Rot & Ruin

13

FOR FIVE DAYS AFTER THEY GOT BACK, BENNY DID NOTHING. In the mornings he sat in the backyard, invisible in the cool shade of the house as the sun rose in the east. When the sun was overhead, Benny went inside and sat in his room and stared out the window. As the sun set he’d go downstairs and sit on the top step of the porch. He didn’t say more than a dozen words. Tom cooked meals and laid them out, and sometimes Benny ate and sometimes he didn’t.

Tom did not try to force a conversation. Each night he gave Benny a hug and said, “We can talk tomorrow if you want to.”

Nix came over on the third day. When Benny saw her standing on the other side of the garden gate, he just gave her a single small nod. She came in and sat down next to him.

“I didn’t know you were back,” she said.

Benny said nothing.

“Are you okay?”

Benny shrugged, but kept silent.

Nix sat with him for five hours and then went home.

Chong and Morgie came by with gloves and a ball, but Tom met them at the garden gate.

“What’s up with Benny?” Chong asked.

Tom sipped from a cup of water and squinted at sun-drowsy honeybees, hovering over the hedge. “He needs a little time, is all.”

“For what?” asked Morgie.

Tom didn’t answer. The three of them looked across to where Benny sat staring at the grass that curled around the edges of his sneakers.

“He just needs some time,” Tom repeated.

They went away.

Nix came again the next day. And the next.

On the sixth morning she brought a straw basket filled with blueberry muffins that were still hot from the oven. Benny accepted one, sniffed it, and ate it without comment.

A pair of crows landed on the fence, and Benny and Nix watched them for almost an hour.

Benny said, “I hate them.”

Nix nodded, knowing that the comment wasn’t about the crows or anything else they could see. She didn’t know who Benny meant, but she understood hate. Her mother was crippled by it. Nix could not remember a single day when her mother didn’t find some reason to curse Charlie Pink-eye or damn him to hell.

Benny bent and picked up a stone, and for a moment he looked at the crows, as if he was going to throw the rock at them, the way he and Morgie always did. Not to hurt the birds, but to scare a noise from them. Benny weighed the stone in his palm, then opened his fingers to let it tumble to the grass.

“What happened out there?” Nix said, asking the question that had hung burning in the air for a week.

It took Benny ten minutes to tell her about the Rot and Ruin. But Benny didn’t just talk about zoms. Instead he talked about three bounty hunters on a rocky cleft by a stream in the mountains. He spoke without emotion, almost monotone, but long before he was finished, Nix was crying. Benny’s eyes were hard and dry, as if all of his tears had been burned away by what he’d seen. Nix put her hand on Benny’s, and they sat like that for more than an hour after he was done, watching as the day grew older.

As they sat Nix waited for Benny to turn his hand, to take hers in his, to curl his fingers or thread them through hers. She had never felt closer to him, never believed in the possibility of them more than she did then. But the hour burned away and turned to ash, and Benny did not return her grip. He merely allowed it.

When the evening crickets began singing, Nix got up and went out through the garden gate. Benny had not said another word since he’d finished telling his tale. Nix really wasn’t sure that he knew she’d held his hand. Or that she’d left.

She cried all the way home. Quietly, to herself, without drama. Not because she had lost Benny, but because she now knew that she had never had him. She wept for the hurt that he owned, a hurt she could never hope to remove.

Benny sat outside until it was fully dark. Twice he looked at the garden gate, at the memory of Nix carefully opening it and closing it behind her. He ached. Not for her, but because she ached for him-and he could feel it now. He’d always known it was there, but now-somehow, for some indefinable reason-he could feel it. And he knew he wanted her. He wanted to break his oath with Chong and forget that they were just friends and…

He wanted a lot of things. But the world had changed, and when he had the chance to take her hand, he hadn’t.

Why not?

He knew that it had nothing to do with the oath. Or with friendship. He knew that much, but the rest of his mind was draped in weird shadows that blinded his inward eye. Nothing made sense anymore.

He could feel the heat of her touch on his hand even though she was now out of sight.

“Nix,” he said. But she was gone, and he had let her go.

He got up and slapped dirt from his jeans, then looked up at the yellow August moon that hung in the sky beyond the garden fence. It was the same moon, but it looked different now. He knew it always would.

14

THE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS COOL FOR THE FIRST DAY OF SEPTEMBER. Benny lay in bed and stared out the window at the dense white clouds stacked tall above the mountains. The air was moist with the promise of rain.

Benny was awake for more than an hour before he realized that he felt better. Not completely. Maybe not even a lot. Just… better.

It was the last week of summer break. School started next Monday, although with his new job, that would only be half days. He lay there, listening to the birds singing in the trees. Tom once told him that birds sing differently before and after a storm. Benny didn’t know if that was true, but he could understand why they would.

He got up, washed, dressed, and went downstairs for breakfast. Tom set out a plate of eggs for him, and Benny ate them all and then scavenged the frying pan for leftovers. They ate in silence almost to the last bite before Benny said, “Tom… the way you do it… Does anyone else do it that way? Closure, I mean.”

Tom sipped his coffee. “A few. Not many. There’s a husband-and-wife team up north in Haven. And there’s a guy named Church who does it in Freeland. No one else here in Mountainside.”

“Why not?”

Tom hesitated, then shrugged. “It takes longer.”

“No,” Benny said. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Sugarcoat it. If this is the way it is, if I’m going to have to be a part of it, don’t jerk me around. Don’t lie to me.”

Tom set down his cup of coffee and then nodded. “Okay. Most don’t do it this way, because it hurts too much. It’s too…” He fished for a word.

“Real?” Benny suggested.

“I guess so,” said Tom. He tasted the word. “‘Real.’ Yeah… that about says it.”

Benny nodded and ate the last piece of toast.

After a while Tom said, “If you’re going to do this with me-”

“I didn’t say I was. I said ‘if.’”

“So did I. If you’re going to do this with me, then you have to learn how to handle yourself. That means getting in better shape and learning how to fight.”

“Guns?”

“Hand to hand first,” Tom said. “And swords. Wooden swords in the beginning. We’ll start right after school.”

“Okay,” Benny said.

“Okay… what?”

“Okay.”

They didn’t speak again that morning.

When Benny got to the garden gate, he stood looking at it, as if it was a dividing line between who he had been before Tom had taken him out into the Ruin and who he was going to be from now on. For a week he had been unable to open that gate, and even now, his hand trembled a little as he reached for the latch.

It opened without a crash of drums or ominous lightning forking through the clouds. Benny grinned ruefully, then headed down the lane toward Chong’s house.

15

“THE ZOMBIES ARE COMING!”

Morgie Mitchell yelled that at the top of his voice, and everyone ran. Morgie ran side-by-side with Benny and Chong, the three of them blocking the pavement to keep the other kids from getting there first. It was a disaster, though. Zak Matthias deliberately tripped Morgie, who went flying and whose flailing fingers caught the back of Moby’s pants and accidentally pulled them down to his knees.

Moby wore stained drawers, and with his pants around his knees, he couldn’t manage the next step, and he went down. So did Morgie. The crowd of kids hit the pair, who were already on the ground, but they were in motion, and everyone knew there was no hope. They all went down.

Only Benny, Chong, and Zak were still running. Zak was halfway down the block. Benny looked back, hesitated, grabbed Chong by the sleeve, mentally said Screw it, and ran even faster.

In the direction of the zombies.

They were at Lafferty’s General Store. The Zombie Cards had arrived.

“Too bad about Morgie,” said Chong.

“Yeah,” agreed Benny. “Nice kid. He’ll be missed.”

They sat on the top step of the wooden porch in front of Lafferty’s. A shadow fell across them.

“You guys are a couple of total jerks,” said Morgie.

“Eek!” said Chong dryly. “It’s a zom. Quick, run for your life.”

Benny sipped from a bottle of pop and burped eloquently.

Morgie kicked Chong’s foot, hard, and sat on the wooden step between his two friends. He looked at the stack of cards that lay on the step between Chong’s sneakered feet. There was a similar stack-two packs still unopened-in front of Benny. Waxed-paper wrappers were crumpled on the top step.

“The guy said they’re sold out already,” he complained grumpily.

“Yeah. Those darn kids, huh?” murmured Benny.

“He said you two monkey-bangers bought the last couple of packs.”

“Guy’s lying,” said Benny.

Morgie brightened. “What? He has some-?”

“We bought the last twelve packs,” said Chong.

“I kinda hate you guys.”

“He’s going to start crying,” Chong said to Benny in a stage whisper.

“He’s going to embarrass himself,” agreed Benny.

“What he’s going to do,” said Morgie, “is start kicking your asses.”

“Eek,” said Chong through a yawn.

Benny pretended to scratch his ankle, but then he moved his sneaker, and there were four packs of Zombie Cards in a neat stack, the waxed-paper wrappers still sealed. Morgie made a grab for them, ignoring the grins on his friends’ faces.

“I still hate you,” he said as he tore open the first pack.

“And yet,” said Chong, “we’ll find a way to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and struggle on.”

Morgie made a very rude gesture as he sorted through the cards.

Zombie Cards were one of the few luxuries the boys could afford. In the next town-forty miles away, along the line of mountains-two brothers had set up a printing business. All hand-crank stuff, because no one trusted electricity anymore, even when they could get it to work.

The printers did it old school. Offset printing in four colors, and they did a quality job. The Zombie Cards were printed on heavy card stock, ten cards to a pack. On the front of each card was a portrait of famous bounty hunters, like J-Dog, Dr. Skillz, Sally Two-knives, or the Mekong brothers; heroes of First Night, like Big Mike Sweeney, Billy Christmas, or Captain Ledger; someone from the zombie war, like the Historian or the Helicopter Pilot; famous zoms, like Machete-head, the Bride of Coldwater Spring, or the Monk; or random cards of famous people who had become zoms. On the back of each card was a short bio and the name of the artist. Benny’s favorite card was of Ben, a tall African American man who was painted in a heroic pose, swinging a torch at a swarm of zoms who were trying to get past him to attack a blond woman who cowered behind him. The bio said that the image was based on “an eyewitness account of a valiant but tragically futile struggle against zoms in Pennsylvania.” The artist had captured the nobility of the man with the torch and had made the zoms look particularly menacing, an effect enhanced by the stark shadows and light from the torch’s flaring flame. It was one of the rarest cards, and Benny was the only one of his friends who had it. He also had a complete set of the bounty hunters, including Charlie Matthias and the Motor City Hammer. He still liked Charlie and the Hammer, but as much as he denied it to himself, reserve bubbled inside him when he looked at their cards. He’d already sorted through his collection, looking for the three bounty hunters he’d seen in the Ruin, but they weren’t there. It reinforced Benny’s belief that their actions were not in any way typical of the bounty hunters Benny knew personally. Tom had to be wrong about that.

He said nothing to his friends about what Tom had said, but he shot a quick glance at Zak, who sat on the store’s porch, fanning through the dozen packs of cards he’d bought. Zak saw him watching and gave him a strange smile, then bent over his cards.

Benny shrugged, absorbed in his memories of the Ruin. So far he’d only told Nix, and he hadn’t seen her since she’d left the garden the day before. Her absence was like an empty hole in his gut, but he refused to think about it.

Chong had the largest collection of Zombie Cards, mostly because he had two cousins who collected them, and they traded doubles. Morgie and Benny had a good-size set. Nix only had a few. She was poor and wouldn’t take handouts, although if Benny gave her his doubles, she always accepted.

“Are you going to save any for Nix?” Chong asked as Morgie tore open his second pack.

“Why?” Morgie asked absently as he peered at the writing on the back of a card that showed a police officer in San Antonio, firing at zoms as he crashed his patrol car through a knot of them. The figures were tiny on the card, but the action was explosive, and Morgie was totally absorbed by it.

Chong and Benny exchanged a look over his bowed head, then shrugged. Morgie could be as dense as a mud wall sometimes.

They opened all of their packs of cards and sat in the shade of the porch, organizing them and reading the backs, swapping doubles with one another, bragging about cards they had and that the others didn’t. Benny smiled and joked and chatted with the others, but as he sorted through the cards, he could feel how false and fragile his smile was. He wanted to feel the way he used to feel, and hated that he had to fake it.

“Hey, you even listening?” Morgie asked, and Benny turned to him, hearing the question as if it were an echo but not remembering what he was asked.

“What?”

“Joe Attentive,” murmured Chong.

“I asked, what’s with you and Nix?”

“Nix?” Benny tensed. “What about me and Nix?”

“She was over your house every day this week, and now she’s not hanging around with us. She hasn’t missed a card day all summer. What’s up?” Morgie wore a smile, but it went about a millimeter deep.

Benny forced his shoulders to give a nonchalant shrug. “No, it’s cool. She was just being a friend.”

“What kind of friend?”

“Just a friend, Morgie.” But Benny could see that answer wasn’t going to cut it. He sighed. “Look, we all know Nix has a thing for me and you have a thing for Nix. Big news flash. I don’t have a thing for Nix, and the reason you haven’t seen her around the last two days is that I think she knows it, and her feelings are hurt. I’m sorry, but there it is. So, if you want to make your move, now would be a pretty good time.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” said Chong without looking up from a card he was reading. The others looked at him. “Nix is probably feeling like total crap right about now. She could use a friend, but what she doesn’t need is someone breathing down her neck or following her like a horny dog.”

“What are you saying?” said Morgie, eyes narrowed.

Chong turned to him. “What part of that was unclear?”

“I don’t just horndog after her. I like Nix. A lot.”

Chong merely grunted and continued to read his card.

Morgie punched Benny’s shoulder.

“Ow! What the hell was that for?” Benny demanded.

“For screwing with Nix’s head!” Morgie shouted. “Now she’s going to be all moody and girly, crying in her room and writing in that stupid diary of hers.”

“Good God,” said Benny, appealing to Chong, and the universe, for help. Chong tried to hide a smile as he pretended to read the Zombie Cards.

They sat in silence for five minutes, each of them absorbed with the cards to varying degrees, each thinking about Nix but pretending not to.

Chong tapped him with an elbow, and when he turned, his friend held out a card, so he could see the picture. “You’re almost famous,” he said.

The picture was that of a young man, standing with his back to a bullet-scarred wall, but instead of a gun, he held a katana in his hands.

Tom.

“Oh, man, don’t do this to me,” Benny said.

Chong smiled. “I thought you and Tom kissed and made up. I thought you were best buds now.”

“Yeah, and pigs can tap dance,” muttered Benny, taking the card. He flipped it over and read the back aloud. “‘Card number 113: Tom Imura. Tom, a resident of Mountainside, is a first-class bounty hunter who prefers to be called a “closure specialist.” He’s known throughout the Rot and Ruin for his quiet manner and lightning fast sword.’”

Benny handed the card back. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he said.

Chong pretended to read off the back of the card. “‘Tom’s brother, Benny, is known throughout the world for his noxious farts and lack of personality.’ Man, they got your number.”

“Get stuffed,” Benny suggested.

Morgie took the card and tried to riff off Chong’s remark, but beyond a few disjointed vulgarities, could come up with nothing biting.

“I am so going to bust Tom on this,” said Benny. “On a Zombie Card for God’s sake. Who does he think he is?”

Chong slid the card into his thick pack. “What’s with you? You’re supposed to be working with him. Didn’t you guys go on some kind of vision-quest thing out into the Ruin? You came back all moody and introspective. What happened?”

“I got over it,” said Benny.

“No, I mean, what happened out there?”

Benny just shook his head.

“Come on, dude,” said Morgie. “Give us all the gory details.”

It was the wrong choice of words, and Benny felt his stomach turn, and his brain started flashing overlapping images of Harold Simmons, the blind eyes of Old Roger, and the squirming torsos of the dismembered zoms in the wagon. Chong caught his change of expression, and before Morgie could say anything, he handed the last unopened pack to Benny.

“Do the honors. Maybe this one will have your own ugly face on it.”

Benny faked a smile and tore open the wax paper. The first few cards were doubles they all had. There was one new one-a celebrity zom that the bio said was Larry King, but Benny couldn’t tell the difference between the before and after pictures. He turned over the last card. It wasn’t a bounty hunter or a famous person who’d gone zom and been bagged and tagged. No, this was one of the elusive Chase Cards-one of only six special cards that showed up so rarely that Benny, Chong, Morgie, and Nix had only two between them.

“What is it?” Morgie asked as he tried to lean closer, but Benny moved the card away. It was a weird reflex action, and even as he did it, Benny suddenly felt as if he stepped out of this moment, this place, and stood somewhere else. Someplace where the wind blew hot and dry, and the birds did not sing in the dying trees; where bones lay bright white on the ground, and the sky was as hard and dark as the bluing on a gun barrel.

Benny stared at the card. Not at the words, but at the image. It was a girl about his own age, maybe a year older. She wore the rags of old blue jeans and roughly made leather moccasins. Her blouse was torn and patched and too small for her, and the pattern had once been bright with wildflowers, but now was so faded that it looked like flowers seen through mist. She had hair that was so thoroughly sun-bleached, it looked snow-white, and her skin was tanned to a honey brown. The girl wore a man’s leather gun belt, which held a small pistol below her left hip and a knife in a weather-stained sheath on her right. She carried a spear, crudely made from a long piece of quarter-inch black pipe wrapped in leather and topped with the blade from a Marine Corps bayonet. Behind her was a heap of dead zombies. The painting was incredibly lifelike-more like a photo than a painting, but there hadn’t been a working camera for years.

What held Benny’s attention-what riveted him-was her expression. The artist must have known her, because he caught her with a blend of emotions on her beautiful face. Anger, or perhaps defiance, tightened her full lips into an inflexible line. Pride lifted her chin. But her hazel eyes held such a deep and ancient sadness that Benny’s breath caught in his throat. He knew that sadness. It haunted his brother’s eyes every day, and since returning from the small village on the mountainside, that sadness darkened the eyes that looked back at him from the bathroom mirror, morning and night.

This girl knew. This girl must have seen some of the things he’d seen. Maybe worse. She’d seen them with eyes that could never see things the way the bounty hunters did. This girl knew, and Benny knew that she knew. She knew in ways that Nix couldn’t.

There was no name in the caption bar at the bottom of the card. Just these words: “The Lost Girl.”

Chong leaned over. He started to make a joke, but he caught Benny’s expression and kept his words to himself.

Morgie was a few steps slower to the plate than Chong. He snatched the card out of Benny’s hand. “Mmm, nice rack. Almost as big as Nix’s.”

Benny’s hand moved so fast that it surprised everyone. One second his fingers were open and empty, and the next they were knotted in the front of Morgie’s shirt.

“Give it back,” Benny said in a voice that was more like Tom’s. Older, uncompromising. Hard.

Morgie wore half a smile for half a second, then he saw the look in Benny’s eyes and surprise-tinged with fear and a spoonful of hurt-blossomed in his eyes.

“I… I mean… sure, man,” he said, tripping over the words. “Sure… I was just…”

Benny took the card from between Morgie’s fingers. It was bent but not creased, and Benny smoothed it on his thigh.

“I’m sorry,” Morgie said, completely confused by what had just happened. Benny looked at him without seeing him, then leaned over to peer at the card. Morgie started to say something else, but Chong-out of Benny’s line of sight-gave a tiny shake of his head.

A shadow fell over them, and they looked up to see Zak standing on the top step, staring down at the card. He grunted once, mumbled something unintelligible as he shoved his own cards into his pocket, then clumped down the stairs and headed home.

They ignored him. To Benny, Chong said, “Who is she?”

Benny just shook his head.

“Read the back.”

Benny turned it over and slowly read the small block of printed text.

“‘Chase Card number 3: The Lost Girl. Legends persist about a beautiful girl living wild and alone in the Rot and Ruin. Many have tried to find her, but none have. And some never returned. Who is… the Lost Girl?’”

“Doesn’t tell you much,” said Chong.

Morgie grunted. “Charlie Matthias said she’s just a myth.”

Benny’s head whipped around. “You’ve heard of her?”

“Sure. Everyone’s heard of her.”

“I haven’t,” said Benny.

“I haven’t,” said Chong.

“Do you guys even live in the same town as me?” said Morgie with exasperation. “We heard about her years ago. Little girl with snow-white hair, hiding out in the Ruin, eating bugs and stuff. Completely wild. Can’t speak English or nothing. What’d you call it? Feral?”

Benny shook his head, but Chong said, “Yeah… that’s ringing a faint bell.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Back in the Scouts. Mr. Feeney told us about her. We were, like, nine or something. It was that weekend we all camped out in Lashner’s Field.”

