12

THE NEXT DAY WAS THE VIEWING AND FUNERAL FOR THE HOUSER FAMILY. More than two hundred people showed up. Benny and Nix went together. She had been sad and quiet since yesterday, and the day suited her mood. Clouds obscured the sun and turned the air wet and cool, but no rain fell. The trees were filled with crows and warblers and grasshopper sparrows. A grackle—scruffy and dark—landed on the closed coffin of Danny Houser and mocked the sermon like an uncouth heckler, until the grave digger chased him away with a shovel.

Pastor Kellogg wore a black robe and held a heavy and very battered old Bible. There was a rumor around town that the pages of the Bible were stained with blood because the pastor had been forced to use the Good Book to beat the head in of one of his parishioners who had been zommed out and attacked him. It was a lurid story, but Benny believed it was true. There were a lot of stories like that in town. Everyone who had survived First Night had one.

The mayor and his wife were there, dressed in formal clothes, and even Captain Strunk of the Town Watch was in a suit.

Benny did not own a suit, but he wore his best pair of dark blue jeans and a clean white shirt. Nix wore a pretty dress that Fran Kirsch, the mayor’s wife, had sewn for her. The dress was a richer shade of blue than Benny’s jeans, and the bodice was embroidered with wildflowers and hummingbirds. The colors made Nix’s red hair and green eyes look more intense.

Tom wore a black shirt and jeans and kept his eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses he’d recently bought from a trader. He did not say a word the whole time. Chong and his family stood nearby, but Lilah was not with them. Only when Benny looked around during one of the hymns did he see her standing on the far side of the graveyard fence. She wore a dress made from some charcoal-colored cloth embroidered with tiny white flowers. Lilah’s snow-white hair danced in the light breeze, and her eyes were in shadow. She looked as cold and beautiful as a ghost.

Benny saw that Chong was staring openly at her.

Morgie Mitchell came to the funeral too, but like Lilah he stood apart from the others.

When the burial was over, only a handful of people walked to the other side of the cemetery for the Matthias service. Nix took Benny’s hand as they threaded their way through the tombstones.

“You know what this feels like?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“It’s like we’re at our own funerals.”

Benny almost stopped, but Nix pulled his hand.

“Think about it … in a couple of days we’ll be gone too. Nobody in town will ever see us again. Someone else will be living in your house, just like somebody else is living in mine now. By Christmas we’ll be an anecdote. By next year people will start forgetting our names. I’ll be ‘the redheaded girl whose mama was murdered.’ You’ll be ‘that bounty hunter’s kid brother.’” Her voice was soft, pitched for just him to hear. She trailed her fingers over the curved top of a tombstone. “Ten years from now they won’t even remember that we lived here.”

“Morgie and Chong will remember.”

“Remember what? That we left them behind? That they weren’t able to escape with us?”

“Is that what this is? An escape?”

She shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be like being born into another world. I don’t know.”

He glanced at her as they walked down the slope to the Matthias plot, but Nix didn’t return his look. Although she was with him, she was wandering somewhere down deep in her thoughts.

Tom and Chong followed behind. Lilah did not.

Zak’s family was Catholic, so Father Shannon performed the service. He was an ancient little man with healed-over burns on his face. Like Pastor Kellogg, the little priest carried with him an awful reminder of First Night.

Father Shannon looked at the sparse gathering and then around at the cemetery, as if hoping more people were coming, but no one was. He sighed, shook his head, and launched into another reading of the same prayer for the dead. Nix still held Benny’s hand, and her grip tightened to an almost crushing force, grinding his hand bones together. It hurt, but Benny would rather have cut that hand off than take it back at that moment. If it would help Nix through this, he’d give her a pair of pliers and a vise so she could do a proper job.

The priest read the prayers and made the sign of the cross and talked a lot about redemption.

Benny leaned close to Nix and whispered, “He sounds like he thought Zak and his dad were as guilty as Charlie.”

“Maybe he’s like some other people around here. They seem to think that the whole Charlie Pink-eye craziness finally died out with the last of his family.” She shook her head. “People can be so blind.”

Benny nodded. He would have given her hand a comforting squeeze, but there was no feeling left in his fingers.

Afterward, Benny, Nix, and Tom walked home together.

At the garden gate, Tom stopped and removed his sunglasses. His eyes were rimmed with red. Had he been crying? For whom? The Housers? Surely not Zak.

“Change of plans,” Tom said. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

They stared at him openmouthed.

“Really?” asked Nix, a big smile erupting on her face.

“Why?” asked Benny at the same time.

Tom looked up at the moody sky for a moment and leaned his forearms wearily on the crossbar between the fence pickets. “I really can’t stand this damn town anymore,” he said. “Sometimes it’s harder to tell which side of the fence the dead are on.”

Nix rubbed his shoulder, and he smiled sadly and patted her hand.

Then he took a breath and turned to give them both a long, appraising stare. “There are conditions. We’ll go out for an overnight trip and camp up in the mountains. Not down in the lowlands where all the zoms are, but not in the clearer zones up high. Minimal protection, no luxuries. We’ll try some roads we haven’t been on together—roads I haven’t been on in a couple of years. If you can handle that, then we’ll just keep going toward Yosemite and points east.”

Tom had planned the trip very carefully, or at least as carefully as a journey through largely unknown territory can be planned. There were a few rest stops along the way, places Tom called “safe houses.” The first was Brother David’s way station, and the next was an old hotel in Wawona; once they passed that, they’d be on their own.

“If anything weird happens and we get separated,” Tom said, “I want you guys to head for the way station or Wawona, depending on where you are.”

