Dust & Decay

48

LOU CHONG YELPED IN FEAR AND BACKPEDALED AWAY AS THE ZOMBIE tumbled into the pit. He pressed his back against the cold dirt wall and threw an arm up to shield his face. The creature struck the ground with a crunch of brittle bones. The crowd above him laughed like they were watching a clown act. People were calling fresh bets based on whether they thought the zom had broken any bones that would prevent him from attacking Chong.

Chong hesitated, looking down at the zom as it moaned and tried to get to its feet.

He wanted to run and hide, but he was in a fifteen-foot-wide pit. Running and hiding were not options. He racked his brain to decide how to survive this. The moment needed action. What was the smart thing to do?

What would Tom do? Before that thought had even finished forming, Chong was moving. He launched himself off the wall, raised the iron pipe over his head, and brought it down with all his force on the back of the zom’s head.

Crunch!

The creature dropped to the ground. The crowd above him went totally silent. A single ration dollar fell downward, seesawing through the humid air.

The zom twitched. One kick of the leg. A tremble of its fingers. Chong growled deep in his throat and hit it again. Harder. This time the crunch was wetter.

The zom stopped moving.

The crowd… went wild. Cheers and applause.

Chong lowered the pipe and looked up at the crowd. The Burned Man crouched on the edge of the pit, grinning like a ghoul.

“Well, well… I’ll be double damned,” he said. “Folks, it looks like we got us a bona-fide zombie killer. Yes sir, that’s what we have here.”

The crowd cheered. Fistfuls of money flashed back and forth. “Give him another!” someone shouted, and instantly the chorus was picked up until everyone was yelling it.

“Okay, okay!” laughed the Burned Man. “Customer’s always right. Nestor? Crab? Bring us another gladiator. Let’s have something really fresh.”

The two assistants wore wicked smiles as they vanished. Betting ramped up until the oddsmaker had to yell at the crowd, “Give me a bloody chance to count, damn you!”

Chong tried not to shiver. In truth he was no longer cold, but he trembled from hair to toes as he waited for the next monster. A shadow obscured the opening, and he looked up sharply to see the long boom of a wooden crane swinging out over the edge. A figure dangled from the pulley, thrashing and twisting. A rope had been looped under its arms, and once it was down, the rope would fall away and the zombie would be free.

The Burned Man leaned over the edge. “We don’t want to damage the goods a second time,” he said, and the comment drew a fresh wave of harsh laughter.

Nestor and Crab turned the winch, and immediately the thrashing zom began descending into the fighting pit. Chong backed to the wall. This zom was massive. Burly, like a bull wrangler or one of the pit throwers back home. Huge chest and stomach, massive arms, almost no neck, and eyes that blazed with dark fire. His skin showed no signs of putrefaction. He hadn’t been dead for very long.

What had Tom told him about the newly risen? They seemed smarter. They were stronger and a little faster. More coordinated. The decay of their motor cortex hadn’t yet reduced them to staggering scarecrows.

Chong gripped the pipe and licked his lips again. “Warrior smart,” he muttered.

“Let ’er go!” ordered the Burned Man. Crab and Nestor jerked the rope from around the big man’s body and whipped it up and through the pulley. The zom dropped the last few inches and landed heavily on its feet.

The creature was immense. Maybe six foot five and at least three hundred pounds, even with no blood left in its veins. Chong was five-eight and weighed 130.

The zom landed facing the opposite side of the pit. Chong had one chance to rush in and bash it with the club. He surged forward, but before his first step touched down he was struck full in the face by a bucketful of icy water. It was so shocking, so surprising, that it stopped him like a punch to the face. Coughing, sputtering, gasping, Chong dropped the pipe and staggered backward, thumping hard into the wall. He pawed water out of his eyes and looked up to see the Burned Man holding an empty bucket.

“Got to make things fair, little man,” he said amid shrill laughter and catcalls.

The splash of the water and Chong’s own confused sputtering made the zombie turn around. It stared at him with those bottomless black eyes. Pale lips curled back from teeth that were still white and strong.

The pipe lay on the ground five inches from the zombie’s feet. Six feet away from Chong.

The zom uttered a moan of hunger that was newly awakened and that could never be satisfied. The monster raised its massive hands and then lunged for Chong.

49

SALLY TWO-KNIVES FOUND HER HORSE DRINKING FROM A STREAM. SHE clicked her tongue and the big Appaloosa-Posey by name-raised her speckled head and stared. Then she whinnied happily and trotted up the hill to meet Sally.

Sally sheathed her knife, patted the horse’s cheek, and kissed her. “You big goof!” she scolded. “You ran off and left Mama out here all alone. What were you thinking?”

“Probably thought you were dead,” said a voice from behind her. Sally whirled around, grabbing for her knife. The blade whipped out of its sheath, but the movement tore a cry of pain from Sally.

Despite the pain, she smiled as a man stepped out of the shadows beneath a tall spruce.

He was medium height, built like a wrestler, and bald as an egg, with chocolate-brown skin and a small goatee shot through with streaks of white. He had a pair of machetes slung over his back and a.45 automatic in a Marine Corps web belt strapped to his waist.

“Damn!” said Sally. “As I live and breathe!”

The man grinned. “I thought that crazy horse was yours. I tried to ride her but she tried to eat me, so we were both letting things calm down before we had another go at it.”

Sally Two-Knives gave him a charming, coquettish smile. “Solomon Jones… why are you trying to steal my horse?”

Solomon opened his arms. “Give us a hug, girl.”

Sally did, but gently, hissing a little as Solomon gathered her in his powerful arms. When he heard the hiss he let her go, ranging his eyes up and down and finally taking in the sling and the bandages.

“Whoa, now… what’s wrong?”

“Well,” said Sally, “the old girl ain’t what she used to be.” She told him everything. Solomon listened with great interest. Like Sally, he was an unaffiliated bounty hunter, mostly working the kind of closure jobs that Tom Imura took and doing some occasional cleanups and guard work. He’d come west from Pennsylvania after First Night with his two kids and a ragtag collection of refugees he picked up during the three-thousand-mile trek through what was becoming the Rot and Ruin. Solomon lived in Fairview, where, also like Tom, he had tried and failed for years to get the town to organize a militia to patrol the part of the Ruin that ran along the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

By the time Sally was done telling her story, Solomon was nodding. “This all fits,” he said, “but it’s worse than you know. White Bear’s got more than seventy goons in his crew, and some of them are real gangsters. Actual gangsters from before First Night. There’s two I know will be trouble. Heap Garrison and Digger Harris. Digger used to be a leg-breaker for the Mob in Detroit, and wasn’t Heap with the Russian Mafia? Or that’s what people say.”

Sally made a face. “Nice.”

“I was looking for Tom,” said Solomon. “Ran into Fluffy McTeague over by Coldwater Creek, and he said that Tom was bugging out. Looking for that jet. I thought that wasn’t until next week.”

“He changed his mind. Wanted to get out of Dodge. Why were you looking for him?” she asked.

“To talk him the heck out of going,” said Solomon. “I’ve been hitting the wall trying to get the militia idea to go anywhere.”

“So has Tom.”

“So has everyone who’s tried to do it alone. I wanted to get Tom to agree to be the spokesman for a committee. Make a case to the towns, one after the other. Campaign for it.”

“Might have worked, Sol,” she said, “but it’s about two days too late. Besides, Tom’s got enough to worry about right now.”

“With Gameland, you mean? Is he really going to tear it down again?”

“Don’t know about tearing it down, but he’s going to get that kid back. His brother and the other kids are waiting for him back at Brother David’s and-”

“No, they’re not,” said Solomon firmly. “I just came through there. Somebody torched it. Turned a couple thousand zoms into crispy critters. No trace of Brother David or the girls.”

Sally swore. “God… you don’t think Tom’s brother was burned up, do you?”

“Hope not, but I don’t think so. There were tracks leading off into the field, off toward Wawona. The kids probably went that way. If I’d known that it was only kids, I’d have gone after them. Bad stuff’s happening in the east.”

“I know.” Sally narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “You said you saw Fluffy? Anyone else around?”

“With all that’s going on? Everybody’s around, and I have half a dozen people out looking for Tom.”

Sally narrowed her eyes. “How fast could you get them together?”

“Pretty fast. But it’d have to be for a good reason. Why?”

“I’m starting to have a thought here.”

“What kind of thought?”

“A dangerous one.”

He grinned. “Tell me, girl.”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Why do zoms eat only living creatures?

Firsthand accounts of zoms say that they will attack and eat any living creature. Humans, animals, birds, insects, and reptiles. No one knows if they will attack fish.

It has been speculated that it is warm, living flesh that attracts the zombies’ appetites, but then how do you explain zoms who eat insects? Insects don’t have much body heat.

Heat alone can’t be what attracts them, because if that was the case they’d continue to feed on the recently dead. But they don’t. Once something has died, zoms lose interest pretty quickly. (It takes hours for a body to cool to room temperature.)

If zombies are attracted to warm flesh, then they should logically be compelled to feast longer on victims in warmer climates and less so on victims in cooler climates.

Zoms don’t attack people who are wearing cadaverine. Is it smell that attracts them? That doesn’t make sense, because a freshly killed person or animal doesn’t smell like decaying flesh, but zoms stop eating it.

THIS DOESN’T MAKE SENSE, AND IT’S DRIVING ME CRAZY!

50

“HOW FAR IS IT TO YOSEMITE?” BENNY ASKED, PEERING AHEAD TO the hazy mass of dark green in the distance.

Nix fanned a cloud of gnats away from her face. “Not sure. How far do you think we’ve come?”

Benny glanced at the sun. “We’ve been walking for three hours. With this terrain, figure about three miles an hour. Maybe a little less. Call it two and a half, which means we’ve come about seven to eight miles since we left the way station.”

Nix tugged her journal out of its pocket and flipped open to one of the pages of maps she’d painstakingly copied. There was one map that showed the eastern side of Mariposa County, with the town of Mountainside circled. A strip of cardboard with incremental mile marks measured onto it was clipped to the page. Nix removed it and found another circled spot marked BD/WS. Brother David’s way station. “Tom said he wanted to take us to Wawona, over near the Merced River.” She did some math in her head and announced, “We could be as close as eight miles to Wawona.”

The thought of the big hotel, with its frequent travelers and patrolled woods, was comforting. Maybe if they regrouped there, they could actually make a decent start on the trip to find the jet. “Someone at the hotel might have seen the jet,” Benny said. “Tom says that there are travelers through there all the time.”

“Like Preacher Jack,” Nix reminded him, then added under her breath, “Freak.”

Benny nodded and pulled out his canteen for a drink. “We’ll be careful. Besides, Tom will know that’s where we went.”

She took the last of the Greenman’s strawberries and gave Benny half of them. “I would love one of Tom’s Sunday dinners right about now. A big steak so rare it would moo when I stuck my fork in it. Spinach and sweet corn. And those honey biscuits he makes from my mom’s recipes. And one of his apple pies with raisins.”

“With raisins and walnuts,” corrected Benny. “It’s important.” They walked, thinking about a feast. “They’ll have plenty of food at the hotel.”

“If they don’t, I’m going to bite your arm off.”

The joke conjured an image of her from his dream. “Come on, Nix,” he said quickly. “We can be there in a couple of hours.”

She looked back the way they’d come. “They will find us, won’t they?”

“Sure,” he said, and for the first time today he actually meant it. “And we’ll be okay until they do.”

The fields, valleys, and meadows through which they’d walked had been clear of serious threats. They’d spotted a few zoms, but each time, Benny and Nix circled around them and kept moving. Neither of them felt any desire to attack zoms unless there was no choice. Last year, on his first trip into the Ruin, Benny and Tom had spied on a trio of bounty hunters who were beating and torturing zombies for fun. The men were laughing and having a good time; however, Benny was instantly sickened by the sight, and the memory was like an open wound in his mind.

“Let’s go,” Nix said, and they began walking again. Even though it was early April and they were in higher elevations, the sun was hot. Most of the clouds had burned off, and neither of them had a hat.

“Wow,” gasped Benny, reaching for his canteen again, “we should sit some of this out and start again when the sun’s not four inches from the top of our heads.”

“I’m for that,” Nix agreed glumly, then brightened and pointed. “Look! Apples.”

They left the road and cut through a field to an overgrown orchard. They collected an armload of apples and settled down with their backs to a bullet-pocked stone wall. The stones were cool, and the apples were sweet. There was a burned-out farmhouse nearby, and beyond that was a barn that had once been painted bright red but that fourteen years had faded to a shade of rust resembling dried blood. A line of crows stood along the peaked roof, dozing in the afternoon heat.

Benny and Nix took off their sweltering carpet coats, and both of them were soaked with sweat. Benny was so exhausted that he was almost-almost-too weary to notice how Nix’s clothes were pasted to her body. He quietly banged his head on the stone wall. Then he closed his eyes and tried counting to fifty million. Eventually he opened his eyes and busied himself slicing apples for them. After a while, Nix pulled out her journal again and started writing.

“What are you doing?” Benny asked, munching on a slice of apple.

“Making a list.”

“Of?”

“Things I don’t understand about what’s been happening.”

“That’s going to be a long list. What do you have so far?”

She chewed the end of her pencil. “Okay, I get the rhinoceros. Zoos and circuses and all. That one makes sense… but what about the guy we found tied to the truck? Who was he and why was he fed to the zoms? And by whom? And worse… why didn’t he reanimate?”

Benny glumly shook his head.

“What does it mean?” Nix asked. “What could it mean? Is the plague or radiation or whatever it is wearing off? Or are we just now discovering that some people are immune to it?”

“Wouldn’t we know that already?” Benny asked.

“With three hundred million zoms in America? How would anyone know, especially if it was rare?”

“The bounty hunters would know,” insisted Benny. “Tom would have known. He’s all over the place. He hears all sorts of stuff. If that’s been happening, then he knows about it.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding thoughtfully, “I’ll buy that… but wouldn’t that mean the other idea is more likely?”

“That whatever caused the zoms to rise in the first place might be coming to an end?” Benny thought about it. “That would be pretty amazing.”

