35
“BACK … BACK!” CRIED NIX IN A FIERCE WHISPER. AS SHE SAID IT she walked backward, herding Lilah and Benny toward the open door. Lilah stumbled along as if her brain had shut itself off. Benny had to push her into the way station. Nix was last in. She tossed down her bokken, grabbed Lilah’s pistol, and stood for a moment in the doorway, tracking the barrel left and right, but she did not fire. There was no point. If she had a barrel filled with bullets it would not be enough. Nix lowered the pistol and retreated inside.
“We’re dead,” Lilah said again, and her voice already sounded dead.
Benny closed and locked the door. “It won’t hold for long,” he said quietly. “Same with the windows. That glass is old. It might last if a couple of them beat on it … but there are hundreds of them out there.”
“Thousands,” said Nix. “There had to be five hundred of them just coming down over the rocks. It’s insane.”
It was insane. Last year Benny had seen three thousand of them in the Hungry Forest, but the seething mass of the living dead outside had to number twice that many. It was an army of rotting flesh-eaters. “Where did they come from?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” said Nix. “It doesn’t make sense. We weren’t that loud. And I don’t think they could see our cooking fire from outside. Not all the way into the forest and up the mountains.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” said Lilah in a hollow voice.
“What about the cans? Zoms couldn’t do that,” said Benny.
“I know, Benny,” said Nix. She scraped a match and lit the little oil lantern.
“Don’t!” gasped Benny.
“Why?” she said softly. The flaring match revealed a crooked smile. “Are you afraid it’ll attract zoms?”
Her voice was way too calm. Benny had heard people talk like that right before they went off the deep end. And yet, what could he say? He turned to Lilah for help, but the Lost Girl truly looked lost. She stared at the pistol and knife she still held and then numbly put them into their holsters.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Lilah said, repeating the phrase in a lost whisper.
Benny shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. If this was something normal, Tom would have told us about it. Besides, Brother David’s lived here for over a year, and he said there were never more than a few wandering zoms in the area. This is … this is insane.”
“Insane,” echoed Lilah.
Benny did not like what he was seeing in her face any more than he liked what he heard in Nix’s voice. Not one little bit. It made him wonder how crazy he looked and sounded.
Crazy or not, they had to do something. Benny looked at the three carpet coats that hung from pegs by the door. He grabbed the coats belonging to Sister Shanti and Sister Sarah and tossed them to the girls. “Put these on!”
Nix immediately slipped into hers, but Lilah let hers drop to the floor. Benny picked it up and pressed it to her.
“Put it on!” he yelled.
Lilah took it but did nothing with it. Finally Nix took it and put it on Lilah the way a mother dresses a child.
“We have to get out of here,” Benny said as he belted on Brother David’s coat. He lifted the blankets and peered outside. The closest of the zoms was still about fifty feet away. “We can still run.”
That made Lilah’s face twitch. “Run where?”
Nix said, “She’s right, Benny. They’re coming from every direction. We’re safer here.”
“This isn’t safety.” Benny waved his hands around at the way station. “This is a freaking lunch pail. They’re going to close in around us, open this place up, and—”
“Stop!” hissed Lilah, pressing her hands to her ears.
“If we run, at least we have some chance.” Benny fished in his pocket and pulled out the bottles of cadaverine. “We have these.”
Nix chewed her lip, caught in the terrible trap of indecision.
Then abruptly Lilah’s hand darted out fast as a snake and snatched a bottle out of Benny’s hand. She opened it and began dribbling the thick liquid onto her sleeves. When Benny and Nix simply stood there staring at her, Lilah growled, “Now!”
It was a freakish moment, as if there had been no disconnect in Lilah, as if she had been strong and in charge all the time. Benny and Nix shared a covert, worried look.
Don’t say anything, warned Benny’s inner voice. She’s ready to break. Push now and she’ll shatter.
Benny tossed his second bottle to Nix and dug the extras out of his pocket.
“Will it be enough?” Nix asked as she smeared the noxious chemical on her coat.
Benny didn’t answer. They each used a full bottle. The inside of the way station reeked as if it was stuffed to the rafters with rotting flesh.
“Weapons and water only,” said Benny.
“Good,” agreed Lilah.
Nix nodded, but she grabbed her journal off the table and stuffed it into a big pocket inside her vest. Then she belted the carpet coat tightly around her. The coat protected her body and arms and had a high, stiff collar to shield the throat, but it was not a suit of armor. Even the fence guards back home said that enough zoms could eventually chew through one.
Benny slung his canteen over his neck and pulled his bokken from its sheath.
At the door, Lilah paused, took a deep breath, and without turning said, “We go slow. Don’t fight unless you have to. Run only if you have to.”
“What if we get separated?” asked Nix.
There was only one answer to that question, and Benny’s inner voice whispered it to him. Anyone who gets lost in the dark … is dead. Aloud he said, “We won’t.”
It was somewhere between a lie and a gamble.
Thump! A dead fist struck the window, rattling it in its frame.
