“Yeah, well, she’s not happy with you, either.”
“Swell.” Benny tossed the rope into the hole. “How about you? You mad at me too?”
She gave him a wicked grin and punched his chest. Which hurt.
Chong came puffing and wheezing up into the sunlight. He did not weigh much more than Nix, but Benny was beyond exhausted, and it felt like hauling a bull out of the pit.
“I’m sorry,” Chong began, but Benny cut him off.
“Grab some rocks.”
“Rocks?”
“Rocks. Anything we can throw. We have to give Lilah some cover. Go!”
Chong understood at once and ran to collect fist-size stones.
Benny tossed the rope down again. “Lilah! Listen to me.”
She didn’t answer, but he heard her grunts as she fought.
“We’ve got some rocks. When I say ‘go,’ drop a couple of zoms with leg cuts to stall the others and—”
Something flashed past him, missing his head by inches. Benny recoiled from it and saw that it was Lilah’s spear. Before he could even speak, the line went taut and Lilah came swarming up the side of the wall, as fast and nimble as an acrobat. She grabbed his shirt as she came out of the hole and used his weight to catapult her body over the edge. She pitched forward, rolled effortlessly, and came to a rest on the balls of her feet. She pivoted and looked at Benny, who lay flat, and Chong, who crouched a few feet away with one arm raised to throw a rock. Benny and Chong gaped at her, unable to manage a single coherent comment between them.
Lilah reached around behind her and removed an item that she’d thrust through one of the straps of her vest, then tossed it onto the grass in front of Benny’s goggling eyes.
Tom’s sword.
Lilah stood above them, tall and beautiful, her white hair whipping in the fresh breeze, her clothes streaked with gore, her hazel eyes glowing with fire.
She turned slowly to Nix and in her ghostly whisper of a voice said, “I hate boys.”
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Warrior Smart.
That’s what Tom called the training program he put together to get us ready for our trip into the Ruin. He said that he based it on a few different things. First were the martial arts he’d been involved with ever since he was a kid. Before First Night there were thousands of different kinds of martial arts. Karate, tae kwon do, kung-fu, aikido, judo. I don’t know much about them. Tom used to study something called jujutsu (which I’ve seen in books spelled a bunch of different ways: jiujitsu, jujitsu, etc.). Tom said that jujutsu was an old Japanese system that his family had practiced for hundreds of years. He said that the name means “art of nonresistance,” and a lot of it involves using the opponent’s attack against him.
Tom also included some of the things he learned while he was in the police academy. And a lot of stuff he learned since, including tracking and hunting, which he mostly learned from bounty hunters like Solomon Jones, Old Man Church, and the Greenman.
The training was hard, and sometimes we all hated Tom because he never cut us a break.
Now I understand. Sometimes I wish he’d been even harder on us.
10
NIX SAT WITH HER BACK TO THE TWISTED TRUNK OF A BRISTLECONE TREE that loomed over the clearing forty yards from the edge of the ravine. She hugged the little girl to her chest as the child continued to scream and cry. Benny wondered if the kid’s mind had snapped. Those screams were hammering cracks in his own sanity.
Lilah squatted in the tall grass a dozen feet away and stared at the child with hollow eyes through which sad shadows flitted. Benny had once heard Tom refer to that kind of look as a “thousand-yard stare.” When Chong made to sit down next to her, Lilah drew her knife and stabbed the point into the earth between them.
“I can see that you need some quiet time,” he said, and scuttled quickly away.
Eventually Nix’s soothing tones and comforting embrace worked their magic on the girl, and she settled down to sniffles. Nix smoothed her hair.
“Sweetie . . . can you tell me your name?” she asked.
“E-E-E . . .” The girl tried to get it out, but every time she tried, she hiccuped a sob. “Eve,” she finally managed. Tiny jewels of tears sparkled on her face.
“Okay, Eve,” said Nix in a voice that reminded Benny of Nix’s mother. Soft and soothing, and full of the certainty of whatever was going to happen next. A parent voice. “Where did you come from?”
