“Yes.”
“Look … I’m sorry for what I said, but you don’t have to—”
She cut him off by suddenly leaning so close that they were nose to nose. Her golden eyes were fierce and hurt at the same time. “I want to throw you out there.”
That shut Benny up.
Thud! Thud!
“Right now, though,” Lilah said, turning away from him, “we need to stop the zom from making so much noise. Noise carries at night.”
“Lilah,” said Nix, “maybe you shouldn’t go out there. It could be something a lot more dangerous than a zom.”
Lilah’s voice was cold. “I’m a lot more dangerous than a zom. Open the door.”
“Lilah,” whispered Benny, “it could be Charlie Pink-eye out there.”
Lilah showed her teeth in a deadly smile. “That would be perfect.”
Outside, the zom continued to pound and pound and the endless wind blew like a black ocean. Nix closed the door on the stove and blew out the candles, plunging the room into total darkness except for a faint outline around the door etched by starlight. Benny fumbled for the door handle. He counted down from three and then pulled the door open as he leaped back out of the way.
The zombie was right there, framed by starlight. Tall, thin as a stick, and pale as wax, with black eyes and a gaping mouth. It lurched forward, reaching for Benny, but Lilah suddenly jump-kicked the zom in the chest, driving it backward out of the doorway. She went through the door like a flash of lightning. She caught up with the zom before it could fall, pivoted and slashed at the back of its knee with the bayonet at the end of her spear . It was her signature move, taught to her as a child by George, the man who had raised her after Lilah had been orphaned on First Night. With the tendon cut, the zom immediately dropped to its knees. Lilah kicked it between the shoulder blades, and as it fell face-forward onto the ground, she whirled her spear and bent forward in a powerful two-handed thrust that drove the spear point unerringly into the narrow opening at the base of the skull. The zombie instantly stopped thrashing and twisting and became completely still. Dead … for real and forever.
The whole process, from jumping kick to final thrust, had taken less than four seconds.
Benny and Nix crowded the doorway, stunned as always by how fast and efficient Lilah was. And how ruthless. They understood it, but it left them breathless.
“God …,” breathed Nix.
“I know,” said Benny.
“No,” Nix said, rising and pointing. “LOOK!”
Benny squinted to see what she meant. Lilah whirled, bringing her spear up as if expecting a sudden attack. She, too, stared in that direction.
There was plenty of starlight. More than enough to bathe the swaying trees in an eerie blue-white glow. Enough to see the lines of tin cans lying on the ground, the ropes cut and the cans carefully placed upright in neat rows. Somebody else was out here. Somebody smart and careful enough to disable the booby trap. But that was not the worst of it. Not by a long shot. What was truly eerie … no, truly terrifying … was how that cold moonlight reflected on the pale white faces of the living dead.
On the hundreds of living dead.
“God …” Benny’s mouth was too numb to say anything more. They were everywhere, an army of lifeless killers that shambled and limped and twitched as they emerged from the utter blackness of the forest. Benny spun and looked left and saw more of them, some walking, a few crawling, all of them moaning louder than the wind. He looked right, going as far as the edge of the station. He could see the long, pale line of tumbled glacial rocks. They were black with the crawling bodies of zombies. The closest of them was a hundred yards away, but they were advancing steadily toward the way station. Benny could not count the dead. They were coming. In minutes they would be here, and there was no way out.
“Please tell me I’m not seeing this,” said Benny. “This can’t be happening.”
“We’re dead,” whispered Nix. “Oh God … oh God …”
Lilah turned to them, and in the moonlight Benny and Nix could see that her iron self-confidence had crumbled to reveal a face as bloodless and empty of emotion as the monsters who closed in on all sides. She lowered her spear and it hung from her fingertips, ready to fall.
“We’re dead,” Nix said again, her voice rising to a hysterical pitch.
“Yes,” said the Lost Girl. “We’re dead.”