“I was sick,” said Benny. “I had the flu, remember?”

“Riiight,” said Chong slowly.

“What’d Feeney say about her?”

“Nothing much. He told a spooky story about people trapped in a farmhouse with zoms all around. Everyone died, but the ghost of the youngest daughter keeps haunting the hills, looking for her folks.”

“Uh-uh,” said Morgie, “that wasn’t how it went. The people in the farmhouse kept going out, one by one, to try and get help, but no one ever came back until only the little girl was left. She’s supposed to still be there.”

“I heard she died,” insisted Chong.

“Not according to Mr. Feeney,” said Morgie.

“I remember that she was a ghost. Everybody died in the story I heard.”

“Everybody dies in every story,” said Morgie.

“If everybody died,” said Benny as he turned the card over to look at the picture again, “then who told the story?”

They thought about it. “Maybe one of the trackers found the place and figured it out,” suggested Chong. They considered it. There were several trackers in town, some of whom used to be cops or hunters before First Night.

“No,” said Benny, shaking his head slowly. “No, if she died as a little girl, then why draw her as a teenager?”

Morgie nodded. “And why give her boobs?”

“Jeez, Morgie,” said Chong. “Don’t you think of anything else but boobs?”

“No,” Morgie said, looking genuinely surprised. “Why would I?”

Benny turned the card over and stared at the back. In the lower left corner was the artist’s name. “Rob Sacchetto.”

“Hey,” said Chong. “Isn’t that the guy you tried to get a job with? The erosion artist. Has the blue house by the reservoir.”

“Yeah.”

“So go ask him. If he did this, then he must have talked with someone who saw her. I mean… if this is real.”

“It’s real.” Benny shuffled through the rest of the cards. There were only three others that had been painted by Sacchetto. Charlie Matthias. The Motor City Hammer.

And Tom Imura.

“Are you two…,” Morgie began, but before he could finish, Benny was on his feet and heading toward the reservoir on the far side of town. He left the Zombie Cards behind-except for the one with the picture of the Lost Girl.

“What’s his malfunction?” Morgie asked. “What, he fall in love with this chick, just because she’s built?”

Chong said, “Do yourself a favor, Morg. Next time you’re staring at a girl’s boobs, look up. You’ll be shocked to learn it, but there’s going to be a face up there. Nose, mouth, eyes. And behind the eyes is an actual person.”

“Yes, Confucius, I know. Girls are people. Wisdom of the ages. Nix is a girl and therefore a person. I know that.”

“Really?” said Chong as he watched Benny vanish around a corner. “Maybe if you looked her in the eyes, she’d know that you know.”

He got to his feet, shoved his hands down deep into his pockets, and headed home. Morgie watched him go, wondering what the hell had just happened.

16

THERE WAS A SIGN ON A POLE THAT READ ROB SACCHETTO-EROSION ARTIST. It hung from two lengths of rusted chain and creaked in the hot western wind. The outside of the house was painted with murals of lush rainforests filled with exotic birds and brightly colored frogs. Benny had barely glanced at the murals when he’d come to apply for a job, but now he lingered to look. The paintings were filled with life-monkeys, insects, flowering plants-but no people.

The artist opened the door on the second knock. He wore low-slung jeans that seemed to be held together by dried paint, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off. His feet were bare, and he had a steaming cup of coffee hooked on one multicolored finger. He peered down at Benny.

“You’re that kid,” he said.

Benny nodded.

“I thought I told you that I couldn’t use you.”

“I’m not here about the job.”

“Okay. Why are you…?” the artist’s voice trailed off as Benny held out the card. Sacchetto looked at the image and then at Benny.

“Who is she?” Benny asked.

Shutters dropped behind the artist’s eyes. “It’s just a card, kid. They’re sold in every settlement in California.”

“I’ve been out to the Rot and Ruin.” When that didn’t seem to do much, Benny added, “With my brother, Tom.”

Nothing.

“Tom Imura.”

The artist studied him, stalling by taking a long sip of his coffee.

“I need to know who she is,” Benny said.

“Why?”

“Because I believe in her. Because she’s real. My friends think she’s dead or that she’s just a ghost story. But I know she’s real.”

“Yeah? How do you know that she’s real?”

“I just know.”

Sacchetto drained his cup. “D’you drink coffee, kid?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll brew another pot. This might take a while.” He wasn’t smiling when he said it, but he stepped back to let Benny enter. The artist paused to look at something that caused his whole body to tense, and Benny turned to see the Motor City Hammer, crossing the street toward the livery stable. However, the Hammer was looking directly at Sacchetto, and he wore a peculiar smile on his ugly face.

The artist’s house was clean but not neat. Sketches were thumbtacked to the walls; partially finished paintings stood on half a dozen easels. A wheeled wooden table held hand-mixed pots of paint. They passed through into a tiny kitchen. Sacchetto waved Benny to a chair while he went to fill the coffeepot. Every house in Mountainside had an elevated cistern that drew upon the reservoir and rainwater to feed the faucets and toilets. Because of some quirk of luck during the influx of First Night survivors, Mountainside had twenty-three plumbers and only one electrician. In terms of electricity they were a half step out of the Stone Age, but there was always water to flush the john and fill the kettle. Benny was cool with that.

“Tom Imura, huh,” Sacchetto murmured. “I can see it now, but not when you were here the first time. I knew Tom had a little brother, but I always assumed he’d look more Asian.”

Benny nodded. Both of Tom’s parents were Japanese, so Tom had straight black hair, light brown skin, black eyes, and a face that showed only the expressions he wanted it to show. Benny’s mother had been a green-eyed, pale-skinned redhead who looked like every one of her Irish ancestors. Benny got an even split of the genes. His hair was straight, but it was medium brown with red highlights. His eyes were a dark forest green. His skin was pale, but he took a good tan. However, where Tom’s body was toned to a muscular leanness, Benny was merely lean.

“We’re half brothers,” he explained.

The artist digested that. “And he took you out into the Ruin?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I guess I’m his apprentice now. I’m fifteen.”

“Did he take you to Sunset Hollow?”

“No, but he mentioned it. Or… someone mentioned it to us. I don’t know what it is, though.”

“If Tom didn’t tell you, then it’s not for me to do it,” said Sacchetto, taking two clean mugs from the cupboard. Before Benny could press him on it, the artist said, “What did you see out there?”

“I don’t know if I should talk about it.”

“Kid, here’s the deal. You tell me about the Ruin, about what you saw out there. About what Tom showed you, and I’ll tell you about the Lost Girl.”

Benny thought about it. The smell of brewing coffee filled the little kitchen. The artist leaned back against the sink, arms folded across his chest, and waited.

“Okay,” said Benny, and he told the artist everything. It was the same story he told Nix. The artist was a good listener, interrupting only to clarify a point and to press him for more precise descriptions of the three bounty hunters who had been torturing the zoms. Sacchetto was on his second cup of coffee by the time Benny finished. The coffee in Benny’s cup was untouched and cold.

When Benny was finished, the artist sat back in his chair and studied Benny with pursed lips.

“I think you’re telling me the truth,” he said.

“You think? Why would I lie about stuff like that?”

“Oh, hell, kid. People lie to me all the time. Even when they don’t have a reason to. Folks that want an erosion portrait but don’t have a photo of their loved one tend to exaggerate so much, the picture comes out looking like either Brad or Angelina.”

“Who?”

“Doesn’t matter. Point is, people lie a lot. Sometimes out of habit. Not many people are good at telling the truth. But what I meant just now was that nearly everybody who comes back from the Ruin, lies about what they’ve seen.”

“What kind of people?”

“You see? That’s the kind of question that makes me think you’ve actually been there. Most people would ask, ‘What kind of lies?’ You see the difference?”

Benny thought he did. “Tom says that people here in town want to believe their own version of the truth.”

“Yes, they do. They don’t want to know the truth and even when they say that they do, they don’t ask the right questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are a lot of very obvious questions about our world that nobody around here seems to want to ask.”

“Like why we don’t expand the town?” suggested Benny.

“Uh-huh.”

“And… why don’t we try and-what’s the word?-reclaim what we lost. I know. Since we got back I’ve been thinking a lot about that.”

“I’ll bet you have. You’re Tom’s brother after all.”

“Okay, now what about that? After what happened, I guess my opinion about Tom has changed a bit.”

“But…?”

“But I still don’t understand why everyone thinks Tom is so tough. He’s even on one of the Zombie Cards.”

“You haven’t seem him in action?”

“All I saw was him do was hog-tie one skinny zom.”

“That’s it?”

“Sure. He ran away from the three bounty hunters.”

“‘Ran away,’” echoed the artist, looking amused. “Tom Imura, running away.” He suddenly threw his head back and laughed for a whole minute, his thin body shaking, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. He slapped the tabletop over and over again until the cold coffee in Benny’s cup jumped and spilled.

“Holy crap, kid.” Sacchetto gasped when he could talk. “God! I haven’t laughed that hard since Mayor Kirsch’s outdoor shower blew away in the Santa Ana, leaving him standing stark naked with soap dripping off his-”

“What’s so freaking funny?” interrupted Benny.

The artist held up his hands in a “sorry” gesture, palms out. “It’s just that anyone who knows your brother, I mean, really knows him, is going to react the same way if you tell them that Tom Imura was afraid of anything.”

“He ran away…”

“He ran away because you were there, kid. Believe me, if he’d been alone…” He left the rest unsaid.

“You don’t live with him,” Benny said irritably. “You don’t know what I know. You don’t know what I’ve seen.”

Sacchetto shrugged. “That pretty much goes both ways. You don’t know what I know. Or what I’ve seen.”

They sat there for half a minute, both of them re-evaluating things and trying to find a doorway back into the conversation.

Finally, the artist said, “The Lost Girl. My end of the bargain.”

“The Lost Girl,” Benny agreed. “Tell me that she’s real.”

“She’s real.”

Benny closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked down at the card. “Tell me she’s alive.”

“That I can’t say for sure,” said Sacchetto, but when Benny looked up at him, his eyes filling with dread, the artist shook his head. “No, I mean that I can’t say for sure how she is today, this minute. But she was alive and well a couple of months ago.”

“How do you know?” demanded Benny.

“Because I saw her,” said the artist.

“You… saw her?”

“Once, just for a minute. Maybe half a minute, but yeah, I saw her out in the Ruin, and I came back and painted her. Tom helped me remember a few details, but that card there… That’s her to a tee.”

“You were with Tom when you saw her?”

Sacchetto paused, his fingers beating a tattoo on the tabletop. “Look, I know I promised to tell you, and I will, but I think I’m only going to tell you some of it. The rest… Well, maybe you better hear that from your brother.”

“From Tom? Why?”

The artist cleared his throat. “Because Tom’s been hunting her for five years.”

17

THE ARTIST POURED HIMSELF A THIRD CUP OF COFFEE, THOUGHT ABOUT IT, then got up and fetched a bottle of bourbon from a cupboard and poured a healthy shot into his cup. He didn’t offer the bottle to Benny, who was fine with that. The stuff smelled like old socks.

“I grew up in Canada,” Sacchetto said. “Toronto. I came to the States when I was fresh out of art school, and for a while I made money doing quick portraits of tourists on the boardwalk in Venice Beach. Then I took a couple of courses in forensic art, and landed a job working for the Los Angeles Police Department. You know, doing sketches of runaways, of suspects. That sort of stuff. I was always good at asking the right questions, so I could get inside the head of a witness to a crime or a family member who was looking for someone. And I never forget a face. I was in a police station on First Night. Lots of cops around me, lots of guns. It’s how I survived.”

Benny didn’t know how this was going to relate to the Lost Girl, but the artist was in gear now, and he didn’t want to interrupt the man’s flow. He placed the card on the table between them, and sat back to listen.

Sacchetto sipped his spiked coffee, hissed, and plunged back in.

“You grew up after, kid, so all you know about is this world. The world after. And I know you’ve probably learned a lot about the world before the Fall in school or from hearing people talk. So you probably have a sense of it, but that’s really not the same thing as having belonged to that world. You live here in town, with a slice of what’s left of the population. What’s our head count at the New Year’s census? Eight thousand? When I was working on the boardwalk, I’d see three times that many people just sprawled in the sand, soaking up the sun. The freeways were packed with tens of thousands of cars, horns blaring, people yelling. I used to hate the crowd, hate the noise. But… man, once it was all gone-I’ve missed it every day since. The world is too quiet now.”

Benny nodded, but he didn’t agree. There was always something happening in town, always some noise or chatter. The only quiet he’d heard was out in the Ruin.

“When the dead rose… The noise changed from the sound of life in constant motion to the sound of the dying in panicked flight. I heard the first screams just as the sun was setting. A guy in the drunk tank died from a beating he’d gotten when he’d been mugged. I guess the cops didn’t realize how hurt he was. They thought he was asleep on the bunk, didn’t know he was dead. Then he woke up, if that’s the right word. ‘Resurrected’ is closer, I guess. Or maybe there should have been new words for it. If there’d been time, if the world had lasted longer, I’m sure there would have been all sorts of new words, new slang. Thing is, the zoms-they weren’t really ‘back’ from the dead, you know? They were the dead. It’s been fourteen years, and the idea still won’t fit into my head.” He closed his eyes for a moment, looking inward-or backward-at images that even his artist’s imagination could not reconcile.

“The Lost Girl,” Benny prompted gently.

“Right. That was later. Let me get to it how I need to get to it, because one thing leads to another, and if I tell it out of order, you might not understand.” He took another sip of coffee. “The guy in the cell started biting the other drunks. Everybody was screaming. The cops thought they had a nutcase on their hands, so they did what they were trained to do: They unlocked the cell to try and break up the fight. But by then at least one or two of the other drunks were dead from bites to their throats or arteries. It was a mess-blood all over the walls and floor, grown men screaming, cops shouting. But I just stood there, staring. All of the colors, you know? The bright red. The pale white of bloodless skin. The gray lips and black eyes. The blue of the police uniforms. The blue-white arcs of electricity as they used Tasers. In a weird, sick way it was beautiful. Yeah, I can see the look in your eyes, and I know how crazy that sounds, but I’m an artist. I guess we’re all a little crazy. I see things the way I see them. Besides, I was around death and dying all the time. I was around pain and loss all the time. This was so real, so immediate. Even working with the police, I’d never been there at the moment a crime was committed… and here it was. Murder and mayhem being played out in all the colors in my paint box. I was transfixed. I couldn’t move. And then the dead drunks woke up, and they started biting the cops. After that… The colors blurred, and I don’t remember much except that there was screaming and gunfire. The younger cops and all of the support staff-the people who weren’t street cops-they went crazy. Screaming, running, crashing into one another.

“It made it easier for the dead to catch them, and the more people they bit, the more the situation went all to hell. A cop I knew-a woman named Terri-grabbed my sleeve and pulled me away a second before one of the zombies could take a bite out of me. She shoved me down a side hall-the hall that led to the parking lot. She told me to get into my car and get the motor running. Then she turned and went back down the hall to get some other people out.” He sighed. “I never saw her again. All I heard was gunfire and the moans of the dead.”

“Is that where it all started?” Benny asked.

The artist shrugged. “I don’t think so. Over the years you talk to people, and you hear a hundred stories about how it all started. You know what I really think?”

Benny shook his head.

“I think that it doesn’t matter one little bit. It happened. The dead rose, we fell. We lost the war and we lost the world. End of story. How it happened doesn’t matter much to anyone anymore. We’re living next door to the apocalypse, kid. It’s right on the other side of that big fence. The Rot and Ruin is the real world. Our town isn’t anything more than the last bits of mankind’s dream, and we’re stuck here until we die off.”

“You always this depressing or is it that crap you poured in your coffee?”

Sacchetto tilted his head to one side and stared at Benny for a ten count before a slow smile formed on his mouth. “Subtlety’s not your bag, is it, kid?”

“It’s not that,” said Benny. “It’s just that I’m fifteen, and I have this crazy idea I might actually have a life in front of me. I don’t see how it’s going to do me much good to believe that the world is over and this is just an epilogue.”

Sacchetto chuckled. “You’re smarter than I thought you were. Maybe I should have given you the job.”

“I don’t want it anymore. I just want to know about the Lost Girl.”

“And I’m wandering around everywhere but in the direction of the point, is that it?”

Benny gave an “if the shoe fits” kind of shrug.

“Okay, okay. Long story short, I got the hell out of Dodge.”

“‘Dodge’?”

“Out of LA. No one else came out of the police station… At least no one alive. After I sat in my car for ten minutes, I saw the desk sergeant come shambling out. His face was smeared with red, and he was holding something in his hands. I think it was a leg. He was taking bites out of it. I spewed my lunch out the side window, backed the hell up, spun the wheel, and burned half a block’s worth of rubber getting out of there. I had three quarters of a tank of gas, and I was driving a small car, so I made it pretty far. To this day I couldn’t tell you the route I took getting out of LA. The streets were already going crazy, but I beat the traffic jams that totally locked down the city. Someone told me later that thousands of people were trapped in their cars on blocked streets and that the dead just came up and… Well, it was like a buffet.” He shook his head, sipped some coffee, and continued. “I passed under a wave of army helicopters flying in formation toward downtown. Had to be a hundred of them. Even with the windows closed and the sound of rotors, I could hear the gunfire as they opened up on the city. When my car ran out of gas, I was actually surprised. I was in shock. I never even looked at the gauge. I ran the tank dry and then started running. I got to a farmhouse and met up with some other people, other refugees. Fifteen of us at first. This was around midnight now. By dawn there were seven left. One of the refugees had a bite, you see, and we still weren’t connecting the bites with whatever was going on. To us it still wasn’t the ‘dead’ rising. We thought it was an infection that made people go crazy and act violent.

“A few people had cell phones, but everyone they called was just as confused as they were. All the lines to police or government were jammed or were down. People kept trying, though. We were all conditioned to believe that our little phones and PDAs would always keep us connected, that they’d always be a pathway to a solution. I guess you don’t even know what those things are, but it doesn’t matter. The batteries eventually ran down, and as you do know, help never came. Everybody was in the same mess.

“At dawn a bunch of hunters came through the area and began clearing out the zombies. We thought that it was over, that somehow the good guys had gotten ahead of it. We went the opposite way, thinking we were heading in the direction of safety, of order. We didn’t get two miles before we hit a wall of them.”

“Zoms?”

“Zoms. Maybe ten, fifteen thousand of them. God only knows where they came from. Some city or town… or maybe they started out as a few and the others followed with them, tracking movement the way the zoms will. Don’t know, don’t care. We kept running, kept trying to hide, but they smelled us-or heard us. They kept coming. We picked up a couple more survivors, and at one point we were back up to close on a hundred people. But, like I said, there were thousands of them. Thousands. They were in front of us, behind us, on both sides. They came at us from everywhere, and we died. I was in the center of our pack, and that was the only reason I survived. The dead kept dragging down the people on the edges of the pack, and with every few hundred yards, we lost another couple of people. Sure, we were faster, and one-on-one we were stronger, but we had no clear path to make a straight run for it. Then we went down into a valley near a vineyard.

“By now our group was down to twenty-five, give or take. We’d started arming ourselves. Rocks and tree branches. A few farm tools we found. A couple people had guns, but the ammunition had run out long ago. The valley had a stream running through it, and we splashed across. That helped. I think the dead lost the scent, or maybe it was the sound of the stream. Those of us who crossed where the water churned over some rocks-where it was noisy-we got across without being chased. Seven of us made it to safety that way. Me, four men, and a woman and her little daughter. The woman, though… She was pregnant. Two days away from her due date. Two of the men had to hold on to her arms to help her run. And I carried the little girl. We ran and ran, and even though the little girl was only two years old… After a thousand yards it felt like she weighed a hundred pounds.” He stopped for a moment, and Benny saw a shadow was moving across his face. “I’ve never been a strong person, Ben. Not physically, and not… Well, let’s just say that not everyone’s as strong as your brother.”

He looked suddenly gray and sick, and older than his fifty years. He drained the cup and turned to stare longingly at the bottle of bourbon on the drain board, but he didn’t get up to fetch it.

Benny watched the emotions that flowed over the man’s face. The artist was one of those people who had no poker face at all. Everything he felt, everything he’d ever seen, was there to be read.

