NIX FELL ASLEEP WITH HER HEAD IN HIS LAP. BENNY 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.