34
TOM IMURA WAS AT HOME IN THE ROT AND RUIN. HE LOVED THE WOODS, even as night came cascading down to turn the green world into an almost impenetrable black gloom. Ever since that terrible night fifteen years ago, Tom had spent nearly a third of his life in these woods. Unlike Mountainside, with its stifled boundaries and pervasive fear, the Ruin was a simpler place. You knew where you stood.
Tom reckoned that it was no different than the way the world had been before humans settled the first cities. Back then there had been predators of all kinds, and life was hardscrabble at best. Every day was a fight for survival, but it was that struggle that had inspired humans to become problem solvers. The inventiveness of the human race was one of the most crucial tools of survival, and it was the cornerstone of all civilization. Without it, man would never have turned fire into a tool, or carved a wheel from a piece of wood.
Tom knew that there were zoms out here, but didn’t fear them. He respected and accepted them as a physical threat the way he respected and accepted the bears and cougars and wolves that roamed these hills. His philosophy was based on the natural order of things. If a problem came up, he would use every resource to handle it. So far he’d been successful with that strategy, which included saving Benny during First Night, burning the first Gameland to the ground a few years ago, and giving closure to many hundreds of zoms. If, on the other hand, a problem arose that was beyond his mental and physical abilities, and if he died as a result of it, he was at peace with that. It was the way of things. Survival of the fittest, and no one was “the fittest” all the time.
He ran lightly, ducking under branches, leaping small gullies, running no faster than his ability to perceive what the forest had to tell him. Tom had stopped calling out Chong’s name. The boy had clearly wanted to run, and calling him might make him hide. In this gloom the best hunter in the world couldn’t find someone deliberately hiding. It was getting hard enough to follow Chong’s trail. Luckily, the boy had tried that old trick of using a piece of brush to wipe out his footprints. Sure, it wiped out the prints, but it left behind very distinct striations in the dirt and moss. Tom almost smiled when he saw it.
Eventually he reached the point where Chong had stopped trying to cover his trail and his distinctive waffle-soled shoe prints were clear in the fading light.
There were other prints along the path too. Most were animal tracks that were of no concern to Tom. He found some human—or perhaps zom—prints, but most of these were days old, and Chong’s tracks overlaid them. One set of tracks made him freeze in place and even touch the butt of his holstered pistol. Old-world hiking boots with worn treads and a crescent-shaped nick out of the right heel.
Tom bent low and studied the prints. Preacher Jack’s without doubt, but it was clear that these had been made on his way to the encounter that had happened a few hours ago.
Tom continued his hunt. The forest was growing quiet, and he moved only as fast as he could go silently. It was a tracker’s trick: Never make more noise than what you’re tracking.
Crack.
There was a sound, soft and close, and within three steps Tom slipped into the shadows between two ancient elms. He listened. Sound was deceptive. Without a second noise it was often difficult to reliably determine from which direction the sound had come. Ahead and to the left? Off the trail?
A rustle. Definitely off to the left. Tom peered through the gloom. The second sound had been like a foot moving through stiff brush. A long pause, and then another crunch.
Tom saw a piece of shadow detach itself and move from left to right through an open patch. It was a quick, furtive movement. Something that walked on two legs. Not a zom, though, he was sure about that.
Preacher Jack? If so, Tom was determined to have a different kind of chat with him than they’d had back on the road.
The figure was coming his way, but from the body language it was clear the person had not seen him. The head was turned more toward the north, looking farther along the game trail.
Judging where Tom should have been if he’d kept moving.
Tom nodded approval. A pretty good tracker, he guessed.
“Tom!” called a voice. A very familiar voice. “Tom Imura. I know you’re up there behind one of those trees. Don’t make me have to walk all the way up the slope.”
Tom stepped out from behind the tree with his pistol in his hand. The shadowy figure emerged into a slightly brighter spot of light. From the soles of her boots to the top of her orange Mohawk, the woman was tall and solidly built, with knife handles and pistol butts jutting out in all directions like an old-time pirate. In her right fist she carried a huge bowie knife with a wicked eighteen-inch blade.
