Rot & Ruin (34 page)

“I know. But … I think he might have burned Gameland down.”

“So what? The problem isn’t the place, Benny, it’s the people. Tom didn’t stop them. I think he was afraid of Charlie.”

Benny shook his head. “You don’t understand. Tom wasn’t who I thought he was. I was completely wrong about him. He wasn’t afraid of—”

But Nix was on the attack and cut him off. “You never liked Tom, so don’t start defending him now. You always said he was weak. He was supposed to be so tough, and yet he wouldn’t even do what my mom wanted. He
couldn’t
… and look what happened. Mom’s
dead
.” She pounded her fists on the metal rail, and the echo bounced off the night-black trees. Benny heard the echo and quickly grabbed her wrist.

“Don’t,” he said. “Not out here. The noise …”

She wheeled on him. “Are you afraid too?” she mocked.

“Yes,” he said. “I am. There are zoms out there, Nix. Zoms and
them.
Sound carries.”

But her hurt and anger still needed a target. “You’re just as bad as Tom. You and Morgie and Chong. You worship Charlie and the other bounty hunters. You think he’s
cool
.” She injected that word with so much venom that Benny knew he would never allow himself to speak it again. It sounded hollow and immature and stupid.

“Not anymore,” he said.

“Oh, sure. Now that it’s too late to do anything, you act all wise and noble. Please.”

Her voice was drenched with bile, and it was getting louder. Benny tried to read her face by starlight, but all he saw were harsh lines.

“And about Tom … I’m not sure what I feel about him anymore. I mean, I miss him. A lot. More than I thought I would.” He shook his head. “Ever since he first took me out to the Ruin, everything’s different. I don’t understand him. I don’t know if I ever did.”

She shoved him hard in the chest. “Who cares? He didn’t save my mom and he could have.”

“Nix, I know you’re hurt. I wish I could fix it, I swear to God. I wish I could make it all different, make what happened not true. If I could … I’d give anything. I’d die to make it right for you and for your mom.”

She started to say something, but he touched her arm.

“If you need to lash out at me, if you need to do anything to me—say anything, throw me off this tower—if it will help even a little, then do it. I don’t care what happens to me anymore. I got what I wanted.”

“What’s that?” she demanded.

“You,” he said. “I got you back safe. The monsters didn’t get you.”

Nix stared at him, unable to speak even though she tried.

Benny tugged the worn leather diary out of his back pocket and pressed it into her hands. “I found this on the floor in your room. I kept it. I … haven’t opened it, haven’t read it. I kept it, because as long as I had it, I knew I’d find you again.”

Nix took the diary, and in the pale light from stars and
moon, she ran her fingers across the cover and along the binding. When she raised her eyes to look at Benny, her eyes were wet with new tears.

“Benny, I—,” she began, but before she could say anything more, he bent forward and kissed her. It was the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong circumstances. There was nothing right in their whole world.

Except that kiss.

40

N
IX FELL ASLEEP WITH HER HEAD IN HIS LAP
. B
ENNY STAYED AWAKE
for another couple of hours, stroking her hair and staring into the infinite star field that stretched above him. After that first scalding kiss, there had been others. And then there had been more tears as the full reality of her loss hit Nix. These tears were quieter, though. They weren’t the tears of shock and denial. They’d already been through that storm. These were the deep, heartbroken tears of acceptance.

Their lives had changed. Their worlds had changed. As he sat there stroking Nix’s hair, Benny had the weird feeling that if he turned around, he would be able to see yesterday and the day before that, all the way back to the point where he had decided to apprentice with Tom. It had been at that moment that his footfalls had diverged from the sane and predictable course of his life. He wished he could call out to the Benny of ten days ago and shout a warning not to come this way. Take the job at the pit, work for the German locksmith, get a tower job with Chong. Anything but this.

As he thought about it, Benny felt sickness creeping into his mind, making ugly questions form like tumors.

Would all of this have happened if I hadn’t taken that damn job with Tom?

And worse yet …

Would any of it have happened?

On a deep level he knew that these thoughts were stupid and wrong. Charlie and the Hammer would have still come after Tom and Sacchetto and Nix’s mom.

Wouldn’t they?

