Rot & Ruin (19 page)

Benny laughed. “What, you want to kill zoms? I thought you guys were doing this sword stuff for fun.”

“I don’t particularly want to kill zoms,” she said. “But I do want to understand them.”

“What’s to understand?” Benny said, though even as he said it he knew it was a stupid thing to say. The real truth was, things had now changed between him and Nix, and he didn’t know the territory. It had a new feel to it, a new language, and he felt immensely awkward. He tried it again. “I mean … why?”

Instead of answering directly, Nix said, “Do you want to live in Mountainside your whole life?”

“Got to live somewhere,” he began, but he saw disappointment blossom in her eyes. Nix shook her head and bent over her book, pencil poised to pick up the thread of her argument. Before she’d finished half a paragraph, a ragged line of seagulls flew
overhead, their stomachs as white as snow, their wings tipped with black. Nix nodded toward them. “They probably sleep on the coast, right by the ocean. According to the maps we’re less than two hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, but I’ve never seen it. No one our age has. The way things are going, no one will. It might as well be on another world.”

“Why do you want to see it?”

“Why don’t
you
?”

“I …” He knew he was on some dangerous ground here. There were all kinds of deadfalls and rabbit holes built into her question. He didn’t know where she was going with this, but he was smart enough to know he was about to put his foot somewhere that would hurt him. “I never really thought about it,” he said, and that was true enough. “Look, I kind of get your point. You’re frustrated because this town’s our world, it’s all we have. Okay. That sucks and I don’t like it either. But how are we going to change that by studying zoms?”

“Do you remember in history class when Mr. West-Mensch talked about war? He said that history shows that it’s easier to conquer than to control. What was the line Chong likes so much?”

“‘They won the war but lost the peace,’” Benny supplied. “But I forget which war Mr. West-Mensch was talking about.”

“He might as well have been talking about this one. The last one. First Night was like a sneak attack, followed by a systematic invasion. Like the Germans in the early part of the Second World War. We lost because we were totally unprepared for the attack, and by the time we understood the nature of the attackers, it was too late to organize a counterattack.”

“Are you quoting someone?”

“No. Why?”

“I don’t know. … It just sounds pretty sophisticated.”

“For a girl?” The challenge was making her freckles glow again.

“No,” Benny said. “For someone younger than me. Or … even someone older than me.”

She ignored the implied compliment and went back to her point. “Right now we hold our own. We’re not losing the war anymore, because the enemy has reached the limits of how it can come at us. We build fences, and they can’t dismantle fences. We know that anyone who dies will come back as a zom, and so we have all these precautions around the sick and dying. We have guns and weapons, we have carpet coats, cadaverine. We have the beginnings of a whole new science of warfare against the enemy.”

“Okay. So?”

“So … we could take back whole sections of the country.”

Benny nodded. He told her about his brief conversations on this topic with Tom and Rob Sacchetto. Neither of those conversations had gone very deep, though; and neither of them had the passion in their voices that he heard in Nix’s.

“Out in the Pacific there are islands not that far off the coast. I read a book about them. Santa Cruz, San Miguel. Catalina. Some of them had only a few thousand people on them, and even if
all
of them are filled with zoms, we have enough people, enough weapons and know-how, to take them away from the zoms. Zoms can’t swim; they can’t use boats. We could take those islands. The book said that there’s farmland on several of them.”

“It would take years to do all that.”

“We
have
years. We have nothing but time, Benny. Years and years and forever, because that’s all we have left.”

“How’s all that better than what we have here? We have farmland that we don’t have to fight for.”

“Because out there on the islands, eventually there would be nothing left but people. Even if there was an outbreak where someone forgot to lock themselves in at night and zommed out, it wouldn’t lead to another First Night. Not anywhere close. Everyone knows the basics of how to control a zom. Everyone. We played games about it when we were in first grade. We’re a culture of zombie hunters, Benny, even if most of the people here don’t want to accept it, or pretend otherwise.”

Benny thought about that, tried to poke holes in it, but couldn’t.