After another few moments Sacchetto continued his story. “Somehow-maybe it was fear or adrenaline or maybe we’d gone completely crazy-we kept running. Four or five miles on the other side of the vineyard, we found a cottage. Pretty little place tucked into the woods. We managed to get the pregnant woman into it, and we locked the door, closed the shutters, and pushed all the furniture against any opening where the dead could get in. There was food and water and a TV and a laptop. The owners were nowhere around. While the others helped the woman settle down on the couch, I turned on the TV, but all we got was a ‘please stand by’ message from the Emergency Broadcast System. So I turned on the computer and skimmed the news. The Internet was still up. Do you know about the Internet?”

“Yeah. They cram all that old-world stuff into our heads at school.”

Sacchetto nodded. “Well, I was able to access news feeds from all over the world. By then it was everywhere. I mean, everywhere. Europe, Asia, Africa. Cities were in flames. Some areas had gone completely dark. The military was in the field, and the authorities were saying they were making headway, pushing back the dead, stopping their advance.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was even true at the time. My cell phone was back at the police station, but I sent e-mails to everyone I knew. I didn’t get very many replies. Those that did get back to me said that it wasn’t happening where they were, but as the day went on, they stopped replying to my e-mails. The situation kept getting worse and worse, until it was spinning completely out of control. The news reports were all mixed up, too. Some of them said that the dead were moving fast, some said that they couldn’t be killed, even with head shots. One reporter, a guy who was a really well-known news anchor from New York, reported that his own family had been slaughtered, and then he shot himself right on camera.”

“God…,” Benny said breathlessly.

The artist snorted. “I was never much of a believer, kid, but if there ever was a God, then He wasn’t on the clock that night. That’s something you can debate at Sunday school. For my part, I don’t see much evidence of any divine hand in what happened.”

“What happened then?” asked Benny.

Sacchetto took a breath. “I stayed glued to the Internet all day, mostly watching news feeds of these huge battles in New York and Philadelphia, in Chicago and San Francisco. And overseas. London, Manchester, Paris. Everywhere. One field reporter, a woman who was braver and crazier than I ever was, got all the way into Washington DC when the Air Force tried to reclaim the city. Jets were laying down napalm, and I saw whole masses of zombies burning on the lawn in front of the White House. They were still walking toward the troops who were making a stand on the other side of the Mall, but they burned as they did so, dropping to the ground as their tendons melted. Crawling until the fire destroyed too much of their muscles, or maybe till it boiled their brains. Wave after wave of helicopters fired on them. The helicopters hovered ten feet above their heads and used machine guns. Miniguns, I think they’re called. Firing hundreds of rounds per minute, tearing the zombies to pieces. I guess if you went by that footage, then it looked like we were winning. But I sat at that computer for more than twenty hours, and one by one the news feeds went offline. Then the power went out, and we got no news after that. The TV… It never came back on, so when we lost power, it was useless anyway.”

Even though Sacchetto spoke of places Benny had never seen and technology that no longer existed, the images of carnage and desperation filled Benny’s mind. When they were out in the Ruin, Tom had reminded him that there had been more than three hundred million people living in the United States on First Night. The thought of all those people, fighting and dying in just a few days… It made Benny feel sick and small.

“What about the pregnant lady?” he asked after a long silence.

“Yeah… well, that’s the real story. That’s the story you want to hear.”

“What do you mean?”

“That woman… She gave birth that night. There was a daybed that we wheeled out into the living room, and made her as comfortable as possible, but we didn’t know what we were doing. I sure as hell didn’t. The others helped. I… Well, I just couldn’t. You’d think someone who was around blood all the time-sketching crime scenes and all-you’d think I could take the blood and mess from her giving birth. But I couldn’t. I’m not proud, and I don’t even understand that about myself… but there it is. I was still cruising the Net when I heard the baby cry. It was right about then-right after the baby started crying-that the first of the dead began pounding on the door.”

“The baby…?”

“It was a girl,” Sacchetto said, but he looked away. “We didn’t know the mother had been bitten.”

“God!” Benny’s mouth went dry, and when he tried to swallow, it felt like he had a throat full of broken glass. “The baby too? Was it a…” Benny couldn’t make his mouth shape the word.

But Sacchetto shook his head. “No. I know there have been a lot of stories about infected mothers giving birth to babies who were, um, monsters. But that’s not what happened.” He cleared his throat. “Years later, when I told this story to Doc Gurijala, he said that maybe the disease, or whatever it was, either couldn’t cross the placental wall or didn’t have time to do it. The woman must have been bitten when we were breaking through the crowds of zombies. None of us noticed.”

“What happened?”

“Well, the infection had already taken hold. We missed it because she was already sweating and moaning from the hard delivery, and we still didn’t understand what we were up against. When they started cleaning her up, she just… died. She fell back against the bed and let out this long, sputtering exhale. It was horrible to hear. It was a series of clicks in the throat as that last breath came out of her. They call that sound a death rattle, but that’s too ordinary a phrase for the sound that I heard. It sounded more like fingernails scraping on a hardwood floor, like her spirit was clawing at life, trying to stay in her body.”

Benny felt the skin of his arms rise with ripples of goose flesh.

“By that time I’d seen hundreds of people die and had seen thousands of zombies… but that death was the worst,” said the artist. “And after all these years it’s still the worst. That poor woman had fought her way out of Los Angeles, had saved her daughter and struggled to survive long enough to bring her baby into the world, and when she’d succeeded-when she was safe-death just dragged her away.”

He abruptly stood and walked over to the counter, snatched up the bottle, and stared at it. He set it down again, thumping the heavy glass against the countertop.

“That baby?” Benny asked tentatively. “Did she live? And… is she the girl on the card? Is she the Lost Girl?”

Sacchetto turned, surprised. “No. She was too young. She’d be only fourteen now.”

“Then I don’t understand…”

“It was her sister,” said the artist. “The little girl who was on the run with her mother. Lilah.”

“Lilah,” Benny echoed. The name was a cool breeze in the middle of the heat of Sacchetto’s terrible story.

“She watched her sister being born, and she watched her mother die. Poor little kid. She was only two, so all the screaming and the blood must have hit her really hard. Before, while we were still running, while I was carrying her, she was talking. Some words, but mostly nonsense stuff. Kid stuff. After that last breath… the little girl screamed for five minutes. She screamed herself raw, and then she stopped talking.”

“For how long?”

The artist looked away again.

“I don’t know. The rest of that night is kind of a blur. The dead surrounded the place. I think they were drawn to the cottage because of the screams. And after… by the smell of blood.”

“What happened to the mother?”

Sacchetto still didn’t meet his eyes. “She woke up, of course. She woke up, and for an insane moment we thought that she was still alive, you know? That she hadn’t died, that we were wrong about it.” He laughed a short, ugly laugh. “She bit one of the men. He was bent forward, trying to talk to her, trying to reach her… and she craned her neck forward and bit him. Then we knew.”

“What did you do?”

“What we had to do.” He came slowly back to the table and sat down. “We still had our weapons. The sticks, the rocks, the empty guns. We…”

He could not say it, and Benny did not need it said. They sat together for a while, listening to the wind-up clock on the wall chip seconds off the day.

“Near dawn,” the artist said at length, “one of the others said that he was going to try and make a break for it. He said that the creatures outside were slow and stupid. He was a big guy, he’d played football in high school and was in really good shape. He said that he was going to break through their lines and find some help. Everyone tried to talk him out of it, but not as hard as we could have. It was the only plan anyone had. In the end, we all went to the living room and banged on the doors and walls, yelling real loud. The zombies came shuffling from all sides of the house. I don’t know how many. Fifty? A hundred? When the back was mostly clear, the young guy went out through the back door at a dead run. He was fast, too. I closed the door and looked through the crack and watched him in the light of the false dawn as he knocked the zombies away and rushed into the darkness.”

“What happened to him?”

“What do you think?” Sacchetto snapped, then softened his tone. “There was nowhere to run to. We never saw him again.”

“Oh.”

“It was almost a full day later when another one of us tried it. A small guy who used to manage a Starbucks in Burbank. He made a torch out of a table leg and some sheets that he’d soaked in alcohol. He didn’t run fast enough, though. And that myth about the zombies being afraid of fire? That’s stupid. They can’t think or feel. They’re not afraid of anything. They surrounded him. Before he fell, the little guy must have set fire to a dozen of them. But the others got him.”

Benny looked down at the card that lay on the table before him. “You said that seven of you made it to the cottage.”

“Six adults, plus the little girl. And the baby made eight. The mother… died. So did the guy she bit. And you know what’s really sad? I never learned either of their names. The little girl only knew her mother as ‘Mama.’ We couldn’t even respect their deaths with their names. Maybe that doesn’t seem important, but it mattered to us. To me.”

“No,” said Benny, remembering Tom reading the note to Harold Simmons. “I get it. It matters.”

Sacchetto nodded. “So that left two of us. Me and last guy-a shoe salesman named George-played rock-paper-scissors to see who’d try next. Imagine that: two grown men playing a kids’ game during the apocalypse to decide which one was probably going to live and which one was almost certainly going to die. It’s comedy.”

“But it’s not funny,” said Benny.

“No,” said the artist. “No, it sure as hell isn’t. Mostly because neither of us really thought we were going to live. We just didn’t want to be the next to die.”

“You won?”

“No,” he said. “I lost. I was the one who had to try. George stayed back there with the two kids. I tore up a throw rug and wrapped strips of it around my arms, and put on a thick winter coat I found in the closet. When I told Tom all this, he joked that maybe I invented carpet coats. Whatever. I wound five scarves around my face. All I left free were my legs. I found a bag of golf clubs in a closet and took two metal putters, one for each hand. George went through the same ritual, banging on the front door. Zombies are as dumb as they are dangerous. They came lumbering around to the front of the house, and I went out the back. I heard the baby crying and George yelling, but I didn’t look back. I ran. Kid… I ran for my life, and that’s what chews me up every day and night since.”

“I don’t understand.”

The artist gave him a bleak smile. “I ran for my life. Not theirs. Not for George or the little kid or the baby. I ran to save my own sorry ass. I ran and ran and ran. On good nights, when I can find a little scrap of self-respect, I tell myself that I ran so far because I couldn’t find anyone alive, closer to the cottage, but that’s not entirely true. At least, I don’t know if it’s true. I saw smoke a couple of times, and I heard gunfire. I could have gone there and maybe found some people who were still alive and fighting, but I was too scared. If there was gunfire, then they had to be firing at the zombies, and that scared me too much. I was crying and talking to myself as I ran, making up lies to convince myself that the little kids back in the house were safe, that the hunters or soldiers or whoever was firing the guns would find them in time. I ran and ran and ran.”

He stopped and sighed again.

“At nights I slept in barns or in drainage ditches. I don’t know how many days I ran. Too many, I guess. Then one morning I heard voices, and when I crept out of my hiding place, I saw a party of armed men, walking down the road. More than sixty of them, with a couple of soldiers and a few cops leading the way. I rushed out at them, screaming incoherently. They nearly shot me, but I managed to get out a few words in time. They gathered around me, gave me some food and water, and grilled me on where I’d been and what I’d seen. I don’t think I made a whole lot of sense, but when I was finally able to get myself together enough to tell them about the cottage, I realized that I had no idea where it was. I wasn’t familiar with this part of California, and I sure as hell hadn’t paid attention to the crazy path I took. They had a map, and I tried to figure it out, but it was hopeless.”

“What happened?”

He shook his head. “They never found the cottage. Not while I was with them, anyway. A party of about a dozen went to look for it, but they never came back. The main group pushed on, and after a week of fighting and running, we found a reservoir with a high chain-link fence and mountains behind it. It was defensible, and it became a rallying point for survivors.”

“You mean here? That’s how this town was started?”

“Yes. I helped reinforce the fence and dig earthworks and build shelters. I worked as hard as I could each day, every day… And except for a couple of very short trips into the Ruin with Tom, I never left this town again. I don’t think I ever will.”

“What about the little girls? What about Lilah?”

Sacchetto sat back. “Well, kid, that’s where I left the story of the Lost Girl, and it’s where Tom entered it. You’re going to have to get the rest from him.”

Benny got up and fetched the coffeepot. He poured the artist a fresh cup and set the bottle of whiskey down next to it. The artist stared at the bottle for a while, then poured some into his coffee, sipped it, then got up and poured the coffee out in the sink.

“Thanks for telling me all this,” said Benny. “Most people don’t want to talk about First Night or what happened after. And those that do… They always make it sound like they were the heroes.”

“Yeah, I sure as hell didn’t do that.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Benny.

The artist sneered. “I ran away and left an infant and a little girl in a house surrounded by the living dead. I sure as hell didn’t do anything right.”

“Could you have carried them out? Both of them?”

Sacchetto gave a single wretched shake of his head.

Benny smiled at him. “Then at least you tried to do what you could do,” he said.

“Kid, I appreciate the effort, but that thought doesn’t even get me through the night.” He closed his eyes. “Not one single night.”

18

“TALK TO TOM,” SAID THE ARTIST AS HE WALKED BENNY TO THE DOOR. “If he’s willing to talk about it, then he can tell you the rest of it.”

“I will.”

“You never did tell me, though… What’s your interest? You don’t know her. What’s she to you?”

Benny was expecting the question but hoping it would slip by unasked. He shrugged. He took the card from his pocket and held it up so they could both look at the image. “It’s hard to put into words. I was sorting through the new cards with my crew, and I saw this one. There was something about it, something about her. I…” He stopped, fishing for the right words, but he came up empty. He shrugged.

However, Sacchetto surprised him by nodding. “No, I get it, kid. She kind of has that effect on people.”

Sacchetto opened the door to a bright spill of September sunlight. The light was clean and dry and seemed to belong to a totally different world than the one Sacchetto had talked about. They lingered in a moment of awkwardness, neither of them sure if this was the whole of their relationship or the first chapter of an acquaintanceship that might last for years.

“Sorry it didn’t work out with the job,” Sacchetto said with a crooked smile.

“Well, it’s not like I’m invested in killing zombies. If you’re hiring, I’m still avail-”

“No,” Sacchetto interrupted, “I mean, I’m sorry your art kinda sucks. You’re a nice kid. Easy to talk to. Easier to talk to than your brother.”

“My art sucks?”

“You can draw,” conceded the artist.

“I…”

“Just not very well.”

“Um… thanks?”

“Would you rather I lie to you, kid?”

“Probably.”

“Then you’re Rembrandt, and having you around would make me feel inferior.”

“Better.”

They grinned at each other. The artist held out a paint-stained hand, and Benny shook it. “I hope you find her.”

“I will,” said Benny.

That got a strange look from the artist, but before Benny could say anything, a voice behind them said, “Well, well, what’s that you got there?”

Benny knew the voice, and in the half second before he turned, he saw Sacchetto’s face tighten with fear. Benny turned to see Charlie Pink-eye, standing on the street right behind him. Next to him, smiling a greasy little smile, was the Motor City Hammer.

“Whatcha holding there, young Benjamin?” said Charlie with the slick civility he used when he was setting up a bad joke-or something worse.

Benny was suddenly aware of the card. It was small, but at that moment it felt as big as a poster. His hand trembled as if the card itself felt exposed and nervous.

The massive bounty hunter stepped closer, and his bulk blotted out the sun. It was weird. Benny liked Charlie and the Hammer. They were heroes to him. Or… had been. Since the Ruin, everything in his head was crooked, as if the furniture was the same but the room had changed. The way these men were smiling at him, the way shadows seemed to move behind their eyes… It made Benny want to gag. There was nowhere to turn, no way to escape the moment unless Benny actually took off running-but that was not any kind of option.

Charlie held out a hand for the card, but Benny’s fingers pressed together to hold it more tightly. It was not a deliberate act of defiance; even in the immediacy of the moment he knew that much. It was more an act of…

Of what?

Of protection?

Maybe. He just knew that he did not want Charlie Pink-eye to have that card.

“It’s just a card,” Sacchetto said. “Like the ones I did of you and the Hammer. I did a couple new ones. You know, for extra ration bucks. It’s nothing special.”

“Nothing special?” said Charlie, his smile as steady and false as the painted grin on a doll. “Let’s see, shall we?” Charlie reached for the card the same way Morgie had. Familiar, as if he had a right or an invitation born of a long-standing confidence. Benny was primed to react, and as the bounty hunter’s fingers closed over a corner of the card, Benny whipped it away. Charlie grabbed nothing but air.

“No!” blurted Benny, and he took a reflexive step backward, turning to shield the card with his body.

The moment-every sound, every trembling leaf in the trees beside the house, even the wind itself-seemed to suddenly freeze in time. Charlie’s eyes went wide. The Hammer and the artist wore identical expressions of complete surprise. Benny felt the blood in his veins turn to icy gutter water.

“Boy,” said Charlie in a quiet voice that no longer held the lie of humor or civility, “I think you just made a mistake. I’ll give you one second to make it right and then we can be friends again. Hand me that card, and you’d better smile and say ‘sir’ when you do.”

Charlie did not make another grab, but the threat behind his words filled the whole street.

Benny didn’t move. He held the card down by his hip and out of sight. He flicked a glance at Sacchetto, but the Hammer was up in the artist’s face, and he had his hand resting on the top of the black pipe he carried as a club. There was no help there.

“Now,” commanded Charlie. He held out a huge, callused hand, palm open and flat to receive the card. A stiff breeze filled with heat and blowing sand suddenly whipped out of the west. The card fluttered between Benny’s fingers.

“Give him the card, Benny,” urged Sacchetto.

“Listen to the man,” agreed the Hammer, laying a hand on the artist’s shoulder. The tips of his fingers dug wrinkled pits through the fabric of Sacchetto’s shirt.

Charlie stretched his hand out until his fingers were an inch from Benny’s face. The bounty hunter’s skin smelled like gunpowder, urine, and tobacco.

“Boy,” Charlie whispered.

Benny raised the card. He did it slowly, holding it between thumb and forefinger, and all four of them watched it flutter like the wing of a trapped and terrified butterfly.

“Give me the card,” said Charlie in a voice as soft as the blowing wind.

“No,” said Benny, and he opened his fingers. The hot breeze whipped it away.

The artist gasped. The Hammer cursed. Charlie Pink-eye snaked a hand after it, but the card tumbled away from his scrabbling fingers. Benny almost cried out as the small rectangle of stiff cardboard and printer’s ink tumbled over and over, bobbing like a living thing on the wind. It struck the sign at the corner of the artist’s property and dropped to the street where it skittered for a dozen yards before it came to a sudden stop as a booted toe stepped down on it, pinning it to the hard-packed dirt.

Benny, the artist, and the two bounty hunters had followed the card’s progress with their eyes, and now-as one-they raised their eyes to look at the man who now stood in the street. The man bent and plucked the card from beneath his toe. He studied it for a moment, then blew dust and sand from its surface. He glanced over the card, then at the four people clustered together in front of the artist’s door. He smiled and slid the card into his shirt pocket.

It was the first time Benny had ever been glad to see him.

“Tom,” Benny said.

19

TOM IMURA WAS DRESSED IN FADED BLUE JEANS AND A GREEN TRAVEL-stained safari shirt with a lot of pockets. He wore old boots, an ancient Pittsburgh Pirates ball cap, and a smile that was every bit as friendly and inviting as a pit viper’s. As he strolled slowly toward the front of the house, Charlie and the Hammer took small sideways steps to be clear of any obstructions. Both men wore knives on their belts. The Hammer had his black-pipe club, and Benny knew for certain that Charlie had a four-barreled derringer in his boot top.

“So,” said Tom amiably, “what are we doing today?”

The question sounded as ordinary as Nix asking if Benny wanted to go swimming or Chong suggesting they entertain the trout down at the stream.

“Just having a chat, Tom,” said the Hammer. “Ain’t nothing.”

“Happy to hear it, Marion.”

Benny gasped. No one ever called the Hammer by his birth name. There was a story Morgie liked to tell about how when the Hammer turned fourteen, he killed his father with a screwdriver for giving him that name. And yet the Hammer didn’t say a single word about it to Tom.

“You doing okay, Benny?” Tom asked.

Benny didn’t trust his voice, so he gave a short jerk of a nod.

“Rob?” Tom asked with an uptick of his chin.

The artist said, “Just a friendly chat. The boys were just passing the time of day.”

Tom stopped a yard away from Charlie. He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and looked up at the hard, blue dome of the sky.

“And it’s a hot one, ain’t it?” said Tom, squinting at a buzzard floating like a black kite, high in the sky. Without looking down he said, “I see they put the Lost Girl on a Zombie Card. How about that?”