“Me, Nix, Benny,” whispered Lilah. “Ready?”
Nix and Benny both lied. They both said they were. Lilah opened the door.
A zombie stood there, arm raised to strike the glass. He was broad-shouldered, his once brown skin bleached to the color of milky tea. Most of his face was gone, and gnawed edges of white bone jutted from the bloodless flesh. The creature took a shambling step forward. It did not sniff the air—Benny had never seen zoms do that—yet through whatever senses it did possess, the creature took the measure of the pale girl with the white hair … and then shuffled past her into the room. For the moment it did not judge her as prey. She reeked of the dead, and the dead passed her by.
Benny could see that Lilah’s whole body was trembling. This wasn’t like that time when she’d freed the zoms in the Hungry Forest. Back then she was on her home turf, and she’d known a thousand paths through those woods. No … this was beyond Lilah’s experience, and maybe that was what crippled her. She had no plan and lacked either the imagination or optimism to believe that some line of escape would present itself.
Or maybe you screwed her up with what you said about Chong. Benny wished with all his strength that he could step back in time and unsay those cruel and stupid words.
Lilah drew a ragged breath and stepped cautiously outside. Nix went next, turning to squeeze by a lumbering fat man with bullet holes in his stomach. As Benny stepped into the doorway his shoe scuffed the floor, and the fat man turned sharply, gray lips pulling back from green teeth. The zom snarled at Benny, then just as suddenly, the look of hunger and menace dropped away as if a curtain had fallen. Its dusty eyes slid away from Benny, and the monster turned awkwardly and trundled inside, followed by another zom, and another.
Holding his bokken to his chest as if it was a magic charm, Benny slipped outside. Lilah had not waited for him. She was already thirty paces away, walking straight into the sea of shambling corpses. Nix was much closer, her steps slower and uncertain. Nix kept looking back for Benny. Lilah never looked back at all—she kept going. Did she see a way out? Benny wondered. She was moving faster and faster, and soon he couldn’t see her at all.
Move or die, growled his inner voice. Benny began walking, moving disjointedly, trying to imitate the artless shamble of the zoms so as not to attract attention.
Don’t stop.
He didn’t … until he reached the edge of the concrete pad by the gas pumps. From that angle he could see almost all the land around the way station. What he saw punched the air out of his lungs and nearly dropped him to his knees. There, in the thick of a seething mass of zoms—an army that numbered uncountable thousands—stood a tall figure with hair even whiter than Lilah’s, massive chest and shoulders, gun butts sprouting from holsters at hips and shoulder rigs, and a three-foot length of black pipe clutched in a nearly colorless hand. It was too far away to see his eyes, but Benny was sure—dead certain—that one would be blue and the other as red as flame.
The figure stared right at him. It was smiling.
The zoms shifted and shuffled around the figure. They did not attack him. They surged past him, heading toward the gas station, toward Lilah and Nix. Toward Benny. Then the sea of zoms closed around the figure, obscuring him from Benny’s sight.
It didn’t matter. Benny had seen it.
Seen him.
“No …,” he whispered to himself. “No.”
He turned and ran. Not walked, not shuffled like a zom. Benny Imura ran for all he was worth. He ran for his life. As he ran he could feel those eyes upon him, burning like cold fire into his back. God! Where was Tom? Benny thought he heard a sound threaded through the moan of the thousands of walking dead. He thought he heard the deep, rumbling, mocking laughter of the man he was positive he had just seen standing amid an army of the dead.
Charlie Pink-eye.
When I was real little, Mom was having a hard time earning enough ration dollars. Before First Night she’d been a production assistant in Hollywood (a place where they made movies, back before they nuked Los Angeles). She didn’t know how to farm or build stuff, and she tried to make a living doing sewing and cleaning people’s houses. It was hard, but she never complained and she never let me know how hard she had to work. Then she was sick for a few weeks and fell behind on all the bills.
Then she met Charlie Matthias. He tried to get Mom to go out with him, but she wasn’t interested. AT ALL. Then Charlie told her there was a way for her to make a month’s worth of ration bucks in one day. It wasn’t sex stuff or anything like that. He said all she had to do was quiet a zom.
Of course, he didn’t tell her that she would be thrown into a big pit with a zom with only a broom handle as a weapon. It was at a place called Gameland, hidden up in the mountains. People came from all over to bet on what they called Z-Games. Zombie games.
Mom was desperate to earn the money, so she went into the pit.
She never told me about this, and I don’t know the details. All I know is that Charlie kept Mom in the pit for a week. I was real little, and Benny’s aunt Cathy took care of me.
Then Tom brought Mom home. Tom was all cut up and burned, from what the neighbors told me later. He smelled of smoke and had bloodstains on his clothes. I learned a lot later that Tom had rescued Mom and destroyed Gameland. I think he had to hurt some people to do it. Maybe kill some people. Shame Charlie wasn’t one of them.
When Charlie Matthias killed my mom last year, he was going to take me to Gameland. The new Gameland.
God … how can people be so cruel?