He also knew that the guilt he felt was no different than the guilt Nix felt for having told Zak about her mother knowing Lilah. Things said and done innocently should never be used as weapons. There was guilt here, he finally decided, but it all belonged to Charlie.

Just thinking that name made fires ignite in the pit of his stomach.

For the first time in his life he wished that Tom was here to help him make sense of it. Tom. Benny had hated him most of his life and had just started to like him—even if he didn’t quite understand him—and now the zoms had gotten him.

The sudden realization that Tom was not only dead but was probably a zom was like a punch in the face. Benny closed his eyes and found that old, old memory of Mom in her white dress with red sleeves, handing him to Tom, screaming at Tom to run, and Tom running away, leaving her behind. Tom the zombie hunter. Tom the coward.

Tom the zombie. Would there be a new Zombie Card? Two weeks ago Benny might have thought that was funny. Or appropriate.

Now the horror of it was bigger than the night that loomed around him. He remembered the argument they’d had when Tom had showed him the old man and the girl in the waitress uniform.

“It’s not the same. These are zoms, man. They kill people. They eat people.”

Tom had said, “They used to
be
people.”

Now Tom was one of them. He tried not to think of what Tom’s last few seconds had been like. The Hammer’s shotgun blast had caught him; Benny had seen the blood fly. Had the blast killed him? That would have been a kindness. The alternative was beyond horrible. Falling down into the mass of them, covered in blood. White hands clawing at his skin, rotting gray teeth biting into him, tearing at him …

Tom did not deserve that. Benny was unsure if Tom was a coward or had ever
been
a coward. He doubted his own memories of First Night, or, at least, of what those old memories meant. No matter what, though, Tom did not deserve what had happened to him.

He shivered and Nix stirred restlessly.

Looking at her dragged his mind into another room of thought. That kiss. With
Nix?
Nix, of all people. It was absurd, impossible. They’d already come to that hurdle back in town, and they hadn’t been able to climb it together. It was dangerous and wrong to fall in love with a friend. It complicated things. He and Chong had once sworn that they would never ever fall for a girl they knew. A bold claim in a town as small as Mountainside. Now … Nix Riley lay asleep on his lap, and he swore he could still feel the warmth of her lips on his.

He tugged the battered and sweat-stained Zombie Card from his shirt pocket and looked at the Lost Girl. A dagger of guilt stabbed him beneath the breastbone, and he quickly glanced down at Nix. He could see her eyes move under her closed lids and knew that she was dreaming. A soft cry
escaped her parted lips, and it was filled with jagged pieces of emotion. Hurt and loss, despair and terror, but also rage and defiance.

Benny brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek.

His stomach churned with confusion and conflict. Even now, even after that incredible kiss he and Nix had shared, when he looked at the picture of the Lost Girl, he felt an almost physical impact. The desire to find and protect Lilah was every bit as strong now as it was when he’d first turned over her card on the porch at Lafferty’s General Store, and that made as little sense to him now as it did then. He didn’t
know
this girl. Even Sacchetto and Tom hadn’t really known her. Even if she was still out here somewhere, she was nothing and no one to him. And yet …

And yet.

He studied the card for a long time, even as exhaustion dragged on his eyelids. Nix groaned again in the private hell of her troubled sleep. Benny looked from Nix to the Lost Girl and back to Nix.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Then he stretched out his other hand, and for the second time, he opened his fingers and let the wind take the card. It blew high into the air, tumbling over and over again, its pasteboard face flashing with silver starlight, and then it dropped into the darkness below.

Benny bent and kissed Nix’s cheek. He leaned back against the wall and stared at the night and drifted off into a sea of stars.

41

“N
OW AIN’T THIS JUST ADORABLE.”

Benny and Nix jerked awake at the sound of the voice, blinking in the harsh dawn light, struggling to disentangle themselves from each other and understand where on Earth they were.

Two men stood on the metal catwalk that ran around the outside of the deserted ranger station. Both men had guns holstered on their hips, shotguns slung over their shoulders, and ugly smiles on their mouths.

Skins and Turk.

“Ain’t nothing like young love,” said Turk.

“Warms the cockles of my heart,” agreed Skins.

