“We haven’t found the jet,” he said. “And until today we haven’t even seen any people. We don’t know if we’re going in the right direction. We’re low on supplies, and now we’ve run into a horde of zoms.” He paused, wondering how far off the cliff of “said too much” he’d already gone. He tried to fix it, but the wrong words came out. “I guess it isn’t what I expected.”
“I thought so,” Nix said, and Benny did not at all like the way she said it.
They walked in silence for another full minute.
“Okay,” he said when he could no longer bear it, “what’s going on?”
“With what?” she asked, not looking at him.
“With us.”
“Nothing,” she said tightly. “Everything’s fine.”
“Really?” he asked. “Is it?”
Nix stared ahead as they walked, watching the bees and the dragonflies.
“Look at me,” he said.
She did not.
“Nix . . . what is it?” he asked gently. “Did I do something, or—?”
“No,” she said quickly.
“Then what is it?”
“Does it have to be anything?”
“Pretty much, yeah. For the last couple of weeks you’ve been weird.”
“Weird?” She loaded that word with jagged chunks of ice.
“Not weird weird, but, you know . . . different. You spend all your time talking to Lilah or not talking to anyone. We hardly talk anymore.”
She stopped and wheeled on him. “And you spend all your time moping around like the world just ended.”
Benny gaped at her. “No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” she insisted.
“Well, okay, maybe I’ve been dealing with some stuff. My brother just died, you know.”
“I know.”
“He was murdered.”
“I know.”
“So maybe I need time to sort through that, ever think about that?”
Nix’s eyes blazed. “Are you going to lecture me about dealing with grief, Benjamin Imura? Your brother died fighting. My mother was beaten to death. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“It makes you feel like crap, how do you think I think it makes you feel?”
“Then what are you harping on—”
“Who’s harping?” he said defensively. “Jeez, Nix, all I did was ask what was wrong. Don’t bite my head off.”
“I’m not biting your head off.”
“Then why are you yelling?”
“I’m not yelling,” she yelled.
Benny took a steadying breath and let it out slowly.
“Nix, I do understand what you’re going through. I’m going through it too.”
“It’s not the same thing,” she said very quietly. An elk poked its head out from behind some sagebrush, studied them for a moment, then bent to eat berries from another bush.
“Then why won’t you tell me what it is?”
She glared at him. “Honestly, Benny, sometimes I think you don’t even know who I am.”
With that she turned and stalked away, her spine as stiff as a board. Benny stood openmouthed until she was almost back to the tree where Chong sat with Eve.
“What the hell was that all about?” he asked the elk.
The elk, being an elk, said nothing.
Dispirited and deeply troubled, Benny thrust his hands in his pockets and walked slowly over to the edge of the ravine to stare at the faces of the living dead. They looked at him with dead eyes, but in some eerie way Benny felt that they could see him and that they somehow understood all the mysteries that were sewn like stitches through the skin of this day.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
A lot of the stuff Tom taught us has nothing to do with zoms. Once, right after we started training, Morgie asked Tom why we bothered, ’cause after all, Charlie and the Hammer were dead. This was before we left town, before we met White Bear and Preacher Jack.
Tom said that we should never assume that we know what’s out there. He said, “People in town refer to everything beyond the fence line as the great Rot and Ruin. We assume that it’s nothing but a wasteland from our fence all the way to the Atlantic Ocean three thousand miles away. But we saw that jet, so there is something out there. We don’t know what it is, or whether whoever’s out there will be friendly. Or generous. Or open to us joining them. A smart warrior prepares for all eventualities.”
Tom also said, “Even before First Night there were all kinds of people who wanted to be on their own. Isolationists, religious orders, militant groups, back-to-nature groups, communes, military bases, remote research stations, and more. Some of these people will do anything to protect their privacy or their way of life. To them . . . we’re outsiders and intruders.”
14
FOR LILAH, READING TRACKS ON THE GROUND WAS AS EASY AS READING words on a page. Her sharp eyes missed nothing, and as she moved deeper into the desert forest, she began cataloging the marks she found. Eve’s were easy to spot, and they wandered out of the east along a crooked path.
As for the rest, Lilah slowed from a run to a walk as she studied them.
The forest was denser than she’d expected. She knelt and pawed at the sandy soil and quickly found darker, wetter soil beneath. She sniffed it.
There was water here. An underground stream or some other source beyond what the wind towers pulled in. Eve had mentioned a creek; and the footprints seemed to be coming from the densest part of the forest. That made sense. People tended to camp near water. Especially in a climate like this.
Lilah bent forward onto all fours and studied the ground. In some spots, like this one, there were many footprints, and they varied. Several men, a few women. From the spacing and gait, it was clear that these were humans. Most of the shoes, even the crudely made ones, were in good repair, and there was none of the aimless shambling typical of zoms.
Not that she didn’t find signs of wandering zoms. They were out here too.
Lilah straightened, eyes alert.
So far they had seen no zoms on this side of the ravine, but the footprints didn’t lie.
