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.