Rot & Ruin (39 page)

“Hey!” said Benny, but he was grinning.

“It’s strange,” said Lilah. “I never thought I would …
want
to talk. To people. I just talk to Annie and George. In my head.”

For the first time since they’d met the Lost Girl, Benny felt that a window had opened into who she was. It was only open a crack, but he thought he caught a glimpse of the stark loneliness and sadness that defined her interior life, just as the weapons and quick actions defined her exterior world.

“Lilah,” he said, “when this is all over …”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to go on knowing you. I’d like us to be friends.” He cut a look at Nix, who was listening intently. “You, me, Nix. And our other friends. Morgie Mitchell and Lou Chong.”

“‘Friends,’” Lilah echoed, as if it was a word she’d never encountered in any of her reading. “Why?”

Benny opened his mouth to speak, but it was Nix who answered. “Because after all of this, after everything that’s happened to us, Lilah … We’re already family.”

It wasn’t exactly what Benny was going to say, but what she said was right. He nodded. The Lost Girl considered it for a while, then said, “Let’s talk about that tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Nix, “I’d like—”

“If there is one.” She turned away and checked her weapons as she prepared to depart.

“Lilah,” said Benny, “are you sure you can do this?”

Instead of a smile or some reassuring comment, Lilah simply said, “Have to try.” Then she paused and looked Benny straight in the eye. “Why?”

“Why …
what
?”

“You could go back. To your town. You and Nix. These people”—she waved a hand in the direction of the kids in the pen—“aren’t yours. So … why?”

Benny didn’t have a ready answer for that. There had not been time to explore his own feelings about everything that had happened or was still happening. He would liked to have made a bold speech about honor and dignity, or fired off a remark of the kind that would be quoted by future generations. All he managed was: “If we don’t do something to stop this, who will?”

Lilah considered him, her hazel eyes seeming to open
doors into his thoughts. She must have seen something that she liked, or perhaps it was the simple honesty of his words, because she nodded gravely.

“Have to try,” she said.

“Have to try,” Benny said, nodding. “For Tom, for Nix’s mom … for Annie.”

Lilah closed her eyes for a moment, nodding silently to herself. Then, without another word, she turned and slipped like a promise into the shadows under the trees.

Benny and Nix climbed down from the plateau and found a dark and sheltered spot under a row of thick pines. Their part would not start for hours.

Overhead a lone buzzard drifted on the thermals.

Benny held his hand out to Nix, and she came and sat next to him. They drank from Benny’s canteen and ate some of the dried meat Lilah had given them. It was only marginally less disgusting than her stew, but they were hungry and eating gave them something to do. They said nothing for almost an hour. Benny spent much of that time reviewing the plan and looking for holes. There were plenty to be found. In fact, there were more ways the plan could go wrong than go right.

“Life’s weird,” Benny said.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

“No … It’s just that two weeks ago the worst thing I had to worry about was finding a job before they cut my rations. All summer long the bunch of us—you, me, Chong, and Morgie—all we did was goof off, hang out, and laugh. We used to laugh a lot, Nix. Life used to be fun.”

She nodded sadly.

“I have to believe,”
Benny continued, “that we’ll get through this. Not just this stuff tonight, but all of it.”

“Get through it for what reason? Nothing seems to matter anymore.”

“That’s just it, Nix. I can’t let myself believe that nothing matters.
You
matter. We matter. We both need to believe that we’ll get past this. That we’ll be able to laugh again. That we’ll want to.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine that right now.”

He had no comeback to that. Her argument was too strong, and his was based only on wishful thinking and a threadbare piece of optimism.

They sat together and listened to the forest.

“Benny?” Nix asked quietly after a while.

“Yeah?”

“Last night … when you kissed me … ?”

His throat went instantly dry. “Yeah?”

“Why did you do it? I mean, was it because I was so upset and you didn’t know how else to help me? Or was it because you really wanted to?”

“I—”

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

He took a breath. “I kissed you because I wanted to,” he said.