She turned and glanced back the way she’d come as if she could see little Eve sitting there with Nix and the others. The girl must be charmed, she thought, to have made it safely from where her parents were camped to where Benny had rescued her. She had no bites on her, no marks to indicate that zoms had tried to hurt her.
That was a great relief to Lilah, one she had not shared with Chong. If Eve had been bitten . . .
If she was infected and needed to be quieted . . .
Lilah did not know if she could do that.
Not to a little girl who looked so much like Annie.
Not again.
She adjusted her grip on the spear and moved on.
A few minutes later she stopped again and knelt down by a different set of tracks. Not human footprints, and not the scuffling marks of zoms. No, these were straight lines of serrated tracks, like wheel marks.
But . . . wheels belonging to what? If they were made by a cart or wagon, then there was no sign of what pulled it.
She cleared away some loose debris and studied the patterns. The impressions were cut deep into the ground. Whatever made them was heavy, and it had four wheels. She thought of the many abandoned cars and trucks she’d seen over the years, and these marks didn’t fit. For one thing, the wheels were too close together.
It was a mystery.
Lilah moved on.
The ground became increasingly moist. Soon she smelled water on the breeze, and then within a few minutes she heard the soft burble of a stream. The footprints and the wheel marks all came from that way.
Five minutes later Lilah stepped out onto the banks of a narrow, shallow stream that ran out of the northeast and jagged off due south. The water was clear and clean, with the kind of mineral taste that confirmed her suspicion that the source was an underground river. She drank handfuls of it and refilled her canteen.
Despite the potential for zoms and the mystery of the tracks, Lilah felt relaxed, content in her skills and in her solitude. She welcomed any opportunity to be alone. Being alone was when she felt most like herself. She felt powerful and normal. For months now, Lilah had felt anything but normal. Except when she went ahead to scout out a path for Nix, Benny, and Chong, she was seldom alone. That bothered her.
Benny and Nix often said things like, “It must be great not to be all alone anymore.” And, “You’ll never have to be alone again.”
On a practical level, Lilah could understand that they meant well. That they thought she had been rescued from loneliness. To a degree, she had.
Mostly, though, the ties between her and her new friends, the responsibility of protecting them, caring for them, felt like tethers holding her down. She did not want to care for anyone. The last person she’d cared for was Annie.
She knew that she was not like other people. Not like Benny, Nix, or Chong, even though they were all her friends. Their life experience was completely alien to her, as hers was no doubt bizarre to them.
Lilah had been two years old on First Night. Her mother was pregnant with Annie, and they were caught up in the mad exodus from Los Angeles as the dead rose. A handful of survivors managed to find a safe house hundreds of miles from the city, but that house was soon under siege by zombies. None of the other survivors realized that the pregnant woman had been bitten. Just as her mother gave birth to Annie, the infection took her and she died, only to reanimate moments later as a monster.
It was the first time Lilah had witnessed anyone being quieted, though there was nothing quiet about it. Her mother screamed like a feral beast as she tried to attack the men; and the survivors screamed in fear as they bludgeoned her with anything they could grab. Lilah screamed too. She screamed so long and so loud that she permanently ruined her vocal cords, leaving her with a ghostly whisper of a voice.
Over the next few days, the survivors tried, one by one, to escape and find help. None ever returned. The last survivor was a quiet little man named George. He stayed. He cared for Lilah and Annie. Raising them, teaching them, loving them as if they were his own children.
As she moved through the dry desert shrubs, Lilah thought more and more about her early life with George and Annie. They had been her whole world. However, during one of their moves to a new farmhouse, George met a group of armed men who claimed to be part of a movement to reclaim the Ruin from the dead.
That was a lie.
The men brutalized George and kidnapped the girls, taking them to the zombie pits at Gameland. There, Lilah and Annie were forced to fight for their lives against zoms while corrupt men and women wagered on who would survive. Lilah fought hardest against her captivity, and the Motor City Hammer and his thugs frequently beat her. She still had the scars from their fists, belts, and switches.
After Annie died, Lilah spent the next five years alone, living in a cave she filled with weapons and books. Until Benny, Nix, and Tom found her and brought her back to Mountainside.
Tom said that he had met George out in the wild, and had even helped him look for his two lost girls. Then rumors began circulating that George had gone crazy and committed suicide. Tom Imura thought it was a lie, believing that Charlie and the Hammer had murdered him and faked his suicide. Not that it mattered. George was dead.
All those men were now dead. Charlie. The Hammer.
And . . . Tom.
Just thinking his name made her eyes sting.
Tom and the others had brought Lilah back to their town. She went to live with the Chongs, who had a big house with plenty of room. Mrs. Chong took it upon herself to teach Lilah how to act “like a young woman,” with all the bizarre rituals that went with that. Lilah’s total lack of tact, deference, modesty, and hesitation was a jolt to the Chong household. After a while, some of the family manners and deportment she’d learned while living with George came back. Grudgingly.
Many times during those months, Lilah found the confinement of a house and the obligations of social interaction to be too much hard work. It became claustrophobic. It was frightening, because every day there were a hundred times when the things she said and did mattered to other people. Things she said caused as much pain as if she’d punched someone. It was confusing to her. So many times she packed her meager belongings—just clothes and weapons—and prepared to sneak away in the dark of the night.
