“So that’s the plan,” Benny said brightly, trying to lighten the mood. “A last blast for the Chong-Imura Gang of Badasses.”
“Language,” said Tom, more out of reflex than anything else.
“‘Chong-Imura’?” echoed Nix with a roll of her eyes. “Gang? Oh, please.”
“Why camping?” asked Chong gloomily. “Why not just rub us all down with steak sauce and send us running into a herd of zoms?”
“I’m not actually trying to get you killed,” said Tom.
“Oh, of course not. Our safely is clearly your first concern.”
Tom sipped his iced tea. “We’re going to be out there for months. We have to provide for ourselves. Besides, it’s a good way to learn woodcraft.”
“Woodcraft?” asked Benny. “What, like making chairs and tables and stuff? How’s that—”
Chong elbowed him. “No, genius. Woodcraft is the art of living in the wild. Hunting, fishing, setting traps, finding herbs. That sort of stuff.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because,” Chong said with raised eyebrows, “when you open those things called ‘books,’ there are words as well as pictures. Sometimes the words tell you stuff.”
“Bite me.”
“Not even if I was a starving zom.” To Tom he said, “We learned some of that in the Scouts.”
“Camping out in McGoran Field is hardly the same as surviving in the Rot and Ruin,” chided Tom. “Lilah already knows how to do that. So do I. Benny and Nix learned a little when we were out in the Ruin, but they don’t know enough.”
“And I don’t know any,” concluded Chong. He sighed. “And I guess I don’t really need any. You know what my parents think about your trip.”
“You don’t have to come camping with us,” said Nix.
Chong sighed again. “No, I guess not.”
“The thing is,” said Tom, “the stuff Mr. Feeney taught you in the Scouts was all well and good, but it’s old world. That’s the problem with a lot of what you kids have been taught, and it’s the problem with a lot of the books they make you read in school. They’re good in themselves, but they aren’t part of this world. It’s important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present. I mean … has Mr. Feeney been outside the gate recently?”
“Not since a few weeks after First Night,” said Nix. “He got here around the same time as my mom, and I don’t think he ever left again.”
Tom nodded. “Right, which means that his knowledge is all based on camping in vacation spots and national parks as they were before the dead rose. He has no idea what it’s like out there in the wild.”
“The wild,” echoed Chong, and looked a little pale. Of his friends, Chong was the smartest and most well-read, but he was by far the least physical. Benny had to bully him into a game of soccer, and even then Chong preferred to be the goalie.
“When do we start?” Nix asked with enough enthusiasm to make Chong wince.
“First light,” said Tom. He narrowed his eyes at Benny. “And that means we are up, washed, dressed, packed, and at the fence by first light … not hiding under your pillow pretending that I haven’t been calling you to get up for two hours.”
Benny made a show of innocence unfairly attacked, but no one bought it.
“Dress for hiking,” Tom told them all. He pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Chong. “Here’s a list of what you’ll need.”
Chong’s eyes flicked down the list. “There’s not a lot of stuff here, Tom.”
“You won’t want to carry a lot.”
“No … I mean, there’s stuff missing. Like … food.”
“We’ll forage and hunt. Nature provides, if you know how to ask.”
“No tents?”
“You’ll learn to build a basic shelter. All you need is a sleeping bag. We’ll be roughing it.”
“No toilet paper?”
Benny grinned. “That’s what ‘roughing it’ means, Chong.”
“We’ll use bunches of grass or soft leaves,” explained Tom.
Chong stared at him. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“Early man didn’t have toilet paper,” said Benny. “I’ll bet it even says so in one of your books.”
“Early man, perhaps,” Chong said icily, “but we did evolve.”
Tom laughed. “Go pack.”
15
THE HARDEST PART WAS SAYING GOOD-BYE.
Benny didn’t have a lot of close friends in town, but there was Morgie. Nix had already said good-bye to him. Now it was Benny’s turn.
