And not for the first time—or even the first time that day—Chong wished that Tom was still here.
But . . .
The motor sounds faded a bit, and Chong felt a splinter of relief that those newcomers were not chasing him. The others, though . . . Riot, Carter, and Sarah. They could be anywhere out here, and Riot had already demonstrated that she was capable of moving like a ghost through the forest and tall grass.
Moving like Lilah.
Chong wanted to find her more than anything in the world.
In the far distance he could see a ridge of rocks that were eye-hurtingly white, but he decided not to go that way. With his dark jeans and shirt, he’d be like a black fly on white linen.
Instead he headed along a ridge of red rocks that cut through the forest and seemed to curve around to the east. Lilah probably went east to find Eve’s parents, so Chong angled that way.
When he was a mile into the woods, Chong dropped into a low squat and listened. He was a very good listener, with sharp senses that he’d honed for months as a tower guard on the fence line between Mountainside and the Ruin. Tom had helped him refine his understanding of the information his senses offered to him. The difference between the rustle of branches in a variable breeze and the sounds of someone—or something—moving stealthily through the brush. The difference between the moan of wind through rusted metal on a deserted farm or abandoned car and the hungry cry of a distant zom. He made his body go absolutely still as he listened.
The motor sounds were far away, and the woods around him were still. The forest, though, is never silent; nature never totally holds its breath. There are always small sounds—insects and animals, the subtle noises made as the temperature changes throughout the day, causing wood to expand and contract. He listened for sounds that shouldn’t be there.
There was nothing.
Until there was something.
Chong tilted his head to try and catch the ghost of a sound. He almost dismissed it because it was in time with the breeze, but then he listened closer. No, not in time with the breeze; just behind it. He nodded to himself. What he heard was the sound a careful person made when they were trying to move with the breeze, but they were doing it slightly wrong. They were waiting for the wind to stir the branches and then moving with the swaying brush; but that wasn’t the way Tom had taught them.
“You have to be warrior smart,” Tom once told them. “And a smart warrior looks ahead. Watch for the wind as it comes toward you, look into the distance and see how the foliage moves. The wind is like a wave rolling in. If you want to hide in its sound and movement, then time your movement so that you are starting to move as the wind reaches you. Don’t chase the wind—let it push you.”
Don’t chase the wind, thought Chong. That was exactly what he was hearing.
He held his position.
Then he caught a whiff of something. At first he recoiled, thinking that it was the rotting stench of a zom, but he shook his head and took another sniff at the odor on the breeze. It was similar to the spoiled-meat smell of cadaverine or putrescence.
The sounds were louder now. Whoever was sneaking through the woods was coming his way. Panic jumped in Chong’s chest, but he fought it down. He looked around and studied the woods for a couple of good choices for escape routes if the stranger came directly toward him. The best route was to his right, a stony path shaded by chokeberry and bitterbrush shrubs. He edged toward it, ready to bolt.
A man suddenly emerged from the woods twenty feet in front of Chong.
But he was facing the other way. Chong froze and stared at the stranger.
And strange he was.
The man was short and broad-shouldered, with huge biceps like soccer balls, a freakishly overdeveloped chest, and almost no neck at all. He wore the same black clothes as the people on the motorbikes, with red streamers fluttering in the sluggish breeze.
The man started to turn, and Chong slipped soundlessly behind a bush, certain that he hadn’t been spotted.
A pair of angel wings had been carefully embroidered on the man’s shirt, and around his neck was a chunky steel chain from which hung a slender silver whistle. Chong recognized it at once.
A dog whistle. Benny was right.
What drew Chong’s eye, though, and sent a thrill of icy fear through him, was the thing the man carried in his massive fists. A long, twisted wooden handle from which a wicked blade curved like the fang of some great dragon.
A scythe.
Chong remembered the word Riot had used.
Reapers.
His mouth went totally dry.
The big man stood listening to the forest, much as Chong had done. His face was harsh and grim, but then a small smile formed on his thin-lipped mouth.
“No sense hiding,” said the reaper as he brought the scythe up and made a slow, deliberate cut through the afternoon air. “Hiding will only make it hurt more.”
28
SHE DRIFTED IN DARKNESS.
Lost.
The Lost Girl.
That was what people called her.
Lost.
For years the travelers in the Ruin believed that she was a myth. Or a ghost.
In the towns, she was a campfire tale. Something used to frighten children.
There were a dozen versions of the Lost Girl story, and in each one of them she died. Sometimes the zoms got her. Sometimes it was crazed loners. Sometimes it was her own bleak despair.
The Lost Girl died, though, in every version of the legend.
When Benny, Nix, and Tom brought her to Mountainside and she learned about those stories, she laughed. They were stupid stories. Silly.
A teenage girl, living alone? With no one to protect her?
No, they all said. Couldn’t happen. She would die.
The Lost Girl. Dead according to everyone who spun a tale about her. It was impossible for a girl to survive out in the Ruin alone. Everyone knew that. There were too many dangers. Zoms and wild animals and bounty hunters. There were crazed loners and cannibals and a thousand different kinds of disease.
