Chong was nowhere in sight.
29
“THIS DAY CANNOT GET ANY WORSE,” TOM SAID UNDER HIS BREATH.
Benny shot him a look. It was the kind of statement that he would never dare make because the universe always seemed to take it as a challenge. He cupped his hands and called Chong’s name.
The echoes bounced around and came back empty.
“Oh, come on,” growled Tom with mounting frustration. “Somebody that smart can’t possibly be this dumb.”
“Maybe he went somewhere to go to the bathroom,” suggested Benny. “Chong’s pretty shy about that stuff… so maybe he-”
“Went to the bathroom where? In his damn parents’ house? There’s an outhouse twenty feet away, and there are bushes everywhere he could squat behind.”
“He was pretty upset,” said Nix. “Maybe he just wanted to be alone.”
Tom turned to her and gave her a long, withering stare. “Alone? In the Rot and bloody Ruin?”
She flushed bright red and immediately started calling Chong’s name again. Tom did too. Only Lilah stayed silent. Her damaged larynx made it impossible for her to shout loud enough to do any good; but her honey-colored eyes missed nothing as she turned in a full circle and surveyed the surrounding forest.
Lilah shot Nix an evil look. “Are all boys this stupid?”
“Hey!” said Benny.
Nix didn’t answer. She called Chong’s name again, shouting it as loud as she could, even though it hurt her injury to do it. If he could hear the shouts, Chong did not answer.
Tom cursed with great vehemence for several seconds. “I am so going to kill him. I’m going to drag him back to town and chain him to his own front porch.”
“I’ll help,” offered Benny, who was as angry as he was scared.
Tom looked from the tree line to the sun and back again. “Damn it.” He turned to the others. “Okay, everyone spread out. Find Chong’s footprints. He has those wedge-soled boots. Keep your weapons in hand and stay in sight with at least one other person. You find anything, call out. Go!”
The four of them moved away from the front of the station as if they were propelled outward by an explosion.
Benny didn’t want to believe it, but his mind was replaying his last conversation with Chong, and Chong’s last words: “I should never have come.”
“Come on, you monkey-banger,” Benny muttered aloud as he scanned the dusty ground and picked his way through the broken concrete. “Stop screwing around.”
Then he found something that froze the blood in his veins. He straightened and yelled as loud as he could.
“HERE!”
Everyone came running. Benny saw the flash of sunlight on Tom’s sword as his brother ran up from his left, and the glitter on the wicked edge of Lilah’s spear as she closed in from the right. Nix came puffing up behind him. They all stopped and stared. No one said a word. The words had already been said.
They were scraped onto the side of a slab of concrete pushed almost vertical by tree roots. Chong had left them a message. Two words.
I’M SORRY.
Benny looked at what lay beyond the slab of concrete. Miles of white rock left by a glacier. White rock baking in the sunlight. The row of rocks split off into five separate threads that led high into the mountains and vanished into the gloom gathering under the forest canopy.
Benny remembered a basic fact of tracking that Tom had taught him: Rubber-soled shoes don’t leave tracks on rock.
There were five possible trails, and there were four of them. The sun was already behind the treetops, and it would be dark in two hours.
With a feeling of sinking horror, Benny realized that Chong, smart as ever, had picked a path away from them that was impossible to follow. In grief and shame, he had run away.
And there was nothing they could do about it.
30
LOU CHONG RAN AS FAST AS HE COULD OVER THE ROCKS. HIS HEART pounded, but it also ached. Benny would hate him for this. So would Nix and Tom. Lilah, however… well, Chong figured that Lilah would be happy to have him gone. Lilah despised weakness, and Chong felt that “weak” had quickly become his defining characteristic. At least out here in the Ruin.
He felt stupid and ashamed. He should never have agreed to come, and though he briefly thought that Tom was just as much to blame for even suggesting this trip, Chong believed the stuff that had gone wrong was all his own fault. He was fairly certain that Tom was on the verge of turning back, which meant that Chong would be responsible for screwing up what Nix and Benny really wanted. And for denying Lilah the freedom that she craved.
That was the process of logic that had spurred him to run, though now, deep in the woods, he could see that the logic was as thin as tissue paper and filled with holes. He remembered one of his father’s countless lessons about logical thinking: “When you add emotion to any equation, you can’t trust the results.” Shame and guilt were emotions, and the sum at the end of his logical calculations was as untrustworthy as his actions back on the road when the rhino first appeared.
“I’m not cut out for the Ruin,” he told himself as he ran. “I’m nobody’s idea of Mr. Adventure.” His words were pitched to sound funny, but his heart was breaking.
As he ran he made himself remember everything that Mr. Feeney had taught them in the Scouts and what he had read in books about the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. All the tricks about tracking and stalking. And about how to foil pursuit. There was a lot of that in books. The Leatherstocking Tales and old Louis L’Amour novels from long before First Night.
Chong knew about doubling back and leaving false trails. He knew how to circle around and cut his own trail. He knew how to keep from scuffing the rocks. Several times he jumped down from the rocks and ran into the tall grass, then carefully walked backward in his own footprints so that anyone following would think he ran into the field. When he reached the forest, he found a broken branch that still had some leaves on it, and as he ran he whisked the ground behind him to wipe out his trail.
Maybe Tom or Lilah could find him, but he didn’t think so. If they were alone and had all the time in the world, sure… but they had to watch out for Benny and Nix.
Chong even smiled to himself with how clever he was being. It felt good to do something right, even if the others would hate him for it. Better that than having them hurt again because of him. Especially if Charlie Pink-eye was still alive. It would be better for Benny and the others to keep going east, to get far beyond the reach of that maniac.
Chong knew enough about orienteering to know which way was northwest. And even though he hated physical exertion, he could climb a tree and lash himself to the trunk to wait out the night.
As it grew dark he slowed to a walk. The canopy of leaves was so dense he could catch only glimpses of the sky. Sunset couldn’t be more than an hour and a half away. It was time to find shelter.