Wawona was likely to be the safest place along the route. Before First Night, the small town had been home to about 170 permanent residents and a few thousand campers during the tourist seasons. Tom had told them a wild story about the Battle of Wawona, in which a small group of uninfected fought off the rest of the town as the zombie plague swept through the population. The siege of the hotel lasted four months, and when it was over there was a mass grave with more than two hundred living dead in it along with sixteen of the initial uninfected. The only survivors were a grizzled old forest ranger, his two young nephews, and a couple of women scientists visiting from the San Diego Zoo. The ranger still lived up there, and Tom often referred to him by his nickname, the Greenman. The others had gone to live in the towns. Apparently the ranger had become something of a deep-woods mystic.

Nowadays the old Wawona Hotel was a traveler’s rest and temporary storehouse for scavenged goods, and there were always a dozen people at the hotel. Rumor had it that a fire-and-brimstone evangelist named Preacher Jack had taken up residence as well. He was happy to share his version of the word of God with everyone who passed through, and was even reputed to have tried to convert and baptize some zoms.

When Benny asked what Tom thought about Preacher Jack, his brother shrugged. “I haven’t met him yet, though I think just about everybody else out there has. A bit eccentric from what I hear, but I guess he’s harmless enough. A guy doing what he believes is the right thing. Nothing wrong with that.”

Nix sighed, and Tom asked her what was wrong.

“What if we don’t find the jet?” she said cautiously.

“We’ll keep trying until we get it right.” Tom smiled at the looks of alarm on their faces. “Understand me, guys, we are going, let’s not kid ourselves about that. The only question is whether you’re ready to go now.”

Nix nodded. “I’m ready,” she said grimly.

Tom gave a noncommittal grunt, which Benny interpreted as I’ll be the judge of that.

“One more thing,” Tom said. “You can ask Chong and Morgie if they want to go with us. Not all the way, just overnight. If so, I can arrange to have Brother David or one of my friends out there take them back to town. J-Dog and Dr. Skillz are always working that part of the Ruin.”

“I met them once,” Benny said, “at the New Year’s party year before last. They’re goofy.”

Tom shrugged.

“I couldn’t understand a lot of what they said,” Benny said.

“I can’t either.” Tom laughed. “They were just breaking into the professional surfer scene when First Night hit. Surfers have their own lingo, and those two use it like a personal language. I don’t think they want people to understand them.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a defense mechanism. Remember that story about Peter Pan and the Lost Boys?”

“Sure, the kids who never grew up.”

“They’re like that. On one hand they work the bounty trade and they can fight like demons, but on the other they don’t really want all this to be real. For them it’s like living inside a video game. Remember when I told you about video games?”

“Sure,” Benny said, though the concept was incredibly alien to him. “With Dr. Skillz and J-Dog … they don’t actually think they’re at the beach, do they?”

“Hard to say,” said Tom. “Everything’s a big game to them. They can be ankle deep in blood or fighting a hundred zoms with their backs against the wall and they’re cracking jokes in their surfer lingo. It’s their way of surviving, and I guess it works for them. Don’t ask me how.” He paused and smiled. “Lot of people can’t stand them. I like them a lot.”

“Weird world,” said Nix.

“You have no idea, sweetie,” said Tom. Benny noticed that he didn’t get the ninja death stare for calling Nix sweetie. Tom gestured to the southeast. “Now … the Greenman has a cabin up there. I got word out to him and a bunch of others that we’re coming. We’ll have friends out there and safe places to rest.”

“Chong’s mom might go for the overnight thing,” Benny said hopefully. “She’d probably think that it would scare the pants off him and get the whole ‘go and see the world’ thing out of his system.” He thought about it. “Probably will work, too. Chong’s not big on roughing it.”

“And Morgie?” Tom asked.

Nix shook her head. “No, Morgie won’t go.”

Benny and Tom looked at her. “You seem pretty certain,” Tom said.

“I am.” But she didn’t explain, and they didn’t press the issue.

“Okay,” said Tom. “If we’re going to get out of here, then I have a week’s worth of stuff I need to get done today. You two better say your good-byes.”

“There’s no one I need to say good-bye to,” Nix began, but Tom cut her off.

“That’s not true and you know it. We’re leaving Mountainside, Nix … we’re not discarding the people who live here. The Kirschs, Captain Strunk, the Chongs … they’ve been kind to you, and they deserve the courtesy and respect of a proper good-bye.”

Nix gave a contrite nod, her face flushed with embarrassment.

“And both of you are leaving friends behind. If Morgie and Chong aren’t going, then are you planning on walking away from them without saying good-bye? Remember, they think we’re going next week. This is going to be hard on them, too.”

Benny sighed, and nodded.

“Leaving is never easy,” said Tom. “Even when you know you have to go.”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

People in the Ruin

Traders: They bring all sorts of stuff from town to town in armored wagons pulled by horses covered in carpet and chain mail. You can buy almost anything from a trader, or make a request and he’ll get it for you for a price, and traders’ goods are always expensive.

Scavengers: These people are nuts. They go into towns and raid houses, stores, warehouses, and other places for all sorts of things: supplies, canned goods, stockpiles of seeds and flour, clothing, weapons, books, and everything else. Sometimes they have bounty hunters go in first and clear out the zoms, but then they have to share their profits with them—so a lot of scavengers prefer to risk going into zombie-infested areas. Tom says that the life expectancy of a solo scavenger is two years, but if they survive, they can make enough money to retire. He says he knows of only three who have retired. He’s quieted over two dozen others who weren’t as lucky.

Loners: These people scare everyone. They live alone (or in small groups), and once they’ve staked out their territory they’ll kill anyone who comes close—human or zom. There’s a rumor in town that some of them are cannibals.