“She ain’t none of your business, Tom,” said Charlie with quiet menace.

Tom nodded as if agreeing, but he said, “I seem to remember you telling folks that the Lost Girl was just a myth. Or was it that she was dead ten years ago and more?”

Charlie said nothing.

Tom finally lowered his eyes and turned toward Charlie. If there was anything to read in Tom’s face, Benny wasn’t able to see it.

“And then I see you getting all worked up over her picture on a kid’s trading card. What am I supposed to think about that?”

“Think what you like, Tom,” said Charlie.

“Yeah,” added the Hammer with a laugh. “It’s a free country.”

The bounty hunters laughed, and Tom laughed with them, sharing a joke that clearly no one found funny. Benny shifted uncomfortably and threw an inquiring look at Sacchetto, who returned the look with a shake of his head.

“Charlie, you and Marion wouldn’t be looking for the Lost Girl again, would you?”

“Can’t look for someone who’s dead,” said the Hammer.

“Seems to me that we do that all the time,” said Tom.

The Hammer colored, annoyed with himself for a foolish comment.

“The last time you were looking for her was after what happened up in the mountains. But you told me that it was all an accident. It made me wonder then, as it does now, if the Lost Girl might have seen something she shouldn’t have. Or some place she shouldn’t have…”

“There was nothing to see.” Charlie growled. “Like I told you a dozen times.”

Tom shrugged. “And yet you get all worked up over her card. Why is that? Are you afraid that now she’s on a card, everyone will know that she really exists? That maybe someone will go looking for her? Maybe… bring her back to town? Ask her about life out there in the Rot and Ruin? Maybe ask her about her sister? Ask her about Gameland?”

Benny frowned. What was Gameland?

“Gameland burned down,” said Charlie. “As you well know.”

“Me? What do I know? As you said, Gameland burned down. Nothing left but cold ashes and a few bones. No way to tell who the bones belonged to.”

Charlie said nothing.

“Wonder if anyone ever rebuilt it,” said Tom. “Oh… not where it used to be. But somewhere else. Somewhere secret. Somewhere that a wandering girl in the mountains might stumble upon.” His voice was quiet, his tone mild, as if he and Charlie were passing the time of day, talking about the price of corn. But Benny could see clouds forming on Charlie’s face, darkening his expression. Lightning flashed in the bright blue eye, and fire seemed to burn in the pink eye. Charlie took a step toward Tom.

“You keep making accusations like that, Tom, and we might have to have a talk.”

Tom smiled. “We are having a talk, Charlie. And I haven’t made a single accusation. I’m just wondering out loud about why a busy man like you would be afraid of what’s on a pasteboard card.”

Charlie took another step, and now his bulk blocked the sun and cast Tom completely in shadows.

“Don’t mess with me, Tom. You got lucky once. Luck don’t hold long these days.”

Tom’s smile never wavered. He took a single sideway step and looked around Charlie Matthias. “Benny, it’s past your time to come on home. We’re supposed to be training today.”

“Training?” said the Hammer. “You’re teaching this pup the hunt?”

Tom turned his smiling face to him, but he didn’t answer. Benny caught the quick sharp look that passed between the Hammer and Charlie.

Charlie edged another half step closer to Tom. He towered over Tom, but Benny’s brother didn’t back away and he didn’t take his hands out of his back pockets.

“It’s a risky business taking a young pup into the trade,” said Charlie.

“He’s of age,” said Tom. “Got to earn his rations, like everyone else.”

“Yeah… but he looks a little soft to me. The Ruin’s a dangerous place.”

“Benny’s already been to the Ruin, Charlie. He did just fine.”

Charlie’s own smile returned as he looked at Benny. “You been out in the great zombie wonderland, kid?”

When Benny said nothing, Tom surprised him by saying, “Answer the man, Benny.”

“Yes.”

“Be polite, Benny,” Tom chided.

“Yes… sir.”

Charlie nodded approval. “You got him trained good as a hunting dog.”

Benny held his ground. “He’s training me to be a hunter,” he said with a growl, “and we’re going to go find the Lost Girl and bring her back to town. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He didn’t know why he said it, and even as he said it he knew it wasn’t true, but he wanted to wipe the smirk off of Charlie’s face.

His words did just that. Charlie’s eyes hardened to stone, and he opened his mouth to say something. Tom put a hand on Benny’s shoulder. “We’ll be moving on home, fellas.”

He turned, pulling Benny gently, but before they went three steps, Charlie said something quietly to the Hammer, and they both laughed. It was a dark and ugly laugh, heavy and swollen with the promise of awful things. Benny tensed, wanting to turn, but Tom’s hand was like iron on his shoulder.

“Hey, Tom!” called Charlie, and Tom slowed and half turned to look back. “Best tell the pup to be real careful out in the Ruin. Lots of things out there will take a bite out of fresh meat like him. Everything out there wants to kill you.”

Tom stopped. He turned very slowly and looked at Charlie for several silent seconds, the smile still on his lips.

“That’s true, Charlie. Everything wants to kill you.”

Then he turned, patted Benny on the shoulder, and started walking. As Benny turned away from the tableau, he got a brief look at Charlie’s face. Did the big man’s smile flicker? Did his eyes show some emotion other than predatory confidence? Benny couldn’t be sure.

He and Tom walked in silence all the way home.

20

WHEN THEY REACHED THE GARDEN GATE, BENNY PUT HIS HAND ON THE latch but didn’t open it. He turned to his brother.

“Okay,” Benny demanded, “what was that all about?”

“It’s not about anything. Charlie and the Hammer like to turn dials on people. You can’t let them get under your skin.”

“What did you mean about the things the Lost Girl saw, about what she could tell people?”

“It’s a bad world, Benny” was all Tom would say.

“Then… what’s Gameland?”

It was clear Tom didn’t want to answer, but eventually he said, “It’s a place that shouldn’t exist. It’s an abomination.”

Benny had never heard Tom use a word like “abomination,” let alone load a word with as much contempt.

“It used to be an amusement park, a place where people would come for a day of innocent fun. It was closed down for a couple of years before First Night, but a few traders and bounty hunters found it and staked it out as theirs. Their version of it had nothing to do with family fun or innocence. Remember when I told you about how some of the bounty hunters have games where they put boys in pits with zoms?”

Benny nodded. He hadn’t believed Tom at the time and really hadn’t given it much thought since. Now the idea of boys being tossed into pits with only a stick with which to defend themselves against zoms was almost overwhelmingly horrific.

“They used to do that kind of stuff at Gameland, and other stuff that’s even worse. A lot worse. Bounty hunters, loners, and other people come from settlements all over this part of the state for these games. They bet on stuff like that. Z-Games they’re called.” He paused, and pain etched deep lines in his face. “When Nix was little and we had that really bad winter-you were six or seven-Charlie coerced Jessie Riley into going out to Gameland as a way of making enough ration dollars to feed her and Nix. Think about that, Benny. A grown woman, a mother, being forced to play ‘haunted house’-a sick game where they make her go through a building filled with zoms and only a sawed-off baseball bat or a piece of pipe to defend herself.”

“No,” Benny said. It was a straight-up denial, a statement that such a thing could not be the truth. That it could never have been the truth.

“She’d had a little kid at home, Nix. Jessie was desperate. She couldn’t let her daughter starve, and a parent will do anything to protect her child. Even if doing those things rips away a piece of her soul. I got her out of there,” Tom said, “but she was never quite the same afterward.”

“That’s impossible. I mean… how can that be legal?”

“‘Legal’?” Tom gave a bitter laugh. “There’s no law past the fence line. What’s done in the Ruin, stays in the Ruin. On the other hand… if it became commonly known what sort of things do actually happen out there, then I doubt anyone involved would be allowed in Mountainside. Or in any town. There may be no law beyond the fence, but letting criminals live next door… well, that’s another matter. But,” he said with a sigh, “so far no one’s been able to adequately prove a connection between Gameland and any of the bounty hunters who live here.”

Benny shook his head. The logic seemed twisted.

“A few years ago,” Tom continued, “someone set fire to the place and burned it down, and the owners moved the Z-Games to a new location. They keep its location secret. Gamblers and such are taken there in shrouded wagons, so that they don’t know where it is.”

“Why?”

“Because whoever burned it down might want to do it again.”

“Do you know who burned it?”

Tom didn’t answer. Instead he considered the sky. It was still blue, but a moist haze was forming. “It’s going to rain tonight. I don’t want to waste the rest of the day talking about stuff like that.”

“Like what? You’re not telling me anything. Did the Lost Girl see something? And could she really say something against Charlie?”

“Ben, you’re asking questions I don’t know the answers to. Could she have seen something or know something? Maybe. Probably. What matters is that Charlie seems to think so. That’s why he started the rumors that she was just a ghost story or that she died a long time ago. He can’t find her, and he doesn’t want anyone else looking.”

“So he had nothing to do with her picture being on the card?”

“Not a chance. Having people think she was real and having a picture of her to help identify her if she was ever found… Those are the last things Charlie would want.” Tom paused. “Charlie isn’t a good person, kiddo, and he’s not a forgiving one. Like most people of his kind, he’s motivated by fear.”

“Fear? What could Charlie be afraid of?”

Tom said, “The truth. A lot of people are afraid of that.”

Benny nodded even though he didn’t fully understand what Tom meant.

“Can I have my card back?”

Tom took the card from his shirt pocket and studied it for a moment, then handed the card to Benny. “I can’t say I’m happy to find out that Rob sold this to the printers. I asked him not to. Stirring up trouble with Charlie isn’t the smartest move.”

Benny smoothed the card against his shirt front. “Why do you think Mr. Sacchetto painted the Lost Girl card after you asked him not to?”

“People do stupid things when they need money.”

“He doesn’t look broke.”

“He’s not, but for most people there’s never enough money.”

“Is this going to cause a lot of trouble?” Benny asked.

Tom looked back the way they’d come. “I hope not, but…” He let the rest of his sentence hang.

“Mr. Sacchetto said that you saw the Lost Girl a couple of months ago, but he said I had to ask you to tell me about her.”

The trees around them were filled with birdsong, and cicadas droned incessantly in the tall grass. Tom leaned his forearms on the fence and sighed.

“We haven’t really talked much since we got back,” he said. “I know that what we saw hit you pretty hard. I know that our relationship has changed a bit. As brothers, I mean.”

After a slight pause, Benny nodded.

“So here’s the problem, kiddo,” said Tom, “and maybe you can help me sort it out. I’m not entirely sure who you are. I mean, you’re not really a kid anymore, and you’re not an adult. You’re not the annoying brat I’ve been living with for the last fourteen years.”

“Eat me,” said Benny with a grin.

“Zombies wouldn’t eat you. They have standards.” Tom pushed himself off the fence. “So, you’re going through all these changes, and I don’t know who you’ll be at the end of it.”

“How’s this all going to lead into you telling me about the Lost Girl?”

“That’s the problem. Last time I checked, you thought Charlie Pink-eye was-and I quote-‘The Man.’ The Hammer too. But a few minutes ago I saw you holding your own against Charlie. That didn’t look like a friendly chat, but if there’s even the slightest chance you’re going to share a single word of this with Charlie or the Hammer, then I can’t and won’t say a single word about Lilah. On the other hand, if I thought that I could trust you-completely and without reservation-then I might consider telling you the whole story.”

“You can-,” Benny began, but Tom stopped him with a raised finger.

“I don’t want an answer right now, Benny. I want us to do our training session and then we’ll have some dinner. We’ll talk after.”

“Why not now?”

“Because you want it too much now.”

“Great time to go Zen on me.”

Tom shrugged. “If I have to get to know who you are, you have to get to know who I am. Fair’s fair.” He opened the gate. “Let’s go.”

Benny stood outside the gate, drumming his fingers on the wooden top rail. He didn’t understand Tom at the best of times, and for a few seconds he felt like he’d just missed the punchline of a joke. He looked down at the card, as if the Lost Girl could whisper some explanation to him.

“Honestly… is it just me or is Tom crazy?”

The Lost Girl’s eyes held infinite answers, but he couldn’t hear a word. He sighed, tucked the card into his pocket, and headed into the house.

Fifteen minutes later Tom tried to kill Benny with a sword.

21

BENNY TWISTED OUT OF THE WAY OF THE SWORD WITH MAYBE A MICRON to spare. He could feel the blade slice the air; he heard the swoosh of the wind. Benny threw himself to one side and tried to roll behind the picnic table, but Tom was as nimble as an ape. He leaped onto the tabletop, dropped quickly into a crouch, and as Benny came out of his roll and started to rise, Tom stopped him with the edge of his weapon across Benny’s windpipe.

“You’re dead.”

Benny put a finger against the blunt edge of the wooden practice sword and pushed it away.

“You cheated.”

Tom lowered his sword. “How do you figure that?”

“I dropped my sword,” Benny said. “I told you to give me a second.”

“Oh, please. Like anyone out in the Ruin is going to cut you any slack.”

“Zoms don’t carry swords.”

“That’s hardly the point.”

“And, as far as I know, none of the other bounty hunters do either.”

Tom picked up a towel and wiped sweat from his face. “Now you’re lying to save face. You saw one of them use a sword when we were out in the-”

“Okay, okay, whatever. Let me catch my breath.” Benny dropped his wooden sword and trudged over to the pitcher of iced tea and drank two cupfuls. “Besides,” he said, turning back, “I’d rather learn how to use a gun.”

“You already know how to shoot.”

“Not like you.” He almost said “not like Charlie,” but caught himself. Last year Charlie had given a demonstration of pistol and rifle trick shooting at the harvest fair. Tom had watched the whole thing with narrowed eyes and a wooden face. Thinking back on that, Benny wondered if Tom was anywhere near as good as Charlie with a gun. He’d had never seen his brother shoot.

Tom didn’t reply. He weighed the wooden bokken in his hand and cut a few slow-motion lines through the air.

“Will you teach me to shoot?”

“Eventually, sure,” said Tom. “Though… you know enough now to stop one of the dead if you get into trouble. But I already told you that I prefer swords and knives. They’re quieter and they-”

“Don’t need to be reloaded,” Benny interrupted. “Yeah, I remember. You’ve told me fifteen times. You also said that sometimes quiet doesn’t matter.”

“True, but there are a lot more times when it does.” Tom hooked the tip of his sword under Benny’s and flipped it up so that it tumbled over and over in the air. It came at Benny faster than expected, and he surprised himself by getting a hand up in time to catch it. Tom grinned. “At least your reflexes are good.”

“Hooray for me.”

Tom raised his sword in a formal two-hand grip and waited until Benny finished making faces and did the same. Tom moved to his right, beginning a slow sideway circle, always keeping his sword ready. Benny shifted to his left, matching him.

“Quiz time,” said Tom.

“Do we have to?”

“No. You can quit and go shovel body parts into the pit. I’m easy.”

Benny didn’t voice the word that rose to his lips.

“Define ‘kenjutsu.’”

“It’s Japanese for ‘sword methods’ or ‘the way of the sword,’” Benny said in as bored a tone as he could manage. Tom darted forward a half step in a quick fake, and Benny stepped backward.

“What does ‘samurai’ mean?”

“‘To serve,’” said Benny. This time he tried the same fake, but instead of retreating, Tom stepped in, parried his blade, and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Blood is now pouring out of a hole where your arm used to be.”

“Yeah, yeah, and when I come back as a zom, I’m going to eat your brains.”

Tom laughed and swung another cut, but Benny blocked it, and Benny blocked the next dozen attacks.

“You’re taking it easy on me,” Benny said.

“You have to work up to full speed.”

“I can handle it.”

“No, you can’t.”

“Yes, I can.”

“No, you-Oh, hell.” Tom moved forward and to one side, and just like that moment back in Harold Simmons’s house, Benny saw his brother’s body blur as Tom moved with incredible speed. His sword seemed to vanish, but then there was a loud TOK!, and Benny’s bokken was flying out of his hands and the world was tilting. Somehow the grass was under his back, and Tom was kneeling on him with his sword pressed into the soft flesh beneath Benny’s Adam’s apple.

“Okay,” Benny croaked. “Fair enough. I’m not ready. Get off my nads.”

Tom raised his knee. “Sorry. Meant to pin your hip.”

“You missed,” Benny said in a tiny voice. “Ow.”

“Really,” Tom said. “Sorry.”

He stepped away and let Benny climb to his feet.

“That was cool!”

Benny turned to see Morgie, Chong, and Nix grinning at him from the other side of the garden gate.

“Hit him again,” said Morgie.

“Yeah,” agreed Nix. She didn’t smile as broadly as Morgie, and there was an edge to her voice.

“Kneel on his nuts some more,” suggested Chong. “I don’t think that’s ever going to get old.”

Benny wheeled on Tom. “Why are they here?”

“Suffering is easier to endure when shared,” said Chong as he lifted the gate latch.

“What?”

“They’re here for lessons,” said Tom. “I invited them.”

“Why? And remember that you can’t defend yourself if I smother you in your sleep.”

“Actually, I can. And I lock my bedroom door,” Tom said over his shoulder as he knelt down by the ancient black canvas bag in which he kept his equipment. He removed three battered but serviceable bokken. “I figured you’d learn better in a class setting. You know… with your friends.”

Benny looked at his friends. Nix was staring acid death at him. Morgie had his hands cupped around his groin, pretending to scream in pain. Chong smiled thinly at him and drew a finger slowly across his throat.

“‘Friends’?” Benny echoed.

Three hours later the four of them stood on trembling legs. Sweat poured down their bodies. Their clothes were pasted to them, their hair hung in rat tails on their foreheads and the backs of their necks. Morgie could barely lift his wooden sword. Chong’s face had lost its smile a while back. Benny was wondering if it was okay to wish for a coronary. Only Nix looked relatively alert. She was as flushed and sweaty as the others, but her hands didn’t tremble as she raised her sword for the last drill.

Tom looked like he just got up from a long nap in a hammock under a shady tree.

“Okay,” Tom said. “Pair up. We’ll run through the same attack and defense we just did, but let’s see if we can take it up a notch. Don’t really try to hit one another, but make the attacks as real as you can safely manage.”

Morgie pushed Chong out of the line, and they settled into stances. Chong was only slightly better than Morgie. He was faster, but Morgie was light on his feet for a stocky kid; he was at least twice as strong as Chong.

That left Nix and Benny as partners. Benny had avoided this all afternoon, but Nix seemed to find the pair-up faintly amusing. They squared off, raising their swords in the ritual salute and settling into their stances.

Tom called, “Hajime!” (Japanese for “Begin!”), and Benny lunged forward to deliver his attack. Nix slapped his sword aside and rapped him hard on the head. Benny saw stars.

“No,” said Tom. “We’re trying not to make contact.”

“Oh,” said Nix distractedly. “Right.”

22

NIX AND BENNY SWUNG AND BLOCKED, STABBED AND EVADED AS THE afternoon sun baked their skin and boiled the sweat from their pores. When Tom finally found a sliver of compassion and ended the session, they dropped where they stood. Morgie lay like a beached starfish, arms and legs spread wide, mouth open. Chong crawled under the picnic table, curled into a fetal position, and appeared to pass out. Benny limped to the oak tree whose thick trunk anchored the whole yard, slid down with a thump, kicked off his shoes, and gasped like a trout.

“Here,” Nix said, and Benny pried one eye open to see her standing there with two tall glasses of cold water. She held one out to him.

Benny hesitated.

“It’s not poisoned,” she said, “and I didn’t spit in it.”

“Thanks.” He took the glass and drank half of it, then looked up again. Nix was still standing there. “Have a seat.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Sit down before you fall down.”

She lowered herself to the grass and sat cross-legged in the shade. Tom was in the house. The yard was still. Even the birds in the trees were too overheated to sing. There was a faint rumble of thunder way off to the west, but if there was a storm coming, then the clouds were still on the far side of the mountains.

They drank their water. Benny waved a fly away. The moment stretched.

“I’m sorry,” they both said at the same time. They blinked at each other, and they almost smiled.

“You first.” Again, both of them said it at the same moment.

Nix held up a hand. “Me first,” she said, but then she took a few seconds to get the words out. “Look… I’m sorry for being such a girl.”

“No-”

“Let me get it out,” she interrupted, “or I won’t be able to say it.”

“But-”

“Please.”

Benny gave in, nodded. Nix flicked a glance across the yard to where Morgie lay, apparently dead.

But when she spoke she didn’t say what Benny expected. “Morgie told me about the card you found. The Lost Girl. He said that the second you looked at it, there were little red hearts floating in the air around your head.”