Benny instinctively spread his arms, like a barrier between the bounty hunters and Nix.

“Charlie’s going to like this,” said Skins. “He was pretty smoked about the little witch skipping out like that.”

“Leave us alone,” Benny said with a growl.

“Yeah.” Turk laughed. “That’s gonna happen. We spent the whole damn night searching these freaking woods and then climbed this big mother of a tower, just to go away ’cause
you asked. Yessir, we’ll be on our way, so sorry to bother your beauty sleep.”

Skins tapped his palm on his thigh, like he was calling in the dogs. “C’mon … get your butts over here.”

Benny and Nix slowly got to their feet, but they made no move toward the bounty hunters. Turk went into the ranger station and came out with the
bokken
. “Look,” he said. “Kid has a toy sword.”

He raised it over his head and brought it down in a powerful two-hand swing onto the metal rail. The hard wood rebounded from the hit, but did not break. Turk cursed and turned it sideways and slammed the flat of the blade onto the rail, and with a sharp crack the sword snapped in half. The long end went spinning off into the canopy of trees far below. Turk laughed and tossed the broken handle onto the catwalk.

“They have anything else in there?” Skins asked.

“Nah.”

“Then let’s haul it,” snapped Skins to Benny and Nix. “C’mon, kids, Charlie is going to have a lot of stuff to
talk
to you two about. Should be a pretty interesting chat.”

“A heart-to-heart.” Turk laughed.

“A meaningful discussion,” agreed Skins.

“Let us go,” said Nix. “You can do that. You can just tell Charlie that you didn’t find us.”

Skins looked genuinely confused. “Now why on Earth would we want to do that?”

Benny took a step forward. “Do you know what Charlie did last night?”

“None of my business.”

“You’re
with
him. You’re helping him do this stuff.”

Skins looked bored. “Is this where you try to appeal to my better nature, kid?”

Behind him Turk cracked up. “Good luck with that.”

“Please …,” Benny said. “We didn’t do anything to you.”

“Who cares?”

“I won’t let you take her—”

Skins suddenly backhanded Benny across the face. It was so fast and hard that Benny was falling before he realized that he’d been hit. He hit the railing with the small of his back and might have gone over if Nix hadn’t grabbed him and hauled him away. Benny sank to his knees and spit blood and a piece of tooth onto the catwalk.

“Leave him alone!” Nix yelled.

The bounty hunter snatched a handful of Nix’s hair, tore her away from Benny, and slammed her against the station wall.

“Shut up, girlie. You don’t tell us what to do.”

Benny came off the deck in a surge and drove his fist into Skins’ ribs. It was a good try, but he was still dizzy from the blow he’d taken, and his fist merely skittered along the big man’s side. Skins pivoted and drove a heavy punch into Benny’s back, nailing him squarely between the shoulder blades and knocking him flat onto his chest.

“Try that crap again, kid, and I’ll cut pieces off of you.”

It was all Benny could do to breathe. When he’d landed, his breastbone had struck the broken
bokken
handle, and it felt like the hard wood had punched a hole through his chest.

“Benny!” Nix cried, but when she tried to bend to help him, Turk grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her away. The action caused her shirt to ride high and expose most of her
midriff. Both of the bounty hunters whistled and laughed and made comments that were as vulgar as they were threatening. Nix did not give in or give up. She fought them, kicking out as hard as she could, slapping at Turk’s face, raking her nails on his arms, pounding her fists on his chest and cheeks. Her attack was so sudden and fierce that for a moment the bounty hunter reeled back, letting go of her to use both hands to block his face. Nix tried to kick him in the groin, but Turk turned his hip and swatted hard enough her across the face to spin her into the wall again. She hit hard and slid down to her knees.

“Filthy little whore!” Turk growled. His lip and right ear were already swelling.

But even then Nix would not stop. As Benny watched she launched herself from her knees and drove into Turk’s legs, knocking him back against the rail. She made a sound like a hunting cat, a snarl that started low in her gut and rose up, filtered through rage and humiliation and the certain knowledge of what the future held. Her scream scared the birds from the trees and echoed off the mountain slope. Turk kept backing away from her, startled and confused by this child who had been frightened and cowering all last night and who was now attacking him with insane strength and speed.