toward the gas station, toward Lilah and Nix. Toward Benny. Then the sea of zoms closed around the figure, obscuring him from Benny’s sight.
It didn’t matter. Benny had seen it.
Seen him.
“No…,” he whispered to himself. “No.”
He turned and ran. Not walked, not shuffled like a zom. Benny Imura ran for all he was worth. He ran for his life. As he ran he could feel those eyes upon him, burning like cold fire into his back. God! Where was Tom? Benny thought he heard a sound threaded through the moan of the thousands of walking dead. He thought he heard the deep, rumbling, mocking laughter of the man he was positive he had just seen standing amid an army of the dead.
Charlie Pink-eye.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
When I was real little, Mom was having a hard time earning enough ration dollars. Before First Night she’d been a production assistant in Hollywood (a place where they made movies, back before they nuked Los Angeles). She didn’t know how to farm or build stuff, and she tried to make a living doing sewing and cleaning people’s houses. It was hard, but she never complained and she never let me know how hard she had to work. Then she was sick for a few weeks and fell behind on all the bills.
Then she met Charlie Matthias. He tried to get Mom to go out with him, but she wasn’t interested. AT ALL. Then Charlie told her there was a way for her to make a month’s worth of ration bucks in one day. It wasn’t sex stuff or anything like that. He said all she had to do was quiet a zom.
Of course, he didn’t tell her that she would be thrown into a big pit with a zom with only a broom handle as a weapon. It was at a place called Gameland, hidden up in the mountains. People came from all over to bet on what they called Z-Games. Zombie games.
Mom was desperate to earn the money, so she went into the pit.
She never told me about this, and I don’t know the details. All I know is that Charlie kept Mom in the pit for a week. I was real little, and Benny’s aunt Cathy took care of me.
Then Tom brought Mom home. Tom was all cut up and burned, from what the neighbors told me later. He smelled of smoke and had bloodstains on his clothes. I learned a lot later that Tom had rescued Mom and destroyed Gameland. I think he had to hurt some people to do it. Maybe kill some people. Shame Charlie wasn’t one of them.
When Charlie Matthias killed my mom last year, he was going to take me to Gameland. The new Gameland.
God… how can people be so cruel?
36
TOM WAS FAST, BUT SALLY TWO-KNIVES WAS DOWN BEFORE HE GOT to her. He knelt beside her and checked her pulse, found a reassuring thump-thump-thump. Then he examined neck and spine before he gently eased her onto her back and brushed dirt and leaves from her face.
“Oh boy, Sally,” he said, “you’re a bit of a mess here.” Her eyelids slowly fluttered open. Even in the bad light Tom could see that her face was taut with great pain. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.
“Everywhere.”
“Can you pin it down for me or do I have to go looking?”
Sally snorted. “Since when did you become a prude?” Then she winced and touched her abdomen. “Stomach and arm.”
Tom opened the bottom buttons of her shirt, saw what was clearly a knife wound. She wasn’t coughing up blood, so he didn’t think she had any serious internal injuries. Or he hoped she didn’t. He removed a small bottle of antiseptic and some cotton pads from a vest pocket and gently cleaned the wound and applied a clean bandage. He used his knife and cut open her sleeve to reveal a ragged black hole. Tom gently raised her arm and leaned to take a look at the back of it, saw a second, slightly smaller hole.
“A through-and-through,” he concluded. “Bullet hit you in the back of the arm and punched out through the biceps. What they’d shoot you with?”
“Don’t know,” she said through gritted teeth. “Something small. Twenty-two or twenty-five caliber, though it felt pretty darn big going in and coming out.”
“Missed the arteries. Didn’t break the bone,” Tom said. “You always were a lucky one, Sally.”
“Lucky my ass. I got shot and stabbed. If that’s your idea of good luck, then give me the other kind.”
“Don’t even joke,” he chided as he cleaned the entry and exit wounds, placed sterile pads over them, and began wrapping a white bandage around her arm. “I’ve seen my share of bad luck already today.”
Tom tied the ends of the bandage with neat precision, but inside he was beginning to feel a slight edge of panic. It was now too dark to track Chong. Tom helped Sally sit up and let her drink from his canteen.
“Don’t suppose you saw my horse anywhere, did you?” she asked. “I left her tied to a tree, but she must have spooked.”
“No,” said Tom. “Look, Sal, what happened and who did this?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “I ran into a couple of the White Bear crew. You know White Bear?”
He nodded. White Bear had once run with Charlie Pinkeye’s gang but had dropped out of sight years ago. “Heard of him but never met him. Big guy from Nevada. Used to be a bouncer at one of the Vegas casinos before First Night, right? Tells everyone that he’s the reincarnation of some great Indian medicine men, though from what I heard he doesn’t have a drop of Native American blood in him. What’s he doing here?”
She hissed in pain as Tom began stitching her stomach wound. He wished Lilah was here.
“OW-damn, son! You using a tree spike to sew that up?” she snarled.
“Don’t be a sissy.”
She cursed him and his entire lineage going back to the Stone Age. Tom endured it as he worked. Curses were better than screams.
“What about White Bear?” he prompted.
She took a breath. “Since Charlie’s gang got chomped by those zoms last year, there’s been a lot of talk about who was going to take over his territory. Charlie always had prime real estate. Mountainside, Fairview, couple of other towns, and the trade route all through these mountains. White Bear wants it all. Brought a bunch of his guys with him. Most of them are jokers who don’t know which end of a rifle goes bang! But he has a lot of them.”
“How many?”
“The two I saw tonight, and maybe twenty more. Maybe twice that number if the rumors are true… and he’ll probably try to scoop up any of Charlie’s guys who are still sucking air.”
Tom tied off the last stitch and began applying a fresh dressing. “Why’d they attack you?”
“They didn’t. I, um, kind of attacked them.” She touched Tom’s arm. “Tom… I think they have your brother, Benny.”
“What?”
“I saw them slapping the crap out of a Japanese-looking kid. Your brother’s, what, fifteen, sixteen?”
“Fifteen. What was this kid wearing?”
She thought about it. “Jeans. Dark shirt with red stripes and a vest with a lot of pockets.”
Tom exhaled a burning breath. “That’s not Benny. That’s his friend, Louis Chong. He’s Chinese, not Japanese.