Stupid stories, she told herself. Except at night, when she thought about them in the private darkness of her bedroom, in the one place where she was safe enough to be weak. That was when she cried. That was when she believed that she was living on borrowed time—alive only because death had considered her too insignificant to pause long enough to collect.
Except that death collected everyone. Death is like that. Relentlessly efficient.
Borrowed time is no place to live.
Lilah had often feared that they were right.
Now she was sure they were.
That was the only thought that would fit into her head as she lay suspended in darkness.
She remembered the boar. Feral, massive. Four hundred pounds at least.
Both dead and deadly.
But animals can’t become zoms. It doesn’t work like that.
Unless, somehow, it does.
The Lost Girl should not be alive.
Unless, somehow, she was.
For now.
It felt like she was falling and yet not falling. Pinpricks of pain held her aloft, and for a long time she could not understand that.
Little points of pain all along her body. Except for her hands, which hung down into the black well of nothingness.
Above her, she heard the grunt of the boar and the scuff of its hoof on the edge of the rocky shelf. Then dirt and loose stones tumbled down, striking her face and chest and stomach and thighs. She heard a rustling sound as the debris fell past her. It sounded like foliage, like pine boughs and vine leaves being pelted by rain.
She forced one eye to open. It was smeared with blood, and what little she saw was filtered through red. She blinked and blinked until tears ran pink from the corners of her eyes. Above her—thirty feet at least—the snout of the dead boar protruded over the edge of the stone shelf. That meant that . . .
Panic flared in her heart, and
it brought with it a fresh burst of adrenaline, and with adrenaline came clarity.
She knew where she was.
She was suspended in a tangle of dense trees and tall shrubs, caught in the midst of her fall. Temporarily held, as if fate was waiting for her to wake up and pay attention as death made his call to collect her.
Lilah tried to move, to lift her arms, and suddenly the whole assembly of branches shifted with her. Pinecones rained down on her. Angry birds fled the trees.
How far down was the ground? The cleft was so choked with foliage that she had not been able to see the bottom. It could be six feet below her. It could be sixty. She wished she knew how badly she was hurt. Or where.
In all the tales, in every variation, the Lost Girl died.
Lilah closed her eyes.
“Chong,” she said hoarsely.
Or, she meant to say “Chong.”
What she said was, “Tom.”
29
BENNY AND NIX MADE IT TO THE WOODS WITH NO TIME TO SPARE. THE motor noise roared as loud as thunder as they dove beneath the canopy of leaves and pine needles.
Nix led the way, and Benny was a half step behind her. He cut a quick look over his shoulder and saw something that made him grab Nix’s arm and jerk her to a stop.
“Look!” he said in an urgent whisper.
They crouched down behind a thick bush and stared with slack-jawed amazement at something neither of them had ever seen.
Ten people came tearing into the clearing, all of them dressed in black clothes tied with red streamers, all of them heavily armed . . . and each of them on four-wheeled motorized vehicles.
“Oh my God,” breathed Nix, gripping Benny’s arm. “What—what—?”
The machines were not cars or trucks, and not quite motorcycles, either. Benny fished for the name and scraped up the initials ATV. He thought they stood for “all-terrain vehicle,” and that was probably right, because these machines roared easily over the uneven surface of the field. They each had four fat rubber tires and a kind of saddle for the driver. The machines were spattered with mud, but some colored metal shone through. Different colors for each—blue and green and other shades. A basket or duffel bag was lashed to the back of each, and the handles of swords and axes sprouted from many. The roar of the machines was unnaturally loud—and even in that moment of tension, it struck Benny how quiet his world was and how loud the old world of machines must have been.
The presence of these machines was like a punch to the head.
“Are we seeing this?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said in a fierce tone. She turned to him, her eyes alight. “First the jet and now this. Benny—the old world isn’t dead. Everything wasn’t destroyed.”
Benny nodded, but he studied the figures on the machines and didn’t like what he was seeing. He remembered the word Riot had used. Quads. This had to be what she was referring to.
The quads zoomed across the field and circled the big bristlecone tree. One rider stopped and dismounted, studying the ground. Looking for footprints, Benny realized.
“Nix,” he said, indicating the man who had dismounted, “look at them, look at his chest.”
She looked where he was pointing, and her mouth turned down into a frown of doubt. On the center of the man’s black shirt were angel wings, neatly embroidered in white thread.
“Angels with wings on their chests,” Nix murmured as she dumped the spent shells from her pistol.
“Angels came and set fire to the trees,” Benny added.
“Uh-oh,” she said softly.
“Listen, much as I’d love to find out about those machines and where these people come from, somehow I don’t think now is the moment.”
“No,” she agreed. She checked all her pockets for bullets and found only two.
“That’s it?” Benny asked, a note of panic in his voice.
“The rest are in my backpack.”
She thumbed the two shells into the gun and closed the cylinder. They both looked at the pistol for a moment.