“Morgie’s an idiot.” He said it as a joke, but in truth he wanted to go over and beat Morgie to death for opening his big, dumb mouth. Especially since the Lost Girl card was lying under his pillow at the moment, and he’d planned to leave it there when he went to bed tonight. His face was wet hot. He hoped she would think that it was still the postexercise flush, but he knew she was way too smart for that.

“Maybe,” she said, “but is he wrong?”

“How could anyone fall in love with someone on a Zombie Card?” he said with a laugh, but he was at least a full second late in getting the answer out, and he knew it.

“So… you’re not in love?” she said offhand, but Benny was already waiting for a snare, and he knew that this was it. That question had as much to do with Zombie Cards as their school textbooks on American history had to do with the world in which they lived. That question was a twisted path filled with thorns and bear traps, and he knew it.

Benny knew that he wasn’t the smartest of his friends, and when it came to perception he wasn’t usually the sharpest knife in the drawer. But he was a long way from stupid. He knew what was happening, and he knew that allowing it to go down that path would only do harm. Nix wanted him to say something about emotions, about love. She wanted him to open a door that would lead to a conversation that would really do neither of them any good. It was too soon to talk about why he hadn’t taken her hand; too soon to talk about what he really felt about her or if he felt anything at all. He didn’t know the answers to those questions himself, and he was afraid of what his mouth would say.

So, he turned to her and instead of saying anything, he simply looked at her. And let her look at him.

Heat lightning forked the sky above them.

“What?” she snapped, and then she heard the shrill sound of her own voice and the need threaded through it. Benny could see the awareness blossom in her eyes, and it was a shared experience, because she knew that he saw it. It was a sobering moment, and in a bizarre way Benny felt like it aged him. Matured him. Just a bit. Nix too; he was certain of it. Her green eyes lost some of their force, and her mouth softened for a second, as if her lips were going to tremble, and then her jaw tightened as she clamped her self-control into place. In an odd, distracted way Benny admired that. He loved that about her.

They sat there for a long time, their eyes shifting away and coming back, their mouths wanting to speak but uncertain what language was spoken in this strange new country.

“I-,” he began, but again she cut him off.

“So help me God, Benny, if you say ‘I’m sorry,’ I’ll kill you.”

She meant it. Even her freckles seemed to glow with dangerous heat. But at the end of her anger, there was the whisper of a smile that lifted the corners of her lips. Benny wished right then that things were different for them, that they had been given the chance to meet at this age rather than growing up together. It would make so many things easier.

He cleared his throat. “So… where does that leave us, Nix?”

“Where do you want it to leave us?”

“I want us to be friends. Always.”

“And are we friends?”

“You’re one of my best friends. You and Chong-you’re my family.”

“Me and Chong? What about Morgie?”

Benny shrugged. “He’s the family dog.”

Morgie raised his head at the sound of laughter. On the other side of the yard, in the shade of the big oak, Benny and Nix were howling with laughter.

“What the hell’s so funny?” he asked irritably.

Chong peered weakly out from under the picnic table. He saw the two of them laughing together, but he also saw that they were sitting apart. He sighed.

“I don’t like it,” growled Morgie. “That monkeybanger’s making a play for Nix.”

“Morgie,” Chong said.

“What?”

“Shut up.”

But Morgie was persistent. “What? You’re saying I don’t have anything to worry about?”

Chong considered. “Knowing you, your personal habits, your general hygiene, and your raw intelligence, I think you have a lot to worry about.”

“Hey!”

Chong grunted and closed his eyes.

Thunder rumbled again in the west.

After a while Nix took her journal out of her satchel, used a pocket knife to sharpen her pencil, and began writing. Benny watched her while pretending not to. He was particularly interested in the way her sweaty T-shirt molded to her when she stretched to grab the bag. And the way the sunlight brought out gold flecks in her green eyes. He banged his head against the rough bark of the tree. Twice. Hard.

What the hell is wrong with me? he wondered, and not for the first time.

Nix either didn’t notice him watching or-even at fourteen and three-quarters-was too practiced at being a young woman to allow anything to show on her face. She bent over the book and wrote for nearly twenty minutes, only pausing long enough to whittle a new point at the end of each full page.

When she stopped again to reach for the knife, Benny said, “Why do you write in that thing?”

“I’m writing a book,” she said, deftly shaving off a fleck of wood.

“About what? Love and bunnies? Do I get eaten by your attack bunnies?”

“Don’t tempt me. No, it’s not a novel. It’s nonfiction.” She blew on the sharpened pencil point. “About zombies.”

Benny laughed. “What, you want to kill zoms? I thought you guys were doing this sword stuff for fun.”

“I don’t particularly want to kill zoms,” she said. “But I do want to understand them.”

“What’s to understand?” Benny said, though even as he said it he knew it was a stupid thing to say. The real truth was, things had now changed between him and Nix, and he didn’t know the territory. It had a new feel to it, a new language, and he felt immensely awkward. He tried it again. “I mean… why?”

Instead of answering directly, Nix said, “Do you want to live in Mountainside your whole life?”

“Got to live somewhere,” he began, but he saw disappointment blossom in her eyes. Nix shook her head and bent over her book, pencil poised to pick up the thread of her argument. Before she’d finished half a paragraph, a ragged line of seagulls flew overhead, their stomachs as white as snow, their wings tipped with black. Nix nodded toward them. “They probably sleep on the coast, right by the ocean. According to the maps we’re less than two hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, but I’ve never seen it. No one our age has. The way things are going, no one will. It might as well be on another world.”

“Why do you want to see it?”

“Why don’t you?”

“I…” He knew he was on some dangerous ground here. There were all kinds of deadfalls and rabbit holes built into her question. He didn’t know where she was going with this, but he was smart enough to know he was about to put his foot somewhere that would hurt him. “I never really thought about it,” he said, and that was true enough. “Look, I kind of get your point. You’re frustrated because this town’s our world, it’s all we have. Okay. That sucks and I don’t like it either. But how are we going to change that by studying zoms?”

“Do you remember in history class when Mr. West-Mensch talked about war? He said that history shows that it’s easier to conquer than to control. What was the line Chong likes so much?”

“‘They won the war but lost the peace,’” Benny supplied. “But I forget which war Mr. West-Mensch was talking about.”

“He might as well have been talking about this one. The last one. First Night was like a sneak attack, followed by a systematic invasion. Like the Germans in the early part of the Second World War. We lost because we were totally unprepared for the attack, and by the time we understood the nature of the attackers, it was too late to organize a counterattack.”

“Are you quoting someone?”

“No. Why?”

“I don’t know… It just sounds pretty sophisticated.”

“For a girl?” The challenge was making her freckles glow again.

“No,” Benny said. “For someone younger than me. Or… even someone older than me.”

She ignored the implied compliment and went back to her point. “Right now we hold our own. We’re not losing the war anymore, because the enemy has reached the limits of how it can come at us. We build fences, and they can’t dismantle fences. We know that anyone who dies will come back as a zom, and so we have all these precautions around the sick and dying. We have guns and weapons, we have carpet coats, cadaverine. We have the beginnings of a whole new science of warfare against the enemy.”

“Okay. So?”

“So… we could take back whole sections of the country.”

Benny nodded. He told her about his brief conversations on this topic with Tom and Rob Sacchetto. Neither of those conversations had gone very deep, though; and neither of them had the passion in their voices that he heard in Nix’s.

“Out in the Pacific there are islands not that far off the coast. I read a book about them. Santa Cruz, San Miguel. Catalina. Some of them had only a few thousand people on them, and even if all of them are filled with zoms, we have enough people, enough weapons and know-how, to take them away from the zoms. Zoms can’t swim; they can’t use boats. We could take those islands. The book said that there’s farmland on several of them.”

“It would take years to do all that.”

“We have years. We have nothing but time, Benny. Years and years and forever, because that’s all we have left.”

“How’s all that better than what we have here? We have farmland that we don’t have to fight for.”

“Because out there on the islands, eventually there would be nothing left but people. Even if there was an outbreak where someone forgot to lock themselves in at night and zommed out, it wouldn’t lead to another First Night. Not anywhere close. Everyone knows the basics of how to control a zom. Everyone. We played games about it when we were in first grade. We’re a culture of zombie hunters, Benny, even if most of the people here don’t want to accept it, or pretend otherwise.”

Benny thought about that, tried to poke holes in it, but couldn’t.

“If there was nothing left but people,” Nix continued, “we wouldn’t have to live in fear all the time. There wouldn’t be any need for bounty hunters, either. It would be a real world again.” She looked toward the east, as if she could see the fence line from Benny’s backyard. “You see the fence as something keeping the zoms out. I don’t. I see it as the thing that pens us in. We’re trapped here. Trapped isn’t ‘alive.’ Trapped isn’t ‘safe.’ And it isn’t ‘free.’”

Benny looked at her, at the side of her face as she stared toward the unseen fence line. Nix was so pretty, so smart, so… everything. Open your mouth you idiot, he told himself. Just tell her.

“Nix,” he said softly, but he had no idea what he would say next.

“What?” She still stared to the east, watching as more gulls came from that direction and flew over them toward the unseen coastline behind them.

“I do want to see the ocean.”

Nix turned toward him.

He said, “The ocean, the islands to the west, or whatever’s on the other side of the Rot and Ruin to the east. Maybe what’s in another country. Whatever’s there, I want to see it. I don’t want to live my life in a chicken cage.” He took a breath, fishing for the right way to say it. “You’re right. If we don’t get out of this town, we’re going to die here. And I don’t mean just us. You and me. The caged birds. I mean all of us. Mountainside was how Tom and the other adults survived First Night. But now it’s-”

She finished it for him. “Now it’s a coffin. No room, no air, no future.”

“Yeah.”

Even though his inner voice screamed at him to say more, he couldn’t make his mouth form the words. He sat there, staring into her green eyes. After a long time Nix sighed. She touched his face. No more than a ghost-light brush of fingertips on his cheek.

“One of us is the stupidest person in the whole wide world, Benny Imura,” she said. Then she rose and went inside to wash up.

23

THE CLOUDS SWEPT OVER THE MOUNTAINS AND ACROSS THE VALLEY, blotting out the sun. Morgie, Chong, and Nix stayed for roasted corn and hamburgers that Tom made on a stone grill in the yard, but as the first fat raindrops splatted down, they bolted for home. The wind picked up, and the Imura brothers ran to close the shutters and button up the house. By the time they were done, lightning was flashing continuously, throwing weird shadows across the lawn and stabbing in through the slats of the shutters.

“This is going to be a bad one,” Tom said, sniffing the air.

Inside, they changed out of their workout clothes, washed, and shambled back into the kitchen in pajama bottoms and T-shirts. The temperature dropped like a rock, and Tom brewed a pot of strong black tea, flavored with fresh mint leaves. They drank it with honey-almond muffins Nix’s mother had sent over.

“How come Mrs. Riley sends us stuff so often?” Benny asked, halfway through his third muffin.

Tom gave an enigmatic little shrug. “She thinks she owes me, and this is how she repays the debt.”

“Does she owe you?”

“No. When a friend does a favor for a friend, it isn’t with the expectation of repayment.”

“What favor? Getting her out of Gameland?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tom said. “And it was a long time ago. But I think it makes Jessie feel better to send us what she can.”

Benny nodded, uncertain what to make of Tom’s answer. He nibbled the muffin. “She’s a pretty amazing baker.”

“She’s a pretty amazing woman,” said Tom.

Benny straightened. “Really?” he said with a grin.

“You can wipe that smile off your face right now, because Jessie and I are just friends. She’s one of the few people I really trust. And that is the end of that discussion.”

Benny grinned all the way through the rest of his muffin. Thunder slammed against the house-hard enough to rattle the teacups.

Tom left the room and came back with his boots, rain slicker, and his sword. The real one, not the wooden training bokken. He set them by the back door.

“What’s that for?”

“That last one sounded like a lightning strike. There are trees near the north wall of the fence.”

“Sure, but there’s a guard detail too.”

“Sure, but it’s always better to be prepared.”

As Tom sat down he spotted the object that Benny had placed in the center of the table. The Zombie Card with the picture of the wild and beautiful Lost Girl.

“Ah,” Tom said.

“Will you tell me about her?”

“Maybe. Will you answer my questions first?”

“About Charlie Matthias?”

“Yep.”

Benny sighed. “I guess.”

Tom stood up. “Good night, kiddo. Sleep tight.”

“Hey!”

Tom said, “‘I guess’ doesn’t sound like a show of trust. Either you will or you won’t.”

“You’re going to go all Zen on me again?”

“Yes,” Tom said. “I am. Now this time think it through and give me a straight answer.”

“Yes,” said Benny. “I’ll answer any question you want to ask, as long as you tell me about Lilah.”

“No reserves, no fake outs. Straight answers?”

“Yes. But I’m going to want the same.”

“Fair enough,” said Tom. “So I’ll get right to it. Do you trust Charlie Pink-eye?”

“After what happened today? No, not much.”

“How much is ‘not much’?”

“I don’t know, and that’s the truth. I like Charlie… or I used to, but today he really freaked me out. For a minute there, he looked like he was going to take that card from me. By any means necessary.”

“Do you think he would have hurt you?”

“To get the card?”

Tom nodded.

“That’s a weird question, because it’s only a card, you know? I mean… so what? It was only dumb luck that I even got it. It could have been Charlie’s own nephew, Zak, who bought that pack. Or one of the other kids that Charlie doesn’t know. It could have been Chong or Morgie. Or Nix.”

“Yeah, things happen in strange ways sometimes,” said Tom. He sipped his tea. “When you let go of the card, was that an accident or did you toss it to keep it away from him?”

“I dropped it.”

“Why? Why not show him the card? Why not give it to him?”

“It was mine.”

Tom shook his head. “No. You were willing to let it blow away in the wind instead of letting Charlie have it. That wasn’t about possession. So what was it about?”

“It’s hard to explain,” Benny said. “But when I first saw that card, when I saw her, I had this weird feeling that I knew her. Or… would know her. Does that make sense?”

“It’s a dark and stormy night, kiddo. Mystical seems kind of appropriate.” As if in agreement, another crack of thunder rattled the crockery in the cupboards and pulled groans from the timbers of the house. “Go on.”

“I don’t know. I felt like I needed to protect her.”

“From Charlie?”

“From everyone.”

Tom reached out and turned the card. The girl looked fierce, and the heap of zombie corpses behind her suggested that she was brutally tough. “She can take care of herself.”

“You say that like you know her,” Benny said. “I was square with you, now it’s your turn. Tell me about the Lost Girl. Tell me everything.”

“It’s not a nice story, Ben,” Tom said. “It’s sad and it’s scary and it’s full of bad things.”

Thunder punched the house over and over again.

“Like you said, this is the night for that kind of thing.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I guess it is.”

And he told his tale.

24

“I FIRST SAW THE LOST GIRL FIVE YEARS AGO,” TOM SAID. “ROB SACCHETTO told me his story, of course, but I didn’t make the connection between the little girl he left in the cottage and the wild girl I saw in the Ruin. It’s hard to believe they’re the same person. Did Rob tell you about the search for the cottage?”

Benny nodded.

“There was more than one search. The first was made by the group that split off from the main rescue party that settled this town. That team never made it to the cottage. No one knows where they ended up. Maybe they gave up the search and found some other place to live or-more likely-they ran into trouble and died out there. It’s odd… People talk about First Night as if it was just that one night, but when the dead rose, it took weeks for civilization to fall. There were lots of fights. Big ones with the military and smaller ones with families defending their homes, or people grouping together to defend their neighborhoods. In the end, though, we kind of lost the fight more than the dead won it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We let fear rule us and guide us, and that’s never the way to win. Never. A long time ago a great man once said that ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ That was never truer than during First Night. It was fear that caused people to panic and abandon defenses. It was fear that made them squabble instead of working together. It was fear that inspired them to take actions they would never have taken if they’d given it a minute’s more cool thought.”

“Like what?”

“Like dropping bombs on the cities. Nukes and regular bombs. A lot of the big cities were destroyed; all the people killed by shock or radiation sickness. Sure, some of the zoms were killed too, but those hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by the bombs came back as zoms. I remember one of the last news reports from Chicago, in which a reporter screamed and wept and prayed as she described waves of radioactive zombies crawling out of the ruins of the city. They were so hot with radiation that they were killing humans long before they made physical contact.” Tom shook his head. “It was fear that caused those bombs to be dropped.”

“That’s another thing they didn’t tell us in school.”

“They wouldn’t,” said Tom. “Trust me, though, fear is the code we live by here in town, and in the other towns scattered along this mountain range. I suspect that if there are other towns still surviving elsewhere in the country or the world, then fear is what they live by too.”

“Not everyone’s afraid, though…”

“No. You’re right… There are some people who don’t let fear rule their actions, and I suspect it’ll be your generation that turns things around. Most of the people my age or older are lost in fear, and they’ll never find their way back. But you and your friends, especially those young enough to not remember First Night… You’re the ones who will choose whether to live in fear or not.”

“Last week, when you said that people in town didn’t trust anything out in the Ruin, that they think everything’s diseased…”

Tom nodded. “You’re on the right track. We-our town-could reclaim most of central California. Not Los Angeles, of course; that’s lost for good. But we could retake hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland. We could reclaim whole towns. Like that town where Harold Simmons lived. Don’t you think three or four hundred armed people could retake that town?”

“We wouldn’t need anywhere near that many. Fifty people in carpet coats, with rifles, axes, and swords could do it. It isn’t a big town.”

“Right. And there are a dozen towns within a day’s walk from here. Hundreds just a few days away, with farmable land where we could grow more food than we could eat. No one would go hungry.”

Benny looked at the muffin he held between his fingers, and it struck him that if Nix and her mother were as poor as everyone said they were, then just the ingredients for the muffins must have cut into their own rations. He set the muffin down.

His brother leaned his forearms on the table and said quietly, “Let me tell you a secret, Benny. The first secret you and I will share, okay?”

Benny nodded.

“I’ll never let Jessie and Nix Riley go hungry. Haven’t you noticed that we don’t have meat on our table seven days a week, even though we can afford it?”

Another nod.

“That’s so there’s meat on their table. Nix doesn’t know, and you have to swear to me that you’ll never tell her.”

Benny tried to say the words, “I swear,” but his mouth was too dry to let the words out. Thunder punctuated his attempt, and Tom nodded, as if a deal had been struck.

When he could speak, Benny said, “I don’t get it. How can the town let anyone go hungry? I mean, we have the rationing system and all. Isn’t it supposed to provide-”

“Believe it or not, it was actually worse before First Night. There were hundreds of thousands of people without homes or food.”

“What, just living on the streets?” Benny laughed.

“Exactly. Homeless. Whole families. In every city in the country. I’ll bet they don’t teach that in school, either. The zombie uprising didn’t change everything.”

Benny shook his head, unable to grasp the concept. “You know how Nix is always writing in her diary?”

“Sure.”

“It’s not a diary. She’s collected everything she can about zoms. She has this idea about getting out of Mountainside.” He told Tom about the Pacific Islands and Nix’s practical dreams of reclaiming them and starting a new life without the constant threat of the living dead.

Tom listened very attentively to every word, nodding his approval. “Darn smart girl. You ever think of asking her out?”

“Don’t go there, Tom.”

“Oookay.” Tom sipped his tea. “As far as Nix’s idea… I did say that it would be your generation that would probably change things. A few of us-too very few of us, really-have been trying to make changes, to get the others to shake loose from the fear. Sadly, we haven’t had much luck. Over the last dozen years, Mountainside has settled into a pattern, and the only thing more powerful than fear is routine. Once people are in a rut, it’s sometimes the hardest thing in the world to get them out of it. They defend the routine, too. They say that it’s a simpler life, less stressful and complicated, more predictable. Some of them are getting nostalgic about it, they mythologize it, as if we’re living in the Old West, except with zombies instead of wild Indians.”

“That’s dumb,” Benny said.

“It’s fearful,” Tom corrected, “but it’s safe. At least they think it is. It allows them to think they know the whole size and shape of their world. Except for when you kids are talking, you almost never hear someone talk about the world that was. People don’t ask one another where they’re from. I mean, they kind of know, and certainly if you look around, Mountainside is a microcosm of global diversity. Doc Gurijala was born in northern India, Old Man Sanchez came here from Oaxaca in Mexico. The Mekong brothers are Vietnamese. Chong’s Chinese, our dad was Japanese. And yet as far as you could tell from conversations around town, we’re all ‘from Mountainside.’ End of story. The rest of the world no longer exists. Do you know why?”

