Two men came out of the woods, one on either side of the stream. They moved fast, but they were not running, nor were they astride horses, and suddenly she understood the nature of the cart tracks she had seen. These men sat on the backs of machines.
They were riding four-wheeled motorcycles.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Can Zoms Think?
Tom said, “As far as we know, zoms have no memory of their previous lives. They don’t respond to their name or anything like that. They appear to be mindless, but that can’t be true. Some zoms can turn a door handle. All of them remember how to walk, climb stairs, and get back to their feet after they’ve been knocked down. They know how to use their hands for things like grabbing, tearing, pulling, or holding something or someone. Most of them can recognize the difference between a blank wall and one with a window or door, because they try to get through those. And all of them remember how to bite, eat, and swallow.”
But . . . do they remember anything else? Maybe something that we don’t know they remember?
That thought sometimes keeps me up at night.
17
BENNY WOKE NIX UP AND ASKED HER TO COME TO THE EDGE OF THE ravine. She carried Eve, who was so thoroughly asleep that she drooped bonelessly in Nix’s arms. Nix’s intelligent green eyes studied the dance of black-winged birds in the sky. She gave a slow shake of her head.
“This is bad,” she said. “How long have they been circling?”
“I don’t know,” said Benny. “At least an hour, and there’s a lot more of them over the forest. See?” He turned and pointed to the east. There were at least twenty of the carrion birds, and more were drifting in on the thermal winds.
Chong’s mouth slowly fell open. He murmured, “Lilah . . .”
“If she was in trouble, we’d have heard gunshots,” said Benny. “But someone else . . .”
He trailed off as they all looked at Eve.
“Oh, man,” said Chong.
“Or,” said Benny, trying a different tack, “there could be something else dead out there. We’ve seen half the animals from Noah’s Ark since we left town.”
It was true enough. Ever since the fall of civilization, wild animals from zoos and circuses had escaped to breed in the Ruin. There were rumors of all kinds of exotic creatures, from rivers filled with hippos to herds of zebras. Shortly after Tom led them from Mountainside they’d gotten firsthand experience, chancing upon a cranky mother rhino that had trampled an entire field of zoms while protecting her calf. She nearly trampled Benny and his friends, too. Since then they’d seen monkeys in the trees, giraffes, birds they did not recognize, and at least three species of deerlike animals with horns that none of them could name. And they had also found bones of animals, large and small, brought down either by zoms, disease, or the new wilderness predators.
Benny nodded at the pistol Nix wore in a nylon shoulder harness. Tom’s pistol. “Do you think we should warn Lilah?”
Firing two spaced shots exactly ten seconds apart was a signal they’d agreed on. If any of them heard it, they were supposed to come back to camp as quickly—and cautiously—as possible. Gunshots carried with them the danger of attracting roaming zombies, so they were only to be used in an absolute worst-case scenario. The other consideration was that it wasted bullets. Lilah had thirty-one rounds for the Sig Sauer automatic she carried, and there were fourteen for Tom’s .38 Smith & Wesson.
Nix chewed her lower lip thoughtfully and made no move to set Eve down. She carried the revolver, partly because she was a far better shot than Benny, and partly because Benny had a dislike and distrust of guns that had increased into an outright hatred since Gameland. The psychopathic old man, Preacher Jack, had shot Tom in the back with a gun. They were tools only, to be used—like the signal plan—as a last resort.
“We don’t have a lot of bullets left,” said Nix. “Besides . . . gunshots make a lot of noise, and we don’t know how many more zoms are in the forest.”
Chong nodded. “Lilah can take care of herself; and she won’t appreciate you second-guessing her like this.”
“A warning isn’t second-guessing,” replied Benny. “She doesn’t know what’s out there.”
“Neither do we,” said Chong. “I mean, let’s have a little perspective here. A few vultures is a mystery, not a certain catastrophe.”
“Maybe,” Benny said dubiously, but he did not ask Nix for the gun. For her part, Nix did not seem anxious to give it over. She stroked Eve’s fine blond hair and studied the sky.
