“Warrior smart,” she told herself.
And then she took her ax in both hands and jumped.
46
“ARE YOU DEAD?”
Chong heard the voice coming from somewhere beyond the darkness in which he floated. A girl’s voice.
Nix? No, it was a harder voice.
Lilah? Definitely not. Lilah’s voice was always a smoky whisper.
“Yo!” said the voice. “You in there, boy?” This time the voice was accompanied by a sharp poke in his shoulder.
He said, “Ow.”
“Okay, then y’all’s not dead.”
She had a thick accent and pronounced it dayud.
Chong licked his lips. “Delighted to hear it,” he said. There was a cool cloth across his eyes, and he had no desire to remove it. If he did, then he would have to face the reality of where he was, and he was not quite ready for that. He felt absolutely terrible. Weakness was the worst part, and it seemed to go all the way down to his bones. He wanted to sleep. Not here; at home. The best thing in the world would be to be curled up in his bed on the second floor of his family’s A-frame house. Maybe Mom would come and tuck the blankets in around him and kiss him on the head in that way she always did, even when he was too big to be tucked in. Moms are moms, they did that sort of thing. It would be nice, too. Being tucked in by his mom would chase all the monsters away. A little kiss to make the pain go away too; to help him drift off to sleep.
That would be real nice.
But that was a different world. Mom probably thought that he was dead by now. Her skinny, bookish son lost out in the Rot and Ruin. Would she be sitting on the edge of his empty bed right now, crying, her heart broken? Would she be praying that her son wasn’t a zom shambling forever through the decaying wasteland?
“Hey,” said the girl, poking him a second time.
“Please stop doing that.”
The cloth was whipped away, and Chong reluctantly opened his eyes.
Riot sat beside him. She had cleaned the blood from her face.
“You asked if I was dead,” he said. His voice was thick. “Should I be dead? Am I dying?”
“Well,” said the girl, “you got shot, boy, so put that in the pot and see if it’s soup.”
“Ah,” he said, bracing himself for the return of his memories. Brother Andrew, the archer. Carter and Sarah.
The black-tipped arrow.
“Riot . . . ?” he said slowly. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Well,” she said, “look at you being sharp as a new blade of grass.”
She studied him with eyes that were older than the face in which they were set. There was wisdom there, and a cunning that looked every bit as sharp as Lilah’s, but there was something else, something that Chong always saw in Lilah’s eyes. Sadness. Not new grief, but an older sadness that ran so deep it was as much a part of this girl as her skin. A sadness that was aware of itself and knew that it had nowhere to go.
They were inside what looked to be an old shack. Bare walls, a wood beam ceiling draped with spiderwebs.
“What else do y’all remember?” asked Riot.
“All of it, I suppose.” Then he gasped. “Eve! What happened to her? Please, tell me that they—”
“She’s here,” said Riot quietly. “Keep your voice down. She’s sleeping.”
Chong turned his head and saw a tiny figure curled up under a thin blanket in the far corner. He made as if to sit up in order to see her better, but a meteor of pain slammed into him. He started to scream, but Riot instantly clapped a hand over his mouth, stifling the sound before it could escape. She bent close and whispered in his ear.
“If y’all wake that little girl yonder, I’ll give you something to scream about, boy. We clear on that?”
Chong took in a ragged breath through his nose. Even that was an effort. He felt thin, hollow, like he was more ghost than person. He stared into her eyes and saw that there was more fear than threat there.
He nodded.
Riot studied him for a moment, returned his nod, and slowly removed her hand. She sat back on her heels.
Chong very carefully gasped in a lungful of air. The pain subsided slowly.
“Poor kid saw her mommy and daddy cut down in front of her,” murmured Riot. “Hasn’t said a word since. Not a peep. She ain’t ever gonna be right after something like that, but at least we can let her sleep some. It’ll be a mite easier trying to grapple hold of things when she’s not dead-dog tired.”
Chong nodded. “She’s still young . . . maybe she won’t remember all of it.”
