“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.
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.
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
