act as a base on which was placed a large hand-carved wooden tray. Large, clean leaves covered the tray, and a wonderful aroma drifted out from beneath them. Nix lifted the leaves and gasped. Benny’s mouth fell open. The wooden plate was piled high with fat yellow mounds of scrambled eggs, thick fried potatoes, and a mound of fresh strawberries.
“What?” Benny asked, looking around. “Who-?”
“Who cares?” Nix said as she scooped a handful of eggs off the plate. “God… there’s enough here for ten people.”
“We are awake, right?”
Nix laughed and shoved eggs into his mouth. He chewed. It was cold but delicious.
“Does this make any sense?” he asked as scooped up more eggs with his fingers.
Nix shook her head, then shrugged. “Maybe. Possible sense, anyway. Think about it.”
It took two mouthfuls of eggs and three potatoes before he caught up with her. “Man, I’m slow!”
“Gee, that’s a news flash,” she said, her cheeks filled like a squirrel.
“The Greenman!”
“Question is,” Nix said, swallowing, “why?”
“He’s a friend of Tom’s.”
She nodded. “Wonder why he didn’t hang around to say hi?”
“No idea. Wish I knew where he lived. Tom said it’s around here somewhere. Probably pretty well hidden, though. Guy’s not supposed to be very social.”
They ate for a while, then Nix said, “God… there are so many questions. What’s happening with Tom and Chong? Where’s Lilah? Who took the cans down last night? Why did all those zoms attack us? And what’s with that freak Preacher Jack?”
Benny smiled. “Since when did you think I knew what the heck was going on?”
“Always a first time.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but today isn’t that day.” He rubbed his hands briskly over his face. “Okay… so, what’s the plan?”
“Plan?” she replied. “Don’t you have one?”
“Um… what makes you think the ‘no answer’ guy is the ‘I have a plan’ guy?”
“’Cause I don’t have a plan either,” she said.
“Ah.” They looked around, watching the woods as if answers would magically appear. “We could wait here and see if the Greenman comes back.”
Benny shook his head. “I don’t think he will. He didn’t wait for us last night, and he didn’t stick around to have breakfast with us this morning.”
Nix sighed. “Maybe we should go back and take a look at the field and the way station. From a distance, I mean. See what’s what.”
“Sure,” he said, brightening. “That’s very plan-like.”
They shared the last of the eggs and potatoes and stuffed their pockets with the strawberries. They wiped the plate clean with leaves and left it at the base of the tree. Benny wrote “Thanks!” in big letters in the dirt.
He turned and caught her watching him, her smile faint and her eyes distant.
“What?” Benny asked.
She blinked, and he thought he saw shutters close behind her eyes. “Nothing.”
Back in town Benny would have let that go, but in a lot of ways he felt like he had left behind the version of himself who was afraid to ask these kinds of questions. So he said, “No… there was something. The way you were looking at me. What is it?”
Birds sang in trees for almost five seconds before she answered. “Back in town… on your roof… I asked you if you loved me. Did you mean it?”
Benny’s mouth went dry. “Yes.”
“You haven’t said it since.”
A defensive reply leaped to his lips, but instead he said, “Neither have you.”
“No,” she admitted, her voice small. She squinted into the morning sunlight. “Maybe… maybe if leaving town had been easier…”
He waited.
“… it would be easier to say,” Nix finished. “But out here…”
“I know,” he said. “I feel it too.”
“Do you understand it?” she pleaded. “I’ve been trying to, but I can’t put it into the right words.”
Benny nodded. “I think so. At least… I understand why I haven’t said it. Since we left town, we’ve been in trouble. Our ‘road trip’ hasn’t exactly been a load of fun. Saying ‘I love you’ out here… don’t laugh, but it would feel like taking off my carpet coat and walking out into a crowd of zoms. Saying it out loud just makes me feel vulnerable. Is that stupid?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s not stupid.”
“My turn to ask a question,” Benny said, and even though Nix stiffened, he plowed ahead. “Do you wish I hadn’t said it? At all, I mean?”
Strange lights flickered in the green depths of her eyes. “When you think the time is right,” she said, “try it again and see what happens.”
Benny’s insecurities wanted to read her comment in all the wrong ways, but his inner voice whispered a different suggestion to him. He said, “Count on it.”
She held out her hand. “So… want to go for a walk?”
“Well… it’s that or clean my room, but since my room is a tree…”
He took her hand, and they walked under the canopy of cool green leaves. Birds sang in the trees, and the grass beneath their feet glistened with morning dew. The first of the day’s bees buzzed softly among the flowers, going about their ancient and important work, collecting nectar and taking pollen from one flower to another. Cyclones of gnats spiraled up from the grass and swirled through the slanting sunlight. The loveliness of the forest was magical and fresh, but it was also immense. Neither of them spoke, unable to phrase their reactions to the rampant beauty and unwilling to trouble the air with the horrors that haunted their hearts.
Despite the warm reality of each other’s hands, they felt incredibly alone. Desolate. Even though they knew that Tom and Lilah and Chong were somewhere in this same forest, it was as if everyone else was on a different planet. Mountainside-home-was a million miles away. The jumbo jet could well have been on the far side of the world, or something from an old dream.
The rocky path wound down among trees and shrubs, and most of the way there was no evidence of what had happened last night except the smell of ash on the breeze. Then they rounded a bend, and all that changed.
“God…,” Nix said in a hollow whisper.
The field was a massive ruin. Trees had burned to stumps, bushes had been reduced to ash. The way station was nothing more than a blackened shell.
However, that was not the worst of it. Not by a long shot. Everywhere-on the field, collapsed over the glacial boulders, twisted into bony knots on the concrete slab by the station-were corpses. Last night they had been the living dead; now they were merely dead, the life force burned out of them by the conflagration Benny had set loose with a tiny match.
It was all so still. A blasted expanse of ash and cracked bones. Nix turned away.
Benny lowered his head. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Nix touched his arm. “This isn’t your fault. You didn’t mean-”
“Yes I did, Nix.” He turned to her and brushed a strand of curly red hair away from her face. “I started the fire because I didn’t know what else to do. I killed all those…”
“Zoms, Benny. They’re zoms. You can’t kill them.”
“I know… but…”
She looked puzzled. “What?”
“They were people once.”
“I know.”
