And he told his tale.
24
“I FIRST SAW THE LOST GIRL FIVE YEARS AGO,” TOM SAID. “ROB SACCHETTO told me his story, of course, but I didn’t make the connection between the little girl he left in the cottage and the wild girl I saw in the Ruin. It’s hard to believe they’re the same person. Did Rob tell you about the search for the cottage?”
Benny nodded.
“There was more than one search. The first was made by the group that split off from the main rescue party that settled this town. That team never made it to the cottage. No one knows where they ended up. Maybe they gave up the search and found some other place to live or-more likely-they ran into trouble and died out there. It’s odd… People talk about First Night as if it was just that one night, but when the dead rose, it took weeks for civilization to fall. There were lots of fights. Big ones with the military and smaller ones with families defending their homes, or people grouping together to defend their neighborhoods. In the end, though, we kind of lost the fight more than the dead won it.”
“What do you mean?”
“We let fear rule us and guide us, and that’s never the way to win. Never. A long time ago a great man once said that ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ That was never truer than during First Night. It was fear that caused people to panic and abandon defenses. It was fear that made them squabble instead of working together. It was fear that inspired them to take actions they would never have taken if they’d given it a minute’s more cool thought.”
“Like what?”
“Like dropping bombs on the cities. Nukes and regular bombs. A lot of the big cities were destroyed; all the people killed by shock or radiation sickness. Sure, some of the zoms were killed too, but those hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by the bombs came back as zoms. I remember one of the last news reports from Chicago, in which a reporter screamed and wept and prayed as she described waves of radioactive zombies crawling out of the ruins of the city. They were so hot with radiation that they were killing humans long before they made physical contact.” Tom shook his head. “It was fear that caused those bombs to be dropped.”
“That’s another thing they didn’t tell us in school.”
“They wouldn’t,” said Tom. “Trust me, though, fear is the code we live by here in town, and in the other towns scattered along this mountain range. I suspect that if there are other towns still surviving elsewhere in the country or the world, then fear is what they live by too.”
“Not everyone’s afraid, though…”
“No. You’re right… There are some people who don’t let fear rule their actions, and I suspect it’ll be your generation that turns things around. Most of the people my age or older are lost in fear, and they’ll never find their way back. But you and your friends, especially those young enough to not remember First Night… You’re the ones who will choose whether to live in fear or not.”
“Last week, when you said that people in town didn’t trust anything out in the Ruin, that they think everything’s diseased…”
Tom nodded. “You’re on the right track. We-our town-could reclaim most of central California. Not Los Angeles, of course; that’s lost for good. But we could retake hundreds of thousands of square miles of farmland. We could reclaim whole towns. Like that town where Harold Simmons lived. Don’t you think three or four hundred armed people could retake that town?”
“We wouldn’t need anywhere near that many. Fifty people in carpet coats, with rifles, axes, and swords could do it. It isn’t a big town.”
“Right. And there are a dozen towns within a day’s walk from here. Hundreds just a few days away, with farmable land where we could grow more food than we could eat. No one would go hungry.”
Benny looked at the muffin he held between his fingers, and it struck him that if Nix and her mother were as poor as everyone said they were, then just the ingredients for the muffins must have cut into their own rations. He set the muffin down.
His brother leaned his forearms on the table and said quietly, “Let me tell you a secret, Benny. The first secret you and I will share, okay?”
Benny nodded.
“I’ll never let Jessie and Nix Riley go hungry. Haven’t you noticed that we don’t have meat on our table seven days a week, even though we can afford it?”
Another nod.
“That’s so there’s meat on their table. Nix doesn’t know, and you have to swear to me that you’ll never tell her.”
Benny tried to say the words, “I swear,” but his mouth was too dry to let the words out. Thunder punctuated his attempt, and Tom nodded, as if a deal had been struck.
When he could speak, Benny said, “I don’t get it. How can the town let anyone go hungry? I mean, we have the rationing system and all. Isn’t it supposed to provide-”
“Believe it or not, it was actually worse
“What, just living on the streets?” Benny laughed.
“Exactly. Homeless. Whole families. In every city in the country. I’ll bet they don’t teach that in school, either. The zombie uprising didn’t change everything.”
Benny shook his head, unable to grasp the concept. “You know how Nix is always writing in her diary?”
“Sure.”
“It’s not a diary. She’s collected everything she can about zoms. She has this idea about getting out of Mountainside.” He told Tom about the Pacific Islands and Nix’s practical dreams of reclaiming them and starting a new life without the constant threat of the living dead.
Tom listened very attentively to every word, nodding his approval. “Darn smart girl. You ever think of asking her out?”
“Don’t go there, Tom.”
“Oookay.” Tom sipped his tea. “As far as Nix’s idea… I did say that it would be your generation that would probably change things. A few of us-too very few of us, really-have been trying to make changes, to get the others to shake loose from the fear. Sadly, we haven’t had much luck. Over the last dozen years, Mountainside has settled into a pattern, and the only thing more powerful than fear is routine. Once people are in a rut, it’s sometimes the hardest thing in the world to get them out of it. They defend the routine, too. They say that it’s a simpler life, less stressful and complicated, more predictable. Some of them are getting nostalgic about it, they mythologize it, as if we’re living in the Old West, except with zombies instead of wild Indians.”
“That’s dumb,” Benny said.
“It’s fearful,” Tom corrected, “but it’s safe. At least they think it is. It allows them to think they know the whole size and shape of their world. Except for when you kids are talking, you almost never hear someone talk about the world that was. People don’t ask one another where they’re from. I mean, they kind of
“I think so,” said Benny. “If they talk about where they’re from, they have to talk about what happened. And… who they left behind.”
“Right. Fear fueled by grief.” Tom rubbed his face with his palms.
“What about the bounty hunters and… and what you do? People have to talk about the outside world for that.”
Tom nodded approval. “That’s true, and it’s a cultural quirk that surfaces once in a while, but once the closure