He walked, hands in pockets, through the streets of town, looking at the familiar buildings and houses. There was Lafferty’s General Store, where Benny and his gang drank sodas and opened packs of Zombie Cards. There were three nine-year-olds sitting on the wooden steps with several packs on their laps, laughing, showing one another cool cards. Heroes of First Night. Bounty Hunters. Famous Zoms. Maybe even one of the ultrarare Chase Cards.
Benny turned onto Morgie’s street and saw the Mitchell house at the end of the block, perpetually in the shadow of two massive oaks. Morgie was sitting on the top step, stringing his fishing pole. His tackle box stood open beside him and his dog, Cletus, drowsed in a patch of sunlight.
Morgie looked up from his work as Benny walked up the flagstone path. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
Morgie bent over the rod and carefully threaded catgut through the guides. It was an old rod, made before First Night and beautifully tended to by Morgie. It had belonged to his father.
“Guess this is it, huh?” Morgie said in a voice that was flat and dead.
“We might be back,” Benny began, but didn’t finish because Morgie was already shaking his head.
“Don’t lie, Benny.”
“Sorry.” Benny cleared his throat. “I wish you could come with us.”
Morgie looked up, his face pinched and cold. “Really? You’d really want me to come with you—”
“Sure—”
“—and Nix?”
There it was. As quick and sharp as a slap.
“Morgie, c’mon, man. I thought you were over her last year… .”
“You’ve been too busy getting ready for your big adventure … how would you know what anyone else was feeling?” Benny started to reply, but Morgie shook his head in disgust. “Just … go away, Benny.”
Benny stepped forward. “Don’t be like that.”
Morgie suddenly flung his fishing pole away and shot to his feet. His face was red and filled with fury and hurt. “I HATE YOU!” he yelled. Cletus woke up and barked in alarm, birds leaped in panic from the oak trees.
“Hey, man,” said Benny defensively, “what the hell? What’s this crap all about?”
“It’s about you and her ditching me and going off with her on some great adventure.”
Benny stared at him. “You’re crazy.”
Morgie stormed down the steps and shoved Benny as hard as he could. Morgie was a lot bigger and stronger, and Benny staggered back and fell. Morgie took a threatening step closer, following Benny as he fell, fists balled with rage.
“I frigging hate you, Benny. You pretend you’re my friend, but you took Nix and now you’re dumping me and going off together. You and that bitch, Nix.”
Benny stared in total shock, then he felt his own anger starting to rise. He scrambled to his feet.
“You can say whatever you want to say about me, Morgie,” he warned, “but don’t ever call Nix names.”
“Or what?” Morgie challenged, moving in almost chest to chest.
Benny knew that Morgie could take him in a fight. Morgie was always the toughest of the crowd, the one who never backed down. He had tried to stand up to Charlie and the Hammer at the Riley house, and nearly died for it.
Morgie shoved him again, but this time Benny was expecting it, and all it did was knock him back a few steps. As he staggered, his heel came down on the fishing rod, and there was a sharp crack!
They both stared down at it. They had caught a hundred trout with that rod. They had spent thousands of hours sitting on the banks of the stream, talking about everything. Now it lay snapped into two pieces that could never be mended. Benny’s heart sank. As symbolic incidents go, it had too much drama and no comfort at all, and he cursed the universe for making a joke like that at a time like this.
Morgie shook his head and turned away. He walked to the steps, climbed heavily up to the porch, and then stopped. He half turned, and in an ugly growl of a voice he said, “I hope you die out there, Benny. I hope you all die out there.”
He went inside and slammed the door.
Benny stood in the yard for a long time, staring at the house, willing Morgie to come outside. He would rather have fought him and gotten his ass kicked than have things end like this. He wanted to scream, to shout, to demand that Morgie come back outside. To take back those words.
But the door remained stubbornly shut.
