Nix was quiet as they climbed over some rocks. Lilah was almost a hundred yards up the trail and didn’t show any sign of slowing down to let them catch up.
“Is she what you expected to find?” Nix asked, one eyebrow arched.
“Not even a little,” Benny said. “She’s pretty weird.”
“She’d have to be,” said Nix.
“Living out here? Fighting zoms and dodging guys like Charlie every day? Yeah, if it was me, I’d have gone buggy a long time ago.”
Nix dropped down on the far side of the rocks and waited for Benny to scramble down. They moved along up the trail, side by side.
“The thing is,” Benny said, “what if I was wrong about Tom all this time?”
“What makes you ask now?”
“Stuff that’s happened. Seeing how he was out in the Ruin the first time he took me out here. He was smart and skillful. He knew things and could do things that I never knew about.”
“That’s true of most people until you get to know them,” she said. “And sometimes even after you think you know them really well.”
He nodded. “Then there’s the way people talk about him. They act like he was all Joe Tough. I think the Hammer and Charlie were even a little scared of him outside of Mr. Sacchetto’s house. Well … maybe the Hammer was scared, and Charlie was just cautious, but why? Tom wasn’t big, and he wasn’t strong like those two guys.”
“My mom said she saw him fight once, but she would never tell me under what circumstances.”
Benny guessed that Mrs. Riley had probably been referring to the time Tom rescued her from Gameland.
“Yeah, and I saw him face down Vin Trang and Joey Duk while all those zoms were closing in on us. Tom was figuring it out. Maybe he was stressed, but I kept looking for him to be afraid, because that’s what I expected to see when the chips were down.”
“But … ?”
“But all he did was fight. He died fighting.”
“There’s another thing,” Nix said, her eyes sad. “Charlie and the Hammer went over to Mr. Sacchetto’s and killed him. They broke into our house. But … they didn’t attack Tom directly.”
Benny sighed and trudged along beside her for a while, lost in a sick depression. “It sucks,” he said eventually. “Tom died, thinking that his brother, the only relative he had left on Earth, thought he was a piece of crap coward.” He shook his head. “But I stopped thinking that the first time he took me out here. I’d give a lot to change things between us.”
Nix took his hand and squeezed it. There was a whole world full of things they both wished they could change.
44
THEY FOLLOWED LILAH THROUGH A FOREST OF ANCIENT OAKS THAT WAS SO lush that the canopy of leaves cast everything below into a twilight darkness. Morning mist clung to the mossy ground, and the trunks of the trees rose, like ghosts in the humid gloom. After only a few steps into this nightmare landscape, the wind settled and died, leaving behind a dreadful stillness.
It was Nix who first heard the moans of the dead.
“Wait!” she hissed, dropping into a crouch. “Zoms!”
Benny pulled the big hunting knife he’d taken from the dead bounty hunter.
The moan was a wordless cry of hunger that drifted to them through the pillars of oak trees, like the plaintive call of a wandering ghost.
“Where is it?” Nix whispered.
“There,” said Benny, pointing. “I think it’s coming from over there.”
Lilah bent and ran quickly in that direction, her feet making no sound on the mossy ground, her body bent, spear ready.
“Um … Benny?” said Nix. “She’s running toward the zombies.”
Fifty yards up the trail, Lilah stopped and waved to them.
“And she wants us to follow.”
“Oh crap.”
“Well,” said Nix, “she’s your object of obsession.”
“Very funny.”
Reluctantly and slowly, they followed.