“If it’s true…,” Nix said dubiously. “Then there’s the big weirdness at the way station. Brother David, Shanti, and Sarah missing. And all the stuff Tom sent for our road trip.”

“And the zoms,” Benny added. “Tom told me that sometimes a bunch of zoms would follow something, like a herd of wild horses or a running bear. He called it ‘flocking.’ Is that what we saw last night?”

“No way,” Nix said firmly. “Last night was no accident. It felt like a planned attack. I think someone drove them down out of the mountains like Lilah did with the zoms from the Hungry Forest.”

They ate their apples in silence for a while.

“Nix,” Benny said tentatively, “there’s… something I have to tell you. Something I didn’t want to say last night.”

“Is it about Lilah?” Nix said quickly.

He turned and looked at her.

“Lilah? What about her? Because she ran off?”

Nix colored. “No, never mind. Go ahead… what were you going to say?”

He took a breath. “Last night… when we were in the field with all those zoms? Before I started the fire? I… um… saw someone.”

“Who?”

Benny cleared his throat. “It was dark. I was scared. There were a million freaking zoms, so I can’t be sure and I’m probably wrong, but… I think I saw Charlie Pink-eye.”

She whipped around and grabbed his sleeve with her small, strong fists. She shook him. “What?”

“Whoa! Ow, you’re banging my head against the stones.”

Nix abruptly stopped shaking him, but her fists stayed knotted in his sleeve. “You saw him?”

“No, I said I wasn’t sure. The dark and the zoms and all-”

“Was he alive or a zom?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Don’t lie to me, Benny Imura!”

“I’m not-I don’t know. It was just a second. I-I think he might have been alive, but the zoms weren’t attacking him.”

“He could have had cadaverine on, Benny, just like we did.”

“I know. But something wasn’t right about it. It might not even have been him.”

Nix stared into his eyes for a long time and then let him go with a little push. She suddenly got up and walked a dozen paces away, her arms wrapped tightly around her chest as if she stood in a cold wind. Benny got up more slowly but stayed by the wall.

He watched her as she worked it through. Every angle of her body seemed jagged and sharp, her posture charged with tension. Benny could only imagine what horrors were playing out in Nix’s mind. The man who had beaten and murdered her mother and then kidnapped her. The thought that somehow Charlie had orchestrated the zombie assault on the way station was horrible. It also made a queer kind of sense, since a swarm of zombies had been used to destroy Charlie’s team. An eye for an eye?

“Nix?”

She ignored him, standing stiff and trembling under the unrelenting sun. Benny waited for her. Three minutes passed. Four. Five. Gradually, by slow and painful degrees, the harsh lines of tension drained from Nix’s shoulders and back. When she turned around, Benny could see unshed tears in the corners of her eyes. She looked at him blankly for a moment, and then her eyes snapped wide.

She screamed.

Her warning was a half second too late, as cold hands clamped onto Benny from behind and dragged him backward over the stone wall. Benny twisted wildly around and saw the face of the zom who had him. A tall, thin man dressed in a tunic that looked like it had been made from an old bedsheet.

“No!” Benny cried.

It was Brother David.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Notes from Mrs. Griswold’s science lecture on how cadaverine is made:

The cadaverine used in the Rot and Ruin is actually a mixture of cadaverine, putrescine, spermidine, and other vile ptomaines. The pure compounds are caustic, toxic stuff although they can be easily diluted in water or ethanol (but not really diluting the aroma).

Making these compounds is not a project for a home basement chem lab or even a high school lab. The glassware, equipment, and chemicals are usually found in college level or industrial labs, and that equipment has been scavenged and brought to Mountainside.

The original method comes from a German journal dating back to about 1890. This method for reacting dichloropropane with sodium cyanide (a deadly poison) followed by reaction with zinc powder and hydrochloric acid. This gives cadaverine. Yuck.

51

TOM KNELT BY A COLD CAMPFIRE AND STUDIED THE GROUND. THIS WAS the second place where he’d found Chong’s footprints and signs of violence. The first time had been the spot where Sally Two-Knives had tried to rescue Chong. There were indeed two dead men there, and Tom recognized them. Denny Spurling and Patch Lewis, bounty hunters of the low-life variety who usually ran with a third man named Stosh Lowinski. These were two of the three men Benny had seen torturing and brutalizing zoms on their first trip into the Ruin. Stosh, a beefy man who used a replica Arabian scimitar to kill zoms, was not here. Sally had given them a little taste of their own medicine. Rough justice, but justice of a kind.

Tom knew Sally’s history. She’d been a rough, hard-edged Roller-Derby blocker with one of the Rat City Rollergirl teams out of Seattle when First Night changed the world. Sally had been the mother of two little kids, and she’d fought her way across Seattle to her small apartment where her mother was minding April and Toby. By the time Sally got to the apartment building, the lobby was splashed with blood. It took her a couple of years to tell Tom the whole story. It came out in broken fragments, and none of it was pretty. There were no happy endings, and when she reached her tenth-floor apartment, all she found was heartbreak.

Broken and more than half-crazy from loss, Sally headed south in a Humvee she took out of a used car lot. The salesmen at the dealership were long past caring. Sally made it as far as Portland before the electromagnetic pulses released by the nukes killed her car. She raided a sporting goods store for weapons. Previous looters had already taken the guns, so she loaded up with knives, including the two bowie knives that eventually became her trademark and her name.

It was nearly two years before she made it into Mariposa County, where she met Tom and discovered that there were towns filled with survivors. Tom remembered the Sally he’d first met: filthy, wild-eyed, almost feral, and more than half-dead from a bacterial infection she’d picked up from drinking bad water. He had gotten her first to Brother David’s and then into town.

Tom knew that Sally felt she owed him a debt, but in his view, if she helped someone else, then a different kind of infection would spread. Generosity could be as contagious as the zombie plague as long as enough people were willing to be carriers.

Tom rose from where he’d been crouching as he studied the scene.

The two men had indeed been quieted and left to rot. Tom wasted no sympathy on them. However, something caught his eye, and he parted some weeds and saw Chong’s bokken lying there. He picked it up. It was undamaged. Tom rigged a sling and hung the sword across his chest. As he did so he walked slowly around the clearing, looking at the prints. There were five distinct sets. Chong’s waffle-soled shoes. Sally’s cross-grained hiking boots. Prints that matched the shoes of the two dead men. And a fifth set that entered the camp from upslope. Tom placed his foot into one of the prints, and it dwarfed his. Tom was not a big man, and he wore a size nine-and-a-half shoe. This print had to be at least a fourteen extra wide, and the impression was ground well into the topsoil. A big man. Tall and heavy.

Like Charlie. Charlie Pink-eye had worn size fourteens.

Tom continued to walk the edges of the clearing until he found an even deeper set of footprints leading away. Same shoes, but clearly a heavier footfall. The answer was there to be read. There were no traces of Chong’s waffle soles, which meant that the big man had carried the boy off.

That gave Tom some hope. If Chong was dead, he would have been quieted and left for the crows. If he was alive and being carried, then even a big man could not move at top speed. And it was virtually impossible to cover your tracks while carrying a burden.

Tom was not carrying a burden. He could move very fast, and even a blind man could follow those tracks. He set out, moving quickly. He had the kind of lean and wiry body that was built for running, and he knew how to run. Two hours later he found the remains of a campfire and the clear and distinct marks of Chong’s waffle soles. The campfire was almost cold. Dirt had been kicked over the small blaze, and it had cooled more slowly than if it had been doused with water. Tom judged that he was now no more than four hours behind the big man. He was making up the time he’d lost by tending to Sally last night; and the big man had stopped to rest. When they’d started out again, Chong was walking instead of being carried. Good.

“Hold on, Chong,” he murmured aloud. “I’m coming for you.”

52

CHONG FLUNG HIMSELF TO ONE SIDE AS THE BIG ZOMBIE LUNGED. He hit the ground in a sloppy roll, coming up too fast, slamming into the opposite wall. He’d tried to snatch the pipe as he rolled, but his fingers merely brushed the cold length of it, sending it rolling away from him.

The crowd cheered, though Chong couldn’t tell if they were in favor of his attempt or its failure.

The zom turned, much faster than Chong thought it could, and instead of a dead moan, the creature hissed at him. The sound was full of hatred. Chong’s mind stalled. Hatred was an emotion. Zoms didn’t have any. But he could see the menace and malevolence etched into the snarling face of the living dead thing.

“No…”

The crowd must have heard him. They burst into raucous laughter.

“Surprise, surprise, little man!” taunted the Burned Man. “Bet you never seen a freshie like Big Joe.”

The zom-Big Joe-took a lumbering step toward Chong. However, its foot came down on the pipe and it rolled under the creature’s weight. Chong seized the opportunity and jumped forward, trying to land one of the kicks Tom had taught them. A jumping front thrust, intended to slam the flat of the foot against the opponent’s center of mass and knock him backward.

That was the plan.

Chong’s foot missed the big zom’s stomach and struck him in the left hip. Instead of knocking the zombie backward, it spun his mass, and with his weight already unstable from stepping on the pipe, the creature toppled off balance and fell. The pipe went skipping off the ground and struck the wall with a dull thud. Chong fell hard on his butt, and pain shot from his tailbone all the way up his spine and ignited fireworks in his brain. This new hurt, stacked on top of all his other aches, made Chong feel like he was toppling into a world where nothing but hurt existed.

Even through the pain and disorientation, he knew that if he just sat there, he’d be dead. With sparks still flashing in his eyes, he twisted around onto his hands and knees and fished for the pipe.

The roar of the crowd blocked out the moan of the zombie and the sounds it made getting back to its feet. Just as Chong’s fingers closed around the cold iron, the icy hand of Big Joe closed around the back of Chong’s neck. The zom plucked him off the ground as if he weighed nothing. Cold spittle splattered on his naked shoulders as he was pulled toward that awful mouth.

Chong shrieked in pain and fear and swung the pipe with both hands up and over his head. It struck the big zom’s forehead hard enough to send a jarring vibration down through the metal and into Chong’s hands.

The zom did not let go.

“Uh-oh!” jeered the Burned Man, sparking more laughter.

Chong felt the rough edges of the zom’s teeth begin to close around his shoulder. He screamed and swung the pipe again and again and again. The teeth pinched him, and the pain was unbelievable. But with the next swing of the club the zom lost its grip on him, and Chong dropped to the floor. He landed hard and instantly scuttled away like a spider, craning his neck to look over his shoulder as the zombie staggered backward, its eyes becoming dull with confusion. The front of its skull had a grooved look where the pipe had hammered it.

But there was bright, fresh blood on its lips!

Chong went crazy. He rushed the monster, swinging the pipe with so much force that he could feel his own muscles pulling and tearing. Spit flew from his mouth; the world seemed to vanish behind a red haze as he brought the Motor City Hammer’s black pipe club down over and over again.

The zom fell against the wall and still Chong hammered it. The creature’s feet slipped out from under it, and Chong beat on it as it slid down to the dirt floor. Its hands fell limply to the ground, and Chong never let up. Only when the creature slumped and fell sideways, his head a lumpy mass that no longer resembled a skull, did Chong pause, the gory club held high.

Big Joe was dead. The crowd cheered. Chong dropped the pipe and twisted his head to look at his shoulder. The flesh was raw and puckered and torn. Blood poured down his chest and back.

“Oh God,” Chong whispered.

He had been bitten.

53

BENNY THREW HIS WEIGHT FORWARD JUST AS NIX BROUGHT HER BOKKEN down with all her strength. The white fingers shattered under the impact, and Benny was free. He fell onto hands and knees but got to his feet in a heartbeat and ran.

Nix backed away, still holding the wooden sword out in front of her.

“Come on!” yelled Benny, clumsily snatching up their carpet coats.

Brother David was trying to climb over the broken stone wall. Two other zoms shambled around the sides. Sister Shanti and Sister Sarah.

Nix’s face went pale with horror and grief. “Oh… Benny… no.”

“We can’t help them,” cried Benny. “Nix, come on… there’s nothing we can do.”

“We can’t just leave them.”

“Yes, we can. Come on!”

The zoms were coming toward them, but they were slow and awkward. Nix kept backing up until she stood with Benny near the wall of the old barn, a hundred yards away from the three zoms. Behind them the road unrolled into the distance toward Yosemite. Here… there was nothing left but tragedy.

And more questions.

“Nix,” Benny said softly. “Please…”

She lowered her sword. The zoms were picking their way through tall weeds and stones. The faces of the two young women were empty of all the light and peace that had been there the last time Nix and Benny had seen them. All the vitality and personality and joy that had made these women what they were, that had brought them a measure of contentment even out here in the Rot and Ruin, were gone. Stolen from them.

“Someone did this to them,” Nix said, her eyes fierce with hurt and anger.

“I know.” He handed over her carpet coat. They quickly put them on, looking at each other, their eyes speaking volumes. So much would have to be left unsaid for now. And if they kept going east, so many things might remain unanswered. Unanswered and unpunished.

Tom had said that the Children of God believed that zoms-the Children of Lazarus-were the meek who had been intended to inherit the earth. Benny did not know if that was true. At that moment he hoped so, because at least it meant that Brother David, Sister Shanti, and Sister Sarah were where and what they had always wanted to be.

That did not make the hurt any less for Benny and Nix. It did not make the rage burn any less hot.

The three zoms continued to lumber toward them. Benny and Nix kept backing up, moving past the rust-colored wall of the barn. Then they froze when they heard the squeal of ancient hinges as the barn door swung outward. Benny whirled, but he was a second too late as a zom lunged at him from the shadows. Waxy lips pulled back to reveal rotting teeth. Benny and the monster crashed to the ground, rolling over and over in the weeds. Two more zoms rushed at Nix. She swung her bokken, catching one across the face; but the second crowded past and grabbed Nix’s red hair.

It was all so fast. Even as Benny fought with the zom, a part of his mind was trying to understand what was happening. The zoms weren’t slow. They were rotted and decayed, but they weren’t slow; and the burly creature trying to tear his throat out was strong. Far stronger than any zom Benny had fought; stronger than any zom he had heard about.

It was impossible.