“I think so,” said Benny. “If they talk about where they’re from, they have to talk about what happened. And… who they left behind.”

“Right. Fear fueled by grief.” Tom rubbed his face with his palms.

“What about the bounty hunters and… and what you do? People have to talk about the outside world for that.”

Tom nodded approval. “That’s true, and it’s a cultural quirk that surfaces once in a while, but once the closure is accomplished, then the client goes right back into their shell. There are plenty of people who were clients of mine in the past, who walk by me on the street without a flicker of recognition. Either they pretend to ignore me, so that they don’t have to think about the service I provided for them, or they truly have forgotten it, as if a door closed in their minds. I can count the number of former clients on the fingers of one hand who will even talk to me about the closure job I did for them.” He paused. “Jessie Riley is one of them.”

Benny’s teacup paused an inch from his lips. “What? Nix’s mom was a client of yours?”

“Yes. Years ago.”

“But… but Nix said that it was just her and her mom.”

“Nowadays, sure. But everyone has family somewhere, Ben. Nix had a father and two older brothers.”

“First Night?”

“First Night,” Tom agreed.

“God! Does Nix even know?”

“That’s hard to say. If Jessie told her, then either Nix has chosen not to say anything to her friends or she’s blocked it out like everyone else does.”

Benny shook his head. “Nix would have told me.”

“Are you sure?”

“She would have told me. Especially after I told her…”

Benny’s voice trailed off and Tom nodded. “After you told her about our trip to the Ruin?”

“Yes.”

“It’s up to her what she chooses to tell you, but as far as what I’m about to share, that’s confidential. Family business. You can’t tell her about this.”

“But-”

“We never break a client’s confidence. I need your word on this.”

Benny finished his tea as he thought it through. He didn’t want to agree, but he couldn’t construct a single reason why not.

“Yeah,” he said, “okay.”

“Good. Now we get to what you want to hear, because the story of Nix’s family is tied to the Lost Girl.”

“Wait!” said Benny, “In the story the artist guy told me, there was a woman who had a baby. Was that baby Nix?”

Tom sat back and cocked his head to one side. “How long ago was First Night?”

“Almost fourteen years ago and… oh. Right. Nix will be fifteen in a couple of months. Can’t be her.”

“My brother, the math genius.”

“Sorry.”

“There is a connection, though, but it’s not a blood link, not a family tie,” Tom said. “I was doing the closure job for Jessie Riley. Rob had done erosion portraits of Mike Riley and the boys, Greg and Danny, and Jessie said that when she fled her house, she’d slammed the door behind her. Very few zoms can turn doorknobs, and most of them don’t have the coordination to climb out of a window. So unless someone else opened the door, there was a good chance they’d still be there.”

“How long ago was this?”

“About five years ago. Remember the first time I left you with Fran and Randy Kirsch? I left on a Sunday, as I remember, heading northeast. There were a lot more zoms roaming free back then, and the farther I went from Mountainside, the more of them I saw. Most of them were singles, walking along, following some movement-a deer, a rabbit, whatever-but there were groups of them, too. Biggest group I saw was about fifty, standing in the middle of an intersection. Probably they’d come down different roads and met at the intersection and had nowhere else to go. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But that’s what happens if there’s nothing for them to hunt and nothing to attract them. They just stop.”

“What about the noms?”

“Good question and I don’t have a good answer. They’re different. The nomads keep wandering and never seem to stop, but they’re rare. Maybe one out of every couple thousand will roam.”

“I thought all zoms were the same,” said Benny, unnerved by Tom’s story.

“Not all of anything is the same. There are always differences, always changes.”

“Zombie evolution?” Benny joked, but Tom shrugged.

“Maybe. We don’t know.”

“How can we not know?”

“Benny… it’s not like anyone’s made a formal scientific study of zombies. Get real. Who would do that? How would they do it? Mind you, I think they should do it, but as I already said, the people around here don’t spend much active thought on what happens beyond the fence line. Any information on differences in zombies comes from the kind of people who go out into the Ruin. Bounty hunters, the way-station monks, the traders who go from town to town. A few others. And the loners.”

“Loners?”

“There are people who live out in the Ruin. They’re individuals who want to be alone and would rather deal with the threat of the zoms than rejoin society.”

“Why?”

“That’s hard to answer, because they’re not a ‘type,’ if you know what I mean. Each one of them has their own reasons. I know some of them. A few are friends. Some never make contact with anyone with a pulse.” He inhaled through his nose. “And a few of them are very bad people. I know of some that I wouldn’t come within fifty yards of without a weapon in my hand.”

“Why?”

“Because some of them will kill anyone they meet. Human or zom, they don’t care. They’ve staked out a spot, and I guess it’s their version of paradise, or maybe their corner of hell, and it’s more than your life’s worth to trespass.”

“How can you tell what are the no-trespass zones?”

“Smart question. The borders are usually marked. Staked out, so to speak. It’s very tribal. I know of a family, living high in the hills, who have driven a line of stakes into the ground all around their place and topped each stake with a head.”

“Human heads or zoms?”

“After the crows have been at them, it’s hard to say, but I wouldn’t want to bet a torn ration dollar that they only kill zoms.”

“Is that how the Lost Girl lives?”

Tom didn’t answer immediately, but instead shifted back to his narrative. “I kept moving, following an old travel map that Jessie had marked for me. By nightfall on the third day, I reached the town where the Rileys lived. The place had been hit hard by First Night and what happened after. There was a big road-an interstate highway that ran past it-and it was choked with rusted vehicles. Zoms had been smashed by cars and trucks; run over by people trying to flee or by people who were trying to kill zoms. Even after all that time, you could see where cars skidded away from an impact with a zom and went off the road, or collided with other cars. I guess once a few accidents blocked the road, the cars behind them got jammed up and then the zoms must have closed in and attacked. It was strange, too, because there were clear signs that some of the zoms used stones and heavy sticks to smash through the windows.”

“Zoms using tools?”

“Sounds weird, right? But I’ve seen it a couple of times. It’s another one of the variations, and I can’t explain it any more than I can explain why they don’t rot away completely.” Tom took a muffin and bit off a piece, chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then continued. “There were some military vehicles there, too, and I could tell there had been a huge battle. Everything had been chopped by heavy caliber rounds or blasted by grenades and rockets. Even with that there were very few bodies, of course, because the dead would have reanimated. That’s why we didn’t win the war. By the time the authorities realized that it was only damage to the motor cortex of the brain or to the brain stem that could permanently put them down, a lot of the combat units had been overwhelmed by zoms they’d hit with body shots. I saw a couple of those early fights, and I saw machine gunners emptying their weapons at the walking dead, chopping off arms and legs and tearing out huge chunks of hips and torsos, and the zoms just got back up and kept coming. Or they crawled toward the troops. I guess the soldiers permanently dropped half of the zoms they faced, but some of the dead got up three, four times, advancing a little closer each time until… well, you know. We lost. There were plenty of bones, though, skeletons from people that had been attacked by crowds of zombies and devoured, or from zoms that had been killed by head shots.”

“What about walkers?” Benny asked, referring to mobile zombies.

“Most of them must have followed survivors out of town. But… there were still plenty of zoms in town. As I walked along the streets I could see some inside of stores or houses. I counted about twenty of them that had fallen into empty swimming pools and couldn’t climb out. Plus there were a lot of them stuck inside of cars. A few banged against the glass as I passed, but they couldn’t do anything to me… though I moved away fast, so the noise didn’t attract the walkers. The worst, though, were zoms who were trapped under the wheels of cars, their legs or hips crushed, so that they were alive from the waist up but stuck there forever.”

“God…,” Benny said. “Did you find the Rileys?”

“Sure. They were in their house, just like Jessie said they were. Front and back doors were closed. The family had owned a couple of big dogs-two German shepherds-and there’d been a terrible fight in the living room. The Rileys must have turned on the animals, and the dogs fought like dogs will. They had old bites all over them. The father was missing his hands, and the oldest son, Danny, had almost no throat left. The dogs made a fight of it, but…” He left the rest unsaid. “Because of the damage, the zoms were very weak. I tied them up and quieted them without a fuss. I was in and out in twenty minutes.”

“Did you have to read a letter? From Nix’s mom?”

“Yes. She wrote a long letter. It was very…” Tom stopped, shook his head. “Jessie really loved her husband and sons. The letter was almost too hard to read, you know? By the time I was finished, I was telling myself that I was done, that I would never-could never-do that sort of thing again.”

“But you still do.”

“I still do.”

“Do you like this stuff?”

Tom winced. “‘Like’? Only a psychopath would like to do what I do.”

“So why do it?”

“Because it needs being done. Someone has to-someone will-and if I don’t, then the people who do won’t necessarily bring any compassion to it. You’ve seen that. I’ve seen a whole lot of it. Way too much.”

There was a burst of lightning and an immediate crack of thunder so loud that Benny jumped. Tom got up and peered through the slats in the shutters. “That was definitely a hit, but it was in town.”

“Do you need to go out?”

“No,” Tom said as he returned to the table. “Not unless I’m called. Where were we?”

“You finished the job at the Riley house.”

“Right. I headed out of town as fast as I could. I was pretty upset-not quite the stoic your big brother has become, I guess-and I needed some time to sort things out, to make some decisions about my life. About our lives, really. I took a different route back, sticking more to the high ground, because there are fewer zoms up there.”

“How come?”

“It’s a gravity thing. Unless a zom is following prey, if it’s walking, it’ll follow the path of least resistance. They don’t walk well, as you know. It’s more of a stagger, like they’re constantly falling forward and catching themselves with their next step. So if there’s any kind of slant to the ground, they’ll naturally follow it. In the Ruin we have to be careful in valleys and downlands. You’re ten times more likely to see a zom on the lowlands than in the hills, so I went high, almost to the snow line. I camped out in a barn one night and in the cab of an eighteen-wheel truck the next. Funny thing… The truck had been hauling a load of microwave ovens. Scavengers had torn through the boxes; the road was littered with ovens someone had smashed. Definitely humans at work there, because zoms wouldn’t be attracted to that kind of cargo.”

“What are microwave ovens?”

“Ovens that run on electricity,” Tom said. “Something I hope you’ll actually get to use one day if people can shake off the superstitious nonsense they’ve associated with electricity. Now, listen close, because this is where the story takes a turn.”

He and Benny both leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands curled around fresh cups of tea.

“That morning, after I left the truck, I found a dead zom in the middle of the road. Nothing too surprising about that, but it was the way it had been killed that intrigued me. Someone had come up on the zom from behind and slashed the back of one knee and the ankle of the other leg. Crude cuts, but effective. Took out the tendons and brought the zom down, and once it was down, they drove a knife into the back of its skull. As I said, this wasn’t a skillful job, but it was smart. An hour later I found another one, and then another. By the end of that day, I’d found eighteen zoms killed the same way. Some of the kills were weeks old, a couple were very fresh, but the method was always the same. Tendon cuts from behind and then the knife in the back of the skull. After about the fifth or sixth kill, I was pretty sure I knew something about this particular zombie hunter. Everyone who works out in the Ruin, anyone who kills on a regular basis, develops a style. They find a method that works for them, a way to get the job done easiest and with the least amount of risk, and they stick to it. After all, it’s not like the zoms can become aware of how hunters work, and change their tactics.”

“So… who was doing this?”

“Ah,” said Tom, “you just sailed past an obvious question.”

“What?”

“Think about it.”

Benny did, and then he got it. “Wait… you said that there weren’t many zoms in the high country, but you found a whole bunch of dead ones. So, why were there so many up there?”

“Right. That had been worrying me all day. At first I thought there was a community up there that had been overrun. If that was the case, I could be walking into real trouble. But then something occurred to me. When I thought back to each of the zoms that this particular hunter had killed, I realized they were all very similar. They were all men. Adult men, all over thirty, all fairly big-or as big as a desiccated zom can be.”

“Were they from a team or something? Or guys from an army base?”

“Good guesses, kiddo, but no. I went back to the most recent kills and followed their trails, backtracking them down to the lowlands. One was from a farm, the other from a service station. I climbed back into the hills and found another kill. A fairly fresh one, blood all over the place.”

“Blood?” Benny said. “Zoms don’t bleed.”

“No, they don’t,” Tom agreed. “Now how about that?”

“This was a murdered person?”

“It was a dead person. ‘Murder’ is a relative term.”

“Then I don’t get it. I can see where you’re going with this. These are kills the Lost Girl made, right? I mean, that’s the surprise twist in your story.”

“It’s not a twist. You asked me to tell you about her, so there’s no surprise. What I’m doing, little brother, is giving it to you as close as I can to the way I came into it. Laying out the evidence.” Tom grinned. “Remember, I was in the police academy before First Night. I was studying to be a cop. Granted, I never spent time on the street, but I learned the basics of investigation and something about psychological profiling. When I bedded down that night, I looked at the evidence I had and made some basic deductions. Not assumptions, mind you. Do you know the difference?”

“One’s based on evidence and the other’s based on guesswork,” Benny said. “We had the whole ‘when you assume you make an ass out of you and me’ speech in school.”

“Okay, so make some deductions.”

“Aside from the fact that this was the Lost Girl?”

“That’s guesswork because I was telling her story.”

“Okay. Well, describe the man she killed. The human, I mean.”

“Not as big as the dead zoms, but sturdy.”

“Was he a farmer or something?”

“No. From his weapons and equipment, it seemed pretty clear that he was a bounty hunter.”

Benny sat back and thought about it, and Tom let him. The more he thought about it, the less he liked what he was thinking.

“She’d have been, what… eleven, twelve?”

“About that.”

“And she was only killing men?”

“Yes.” Tom was no longer smiling.

“Men who kind of fit a ‘type’?”

“Yes.”

Benny stared at Tom’s hard, dark eyes for as long as he could. Thunder beat furiously on the walls.

“God,” he said. “What did they do to her out there?”

But he already knew the answer, and it hurt his heart to know it. He thought of what Tom had said, of the fighting pits at Gameland, and tried to imagine a young girl down in the dark, armed with only a knife or a stick, the dead gray hands reaching for her. Even if she survived it, she would have scars cut deep into her mind. Benny and Tom sat together and listened to the storm punish the town.

“There’s more to the story,” said Tom. “A lot more.”

But he never got to tell it. Not that night, anyway. A moment later there was a flash of lightning so long and bright that even through the shutters, it lit the whole kitchen to an unnatural whiteness, and immediately there was a crack of thunder that was the loudest sound Benny had ever heard.

And then the screaming began.

25

TOM WAS UP, AND HAD THE BACK DOOR OPEN BEFORE BENNY WAS EVEN out of his chair.

“What is it?” Benny asked.

Tom didn’t answer. The wind whipped the door inward toward him, driving him back a step. Even over the roar of the storm, they could hear people yelling. There were more screams, and then a gunshot. A second later there were more shots.

“Stay here,” Tom ordered. “Close and bar the door!”

“I want to go with you!”

“No!” Tom growled. He grabbed his rain slicker and pulled it on, looped the strap of his sword over his shoulder, and ran barefoot into the black downpour. Benny came out onto the back porch, but Tom was already gone, swallowed whole by the wind and blowing rain. In less than five seconds he was soaked to the skin. Lightning flashed again and again, each burst punctuated by a huge boom, and Benny wondered if this was what it must have been like during the battles on First Night. Darkness, screams, and the bang and flash of artillery. He moved backward into the house and forced the door shut. The locks were strong, but he realized that Tom had no keys. All his brother wore under his slicker was an undershirt and pajama bottoms. He hadn’t even taken a gun.

Benny looked at the heavy piece of square-cut oak that stood beside the door. There were two iron sleeves bolted to the wall on either side of the frame. The bar slid through them and completely barricaded the entrance. Benny had seen Tom install it years ago, and the bolts went all the way through the wall into steel plates on the outside of the house.

“You’d have to knock down the whole wall to get through that,” Tom had said.

Benny picked up the bar and hefted it. It was heavy and dense. Twenty zoms couldn’t crack it. He fitted one end into the closest sleeve and began sliding it across the door.

Tom was out there with nothing but a sword. No shoes, no gun, no light. If a tree had fallen over and torn a hole in the fence, who knows how many zoms could be out there.

There were more shots, a whole barrage of them. Someone was yelling, but Benny couldn’t make out any words. The hammering of the rain was too insistent.

He chewed his lip, torn by indecision.

On one hand, Tom had told him to bar the door. On the other, the door was already locked, and zoms couldn’t pick a lock. All of the windows were shuttered, and the front door was as sturdy as this one. He was safe.

But what about Tom?

If there was a full scale invasion of the town, Tom might have to come running back here for shelter. It could come down to seconds. How long would it take Benny to get to the back door, push the heavy bar out of the sleeves, and unlock the locks? Ten seconds? Eight?

Too long.

He pulled the bar from the sleeve and set it back against the wall.

Tom’s guns were locked up, and Tom wore the key on a chain around his neck. If he busted open the locker and this turned out to be nothing, Tom would fry him.

On the other hand…

Doubt was a hungry thing that chewed at him.

Something hit the wall outside. Hard and sharp. It wasn’t rain. He listened, trying to remember exactly what he had heard, trying to listen the way Tom listened when they were out in the Ruin. Had it been an acorn blown out of the oak tree? No, they had a different, lighter sound. Whatever had hit the outside wall had hit fast and with a lot of power.

A bullet?

He was almost positive that’s what it had been.

He crouched low and put his ear to the corner of the kitchen window. There were more screams and a whole bunch of gunshots. Then he heard footsteps on the back porch and a second later, the doorknob turned. Benny twisted around to see out the window, but all he could see was a flap of something glistening.

A slicker.

The doorknob turned again and again.

Tom!

Benny shot to his feet and threw open the locks. God… please let Tom be okay, he thought as he undid the four heavy dead bolts. Benny yanked the door open.

Tom staggered inside. Head bowed, his rain slicker torn and hanging in shreds, dark hair dripping with water.

Benny backed away.

It wasn’t Tom.

It was Rob Sacchetto, the erosion artist.

He was a zombie.

26

THE CREATURE LIFTED ITS WHITE FACE TO BENNY AND OPENED ITS MOUTH. Blood ran over the artist’s broken teeth and dripped onto the front of the slicker.

“Mr. Sacchetto…?”

The zombie took a shambling step toward him, raising fingers that were bone white and looked strangely disjointed, as if all of the knuckles were broken. Benny was frozen in place. He had never known anyone who had become a zom-not since the disease had taken his mother from him. He and Chong and Nix had talked about it, wondered about it, even joked about it, but even to them, even in this world, it was slightly unreal. Zoms were out there, real life was here in town, and deep inside, in a flash of understanding, Benny realized he had been just as detached from the realities of the world as everyone else. Even with people talking about quieting a relative who’d died. Even with all of the incontrovertible evidence in his face every day, Benny realized he never quite equated zombies with people. Not even his trip into the Ruin had done that, not completely. But now, as this zombie-this person-reached for him, the horrible truth of it hit him with full force.

For a dreadful moment Benny was frozen to the spot and frozen into this state of awareness. The creature’s eyes met his, and for a moment-for the strangest, twisted fragment of a moment-Benny could swear that there was some splinter of recognition, that some piece of Sacchetto looked out in blind panic through the eyes of the dead thing that he had become.

“Mr. Sacchetto,” Benny said again, and this time his voice was full of cracks, ready to break.

The zom’s mouth moved, trying to form words, and against all evidence and sense, Benny hoped that somehow the artist was in there. That he had been able, through some unimaginable way, to fight the transition from man to monster. But all that came from the dead throat was a low moan that possessed no meaning other than that of a hunger it could never understand and never assuage.

It nearly broke Benny’s heart. To see the husk of the person and to know that what had made him human was… gone. Benny felt like his head would break if he tried to hold that truth inside.

The zom stepped toward Benny, reaching with its broken fingers, and still Benny was frozen into the moment, rooted to the rain-slick kitchen floor. It was only when the very tips of the zombie’s cold fingers brushed his cheek that Benny came alive again.

He screamed.

It was terror and it was rage. The terror was for what was reaching for him-this dead and shambling thing; and the rage was for what had been taken from him-a friend, a person he knew.