She nodded. “Last night, when you thought I was sleeping … I saw you looking at her card.”

Benny plucked a stem of grass and ran it slowly between his fingers. It felt like cool silk. “Did you?” he asked.

“I saw you throw it away, too.”

“Did you?” he asked again softly.

“Yes, Benny … I did.”

She didn’t say anything else, didn’t speak another word for a long time. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and they sat there and waited for the day to burn away.

49

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON THE SUN WAS COMPLETELY COVERED BY A SHEET OF
thick gray clouds. The temperature fell, but the humidity thickened the air to a hot soup. Benny drowsed against the trunk of one of the pines, and in his dreams he heard a sound that was like the roar of Lilah’s waterfall. The sound started small and far away, and Benny’s dreaming mind made it
be
the noise of the waterfall, which was a perfect backdrop for his dream of running through the woods, being chased by Charlie and the Hammer, both of who were now zoms but who also somehow managed to keep their personalities. They yelled to him in mocking voices, calling him “Little Benny” and promising to do terrible things to him. In his dream Benny ran as fast as the wind, and somehow the surrounding landscape barely moved, as if he was almost running in place. The zombie bounty hunters shuffled along behind him, almost close enough to grab him.

The roaring sound grew steadily louder, and Benny thought that maybe he was making some distance, that he was nearing the waterfall, but when he looked around, all he saw was the plateau on which the bounty hunters had their camp. Something brushed him, and he turned to see that
Nix was running next to him. She was screaming, but Benny could not hear her voice. The roar of the waterfall kept getting louder and louder. And it was deeper in tone now, more of a loud drone than the splash of water.

“Benny!” Nix called his name, but it didn’t match the shape her mouth made.

The roar was huge.

“BENNY!”

With a start, Benny realized that Nix’s voice was not coming from the girl running beside him, and just as quickly he understood that he was dreaming and that the real-world Nix was yelling at him. He snapped his eyes open. The camp and the zombies vanished. The roar, however, was still there. Deep and loud, and getting louder.

“Benny!” Nix yelled.

“What … what is it?”

“You have to come and look!”

Nix grabbed his hands and fairly hauled him to his feet and then pulled him out from under the shelter of the trees. Not toward the promontory that looked down on the camp. Instead, she pulled him toward the trail that led back into the woods. She was running, and her grip was so tight and insistent that Benny ran too.

“What is it? What’s that sound?”

“You have to come
see
!”

They raced along the path to a clearing, and there, Nix stopped and pointed. She need not have bothered, because Benny saw it. His eyes bugged wide, and his mouth fell open as he stared up at the roaring thing.

It was silver and white, with vast wings that lifted it high
above the mountains. Benny raised his hand, as if he could touch it. The thing appeared to move slowly, but that was an illusion. It was just so far away. Higher than the tallest of the surrounding mountains, skimming just below the ceiling of gray storm clouds. In another hour there wouldn’t have been enough light to see it. If the storm had started, it would have been both invisible and unheard.

But they stood there, holding hands, staring up as it roared above them, soaring with alien majesty from one horizon to the other. Coming from the west, heading east; far, far above the Rot and Ruin.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Nix just shook her head.

“Where did it come from?”

“From the east.”

“No, it’s heading east,” he said, but Nix shook her head.

“It came from the east and turned around. I saw it and ran to get you.”

They watched it go, diminishing in size from a giant to a gnat and then to nothing, taking its roar with it. When it was gone, there was at least five minutes of silence before the birds began to sing again. They stood in the clearing for ten minutes more, hoping it would come back.
Willing
it to come back.

Benny said, “Nix … did we just see that? I mean, tell me we actually saw that.”

Nix’s green eyes were filled with magic, and her smile was bright enough to hold back the storm. “It’s real, Benny. We saw it.”

“But
how
? It doesn’t make sense.”

She shook her head, and they stared off to the east. The thing they had just seen belonged to another age, to the days before First Night. They knew about them from the history books, but neither had ever seen one. Never expected to. They kept looking into the distance.