She never did, though.
Partly because she wanted to belong to a family. The loss of George and Annie was so strong, even after all this time. It was as if the bounty hunters had literally carved away a piece of her body; she could feel the loss every day.
But there was another reason she stayed.
During her years of lonely isolation Lilah had read every novel she could find, from Sense and Sensibility to The Truth About Forever. She understood the concept of romance, of love. Of emotional and physical attraction. She was strange, she knew that, but she was still a teenager. A young woman.
Even so, she was unprepared for the moment when she discovered that Lou Chong had developed “feelings” for her. It was an absurd concept. He was a town boy. Not a hunter, not a fighter. He wouldn’t last a single night alone in the Ruin.
And yet.
Lilah did not want to have feelings for Chong.
She would rather have been with Tom Imura.
She even approached him once, on a winter night when no one else was around. She’d come right out and told him, “I love you.”
In the novels she read, that usually did it. The hero was swept off his feet by the honesty and directness of the heroine’s bold announcement.
What Tom said was, “Wow, Lilah. That’s a hell of a way to open a conversation. I thought you came over looking for Benny or Nix.”
“They are out,” she told him. “I waited until they left.”
“Ri-i-ight,” Tom said. They were standing in the kitchen. Tom had a cup of coffee in his hand. Outside it was thirty degrees and lightly snowing. “And you stood out there in the storm?”
“It is only snow.”
“Right,” he said again. “Okay, so here’s the thing, Lilah. I know that you like people to be direct with you, so that’s exactly what I’m going to be. I don’t know if this is going to hurt your feelings, but I think it’s absolutely necessary for us to put all our cards on the table. Do you understand that expression? Cards on the table?”
She nodded. “The truth, with nothing hidden.”
“Good. Then here’s the thing. I’m twice your age.”
“What does that matter—?”
“Shhh, let me talk. Let’s do this the right way, okay?”
Lilah had not replied to that. The moment had not become what she had expected. In books, the hero sweeps the heroine up into his arms and they kiss. Lilah had never kissed anyone except Annie and George, and those were cheek kisses. Not the fiery kisses she’d read about. The kinds of kisses where the world tilts on its axis and the heroine feels like she’s going to faint. Lilah did not know what that really meant, but she wanted to find out.
What Tom said was, “Lilah, you are my friend. You’re a very pretty girl, no doubt about that. You are strong, and intelligent, and lovely, and you care about people. All of those are amazing qualities. If I was Benny’s age, I have no doubt that I would be one of a hundred boys who would fall head over heels for you. But that’s not going to happen, for a couple of very good reasons. First, I’m an adult and you’re a teenager, so there are all sorts of legal and moral issues right there, and I’m not the kind of guy who’s ever been interested in crossing those lines. Not now and not ever.”
Lilah said nothing to that. It was a stupid reason, and she was sure that she could kick it aside.
“Second, even though it’s a self-appointed role, I’m charged with protecting you. That means I have to advise you against making the wrong kinds of choices. If you came to me and told me that you were in love with someone else, some ot
her adult, I’d give you the same advice: Don’t do it.”
She ignored that, too. There were no protectors when she lived alone in the Ruin, and she did not believe she needed anyone to make decisions for her. She had to fight to keep a dismissive sneer off her face.
“And third, and most important of all—I don’t love you like that, Lilah. I don’t now and I won’t.”
“Why not?” Lilah demanded, her tone fierce, her posture aggressive.
Tom set his coffee cup down and looked out the window at the falling snow for a long time. When he turned back to her, his eyes were filled with more sadness than Lilah had ever seen in anyone’s eyes.
“Because I’m already in love with someone, Lilah,” he said softly. There were thorns and broken glass in his voice.
“With who?” demanded Lilah.
“With Nix’s mom. With Jessie Riley.”
Lilah blinked. “But . . . Nix’s mother is dead. Charlie Pink-eye killed her.”
“Yes,” agreed Tom. “Charlie beat her so badly that she was dying when I found her. I held her while she died, Lilah. I felt her go. I felt her heart stop. I felt her last breath on my lips.”
A single tear broke and fell down Tom’s cheek.
“I loved Jessie Riley with my whole heart.”
“I—” began Lilah, but Tom shook his head.
“No.” He wiped the tear away with his fingers and looked at the wetness for a long moment. “I had to use a sliver to keep her from coming back.”
“Oh . . .”
“You know,” Tom said softly, “this year, during the spring festival, I was going to propose to her. Benny and Nix don’t know that. There’s a silversmith in Haven who was making the ring.”
He sniffed and took a breath.
“Jessie had my heart, Lilah. And . . . when she died, I think that part of me died with her.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone else. Not like that.”
“In books,” Lilah protested, “people heal. They get over it.”
“Other people, maybe,” Tom said. “But—those books were written before First Night.”
It was the last thing he said about it. Lilah stayed for a cup of coffee, but they sat at the table and looked at things inside their own heads and said nothing to each other. Her coffee was cold and untouched when she left the house, and they never spoke of it again.