Riot gave him a strange, sad look. “Nobody’s that young.”
“You see something like that too?”
She shrugged. “I’ve seen some things.”
He waited, but she didn’t elaborate. He looked around. “Where are we?”
“Old ranger station, I think. Brought you here on a quad I filched from one of the reapers who clear don’t need it no more.”
He cleared his throat. He was bare-chested, and he glanced down at the feathered end of the arrow that stood up straight from his flesh. It was low, just inside the hip bone. He touched the feathers ever so lightly. “What do we do about . . . um . . . this?”
“Unless you like the look of it, we’s going to have to git ’er out. Your shirt was all bloody so I cut it off ya.”
“Ah.”
“Wound’s a funny color and it smells, which bothers me ’cause that’s too fast for ordinary infection. So I packed some stuff around the entry and exit holes—spiderwebs and moss and suchlike. Keeps it from going septic.”
Chong nodded; he knew something about natural medicines. These days everyone did, and he’d read several survival manuals during the Warrior Smart training. Sphagnum moss had acidic and antibacterial properties; spiderwebs, apart from also being antibacterial, were rich in vitamin K and helped blood to clot. Chong found it comforting that this girl knew her natural medicines. Out in the Ruin, infection was every bit as dangerous as zoms and wild animals.
Over in one corner was a small fire, and some herbs were steeping in a shallow pan of water. The bow and quiver of arrows that had once belonged to Brother Danny lay on the floor. Souvenirs of an encounter Chong would rather have forgotten.
“How . . . how bad is it?” he asked cautiously. “How bad am I hurt?”
“You ain’t dead, so that’s something. Arrow missed most of the good stuff, and you ain’t spittin’ blood or nuthin’.”
“Hooray?” he muttered weakly, making it almost a question.
“On the downside, you lost about a bucket of blood, boy, and you didn’t do yourself any favors when you grappled hold of Andrew back there. I wouldn’ta bet a dead possum on you making it this long, you being such a skinny boy an’ all. But there’s some pepper in your grits.”
“Thanks. I think.” He closed his eyes for a second as a wave of nausea swept through him. His skin felt greasy and clammy. “Can you just pull it out?”
Riot snorted and bent down to pick up Brother Danny’s quiver of arrows. She fished one of the arrows out and held up the point. “That arrow’s got the same barbed point as this. Big bear tip. I’d tear a flank steak offa you if I tried to pull it out. That what you want, boy?”
“No. And will you please stop calling me ‘boy’?”
“What do you want me to call you?” she asked, her eyes filled with challenge and amusement.
“My name is Louis Chong. Most people just call me Chong.”
“Chong, huh. That Korean?”
“Chinese.”
“Okay. Well, t’other thing is that I don’t know what this black stuff is that’s smeared all over the tip. Smells like death, and that’s generally not good news.”
“Poison?”
“Or something,” she said. “Either way, we have to be smart about how we take it out and what we do about infection.”
He cocked his head at her and licked his lips. “Why are you helping me? Back
there at the field, you and your friends seemed pretty determined to . . . you know.”
“Yeah, I do know, and we’d have done it too.”
“I believe you. So . . . why the change of heart? Not that I’m looking to make you question your decisions.”
Riot glanced at Eve for a moment. “Evie told me that you and your friends—the cute boy with the sword and that red-headed witch—saved her from the gray people. That earned you some real points.”
“It didn’t look that way back on the field. I remember you trying to take our weapons and supplies.”
Riot shrugged. “Times is tough, ain’t you heard? Apocalypse an’ all.” She rubbed her face. “You also tried to save Sarah and Eve from Brother Andrew. Almost died doing it. Cartin’ you here and plucking out an arrow seems the least I can do.”
“Brother Andrew,” Chong repeated with a confused shake of the head. “Who the heck are these reapers and why are they doing all this?” he asked. “I mean, I heard Andrew and Carter talking, so I think I understand some of it. Is it some kind of cult thing? Some religious cult?”
