As if there had been no interruption, Tom picked up the conversation where his narrative of the events at the Houser place had left off.

“… and you know the rest,” Tom concluded.

“What about Danny’s dad?” asked Nix. “And the twins?”

Tom sighed. “The girls told me that they and their dad got home about two hours ago. The girls went upstairs to play, and Jack went into the kitchen. Danny must have come home sometime after Michelle was attacked but before Jack. From the way I read it, Danny, Grandpa, and Michelle attacked Jack when he went into the kitchen. He got away, but he was badly hurt. He got the girls into their room and told them to barricade the door. Then he got his gun.”

“He fired that first shot?” asked Benny.

“Probably. Maybe he was planning on quieting Michelle and the others, but he was too badly torn up. I think he realized that he was about to die, and he did what he thought was best to try and protect the girls.”

“He shot himself?” asked Nix, horrified.

Tom nodded. “Right at the top of the stairs, so his body would block the others from getting at the girls. Jack must have been too weak to hold the gun right; his bullet missed the motor cortex and the brain stem. All he did was speed up how fast he came back. When we came in, he was just about to break into the girls’ bedroom.”

Nix sniffed and wiped tears from her eyes.

“All those people,” Benny said softly. “And those two little girls.”

“More orphans.”

It was Lilah who spoke, and everyone turned to her. Her stern expression had softened, and it was clear that she was looking into her own memories. Like Nix, Lilah was an orphan. And like Nix and the little girls, Lilah had lost her sibling as well: Annie, a little sister who was born on First Night and who had died trying to escape the zombie pits at Gameland.

Chong said, “What will happen to them?”

“The girls?” Tom asked. “I think there’s an aunt somewhere. In Hillcrest, maybe.”

That town was four days’ ride to the north, and the route went through some of the worst zombie-infested lands. It was a terrible thing. The girls would go off to another town—and as travel between the few towns left in the Ruin was rare, usually only the bounty hunters and traders risked the journey. Benny knew that people here in Mountainside would never see Faith and Hope again. Probably never even hear about them again, as if they had been erased from the world as so many other people had been erased.

The thought of so much death and loss hit him like a punch to the heart.

Nix, however, was furious, and she pounded her thigh with a small, hard fist. “God! I can’t wait to leave this place. I want to get out of here and never come back.”

Tom looked at her and then turned his face to the east and gave a slow nod.

“I wish we could leave now,” Nix growled, then elbowed Benny. “Right?”

“Absolutely,” he said, though he had to force the enthusiasm. At the moment all he wanted to do was go lock himself in his room and sleep until the horror went away.

“I still can’t believe you’re really going,” said Chong softly, but although he spoke to Benny and Nix, his eyes kept darting toward Lilah. “I wish I could go.”

“Me too,” muttered Nix. “We should all leave. God, I hate this town. I hate the way people think here. No one talks about First Night. Everyone’s afraid to even discuss the possibility of reclaiming the world. They won’t even expand the town.”

“They’re scared,” said Morgie.

“So what?” she snapped. “There’s always been something to be scared of. Between wild animals, earthquakes, volcanoes, viruses, wars … Yet look at what people did! They built cities and countries. They fought off their enemies. They stopped being scared and started being strong!”

“No,” said Lilah. “Even the strong are afraid.”

Nix turned to her. “Okay, then they learned how to be brave.”

“Yes,” said Tom. “They also learned how to work together. That mattered then and it’ll matter now. None of us could do this alone. I know I couldn’t. Not going across the whole country.”

“I thought you liked being alone,” said Benny, half joking. “The Zen master and all that.”

Tom shook his head. “I can handle loneliness, but I don’t like it. Every time I was out on a long job I even looked forward to coming home to you. An ugly, smelly, bratty little brother.”

“Who will smother you in your sleep,” suggested Benny.

“Point taken.”

“I want to go,” said Lilah abruptly. “Being alone … being lonely …” She didn’t finish and simply shook her head.

Since she’d first come here last year, Lilah had gone back into the forests and up into the mountains dozens of times, and often to the cave where she used to live, bringing back sacks filled with her precious books. Benny, Tom, and Nix had gone with her several times. However, no one commented on her statement. None of them understood loneliness a tenth as well as the Lost Girl.

“I really wish I could go,” repeated Chong wistfully, still looking at Lilah while trying not to appear that he was.

“Parents won’t cave?” Benny asked.

“Parents won’t even talk about it. They think the idea is suicidal.”

“They could be right,” observed Tom.

“And that’s why I don’t want you talking to them about it anymore, Mr. Positive Energy,” growled Chong. “After the last time you talked about it, Mom wanted to handcuff me to the kitchen chair.”

“You could just go,” suggested Lilah.

Chong made a face. “Very funny.”

“I am serious. It’s your life … take it.”

“You sure that’s how you want to phrase that?” murmured Benny.

“You know what I mean,” Lilah snapped irritably.

“Yes,” said Tom, “and it’s a bad suggestion. Chong is a minor, and he has a responsibility to his family.”

“First responsibility is to here,” she retorted, tapping herself over the heart. “To self.”

“Fine, then maybe you should go talk to the Chongs,” said Tom.

“Maybe I should.”

“But,” interjected Benny, “don’t bring your weapons.”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Things We Don’t Know About Zoms

Why they stop decaying after a certain point.

Why they attack people and animals.

Why they don’t attack each other.

Whether they can see or hear the way living humans can.

Why they moan.

If they can think (at all).

If they can feel pain.

What they are.