Gray teeth snapped at the neckline of his carpet coat. Benny drove his knee into the zom’s groin, not that he thought he could hurt it, but because Tom had taught him to always try and lift his opponent’s mass. The zom’s hips bucked up from the impact, and Benny tried to turn, but then he felt cold fingers wrap tightly around his ankle.

Another zom.

More of them were staggering out of the barn. Farmers and women dressed in nurses’ uniforms and men in logger’s shirts. Kids, too, one of whom still clutched a stuffed bear to her chest. It was horrible and heartbreaking and absolutely terrifying.

“Benny!”

He heard Nix scream his name, but there were three zombies clawing at him now-the big one on top of him, the one holding his ankle, and the little girl with the stuffed bear, who had dropped to her knees and was trying to chew through the sleeve of his carpet coat.

Benny thought, We’re going to die. His inner voice could offer no argument.

And then a sound split the air.

“WOOOOOOOOOOO-HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

It was a huge, barrel-chested war whoop. The kind Morgie let loose when he hit a homer out past the line on McGoran Field. Benny could hardly see past the growling, biting zom, but he caught a flash of movement as something came from his left and slammed into the burly monster. The zom flipped off him. The figure kicked and stomped and then the other two zoms were rolling away and Benny was free. He spun around on the ground, coming up on all fours, the name rising to his mouth.

“Morgie!”

But as soon as he said it, even before he saw who it was, Benny knew that it wasn’t Morgie. It couldn’t be Morgie. The man who stood over him grinned through the grille of a New Orleans Saints football helmet. He was tall, thin, but wiry, with a carpet coat augmented with metal cut from license plates, each from a different state. He had a spear almost like Lilah’s, except that on the end opposite the blade was a round metal ball as big as Benny’s fist. He wore a pair of cheap black sunglasses and a good Cheshire cat grin.

Benny knew him from the Zombie Cards. Dr. Skillz.

There was a yell and a grunt, and Benny turned to see another man in similar garb taking the head off a zom with a powerful two-handed stroke of a heavy logging ax. J-Dog.

The two bounty hunters grinned at Benny. They were a little younger than Tom, so Benny figured that they had been teenagers during First Night. Tom had said they’d been surfers and beach bums once upon a time, but Benny had only a vague idea what a “surfer” was, and he’d never seen a beach except in books.

“Far out,” said Dr. Skillz. “Benjamin Imura and Phoenix Riley. Wassssabi?”

Dr. Skillz nodded. “Seriously, brah, and Jessie’s daughter’s gone all aliham.”

“Babelini!” agreed J-Dog, though he was smiling, not leering, when he said it. The surfers gave Benny the thumbs-up. “Good call, dude.”

“Huh?” asked Benny.

Dr. Skillz nodded. “Where’s the big kahuna? And… besides that, what are you Menehunes doing out here?”

“Trying not to die,” grunted Nix as she swung her bokken at a zom who charged at her from J-Dog’s blind side. The zom went flying backward with a shattered jaw.

“Dudette’s no Barbie, brah,” said J-Dog, and his partner nodded.

“I know, right? Kahuna was on when he said little cat’s hyper-fierce gnar gnar.”

Nix turned to Benny. “What language are they speaking?”

“Surferese, I think.”

She made a face. “Guys?” she warned. “Zoms?”

J-Dog turned, and if he was concerned about the ten zoms circling them, he managed not to show it. In fact, he managed to look bored. “Oh yeah,” he said. “Good point.” He turned to Dr. Skillz. “Dude?”

“Dude,” he agreed, as if his partner had just said something profound. To Benny he said, “You and the crippler chick hang back. We’ll jack these land-sharks.”

“What?” Benny and Nix asked at the same time.

Dr. Skillz pointed and in plain English said, “Stand over there. Out of the way. Dig?”

Nix pulled Benny to a safe distance.

“Watch out!” warned Benny. “These zoms are different.”

“Different how, brah?” asked J-Dog.

Two of the zoms suddenly rushed at him. J-Dog’s smile flickered for a moment, but even in the presence of zoms moving with nearly human speed, he wasn’t stunned to immobility.

“Whoa,” said Dr. Skillz. “That’s new.”

J-Dog stepped toward the rushing creatures and swung the ax low and wide. The big blade sheared through the knee of the first zom and the calf of the second, and they both went down in a snarling tangle. Dr. Skillz darted past him and with two lightning-fast swings crushed their skulls with the iron ball on the end of his spear.

“Dog,” said Dr. Skillz, adjusting his shades, “these land-sharks are seriously truckin’.”

“Chyeah,” snorted J-Dog. “What’s that all about?”

There were eight zoms left.

“Dude-four on the left,” said J-Dog. “Go agg.”

Dr. Skillz grinned. “Always aggro.”

They waded in, ax and spear whirling and striking and smashing and cleaving. Benny and Nix stumbled backward from the carnage as pieces of desiccated flesh and brittle bone pelted them.

“Dude!” called Dr. Skillz, and J-Dog pivoted as one of the zombie children jumped at him, trying to bite his thigh. J-Dog twisted out of the way and quieted the little zom with a stomp of his steel-reinforced boot. And then, suddenly and inexplicably, it was all over. Not one of the zoms was moving, and not one of them was whole. J-Dog and Dr. Skillz stood in the center of a circle of gory detritus. Dr. Skillz looked around, nodding to himself. “Dude,” he said.

J-Dog nodded in agreement. “Totally, dude.”

They turned to Nix and Benny, pulling off their helmets. Dr. Skillz had long brown hair and a soul patch under his lower lip; J-Dog had long black hair and a goatee. They were both very tan, and when they smiled, their teeth were eye-hurtingly white.

Benny cleared his throat.

“Dude?” he suggested.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

My mom said that everyone who survived First Night has PTSD-post-traumatic stress disorder. Chong says it should be called PFNSD, post-First Night stress disorder, which he insists is PTSD plus something called “survivor’s guilt.”

Some people pretend like everything is okay with them, as if they aren’t messed up from what happened. Mom said that this is just a symptom of damage. There has never been a trauma as bad as First Night. Even if you combined all the wars and plagues together, they wouldn’t be as bad, so everyone has to be affected.

Other people seem to know that they’re supposed to be a little crazy, so they take the craziness and make it work for them. Tom says that’s why so many people, especially those who deal with zoms out in the Ruin all the time, took weird nicknames. He says, “It’s easier to be like a character in a story than the star of your own tragedy.” It took me a long time to understand that.

Tom’s friends J-Dog and Dr. Skillz are like that. After I met them, I could see in their eyes how hurt they are. And how scared. But they play a kind of game. The “surfer dude” game, and that insulates them against reality. It’s like wearing a carpet coat. A bite will still hurt, but it won’t kill you.

It makes me wonder in what way I’m crazy.

54

THE TRAIL OF PRINTS LEFT BY CHONG AND HIS CAPTOR WAS EASY FOR TOM to follow, but the direction was confusing. Instead of heading straight to high ground, where bounty hunters preferred to make their camps, this trail was circling around to head almost due east. That troubled Tom. Could Gameland have been moved to Yosemite? Or was this man taking Chong somewhere else?

Tom heard male voices farther up the path, and he cut quickly behind a line of thick brush and crept toward them in silence. The men spoke with the uncaring loudness of people who were not afraid to be heard. There were three of them, standing in a clearing formed by the crossroads of two well-used trails.

Tom recognized one of them: Stosh-the surviving partner of the two men Sally had killed. His fashioned Arab scimitar was slung from his waist. The others were strangers; big, brutal-looking men. One was a redhead who wore a necklace of finger bones; the other was brown-skinned and wore matched.45 automatics in shoulder holsters. Tom edged closer to listen to their chatter.

“I still don’t get why you want to try and sell him to the Bear,” said the gunslinger.

“Yeah, why risk it?” agreed the redhead. “Bear don’t want to make deals with you, Stosh. He wants to feed you to the zoms and be done.”

“Nah, you guys got it wrong,” insisted Stosh. “If I bring him Fast Tommy, then it’s gonna be forgive and forget. You’ll see.”

“We’ll see the Bear nail your scalp to a tree with you still wearing it,” said Gunslinger, and Redhead laughed with him.

“Seriously, man,” said Gunslinger, “you ought to cut your losses and head north. Go up to Eden or Fort Snyder. Get outside of Bear’s backyard, ’cause even if you managed to bring in Fast Tommy or his puke brother, Bear’d just take them from you and do to you what he did to Bobbie Talltrees. Stake you out and feed you to the swarm. We tried to tell Bobbie the same thing-but did he listen? Nope. Now look what happened.”

“I know,” said Stosh softly. “That was ugly. Bobbie wasn’t a bad guy. And it’s not fair for White Bear to blame us for what happened to Charlie. Me and my crew were all the way the heck up Hillcrest when that happened. Nothing we could have done.”

“Uh-huh. Bobbie tried to run that by the Bear, and look what it got him,” agreed Gunslinger. “The same thing you’re gonna get if you don’t put a lot of gone between you and the Bear’s territory.”

“No way,” said Stosh stubbornly. He produced a piece of paper from a pocket and shook it at them. “I know how much the Bear wants Tom. You see the prices on this thing? You ever saw bounties like that? No! The Bear wants the whole bunch of them, and he’ll kiss my butt if I bring them in. All of ’em. Tommy, that skank Riley chick, the Lost Girl, and Tom’s rat-meat brother.”

Redhead took the paper and read it, nodding. “Yeah… a man could retire off of this.”

“If you’re lucky,” said Tom as he stood up from behind the bush, “it’ll cover your funeral expenses.”

The three men spun toward him. The black gunslinger made a grab for his twin.45s, but Tom drew and fired in a single smooth move that was too fast for the eye to follow. Gunslinger pitched backward, a neat round hole punched into his forehead above the left eyebrow. It was the kind of kill the bounty hunters called a “one and done.” Head shot, no need to quiet the body later.

That left Stosh and Redhead standing on either side of the corpse, both of them gaping in wide-eyed horror. “Holy jeez,” whispered Stosh. “Tom!”

Redhead sneered. “I know who it is.” He narrowed his eyes to feral slits. “You just shot an innocent man, pardner. You don’t know what kind of trouble you’re-”

Tom put a bullet in the dirt between the man’s feet.

“Save it for someone who cares,” he said quietly. “Lose the hardware.”

The smoking barrel of the gun offered no option for debate. Weapons clanked as they fell to the ground.

“All of it,” warned Tom.

They looked disgusted but began removing knives, two-shot derringers, strangle-wires, and brass knuckles from hidden pockets.

“Kick them away. Good. Now, listen to me,” said Tom, his eyes flat and hard. “You guys have one chance to walk out of this alive.”

“What are you offering?” demanded Redhead warily.

“Straight exchange. You answer my questions and I let you walk out. If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I’m a hard guy to lie to, but you’ll also know I keep my word. You walk out and go somewhere else. I don’t see you again. You don’t work these hills ever again.”

Stosh snorted. “What’s it to you where we work? Heard you were leaving town.”

“Says who?”

“Says everyone. People are talking about it all through the Ruin. Fast Tommy Imura’s leaving town for good. Going on some kind of quest to find that jet plane, or at least that’s the cover story.”

“Way I heard it,” said Redhead, “is that you lost your nerve, that you’re running from White Bear. White Bear says this whole area is his now. He’s bringing in more muscle than you can handle, so you’re cutting out to save your butt. The jet thing is just a cover story to save face.”

“Anyone really believe that?” Tom asked, amused.

“Doesn’t matter. With you gone, the Bear will own the whole Ruin, and folks will believe what he wants them to believe. Bear’s like that.”

“Everyone needs a hobby,” said Tom neutrally.

“What is it you want to know?” asked Stosh. “To let us walk?”

“First, I want that piece of paper,” demanded Tom. “It’s a bounty sheet, right? Give it to me. Don’t get cute about it either. Put it on the ground, weigh it down with a rock. Then step back.”

Redhead did as he was told. He backed up until Tom ordered him to stop. Tom stooped and plucked the paper from under the rock and glanced at it. There were four sketches on the sheet. The text read:

Reward for Four Murderers

Payment on Delivery at G

Nix Riley: ALIVE (one year’s ration dollars);

DEAD (one month’s ration dollars)

Benny Imura: ALIVE (one year’s ration

dollars); DEAD (one month’s ration dollars)

Lilah (aka the Lost Girl): ALIVE (two years’

ration dollars); DEAD (one month’s ration

dollars)

Tom Imura: ALIVE (five years’ ration dollars);

DEAD (one year’s ration dollars)

Tom stuffed it in his pocket. “Who’s looking?”

“Everyone’s looking,” said Redhead. “Whole Ruin’s filled with hunters working your trail.”

“You’re the first I’ve seen. Except for Stosh’s dead friends.”

“Then you’re looking in the wrong place. Everyone knows the routes you usually take, and we got word from town that you were heading out yesterday. Everybody-and I mean everybody-knows that White Bear’s got a stack of cash on this.”

Tom considered. He’d taken Benny and the others out on a route he hadn’t used in months. His intention had been to keep the kids away from the areas of heaviest zombie infestation, but now it seemed as if that decision had saved all their lives. At least so far.

“Paper says ‘payment at G.’ G for Gameland?”

“Yeah. This is all off the record, so to speak,” said Stosh, grinning at Tom with uneven yellow teeth. “From what I heard, they’ll pay double if the young’uns are brought to Gameland with some spunk left in ’em. People say you’ve been training ’em a bit. That means they’d last a whole week, maybe two in the pits. There’s serious money in the Z-Games.”

“This is a lot of money. What’s White Bear’s stake? Especially if I’m leaving?”

Both men looked momentarily confused. “What do you think, man?” asked Stosh, totally perplexed.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask,” said Tom. “And you’re wasting my time.”

“Oh man,” said Redhead, “this is great. This is like those old comedy shows from back in the day. This is fricking hilarious!”

And suddenly Redhead made his move. He kicked a baseball-size rock at Tom and charged forward in a powerful tackle. They must have shared some kind of signal, because Stosh was only a half step behind him. Redhead caught Tom around the chest, and Stosh slammed his shoulders into Tom’s thighs. The three of them crashed backward into the bushes in a cloud of torn leaves, dust, grunts, and yells.

