Rot & Ruin

“Oh, sure. Now that it’s too late to do anything, you act all wise and noble. Please.”

Her voice was drenched with bile, and it was getting louder. Benny tried to read her face by starlight, but all he saw were harsh lines.

“And about Tom… I’m not sure what I feel about him anymore. I mean, I miss him. A lot. More than I thought I would.” He shook his head. “Ever since he first took me out to the Ruin, everything’s different. I don’t understand him. I don’t know if I ever did.”

She shoved him hard in the chest. “Who cares? He didn’t save my mom and he could have.”

“Nix, I know you’re hurt. I wish I could fix it, I swear to God. I wish I could make it all different, make what happened not true. If I could… I’d give anything. I’d die to make it right for you and for your mom.”

She started to say something, but he touched her arm.

“If you need to lash out at me, if you need to do anything to me-say anything, throw me off this tower-if it will help even a little, then do it. I don’t care what happens to me anymore. I got what I wanted.”

“What’s that?” she demanded.

“You,” he said. “I got you back safe. The monsters didn’t get you.”

Nix stared at him, unable to speak even though she tried.

Benny tugged the worn leather diary out of his back pocket and pressed it into her hands. “I found this on the floor in your room. I kept it. I… haven’t opened it, haven’t read it. I kept it, because as long as I had it, I knew I’d find you again.”

Nix took the diary, and in the pale light from stars and moon, she ran her fingers across the cover and along the binding. When she raised her eyes to look at Benny, her eyes were wet with new tears.

“Benny, I-,” she began, but before she could say anything more, he bent forward and kissed her. It was the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong circumstances. There was nothing right in their whole world.

Except that kiss.

40

NIX FELL ASLEEP WITH HER HEAD IN HIS LAP. BENNY STAYED AWAKE for another couple of hours, stroking her hair and staring into the infinite star field that stretched above him. After that first scalding kiss, there had been others. And then there had been more tears as the full reality of her loss hit Nix. These tears were quieter, though. They weren’t the tears of shock and denial. They’d already been through that storm. These were the deep, heartbroken tears of acceptance.

Their lives had changed. Their worlds had changed. As he sat there stroking Nix’s hair, Benny had the weird feeling that if he turned around, he would be able to see yesterday and the day before that, all the way back to the point where he had decided to apprentice with Tom. It had been at that moment that his footfalls had diverged from the sane and predictable course of his life. He wished he could call out to the Benny of ten days ago and shout a warning not to come this way. Take the job at the pit, work for the German locksmith, get a tower job with Chong. Anything but this.

As he thought about it, Benny felt sickness creeping into his mind, making ugly questions form like tumors.

Would all of this have happened if I hadn’t taken that damn job with Tom?

And worse yet…

Would any of it have happened?

On a deep level he knew that these thoughts were stupid and wrong. Charlie and the Hammer would have still come after Tom and Sacchetto and Nix’s mom.

Wouldn’t they?

He also knew that the guilt he felt was no different than the guilt Nix felt for having told Zak about her mother knowing Lilah. Things said and done innocently should never be used as weapons. There was guilt here, he finally decided, but it all belonged to Charlie.

Just thinking that name made fires ignite in the pit of his stomach.

For the first time in his life he wished that Tom was here to help him make sense of it. Tom. Benny had hated him most of his life and had just started to like him-even if he didn’t quite understand him-and now the zoms had gotten him.

The sudden realization that Tom was not only dead but was probably a zom was like a punch in the face. Benny closed his eyes and found that old, old memory of Mom in her white dress with red sleeves, handing him to Tom, screaming at Tom to run, and Tom running away, leaving her behind. Tom the zombie hunter. Tom the coward.

Tom the zombie. Would there be a new Zombie Card? Two weeks ago Benny might have thought that was funny. Or appropriate.

Now the horror of it was bigger than the night that loomed around him. He remembered the argument they’d had when Tom had showed him the old man and the girl in the waitress uniform.

“It’s not the same. These are zoms, man. They kill people. They eat people.”

Tom had said, “They used to be people.”

Now Tom was one of them. He tried not to think of what Tom’s last few seconds had been like. The Hammer’s shotgun blast had caught him; Benny had seen the blood fly. Had the blast killed him? That would have been a kindness. The alternative was beyond horrible. Falling down into the mass of them, covered in blood. White hands clawing at his skin, rotting gray teeth biting into him, tearing at him…

Tom did not deserve that. Benny was unsure if Tom was a coward or had ever been a coward. He doubted his own memories of First Night, or, at least, of what those old memories meant. No matter what, though, Tom did not deserve what had happened to him.

He shivered and Nix stirred restlessly.

Looking at her dragged his mind into another room of thought. That kiss. With Nix? Nix, of all people. It was absurd, impossible. They’d already come to that hurdle back in town, and they hadn’t been able to climb it together. It was dangerous and wrong to fall in love with a friend. It complicated things. He and Chong had once sworn that they would never ever fall for a girl they knew. A bold claim in a town as small as Mountainside. Now… Nix Riley lay asleep on his lap, and he swore he could still feel the warmth of her lips on his.

He tugged the battered and sweat-stained Zombie Card from his shirt pocket and looked at the Lost Girl. A dagger of guilt stabbed him beneath the breastbone, and he quickly glanced down at Nix. He could see her eyes move under her closed lids and knew that she was dreaming. A soft cry escaped her parted lips, and it was filled with jagged pieces of emotion. Hurt and loss, despair and terror, but also rage and defiance.

Benny brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek.

His stomach churned with confusion and conflict. Even now, even after that incredible kiss he and Nix had shared, when he looked at the picture of the Lost Girl, he felt an almost physical impact. The desire to find and protect Lilah was every bit as strong now as it was when he’d first turned over her card on the porch at Lafferty’s General Store, and that made as little sense to him now as it did then. He didn’t know this girl. Even Sacchetto and Tom hadn’t really known her. Even if she was still out here somewhere, she was nothing and no one to him. And yet…

And yet.

He studied the card for a long time, even as exhaustion dragged on his eyelids. Nix groaned again in the private hell of her troubled sleep. Benny looked from Nix to the Lost Girl and back to Nix.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Then he stretched out his other hand, and for the second time, he opened his fingers and let the wind take the card. It blew high into the air, tumbling over and over again, its pasteboard face flashing with silver starlight, and then it dropped into the darkness below.

Benny bent and kissed Nix’s cheek. He leaned back against the wall and stared at the night and drifted off into a sea of stars.