51

TOM KNELT BY A COLD CAMPFIRE AND STUDIED THE GROUND. THIS WAS the second place where he’d found Chong’s footprints and signs of violence. The first time had been the spot where Sally Two-Knives had tried to rescue Chong. There were indeed two dead men there, and Tom recognized them. Denny Spurling and Patch Lewis, bounty hunters of the low-life variety who usually ran with a third man named Stosh Lowinski. These were two of the three men Benny had seen torturing and brutalizing zoms on their first trip into the Ruin. Stosh, a beefy man who used a replica Arabian scimitar to kill zoms, was not here. Sally had given them a little taste of their own medicine. Rough justice, but justice of a kind.

Tom knew Sally’s history. She’d been a rough, hard-edged Roller-Derby blocker with one of the Rat City Rollergirl teams out of Seattle when First Night changed the world. Sally had been the mother of two little kids, and she’d fought her way across Seattle to her small apartment where her mother was minding April and Toby. By the time Sally got to the apartment building, the lobby was splashed with blood. It took her a couple of years to tell Tom the whole story. It came out in broken fragments, and none of it was pretty. There were no happy endings, and when she reached her tenth-floor apartment, all she found was heartbreak.

Broken and more than half-crazy from loss, Sally headed south in a Humvee she took out of a used car lot. The salesmen at the dealership were long past caring. Sally made it as far as Portland before the electromagnetic pulses released by the nukes killed her car. She raided a sporting goods store for weapons. Previous looters had already taken the guns, so she loaded up with knives, including the two bowie knives that eventually became her trademark and her name.

It was nearly two years before she made it into Mariposa County, where she met Tom and discovered that there were towns filled with survivors. Tom remembered the Sally he’d first met: filthy, wild-eyed, almost feral, and more than half-dead from a bacterial infection she’d picked up from drinking bad water. He had gotten her first to Brother David’s and then into town.

Tom knew that Sally felt she owed him a debt, but in his view, if she helped someone else, then a different kind of infection would spread. Generosity could be as contagious as the zombie plague as long as enough people were willing to be carriers.

Tom rose from where he’d been crouching as he studied the scene.

The two men had indeed been quieted and left to rot. Tom wasted no sympathy on them. However, something caught his eye, and he parted some weeds and saw Chong’s bokken lying there. He picked it up. It was undamaged. Tom rigged a sling and hung the sword across his chest. As he did so he walked slowly around the clearing, looking at the prints. There were five distinct sets. Chong’s waffle-soled shoes. Sally’s cross-grained hiking boots. Prints that matched the shoes of the two dead men. And a fifth set that entered the camp from upslope. Tom placed his foot into one of the prints, and it dwarfed his. Tom was not a big man, and he wore a size nine-and-a-half shoe. This print had to be at least a fourteen extra wide, and the impression was ground well into the topsoil. A big man. Tall and heavy.

Like Charlie. Charlie Pink-eye had worn size fourteens.

Tom continued to walk the edges of the clearing until he found an even deeper set of footprints leading away. Same shoes, but clearly a heavier footfall. The answer was there to be read. There were no traces of Chong’s waffle soles, which meant that the big man had carried the boy off.

That gave Tom some hope. If Chong was dead, he would have been quieted and left for the crows. If he was alive and being carried, then even a big man could not move at top speed. And it was virtually impossible to cover your tracks while carrying a burden.

Tom was not carrying a burden. He could move very fast, and even a blind man could follow those tracks. He set out, moving quickly. He had the kind of lean and wiry body that was built for running, and he knew how to run. Two hours later he found the remains of a campfire and the clear and distinct marks of Chong’s waffle soles. The campfire was almost cold. Dirt had been kicked over the small blaze, and it had cooled more slowly than if it had been doused with water. Tom judged that he was now no more than four hours behind the big man. He was making up the time he’d lost by tending to Sally last night; and the big man had stopped to rest. When they’d started out again, Chong was walking instead of being carried. Good.

“Hold on, Chong,” he murmured aloud. “I’m coming for you.”