“No.” Benny groaned.
Tom turned his head so sharply that it looked like it was unscrewing from his shoulders. “Where are you hurt? Are you bit—?”
“No … it’s not me. It’s Nix!”
“At least we know she’s alive, Benny. That’s something. Hold on to that.”
“They also know we’re coming.”
Tom managed to sit up. He was bleeding from a dozen small cuts, but he assured Benny they were from the sharp fragments of stone that pelted him when the cliffs blew. He crawled over and pulled the canteen from his saddle, drank deeply, and then handed it to Benny. “They knew long before now,” he said. “You can’t rig charges like that and bring down that much stone without taking time to set it up. No, kiddo. … They knew we were onto them, and they set a very smart trap.”
The water opened up Benny’s parched throat, but he coughed and gagged on it.
“You sure you’re okay?” Tom asked, peering curiously at him, his eyes darting to Benny’s arms and legs. “You’re positive you didn’t—”
“I’m not bit,” snapped Benny. “I want to go find Nix.”
“We will,” Tom promised. “But the horses are a step away from dead. Unless you want to chase them on foot, we have to rest.”
“How long?”
“At least an hour. Two would be better.”
“Two hours!”
“Shhh … keep your voice down. Listen to me, Ben,” Tom said, and his face was tight. “If we rest for two hours, we can catch up with them in maybe two more hours. If we don’t rest, it’ll take all day, if we catch up at all. This is a situation where slow is faster.”
Benny glared at him, but then he growled and turned away. He knew that Tom was right, but every second they sat there felt like it was one less second for Nix. Seconds burned away into minutes, and it took centuries for enough minutes to gather into an hour, and then two. By the time Tom said that they were ready to go, Benny was a half tick away from screaming insanity.
“How come Charlie and the others didn’t just hide behind rocks and shoot us?”
Tom busied himself by putting the carpet coats back onto the horses.
“Tom?”
“I guess they didn’t like their chances in a shoot-out,” Tom said.
“Are you kidding? Six or seven against one?”
All Tom gave as a reply was a shrug, and Benny stared at his brother. What the hell did that mean?
“Besides,” Tom said as he tightened the last of the straps, “the dynamite was a big bang, big enough to draw most of the dead toward the pass, which meant that it drew them away from the forest. If we’d been killed, they would never have risked shooting at us. It was a stupid risk even if he’d hit us, because it drew some of the zoms toward them. I expect Charlie’s going to be pretty upset with the shooter.”
“It wasn’t the Hammer?”
“No. Too skinny. Probably one of the Mekong brothers. Whoever it is, though, I want to have a chat with him.”
“A ‘chat’?” Benny said, grinning for the first time in hours.
“A meaningful chat,” Tom agreed. “C’mon, mount up. We’ll stay under the trees for a while. This side of the creek is all farms, so we can cut through and then cross the water a couple of miles upstream. If we’re lucky, we’ll hit the highway and cross that before they can reach it, and then we can see about laying our own trap. The highway’s the tough part, and I want to have time to figure it out, so let’s make tracks.”
“Good,” Benny said, reaching for the saddle horn and pulling himself up.
“This is probably the last leg of this chase, Ben,” said Tom. “I know what we just went through was rough, but there’s a big difference between fighting zoms and fighting people. When we find Nix, I’ll try to draw Charlie and the others off, and I want you to grab Nix and make a run for it. Don’t worry about where you go, I’ll find you. If you can, get to the water and wade as far south as you can before you come out on the bank. Try to leave no trail.”