Benny backpedaled away from those clutching fingers, his feet slipping and sliding on the floor until his back struck the edge of the doorway that led to the middle room. The impact galvanized him, and he spun off the frame and bolted toward the living room. He crashed into a small table and then flung it behind him, not bothering to look as he heard it crack against the zom’s shins. The monster fell over it, and Benny heard the thump of kneecaps and elbows on the hardwood, but no cry of pain. Nothing normal like that.

He burst into the living room and dove for the bag of training equipment. The best weapons were in the kitchen-knives, hammers, a toolbox. He had the wooden swords. They would have to do. Benny pulled at the rough canvas, his fingers clumsily scrabbling at the zipper, pulling it down, half tearing one of his fingernails, cursing, not caring about the pain. The bag opened, and he reached inside just as Sacchetto lumbered into the living room. Benny flicked a glance at the front door. It was locked, and he knew that he would never get the locks opened before the creature could get him. It was the reverse of what he had imagined for Tom.

Fingers brushed his hair and tried to grab hold, but Benny threw himself over the couch, dragging the bag with him. The wooden swords spilled out with a clatter. He grabbed one and spun around on his knees as the zombie bent over the couch to grab at him.

Benny rammed the tip of the sword against the zom’s chest. The impact had all of his fear behind it, and it was harder than he expected, sending shock waves up his arms. He almost dropped the sword.

The zombie swiped at his face, and Benny could feel a fingernail slice him across the cheek, from ear to nose.

He shifted his grip on the bokken, holding it like a quarterstaff, and used the span between his clenched fists to drive into the zom’s shoulders, shoving it back and knocking it off balance. It was more powerful than he thought, and he realized that Sacchetto could only have been turned recently. Just before, or during, the storm. He wasn’t decayed, hadn’t lost his mass. Maybe hadn’t even lost all of his mind. Maybe that was why he could turn the doorknob. What had Tom said?

Very few zoms can turn doorknobs, and most of them don’t have the coordination to climb out of a window. Very few could. Not “none.” Maybe it was the recent dead who could do this.

The realization gave him clarity, but not one shred of comfort. It meant that Sacchetto was even more dangerous. Stronger, faster, maybe smarter than the image of a zom that Benny had in his mind.

The zom lurched toward him again and began clambering over the couch.

Benny jumped to his feet and backed away, and as he did so, he almost unconsciously took the handle of the wooden sword into the proper two-hand grip. Fists apart for leverage, raising the sword, elbows slightly bent.

The zom reached for him, trying to grab his wrist.

“I’m sorry,” Benny said.

And he brought the sword down on the top of the artist’s head.

The creature did not stop.

Benny hit him again and again.

And again.

His arms rose and fell, rose and fell, slamming the hard wood down on the zombie’s skull. Benny could hear screams as he struck. Not the zombie’s. They were his own.

“STOP!”

Tom’s shout cut through the air, and Benny froze in place, the wooden sword raised high, his hands slick with blood and brain matter. Benny turned his head to see Tom, standing in the doorway to the middle room. His brother was covered with blood and mud and rainwater; his steel katana was in one strong hand, a thick-bladed bayonet in the other.

“Benny,” Tom said, “it’s over. You won.” Tom laid the bayonet on a table and stepped close. He reached up to take hold of the bokken. “You did it, kiddo. You killed the monster.”

“‘Monster’?” Benny said in a soft and distant voice. He looked down at the shattered, lumpy mass that was all that was left of Sacchetto. It no longer looked human. It no longer looked like a zom. All it was now was dead meat and broken bones and stuff that glistened and dripped. Benny let Tom take the sword from his hands. In truth he could barely feel his hands. They were icy, detached, alien. Those hands had just done things that he could never have done. Benny looked numbly at them; at the bloody hands of a killer.

Benny suddenly turned and threw up into a potted plant. Tea and muffins and burgers. He wished he could vomit up the last few moments of his life, to expel these memories and experiences.

Tom stood apart, a sword in each hand, panting.

“Are you hurt, Benny?” he asked. “Did he…?”

“Bite me?” Benny wiped his mouth and shook his head. “No. He didn’t.”

Tom nodded slowly, but his eyes ranged up and down Benny, looking for injuries. The only injuries Benny had were a scratch on the cheek and a torn fingernail. However, Benny understood Tom’s caution, and he wondered what Tom would have done if he had been bitten.

Finally, Tom put down the wooden sword and used a cloth to wipe the gore from his katana.

“What happened?” Benny asked thickly. “Was it lightning? A fallen tree?”

“The lightning hit the north watchtower. It collapsed and dumped Ramón Olivera over the fence. About a couple dozen zoms rushed at him when the tower fell. The two other guards must have been spooked by the storm. They panicked and opened the gate to try and rescue Ramón, and the zoms were all over them. Sally Parker-you know her, don’t you? Lives next door to Morgie? Well… she was killed.”

“No…”

“The other guards didn’t hear the screams, because of the thunder, and before they knew what was happening there were twenty or thirty zoms in the streets. You’d think after all this time, after everything that’s happened, people wouldn’t panic. But they did. Every idiot who could pull a trigger started shooting. Three people were shot, and two others were bitten. I think the gunshot victims will all make it, but as for the others…”

He let it hang. Everyone knew there was nothing that could be done to stop the infection from a zombie bite. Depending on the strength of each person’s immune system, they’d last a day or a week, but they were doomed. All victims would be taken to the Quiet House on the far side of town. They’d be given food and water and books. A priest or pastor or rabbi would come and sit with them. The doors would be locked, and everyone would wait. Chong said that bite victims often committed suicide and that a few were murdered by friends or family who didn’t want to see them suffer. Benny didn’t used to believe Chong. Now he knew his friend was probably right.

“Did they get all the zoms?”

“Yes,” said Tom. “Captain Strunk and his crew made sure of that. And Ramón will be fine. He broke his leg, and he has some burns, but there was so much wreckage around him that the dead couldn’t get to him.”

“Was anyone else bitten?”

“No. The zoms never got farther than the red zone. Strunk has forty people with rifles at the north gate while the crew repairs the fence.” He swore. “If I had a dime for every time I told the town council that we need a double line of fences…”

“Tom,” Benny said. “Some zoms must have gotten past you.”

“No. Not one.”

“But… Mr. Sacchetto… Zoms got to him, and he lives all the way over by the reservoir.”

Tom squatted down and rolled the dead artist over onto his back. He examined the man’s hands and wrists, lifted his shirt to look underneath. Tom’s lips were pursed and his eyes narrow and unreadable. Tom stood and walked quickly through the house, unlocked the back door, and stepped out onto the porch. Benny followed along and watched as Tom bent to examine the scuffed mud on the wood porch floor and the steps. The rain had washed most of it away, but there must have been enough left, because Tom made a disgusted sound and stared for a few seconds out into the darkness. Benny realized that the storm had eased, and there were no new screams, no additional gunshots.

Tom gently pushed Benny back inside and locked the door. Almost as an afterthought, he picked up the oak bar and slid it through the sleeves. Tom told Benny to wash the blood off his hands, and he gave him a bandage to wrap the finger with the torn nail. It hurt, but pain seemed to be such a small thing. All of this was done without words, and they walked back to the living room in silence and stood over the body. Benny could tell that Tom was working something out. His brother kept looking toward the back door and then down at Sacchetto.

“Damn,” Tom said softly, “I hate it when I’m right.”

Benny stood over Sacchetto, looking down at the body. He did not see the zombie. He saw the man who had painted the portrait of the Lost Girl. A man who had helped establish and build this town. A friend.

“What do you mean?” he asked Tom.

Tom studied his face for a moment and then nodded to himself, as if he’d just made a decision about whether it was safe to share his suspicions with Benny.

“Look at his fingers. Tell me what you see.”

Benny didn’t have to look. He’d already noticed how grotesquely crooked the artist’s hands had been.

“Someone did that to him,” Benny said. “While he was alive.”

Tom nodded. “His ribs are bruised, too, and it looks like someone knocked some of his teeth out, broke a couple others. Someone tortured him to death, Benny. And when he reanimated as a zom, he was brought here.”

“Brought here? Why would someone bring a zom here?” Benny demanded.

Tom looked at him with cold and dangerous eyes.

“Why, to kill us, of course.”

27

“WHO WANTS TO KILL US?” BENNY SAID.

Tom didn’t answer. Instead he asked, “Did you see anyone outside? Hear anyone?”

“No. Just the storm,” Benny said, then paused. “Well… I did hear one thing. Something hit the side of the house. I think it was a bullet. You said that bullets could travel a long way, so I figured it was a stray shot from the fight. Then someone started jiggling the doorknob. I thought you were trying to get back in. You didn’t take your keys with you, so I-”

Tom touched his shoulder. “It’s okay. I understand why you opened the door, and it’s my fault for not working out some kind of code. Like three knocks and then two.”

“Or how about just yelling through the door?” Benny said.

His brother grinned. “Right. Sorry. This has me a little rattled. But go back to the doorknob. You said someone turned it?”

“A couple of times.”

They looked down at the corpse. “I suppose Rob could have done it.”

“With broken fingers?”

“Zoms don’t feel pain, remember?”

“But… turning a doorknob? Zoms can’t-”

“It’s rare, but it’s been known to happen. Usually you get that sort of thing in the first couple of minutes after reanimation, because the longer someone is a zom, the less coordinated they are. The brain continues to die.”

“Has Mr. Sacchetto been dead that long?”

Tom knelt and put his fingertips against the artist’s skin. “Mmm, hard to say. Hot day, cold rain. But I doubt he’s been dead more than an hour or two. So, we’re in a gray area.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Well, if Rob didn’t turn that doorknob, then someone else did. That same person, or persons, brought Rob over here. I’ll maybe buy Rob having enough brain power left to jiggle a doorknob, but no way I’ll buy that he turned zom and then walked all the way across town specifically to target us. Aside from the fact that zoms don’t do that, there are hundreds of people living between us and the reservoir. No. This was as deliberate as if someone pointed a gun at us and pulled the trigger.”

“But… why?”

Tom’s lip curled into an almost feral grimace of anger. “‘Why,’ in this case, is the same as ‘who.’”

“What do you mean?”

“I would have thought it was obvious, kiddo. Whoever did this doesn’t want us to find the Lost Girl.”

That was all Benny needed. The pieces fell into place.

“Charlie?” he asked incredulously.

“Charlie. And Marion Hammer.”

“They weren’t out at Mr. Sacchetto’s house by accident, were they? They must have found out that the new set of Zombie Cards came out. Zak Matthias bought a dozen packs. He must have gotten one of the Lost Girl cards, too, and showed it to his uncle.”

“I’d bet on it.”

“Zak was at the store when I found my card. Maybe he went home and told his uncle. But even so, why would Charlie care about Lilah? He doesn’t even know her.” He paused and stared at Tom. “Does he?”

“Yes, he does,” said Tom. “And considering how tight Charlie is with Big Zak and your friend Zak Junior, Charlie probably has them primed to report back to him with any mention of the Lost Girl. Even something as apparently innocent as her picture on a Zombie Card. I can imagine it gave Charlie quite a start to learn that my little brother found a picture of Lilah in his Zombie Cards.” He glanced down at the body, then cocked his head to listen. “The rain’s almost stopped. Listen, Benny. I want to leave at first light, and I want you to go with me.”

“Leave? For where?”

“For the Rot and Ruin, kiddo.”

“But… why?”

“Because we have to save the Lost Girl from Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer,” said Tom. “And just pray that we’re not already too late.”

28

BUT THE NIGHT WAS NOT DONE WITH THE IMURA BROTHERS.

First they had to remove the artist’s body from the house and turn it over to the town watch. Two men came with a horse-drawn cart to remove the body, accompanied by Captain Strunk, who looked haggard and worn from the night’s activities. Once upon a time Strunk had been an acting teacher and director, but during the madness of First Night, he’d stepped up and organized the defense of a school that was attacked by zombies during a late rehearsal of a new play. The students held out for three weeks against the dead, always hoping that help would arrive. It never did, but eventually the zoms outside were drawn off by other distractions-people fleeing, animals trying to escape the small town in which the school was set. When there were fewer than a dozen of the dead in the schoolyard, Strunk dressed his kids in heavy coats and choir gowns; armed them with golf clubs, hockey sticks, and baseball bats from the gym; and led his makeshift army out of the danger zone. Of the thirty-seven kids and four other adults who left the building with him, twenty-eight kids and two adults were still alive and uninfected by the time they discovered another group of refugees who were bound for a fenced-in settlement in central California. Strunk helped organize the town’s defenses and served as its first mayor, and now he commanded the fence patrols and the town watch. And although he and Tom agreed on many things, Strunk had no inclination to expand the town or reclaim the world. He was haunted by those kids he had not been able to save.

Strunk watched as the artist’s body was loaded onto the cart by a cluster of deputies, and he listened to Tom’s account of what happened. Mayor Kirsch came out of his house next door and joined them.

“And you think this was Charlie and the Hammer?” Strunk asked, running his fingers though his thick, curly gray hair.

“Yeah, Keith, I do.”

Mayor Kirsch sighed. “I don’t know, Tom. You’ve got nothing but circumstantial evidence, and pretty thin evidence at that. Guesswork isn’t the same as proof.”

“I know,” said Tom. “But the pieces fit as far as I’m concerned.”

“What do you expect me to do?” asked Strunk.

“How about arresting them?” said Benny.

“And charge them with what?”

“Murder. Torture. How much do they have to do before you’ll do something?”

“Hush, Ben,” cautioned Tom. To the others he said, “I know you can’t do much based on my say-so, but I have to do something.”

“Whoa now, Tom, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” the mayor said quickly.

“Don’t worry, Randy, I’m not going to do anything in town. Not without proof.”

“We have to do something!” Benny said, and then realized he was yelling. He dropped his voice to an urgent whisper. “Tom, we have to do something. You said-”

“I know what I said, kiddo. Go inside and get washed up. Try to get some sleep.”

“Sleep? Sleep? What are the chances that I’m ever going to be able to sleep again?”

“Try,” said Tom.

“And what are you going to be doing?”

“Your brother asks a fair question, Tom,” said Strunk. He had his thumbs hooked into a Western-style gun belt, and it made him look like a gunslinger that Benny had seen in a book about the old West. Benny realized that Strunk was willing to use force, or at least imply that he would, to keep Tom from taking the law into his own hands. Benny wanted to knock Strunk’s teeth out. How could the man want to give Tom a hard time when Charlie Matthias was walking around free? When he opened his mouth to say something, he caught Tom’s eye, and his brother gave him a small shake of the head.

Reluctantly Benny lapsed into silence.

To Strunk, Tom said, “I’m going to go over and take a look at Rob’s place. I can do that alone or you can come with me. Rob was tortured, and I’m betting it was done there. Who knows what we’ll find?”

“And then what?”

“Then tomorrow morning, at first light, Benny and I are going out into the Ruin to try and find that girl.”

Mayor Kirsch snorted. “Every bounty hunter and way-station monk for five hundred miles has looked for the Lost Girl, and nobody’s found her yet.”

“I found her,” said Tom. “Twice. And I can find her again.”

The other men gaped at him. From their expressions it was clear they didn’t want to believe him, but Benny knew that Tom never bragged. He had his faults, but lying wasn’t one of them.

“Why would anybody care?” asked one of the deputies.

“Gameland,” said Tom.

“That burned down.”

Strunk sighed. “Tom thinks they rebuilt it and that they’re dragging kids off to play in some kind of zombie games. He thinks the Lost Girl knows where it is.”

The men looked at one another and shifted uncomfortably. Benny noticed that not one of them asked Tom to verify this, and no one asked where Gameland might be. They said nothing. Tom made a disgusted noise.

Strunk nodded. “Okay, Tom. Let’s do it your way. Let’s go over to poor Rob’s house and see what we can see.”

“I want to go too,” said Benny.

“You need to sleep.”

“We already covered that. Maybe-maybe-I’ll sleep when I’m forty, but I just killed a zombie who used to be someone I know. If I close my eyes, he’s going to be right there. I’d rather stay awake.”

It wasn’t said as a joke, and no one took it that way. All three men nodded their understanding.

“Okay, Ben,” Tom said.

Before they left, Tom went inside, dressed in cowboy boots and jeans, strapped on a pistol belt, clipped his double-edged commando dagger inside his right boot, and slung his katana across his back.

“What the hell, Tom? The fight’s over,” said Mayor Kirsch.

Tom didn’t dignify that with an answer.

They walked down the middle of the street-Tom on one side, Strunk on the other, with Benny in the middle. Tom had given him back the wooden sword.

“How about a real one?”

“How about no? You’d cut my head off, or your own. And besides, you already know you can do enough damage with this.”

“How about a gun?” Benny asked hopefully.

“How about you stay home?”

“Okay, okay. Geez.”

They walked on through the shadows. Now that the storm was over, the lamplighters had come out to relight the torches that served as streetlights. Captain Strunk took one of the torches to light their way through town. Mountainside was laid out on a broad, flat piece of ground. The mountains rose up impossibly sheer behind them, and the great fence line stretched in a rough three-sided box from cliff wall to cliff wall. Most of the oldest homes in town were little more than shotgun shacks that were a dozen feet wide and built like long, narrow rectangles with doors at both ends. There were several hundred motor homes, most of which had been dragged into town by teams of horses. Some, of course, had arrived before the EMP blew out the ignitions and electronics on the vehicles. Roughneck traders occasionally brought wagon trains of building supplies to town-along with clothing, books, tools, and other precious items recovered from abandoned farms and towns throughout that part of the Ruin-and those materials had gone into the construction of some of the two-story houses. The Imura house was a tiny two-story that Tom had built himself.

The artist’s house, one of the very first that had been built, was narrow. It would have been ugly except for the rainforest murals Sacchetto had painted on the exterior walls. As they stopped outside, Benny studied the art and felt a deep sadness spear through him. He’d only met the man twice, but he had liked him.

Tom must have sensed his feelings, because he put a brotherly hand on Benny’s shoulder.

“Gate’s open,” Strunk said. “Rob could have walked out after he turned.”

“And bright blue pigs might fly out of my ass,” muttered Benny. Strunk shot him a stern look, and Tom turned aside to hide a grin.

“My point is that we shouldn’t make assumptions,” Strunk snapped.

Benny felt another joke coming on, but he restrained himself as Tom drew his gun-a Beretta nine millimeter-racked the slide, and stepped carefully through the open gate. Strunk drew his gun and followed, holding the torch high. Benny, feeling enormously underdressed for this party, took a firmer grip on his wooden sword and crept after them.

Tom walked beside the path rather than on it, and bent low to examine the mud, but he shook his head. “There are plenty of footprints here, but there was too much rain.”

They moved to the top step, but the story was the same. Just meaningless smudges. Tom placed a finger on the front door and pushed lightly. It swung open, and as Strunk moved beside him, they could see that the lock was splintered.

“No zom did that,” said Benny.

Even Strunk didn’t argue.

Tom pushed the door all the way open, and Captain Strunk angled the torch to spill maximum firelight inside.

The house was a ruin. Even from outside they could see that the whole place had been trashed. They went in, careful not to step on anything that looked like a footprint. It was a mess. Every canvas had been slashed, all of the sketches had been torn from the walls and ripped to confetti, the pots of paint had been thrown against the walls or poured onto the floor.

“You still think this was zombies, Keith?” Tom asked quietly.

Strunk cursed continuously for more than a minute without repeating himself once. Benny was impressed, and he agreed with the captain’s sentiments. Killing the artist had not been enough. The murderers had destroyed every last bit of the man’s work. There was not one single piece of undamaged art in the whole place. And the carnage went beyond that. Every plate was broken, every bottle smashed, every piece of furniture kicked apart and broken into kindling.

“This is rage,” Strunk said.

“Yes, it is,” said Tom. “And it makes me wonder if maybe Rob didn’t give them what they wanted.”

“What is it they wanted, Tom?” Strunk asked.

Tom eased the hammer down and slid his gun into its holster. In the torch’s yellow glow his face looked older, harsher. “I told only a couple of people where I last saw the Lost Girl. Rob was one, and today Charlie saw Rob talking to Benny about the Lost Girl. I think they tried to torture the information out of him.”

Benny stiffened and grabbed his brother’s arm. “Wait! You said that there were only a couple of people you told about the Lost Girl. Who else did you tell?”

Tom’s face went white, and his eyes snapped wide. “I’m a bloody fool!”

“What is it?” Strunk demanded.

“God, I hope I haven’t gotten them killed!”