Chong opened his mouth to say more, but instead he froze and stared past Benny and Nix. For the second time in a little over five minutes, Chong’s face lost all color, and he suddenly whipped his bokken out of its canvas sheath.
Benny and Nix spun too, their reflexes honed by months of training with Tom and weeks of dangerous travel in the Ruin. Benny’s sword flashed in the sunlight, but then it jolted to a halt as his whole body became rigid.
“Oh my God,” breathed Nix in a terrified whisper.
There were no zoms behind him.
Zoms—even a lot of them—might have been something they could handle.
This was different. This was much worse.
Instead, standing fifty yards away, huge and powerful and incredibly deadly, was a lion.
18
LILAH STARED SLACK-JAWED AT THE MOTORCYCLES.
She had read about such vehicles in books, had seen abandoned ones on the roads, their bodies rusted and their drivers gone to wander the world as living dead. She had never imagined she would see one still in operation—let alone two of them. Yet here they were, mud-smeared and battered, but clearly in working condition. How had these men gotten them to work? How had they kept them working this long after First Night? Where did they find fuel that was still chemically sound after fourteen years? Unless it was in tightly sealed containers, most forms of gasoline broke down over time.
Lilah ducked down behind a bush. The motorbikes zoomed past her, and as they went she winced at the stink of the thick exhaust fumes. It was a terrible and unnatural smell.
Each of the men carried a weapon slung across his back. The one on the left bank wore a heavy fire ax in a sling; the other man had a big two-handed sword in a leather scabbard. Lilah thought that such a weapon must have been looted from a museum or private collection. She’d seen bounty hunters with similar ancient weapons. They were clumsy in the age of guns before First Night, but practical in the world of the dead, because a sword is quiet and does not need to be reloaded.
Lilah left her place of concealment and began following the vehicles, running as quickly as caution would allow. Half a mile melted away, then a mile. More. Lilah enjoyed running, and she could travel at a jog trot all day long. Even so, the four-wheeled vehicles quickly outpaced her and vanished into nothing more than a distant engine whine.
She kept going, following their tire tracks for two more miles, and then she heard the engines again. They were stationary now, their grumbling motors idling somewhere around a bend in the stream. She faded into the woods and circled to come up on the stream from the far side, using a line of broken boulders as cover.
Then she heard more engines, and she slid into a hollow formed by several tumbled rocks. Five more of the four-wheeled vehicles came racing out of the woods and went splashing along the shallow streambed to join the others. One by one the engine roars coughed and fell silent as the motorcycles were switched off. In the ensuing silence she could hear the chatter of at least a dozen voices, and as she watched, she saw people moving through the forest on foot, alone and in small groups of two or three.
Lilah wormed her way forward to get a better look.
The gathering was a mix of men and women of all ages—but they were all dressed alike in black pants and shirts, with bloodred ribbons tied around their arms, legs, waists, and necks. On each person’s chest, whether rendered in chalk, paint, or fine stitchery, was a similar design of stylized wings. Angel wings.
Lilah immediately thought back to what little Eve had said.
I was running after Ry-Ry, and I lost my way ’cause there were angels in the woods.
Every person’s head was shaved bald, and their scalps were covered in complex tattoos. Most of them had patterns of wildflowers, green vines, autumn leaves, and thornbushes. A few had images of chains and barbed wire inked among the flowers. The art ranged from very crude to exquisitely rendered.
All the people were armed, and every one of them showed signs of recent trauma. Bruises, stitched wounds, crusted cuts, and stained bandages.
These were fighters, Lilah decided. She appraised their weapons and saw every kind of knife, hatchet, cleaver, ax, and sword—but not one firearm.
As more people came out of the woods, the others greeted them with joyful smiles, handshakes, and hugs.
Lilah moved away from the rocks and silently threaded her way through a stand of leafy shrubs so she could reach a high stone ledge that rose above and behind the group of people. She moved like a ghost, and no one saw or heard her. She flattened out and went utterly still with a clear view of the gathering through a tiny break in the overhanging foliage.
