“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.”
“
“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
“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.
Around the bend, the view opened up, and Benny saw the roads that wandered from all directions over hills down to the crossroads.
“God!” Benny gasped, but immediately clamped a hand over his mouth.
It was neither the beauty of the vista of endless mountains nor the tens of thousands of silent cars crowding the road that tore a gasp from him. The crossroads and the fields surrounding it were crowded with the living dead. There were at least a thousand of them. Benny stared, searching for movement, waiting for the sea of monsters to turn and begin shambling toward them. But they did not. The zombies just stood there in one crowded mass. Others, alone or in small groups, stood along the roads or in the fields. All still, all silent.
The horses now showed their training, and in the actual presence of the dead, they made no sound, but