“If there was nothing left but people,” Nix continued, “we wouldn’t have to live in fear all the time. There wouldn’t be any need for bounty hunters, either. It would be a real world again.” She looked toward the east, as if she could see the fence line from Benny’s backyard. “You see the fence as something keeping the zoms out. I don’t. I see it as the thing that pens us in. We’re trapped here. Trapped isn’t ‘alive.’ Trapped isn’t ‘safe.’ And it isn’t ‘free.’”

Benny looked at her, at the side of her face as she stared toward the unseen fence line. Nix was so pretty, so smart, so … everything.
Open your mouth you idiot,
he told himself.
Just tell her.

“Nix,” he said softly, but he had no idea what he would say next.

“What?” She still stared to the east, watching as more gulls came from that direction and flew over them toward the unseen coastline behind them.

“I
do
want to see the ocean.”

Nix turned toward him.

He said, “The ocean, the islands to the west, or whatever’s on the other side of the Rot and Ruin to the east. Maybe what’s in another country. Whatever’s there, I want to see it. I don’t want to live my life in a chicken cage.” He took a breath, fishing for the right way to say it. “You’re right. If we don’t get out of this town, we’re going to die here. And I don’t mean just us. You and me. The caged birds. I mean all of us. Mountainside was how Tom and the other adults survived First Night. But now it’s—”

She finished it for him. “Now it’s a coffin. No room, no air, no future.”

“Yeah.”

Even though his inner voice screamed at him to say more, he couldn’t make his mouth form the words. He sat there, staring into her green eyes. After a long time Nix sighed. She touched his face. No more than a ghost-light brush of fingertips on his cheek.

“One of us is the stupidest person in the whole wide world, Benny Imura,” she said. Then she rose and went inside to wash up.

23

T
HE CLOUDS SWEPT OVER THE MOUNTAINS AND ACROSS THE VALLEY,
blotting out the sun. Morgie, Chong, and Nix stayed for roasted corn and hamburgers that Tom made on a stone grill in the yard, but as the first fat raindrops splatted down, they bolted for home. The wind picked up, and the Imura brothers ran to close the shutters and button up the house. By the time they were done, lightning was flashing continuously, throwing weird shadows across the lawn and stabbing in through the slats of the shutters.

“This is going to be a bad one,” Tom said, sniffing the air.

Inside, they changed out of their workout clothes, washed, and shambled back into the kitchen in pajama bottoms and T-shirts. The temperature dropped like a rock, and Tom brewed a pot of strong black tea, flavored with fresh mint leaves. They drank it with honey-almond muffins Nix’s mother had sent over.

“How come Mrs. Riley sends us stuff so often?” Benny asked, halfway through his third muffin.

Tom gave an enigmatic little shrug. “She thinks she owes me, and this is how she repays the debt.”

“Does she owe you?”

“No. When a friend does a favor for a friend, it isn’t with the expectation of repayment.”

“What favor? Getting her out of Gameland?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tom said. “And it was a long time ago. But I think it makes Jessie feel better to send us what she can.”

Benny nodded, uncertain what to make of Tom’s answer. He nibbled the muffin. “She’s a pretty amazing baker.”

“She’s a pretty amazing woman,” said Tom.

Benny straightened. “Really?” he said with a grin.

“You can wipe that smile off your face right now, because Jessie and I are just friends. She’s one of the few people I really trust. And that is the end of that discussion.”

Benny grinned all the way through the rest of his muffin. Thunder slammed against the house—hard enough to rattle the teacups.

Tom left the room and came back with his boots, rain slicker, and his sword. The real one, not the wooden training
bokken.
He set them by the back door.

“What’s that for?”

“That last one sounded like a lightning strike. There are trees near the north wall of the fence.”

“Sure, but there’s a guard detail too.”

“Sure, but it’s always better to be prepared.”

As Tom sat down he spotted the object that Benny had placed in the center of the table. The Zombie Card with the picture of the wild and beautiful Lost Girl.

“Ah,” Tom said.

“Will you tell me about her?”

“Maybe. Will you answer my questions first?”

“About Charlie Matthias?”

“Yep.”

Benny sighed. “I guess.”

Tom stood up. “Good night, kiddo. Sleep tight.”

“Hey!”

Tom said, “‘I guess’ doesn’t sound like a show of trust. Either you
will
or you
won’t
.”