Eve looked at her with huge eyes and then looked over her shoulder, as if she could see her own memories. Her words came out all in a rush. “I was running after Ry-Ry, and I lost my way ’cause there were angels in the woods, and then the gray people were there and I ran some more and I tripped and fell. Where’s my mommmmeeee?”
Nix pulled her close again, and the child’s face vanished into a swirl of soft red curls. “Shhh, it’s okay, Eve. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll find your mommy.”
Benny looked down at the child clutched in Nix’s warm arms. He was far less certain about that.
He wasn’t certain about anything. He thought about the sheer number of zoms that had come out of the forest.
Don’t forget the first rule about the Ruin, whispered Tom’s voice. Out here everything wants to kill you.
Benny closed his eyes, and even now, separated from the madness of the ravine, he wasn’t at all sure if the voice was a memory or a ghost.
Or something worse than both.
Please don’t let this be me, Benny thought. Please don’t let me be going crazy.
The sun shone and the birds sang in the trees and Benny tried hard not to scream.
11
IN A QUIET TONE SO THAT ONLY BENNY COULD HEAR HIM, CHONG MURMURED, “Some day, huh?”
Benny jumped, and Chong shot him a puzzled look.
“What are you so twitchy about?”
For a moment Benny wondered if Chong could read his thoughts.
“Sorry,” said Benny when he was sure his words wouldn’t come out choked and twisted. “Yeah. Weird day.”
Chong sneaked a glance over at Lilah and sighed softly. “You know, I think I liked being down in that hole better. All the zoms wanted to do was eat me. I think Lilah would enjoy skinning me alive.”
Benny followed his gaze and half smiled. “It’s not you, man.”
“What?”
“She’s not mad at you. I mean, she is . . . but not any more than usual.”
“I fell in, and you know how she is with the whole thing about me being a clumsy town boy and—” began Chong, but Benny cut him off.
“It’s the kid. I . . . think she looks like Annie.”
Chong winced as if Benny had punched him in the stomach. “Oh, man . . .”
“Yeah.”
Benny understood Lilah’s pain. He and Tom had quieted the zombies that had once been their parents. Tom had helped him through it, though; and later, when Tom passed, Benny had been spared the horror of quieting him. Tom never reanimated. However, Lilah had been all alone with Annie. She had no older sibling to help her through it. Benny was wise enough to understand that no matter how bad his own experiences were, there were some people who had it worse.
As if reading his thoughts, Chong said, “I’d give a lot, you know? To make it different for her.”
“Yeah, man. I know.”
It was something Benny deeply understood, and he wondered if there was anything he wouldn’t give to change some of the things that had happened. To Nix’s mom. To Nix. To Tom.
To his parents.
He and Chong each drifted down the silent corridors of their personal pain as the sun burned its way through the hard blue sky. A pair of spider monkeys chattered in the trees. Benny looked at them because it was easier than looking at Eve, who still wept in Nix’s arms. He sighed, feeling immensely useless.
In town there was always someone around to help with children. The whole town looked after everyone’s kids. It was the way it had always been, at least in Benny’s experience. No one would ever let a little kid go wandering off on their own.
Nix kept stroking the sobbing child’s hair and murmuring words that Benny could not hear.
Eve was a little girl. Five years old. Helpless.
As Annie had been helpless.
Benny felt the weight of the sword slung over his shoulder. Tom’s sword. His sword now. The sword he had very nearly lost.
He felt his face flush as he thought about how Nix had chased him out of the ravine and Lilah had recovered the sword. That was wrong. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to work.
He felt eyes on him and turned to see Chong giving him a considering appraisal.
“What?” Benny demanded.
“What’s on your mind? You look like you’re trying to squeeze out a thought.”
“Nothing,” said Benny.
Chong sighed.
“Actually, there is something,” Benny said tentatively.
“What?”
“When I was in the ravine, I thought I heard something.”
“Like the sound of you peeing your pants?”
“Hilarious. Like a motor, like the hand-crank generator at the hospital. Did—did you guys hear that?”
