Somewhere, somehow, during the long weeks after that conversation with Tom, Lilah’s heart changed. She let go of her desire for Tom, though in a different way she loved him more than ever. She always would.
Now Tom was dead.
She walked on along the stream, pushing herself to focus on her mission.
However, she wondered if, now that Tom was gone too, there was someplace where he and Mrs. Riley were together again. Lilah’s understanding of her own spiritual beliefs was largely unformed, but she wanted Tom and Jessie Riley to be together. Tom had earned that.
If that could be true, then maybe there was a place where George and Annie were together. He’d be lying under a tree, peeling an apple, and she’d be laughing as she chased butterflies in a sunlit field where there were no living dead and no evil men.
It was why Lilah did not fear death. So many of the people she loved were waiting for her there.
Lilah kept walking along the muddy bank of the stream, but she slowed and then stopped completely. The path ahead of her was invisible now. It was not hidden by shadows, and it had not petered out as loose soil gave way to hard rock. No, it was simply that Lilah couldn’t see a thing through the hot tears that boiled from her eyes and burned their way down her cheeks.
15
BENNY AND CHONG STOOD AT THE EDGE OF THE RAVINE. MORE THAN AN hour had passed since Lilah had gone looking for Eve’s family, and half an hour since Benny’s inexplicable fight with Nix. Now Nix sat sleeping against the tree with Eve in her arms. Benny did not tell Chong about the argument. He was still trying to figure a way to explain it to himself and so far had made no headway at all.
Benny sighed.
“Something wrong?” asked Chong, distractedly peeling a fig while staring into the ravine.
What could possibly be wrong? wondered Benny sourly. I either think I’m hearing voices or I’m actually being haunted. And I got so depressed down in the ravine that I almost gave up fighting for my own life. How’s that for “wrong”?
“Tell me something, O mighty sage,” Benny said at length. “Do you ever have too many thoughts in your head?”
Chong started to say something funny and biting, but stopped himself and studied Benny for a slow three-count. He turned back to study the faces of the dead.
After a long time he said, “All the time, man. All the darn time.”
They were silent for many long minutes before either of them spoke again.
“Earlier . . . you said you saw a woman?” asked Chong. “What was that about?”
Benny told him. And about how she appeared to blow on a silent whistle, and how the zoms did not attack her. By the time he was finished, Chong had a half smile on his face.
Benny sighed. “Go on, say it.”
“You are monkey-bat crazy.”
“Thanks.”
“A whistle?”
“Yeah.”
“Like . . . what? A dog whistle?”
Benny grunted. He hadn’t considered that possibility. Mr. Lafferty, who owned the general store, had a dog whistle. You couldn’t hear that sound either.
“Maybe,” said Benny. “That’s what it kind of looked like.”
“For calling zoms?”
“I never said she called the zoms. I’m telling you what I saw.”
“Okay,” said Chong.
“Okay,” said Benny.
They watched the zoms.
“Real question,” said Chong, “so don’t hit me.”
“Okay.”
“How was it down there? Was it bad?”
“It was bad.”
“Are . . . you okay?”
Benny shrugged.
“Did you see any fast ones?” asked Chong.
“A couple.”
“Jeez.”
“Yeah.”
All their lives there had been only one kind of living dead. Slow, mindless, shuffling zoms. It was the way it was—a zom was a zom was a zom. Then last month, while Benny and Nix were on the way to Gameland, they had encountered zombies who moved faster. Not really as fast as a healthy human, but at least twice as fast as any zom Benny had ever heard about.
That ugly fact was just one of several things about the zoms that was changing the world as Benny knew it. The people back in town had only survived this long because they began to understand what zoms could and could not do. Knowledge of them did not make the dead less of a threat, but it increased the chances of survival in a world where zoms were everywhere.
Now that was changing. Now nothing that had previously been known about them could be relied on. Some zombies were faster. The few advantages people had over zoms seemed to be crumbling.
What if the dead started thinking? There were seven billion of them, and barely enough humans to fill a small city.
They stood in the silence of their own thoughts for a long time. The zombies watched them with unblinking eyes. Birds sang in the trees on Benny’s side of the divide, but there was movement in the sky above the zoms. Benny shielded his eyes from the glare and peered at a dozen large black birds drifting in slow circles high above the far side of the field. Chong noticed him looking and cupped his hands around his eyes too. He turned and saw even more of them over the forest behind them.
