2
BENNY STARTED TO SAY SOMETHING THAT WOULD BE WILDLY CRUDE AND physically improbable, but then a smaller shape pushed her way between the bulky Morgie and the wiry Chong. Even though he saw her every day, seeing her again always made his heart bang around like a crazy monkey.
“Nix,” he said, smiling.
“‘Sweetie’?” she asked. Not smiling.
It wasn’t the sort of thing he ever said to her. Not out loud, and he could kick himself for letting it slip. He fished for a clever comment to save the moment, aware that Tom was watching all this from the table, and Morgie and Chong were grinning like ghouls.
“Well,” he said, “I—uhh …”
“You’re so smooth,” Nix said, and pushed past him into the kitchen.
Chong and Morgie mimed kissy faces at him.
“Expect to be murdered,” Benny threatened. “Painfully and soon.”
“Yes, snookums,” said Morgie as he followed Chong into the kitchen.
Benny took a few seconds to gather the fractured pieces of his wits. Then he turned and closed the door, doing it very carefully even though slamming it would have felt much better.
After her mother died, Nix had first moved in with Benny and Tom, but then Fran Kirsch, wife of the mayor and their next-door neighbor, suggested that a young girl might prefer to live in a house with other females. Benny tried to argue that Nix had her own room—his room—and that he didn’t mind sleeping on the living room couch, but Mrs. Kirsch didn’t buckle. Nix moved into the Kirschs’ spare bedroom.
Nix and the boys crowded onto chairs at the table and were doing a pretty good imitation of vultures with the leftovers. Tom settled back into his chair, and Benny reclaimed his.
“We training this evening?” Morgie asked.
Tom nodded. “Road trip’s coming up, remember? Benny and Nix have to be ready, and you two guys need to stay sharp, Morgie. Who knows what you will have to face in the future?”
“You’ve been working them pretty hard,” said Chong.
“Have to. Everything we do from now on will be about getting ready for the trip. It’s—”
“—not a vacation,” Benny completed. “Yes. You’ve mentioned that thirty or forty thousand times. I just thought we’d have, y’know, a night off.”
“Night off?” echoed Nix. “I wish we were leaving right now.”
Benny dodged that subject by asking, “Where’s Lilah?”
Lilah was the newest member of their pack. A year older and infinitely stranger, she had grown up out in the Ruin, raised for a few years by a man who had helped to rescue her during First Night, and then living on her own for years afterward. She was more than half feral, moody, almost always silent, and incredibly beautiful. The Lost Girl, they called her on the Zombie Cards. A legend or myth to most people, until Tom and Benny proved that she existed. She wanted to go with Benny, Nix, and Tom into the Ruin to find the jet.
Chong tilted his head toward the back door. “She didn’t want to come in.”
Chong sighed, and Benny had to control himself not to seize the moment and bust on him. His friend had developed such a helpless and hopeless crush on Lilah that the wrong word could put him into a depression for days. Nobody, including Nix, Benny, and Chong, thought that Lilah had so much as a splinter of interest in Chong. Or maybe she didn’t have a splinter of interest in anything that didn’t involve blades, guns, and violence.
“What’s she doing?” asked Benny, carefully sidestepping the issue.
“Strip-cleaning her pistol,” said Nix, her green eyes meeting Benny’s and then flicking toward the yard outside.
Lilah treated her handgun like it was her first puppy. Chong said that it was cute, but really everyone thought it was kind of sad bordering on creepy.
Benny refilled his teacup, poured in some honey, and watched Nix pick the last scraps of meat from a chicken breast. He even liked the way she scavenged food. He sighed.
Morgie said, “I’m going to catch the first catfish of the season.”
“What are you going to use for bait?” asked Chong.
“Benny’s brain?”
It was one of their older routines, and Benny made the appropriate inappropriate response. And Tom gave the expected admonition about language.
Even that ritual, as practiced and stale as it had become, felt good to Benny. Especially with Nix sitting beside him. He fished for something to say that would earn him one of her smiles. Nix’s smiles, which had been free and plentiful before her mother’s death, had become as rare as precious jewels. Benny would have gladly given everything he owned to change that, but as Chong once said, “You can’t unring a bell.” At the time—a year ago, when Benny’s wild attempt at driving in a home run had smashed through the front window of Lafferty’s General Store—he had thought the observation was stupid. Now he knew that it was profound.
So much had happened since last year that he wished could be undone, but it was all written into the past and nothing—not wishing or willpower or nightly prayers—could change it.
Nix’s mom was dead.
You can’t unring a bell.
“What are you attempting to think about?” asked Morgie with a suspicious squint.
Everyone looked at Benny, and he realized as an afterthought that someone had probably asked him a question, but he’d been so deep in melancholy thoughts that it had sailed right past.
“What? Oh … I was just thinking about the jet,” Benny lied.
“Ah,” said Chong dryly. “The jet.”
The jet, and all that it symbolized, was a big silent monster that had followed them around since they’d returned last September. The jet meant leaving, something that Nix and Benny were going to do and Chong and Morgie were not. Tom called it a “trip,” suggesting that they would eventually return, but Benny knew that Nix had no intention of ever returning to Mountainside. The same was probably true of Tom, who still grieved for Jessie Riley. Benny, however, did want to come back here. Maybe not forever, but at least to see his friends. Once they left, though, he was pretty sure that their road trip was going to be permanent.
It was a horrible, heartbreaking thought, and none of them liked talking about it; but it was always there, hiding inside every conversation.
“That freaking jet again?” griped Morgie, and gave a sour shake of his head.
“Yeah. I thought that I’d go to the library tomorrow and see if they have any books about jets. Maybe I’ll see the one Nix and I saw.”
“Why?” Morgie persisted.
“If we know what kind of plane it was,” Nix said, “we might have some idea of its range. Maybe it didn’t come all the way across the country. Or maybe it came from Hawaii.”
Morgie was confused. “I thought you said it came from the east and went back that way.”
“They’re not air traffic controllers, Morgie,” added Chong. “The more they can learn about the jet, the better the chance they’ll have to find it. I think.”
“What’s an air traffic controller?” persisted Morgie.
That allowed Chong to steer the conversation away from the road trip and into areas of pre–First Night trivia. Benny cut a sly sideways look at Nix, and there it was: just the slightest slice of a smile. She reached under the table and gave his hand a quick squeeze.
Tom, who had been watching this performance, hid a smile behind his teacup as he drained it. Then he set it down with a thump that drew all eyes his way.
“Okay, my young Jedi … time to train.”
Everyone jumped up, but as they headed outside, Morgie nudged Chong in the ribs.
“What’s a Jedi?”
Things We Know About Zombies, Part 1
They are dead human beings who reanimated.
They can’t think. (Tom’s pretty sure about this.)
They do not need to breathe.
They don’t bleed.
They are clumsy and slow.
They can do some things (walk, grab, bite, swallow, moan).
They rarely use tools. (Tom says that some of them pick up stones or sticks to try and break into a house; but he says it’s really unusual.)
They aren’t very coordinated. (Tom has seen a few turn door handles. They only climb stairs when following prey. No ladders, though.)
**They are really scary!