And then a single male voice let loose a high-pitched scream.

A death scream.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Information on bites (zombie and human) that I’ve collected.

I copied some of this from notes Tom put together for us to study before we leave.

Male adult humans bite with more force than adult females.

Adult humans bite with more force than human children.

Zoms do not bite as hard as humans, because their teeth ligaments have decayed.

A “fresh” zombie will be physically stronger in both limb and bite-capability than a weak one, but still less than a human. So the more the zoms decay, the weaker they’ll get.

Dr. Gurijala said (after I bugged him about it fifty times), “Teeth are not fused to bone but rather are attached to the bone by a ligament system. As decomposition occurs, this ligament breaks down and releases the teeth. Morphology of the tooth root will sometimes cause them to be retained in skeletal remains, but the cone-shaped roots of the incisors tend to make them more prone to postmortem loss.”

The act of biting through skin and actually avulsing or tearing out a piece would require forces at the high range of the human biting force. So zombies aren’t likely to tear out large chunks of a person, as people claim in their First Night stories. If they do tear off something, it’s probably from a weak and vulnerable piece of anatomy (e.g., an earlobe).

EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

55

BENNY, NIX, J-DOG, AND DR. SKILLZ STOOD IN THE ROAD AND WATCHED the three zoms shuffle toward them. Sister Shanti was out in front, with Brother David and Sister Sarah close behind. They were still sixty yards away.

“They’re still moving slow,” said Benny. “Not like the ones from the barn.”

“Totally,” agreed J-Dog.

Benny looked at him. “So how come the others were fast? I never heard of fast zoms before. Have you?”

“Tall tales out of the east,” said Dr. Skillz. “No one I know’s put goggles on ’em, though.”

“That’s crazy. How can zoms be fast?” demanded Nix.

J-Dog grinned. “Dudette… how can they be zoms?”

Dr. Skillz pulled down his sunglasses and peered over the dark lenses at the monk and the sisters. “That’s a bummer. Brother David’s trippy but totally boglius.”

“I can’t understand anything you’re saying!” grumbled Nix irritably.

“Yeah, okay,” Dr. Skillz chuckled, “busted. Let’s see if you grok this. The Dog and me are friends with Brother Dave. Between you and me, cutie, I think Dog’s sweet on Shanti.”

“She’s bootylicious-,” began J-Dog.

“English,” insisted Nix.

“She’s fine.” Then J-Dog looked down the hill, and his goofy surfer grin drained away to reveal genuine sadness. “She was fine. Sweet, too.”

“They were friends of ours,” said Dr. Skillz. Benny caught a look in his eyes that was miles from the sun and fun of a beach. In that unguarded moment, he could see the hurt in the hunter’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” said Benny. “I liked them too.”

The four of them stood and watched the three zoms struggle up the hill. Even though he knew they were beyond feeling anything, it seemed to Benny that each step looked painful. It made his heart hurt.

“Who would do something like that?” demanded Nix.

“A real monster,” said Benny.

Dr. Skillz nodded. “For sure. There’s killing and then there’s murder. Brother Dave and the girls never hurt no one.”

“What… should we do?”

“Quiet them,” said J-Dog. “Put ’em to rest.”

“No,” said Nix and Dr. Skillz at the same time.

“It’s not what they would want,” said Benny.

J-Dog sighed, and under his breath muttered, “Son of a bitch must pay.”

“Word. But dude, we’d better roll,” suggested J-Dog. “Or we won’t have a choice.”

They turned and hurried away at a light jog, putting a mile of crooked road between them and the zoms. Soon Brother David, Sister Shanti, and Sister Sarah were out of sight. Benny knew that without prey to follow, the zoms would stop pursuing them. He wondered if they would stand in the road for years like so many zoms did.

They slowed and walked under the shade of a line of young white oaks. “Story time,” said J-Dog. “The kahuna said-”

“Who?” interrupted Benny.

“Tom, man. Tom’s the big kahuna. He’s a crusher, he’s the legend.”

“Okay… but can we just call him ‘Tom’?”

Dr. Skillz grinned. “You guys are rough.”

“We don’t speak surfer,” said Nix. “We’ve never even seen the ocean.”

“Yeah.” Dr. Skillz sighed. “And we ain’t seen it since First Night. Sucks.”

“Tom,” prompted Benny.

“Right… Tom said you guys were heading east to find the jet. Said to meet you at the way station, but we just came from there and it’s mosty-toasty. Someone had a luau supremo and roasted a lot of zoms.”

“That would be us,” said Benny uneasily. He and Nix explained what happened.

Dr. Skillz grinned. “Way to think outside the box, duderman.”

“We lost Lilah, though,” said Nix. “She ran away.”

“Spook girl got spooked?” J-Dog shook his head. “Lot of forest to get lost in. Anyway… Tom said you’d be hitting Brother Dave’s first and then cruising to Wawona, so we caught a wave and here we are.”

“Nice timing,” said Benny appreciatively. “Thanks.”

“Hey, our pleasure,” Dr. Skillz said with a grin. “Fast Tommy’s saved our butts enough times.”

“Totally,” said J-Dog. “Wawona’s not far from here. Good place to kick back.”

“Is that where you were coming from?” asked Benny.

Dr. Skillz removed his shades to clean them. “Nah. We ain’t been there in almost three months. Been doing a lot of guard work for the scavenge team way over at Lushmeadows Estates. Got hired to clear out all the zoms and then babysit the scavenger team.”

J-Dog gave an enthusiastic nod. “Yeah… made some nice green, too. We ran into Tom last week and told him we’d be crashing at Wawona, though. Still some snow high up, so we were gonna rest up, then go high and snowboard. It’ll be a powwow for sure. Saaaa-weeeeet!”

“Um. Okay,” said Benny uncertainly, not sure what a “snowboard” was.

“We were heading to Wawona,” Nix interjected, “but we don’t have to. I mean… there’s four of us now. Shouldn’t we go try and find Tom and Chong?”

Dr. Skillz put his shades back on. “No doubt. Kind of surprised Tom isn’t already back.”

“Wait,” yelped Benny, “what are you saying? That Tom’s in trouble?”

“I didn’t say he was in trouble,” said Dr. Skillz. “It’s just that a lot of weird stuff’s been happening in the last few weeks. We missed most of it ’cause we were over at Lushmeadows. Bunch of animals coming out of the east, and an upsurge in the zom head count.”

“And now we got fast zoms,” said J-Dog. “Weird times.”

“It’s weirder than you think,” said Benny, and he told them about the man who hadn’t reanimated.

“Whoa,” said J-Dog. “You sure?”

“Tom was sure,” said Nix.

The bounty hunters looked at each other, then turned and looked back the way they had come, as if some kind of answer was painted on the forest.

“For the record, dude, I do not dig this,” murmured Dr. Skillz.

The four of them walked in silence for almost five minutes as they considered their next move. Nix asked, “Have you met anyone who saw the jet?”

“Sure,” said J-Dog. “Lots of people. Us too. Kinda wild.”

Dr. Skillz nodded. “Tom said that’s where he was taking you guys. A quest thingy to find whoever has that jet.”

“Yes,” said Nix firmly. “Whoever fixed and fueled that jet is trying to bring civilization back.”

“You sure?” asked Dr. Skillz. “Bad guys and freaks can fly jets too.”

Nix either didn’t hear him or chose to ignore the remark.

Dr. Skillz abruptly stopped. “Dog,” he said, “I think we’re making a mistake here.”

“Why? Tom wanted us to lifeguard these guys and-”

Dr. Skillz cut him off. “Wawona’s only six or seven miles. They can do that without us. But that dead guy bothers the crap out of me. The way he was killed? That’s got Charlie’s tag on it.”

“Totally,” said J-Dog.

“Charlie or White Bear. They used to run in the same pack; they got a whole lot in common.”

“Yeah, and I don’t like the idea of the kahuna running those hills.” Dr. Skillz glanced at Benny and Nix. “You guys said that Tom took you out on a back road, right? A route he doesn’t use much?”

“Yes, he wanted to-”

“I see where you’re going, brah,” said J-Dog.

“I don’t,” snapped Nix. “And who’s White Bear?”

Dr. Skillz made a face. “White Bear is a very big and very bad hombre. Mucho bad mojo. Even over in Lushmeadows they’re talking about him rebuilding the Matthias Empire. Got people all over the place. We saw a dozen of them today, though we steered clear.”

“We’re peace-lovin’ citizens,” said J-Dog.

“The Matthias…? God…,” breathed Nix, putting her hand to her mouth.

“White Bear’s no friend to Fast Tommy, and that’s for sure,” continued Dr. Skillz. “What I’m thinking is that Tom might not know that the Bear’s got his goons out. Not if he came out a back way. He’d have missed the traffic. But if he’s dogging your boy Chong, then…”

“We have to go find him!” declared Benny, taking a decisive step toward the west.

“Whoa! Not a chance, duderino,” said J-Dog with a grin. “You two are going to Wawona just like your brother told you to. Skillz and I will find the kahuna.”

“No way!” snapped Nix. “You don’t expect us to-”

“-stay out of trouble? Yes, we do. If we drag you into a fight with White Bear, Fast Tommy’ll fry us for it.”

“We can handle ourselves,” Nix insisted. “Tom’s been training us, and-”

Dr. Skillz gave her a toothy grin. “I’ll bet you’re fierce as a tiger shark, Reds, but this is about speed, too. We’re gonna boogie like banshees. We got tricks for this, and believe me, you don’t know ’em.”

J-Dog nodded. “We got to catch a monster wave, dig?”

“But-,” Benny began, but left the rest unsaid because without a single additional word, J-Dog and Dr. Skillz turned and began running down the road. They ran with the easy grace of athletes. Benny knew that he and Nix could never match their speed.

Nix took a few steps after them, but it was more out of frustration than any hope of catching them. Then she turned to Benny, fists on hips. “Now what do we do?”

Benny sighed and adjusted the sling that held his bokken. “I guess we go to Wawona. At least it’ll be safe there.” Then he added, “Dudette.”

Nix giggled, and that laugh was worth more to Benny than all the homespun comforts in the world. They turned and headed down the road to Wawona.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Tom says that zoms move faster or slower depending on how soon it is after they’ve reanimated and where they are in the process of decay. He says there are different stages for decay. I checked this with some medical books (and bugged Dr. gurijala about it, too. I think he thinks I’m really weird).

ALGOR MORTIS (Latin: algor-coolness; mortis-of death): the process a body goes through after death, during which the body cools to ambient temperature. Temperature drops at approximately 1 to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit per hour.

RIGOR MORTIS (literally “death stiffness”): the stiffening of the limbs following death as muscle cells decay.

VITREOUS HUMOR CHANGES: There is a clear gel that fills the gap between the retina and the lens of the eye. Following death, the potassium level in this gel increases at a measurable and predictable rate, which allows forensics experts to use it to measure time elapsed since death.

ENTOMOLOGY: Insects always appear on a corpse and are crucial to its decomposition.

AUTOLYSIS (literally “self-splitting”): This is the process of postmortem cell disintegration.

PUTREFACTION: the decomposition of proteins by anaerobic microorganisms called putrefying bacteria.

I’m going to go throw up now.

56

IT HURT TO RIDE HER HORSE, BUT SALLY MANAGED IT. SHE SWALLOWED HER pain and discomfort and kept moving. There were four horses following her up the winding mountain path; other figures moved through the forest to either side of the road. Solomon Jones walked beside Sally’s horse.

Sally turned gingerly and looked back at the crew they were assembling.

The barrel-chested man riding a one-eyed Tennessee walking horse was Hector Mexico, and he wore a necklace of wedding bands. He specialized in closure jobs for families. Behind him, Sam “Basher” Bashman was discussing pre-First Night baseball with Fluffy McTeague, a gigantic man in a pink floor-length carpet coat. The three horses behind them bore a little dark-skinned woman-LaDonna Willis-and her twin sons, Gunner and Dieter. The twins were short, but they were nearly as wide as they were tall, and neither of them had ever lost a fight except to each other. There were others, too, bounty hunters and trade guards, and the scavenger-turned-closure-expert Magic Mike.

The crew amused Sally. Except for LaDonna and her sons, they were mostly loners like Sally, people who preferred to live hard and alone in the wild of the Ruin. Often the only connection they had to the towns was through Tom. Maybe a case could be made that few of them were nice people, but all of them were good. They were people Tom trusted, and that counted for a whole lot. None of them were happy that he was leaving. No one had ever claimed that Tom was the leader of this band, or of any group; but it was always understood that what Tom said was the law. At least to the odd assortment of fighters and killers who followed Sally up the hill.

And there was not one of them who liked the idea of White Bear coming in to take over the territory. It had been tough enough under Charlie’s reign, because Charlie held contracts from every town, and anyone who wanted work had to go through him. Charlie always took a slice. White Bear was supposed to be worse. Younger, bigger, meaner, and-from what folks who knew both men said-smarter. White Bear was an organizer. The kind of man who inspired others to follow but who ruled with a heavy hand. If he got a solid foothold, then everyone was going to be jumping whenever White Bear yelled “frog.”

Plus, there were the rumors about Gameland. Everyone knew that it was back, but some of the rumors said that it had changed. That it was worse.

The men and women who walked or rode up this hill were not fans of Gameland. Not in the least. It was the antithesis of the freedom they treasured. And most of them had kids now, or had lost kids during First Night. Gameland was an abomination, and they all wanted to see it burn.

Sally rode, eating her pain and drawing her plans. All that mattered now was finding Tom in time.

57

TOM CRASHED BACKWARD INTO THE BRUSH WITH BOTH MEN CLAMPED around his body. There had been no chance at all for him to avoid the hit, but as they fell he wrenched his hips and shoulders around so that he wouldn’t land first. They hit hard, with Tom on top, Stosh landing on his left side, and Redhead taking the full brunt of his own weight and most of the mass of the others. Redhead’s back struck a stone the size of a football, and the bounty hunter screamed so loud that it chased the birds from the trees. The scream was almost loud enough to mask the sound of his spine shattering. His arms flopped limply away from Tom, and he lay gasping and dying under the weight of the man he had tried to kill.

