abdomen, and he howled in pain. He used one fist to club the spear down, so that the point dug into the mud, and with his other fist he punched Lilah in the stomach. She collapsed to her knees and threw up into the weeds. Nix made a grab for Lilah’s spear, but Charlie backhanded her to the edge of the path, so that she stood wobbling on the edge of a sheer drop, her arms pinwheeling for balance.
And then Benny moved. He ran to Nix and grabbed her wrist and pulled her away from the ledge and then he rushed at Charlie. He still had the Hammer’s club, and Benny swung it hard at Charlie’s head. The bounty hunter was actually starting to smile at the obviousness of the attack, but Benny was tired of being obvious, tired of being beaten up, clubbed down, tossed aside like something that, in the grand scheme of things, just plain didn’t matter. He turned the swing into a fake, checked the hit, and used his left hand to punch Charlie in the nose. It wasn’t a very powerful blow, but it doesn’t require power to break a nose. Charlie’s head rocked back as his nose flattened and blood flew from his nostrils.
And that’s when Benny hit him with the pipe.
He grabbed the weapon with both hands and swung it in a sideways arc that fourteen years ago would have sent a baseball into the bleachers in any major league park in the country. The swing had everything Benny had to give: rage and hate, hurt and fear, passion and confusion. And it also had love and grief. For Nix and her mother. For Lilah and her sister, Annie. For the twelve-year-old girl and the kids who huddled around her. For George Goldman, the quiet hero. For Tom and the heartbreak he felt over Jessie Riley. For people named and unknown who had fallen victim to this man. This abomination.
He hit Charlie Matthias only once.
And once was enough.
The big man took a single wandering sideways step, all sense and control knocked out of his head by the blow. He staggered past Nix, who was crouched down holding Lilah against her. He swung around in a sloppy turn, fighting for balance that was no longer his to own, and then his next step came down three inches past the edge of the path. Below his big foot was a drop that plunged a hundred yards into darkness. Charlie Matthias shot Benny one last, momentary glance of desperation and fear.
Benny would like to have seen guilt there or some last minute awareness and acceptance of the wrongness of all that he had done. That would have been nice. That would have been closure.
All he saw in Charlie’s eyes was hatred.
Then Charlie fell.
With the rain, with the last few pops of gunfire from the camp, and with the moans of the hungry dead, they never heard him land. Benny stood on the edge of the trail, and for all that he could see or hear, he might as well have been on the edge of the world. He held the Hammer’s club out at arm’s length, opened his hand, and let the weapon fall. There would be a need for weapons, he knew that; but there would be other weapons. This one, like the man it had killed, was unclean.
He turned to the others and sank to his knees by Nix and Lilah. They both stared past him to the edge of the road, their eyes wide. Benny rested his head on Nix’s shoulder, and she gathered him to her. Lilah wrapped her arms around them both. Then there were other arms-the twelve-year-old girl and the children.
Tom Imura sat on Apache’s back and stared at the huddled mass. He’d heard the single gunshot behind him and had come as fast as he could. He read the scene and understood what he was seeing.
He heard Benny and Lilah and Nix and the others as they wept.
Tom bowed his head and he too wept.
EPILOGUE
THEY WALKED IN SILENCE, SIDE BY SIDE, HEADING SOUTHEAST. MILES FELL away behind them. They passed another gas station, where Tom greeted another monk. They didn’t linger, though. The day was burning away.
Benny’s hand was still wrapped in tape. One of his knuckles was cracked and his wrist was sprained, but in the two weeks since the fight at the camp, he’d healed quickly. Tom looked like an Egyptian mummy. Doc Gurijala had pulled forty-one shotgun pellets out of him, and there were at least ten that he couldn’t reach without doing more harm than good. Tom told him to leave them.
Lilah was healing, too, although more slowly. When Charlie had punched her in the stomach, he’d clipped her rib cage and broken three bones. She was staying with Lou Chong’s family. They had the room, and Chong’s aunt was a nurse. If Lilah was impressed by the town and all it had to offer, she didn’t show it. And getting her to part with her spear nearly caused a minor war at the Chong residence.
Benny was surprised to see that Nix and Lilah were bonding, and the two girls spent hours sitting apart from Benny and Chong, heads bowed together, talking. Nix never told him what they talked about.
One night, while walking back from Chong’s, Benny said, “I’m trying to see things from her perspective. She must not know where she belongs.”
“She belongs with us,” said Nix.
“Even if we leave? Wouldn’t she be better off staying here with the Chongs or the Kirsches?”
Nix shook her head. “Would they understand what she’s been through, Benny?”
“Do we? Nix… we don’t even really
She shrugged and brushed a curly strand of red hair from her face. “Maybe not. But we know her better than anyone else.”
They went home. Nix slept in Benny’s room; Benny camped out on the couch. The couch was uncomfortable, but he really didn’t care.
Morgie came to see them, but he was weak and fragile. Even with a head injury, he was able to see how things were between Benny and Nix. Benny braced himself for Morgie to be angry, but he too had been changed by what had happened. He nodded thoughtfully, and went home.
It all seemed like a thousand years ago. Gameland was still out there, and now they knew where. However, if Benny thought that hearing Lilah’s story would change the people in town or spark them to action, he was disappointed. They were shocked, they were sympathetic… but they said that it was too far away. That it wasn’t their concern. That it was too dangerous to mount a raid on it. After a couple of days they even stopped talking about it.
“It’s just like everything beyond the fence,” Benny complained. “They act like it’s all happening on a different planet.”
“To them it is,” said Nix. “My mom told them about the first Gameland, and they didn’t do anything then, either.”
Nothing would be done, and that was the ugliest truth.
But when he said this to Tom, his brother’s eyes became distant, and he changed the subject. Each day, however, he spent at least an hour in his workroom making bullets, and he had maps pinned to the walls.
Benny, Nix, and Tom spent every evening talking about things. Not about the fight or the dreadful things each of them had been forced to do. No. They talked about the jumbo jet. Tom had seen it too. He’d watched it fly out of the east and then turn slowly over the mountains and fly back.
“What do you think is out there?” Benny asked Nix one night after Tom went to bed. “Out where the jet went?”
“I don’t know. It won’t be my islands,” she said. “It’ll be something… different. Something that isn’t
“
Her green eyes were full of shadows. “‘Here,’ Benny, they accept that Gameland exists and won’t do anything about it.” She shook her head. “Here isn’t enough, Benny. Not for me. Not anymore.”
Later, when Benny told Tom that Nix wanted to go find where the jet came from, Benny had expected Tom to scoff at the idea. Tom hadn’t. Next morning there was a stack of maps on the kitchen table. There was one for