Chong shook his head. “I didn’t. I was asleep.” Then, without meaning to, he said something very unkind. “Maybe you imagined it. You know, stress and all.”
Benny stared ahead, and for a few moments he did not actually see a thing except shadows drifting across the front of his mind.
“Yeah,” he said very quietly, “crazy, huh?”
Nix hugged Eve and kissed her hair. Then she encouraged her to drink from a canteen. Finally Nix caught Benny’s eye and gave him a tiny nod.
Benny and Chong came over, but they did not sit too close, warned off by a quick flare of Nix’s eyes. Benny sat cross-legged next to Chong and waited as Eve looked shyly at them from within the protection of Nix’s arms.
“Eve—?” began Nix softly.
“Mmm?” Eve answered in a tiny voice.
“Do you live around here?”
Eve sniffed and shook her head. “They chased us and . . . we had to run away.”
Ouch, thought Benny.
“Who did you run away with?” asked Nix. No need to ask who they ran from.
“Mommy and Daddy and Ry-Ry and me, we had to run away ’cause the angels came and set fire to the trees, and then the gray people came through the fence and ate all the sheep and cows and tried to eat—” She suddenly stopped and looked around, her eyes filling with new tears. “Where’s my mommy?”
“Shhh, shhh, it’s okay, it’s all right,” soothed Nix, “we’ll find her.”
Benny marveled at Nix’s patience. As sympathetic as he was to Eve, he could not stand the tears, the crying, the panic that emanated from the girl. It made him want to scream and run and hit things. Dead things. Or . . . anything. Trees, a rock wall. His fists were balled tight, and his whole body remained rigid as he tensed against a possible new wave of weeping.
“Sweetie,” said Nix to Eve, “where was your mommy when you last saw her?”
Eve’s face went blank as she thought about it. She glanced over Nix’s shoulder to the slope that rose above the jagged mouth of the ravine, then turned and scanned the entire terrain. “I was playing in the creek,” she said. “Mommy was doing the washing. And Ry-Ry was making breakfast and—”
Benny nodded. He leaned forward and said, “Eve . . . does your mom have black hair?”
Eve blinked at him like a confused turtle. “No. Mommy has yellow hair.” She said it as if everyone knew that.
Chong bent close and whispered, “Why’d you ask that?”
Benny shrugged. “Probably nothing. I thought I saw a woman in the woods right before the zoms started chasing me.”
“Was she—?” began Chong, and left the rest unsaid.
“I thought so,” Benny said, “but the zoms didn’t go for her.”
“Cadaverine?” suggested Chong.
“Maybe. I don’t know, it was all so fast.”
Chong nodded sadly. They both remembered Tom’s admonition about strangers. “A newly reanimated zom hasn’t had time to rot, so they’ll look like a living person right up to when they take a bite out of you.”
“Where was your camp?” Nix asked the little girl.
“I don’t know. When the gray people tried to get me, I ran and ran. We have to find Mommy and Daddy and Ry-Ry.”
“Who’s Ry-Ry?”
“A girl,” Eve said, as if that was obvious to anyone. “She was taking us to a new home where we could all be safe from the gray people and the angels.”
Lilah abruptly stood. “I’ll find them,” she said, and stalked off to begin preparing her gear for a hunt.
“Where’s the spear lady going?” asked Eve.
“She’s a very good hunter,” said Nix. “She’ll find your mommy and the others.”
“What about the gray people?” Eve asked in horror. “They’ll get her!”
Nix smiled. “No, honey. They gray people won’t get Lilah. She’s smart and really strong, and she’s quieted a lot of them.”
“Quieted?”
“Put them to sleep.”
“Pretend sleep or forever sleep?”
“Um . . . forever sleep,” Nix assured her.
Chong leaned close to Benny again. “This is fascinating,” he said quietly. “If there are other settlements out here, then they’re probably like islands or distant countries used to be in the days before the world was mapped. So isolated that their own phrasing and references—all the slang and jargon that we’ve used since First Night—is going to be different.”