“Blood?” Benny said. “Zoms don’t bleed.”
“No, they don’t,” Tom agreed. “Now how about that?”
“This was a murdered person?”
“It was a dead person. ‘Murder’ is a relative term.”
“Then I don’t get it. I can see where you’re going with this. These are kills the Lost Girl made, right? I mean, that’s the surprise twist in your story.”
“It’s not a twist. You asked me to tell you about her, so there’s no surprise. What I’m doing, little brother, is giving it to you as close as I can to the way I came into it. Laying out the evidence.” Tom grinned. “Remember, I was in the police academy before First Night. I was studying to be a cop. Granted, I never spent time on the street, but I learned the basics of investigation and something about psychological profiling. When I bedded down that night, I looked at the evidence I had and made some basic deductions. Not assumptions, mind you. Do you know the difference?”
“One’s based on evidence and the other’s based on guesswork,” Benny said. “We had the whole ‘when you assume you make an ass out of you and me’ speech in school.”
“Okay, so make some deductions.”
“Aside from the fact that this was the Lost Girl?”
“That’s guesswork because I was telling her story.”
“Okay. Well, describe the man she killed. The human, I mean.”
“Not as big as the dead zoms, but sturdy.”
“Was he a farmer or something?”
“No. From his weapons and equipment, it seemed pretty clear that he was a bounty hunter.”
Benny sat back and thought about it, and Tom let him. The more he thought about it, the less he liked what he was thinking.
“She’d have been, what … eleven, twelve?”
“About that.”
“And she was only killing men?”
“Yes.” Tom was no longer smiling.
“Men who kind of fit a ‘type’?”
“Yes.”
Benny stared at Tom’s hard, dark eyes for as long as he could. Thunder beat furiously on the walls.
“God,” he said. “What did they do to her out there?”
But he already knew the answer, and it hurt his heart to know it. He thought of what Tom had said, of the fighting pits at Gameland, and tried to imagine a young girl down in the dark, armed with only a knife or a stick, the dead gray hands reaching for her. Even if she survived it, she would have scars cut deep into her mind. Benny and Tom sat together and listened to the storm punish the town.
“There’s more to the story,” said Tom. “A lot more.”
But he never got to tell it. Not that night, anyway. A moment later there was a flash of lightning so long and bright that even through the shutters, it lit the whole kitchen to an unnatural whiteness, and immediately there was a crack of thunder that was the loudest sound Benny had ever heard.
And then the screaming began.
25
TOM WAS UP, AND HAD THE BACK DOOR OPEN BEFORE BENNY WAS EVEN out of his chair.
“What is it?” Benny asked.
Tom didn’t answer. The wind whipped the door inward toward him, driving him back a step. Even over the roar of the storm, they could hear people yelling. There were more screams, and then a gunshot. A second later there were more shots.
“Stay here,” Tom ordered. “Close and bar the door!”
“I want to go with you!”