Benny and Nix took off their sweltering carpet coats, and both of them were soaked with sweat. Benny was so exhausted that he was almost-almost-too weary to notice how Nix’s clothes were pasted to her body. He quietly banged his head on the stone wall. Then he closed his eyes and tried counting to fifty million. Eventually he opened his eyes and busied himself slicing apples for them. After a while, Nix pulled out her journal again and started writing.
“What are you doing?” Benny asked, munching on a slice of apple.
“Making a list.”
“Of?”
“Things I don’t understand about what’s been happening.”
“That’s going to be a long list. What do you have so far?”
She chewed the end of her pencil. “Okay, I get the rhinoceros. Zoos and circuses and all. That one makes sense… but what about the guy we found tied to the truck? Who was he and why was he fed to the zoms? And by whom? And worse… why didn’t he reanimate?”
Benny glumly shook his head.
“What does it mean?” Nix asked. “What could it mean? Is the plague or radiation or whatever it is wearing off? Or are we just now discovering that some people are immune to it?”
“Wouldn’t we know that already?” Benny asked.
“With three hundred million zoms in America? How would anyone know, especially if it was rare?”
“The bounty hunters would know,” insisted Benny. “Tom would have known. He’s all over the place. He hears all sorts of stuff. If that’s been happening, then he knows about it.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding thoughtfully, “I’ll buy that… but wouldn’t that mean the other idea is more likely?”
“That whatever caused the zoms to rise in the first place might be coming to an end?” Benny thought about it. “That would be pretty amazing.”
“If it’s true…,” Nix said dubiously. “Then there’s the big weirdness at the way station. Brother David, Shanti, and Sarah missing. And all the stuff Tom sent for our road trip.”
“And the zoms,” Benny added. “Tom told me that sometimes a bunch of zoms would follow something, like a herd of wild horses or a running bear. He called it ‘flocking.’ Is that what we saw last night?”
“No way,” Nix said firmly. “Last night was no accident. It felt like a planned attack. I think someone drove them down out of the mountains like Lilah did with the zoms from the Hungry Forest.”
They ate their apples in silence for a while.
“Nix,” Benny said tentatively, “there’s… something I have to tell you. Something I didn’t want to say last night.”
“Is it about Lilah?” Nix said quickly.
He turned and looked at her.
“Lilah? What about her? Because she ran off?”
Nix colored. “No, never mind. Go ahead… what were you going to say?”
He took a breath. “Last night… when we were in the field with all those zoms? Before I started the fire? I… um… saw someone.”
“Who?”
Benny cleared his throat. “It was dark. I was scared. There were a million freaking zoms, so I can’t be sure and I’m probably wrong, but… I think I saw Charlie Pink-eye.”
She whipped around and grabbed his sleeve with her small, strong fists. She shook him. “What?”
“Whoa! Ow, you’re banging my head against the stones.”
Nix abruptly stopped shaking him, but her fists stayed knotted in his sleeve. “You saw him?”
“No, I said I wasn’t sure. The dark and the zoms and all-”
“Was he alive or a zom?”
“I… don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me, Benny Imura!”
“I’m not-I don’t know. It was just a second. I-I think he might have been alive, but the zoms weren’t attacking him.”
“He could have had cadaverine on, Benny, just like we did.”
“I know. But something wasn’t right about it. It might not even have been him.”
Nix stared into his eyes for a long time and then let him go with a little push. She suddenly got up and walked a dozen paces away, her arms wrapped tightly around her chest as if she stood in a cold wind. Benny got up more slowly but stayed by the wall.
He watched her as she worked it through. Every angle of her body seemed jagged and sharp, her posture charged with tension. Benny could only imagine what horrors were playing out in Nix’s mind. The man who had beaten and murdered her mother and then kidnapped her. The thought that somehow Charlie had orchestrated the zombie assault on the way station was horrible. It also made a queer kind of sense, since a swarm of zombies had been used to destroy Charlie’s team. An eye for an eye?
“Nix?”
She ignored him, standing stiff and trembling under the unrelenting sun. Benny waited for her. Three minutes passed. Four. Five. Gradually, by slow and painful degrees, the harsh lines of tension drained from Nix’s shoulders and back. When she turned around, Benny could see unshed tears in the corners of her eyes. She looked at him blankly for a moment, and then her eyes snapped wide.
She screamed.
Her warning was a half second too late, as cold hands clamped onto Benny from behind and dragged him backward over the stone wall. Benny twisted wildly around and saw the face of the zom who had him. A tall, thin man dressed in a tunic that looked like it had been made from an old bedsheet.
“No!” Benny cried.
It was Brother David.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Notes from Mrs. Griswold’s science lecture on how cadaverine is made:
The cadaverine used in the Rot and Ruin is actually a mixture of cadaverine, putrescine, spermidine, and other vile ptomaines. The pure compounds are caustic, toxic stuff although they can be easily diluted in water or ethanol (but not really diluting the aroma).
Making these compounds is not a project for a home basement chem lab or even a high school lab. The glassware, equipment, and chemicals are usually found in college level or industrial labs, and that equipment has been scavenged and brought to Mountainside.
The original method comes from a German journal dating back to about 1890. This method for reacting dichloropropane with sodium cyanide (a deadly poison) followed by reaction with zinc powder and hydrochloric acid. This gives cadaverine. Yuck.
51
TOM KNELT BY A COLD CAMPFIRE AND STUDIED THE GROUND. THIS WAS the second place where he’d found Chong’s footprints and signs of violence. The first time had been the spot where Sally Two-Knives had tried to rescue Chong. There were indeed two dead men there, and Tom recognized them. Denny Spurling and Patch Lewis, bounty hunters of the low-life variety who usually ran with a third man named Stosh Lowinski. These were two of the three men Benny had seen torturing and brutalizing zoms on their first trip into the Ruin. Stosh, a beefy man who used a replica Arabian scimitar to kill zoms, was not here. Sally had given them a little taste of their own medicine. Rough justice, but justice of a kind.