Riot considered the questions. “It’s religious,” she admitted. “Don’t know much about ‘cults.’ But this is something real, and it’s big.”
She explained about Saint John and his belief that the Gray Plague had been a kind of “rapture,” and that anyone left behind was a sinner. Saint John formed the reapers to usher those left behind into the darkness.
“Darkness? What’s that? Heaven?”
“Don’t rightly know. Saint John says that it’s the place where pain and sufferin’ don’t exist no more. He never said anything about pearly gates or none of that stuff.”
“And people join him?”
A strange light kindled in her eyes. “Oh, yes they do. By the hundreds and by the thousands.”
Chong thought about it. “Brother Andrew said a lot of things about how hard it is to survive out here. All the disease and hunger, not to mention the zoms.”
“Zoms? Oh, you mean the zees. Nobody much calls ’em zoms, ’cept the odd trader or ranger. Mostly it’s ‘gray people,’ ‘gray wanderers.’ All the same.”
“So . . . let me see if I understand this,” said Chong. “People are eager to join the reapers and embrace the ‘darkness’ because this world is too hard to live in? Is that about it?”
She nodded. “It ain’t as simple as that, but you got the bones of it. If all you know is suffering and fear, and next year looks to be just as bad, and the year after that and the year after that . . . who wouldn’t take a hard look at an offer of no pain, no suffering?”
Chong sighed. “I’d say it was the craziest thing I ever heard of, but it’s actually not. Those who want to go see God can do it right now, and those who want to find some kind of redemption—or maybe some kind of important purpose—can join the reapers and do God’s work before they head off to join their loved ones.”
Riot gave him a long, appraising look. “Ain’t stupid, are ya?”
“I try not to be.”
He suddenly swayed as another wave of nausea churned through him. He fought to control the urge to vomit.
“You okay?”
“I’ve felt better. Little woozy. Sick to my stomach.”
Riot placed her palm on his forehead. “You’re sweatin’ up a storm, but I don’t feel no fever. You’re sick as a dog.”
“Arrows in my body tend to do that to me,” Chong said.
“Ah,” she said. “So I heard.”
Riot bent close and studied the arrowhead. “That is a beaut.”
“Swell.” Chong could actually feel his body turn cold. “Since we can’t, um, yank it out . . . what are our options?”
“It’s an aluminum arrow,” she said, nodding toward the shaft. “So I’ll try and unscrew the head, and then we can pull it out backwards-like. Might jostle a bit, which is why I wanted you awake ’fore I try. Can’t have you waking up screaming.”
“No, we can’t have that.”
She nodded at his bare shoulder. “What’s that?”
Chong did not need to look to see what she meant. There was a fresh scar from where a zombie had tried to take a bite out of him in one of the fighting pits at Gameland. He explained that to Riot.
“You was a pit fighter?’
“Not by choice.”
“And you got bit and healed?” She looked dubious.
“The zom’s teeth just pinched, and I pulled away at the same time. I lost some skin, but I didn’t get infected.”
“You got the luck. Bit by a gray wanderer and lived to brag on it, and now shot by a reaper and you’ll have that scar to use to charm the ladies. Is . . . there a lady, by the way? Maybe that little redhead with the freckles?”
“That’s Nix, and she’s with Benny.”
“And you all alone?” she asked, a smile touching the corners of her mouth.
“I . . . I’m kind of seeing someone.”
“Oh?” she asked casually as she knelt over the small fire and placed the tip of a knife in the flames. Chong did not ask her why. He already had a bad idea about what that burning metal would be used for.
“Tell me about her.”
Chong told Riot an abbreviated version of Lilah’s story.
Riot turned and stared at him. “The Lost Girl? You’re joshing me.”
“No . . . why? Don’t tell me you’ve heard of her?”
“Oh, dang, son, I heard ten different versions of that tall tale.” She laughed and shook her head. “Boys are funny. They’ll make up any dang story just to impress a gal.”