But the slow, lumbering jumbo jet did not return.

50

T
HEY DID NOT KNOW HOW TO TALK ABOUT WHAT THEY HAD JUST SEEN.
It was strange and wonderful, but it seemed more like a dream than a part of what they were about to do.

“I wish I could tell Tom,” Benny said.

“I wish I could tell Mom,” said Nix, then she said, “Benny, if we get out of this—”

“
When
we get out of this,” he corrected.

She gave only a tiny nod to acknowledge that possibility. “After this is over,” she said, “we need to find out about that jet.”

“Sure, I mean we let everyone know—”

“No,” she said firmly. “
We
have to find out about it. Lilah was right. We don’t have a home anymore. We’ve been—I don’t know how to say it. Cut loose? We’re no longer connected to anything, and certainly not to Mountainside.”

“There’s Morgie and Chong.”

She shrugged. “If you want, we can go back for them, Benny. But then I want to follow that plane.”

“Where? All we know is that it went east.”

“It came from the east and turned around and went back. Why?
Was it exploring to see what was out here? Or was it sending a message.”

“What message?”

“’Follow me’?” she suggested. “I don’t believe in much anymore, Benny … but I believe that was a sign.”

“And if it’s not?”

“Then I’ll find that out. One way or another, Benny, my life is over in Mountainside.”

He thought about it and looked up at the cloud-covered eastern sky. “Yeah,” he said after some long thought. “Maybe.”

“That’s what I’m going to do, Benny. If I’m alive tomorrow, then I’m going east.”

“We don’t know that there’s anything out there but three hundred million zoms.”

“Sure. Three hundred million zoms and enough people to repair, fuel, and fly an airplane. A jet. That says something. That says a lot.”

The storm clouds pulsed with lightning.

“If you’re going east,” he said, “then so am I.”

They sealed the deal with a kiss.

Two hours later the storm roiled and boiled above them, and Benny knew that this one was going to be every bit as bad as the one that had pounded the town two nights ago.

God,
he thought,
was it only two nights ago?

In less than two hours the clouds went from white to slate gray to bruised purple to midnight black, and fierce winds from the lowlands snatched up leaves and branches and desert dust and used them like artillery. The rain had not yet started to fall, but the humidity made Benny and Nix feel
like they were underwater as they climbed down from the promontory and began sneaking toward the camp. Lilah was nowhere to be seen, nor had they had a sign of her in hours. Had she succeeded or had Benny sent her to her death with his harebrained plan?

The wind howled through the trees, like a host of banshees. Benny had never heard anything like it, and despite everything, there was some weird little part of him that liked it. It wasn’t “cool”—He’d cut off his leg before he used that word again. No, it was, in its own raw and primal way, magnificent. Nature screaming in anger, and Benny could not help but believe that it was screaming in anger against all that had been done by the men in this camp. Maybe some of those whistling shrieks were in support of what three kids—a red-haired beauty of a sun-freckled girl, a wild hazel-eyed man-killer, and a moody and battered boy who had no right trying to be a hero—were trying to do.

As they crawled through the foliage, Benny kept grinning. Nix looked at him and shook her head.
That’s okay
, he thought,
she already thinks I’m crazy
.

Charlie Matthias whipped open the flap of his tent, and the wind nearly knocked him over. He tilted into the gale and grabbed a sapling for support. All around him debris was flying. A cooking pot sailed past him, and he was pelted by acorns and pinecones. Using one massive hand to shield his eyes, he roared orders to his men to secure their gear.

He pointed at the pigpen, where the kids huddled in terror. “Joey! Get over there and see to the merchandise!”

On the far side of the camp, Joey Duk climbed out of his
tent and bent into the wild rain to comply. He climbed over the rail of the pen and pushed through the kids. All of their collar ropes were bundled together in one central point, and that was wound around the trunk of a small tree, but the tree was whipping back and forth with each gust. Joey lashed the lines tighter and shifted the central line lower to make use of the thicker base of the tree.