence to keep them out. Even so, those pigs . . . man, they give me the creeps.”
Lilah could tell that he was trying to keep his tone light, but the horror was in his eyes. “That’s not the only thing that’s changed,” she said. “Some of the zoms are faster.”
“Yeah, that’s old news. I’ve seen some real Olympic sprinters in the last year. Mostly in the Pacific Northwest. Not so much here, though.”
“We saw some today.”
He narrowed his blue eyes. “You’re sure?”
“I killed two of them today. One of them picked up a stick and tried to hit me with it.”
That news seemed to jolt Joe, and he stared at her for a moment. Several times his mouth began to form questions, but he left them unsaid. They ate their soup in silence, each of them contemplating the implications of faster and perhaps smarter zoms.
Lilah held out her cup for more soup. “You haven’t asked me my name.”
“Don’t need to,” he said as he ladled more into her cup. He was smiling, but the smile held secrets. “You’re the Lost Girl, aren’t you?”
53
THE COCKPIT WAS A SMALL COMPARTMENT WITH TWO BIG CHAIRS FACING the smashed-out front windows and one chair set to one side, facing a wall of controls the like of which they had only ever seen in books. Computers and scanners. Things that belonged to a world that might as well have been ancient Rome or the Dark Ages for all that these devices related to Benny and Nix’s experience.
Light streamed in through the gaping windows.
There were three chairs, all empty, which reinforced Benny’s guess that the zoms outside had once been the crew.
“What do you think happened?” asked Nix. “Why’d it crash?”
“I have no idea,” he said. They spoke in hushed voices even though they were alone. The altar outside and the painted warning inside made them both feel like something was about to jump out at them.
There was a discarded jacket on the floor, and Benny picked it up. A small version of the same flag that was on the plane’s tail had been sewn onto one pocket, and below that was embroidered THE AMERICAN NATION.