Rot & Ruin (28 page)

“Is this the route the traders take?”

“Yes. This is the same area where I first saw the Lost Girl,” Tom said. “This is where I found the first couple of zoms that Lilah killed. I told you they were all similar in size and look.”

“Yeah,” Benny said. “Like she was hunting one person over and over again. Hard to believe that a little girl could do that.”

“What, kill a full-grown man? All it takes is stealth and the right weapons.”

“No,” said Benny. “It’s hard to believe that a little girl could kill
anyone
. I mean, sure, zoms … but how does a kid get to the point where they want to take a life?”

“Fair question, Ben, but let me ask you one in turn. If Charlie Pink-eye was in front of you, right now this minute, would you want to kill him?”

Benny nodded. “In a heartbeat.”

“You’re sure?”

“After what he did?”

“Even if we get Nix back unharmed?”

“No question about it, Tom.”

Tom studied him for a while before he said, “Couple things about that. I hear you when you say you’d kill Charlie, and for the most part I believe you, but there’s a little hesitation in your voice. If I’d have asked the same question last night, you’d have said yes without the slightest hesitation, because the hurt was immediate. It was right there in your face. But this is hours later. The blood cools, and the more distance you put between the heat of passion and any act of commission makes something like killing much harder to do. When people talk about killing in cold blood, they’re referring to something someone does even after they’ve calmed down and had time to think. If it takes us a month to find Charlie, you might not want him dead at all. You might want to see him put on trial, you might want to see the system work instead of getting blood on your own hands.”

“Okay, okay, I get the idea. You said there was a couple of things. What’s the other?”

“Why do
you
want Charlie dead?”

“Is that a real question?”

“Sure. I mean, he didn’t physically hurt you. He didn’t kill anyone in your family. He didn’t kill Nix, at least as far as we know. … And I don’t think he has, even now.”

“He …,” Benny began, but faltered. “Because of Mr. Sacchetto and Nix’s mom. Because of what he might be doing to Nix. What kind of question is that?”

“So, you want to kill him for revenge?”

Benny didn’t answer. Apache blew loudly, scaring some robins from the grass.

“Will that bring Rob Sacchetto or Jessie Riley back from the dead? Will it fix Morgie’s head or guarantee that we’ll find Nix safe and unharmed?”

“No, but—”

“So, why do you want Charlie dead? What good will it do?”

“Why do
you
want him dead?” Benny snapped, frustrated by Tom’s questions.

“We’re not discussing me,” said Tom. “We can, but we’re not right now.”

Benny said, “Charlie’s hurting people that I care about, and last night we agreed that Charlie’s going to come after us. To shut us up or whatever. He knows that we know, and he knows that we’re not going to let it go, even if the court clears him.”

“Right,” said Tom. “Charlie’s smart enough to have figured that out. So … you want to kill him to prevent him from killing you?”

“Us, not just me. But, yeah. That makes sense, man. Doesn’t it?”

“Sadly, yes, it does.”

“Why sadly?”

“Because it’s the way things still seem to be among us humans. Like Leroy Williams said, we never seem to learn.”

“What’s the alternative? Do nothing and let Charlie kill us?”

“No. I’m a pacifist by inclination, but I have my limits. And on top of that I’m not a martyr.”

“So, you intend to kill Charlie?”

Tom’s eyes were black ice. “Yes.”

“So why are you grilling me on this stuff, Tom?”

“Because the things that happened yesterday just kicked you into the same world as the Lost Girl. There’s some logic to it, even some justice in it, but the more you walk in that world, the more damage it’s going to do. And I don’t think there’s a way for us to turn back. Not anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“The bodies that I found. The girl wasn’t just trying to kill a certain person or a certain type of person. She was trying to punish the image of that person that existed in her mind. Something had been done to her that was so bad, so tragic, that it changed her—maybe forever. Revenge isn’t really enough of a word to explain what she’s feeling and why she’s doing what she’s doing. It’s more like an infection of the spirit, and it distorts everything she sees and everything she does.”

“So,” Benny said, sorting through it, “she’s trying to kill the
idea
of this guy? That she’s trying to kill the infection by killing what caused it?”