Tom ignored the man’s screams. Without a moment’s pause, he twisted sideways and hammered Stosh on the ear with the side of his balled fist. Stosh let go of Tom’s legs and tried to block, but Tom twisted around and kicked Stosh in the chest hard enough to spill him five yards down the slope. Tom back-rolled down after him and came out of the roll in a near handspring, driving both of his feet into Stosh’s face. The man’s head jinked sideways on his neck, and there was a sharp, wet snap! Stosh collapsed into a lifeless sprawl.

Tom relaxed. People with broken necks don’t reanimate. Another one and done.

Up the slope Redhead was still screaming. With a grunt of anger and disgust, Tom scrambled up the slope. The crippled man saw him coming, and his scream changed to a whimper. He tried to scramble away, but his legs were dead and his arms barely flapped.

Tom squatted down and assessed the man’s condition. Then he put a finger to his lips. “Shhhh.” The other man fell silent, though he stared with eyes that were huge and filled with terror. “Your back’s broken.”

Redhead began to cry.

“Listen to me now. You’re done. You know that. I can leave you here like this and you can spend your last hours screaming. Lot of zoms in these woods. With your back broken, you might not even feel it when they start tearing chunks out of you. After that… well, you’ll reanimate, and then you’re going to lie here for the rest of time. Crippled and undead and useless.”

Redhead was blubbering, mouthing unintelligible words. Tom leaned toward him. “Or… you can buy yourself some grace. You square things with me and I can ease you down. You’ll never feel it, and you won’t come back. It’s your call.”

The reality of it all hit Redhead, and he stopped mewling. He stared at Tom with eyes that suddenly possessed a dreadful wisdom about the nature of his world. Tom could see the understanding blossom in the man’s eyes.

“Okay…,” Redhead whispered, then hissed in pain.

Tom nodded. He didn’t gloat. That never occurred to him. He removed his canteen and gave the man a sip. “Who took the boy from Stosh’s buddies after they were ambushed?”

“W-White Bear. They were Charlie’s guys. White Bear’s tearing up everyone from Charlie’s crew, ’cause of what happened to Charlie.”

“Why? What does White Bear care about what happened to Charlie?”

Redhead almost smiled. “Are you… kidding me?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding you? What’s the thing between Charlie and White Bear?”

“Jeez, man… you can see it when you look at him.”

“I never met White Bear.”

“Yeah, you did. He was there when you burned down Gameland.”

“What? There was no one there like him.”

“He… wasn’t calling himself White Bear then. That was something he came up with after he got hurt.”

“You’re not making sense,” Tom said, “and you’re beginning to piss me off.”

Redhead looked instantly afraid. “God… please don’t leave me like this!”

“Shhh, shhh,” Tom soothed. “Just tell me about White Bear and Charlie.”

“It’s all about Gameland,” said the man, and Tom noticed that his voice was beginning to fade. Shock was setting in, and the man didn’t have long. “When you burned down Gameland, Charlie lost a lot of people, a lot of friends. You know that. But what you don’t know is that someone close to him was burned in that fire. Used to go by the name of Big Jim.”

Tom grunted. “Big Jim Matthias? Charlie’s brother? He was at Gameland that day?”

“Yeah. He got messed up pretty bad, too. Face all burned, lost an eye. Almost died. Charlie sent him way over into Yosemite, to a place he has there. Big Jim got real sick. They say he died for a while, but he didn’t come back as a zom. They say that while he was dead he had a vision of some old Indian medicine man, and that when he came back he wasn’t Jim Matthias anymore. He was-”

“White Bear,” Tom finished, shaking his head. “White Bear is Charlie’s brother. I’ll be damned. That’s why he wants me.”

“You… and your brother and his friends. He wants you so bad that it’s made him even crazier. When he heard you were leaving Mountainside, maybe for good, he put everyone he has out into the Ruin. There’s a hundred pair of eyes looking for you, man. You won’t make it off this mountain.”

Tom didn’t comment on that. Instead he asked, “Why’s he killing Charlie’s men?”

“Not all of them. Just the ones he thinks should have been with Charlie when you hit his camp last year. Blames them, says they should have died protecting Charlie.”

“That’s crazy.”

“White Bear is crazy, man. Plays it cool… but he’s totally out of his mind. Makes Charlie look like Joe Ordinary Citizen.”

“Swell. Okay, now tell me one more thing. Where’s Gameland?”

“If I tell you… will you do what you promised? Make it easy? Keep me down?”

“I promise.”

“Swear it, man. I… I used to be Catholic. Swear on the baby Jesus.”

Tom sighed and held his hand to heaven. He swore.

The man told Tom where Gameland was. Tom swore again, much louder.

The man tried to smile, but he was fading like a setting sun. “You know, man… I almost wish I could see you go up against White Bear and Gameland.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet you’d like to see me fed to the zoms, too.”

Redhead gave him a strange look. “No… you… don’t have to believe me, man, but I’d kind of like to see you kick that crazy son of a bitch’s ass. Him and his whole damn family.”

A terrible coughing fit hit him, and he hacked and coughed until blood mottled his lips and his face turned the color of sour milk. Then his eyes flared wide and his mouth formed a small “Oh” and he stopped moving. His eyes stared upward into the vast blue forever. The forest was silent except for the buzzing of insects.

Tom’s face and body were as still as the dead man’s, but inside his heart was hammering with fear. “Gameland,” he murmured. “Oh God…”

He looked down at the dead man and drew his quieting dagger. Reanimation could take as long as five minutes, but not with traumatic injuries. They were always faster. Redhead’s face was slack, his eyes half-closed, and there was no sign at all of the jerks and twitches that signal reanimation. Tom counted out sixty seconds. Then another sixty. The man stayed silent and still. And dead. Inside Tom’s head the pounding was getting louder.

He was curious, though. After the man he’d found on the road, he needed to know if that was a total fluke or part of a pattern. It was crucial to understand as much as possible about the living dead.

But Gameland was waiting, and he knew that he had to go, and go now.

Tom counted out another sixty seconds. And another.

Go! Go! Go! screamed his inner voice.

“Damn it,” he snarled, and rolled the man over. He drove the blade in to sever the brain stem. He wiped the dagger clean and got to his feet, thinking, He was going to come back. It was just taking longer for some reason.

He thought it, but he wasn’t sure that he believed it.

With that burning in his mind, he turned in the direction of Gameland. There was no need for tracking now. It was no longer a hunt. It was a trap, and he was heading straight into it. But he had no choice.

He ran.

58

THEY FOUND A ROAD WITH A RUSTED SIGN THAT READ “WAWONA HOTEL, six miles.” The sign was pocked with old bullet holes and badly faded, but they could read it, and it filled them with new energy. A line of cumulus clouds swelled out of the west, their bottoms shaved flat by crosswinds and condensation, their tops reaching upward like puffy white mountains.

For a while they walked hand in hand, but as each of them drifted into their own thoughts they let go, content to be in their own space. They topped a rise and paused, watching a spectacle that was both funny and sad. Over the rise, the road wound like a snake through farm fields that had long since grown wild. A horse stood in the middle of the left-hand field, head down to munch the sweet grass, tail swishing at flies. Fifty yards away a lone zombie staggered awkwardly toward it. The zom wore a soiled pair of overalls with one torn shoulder strap. It marched unsteadily yet with clear purpose toward the horse, but when it was within a dozen yards the horse calmly lifted its head to regard the zom, then trotted out of the field and across the road before stopping a hundred yards into the middle of that field. The horse passed almost within grabbing distance of the zom, and the creature flailed at it, but the animal moved in a way that demonstrated an understanding of the danger. Once it was well into the next field-now a total distance of three hundred yards from where it had originally been-it flicked its tail and then lowered its head to continue eating. The zom began walking toward the road and the opposite field, arms reaching, legs carrying it along with the same awkward gait.

“I’ll bet that’s been happening all day,” Benny said to Nix.

She nodded, but her eyes were sad. There was a bit of comedy in the staging of all this: the patient, clever horse and the untiring, mindless zom-the two of them moving back and forth between the fields all day in a freakish pas de deux. A dance for two, probably played out on countless days here in the dust and decay of a broken world.

They did not speak at all for the next few miles. Not until the black peaked roof of the Wawona Hotel rose above the endless trees.

59

THE GREENMAN’S VOICE WAS QUIET, GENTLE. “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE,” he said. “Do you know who I am? I think you’ve seen me a few times. Here and there. People call me the Greenman, or just Greenman. No ‘the.’ Doesn’t matter. You can call me whatever you want. Or not.”

They were in the Greenman’s cabin, deep in the woods. When Lilah did not respond or even lift her head, he got up and walked into the small kitchen. A moment later there was the aroma of brewing tea.

Lilah sat curled into a large rattan chair, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around her shins. After the Greenman had found her in the woods, he’d sat with her for over two hours, mostly in silence, occasionally singing old songs that Lilah had never heard. Except for one, a song that George used to sing when he was cleaning the small house where he and Lilah and Annie had lived for the early years following First Night.

“California dreamin’… on such a winter’s day…”

Lilah had started to cry, and the Greenman had not said anything to her. He kept quietly singing the song. When it was done, he sang another song. And another.

Now they were in his house. It was filled with plants of all kinds. They hung in baskets from the ceiling and stood in pots along the walls. Boxes of them hung on both sides of the open windows. Birds sang and chattered in the trees outside, and a squirrel came in and sat eating nuts from the bowl on the table. The Greenman did not chase it away.

He returned from the kitchen with two steaming mugs that he placed on a small table. Then he went and loaded a wooden tray with seedcakes, homemade granola bars, and little pots of jelly and butter. The first time Lilah had ever tasted butter was at the Chongs’ house. She stared at the tray and the food and the tea and did nothing.

The Greenman drank his tea, but he didn’t say anything about hers. She would drink it or she wouldn’t, and he seemed to be content with either outcome. A large cat came in through the kitchen window, cast a wary eye at Lilah, then a longer look at the squirrel, but strolled across the room toward Lilah. For a moment it peered up at her with luminous eyes. Then it hopped up into her chair and rubbed itself against her, its purr louder than the larks in the trees. Lilah unwrapped her arms and the cat stood on its back legs, resting its front paws on her knee, leaning its face toward hers. Lilah cut a quick look at the Greenman, who gave a single small nod; then she gathered the cat up in her arms and held it to her chest as if it was the most precious thing in the world. Or as if it was the one thing that tethered her to the moment.

The cat meowed softly and continued to purr. Lilah bent her head until her forehead touched the cat’s cold nose. It gave her a single raspy lick.

Lilah closed her eyes and wept.

60

BENNY AND NIX PASSED THROUGH THE SOUTH ENTRANCE OF YOSEMITE National Park and walked along a road that was virtually weed free-the first clear road they had ever seen out in the Ruin.

They encountered the first fence two miles up the road. It was a heavy chain-link affair similar to the one that surrounded Mountainside, but it was hidden between two rows of thick evergreen hedges that acted as screens.

“Smart,” said Nix.

A sign told them that the hotel was two miles along the road.

The road led through a complex network of trenches. There were rows of trip wires, and deadfall pits covered by camouflage screens. Directions for navigating the road safely were written on large wooden signs. Benny appreciated the strategy. Zoms couldn’t read. Instead of building defenses that were based on the way people used to protect towns and forts against attacks, these were specifically designed against an unthinking and yet unrelenting enemy. Subterfuge was unnecessary. Benny and Nix peered into some of the trenches and saw heaps of old bones-eloquent proof that the defenses worked.

“The way this is laid out,” Benny observed, “ten people could hold off a zillion zoms.”

“This is the kind of thing I’ve been talking about,” Nix said excitedly. It was true; since last year she had been making journal notes about how people could take back the zombie-infested lands while at the same time protecting themselves from the dead.

The winding path was lined with hundreds of trees, ancient oaks and many younger trees planted in the last decade or so to reduce visibility. In the distance they could see much larger trees rising up above the forest-monstrous sequoias that towered more than 250 feet into the blue sky. Then the forest opened up and the big Wawona Hotel rose above them like a promise of warm beds, country breakfasts, civil conversation, and stout locks.

“Finally,” breathed Nix, exhausted.

The Wawona Hotel had a double row of verandas-one on the ground level at the top of a short flight of steps, and the other built directly above it on the second floor. Whitewashed columns rose to the pitched roof, which was covered in gray shingles that, though weathered, looked to be in good repair. Tall willows blocked most of the view of the upper floor and roof, and these softer trees lent the place a quiet and rustic appearance that was as calming in its way as were the fortifications and weapons. Because of the trees, all they could read of the hotel’s name was a large black W painted just below the edge of the roof.

Beside the hotel was a corral filled with horses, most of them standing with heads down as they munched the green spring grass; a few stood by the rails, watching with browneyed curiosity. Beyond the corral stood more than two dozen armored trade wagons. In the distance, off behind the big building, were party sounds. Loud voices and laughter.

“If I’d known what this place was like,” said Benny, “I’d have tried to get a job here instead of apprenticing with Tom.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I’ll bet everyone out here talks about the way things are, instead of always going on about how things used to be. You’d have enough stuff to fill up your journal in a week.”

She nodded, smiling at the thought. “There seem to be a lot of people here. Maybe we can get together some kind of search party.”

They were still sixty yards from the front steps when they heard a sound behind them. A soft footfall, and they turned to see three men standing on the grass verge behind them. Benny realized that he and Nix had been so focused on the hotel that they must have walked right by them. Two of the men were strangers with the hard faces of bounty hunters-one was a brown-skinned brute with a flight of ravens tattooed across his face and down his throat; the other was a hulk of a white man with no neck and mean little pig eyes. They studied Benny and Nix with unsmiling faces. The third man, however, was smiling, and he was known to Benny and Nix.

“Well, well, if this ain’t cause to say hallelujah,” said the man. He had eyes the color of deep winter ice, cold and blue. As if conjured by the dark magic of the man’s smile, a chilly wind whipped past them, rustling the leaves and sending the birds shrieking into the air.

“God!” Nix gasped, and took Benny’s hand, squeezing it with her usual bone-crushing intensity.

