Rot & Ruin (37 page)

“Geez,” Benny said, “those were the zoms we ran into by Coldwater Creek. You let them
go
?”

Lilah nodded. “Sometimes … seeing them. Tied. Makes me sad. I untie and lead them away.”

“You lead them? How do you do that without getting chomped?” Benny asked.

She looked at him as if he was a moron. “They’re slow. I’m not slow.” Then she pinched the skin of her forearm. “They follow flesh.”

Benny swallowed hard, trying to imagine a horde of zombies, shambling along after this beautiful and crazy Lost Girl.

Lilah looked up through a small opening in the canopy of leaves at the position of the sun. “Time to go.”

With that, she turned and walked deeper into the Hungry Forest. Each zombie she passed craned its neck and tried to bite her, but the Lost Girl did not appear to notice. Or care.

Benny and Nix lingered a moment longer, caught up in all of the different ways in which this place was wrong. Whether the zoms were tied to the trees or taken for bounties or freed to wander, the horror of it was overwhelming.

The zombies closest to them moaned incessantly, biting the air, as if aching to feed on just the smell of living flesh.

“Your girlfriend is deranged,” said Nix.

“She’s not my girlfriend, thank you very much. And I believe Tom said the expression was ‘touched by God.’”

“She’s touched all right. Come on, this place is way beyond creepy. Let’s get out of here, Benny,” Nix said. “Right now.”

“With you on that,” he agreed, but as they hurried along the path to catch up, Benny kept looking back, compelled to lock this image in his mind. There was something about it that was starting to shove ideas around in his head. Weird and wicked ideas.

Nix caught the look on his face. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he lied. The thoughts running through his head were not thoughts he wanted to share with her. Not yet.

46

T
HEY CAME TO A SHELTERED CLEARING BY A ROCK CLIFF, THROUGH WHICH
a million years of erosion had cut a waterfall that fed all the streams that ran down to Coldwater Creek. It was a strange place. The woods were overgrown with vines and scrub pines, the ground was covered with a thick carpet of pine needles. At the base of the cliff was a pool of threshing water that looked as clear as glass. However, all around the clearing, there were dead animals in various stages of decomposition. The stink was ungodly, and the air was thick with flies.

Nix gagged, and Benny dug the bottle of mint paste from his pocket, showing her how to dab it below her nose to kill the smell. As he did so, he marveled at the restraint with which she’d managed to put up with his smell since last night. He realized that his clothes were probably still ripe with the stench of cadaverine.

Lilah stood at the point where the path reached the clearing.

“Here,” she said, pointing to the waterfall.

“What, through there?” Benny asked.

She nodded, then pointed to the open ground in front of them. “Feet where my feet go.”

Benny didn’t immediately understand what she meant, and when she set off across the clearing in a weird zigzag pattern, he started walking straight toward the cool water. Lilah turned abruptly. “Stop!”

She hurried back, following the same twisted route.

“Stupid?” she asked harshly, then knelt in front of him and dug her fingers under the covering of pine needles and lifted a section of ground that proved to be a very thin, woven screen with needles and other debris cleverly sewn onto it. Beneath the screen was a hole that was filled with the pointed ends of wickedly sharp sticks.

“Oh my God!” Benny said.

Nix gestured to the clearing. “Is the whole clearing like that?”

“Yes,” said Lilah in her graveyard whisper of a voice. “So, watch my feet. Where I walk only. Yes?”

“Absolutely,” agreed Benny weakly.

In single file they followed Lilah around the clearing toward the cliff wall. There was no way anyone could have picked out a safe route through without knowing exactly where to step. Benny was impressed.

Along the wall was a screen of bushy pine trees, and it wasn’t until they’d all reached them that Benny and Nix could see that there was a narrow path behind them, which led to a depression behind the waterfall. The water cascaded out and away from the wall, and there was a cave mouth five feet high and seven feet wide. The whole mouth of the cave was covered with multiple sheets of heavy industrial plastic that Lilah had scavenged from somewhere. She pushed through, and they followed her into a short, damp chamber. Another set of
plastic was hung ten feet in, and behind that was a thick layer of heavy drapes. Benny was blown away by how smart this was. The plastic kept the water out and the drapes kept light in, and together they muffled the roar of the waterfall. Lilah went in first and Benny followed, with Nix holding the drapes open to allow diffused light in. Lilah apparently didn’t need it, because she went into the darkest depths of the cave, and soon there was the scrape and smell of a sulfur match. Lilah lit an oil lantern, and a comfortable yellow glow expanded out to fill the huge inner chamber.