Tom cut a sharp look at Benny.

“What?” asked Benny.

“That may have been the smartest thing you ever said, kiddo. It shows that you have insight. Yes, that’s exactly what Lilah is doing.”

“So … who’s the guy she’s trying to kill?”

“Maybe one of the bounty hunters killed Annie, or maybe she died in the Z-Games and Lilah’s fixated on the image of the man who put her into one of the pits. Finding that out is one of the reasons I want to find her.”

Benny digested this as they came out from under the shade of the trees into a gorgeous field in which wildflowers
ran rampant and proclaimed their freedom in shouts of colors. The sky was a distant blue, and massive white clouds sailed across it. The image was so lovely that Benny’s mind saw but discounted the abandoned cars that were covered with weeds and probably filled with old bones.

“It’s hard to imagine that there is so much hurt and harm out here, isn’t it?” said Tom softly.

All Benny could do was nod. He took the Lost Girl card out of his pocket and stared at it. Such a beautiful, proud, tragic face. “Lilah,” he murmured, but the breeze through the tall grass answered him in Nix’s voice.

They reached the creek and turned north; riding in silence for several miles till Tom swung out of the saddle and squatted down by a rusted metal footbridge. Benny watched his brother’s face as he examined a series of overlapping footprints and turned his head to see which direction their prey went.

33

T
HEY CAME DOWN ANOTHER SLOPE AND THERE, NESTLED BETWEEN A LONG
tumble of boulders left over from a glacier thousands of years ago, was a stream that glimmered like a blue ribbon through the forest. They dismounted and led the horses as they followed a crooked path that kept trees between them and whoever might be down there—bounty hunters or zoms. Chief clearly did not want to go that way and tugged on the reins; Apache looked equally nervous.

Tom picked up some loose bits of dirt and leaf debris and threw it into the air, watching where the wind took it. “Wind’s blowing toward us. If we stay on this side of the creek, we should be okay. But we’ll need to keep our voices low.”

The path along the creek had once been a scenic country road, and it was wide enough for them to walk side-by-side, leading the horses.

“Tom?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re going to find her, aren’t we?”

“Lilah? I—”

“No,” Benny said, “Nix. We’re going to find her, right?”

“We’re going to try.”

“That’s not good enough, man. We’ve
got
to find her. She’s lost everything. Everyone. We can’t … abandon her.”

“We won’t.”

“Swear it.”

Tom looked at him.

“Swear that no matter what happens, we’ll find her. That we’ll never stop looking for her.”

In another place, under other circumstances, what Tom did next might have seemed silly or corny, but out here in the Rot and Ruin it had a strange sense of grandeur, perhaps of nobility. Tom placed his hand over his heart.

“I swear to you, my brother, that we will find Nix Riley. I swear that we will never stop looking for her.”

Benny nodded.

They walked on, entering the thickest part of the forest that ran alongside the creek. Under the roof of leaves the air was cooler, but it was as damp as a cave. There were so many songbirds singing in the branches that it was impossible to pick out a particular voice.

Half a mile in, Tom knelt and ran his fingers over the damp grass. “Got you, you bastard!”

“What is it?”

“Footprints. Big, have to be Charlie’s. Grass hasn’t even had time to unbend all the way.”

“How long?”

“Half an hour. We’re close now, kiddo. Time to move quick and quiet.”

“The horses make a lot of noise.”

“I know, but it’s what we have, so we’ll need to be twice as vigilant.”

They remounted, and Tom led the way down the grassy lane. The soft green of the grass as it ran along the glistening blue water, and the constant birdsong all around them, gave the moment a fairy tale feeling that Benny found hard to shake. It was unreal, even surreal in its gentle, unhurried beauty. So at odds with everything that was real in their immediate world of hurt and harm and hurry.

“Tom? About Gameland. Do you know for sure that they rebuilt it?”

“Not firsthand, but from people whose word I believe. People who said that Lilah’s been there. Even if we don’t find it today, I’ll keep looking for it.”

“Why? No one in town even cares about it. They won’t do anything about it.”

“I know. But I care.” Tom sighed. “We lost the world, Benny. That should have taught us something about the value of human life. Gameland shouldn’t be allowed to exist. It needs to be taken down.”