Preacher Jack’s pale eyes sparkled with pleasure, and when his lips writhed into their twitchy smile it revealed teeth stained with chewing tobacco and black coffee. “Now,” he said softly, “how is it that I’m blessed with the company of two such fine young people here on my own humble front lawn?”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean your front lawn?”

Preacher Jack chuckled and lifted his chin toward the house. “Funny, you being Tom Imura’s brother, and him supposed to be so smart, I’m downright surprised you ain’t figured things out yet.”

Benny turned to look at the hotel. The chilly wind was blowing through the weeping willows, lifting the leaves to reveal the upper story, and they could now see with terrifying clarity the words that had been painted there. The black W was not the first letter of Wawona Hotel. It was the first letter of “Welcome.”

Benny’s could feel his insides turn to icy mush. Even Nix’s hand lost its crushing force as the two of them read the three words painted across the front of the hotel.

WELCOME TO GAMELAND.

61

CHONG SAT HUDDLED AGAINST THE DIRT WALL. THE TWO ZOMS WERE STILL with him. Silent and still, and yet the horror of what they represented was much worse than if they were still moaning and reaching for him.

Blood still seeped sluggishly from the bite on his shoulder. He had done nothing to dress the wound. He had not done anything at all except to lean his back against the wall and slide down to the floor. Above him the crowd was gone. Even the Burned Man was gone. There had been some rude jokes about him “winning and losing” at the same time; and one of the bettors had told him to “relax.” The crowd had left laughing.

If he turned his head, Chong could see the bite. His skin had been caught between the zom’s strong teeth, and as the creature had fallen away the pressure had popped the skin, leaving a ragged flap that had bled profusely at first but had now almost stopped.

Chong stared across the pit to the far wall. The hard-packed earth was cold and dark and lifeless. It seemed to present an eloquent window into his own future. The pipe lay on the ground between his bare feet. The weapon of the Motor City Hammer. A killer’s tool. Caked with blood, old and new. A weapon to murder humans and quiet zombies.

He picked it up. It was cold and heavy. Could such a weapon be used to kill oneself? he wondered. What would happen if he tried to bash out his own brains, and failed? What would happen if he did nothing? He could not feel any changes inside. He was sick to his stomach, but the nausea had started with the beating he’d gotten yesterday. Would he be able to tell when the infection took hold? What would it feel like? How sick would he get?

The pipe felt very solid in his fist, and Chong thumped the ground with it, wishing that he could get out of the pit and use what time he had left to avenge his own death. To go down fighting.

Would Lilah admire that, at least? A warrior’s last stand, taking as many of his enemies with him as possible?

But he knew that the Burned Man would never let him have that chance. Chong knew that he would be left down here until he zommed out or was made to fight one more time. Anger flared in his chest, and he hurled the pipe as hard as he could. It flew across the pit and struck tip-first against the wall, chunking out a lump of dirt half as big as Chong’s fist. Dirt and pipe fell to the ground.

So much for being warrior smart, he thought bitterly. He wrapped his arms around his head and tried not to be afraid of dying.

And that lasted for about fifteen seconds. Then he raised his head and looked at the pipe, at the clod of dirt he’d knocked out of the wall. Then at the divot in the wall.

Despite everything, despite a future as dark as that cold wall, he smiled.

62

BENNY WHEELED AROUND TO GAPE AT PREACHER JACK.

“That’s impossible! This place can’t be Gameland!” Benny shouted.

“Nothing’s impossible in this world of wonders, young Benjamin Imura,” said Preacher Jack with a soft chuckle.

“I don’t understand! Tom said-”

“Tom ain’t been out here for a long time, boy.”

“Good thing, too,” groused the black man with the raven tattoos. “Used to be a man couldn’t piss in these woods without Fast Tommy giving him a ration of crap for it. Your brother’s a pain in everyone’s butt out here, kid.”

“Was,” corrected Preacher Jack, holding up a slender finger. “Tom Imura’s day is over. None of our fellowship need fear that sinner or his violent ways. A bright new day has dawned out here in the Lord’s paradise. Believe it, for it is so.”

Nix curled her lip in distaste. “Really? What I believe is that when Tom gets here he’s going to kick your ugly-”

Preacher Jack suddenly stepped forward and struck Nix across the face with an open-handed slap that was so shockingly fast and hard that it spun her around and dropped her to her hands and knees.

Benny cried out and tried to catch her while also trying to drag out his bokken. He failed in both attempts. The white man with the pig eyes grabbed Nix by the hair and pulled her away. Benny instantly stopped fumbling with the sword and punched the man in the solar plexus. The man’s torso was sheathed in hard muscle, but Tom had taught Benny how to use his whole body to put force into a punch. The little pig eyes bulged, and the man coughed and released his hold. Benny slammed him backward with a two-handed shove that sent the thug crashing into the black man. They both went down amid tangled limbs and vile curses.

Nix struggled to get to her feet, but she was dazed and bleeding. Preacher Jack’s blow had opened up some of Lilah’s fine stitchery. With a howl of rage, Benny whipped out his bokken and swung it with all his strength at Preacher Jack’s grinning mouth.

It never connected.

Preacher Jack was old-in his sixties, with a face as lined as a road map and a body as frail-looking as a stick bug-but he stepped into the blow and caught the wooden sword with one calloused hand. The sudden stop jolted Benny, but the shock of it, the seeming impossibility of it, froze him into the moment. He stared at the hand that gripped his sword and then looked up into Preacher Jack’s face. That smile never wavered.

“Surprise, surprise,” whispered the preacher. With his free hand he punched Benny full in the face. Benny reeled back, bright blood spurting from his nose and lips. He suddenly fell, and his flailing left arm struck Nix across the temple. They both crashed to the grass.

Worms of flame twisted through the air in front of Benny’s eyes, and his whole head seemed to be filled with bursting fireworks. Next to him, Nix groaned softly and rolled onto her side.

The two bounty hunters were on their feet now, and they glared down in fury at Benny. The big white man raised his leg to stomp Benny, but Preacher Jack stopped him with a small click of his tongue. “Digger, Heap-take their toys,” said the preacher. The two men seethed for a moment, their hands opening and closing. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

They shot frightened looks at the old man and immediately bent to strip Nix and Benny of knives and anything else that could be used as a weapon, including their fishing line and storm matches. The men were rougher than they needed to be, and their searching hands were far more personally intrusive than necessary. Nix yelped in pain and indignation and kicked the pig-eyed man named Heap in the thigh, missing her intended target by inches. Heap snarled at her and stepped back.

Preacher Jack stood over them. “Oh, how strange the world must be to you young people. Strange, and wondrous and full of mysteries,” he murmured. Weird shadows swirled in his pale eyes. “I know what questions must be screaming inside your heads right at this very moment, indeed I do.”

Benny spat blood out of his mouth. “You don’t know anything about us.”

“Actually, my young buck, I know more about you than you know about me… and that’s going to be so unfortunate for you.”

“Tom will kill you,” said Nix with real heat.

“Oh… I pray he tries.”

Digger and Heap chuckled.

Nix wiped blood from her eyes. “Tom’s going to find us and-”

“Of course he’s going to find you, girl. Lord oh Lord but we’ve made it easy for him to find you. To find me.” Preacher Jack stepped closer and squatted down so that he was nearly eye to eye with Benny and Nix. “Mmm… didn’t expect that answer, did you? Tell me… what is it you think is going to happen? Do you think you’re going to be rescued by the big bad Fast Tommy? Tom the Swordsman, Tom of the Woods… Tom the Killer? Is that what you think?”

“Why are you doing this?” pleaded Nix. “Why can’t you people just leave us alone? All we want to do is leave this place.”

“Leave? And go where?”

Nix pointed east. “Far away from you and all this stuff. We don’t want any part of it.”

“You want to go east?” Something moved behind Preacher Jack’s eyes, and for a moment he almost looked afraid. Then his eyes hardened. “Oh, my foolish little sinners, you don’t want to go east. There’s nothing out there for you.”

“Yes there is,” Nix said. “There’s-” She stopped, cutting off her own words.

“What were you going to say? That there’s a plane? A big, shiny jet plane?” Preacher Jack shook his head. “I might be doing you a kindness to keep you from that path. Only thing you’d find east of here is horror and heartache.”

“As opposed to the good times and bunnies we have here,” said Benny. However, despite his snarky comment, Preacher Jack’s words-and that look that had passed behind his eyes-opened an ugly door of doubt deep in Benny’s soul. Had Nix caught it too?

“Why?” Nix demanded again. “Why are you doing this?”

Preacher Jack drove the tip of Benny’s bokken into the soft ground and leaned on it, laying one cheek against the polished hardwood. “Now that’s a wonderful question, little girl. Why indeed? Why did I come out of ‘retirement’? Until December of last year I was content to tend to my flock. I was at work in the fields of the Lord, seeing to the Children of Lazarus.”

“Zoms,” breathed Benny, wanting the word to wipe the smile off Preacher Jack’s mouth.

“Ah yes, the tactic of provoking your enemy. Did Tom teach you that? Or is it your own natural sinfulness that leads you to insult a servant of God? No… don’t answer, boy, because if I hear that word come out of your mouth, I’ll cut off your tongue and nail it to your forehead. Don’t think I’m joking, little Benjamin, ’cause it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve stilled the offending tongue of a sinner. Ain’t that right, boys?”

“Amen to that, padre,” they said.

Benny, wisely, said nothing.

Preacher Jack nodded approval. “When word came to me that Tom Imura had murdered Charlie Matthias and Marion Hammer, well… I knew that the Lord was calling me to do other work.”

“Tom didn’t murder anyone!” declared Nix. “Charlie Pink-eye was the murderer! He killed my mother!”

“Shhh, little girl. I believe you’d find it hard to speak lies with your lips sewn shut.”

Nix spat at him. Benny tensed, ready to throw himself between Nix and Preacher Jack’s retaliation, but the preacher merely laughed and wiped the spittle from the lapels of his dusty black coat. He shook his head, and his smile dimmed a little.

“Oh, child of the dust… you are just stacking up sins in the storehouse of the Lord,” he said softly. “You speak ill of Charlie, but he was a good man. Trusted by his men, good to his family, and a role model for everyone in these troubled, troubled times. Stupid and sinful people can’t see past their own inadequacies to understand the difficult choices a man like Charlie has to make in order to protect what’s his.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “To know that the man who murdered him still walks this earth is like a splinter in my mind. Tom Imura is an evil man. He’s been hounding the Matthias family for years, making spurious claims, interfering with authorized trade, and now he’s a bloody-handed murderer.”

Benny started to say something, but thought better of it. From the look in this man’s eyes, it was clear he wasn’t bluffing about his horrible threats. He briefly wondered if there was any value in telling Preacher Jack that Charlie might still alive, that he’d seen him in the field by the way station, but he held his tongue.

“I’ve seen Tom’s type in a hundred places around the world,” said the preacher. “Before First Night, before I heard the calling of the Lord that directed me to my sacred purpose, I was a different man. More like Charlie and White Bear. You see, I was a soldier once. A special operator, though I don’t suppose that label means anything to you young’uns. I served my country in black bag operations in Africa and Asia, in the Middle East and South America. We were the righteous ones, the hard ones. Heartbreakers and life takers.” He sighed. “Then things got… complicated. Too many regulations imposed on the military. So me and a bunch of my brothers in arms went private. We became contractors.”

“You mean mercenaries,” sneered Nix.

“I’m not ashamed of that word, little girl. Mercs or contractors, it’s all the same… we served the best interests of the American people. One way or t’other.” Preacher Jack laughed again. “Surely you didn’t think I learned to handle myself in Bible school, did you? No, and I’m not saying I was a saint because I was loyal to flag and country. Nope, I won’t spit that lie into the wind. Truth to tell, I was a sinner back then, I’ll admit it and testify my sins, and yet still on the side of the white hats. Still proud to be an American, no matter where I was or on what piece of backwater land I stood.” He leaned closer. “Then came First Night. Ah… that was the miracle that opened the eyes of this poor sinner. The dead rose to claim the earth. Those who had been left to decay into dust rose instead and claimed dominion over the lands of the living. The Children of Lazarus rose, and in their purity they showed us the errors of our ways. Our sinfulness was revealed. That’s when I changed my wicked ways and took to preaching from the Good Book.”

Benny found his voice and very quietly asked, “If you’re so holy, then explain Gameland. How’s that part of God’s plan?”

Preacher Jack shrugged. “This world may be paradise for the Children of Lazarus, but to snot-nosed little sinners like you… this world is hell. How’s that for a cosmic paradox? Heaven and hell coexisting out here in the Rot and Ruin, and the two of ’em forming a brand-new Eden. The towns-why, you might consider them limbo, where souls are just waiting for judgment. As for Gameland… now it would be God’s own truth to say that Gameland is purgatory. It’s where you have a chance to expunge your sins.”

“By fighting z-” Benny caught himself before he said the word. “By fighting the dead in pits?”

Preacher Jack nodded. “When a person faces one of the Children, both are being tested for their worthiness. If the Child wins, then it has shown that God’s power is alive within it, even though the vessel is dead… and the sinner himself gets elevated to a higher being as he joins the Children. If the sinner wins, then by God he’s just shown that he is more righteous in the eyes of heaven, and by striking down one of the Children he has removed imperfection from the holy landscape.”

What a bunch of crap. Benny’s inner voice yelled it, and he almost said it aloud, but he knew that those would be the last words he would speak. He wondered if the old man believed this or if it was some kind of crazy con game. Charlie had tried to justify his actions by saying that he’d earned the right by helping to establish the trade routes that kept the towns alive. Was this more of the same kind of rationalization?

He cut a glance at Nix. The bleeding had slowed, but her eyes were wild with hatred and terror. It made him wonder what lights burned in his own eyes. Aloud Benny said, “What are you going to do with us?”

“I think we all know the answer to that question. Purgatory awaits all sinners.” Preacher Jack rose and nodded to his men. “Bring them.”