Benny and Nix were speechless. The cave was a treasure trove. There was a comfortable chair and a small table, a wire rack of dishes, barrels filled with canned food, some old toys, and books. Thousands and thousands of books. Technical manuals and novels, anthologies of short stories and collections of poetry, biographies of great thinkers and joke books, magazines and comic books. There were stacks of books on every surface, heaped against the walls. Even in the town library, Benny had never seen so many books. Nix looked dazed, her mouth open in a silent “oh.”

Lilah looked from them to the books and back again. “I read,” she said simply.

Then Benny noticed the second thing that Lilah had been collecting. There was a table made from boards stretched across stacks of heavy encyclopedias, and the table bent under the weight of weapons. Handguns and boxes of bullets, knives and clubs, spears and axes. Enough weapons to start—and win—a war. Benny realized Lilah was doing exactly that—fighting a war. He walked over to the table, aware the Lilah was watching him, and saw that a how-to
manual for making bullet reloads was open and looked well-thumbed. There were coffee cans filled with lead pellets and gunpowder, and a bullet mold with castings for various calibers. Several men in town had similar setups.

“This is amazing,” he said.

She shrugged. It was commonplace to her. It was her day-to-day life.

Lilah folded some blankets and set them on the floor, then indicated that they could sit down while she started a fire in a small stone cooking pit. Benny noticed that the smoke funneled upward instead of filling the cave, and he bent forward to see that there was a hole in the ceiling. No daylight showed through, so he figured it didn’t rise straight up, but instead filtered out through various fissures in the rock. He thought that Tom would approve.

Benny watched Lilah as she busied herself with what probably passed for her daily routine. Her first concern was security, and she checked the hang of the drapes to prevent any trace of light from showing through. Even a pinpoint of firelight would be visible for miles in the absolute darkness of these mountains at night. Then Lilah strung two lines across the entrance. The first was a length of twine on which dozens of empty tin cans and pieces of broken metal were strung. When it was in place, it lay against the drapes. If anyone moved the cloth, the metal would kick up a jangling din, loud enough to wake her. The second line was a length of silver wire she positioned at mid-shin level. It was virtually invisible in the gloom, but once someone passed the drapes, they would trip over it. Between the noise and this delaying trick, whoever broke in would not be sneaking up on a sleeping
girl, but would be sprawled on the ground while a practiced killer hunted
them
in the dark.

“Did you ever have to use that trip wire?” he asked. He and Nix and their friends had learned all about simple booby traps in the Scouts. They were great for slowing down a zombie attack.

Lilah tested the tension on the trip wire, plucking it like a guitar string, so that it hummed. “Once,” she said. “It worked.”

“Zom or human?” asked Nix.

Lilah shrugged. “What does it matter?”

Once the entrance was rigged, she unbuckled her gun belt and placed it next to the pallet she used as a bed. She put the spear into an old umbrella stand in which there were various clubs, baseball bats, hockey sticks, and a long-handled axe.

“Lilah,” said Nix. “This place—all these things—it’s incredible. You brought all of this here by yourself?”

Lilah poured water into a cooking pot and began adding bits of meat and vegetables. “By myself. Who else?”

“How many of these books have you read?”

“All.” She smiled for the first time since they’d started walking. She leaned over and began stirring the mixture in the pot. “I … read, um, better than talk. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” said Benny enthusiastically. “Lilah, you’re amazing! Isn’t she amazing, Nix?”

Benny, caught up in the moment, turned to Nix, but her expression was a few hundred degrees colder than his. Benny’s common sense took a giant step back for an emergency re-evaluation of everything that had happened in the
last few seconds. Lilah, lit by the soft glow of the cook fire, was bending over and smiling. The inadequate rags of her shirt were doing even less of their job. Benny, who, to his credit, hadn’t even been
aware
of all this, was suddenly very aware—and aware of the fact that Nix was watching both of them. The common sense part of him slapped his forehead and prayed for an earthquake or a timely invasion by a horde of zoms. Benny tried to salvage the moment by stretching his last question into a longer one. “… to have read so many books.”