“Turkey vultures,” observed Chong.
“I know.”
They watched the dark, ugly birds glide without sound on the thermal currents above the endless miles of pinyon pines.
“There are a lot of them out today,” Chong said. “Seem to be everywhere.”
Benny looked at him. He could feel the blood drain from his face.
“Oh, crap . . .”
“Yeah. Carrion birds don’t eat zoms . . .”
“ . . . so what are they circling?” Benny finished.
It was one of the great mysteries of the Ruin that vermin did not feed on the zoms, even though they smelled of decay. No one understood it, and as Mr. Lafferty at the general store once said, “Kind of a shame, too, ’cause in about a month we’d have had a zillion fat crows and no zoms at all.”
Chong said, “Something’s dead out there.”
“I’d better get Nix,” said Benny.
16
LILAH ANGRILY FISTED THE TEARS FROM HER EYES AND GLARED AROUND AS IF ready to bash anyone who happened to be a witness to those tears. She detested weakness of any kind. It was something she could barely tolerate in her friends and would not allow in herself.
Especially after what had happened a month ago. After Tom led them out of town, their group had gotten separated. Chong, torn by guilt for having inadvertently caused Nix’s face to be slashed, and generally feeling like the town boy he was, had run away, requiring that Tom go and find him. That night, while Nix, Benny, and Lilah waited for Tom’s return in a deserted monk’s way station, the place was overrun by a sea of zoms. Thousands upon thousands of them; more zoms than anyone had seen in one place since First Night. In the moments before the attack, Lilah had been arguing with Benny, and he accused her of deliberately ignoring and mocking Chong’s feelings for her. That hurt, because it was entirely true. Lilah cared for Chong, but he was the weakest and least hardy of their team. He was not suited for the Ruin; not at all. When the zoms attacked, Lilah panicked and ran. It was the first time she had ever panicked since that terrible night when she had escaped from Gameland and was forced to quiet Annie. She’d thrown down her spear and run blindly into the dark. Even now she could not remember what her thoughts had been in those moments. Or even if she’d had any thoughts. All she remembered was running through the blackness, inside and out.
Awareness came back to her much later. She found herself curled on the ground, totally vulnerable and totally lucky to be alive. The zoms had not found her; but a strange mountain loner named the Greenman had. He hadn’t attacked her—just the reverse; he showed her kindness and patience, and helped her discover where she’d left her strength. He also spoke with her about love, about responsibility, about guilt, and about
the choices everyone makes.
Lilah had wept several times that day. And she wept even more bitterly that night, when the monster Preacher Jack shot Tom Imura in the back. It did not matter that Preacher Jack and Gameland both died that night. Tom Imura had died too. Lilah had clung to his hand as the last strength went out of it. Even now, a month later, thinking about it was like being punched in the heart.
She stood there in the forest and wept again. For Tom.
And for Annie.
God, how that little girl, Eve, looked like Annie. So much. Too much.
It was unfair.
It was cruel.
She sniffed and wiped her eyes and took as many deep breaths as she needed to in order to stop her chest from hitching with sobs. The forest waited for her. The day seemed to pause for her.
“Annie,” Lilah whispered to the forest. “Oh God, Annie, I miss you.”
She begged the forest to answer her. She begged for the ghost of Annie to speak inside her mind, like the ghost of Tom Imura sometimes did.
And suddenly the forest stopped being empty and silent.
She spun and faced the northern reach of the forest as noise filled the air. She frowned. This was not a forest sound. It was a sound she had only ever heard once, back in Mountainside.
It was the sound of a machine.
No . . . machines. At least two, coming from different directions.
The sounds rode the breeze toward her from different directions. Motor sounds, clearly mechanical, like the hand-crank generators in the town’s hospital.
Lilah ducked behind a tumble of rocks, going low and still, melting into the landscape as the motor sounds grew from a growl to a roar.
The leaves of the forest wall parted, and Lilah beheld something that shocked her. Something she’d believed belonged only to a world that no longer existed.
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 a
cross 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.