63

LILAH FELL ASLEEP WITH THE CAT IN HER ARMS AND WOKE TO FIND HERSELF alone. She looked out the window and saw the Greenman working at a picnic table outside. The old man looked up briefly, saw her hesitating in the doorway, smiled, and bent over his work once more. Lilah came tentatively out of the house and stood on the far side of the picnic table, watching him. The table was covered with bowls of herbs and leaves, bunches of flowers, a small flower press, and piles of pine-cones and other items that Lilah did not recognize. There were various tools around. Knives, a cheese grater, carving tools, sewing stuff, wire, and cutters.

“If you need to use the bathroom,” said the Greenman without looking up, “there’s an outhouse behind that row of pines.”

Lilah drifted away and came back in a few minutes. When she did, she found a fresh cup of tea at the far end of the table. The Greenman was shelling nuts into a small wooden bowl. He paused and pushed a bowl of water, a bunch of flowers, and a pair of tweezers to within her reach, always careful not to move quickly or get too close.

“If you want to help,” he said, “I’ll tell you how.”

Lilah looked at the flowers and then at him. She nodded.

“Use the tweezers to remove each petal and place it in the water. Let it float. Be careful not to get your skin oil on the petals. We want them pure. Once you fill the bowl, we’ll cover it with cheesecloth and set it out in the sunshine for four hours. We have that much sun left. After that, we’ll strain the water through a coffee filter into some jars. I’ll add a little brandy, and we’ll set it in my root cellar.”

“Why?” It was the first word she had spoken in hours.

“We’re making flower essences. We’ll add walnut and Mimulus ringens.” He nodded to the thick bunch of large purple flowers with yellow centers. “It’s very rare for those to bloom this early. Usually don’t see them until June or later, but we needed it now and nature provided. Funny… but I didn’t know why I picked them yesterday. Now I understand.”

“What is it for?”

The Greenman smiled. His face was heavily lined, but when he smiled, all those creases conspired to make him seem much both younger and timeless. “For courage, Lilah,” he said.

Lilah tensed. “You know my name?”

“Everyone in these hills knows your name,” he said. “Lilah, the Lost Girl. You’re famous. The fearsome zombie hunter. The girl who helped bring down Charlie Pinkeye and the Hammer.”

She shook her head.

“I know, I know,” said the Greenman with a gentle laugh. “No one is really who people think they are. It’s unfair. When they give us nicknames and create a story for us, everyone expects us to be that person and to live up to that legend.” He went back to shelling walnuts. “Tom knows something about that. Out here, people see him as either a hero or a villain. Never anything in between, not for Tom. He hates it too. Do you know that? He doesn’t want to be anyone’s hero any more than he wants to be a villain.”

“Tom isn’t a villain.”

“Not to you or me, no. Not to the people in town. But to a lot of the people out here-people like Charlie and his lot-Tom’s the boogeyman.”

“That’s stupid. They’re the villains.”

“No doubt.” He nodded to the flowers. “Those petals won’t jump into the bowl by themselves.”

Lilah stared at the purple petals for a moment, then picked up the tweezers and began pulling them off. She tore a few before she got the knack. The Greenman watched, nodded, and picked up another walnut. “Who are you?” she asked. “I mean really.”

“Most of the time I’m nobody,” said the Greenman. “When you live alone, you don’t need a name. I don’t need to tell you that.” She said nothing, but she gave a tiny nod. “I used to be Arthur Mensch-Ranger Artie to the tourists in Yosemite. That was before First Night.”

“When the world changed and everything went bad,” she said.

“A lot of folks see it that way,” said the Greenman, “but it was death that changed. People are still people. Some good, some bad. Death changed, and we don’t know what death really means anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this is an object lesson about the arrogance of our assumptions. Hard to say. But the world? She didn’t change. She healed. We stopped hurting her and she began to heal. You can see it all around. The whole world is a forest now. The air is fresher. More trees, more oxygen. Even in Yosemite the air was never this fresh.”

“The dead-,” she began.

“Are part of nature,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because they exist.”

She thought about that. “You don’t think they’re evil?”

“Do you?”

She shook her head. “People are evil.”

“Some are,” he admitted. He set the walnut shells aside and began shaving the walnut meat with the cheese grater. “People are all sorts of things. Some people are evil and good at the same time. At least according to their own view of the world.”

“How can people be good and bad?”

His dark eyes sought hers. “In the same way that people can be very brave and very, very afraid. They can be heroes and cowards from one breath to the next. And heroes again.”

Her eyes slid away. “I did something bad,” she said in a tiny voice. “I ran away.”

“I know.” It was acceptance of information but in no way a judgment.

“I-I haven’t been afraid of…” Lilah swallowed. “I haven’t been afraid of the dead for years. Not since I was little. They just… are. Do you understand?”

“Sure.”

“Last night, though… there were so many.”

“Was that it? Was it just that there were a lot of them? From what Tom told me, you used to play in the Hungry Forest. What was different about last night?”

The cat came out of the woods, jumped up on the table, and settled down with its legs tucked under its fur. Lilah began plucking more petals. “I left Benny and Nix behind at the way station. I just… ran.”

“Were you running from the dead? Because there were so many?”

“I-I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” he said gently. “You do.”

Lilah looked at the purple flower petal caught between the iron jaws of the tweezers. “This stuff gives courage?”

“Not really.” The Greenman smiled. “It helps you find where you left the courage you had. Courage is tricky, oily. Easy to drop, easy to misplace.”

“I thought that if you had courage you always had it.”

The Greenman laughed out loud. The cat, who had been dozing, opened one eye and glared at him for a moment, then went back to sleep. “Lilah, nothing is always there. Not courage, not joy, not hate or hope or anything else. We find courage, lose it, sometimes misplace it for years, and sometimes live in its grace for a while.”

She digested this as she worked. “What about love? Is that elusive too?”

“I have two answers for that,” he said, “though there are probably more. One answer is the big answer. Love is always there. It lives in us. In all of us. Even Charlie Pink-eye, bad as he was, loved something. He loved his friend Marion Hammer. He had a family. He had a wife, once. Before First Night. Everyone loves. But that’s not what you meant and I know it. The other answer, the smaller answer, is that when we love something we don’t always love it. It comes and goes. Like breath in the lungs.”

“I don’t understand love.”

“Sure you do,” said the Greenman. “Tom told me about Annie, and about George. I met George once, a long time ago, when he was out looking for you. He was a good man. A genuine person, do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes.” Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.

“He loved you, and I believe-I know-that you loved him. Just as you loved Annie. No, you understand love just fine, Lilah.”

She said nothing.

“Or do you mean another kind of love?” he asked, arching one eyebrow. “Boy-girl love? Is there someone you love? Is there someone who loves you?”

She shook her head, then shrugged. “There is a boy named Lou Chong.”

“Benny Imura’s friend? Tom told me about him, too. A smart boy.”

“He can be stupid, too!” Her words were quick, and she stopped and shook her head again. “In town… Chong is smart. He knows science and books and stars and history. I can talk to him. We talked on his porch, at nights. Every night since I lived there. Seven months. We talked about everything.”

“He sounds nice.”

“He is… but out here… he isn’t smart.” She threw down the tweezers. The cat gave a disgusted grunt, stood up, turned around, and lay back down.

“Tell me,” said the Greenman as he reached over, picked up the tweezers, and handed them to her. After a long pause, she took them.

Lilah told him everything that had happened since Tom led them out of town. By the time she was done, all the flower petals had been plucked and were floating in water.

“If Chong loves you,” said the Greenman, “do you love him?”

“I don’t know!” she snapped, then, more softly, “I don’t know how to.”

The Greenman chuckled. “You wouldn’t be the first to feel that, but maybe the first to admit it. So… what does this have to do with running away from Benny and Nix? Take a breath. Think about it. Answer when it feels right.”

She took the breath. “Benny kept saying that Chong ran away because of me. That I made him because of what I said.”

“What did you say?”

“Back on the road… I told Chong that…” She wiped her eyes. “I told him that he was a stupid town boy and he shouldn’t be out here. I wanted him to go home. I told him to go home. Then, when Benny told me it was my fault… I… it made me forget how to use my spear. Or my gun. My hands wouldn’t think anymore.” She shook her head. “I’m not making sense.”

“Yes,” said the Greenman, “you are.”

“I made Chong run away.”

The Greenman leaned on his forearms and regarded her with a kindly smile. “A wise man once said that we can’t make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it’s up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall. Do you understand?”

She shook her head.

“It’s about responsibility. Chong felt responsible for what happened. Your words didn’t force him to run away.”

“I wish I could… un-say them.”

“Yep. I’m sure. But it’s still on Chong; it was his choice to run. He could have stayed, no matter what you said. Just as you could have stayed after what Benny said. It doesn’t make it right that hard words were said, but it doesn’t make you or Benny wrong for saying them. That’s yours to settle with yourself. Chong chose his path. Benny chose his when he spoke. You chose yours when you ran.”

“But it was the wrong choice!” she cried.

“That’s your call, honey,” he said. “Do you know why you ran away?”

She shrugged. “Before… I met Benny and the others… I knew the world. How it was. Zoms and bounty hunters and me. My cave, the way of hunting. Quieting zoms. Fighting men. Traps and hunting and all of that. It was just me and everything else. Me. I knew me. I knew what wasn’t me. But after I met them, things became… complicated. I had people. I had to care about them.”

“And that scared you because the last time you cared about someone was with Annie and George? No, don’t look surprised, Lilah. I lost people too. Everyone did. After you lost them, you stepped away from humanity. Not by choice, but out of a need to survive. You became used to being alone and not caring for or about anyone. Then you met Benny and Nix and you started to care.”

“It hurts to care!” she yelled as loud as her damaged voice would allow. Then, more quietly, she added, “It’s scary, and I never used to be afraid. If I lived, I lived. If I died, who would know? Who would care? Annie and George were gone. Without them it was like I had… armor. I don’t understand it.”

“You probably do on some level.”

“Benny said that Chong only came along because he loved me.” She shook her head in amazement at the thought. “I don’t understand that. I mean… I read books about love and romance, but it’s not the same.”

“No,” he conceded. “It surely is not. How does that make you feel, though? To have someone love you?”

She shook her head again. “Annie loved me. George loved me.”

“And you loved them… but now they’re dead,” said the Greenman softly. “And you probably feel guilty about that.” Lilah gave him a sharp look, but he continued. “I’m guessing here, but you probably feel guilty because you had already escaped from Gameland and you didn’t get back in time to save Annie. And George died while he was out looking for you. Are you afraid that if Chong loves you, and if you fall in love with him, that he’ll die too?”

“He’s… already gone.” Her face screwed up, but she forced herself not to sob. “Nothing makes sense anymore. Last night we went outside, and the trip wires were down. All those zoms were there. Too many of them. I-I looked into all those dead eyes. I saw Chong. In my mind… dead. Tom, too. Benny and Nix. I saw them all dead. Everyone I care about. Dead. I felt like I was dead too.”

“Ah,” said the Greenman gently. “That’s called terror. It’s confusion and a little paranoia and a nice big dose of panic. Everyone has those moments. Everyone. Even heroes like Tom.”

“But I ran away. I can’t take that back. I ran away and left Benny and Nix there. I didn’t help them, and I didn’t go looking for Chong. He left because of me. Because of how I treated him. Because of what I said to him. Benny said so.”

“Benny’s just a boy,” the Greenman said, “and I’ll bet he’s just as confused and scared as you. Sometimes people say terrible things when they’re scared. They don’t mean to, but they can’t help it. They lash out because if they can see that their words hurt someone else, it makes them feel as if they aren’t completely powerless.”

“That’s stupid!”

“No, it’s unfair, but for the most part it’s unintentional. If Benny’s anything like Tom, he’s probably kicking himself for what he said. He’d probably give a lot to roll the clock back to yesterday and make it right to you.”

“He can’t! He said it.”

“That’s true. He said it, and it hurt you, and with everything else that’s going on, all of you are probably in the same place. Confused, scared, and doing things you wish you could undo.”

Lilah wiped her eyes again. “I’m sorry for what I said to Chong. I do wish I could take it back.”

The Greenman stopped working for a moment. “Let me tell you a truth, little sister. No matter what choice you make, it doesn’t define you. Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there’s ever a choice you’ve made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice.”

“I can’t undo it, though.”

“That’s not what I said. I’m pretty sure undoing it would involve time travel, and I don’t happen to have a time machine.”

She almost smiled at that.

“Everyone’s been there,” said the Greenman. “First Night wasn’t the only crisis. We’ve all had our moments of weakness and failure. All of us. We’ve all suffered through dark nights of the soul.”

“So is that it? Will I have to live the rest of my life like this? Not doing the right thing? Not saying the right words?”

“That’s your choice. You can’t change the past. Ah, but the future… you own the future.” The Greenman smiled. “So, you tell me… what choice do you want to make now?”

64

DIGGER AND HEAP HERDED BENNY AND NIX INTO THE HOTEL, GUIDING them with slaps and kicks. Preacher Jack walked behind them, humming to himself. Benny was sure it wasn’t a hymn.

They entered the main lobby, which was piled high with crates of goods scavenged from local towns. Sturdy shelves had been erected on every inch of wall space, and these were crammed with canned goods, sacks of grain, jars of spices, and bottles of everything from extra-virgin olive oil to Kentucky whiskey. One wall had a rack of guns running from floor to ceiling: shotguns, rifles, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, and every kind of handgun. Most of these Benny had seen only in books. And there were barrels filled with bayonets, machetes, swords, spears, axes, and clubs. Against one wall were six crates labeled C4. Benny had never heard of it, but on each case, in big red letters, three words were stenciled: DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES. He swallowed.

There were enough weapons to start a war… or to reclaim the wastelands from the living dead. Benny saw Nix staring longingly at the collection.

Digger noticed and slapped the back of her head. “Don’t even think about it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Nix said under her breath.

Benny ground his teeth and swore on the graves of his parents that he would make these men pay for touching Nix.

They pushed Benny and Nix through the hotel and up several sets of stairs until they stood in the doorway of a dusty attic. The room was empty except for cobwebs.

“Make yourselves comfy,” said Heap as he shoved them into the room. “Call room service if you want anything.” The men were laughing as they slammed the door shut and locked it.