As lame attempts go, this one was barely able to limp.

The grin he gave Nix was intended to be earnest, scholarly, and totally oblivious to the miles of cleavage Lilah was showing. Nix’s smile was chilly enough to kill houseplants.

And Chong fries Morgie for being thick
, Benny thought, feeling the edges of his smile begin to crack.

To Lilah, Nix said, “George taught you to read?”

Lilah, who was unpracticed enough with people to misread the moment, nodded and sat back. “Yes. We had to read. All the time. ‘Knowledge is power,’” she recited in a voice that was clearly an attempt to imitate George’s.

They nodded. Benny took the opportunity to ask her some questions. “Lilah, have you been alone all this time? I mean … since Gameland?”

She nodded. “Alone.”

“How did you survive?” asked Nix.

Lilah turned cold eyes on her. “What I see,” she said, “I kill.”

“God,” said Nix.

Benny said, “What about the way-station monks? Do they help you at all?”

“Monks … We don’t talk.
They have their, um, things. I have mine.”

“Tom said he saw you twice.”

“Tom,” she said, and shook her head.

“He looked like me. But he was older. Darker hair, darker skin. Tall. Carried a sword.”

The Lost Girl brightened and smiled in a way that Benny thought it showed she not only knew who Tom was but maybe betrayed something more than simple recognition.

“Sword man,” Lilah said. “Very, um, pretty.” She looked at Nix for approval. “Pretty?”

“Handsome,” Nix said. “Hot.”

Lilah liked that word. “Hot.” She turned to Benny. “But … dead?”

He nodded. “The Hammer shot him, and he fell into a bunch of zoms.”

Her smiled vanished. “Then he’s a walker.”

Benny couldn’t bear to think about that and changed the subject. “Lilah, Tom said that you could tell people where the new Gameland is.”

“What people?”

“People in our town. In Mountainside.”

She shrugged. “Why?”

“I think he was hoping to have Charlie arrested. Do you understand what that means? Arrested?”

“Read about. Old world stuff. Not our world.”

“No,” said Nix bitterly. She touched Lilah’s arm. “Tell us, though. What happened after they took you and Annie away from George?”

“George,” she said in a small, sad voice that was an echo
of the child she had once been and would never be again. She sorted through her conflicted emotions and jumbled thoughts. “They hit George. Killed him, I thought. But … not?”

“No,” said Benny. “He was hurt, but he lived. As soon as he woke up, he started looking for you and your sister. He met Tom, and they looked together. They couldn’t find you. I guess George didn’t know where to look. How far is Gameland from here?”

“Far. Three days fast walk. Two mountains from here,” said Lilah. “Have to know how to, um …
find
it. Hard to find.”

“George never found it. All he heard were rumors of what goes on there. It tore him up.”

It took Lilah a second to understand that last comment, then she nodded. “George loved us. Loved him. He is … dead?”

“I think so. A monk told Tom that George hung himself.”

Lilah barked out a harsh laugh and shook her head. “No,” she said decisively.

“Tom didn’t believe it, either.”

They sat for a minute in silence.

“He was murdered,” Nix said eventually. “Do think it was Charlie?”

“Or one of his creeps,” said Benny. Lilah’s lip curled, but she said nothing.

“Lilah … tell us about Annie.”

“Annie.” Lilah’s eyes were as hard as knife steel, but they glistened wetly. “They took us. Lots of girls at Gameland. Boys too. They … make us
fight
.” She loaded that last word with enough venom to kill a hundred men.

“Did they make
you
fight?” Nix asked, and Benny winced, not wanting to hear the answer.

But Lilah shook her head. “Tried. Many times they tried. Fought them instead. Bit. Kicked. Thumbs to eyes. George taught me. Taught Annie.” She made a fist so tight, her knuckles creaked, and the lights in her eyes looked both dangerous and a little crazy. “Be tough, George said. Be tough and live. George always said that.”

“George was right,” Benny said. “I wish I’d met him. He sounds like a pretty great guy.”