Two of the gathered people produced glass bottles filled with a viscous red liquid. They uncorked the bottles and moved through the crowd, dribbling the fluid onto the ends of the red ribbons. The breeze carried the foul smell of it to Lilah, and she wrinkled her nose. It was not the same as cadaverine but definitely something similar, and it probably served the same purpose.
The crowd suddenly stiffened and turned as two additional figures stepped out into the sunlight at the edge of the stream. A woman, with a brute of a man walking a pace behind her. The gathered mass of fighters bowed with great reverence to her.
Lilah heard many of them speak a name as they bowed. “Mother Rose.”
The woman—this “Mother Rose”—was the most beautiful person she had ever seen, like one of the goddesses from the books of ancient myths that Lilah had read. She was tall, with haughty features and eyes that seemed to radiate their own dark light. Unlike the others, she had all her hair, and it fell in gleaming black curls around her face and shoulders. This woman’s personal power was such that all the others, even the men who towered above her, seemed to shrink in her presence.
Behind Mother Rose was a man Lilah knew had to be a bodyguard. He was enormous, a giant who could not have been an inch less than seven feet tall. He had skin the color of mahogany and a shrewd, intelligent face on which was no single trace of compassion or humanity. It was a killer’s face, and Lilah knew what killers looked like. The giant stood apart, just inside the darkness of the forest. He leaned on the haft of a long-handled sledgehammer. There were knives sheathed at both hips, and around his neck he wore a necklace of withered human hands. Lilah counted nineteen of them. Somehow she did not think that these hands had been cut from the wrists of zoms.
“Blessings to you all, my reapers,” Mother Rose said in a soft southern drawl. “May you always walk the shortest path to the darkness.”
“Praise be to the darkness,” they responded.
Reapers, mused Lilah. Her hands tightened on the shaft of her spear.
One of the men Lilah had seen on the bikes, the one with the two-handed sword, knelt and kissed one of the streamers that was tied to Mother Rose’s ankle. It did not seem to matter to him that this streamer had trailed in the dirt and mud.
“What have you found, Brother Simon?” asked Mother Rose.
“The gray wanderers you flushed toward the clearing are still there,” said the man. “Jack and I—”
“Brother Jack,” corrected Mother Rose.
Brother Simon nodded, took a breath, and continued. “Brother Jack and I put the call out all along the western slope. There are at least three or four hundred grays heading downland now, which means that those trails will be totally blocked. Sister Abigail has her reapers on the north flank, and Brother Gomez is in a nice blind down at the southern end. If any of Carter’s people slip the grays, they’ll have to take one of those two routes, and they’ll walk right into our people.”
Mother Rose nodded.
“I think Carter and his people are still heading southwest,” continued Brother Simon.
“Good,” said Mother Rose, nodding her approval. “That means the heretics will walk right into Saint John.”
At the mention of that name, Lilah saw many of the people stiffen, their smiles becoming tighter, forced.
“It would be better for Carter if he let us catch them,” said one of the reapers, a woman with red poppies tattooed on her face. “They’d at least have a chance to join us instead of immediately going into the darkness.”
Many of the others nodded. Mother Rose’s smile was less forced and entirely unpleasant. Lilah did not like that smile. Not one little bit. It was the way she imagined a shark might smile.
Mother Rose said, “Saint John is the favored son of the Lord Thanatos.”
“Praise be to the darkness,” replied the gathered reapers immediately upon hearing the name.
“Saint John has his own path to the darkness,” continued Mother Rose, “and it is for him alone and not for us to understand.”
“All blessings to Saint John,” said Brother Simon. “All blessings to the beloved of Lord Thanatos.”
As the others echoed his words and bowed low, Lilah saw Mother Rose cut a quick look at her bodyguard. Was that a smile they shared? Or a sneer? Lilah was not well practiced at reading faces, but she had spied on Charlie Pink-eye and his crew many times, and she could recognize deceit when she saw it. Whoever this Saint John was, Lilah guessed that he should be worried about how much Mother Rose truly respected him.