Benny pressed his ear to the door and listened until he couldn’t hear their footfalls on the steps anymore. Then he tried the door handle. It jiggled, but the lock was tough and the door was too solid to kick open. With a sigh of resignation he turned to Nix.

“We’ll get out of this,” he promised.

She looked dazed and small in the dusty light. “How? Benny-they’re going to put us in the zombie pits! They did that to my mom!”

“I know… but she survived, Nix… and she wasn’t a fighter. We are. Warrior smart, remember?”

Nix sniffed. “I don’t feel like a warrior right now.”

Benny forced a grin. “Then we’ll have to concentrate on being smart. Remember what Tom said. ‘When you’re in a dangerous situation’-”

“-‘immediately assess your resources.’”

They looked around. The room was completely empty. Bare floor, bare walls with cracked plaster that had crumbled in places to reveal the thin wooden bones of the walls, a light fixture that hadn’t worked in fifteen years hanging from the ceiling, and a cracked window that looked out into the horse corral.

“Okay,” Benny said, “so… we’re not big on supplies.” But when he looked at Nix, she was smiling. “What?”

She told him. Then he was smiling too.

65

TOM IMURA STOOD JUST INSIDE THE SPILL OF SHADOWS CAST BY THE TALL willows that bordered the old hotel. Anyone standing three feet away would not have seen him. He might have been a ghost, or a layer of the deepening twilight shadows. Only his mind was in motion, and that was a howling firestorm of rage and frustration and self-hatred. Despite all logic to the contrary, his mind kept shrieking out that he was responsible for this. For all of this. For Chong. For Benny and Nix. For Gameland. All of it.

This is my fault. I should have seen this coming.

No, that wasn’t quite right. He had seen this coming. He had been warned. By Basher and Sally, by Captain Strunk and Mayor Kirsch. Warned that he could not just walk away, that perhaps it was his destiny to stop Gameland once and for all.

He was sure that Benny and Nix were being held inside. After he’d left the dead bounty hunters, he had gone racing back to the way station, found it in ashes, then saw footprints leading toward Wawona. Benny and Nix’s shoes, no doubt about it. And Preacher Jack’s following them. Tom had raced along the path and only paused a moment when he saw that Preacher Jack’s prints veered away from a straight pursuit and took a shortcut toward the hotel.

Tom had found the scene of slaughter by the barn, had read the tale in the scuff marks and knew that J-Dog and Dr. Skillz had been with Benny and Nix for a time. But he also saw that the two surfers had turned and gone back into the hills. Their path must have missed Tom’s by no more than half a mile.

Now Tom was at Gameland, and now he knew the full horror of things. White Bear had taken over the old hotel and transformed it into a killing ground. There were single zombie pits all around the building, and a cluster of larger ones out back in an enclosure made from a line of trade wagons and a circus tent. There were dozens of guards and hundreds of people-traders and others-so Tom had backed away and now stood watching from the edge of the woods.

Preacher Jack was here. The footprints had led right to a spot where they had encountered Benny and Nix again. There were clear signs of a struggle and drops of blood. Tom’s mind ground on itself, lashing him for not seeing this sooner. For not acting preemptively instead of going off on this road trip.

Any innocent blood that falls is on me, he told himself.

The Matthias clan was moving in because of Charlie’s death and because Tom was leaving. It was a double power vacuum, and White Bear was making his bid to fill it. Tom didn’t yet know how Preacher Jack fit into this, but he and White Bear would make a formidable team. The people of Mountainside were not going to do anything to stop it. That was obvious, but who else was there? Sally? J-Dog and Dr. Skillz? Basher? Solomon Jones? There were plenty of fighters who could make a serious stand against White Bear, but only if they were a unified front, and that was a million miles from likely.

Rage was building in his chest, and he could feel his body start to tremble. He wanted to scream. He needed to give a war cry, draw his sword, and go charging into the hotel and kill White Bear, Preacher Jack, and as many of their people as he could. That would feel good. It would feel right. It would also be suicide… and it probably wouldn’t save Benny, Nix, or Chong. Rage was sometimes a useful ally in the heat of a fight, but it was a trickster. It made everything seem possible.

He needed to go in there cold. So he closed his eyes and murmured the words he had drilled into his brother and the others. “Warrior smart.” He breathed in and out slowly, letting the rhythm vent the darker emotions from him. Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices. With each inhalation he made himself think of happier times, of things that had filled his heart with peace and hope and optimism. Benny and his future. That day last year when Tom realized that Benny no longer hated him, that maybe his brother understood him. Rescuing Nix. Finding Lilah. Training the teenagers. Laughing with them in the sunlight. Eating apple pie in the cool of the evening.

They were simple memories, but their simplicity was the source of their power. As Tom remembered smiles and laughter and Benny’s goofy jokes, the rage began to falter within him. As he recalled watching from afar as Benny and Nix fell in love, the reckless anger cracked and fell apart. And as he remembered the promise he’d made to Jessie Riley as she lay dying in his arms-that he would protect Nix-his resolve rose up in his mind like a tower of steel.

He stood in the shadows and found himself again. He found the Tom Imura that he wanted and needed to be. He took another breath and held it for a long moment, then let it out slowly. He opened his eyes. Then he made himself a promise. “I do this one thing and then I’m done. I do this and then I take Benny and the others and we go east.”

Tom adjusted his sword and checked his knives and his pistol. If there had been anyone there to see his face, they would have seen a man at peace with himself and the world. And if they were wise, they would know that such a man was the most dangerous of all opponents-one who fights to preserve love rather than perpetuate hatred.

When he moved, he seemed to melt into the darkness.

66

LOU CHONG HEARD A SCREAM. NOT A WARRIOR’S CRY. IT HAD BEEN high and wet and filled with pain; and it had ended abruptly. Laughter and shouts rose up immediately and washed the scream away. Chong knew what it meant. Someone else had been fighting a zom, and had lost.

The thought threatened to take the strength out of his arms, but he set his jaw and held on. Literally held on. For the last two hours he had been using the Motor City Hammer’s black pipe club to chop divots out of the packed earth walls of the pit. It was grueling work, and to do it he had to gouge divots deep enough for his feet so he could stand in them and reach high to chop fresh holes. His muscles ached. Sweat poured down his body. His toes were numb with cold from standing in the holes, and his arm trembled between each strike.

He never stopped, though. Every time pain or exhaustion or fear tried to coax him down the wall and away from what he was doing, he held a picture in his mind. It wasn’t a picture of himself fighting another zom. It wasn’t even a picture of running free from this place. Chong knew that he had been bitten. He knew that he was going to die.

No, the picture he held in his mind was that of a girl with honey-colored eyes and snow-white hair and a voice like a whisper. A crazy girl. A fierce and violent girl. A lost girl who didn’t even like him.

Lilah.

If he was going to die, then he was going to die as a warrior. If Lilah didn’t-or couldn’t-love the weak and intellectual Chong, then perhaps she would have a softer heart when remembering the warrior Chong who fought his way out of Gameland. As Lilah herself had fought her way out years ago.

And maybe… just maybe… he could save some of the other kids trapped here in Gameland. Like Benny and Nix and Lilah had done last year. If he couldn’t go with them on their journey, if he was to die sometime in the next few hours or days, then he wanted his life to mean something. He wanted to matter.

He reached and slid his fingers into the hole he’d just chopped, and pulled. His muscles screamed at him, but his mind screamed back at them. The rim of the pit was only three feet above him now.

One more hole to go.

67

THE DOOR TO THE DUSTY ROOM OPENED, AND DIGGER AND HEAP CAME in. The two thugs looked at the wires that had been torn down from the ceiling fixture and at the hole in the wall, which was bigger than it had been and revealed broken laths. Piles of torn plaster and broken lath littered the floor by the wainscoting. Benny and Nix were covered with plaster dust. The two men cracked up laughing.

“What’d you two morons try to do?” asked Digger between brays of laughter. “You try to chew your way outta here?”

“Yeah,” said Benny with a sneer. “We were hungry.”

Heap laughed, but Digger hit Benny across the face with a backhand blow. Benny saw it coming and turned with it, a move Tom had taught him to shake off some of the power of a hit. It made it look like Benny took the blow and shook it off.

Digger and Heap exchanged a look. “Tougher than you look, boy,” murmured Digger, getting up in Benny’s face. “You make it out of the pits with a whole skin, you and I might have to go out behind the barn and dance a bit. Bet you ain’t nearly as tough as you think you are.”

“Save it for later,” warned Heap, and they all turned as Preacher Jack entered the room, followed by a stranger who was taller than the old man and more massive than Charlie Pink-eye had been. The man’s face was a ruin of melted flesh. One eye was a black pit, and the other as blue as lake water. He wore heavy cloak of white bearskin. Even though Benny had never seen him before, he knew at once who this had to be. White Bear.

“So this is Tom Imura’s kid brother and Jessie Riley’s daughter,” said White Bear with a grin. “Well, I’ll be a dancing duck if they ain’t cute as puppies, the both of ’em.”

Heap and Digger chortled, and Preacher Jack smiled his ugly smile. “Figured you’d want to have a word with them before we get started,” murmured the preacher.

“Oh yes indeed,” said the big man, and he entered the room. Beneath the cloak of bear fur he wore hand-stitched leather pants and moccasins. His bare chest was marked with large burned patches too. He wore at least a dozen necklaces of oyster shells, beads, and feathers, and he had silver rings on every finger. He stood in the center of the room and exuded so much personal power that he appeared to fill the place, dwarfing the others. Only Preacher Jack seemed undiminished. The big man grinned at Benny and Nix. “You two know who I am?”

“White Bear,” said Nix.

“That’s right,” said the big man, obviously pleased. “But do you know who I am?”

They shook their heads.

“I am the spirit of the Rot and Ruin. I’m the old medicine reborn to save the world from itself. I’m the immortal White Bear, born in fire and born of fire.” He glared at them for a long moment, and then he cracked up laughing. The other men joined him, and the four of them howled at a joke neither Benny nor Nix understood. Finally White Bear dabbed at a tear at the corner of his remaining eye. “Okay, okay… so that’s the public relations line. That’s what we tell the rubes to get them all excited. Works pretty well, too. Misinformation and disinformation make the world go round.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Nix.

“Call it a campaign strategy,” replied White Bear. “You always need a good campaign strategy if you’re running for office.”

Benny narrowed his eyes. “Running for what office?”

“Chief badass of the whole damn Rot and Ruin,” supplied Digger.

“In so many words,” agreed White Bear. “Y’see, when we heard that your brother Tom was clearing out of the area, we figured it was a ripe moment to come in and make some changes. Time to stop screwing around with the silly rules they got in nowhere places like Mountainside and Haven and suchlike. Charlie was getting ready to do that too, but he was… um… reluctant to make his move with Tom in the mix.”

“That’s because he was afraid of Tom!” snapped Benny.

The smile flickered on White Bear’s face. “Boy, you don’t need teeth or both eyes to go into a zom pit. Say another word about Charlie and I’ll do you ugly before I feed you to-”

“Bear,” said Preacher Jack quietly. It was all he said, but it stopped White Bear for a moment. The big man nodded and took a breath.

“Yeah, okay,” he said, but he fixed his wicked eye on Benny. “Charlie wasn’t afraid of nobody on God’s green earth, you little snot. He was a man of honor, and he showed respect to your brother. Not fear… respect.”

Benny didn’t want to make things worse, so he said, “Okay. I understand that.”

White Bear gave a single, curt nod. “Tom Imura may be a pain in my butt, but he’s a warrior, and I won’t put the lie to it and say he isn’t.” Heap and Digger grunted agreement, and even Preacher Jack nodded. “But Tom’s leaving, and he’s as much as said that this area ain’t his concern no more. That means it’s fair game, and what was Charlie’s is mine by right, and so I’m moving in and taking over. I got big plans for this area. Big plans. Good plans, and you want to know the funny part? The real knee-slapper of a joke?”

“Um… sure,” said Benny.

“I’ll bet your brother would even approve of what I got in mind.”

Nix made a sound low in her throat, but White Bear didn’t hear it.

Benny said, “What do you mean?”

“It’s long past time for people to stop being afraid of the dead,” said White Bear. “The, um, Children of Lazarus.” He shot a sideways look at Preacher Jack, and Benny caught a flicker of disapproval on the older man’s face. “We have to share a world with them, but there’s room for everyone to have what they want.”

“How?”

“We’re going to reclaim the Ruin, kids. As much of it as we can. We’re moving the dead out of here. We’ll herd them all-”

“‘Guide’ them,” corrected Preacher Jack.

“Okay, guide them out of these hills. We’ll put people to work building new fence lines, but we’ll do it at rivers and gorges and natural barriers. We’ll take back farmable lands, we’ll run cattle again. Not just a few hundred head like they got in town-we’ll run tens of thousands of heads. We’ll plant a million acres of food. And we’ll figure out how to start the machines again. Mills and factories, tractors and combines. Maybe some tanks, too, to keep everything working smooth.”

“Who’s going to do all that labor?” asked Nix dubiously.

White Bear grinned. “There’s a lot of lazy people sitting behind the fences. Me and my crew have been working all these years, taking all the risks. Now it’s time that other people broke a sweat and got their hands dirty.”

“You’re talking slave labor,” said Nix.

“It’s not slave labor,” protested White Bear, trying to look innocent, “it’s cooperative labor. No different from the ration dollar system we got now. They want to eat, then they’ll work. They work, and we’ll protect ’em.”

Benny turned to Preacher Jack. “What about the Children of Lazarus? I thought you said that this world was theirs now?”

The preacher’s lips twitched. “Don’t confuse philosophy with practicality, child.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means that the dead don’t need farmland and clean water,” said White Bear. “They’s already been raised up to the Lord, so to speak. All they need is to be. So… we’ll just herd-I mean guide-them to areas where they can be without chowing down on us. Hell, nobody’s using Utah and Arizona and New Mexico. Who needs fricking deserts? We’ll keep ’em there, and they won’t know or care.”

“Such is the will of God,” agreed Preacher Jack, and the two thugs with him murmured, “Amen.”

“How are you going to guide millions of-” Benny almost said “zoms” but caught himself. “How are you going to guide all those dead?”

“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.”