“You’re going to go all Zen on me again?”

“Yes,” Tom said. “I am. Now this time think it through and give me a straight answer.”

“Yes,” said Benny. “I’ll answer any question you want to ask, as long as you tell me about Lilah.”

“No reserves, no fake outs. Straight answers?”

“Yes. But I’m going to want the same.”

“Fair enough,” said Tom. “So I’ll get right to it. Do you trust Charlie Pink-eye?”

“After what happened today? No, not much.”

“How much is ‘not much’?”

“I don’t know, and that’s the truth. I like Charlie … or I used to, but today he really freaked me out. For a minute there, he looked like he was going to
take
that card from me. By any means necessary.”

“Do you think he would have hurt you?”

“To get the card?”

Tom nodded.

“That’s a weird question, because it’s only a card, you know? I mean … so what? It was only dumb luck that I even got it. It could have been Charlie’s own nephew, Zak, who bought that pack. Or one of the other kids that Charlie doesn’t know. It could have been Chong or Morgie. Or Nix.”

“Yeah, things happen in strange ways sometimes,” said
Tom. He sipped his tea. “When you let go of the card, was that an accident or did you toss it to keep it away from him?”

“I dropped it.”

“Why? Why not show him the card? Why not give it to him?”

“It was mine.”

Tom shook his head. “No. You were willing to let it blow away in the wind instead of letting Charlie have it. That wasn’t about possession. So what was it about?”

“It’s hard to explain,” Benny said. “But when I first saw that card, when I saw
her
, I had this weird feeling that I knew her. Or … would know her. Does that make sense?”

“It’s a dark and stormy night, kiddo. Mystical seems kind of appropriate.” As if in agreement, another crack of thunder rattled the crockery in the cupboards and pulled groans from the timbers of the house. “Go on.”

“I don’t know. I felt like I needed to protect her.”

“From Charlie?”

“From everyone.”

Tom reached out and turned the card. The girl looked fierce, and the heap of zombie corpses behind her suggested that she was brutally tough. “She can take care of herself.”

“You say that like you
know
her,” Benny said. “I was square with you, now it’s your turn. Tell me about the Lost Girl. Tell me everything.”

“It’s not a nice story, Ben,” Tom said. “It’s sad and it’s scary and it’s full of bad things.”

Thunder punched the house over and over again.

“Like you said, this is the night for that kind of thing.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I guess it is.”

And he told his tale.

24

“I
FIRST SAW THE
L
OST GIRL FIVE YEARS AGO,”
T
OM SAID. “ROB
S
ACCHETTO
told me his story, of course, but I didn’t make the connection between the little girl he left in the cottage and the wild girl I saw in the Ruin. It’s hard to believe they’re the same person. Did Rob tell you about the search for the cottage?”

Benny nodded.

“There was more than one search. The first was made by the group that split off from the main rescue party that settled this town. That team never made it to the cottage. No one knows where they ended up. Maybe they gave up the search and found some other place to live or—more likely—they ran into trouble and died out there. It’s odd. … People talk about First Night as if it was just that one night, but when the dead rose, it took weeks for civilization to fall. There were lots of fights. Big ones with the military and smaller ones with families defending their homes, or people grouping together to defend their neighborhoods. In the end, though, we kind of lost the fight more than the dead won it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We let fear rule us and guide us, and that’s never the way to win. Never. A long time ago a great man once said that ‘we
have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ That was never truer than during First Night. It was fear that caused people to panic and abandon defenses. It was fear that made them squabble instead of working together. It was fear that inspired them to take actions they would never have taken if they’d given it a minute’s more cool thought.”

“Like what?”

“Like dropping bombs on the cities. Nukes and regular bombs. A lot of the big cities were destroyed; all the people killed by shock or radiation sickness. Sure, some of the zoms were killed too, but those hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by the bombs came back as zoms. I remember one of the last news reports from Chicago, in which a reporter screamed and wept and prayed as she described waves of radioactive zombies crawling out of the ruins of the city. They were so hot with radiation that they were killing humans long before they made physical contact.” Tom shook his head. “It was fear that caused those bombs to be dropped.”