11

THE REST OF THE DAY WAS QUIET. NIX WENT FOR A LONG WALK WITH LILAH, and Chong trailed along like a sad and silent puppy. Morgie went fishing and Benny slouched around the house, looking at all the familiar things, trying to wrap his brain around the idea that he wasn’t going to see any of this stuff anymore. Even the beat-up chest of drawers in his room seemed wonderful and familiar, and he touched it like an old friend.

Say good-bye to this, whispered his inner voice. Let it all go.

He took a long, hot bath and listened to a voice speak to him from the shadows in his mind. For months now Benny had heard that inner voice speaking as if it were a separate part of him. It wasn’t the same as “hearing voices,” like old Brian Collins, who had at least a dozen people chattering in his head all the time. No, this was different. To Benny it felt like the inner voice he heard was his own future self whispering to him. The person he was going to become. A more evolved and mature Benny Imura, confident and wise, who had begun to emerge shortly after the events at Charlie’s camp.

The current Benny didn’t always agree with the voice, and often wished it would shut up and let him just be fifteen.

After his soak, Benny stood for a while peering into the mirror, wondering who he was.

After seven months of Tom’s insane pre-trip fitness regimen, he was no longer the skinny kid he’d been when he had first ventured out into the Rot and Ruin. He actually had muscle definition and even the beginnings of six-pack abs. He made sure that he took his shirt off in front of Nix as often as he could reasonably justify it, usually after hard training sessions. He worked hard to make it look casual, but it was disheartening how often Nix giggled or didn’t appear to notice instead of swooning with lust.

Now he looked at his arms and chest, at the muscles earned through all those hours of training with swords and jujitsu and karate; at the tone acquired from endless repetitions with weights, from running five to ten miles five times a week, from climbing ropes and trees and playing combat games. He bent closer, wondering how much of that face belonged to the man he was becoming or to the boy he still believed himself to be. The face seemed to fit more with his inner voice than with Benny’s perception of his current self.

That was the problem, and it was at the core of everything. On one hand he wanted to be fifteen and go fishing and play baseball and get in trouble swiping apples from Snotty O’Malley’s orchard. On the other hand, he wanted to be a man. He wanted to be as strong as Tom, as powerful as Tom. He wanted people to show him the fear and respect they showed Tom.

Benny knew that once they left Mountainside he would have to become tougher. There would be challenges that would toughen him and strengthen his “legend,” just as Tom’s many adventures as the region’s most feared zombie hunter had built his legend. No doubt Nix would find him irresistibly sexy the farther from town they got and the tougher he became.

For Nix, everything that mattered was out there.

Benny was more than half sure that if Nix actually loved him, then it was because he had agreed to go with her into the Ruin. Maybe not completely, but in a large part. He would have bet everything he had on it.

So he didn’t dare tell her that he wasn’t really sure he wanted to go.

Tell her, said the inner voice. Don’t lie to her.

Benny ignored the suggestion.

The Ruin was dangerous and it was uncertain, and everyone he’d talked to in town said that no one had ever gone past Yosemite Park and come back. Nix wanted to go all the way across the country, if that was what it would take to find the jet. Tom, too; and Lilah.

He stared into his brown eyes and studied the doubt and fear that he saw there.

“Some hero,” he said under his breath. “Some legend.”

Nix believed that to stay in town was to be stifled and die behind walls, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. Nearly everyone in Mountainside feared the Ruin with a dread that was so profound that they almost never mentioned anything beyond the fence line. A few went out, visiting other towns, but even then they traveled in metal-reinforced wagons with the shades pulled down to block out any sight of the Ruin. Only the drivers and their bounty-hunter guards rode outside the wagons. Benny imagined that even in the early spring those wagons had to be sickeningly hot, but the travelers seemed to prefer that discomfort rather than the fresh air that came with looking out the window at the real world. It drove Benny nuts. He wondered what the passengers thought when they were inside the wagon but outside the fence. Did they just shut down their higher reasoning? Did they drug themselves so they slept through the journey? Or was the denial so deep that they somehow regarded entering and exiting the shuttered wagons in the same way they would passing through a doorway? Maybe to them there simply was nothing in between.

It was like a plague, but different from the one that had destroyed the world. This was an emotional pandemic that blinded the eye and deafened the ear and darkened the mind so that there simply was no world other than what existed inside each fenced town.

Most people had long ago stopped talking about First Night; and although no one said it aloud, it was pretty clear that they felt that they were all just waiting for everything else to end. Society had collapsed, the military and government were gone, nearly seven billion people had died, and the zombie plague was still running at full strength. They all knew that their fellow citizens of Mountainside believed that the world had ended and what was left was just the clock winding down to a final and inevitable silence.

It was a horrible thought, and until the big fight at Charlie’s camp last year, Benny had been as adamant as Nix in wanting to break free of the town and find someplace where people wanted to be alive. Someplace where people believed that there was a future.

Then there had been that fight. Benny had been forced to kill people.

To kill.

People.

Not just zoms.

How was that going to open the way to a future?

There were so few people left. Barely thirty thousand left in California, and no way to know if there were any more anywhere else. How was killing going to increase that number? It was insane.

Only here, only when he was alone and looking into the eyes of the person he was becoming, could Benny admit the truth to himself.

“I don’t want to do this,” he said.

His mirror image and his inner voice repeated that truth, word for word. They were all in total agreement.

He got dressed and went downstairs and stood for a long time looking at the map of Mariposa County and Yosemite National Park. He heard voices and went to the back door and listened. Tom was in the yard, talking across the rail fence to Mayor Kirsch and Captain Strunk. Benny cracked the door so he could hear what they were saying.

“It’s not just a few people, Tom,” said the mayor. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

“It’s not a secret, Randy,” Tom said. “People have known I was leaving since Christmas.”