“You think I’m making this up?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. But when we’re done here I’ll introduce you to my uncle, Daniel Boone. He keeps a chupacabra for a pet and has a fresh-raised gray man as his personal butler.”
Chong tried to argue, to explain that Lilah was real and that he knew her, but Riot kept laughing and shaking her head. Finally he gave it up.
Riot gave him a wicked little grin and ticked her chin toward the arrow. “So, unless you got more tall tales to tell . . . let’s give ’er a go, shall we?”
47
BENNY AND NIX STARED AT THE ZOMBIES ON THE T-BARS. THE CREATURES twisted and reached for them, their moans softer than the desert breeze. Red streamers were tied around their ankles.
Around the neck of each was hung a small plank of whitewashed wood. The message on each was the same.
I DIED A SINNER
DARKNESS IS DENIED TO ME
“What’s it supposed to mean?” asked Nix in a hushed and frightened voice.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”
Nix nervously touched one of the streamers tied to the nearest zom’s ankle. “That looks like what Saint John was wearing.”
“Yeah. Let me rephrase what I said. I really do not freaking want to know what this means. Actually, this whole thing is really scaring the crap out of me. We need to find Lilah and—”
“We need to look inside that plane.”
He smiled at her. “You’re actually nuts, aren’t you? The desert sun’s baked your brains and—”
Nix just looked at him. Benny felt suddenly detached from the moment. Here was Nix, the girl he loved, the girl he’d risked his life for, the girl he’d left his home for. Nix, with her wild red hair and explosions of freckles and brilliant green eyes. Nix, who had a scar on her face that Benny actually thought looked sexy. Nix, who was everything to him. But she was also the Nix he did not know. The girl he’d come to know less and less ever since they’d seen that jet.
This Nix laughed less often. This Nix was less kind, less . . .
Soft?
He considered that word and its implications.
Soft could mean weak, or it could mean gentle, open, receptive. The Nix he’d known all his life was soft, but was she ever weak? No, absolutely not. Not before and not after the jet. Okay, then what about the other meaning of soft? Was this new Nix gentle?
Mos
tly no. Life had been so hard on her that she had become hardened.
Was she open?
Again, mostly no. Where once they could spend hours discussing or even debating points as trivial and varied as the species of a butterfly or the politics of the Nine Towns, this new Nix seldom let him inside her thoughts.
Was this Nix receptive?
That was the hardest call. She seemed open to new experiences, and would readily listen to advice or information about the best ways to do things, the best routes, safety in the Ruin, all sorts of things. But that was only receptivity along the lines of a file cabinet—information was stored, but Benny had no idea of how it was being processed.
Was this the Nix he’d fallen in love with?
No. That Nix was gone. If not forever, then at least for now. There was hardly any trace of her left.
That left a final and dreadful question. One that he had been debating for a couple of weeks now.
Was he in love with this Nix?
Benny searched and searched inside his head and heart, and he just simply did not know. The only consolation was that he didn’t understand this Nix. Maybe when he did, things would get better.
He knew that Nix had always wanted to leave Mountainside. He and Chong both considered her a visionary; she had big, but practical, dreams about going beyond the fence line to make a new home out here in the Ruin. But that was before her mother was murdered and Nix was abducted. It was before Nix had been forced to fight in the zombie pits at Gameland, where she’d encountered the reanimated zombie of Charlie Pink-eye. It was before Tom died.
After all those things, Nix had changed.
Now, standing in front of the crashed plane, with proof of ugliness and madness out here in the Ruin, Benny looked into those emerald eyes and did not see anyone he recognized.
All this, all these jumbled thoughts, crashed through his mind in the space of a second or two. Most of the thoughts were rehashes of issues that had been hanging unresolved on the walls of his brain.
Benny turned away from her stare, unable to look into her eyes any longer. The Nix he knew was not there, and he didn’t want this new Nix to see the agony that must be in his own eyes.