“They rebuilt it once, wouldn’t they do it again?”

“Maybe. And if they did, then someone should always be ready to burn it down again.”

“Who?” Benny asked. “You?”

Benny was suddenly aware that too much of his skepticism about his brother’s abilities showed through in his tone. He immediately regretted his words. They were part of an old reflex, and he didn’t actually hate Tom anymore. In fact, after everything that had happened last night, on top of what they
had experienced together that first time in the Ruin, Benny was seeing Tom in a different light.

But the words were said, and Benny didn’t know how to unsay them.

Tom squinted into the sun. Small muscles bunched and flexed at the corners of his jaws. “Some of the travelers and traders I’ve talked to say that certain bounty hunters that they declined to name have been gathering kids—girls and boys—to take to Gameland.”

“Kids from where? I haven’t heard about any kids from town going missing.”

“There are other towns, Benny. And there are kids living with some of the way-station monks. Some of the loners have kids, too. None of these kids would be missed, not by the people in Mountainside. The bounty hunters prey on them because of that, and there’s nobody out here to protect them. No one to stand up for them or speak for them. It’s a bad, bad world out here.”

“All of it?” Benny asked. “Is that all there is? Fear back in town and evil out here?”

“I hope not.”

The path rounded a bend and then moved sharply away from the water and eventually left the shelter of the trees to run through a series of low, rocky hills. Without the canopy of cool leaves, the heat returned like a curse. Even through his shirt, Benny’s shoulders and back felt charbroiled. His forearms glowed with sunburn, and sweat boiled from his pores and evaporated at once without any perceptible cooling of his skin.

Tom studied the landscape and slowed to a stop, looking concerned.

“What is it?”

“Something doesn’t make sense,” Tom whispered. He pointed to where their path curved around between two walls of rock. The red-rusted span of a train bridge arched over the path.

“There’s a spot down there that everyone avoids. It’s thick with zoms, one of the natural lowland points where the nomad zoms gather. Last time I came this way, there were a few hundred of them.”

“
Hundred
?”

“Yep, some of them had probably been there since First Night. Others just kind of wandered in.”

“Pulled by gravity, right? Following any downsloping path.”

“Exactly. There’s a crossroads down there. A highway intersects with two farm roads and this road we’re on. Big intersection.”

“So … why don’t we just go around?”

“We can, but the trail we’re following goes straight along this road.” He pointed to visible footprints in the soft clay beside the road.

“That doesn’t make sense. Why would Charlie go right into a nest of zoms? Isn’t he supposed to know the Ruin as well as you?”

“He knows it better than me. He spends more time out here.”

“Okay, look … I may only be your little brother, and I know I’m not a bounty hunter and all that, but doesn’t this have ‘trap’ written all over it in bright red paint?”

Tom almost smiled. “You think?”

“So you
know
it’s a trap?”

“Benny, this whole thing is a trap. Everything Charlie’s done since he attacked Rob Sacchetto has been a trap.”

Tom stopped and suddenly pointed to the trail of footprints that led off around the bend. The prints were mostly those of a man with big feet. Charlie. However, at one point, another set of prints suddenly appeared beside his. Small bare feet.

“Nix?” Benny asked.

Tom put a finger to his lips and whispered, “It looks like Charlie was carrying her and set her down here. See? Their prints go all the way around the bend. Right toward the crossroads.”

“Maybe they don’t know how close we are,” Benny suggested. He looked for confirmation in Tom’s face, but didn’t see any. Benny started to draw his knife, but Tom shook his head.

“Wait until you need to,” Tom cautioned. “Steel reflects sunlight, and that’ll attract zoms as much as movement. Now, I need you to stay steady, kiddo. Once we round this bend, it’s going to get weird. Maybe it’s a trap, maybe not; but even if it isn’t, this is one of the most dangerous spots out here. You’ll see why.”

“Great pep talk, coach.”

Tom grinned.

Moving very slowly, careful not to make a sound, they rounded the bend in the road, hugging close to the wall and staying in the shade of the rocks. Apache and Chief were trained for this, and they moved only when and where they were steered.