“Hope we don’t need more than two shots,” said Benny.
“No kidding.” As she holstered the pistol, she glanced back the way they’d come, indecision stamped on her face.
“Look,” Benny said, “Carter and those other people said they saw the jet. If we circle around to find Chong, we’ll probably find them. Even with everything that just happened on the field, I’d still rather talk to Eve’s folks than . . . these guys.”
“Yes.” Nix brushed a tangle of red hair away from her face. “Damn it.”
They rose silently and moved deeper into the forest, going as fast as caution would allow and sticking to paths that were heavy with fallen branches or uneven ground. Benny did not believe that “all-terrain” could possibly mean that.
With minds full of questions and hearts heavy with regrets, they fled from the angels and their impossible machines.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Tom taught us that you can’t prepare for every emergency or every threat.
“The trick isn’t to practice too many specific danger scenarios, but to learn the skills that are common to all. A smart warrior is always observant, always aware of his surroundings, always aware of his resources, and always ready to adapt to situations as they change.”
30
“NIX,” PUFFED BENNY AS HE SLOWED TO A WALK, “MAYBE WE’RE DOING this wrong. Maybe we should go back and try to talk to those people.”
She made a face. “Really? That’s your plan?”
“I—”
“Or is that what you think Tom would do?”
That stung.
“Now wait a minute—” he began, but she shook her head.
“No,” she snapped, “don’t you have a clue as to how you’re behaving lately? You keep telling me and the others to back off so you can handle things. You were going to charge those lions and—”
“What does that have to do with Tom?” he demanded.
She peered up at him, her green eyes surrounded by a sea of freckles and wild red curls.
“Look,” she said, “I know you think that because you have Tom’s sword, you have to be the great warrior, but here’s a news flash, Benny: You’re not Tom. The sword doesn’t give you superpowers.”
Benny felt his face grow hot. “I never said—”
She pointed back toward the field. “You think Tom would have just waltzed in there and sorted this out?”
“I know he would. This is the sort of thing he was good at.”
“No, he wasn’t,” snapped Nix. “He was never out this far. He doesn’t know these people. We stepped into the middle of something big and nasty that doesn’t concern us. It wouldn’t have concerned Tom, either. He’d have steered us around this and left these people to sort out their own troubles.”
Benny seethed for a moment before he tried to speak. “Tom would never have walked away from that little girl.”
Nix’s eyes were as hard and cold as green glass. “Tom brought us out here to find that jet, not to solve the problems of everyone in the world.”
“So . . . what? Are you saying we should just walk away from Eve?”
“She’s with her parents,” she said, “and here’s another news flash: Eve’s parents tried to kill us back there. I’m going out on a limb here, but I pretty much think that means they don’t want our help.”
“That’s because they were looking for her and were probably scared out of their minds, Nix.”
“Doesn’t change anything.”
“And they thought we were reapers.”
Nix cocked her head to one side. “It’s that bald girl, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“You want to go back and talk to that bald girl with the slingshot.”
“Oh, for—”
Screams tore through the air behind them. A male voice, but high and filled with terrible pain. The sound was cut off in a way that suggested the worst.
The air was fi
lled with screams and the roar of quad engines.
“Chong—?” Benny gasped. “We have to—”
“No, that’s not Chong,” Nix said with a firm shake of her head. “Chong made it to the woods before we did. I never saw him run that fast before. He’ll be okay.”
There were more screams and shouts, male and female voices; and every now and then the blast of a shotgun.
“Sounds like a full-out war,” said Benny.
“You still want to go back?” asked Nix.
Benny said nothing.
“Look,” Nix said, “Chong knows which direction Lilah took. He’ll head that way, and if those machines chase him, then Lilah will hear it. She’ll know what to do.”
When Benny still said nothing, Nix touched his arm.
“Benny, let’s find the others and see what they want to do, okay?”
He sighed and nodded, and kept to himself so many things that needed to be said.
Before Nix turned away, they shared a moment of silent eye contact. Benny ached to say so many things, and he was sure Nix did too. It was just that . . . he was afraid to hear what those things were. Her thoughts, and his.
He turned away first, and the ground seemed to be tilting under him, as if the world was no longer properly mounted on its axis and everything was tipping the wrong way.
I want to go home, he thought.
Deep inside his mind, Tom whispered, Be careful, little brother, or you’re going to lose Nix forever. Everything’s hanging by a thread.
They began walking, angling through a dry wash that was thick with tumbleweeds.
“I like the slingshot,” observed Benny, half because it was true and half because he felt a peevish desire to score a point on Nix. “Quiet and nasty. We should get one. Chong used to be pretty good with one; maybe we could all learn.”
“Slingshots are stupid,” muttered Nix. “Something a kid would use.”
“That girl was pretty tough,” Benny said.
“You thought that cow looked pretty?”
“I said ‘pretty tough,’ Nix. Don’t start, okay? She was tough and dangerous with that slingshot and the firecrackers and all. Saved us from the lions.”