The ground became increasingly moist. Soon she smelled water on the breeze, and then within a few minutes she heard the soft burble of a stream. The footprints and the wheel marks all came from that way.
Five minutes later Lilah stepped out onto the banks of a narrow, shallow stream that ran out of the northeast and jagged off due south. The water was clear and clean, with the kind of mineral taste that confirmed her suspicion that the source was an underground river. She drank handfuls of it and refilled her canteen.
Despite the potential for zoms and the mystery of the tracks, Lilah felt relaxed, content in her skills and in her solitude. She welcomed any opportunity to be alone. Being alone was when she felt most like herself. She felt powerful and normal. For months now, Lilah had felt anything but normal. Except when she went ahead to scout out a path for Nix, Benny, and Chong, she was seldom alone. That bothered her.
Benny and Nix often said things like, “It must be great not to be all alone anymore.” And, “You’ll never have to be alone again.”
On a practical level, Lilah could understand that they meant well. That they thought she had been rescued from loneliness. To a degree, she had.
Mostly, though, the ties between her and her new friends, the responsibility of protecting them, caring for them, felt like tethers holding her down. She did not want to care for anyone. The last person she’d cared for was Annie.
She knew that she was not like other people. Not like Benny, Nix, or Chong, even though they were all her friends. Their life experience was completely alien to her, as hers was no doubt bizarre to them.
Lilah had been two years old on First Night. Her mother was pregnant with Annie, and they were caught up in the mad exodus from Los Angeles as the dead rose. A handful of survivors managed to find a safe house hundreds of miles from the city, but that house was soon under siege by zombies. None of the other survivors realized that the pregnant woman had been bitten. Just as her mother gave birth to Annie, the infection took her and she died, only to reanimate moments later as a monster.
It was the first time Lilah had witnessed anyone being quieted, though there was nothing quiet about it. Her mother screamed like a feral beast as she tried to attack the men; and the survivors screamed in fear as they bludgeoned her with anything they could grab. Lilah screamed too. She screamed so long and so loud that she permanently ruined her vocal cords, leaving her with a ghostly whisper of a voice.
Over the next few days, the survivors tried, one by one, to escape and find help. None ever returned. The last survivor was a quiet little man named George. He stayed. He cared for Lilah and Annie. Raising them, teaching them, loving them as if they were his own children.
As she moved through the dry desert shrubs, Lilah thought more and more about her early life with George and Annie. They had been her whole world. However, during one of their moves to a new farmhouse, George met a group of armed men who claimed to be part of a movement to reclaim the Ruin from the dead.
That was a lie.
The men brutalized George and kidnapped the girls, taking them to the zombie pits at Gameland. There, Lilah and Annie were forced to fight for their lives against zoms while corrupt men and women wagered on who would survive. Lilah fought hardest against her captivity, and the Motor City Hammer and his thugs frequently beat her. She still had the scars from their fists, belts, and switches.
After Annie died, Lilah spent the next five years alone, living in a cave she filled with weapons and books. Until Benny, Nix, and Tom found her and brought her back to Mountainside.
Tom said that he had met George out in the wild, and had even helped him look for his two lost girls. Then rumors began circulating that George had gone crazy and committed suicide. Tom Imura thought it was a lie, believing that Charlie and the Hammer had murdered him and faked his suicide. Not that it mattered. George was dead.
All those men were now dead. Charlie. The Hammer.
And . . . Tom.