Slowly, brokenly, Benny turned and walked back home.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Tools of the Zombie Hunter Trade
BOKKEN: A wooden sword developed by the Japanese. The name combines two words, bo (“wood”) and ken (“sword”). The bokken is used for training and is usually the same length and shape as the katana, the steel sword carried by samurai. Also called a bokuto.
My bokken is thirty-nine inches long and is made from air-dried hickory. It weighs five pounds.
Benny’s bokken is forty-one inches long and made from white oak. (So far he’s cracked three of them, and Tom is getting mad at him.)
16
WHEN THE FIRST PROMISE OF SUNRISE GLIMMERED BEYOND THE TREE LINE of the forest, Tom had them all rigged and ready at the gate.
Over the last few weeks Tom had gotten the mayor’s wife to sew each of them a vest made from very tough pre–First Night canvas. The vests had lots of pockets and were extremely durable. Benny filled his pockets with gum, all-weather matches, a compass, spools of wire and twine, and a hand line for fishing. He tried not to think about Morgie as he stuffed this last item into its pocket. Tried and failed.
As they checked their gear, Benny kept looking back toward town.
“He’ll be here,” Nix said.
But Morgie never came.
Tom bought each of them three small bottles of cadaverine and a pot of mint gel from a vendor at the gate. The cadaverine was a chemical harvested from rotting flesh—and Benny was almost completely sure that it was made from dead animals and not from other sources … like maybe dead zoms. Dribbling it on clothes and hair made the living smell like rotting corpses. Zoms did not attack other zoms, so the smell usually kept the wearer safe.
Chong sniffed the cadaverine and winced. “Charming.”
Tom handed them the mint gel and said to Chong, “When we use the cadaverine, it’s best to rub this on your upper lip. It overwhelms your sense of smell.”
Chong began unscrewing the cap, but Tom said, “Not yet. We’ll use the cadaverine and the mint as a last resort. We’ll conserve it for now.”
“Why?” asked Chong. “Why not buy a couple of gallons of it and take a bath in the stuff?”
Benny leaned closed and said under his breath, “Yeah, that’d make Lilah want to crawl all over you.”
Without changing expression, Chong murmured, “Feel free to fall over and die.”
Benny grinned. He was surprised he still could. He threw one last look back toward town. No Morgie. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and tried to let it go. The ache, the betrayal, the memory of Morgie’s last words. When he breathed, it felt like his lungs were on fire. He kept doing it until something in his mind shifted.
We’re leaving, he thought. It’s really happening.
At the same moment that he thought that, a second thought flitted through his mind. There’s no turning back now.
The juxtaposition of the two thoughts was deeply disturbing, and he recalled his musings yesterday when Nix asked him if he wanted to go. Part of him answered, I want to go, but a different part whispered, I am going. They were totally different answers.
Nix, intuitive as ever, caught his eye and with a look asked if he was okay. Without waiting for an answer, she cut a look back to the empty fence, and her shoulders slumped. She looked at Benny and nodded sadly.
Good-bye, Morgie, Benny thought.
“Okay,” Tom said, “here’s the way we’re going to do it. I lead, you follow. When I give instructions, I want you to pay attention. No screwing around.”
He was looking at Benny and Chong when he said this last part, and they affected to look like angels falsely accused of grievous sins.
“I’m serious,” Tom said. “I know that we’re all armed and you’ve each had some training, but in the Ruin you only get to make one mistake. And then you’re dead.”
Lilah made a noise low in her throat when Tom said that, and Benny unconsciously touched the point on his throat where she’d pressed her blade on the Matthias lawn after the fight with Big Zak and Zak Junior. Nix must have had the same thought, because she took a half step to stand between Benny and Lilah, and there was no trace of a smile on her face.
Tom adjusted the sling that supported his steel katana, then cleared his throat. “Once the fence guards draw the zoms down to the far end, we go out and head straight for the tree line. Single file. I’ll lead, then Nix, Benny, Chong, and Lilah. Got it?”