Something black gleamed on the blade, and though it looked like oil in the bad light, Tom knew that it was blood. The woman’s face and clothes seemed to be smeared with it. She tottered into view, and Tom saw that her left arm hung limp and dead at her side.
Tom stepped out from behind the tree. “Sally?”
Sally Two-Knives grinned at him with bloody teeth. “You alone, Tom?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” she said, and pitched forward onto her face.
35
“BACK … BACK!” CRIED NIX IN A FIERCE WHISPER. AS SHE SAID IT she walked backward, herding Lilah and Benny toward the open door. Lilah stumbled along as if her brain had shut itself off. Benny had to push her into the way station. Nix was last in. She tossed down her bokken, grabbed Lilah’s pistol, and stood for a moment in the doorway, tracking the barrel left and right, but she did not fire. There was no point. If she had a barrel filled with bullets it would not be enough. Nix lowered the pistol and retreated inside.
“We’re dead,” Lilah said again, and her voice already sounded dead.
Benny closed and locked the door. “It won’t hold for long,” he said quietly. “Same with the windows. That glass is old. It might last if a couple of them beat on it … but there are hundreds of them out there.”
“Thousands,” said Nix. “There had to be five hundred of them just coming down over the rocks. It’s insane.”
It was insane. Last year Benny had seen three thousand of them in the Hungry Forest, but the seething mass of the living dead outside had to number twice that many. It was an army of rotting flesh-eaters. “Where did they come from?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Nix. “It doesn’t make sense. We weren’t that loud. And I don’t think they could see our cooking fire from outside. Not all the way into the forest and up the mountains.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” said Lilah in a hollow voice.
“What about the cans? Zoms couldn’t do that,” said Benny.
“I know, Benny,” said Nix. She scraped a match and lit the little oil lantern.
“Don’t!” gasped Benny.
“Why?” she said softly. The flaring match revealed a crooked smile. “Are you afraid it’ll attract zoms?”
Her voice was way too calm. Benny had heard people talk like that right before they went off the deep end. And yet, what could he say? He turned to Lilah for help, but the Lost Girl truly looked lost. She stared at the pistol and knife she still held and then numbly put them into their holsters.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Lilah said, repeating the phrase in a lost whisper.
Benny shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. If this was something normal, Tom would have told us about it. Besides, Brother David’s lived here for over a year, and he said there were never more than a few wandering zoms in the area. This is … this is insane.”
“Insane,” echoed Lilah.
Benny did not like what he was seeing in her face any more than he liked what he heard in Nix’s voice. Not one little bit. It made him wonder how crazy he looked and sounded.
Crazy or not, they had to do something. Benny looked at the three carpet coats that hung from pegs by the door. He grabbed the coats belonging to Sister Shanti and Sister Sarah and tossed them to the girls. “Put these on!”
Nix immediately slipped into hers, but Lilah let hers drop to the floor. Benny picked it up and pressed it to her.
“Put it on!” he yelled.
Lilah took it but did nothing with it. Finally Nix took it and put it on Lilah the way a mother dresses a child.
“We have to get out of here,” Benny said as he belted on Brother David’s coat. He lifted the blankets and peered outside. The closest of the zoms was still about fifty feet away. “We can still run.”
That made Lilah’s face twitch. “Run where?”
Nix said, “She’s right, Benny. They’re coming from every direction. We’re safer here.”
“This isn’t safety.” Benny waved his hands around at the way station. “This is a freaking lunch pail. They’re going to close in around us, open this place up, and—”
“Stop!” hissed Lilah, pressing her hands to her ears.
“If we run, at least we have some chance.” Benny fished in his pocket and pulled out the bottles of cadaverine. “We have these.”
Nix chewed her lip, caught in the terrible trap of indecision.
Then abruptly Lilah’s hand darted out fast as a snake and snatched a bottle out of Benny’s hand. She opened it and began dribbling the thick liquid onto her sleeves. When Benny and Nix simply stood there staring at her, Lilah growled, “Now!”