Tom shoved past Strunk and bolted from the house. Benny and the captain ran after him, but by the time they were on the top step, Tom was a block away and running full tilt for the poor side of town.

“Where’s he going?” Strunk asked, grabbing Benny’s shoulder.

Benny shook off the grab and ran after his brother without answering. He already knew where Tom was going. There was only one other person Tom trusted that much.

Jessie Riley.

As he ran, Benny repeated a single word over and over:

“Nix.”

29

BENNY RAN AS FAST HE COULD, AND EVEN THOUGH TOM WAS FAR AHEAD, by the time they passed the stables, Benny had caught up. Captain Strunk was blocks behind. As they passed the long, flat Ration Office, they ran abreast, and it was side-by-side that they jumped the hedges on the left side of the Riley property. They skidded to a halt in the wet grass.

A boy sat on the top step of the tiny house. He was neatly dressed, and he held a small bunch of daffodils in one hand, the flowers lying in twisted tangles across his thighs.

Benny said, with total surprise, “Morgie?”

The boy did not move. His head was bowed forward, as if he dozed there on the porch step. Moonlight was breaking through the cloud cover, and in its wan glow, Morgie’s face looked unnaturally pale.

“Careful, Benny,” Tom warned. He drew his sword and looked up and down the street, but except for the flicker of torchlight, nothing moved. The only sound was the nervous nickering and blowing of horses in the stables.

Benny took a step forward. Morgie sat still, his arms crossed over his stomach, his knees pressed together. He looked like he was huddled there against the cold rain and had fallen asleep. Except that his clothes were dry.

“Morgie? Are you okay, man?”

Morgie did not raise his head or move in any way.

“C’mon… don’t do this to me, Morg,” urged Benny as he moved closer. He brought the bokken in front of him, taking it with both hands. “Give me something here, man.”

Slowly, awkwardly, Morgie Mitchell raised his head, and what Benny saw tore a gasp from him. Morgie’s face was as icy pale as the moon. His eyes were dark and uncomprehending, sunk into shadowy pits, his lips slack.

There was fresh blood on his lips. It glistened like oil in the moonlight.

“No…” Benny’s breaths burned in his lungs, and he shook his head, denying the possibility of this.

Tom raised his sword over his shoulder, the steel glittering in the cold moonlight.

“Say something,” Tom ordered, his voice hard.

Morgie’s mouth worked, but no words came out. Tom’s fingers tightened on the handle of his sword.

“Tom… don’t,” begged Benny.

“I’ll do what I have to, Ben,” said Tom between clenched teeth.

Benny took another step forward. Almost in reach. Morgie’s dark eyes caught his movement, and turned to him.

“Morgie, you fat jerk, you freaking well say something!” Benny yelled. Behind him he heard Captain Strunk come huffing up.

“God!” he said, “Is that the Mitchell boy?”

“His name’s Morgan,” snapped Benny. “Morgie.”

“Is… is he turned?” Strunk glanced at Tom, who gave a tight shake of his head. Not an answer to the question, but rather a command to be quiet.

Benny took one more step closer. Definitely in reach now. Tom hissed, but didn’t move. His blade was poised to cut, and Benny knew how fast his brother was. If Morgie grabbed him, though, would it be fast enough?

“Morgie… you’re freaking me out here. If this is one of your jokes, it’s not funny.”

Morgie’s mouthed worked and worked.

“Morgie… please.”

Morgie whispered, “Nix!”

Then he bent forward and toppled off the step. Strunk cried out in alarm, clawing at his pistol. Tom almost took the boy’s head off, but checked his swing as Benny darted forward and caught his friend. Morgie was heavy, and he clamped cold fingers around Benny’s arms and pulled himself closer until his mouth was right next to Benny’s throat. Benny could feel the labored breathing on his neck.

“Benny get out of there!” Tom yelled. He grabbed Morgie’s shoulder with one hand, keeping the sword raised with the other, ready for the killing blow. “Benny!”

“Kill it!” bellowed Strunk.

Benny wheeled on them with a snarl. “Shut up!” Then he turned back to Morgie and leaned close.

“Benny…” Morgie gasped weakly. “They took Nix.”

“What? What happened?”

“Mrs. Riley… They wanted her to tell them… something… but she wouldn’t. They… beat her up. They made me stand and watch. Gun to my head. Nix tried to… stop them. Couldn’t. She was hurt. Mrs. Riley…”

And then his eyes rolled up in his head, and he collapsed against Benny, his limbs going slack, his head lolling.

“Tom!” Benny said, trying to catch his friend, to keep him from tumbling to the ground. Tom and Strunk caught Morgie under the armpits and pulled him back. The handful of crushed flowers tumbled slowly to the ground, scattering petals. They laid him on the ground.

“Give me some light,” Tom ordered, and Strunk brought the torch.

“Is he bitten?” Strunk asked. “Is he dead?”

Tom pressed two fingers into Morgie’s throat. “No. He’s alive, but he’s hurt.” He reached up to push the torchlight into place for a better view, and there it was. Although Morgie’s clothing had not appeared to be wet from the rain, the back of his hair and shirt were soaked. Benny leaned over to take a look, and gagged. The back of Morgie’s head was a tangle of matted, bloody hair, and the blood had run down his neck and soaked his back. Tom gently probed the wound, his expression lacking optimism.

“Is it bad?” Benny asked.

“It isn’t good. I think he has a skull fracture, and he’s going into shock. Keith, get me some help now.”

Even though Strunk was the head of town security and was not used to taking orders from anyone except the mayor, he nodded and went off without an argument. He ran to the end of the block where there was an alarm bell, and began ringing it loudly, calling out for the town watch.

Tom waved Benny over and laid Morgie’s head carefully onto his brother’s lap. “Stay with him, Benny. I have to check inside.”

They were both keenly aware there were lights on inside the Riley house, and no one had come out to investigate the voices and commotion on the lawn. Not even a bark from their dog, Pirate. Benny’s heart was a cold stone that kept falling through the icy waters of a deep well.

“Tom, Morgie said…”

“I heard what he said.” Tom sheathed his sword, drew his pistol, and thumbed back the hammer. As he turned toward the front door, Benny saw his brother’s expression in the moonlight. It was equal parts rage and terror.

Benny sat on the muddy ground with Morgie’s head in his lap. His friend’s mouth moved once or twice, and even though Morgie made no sound, Benny knew what he was saying.

“Nix.”

People were yelling now, boiling out of their houses with guns and axes and sharpened pitchforks. Some had oil lanterns, a few paused to light torches from the streetlight. Guards from the town watch came flying toward them on galloping horses that were covered in heavy carpet from flanks to withers.

“Where’s Tom?” demanded Strunk as he raced back, his gun in his hand.

“He went inside,” said Benny. There had been only silence from the house. No screams, no gunfire.

The silence was dreadful.

Two medics from the town watch took charge of Morgie, gently pushing Benny away. Benny rose, and he realized that for the second time that day he was covered in the blood of someone he knew. He bent and snatched his bokken and headed up the stairs.

Captain Strunk got in his way. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?

“Get out of my way.” Benny wanted to hit him with the wooden sword. “I’m going in.”

Strunk looked into Benny’s eyes, and he must have seen something that changed his view of Benny Imura. Maybe he saw the shadow of Tom in Benny’s eyes. Or maybe he saw a new version of Benny. But he nodded and said, “Okay… but with me. And stand out of the line of fire.”

The other armed guards came up onto the porch, rifles and shotguns ready.

The front door was open. Candles were lit in the living room. The party moved inside, gun barrels seeking out each flickering shadow. The living room was a wreck. It was not as comprehensively destroyed as Sacchetto’s had been, but most of the furniture was overturned, vases smashed, a guitar stomped to splinters, art torn from the walls. The floor was crisscrossed with muddy footprints. The Riley’s dog, Pirate, a tiny mixed breed, was crouched under the overturned breakfront, its eyes glazed with pain. There was a clear imprint of a muddy boot toe on its heaving side. The dog whimpered quietly, but did not move or bark. When Benny reached out to it, the dog gave his fingers a few frantic licks. Benny saw splashes of blood on the floor and a single bloody handprint on the wall outside of Nix’s bedroom.

He cut straight across the debris-filled floor to her room. It was empty, however. The mattress had been overturned; her collection of old dolls in pieces, their heads torn off. All of her clothing had been pulled out of the closet and slashed with knives. Even her sparse collection of Zombie Cards had been torn in half.

Nix was not there.

Deputy Gorman came up behind him and surveyed the room. “Looks like your friend Nix put up quite a fight,” he said.

Benny swallowed and nodded. “She would.”

“She a tough girl?”

“You have no idea.”

“She’ll need it,” Gorman said as he turned away. “It looks like they took her.”

Although he already guessed it, the words were like bullets striking his heart. As he turned to leave, he spotted the corner of a familiar book sticking out from the debris of her writing desk. Benny bent and picked it up. It was her diary. He pressed it to his chest.

“Nix,” he whispered.

“In here,” someone called, and Benny rushed out of Nix’s room to see the guards clustered around the entrance to Jessie Riley’s room. Benny pushed his way through the throng, but Strunk grabbed his shoulder.

“You don’t want to go in there, kid.”

“Let me go. Tom!” With a wrench he tore free of Strunk’s grip and charged into the room. And stopped.

It was a small room. When he and Nix had been little, they’d played hide-and-seek in this house, and Nix’s mom’s room had always been too neat, too sparse to offer any good hiding places. Now it was a ruin. The cheap dresser had been kicked to pieces, and all of Mrs. Riley’s clothes-pants and blouses, stockings and underwear-lay scattered on the floor, trampled by heavy feet and stained with blood.

Tom sat on one corner of the collapsed bed. His pistol lay on the floor next to him. Jessie Riley lay curled against him. Benny could see that her face-always a kind and pretty face-was an unrecognizable mass of bruises and torn flesh. One eye was puffed closed, the other with bright and glassy with shock. She clung to Tom, holding his chest and sleeve, as if they were all that tethered her to this world. Her knuckles were red and torn. Like Nix, she had fought back, and fought hard.

“Mrs. Riley,” Benny said, but the woman showed no sign of having heard.

“Not now, Benny,” Tom murmured. “She needs to sleep.”

“Tom,” said Benny, “will she be okay?”

Tom slowly raised his head, and from the lost and broken look in his eyes, Benny knew that nothing was ever going to be okay. That time had passed when men with brutal fists and empty hearts had invaded this home.

“We have medics, Tom,” said the captain.

Tom shook his head. “Give me a sliver.”

A sliver. A simple word, and yet to Benny, it was so ugly that it made him want to scream. The thing Tom wanted was a six-inch length of polished metal, flat on one end for pushing, sharp and narrow on the other for piercing. Everyone on the town watch had a holster full of them. Tom never carried one. He used the black-bladed dagger he kept in his boot. Benny had seen him do it, but Tom did not want to use that knife now. Not for this.

“Oh, no…,” Benny protested as Captain Strunk slid one out of a pack strapped to his gun belt and offered it to Tom.

Tom nodded, and then glanced at the door and back up at Strunk. Immediately the captain turned and ushered everyone outside, although they lingered in the hall. Benny stayed right where he was.

He said to Tom, “Maybe she’ll get better, Tom. Maybe you’re wrong.”

“No,” said Tom in a ragged voice. “She’s already gone.”

And Benny saw it then. The hands that clutched Tom were held in place only by the fingers caught in the folds of his shirt, but the knuckles were slack and the elbows sagged under their own empty weight. Tom hugged her closer to him, and as he did so, her dead hands fell away, opening like dying flowers on the edge of the bed. Tom held her with one hand and reached around behind her to place the tip of the sliver against the base of her skull.

Everyone who died came back as a zombie. No matter how, no matter who. Everyone.

“Go outside, Benny.”

“I… can’t.”

“Benny… please!”

Benny backed away only as far as the doorway, but he could not make himself leave.

Tom closed his eyes, first lightly, as if asleep. And then he squeezed them shut with all of his might, as if lost in a terrible nightmare in which he was unable to scream. His lips curled back from his teeth, and his chest heaved-once, twice-and then there was a flash of silver.

Jessie Riley never returned from death. She had suffered enough and would be spared that last indignity.

Benny stood in the doorway for several minutes as Tom sat on the edge of the bed and rocked her back and forth in his arms. Tom did not weep, did not cry out. Instead he ate his pain, biting down on it hard enough to drive all of the poison deep into his soul. Benny understood that. Maybe there would be some other time when that rage could be allowed out. But not now, and not here.

Not with Nix out there somewhere.

After a long time, Tom lay Jessie down and tugged the sheets around her, so that she was completely covered. He got shakily to his feet and stood over her, head bowed, and Benny saw his brother’s lips moving. Was it a prayer or a promise?

Benny said nothing. He knew that he was an outsider to this, an intruder into Tom’s privacy… but he could not leave. He could not abandon his brother any more than Tom could abandon Nix’s mother.

When Tom turned to him, his face was calm. Or at least it appeared to be calm. Benny wasn’t sure if his brother’s air of unshakeable poise was genuine or a mask he wore when he needed to fend off the rest of the world. Before now, that calm demeanor had annoyed Benny; now it unnerved him. It seemed so alien, so unnatural.

Tom passed Benny and went out into the living room, where the town watch was making a thorough examination of the crime scene. One of them, the short Navajo named Gorman, snapped his fingers. “Got something!”

Tom and Strunk hurried over, and Benny had to crane his neck to see past them. Gorman pushed aside some broken crockery, and there on the floor was an old battered coin. On one side was an exotic flower, on the other were the words: “Chúc may m n.”

He handed it to Strunk, but Tom took it from him.

“It means ‘good luck,’” said Tom.

“What language is that?” asked Gorman. “The Rileys are Irish. Is that Gaelic?”

“No,” said Tom, “it’s Vietnamese.”

Strunk frowned. “Then… this wasn’t Charlie and the Hammer?”

“It was the Mekong brothers,” said Gorman.

Tom turned the coin over and over between his fingers. He didn’t nod, didn’t even grunt to show that he agreed with this assessment.

“Benny… let’s go home and pack.”

“Pack for where?” Strunk demanded. “I’ll bring the bloody Mekong brothers in.”

“Go right ahead,” said Tom, “but in the meantime my brother and I are going to go after the people who actually did this.”

“What are you talking about? We have proof right here.”

Tom didn’t bother to answer. He dropped the coin on the floor and walked toward the door.

Outside, they had to push through a crowd that was ten deep. Everyone had questions, but Tom’s face was a stone. Benny shoved and pushed to stay at his brother’s back. The medics had taken Morgie to the hospital.

When they were through they walked down the street. The sky above them had cleared, and there was a surprisingly cold wind. Benny waited until they were out of earshot.

“Tom… I’m sorry about Mrs. Riley.”

If Tom heard him, he didn’t reply.

“Are we going to find Nix?”

“We’re going to try.”

“They killed Mr. Sacchetto and Mrs. Riley to get information on the Lost Girl. Why hurt Morgie?”

“You saw him. He was dressed nice, carrying flowers. He was calling on Nix, and he showed up at the wrong time, poor kid.”

“So why take Nix?”

Tom’s bleak expression was answer enough. Nix would either be killed… or taken to Gameland.

One of the town watch guards caught up to them and reined his horse to a stop. “Tom,” he said, “the gate guards said that Charlie and the Hammer left almost three hours ago.”

“What about Nix?”

The guard answered, “It was just after all the excitement, you know? The Hammer had that big equipment bag of his- you know the long canvas one? It was slung over his back and looked heavy, but the guard didn’t even think to ask what was in it. He assumed it was filled with guns and stuff. Bounty hunter’s stuff. He figured Charlie and the Hammer had gotten a job because of what happened.”

“Yeah,” Tom said tightly. “What about the Mekong brothers?”

“They left a few minutes later. They both had their kit bags strapped over the saddle of that ugly donkey they have. The one they call Uncle Sam.”

Tom had never thought much of the Mekong brothers’ sense of humor.

“Thanks, Billy,” Tom said.

“Are… you going out after them?”

“Yes. Benny and me.”

Billy leaned out of the saddle. “Listen, it’s not my place to tell you how to do your job, Tom, but if they are the ones who did this, they’ll be expecting someone to follow. You follow too soon, and they’ll kill you in the dark. You’ll never see it coming. And torches at night out there in the mountains… Hell, they’ll attract every zom for a hundred miles.”

“Then we’ll leave at first light.”

“Wait,” Benny interjected, “what about Nix?”

“Billy’s right. We can’t find her if we’re dead.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence. They did not sleep at all that night. They got cleaned up, ate a large high-protein meal of meat and eggs, and dressed for hiking. They packed only those supplies they needed to take, including several bottles of cadaverine and two tough but lightweight carpet coats. They took plenty of weapons-after all, this was no longer just a hunting trip. It was a rescue mission. And it was even more than that. The Imura brothers were going to war.

When they stepped out onto the porch an hour before first light, Benny turned and looked back at their house. A shiver ran up his spine and raised bumps on his arms, and he had a dark feeling that he would never see the house again, maybe never see the town of Mountainside again. The feeling lingered for a long moment and then passed, leaving him as abruptly as it had come. What remained in its place was a coldness of spirit that he had never felt before, and it had nothing to do with his house or this town. His world had changed again, and he knew it. This time it had not been the removal of veils from naive eyes. Benny knew that much for sure. No, this time he felt as if a piece of him had been carved out, forcibly taken, thrown away. Although he had not been tortured as Mr. Sacchetto had or beaten as Mrs. Riley and Morgie had, he had been hurt just as surely. He could feel it. It was a dead place on his soul, as insensate as scar tissue and as violently earned.

He turned away from the house and stood on the top step of the porch with Tom. Without speaking they adjusted the straps of their packs, patted their pockets for the necessary things they would need out in the Ruin, and made sure of their weapons. Benny had his wooden sword, and he had a sturdy hunting knife that Tom had told him to hang from his belt.

The last thing he’d packed was Nix’s small leather notebook. He hadn’t opened it yet. Nothing in there would be a clue to finding her, but having it felt like a talisman. He slipped it into his back pocket.

“Tom?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Are you sure it’s them? Charlie and the Hammer?”

“Yes.”

“Not the Mekong brothers?”

“If they’re involved at all, it’s because Charlie’s paying them. Or maybe Charlie planted that coin there to frame them. Maybe he thinks he can come back to Mountainside after he-”

“After he kills the Lost Girl?”

“Yes.”

“He’d know that he couldn’t come back as long as you’re here,” Benny said. “And me, I guess. We know about the Lost Girl, and we know about what he’s done. Even if we can’t prove anything to Captain Strunk and the others, we’d be able to cast suspicion on them, right?”

“Right.”

“So… even if we didn’t go out there, we’d always be in danger.”

The moon was down, and Tom’s face was almost invisible in the darkness. The street lamp torches were too far away for Benny to read his expression, but he could feel Tom searching his face, trying to read him.

“That’s right, Benny.”

“Then no matter what else happens, we have to face them.”

“Yes.”

“Can we… I mean, can you take them?”

“We’ll see.” Tom paused. “You don’t think too much of me, do you?” Before Benny could answer, Tom pressed on. “Little brother, you may never have said it in so many words, but I know that you think I’m a coward. You think I ran away and left Mom to die back on First Night.”

Benny didn’t dare say a word.

“I did run, Benny. I ran like hell. I left Mom and I took you and I ran. Is that what you want me to say? Does it help that I said it?”

“I-”

“The world is bigger and harder to understand than you think, Benny. It was before First Night and it still is now. You have to keep your mind as wide-open as your eyes, because almost nothing is what it seems.”

“What does that mean?”

Tom sighed. “It would take too long to explain it now, and we don’t have the time. It’ll be light in forty minutes, and I want to be outside the fence the moment it’s bright enough to see. Are you ready?” Tom asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? I’ll give you one chance, Ben. You can stay here, with the Kirsches or Chong’s family… Or you can go with me into the Ruin.”

“I have to go.”

Tom nodded. “I hope that means the same thing for you as it does for me. I’m not going to baby you. We’re going to have to move light and fast, and we’re not going out there for fun. This is going to be ugly work. Can you deal with that?”

“I was at the Rileys’ too,” said Benny, and that was enough answer for both of them.

“Okay.”

“There are two of them now.”

“Two?”

“Lost girls. Nix and Lilah. We have to save them both.”

Tom put his hand on Benny’s shoulder and gave it a single, solid squeeze. “Then let’s go.”

They started out walking toward the fence, but after a block they were running.