explosion, and they turned to see several of the wagons that formed one of the walls of the arena disintegrate into a fireball that knocked down at least a third of the surviving people in the place. Zoms were flung halfway across the gaming floor, and a dozen spectators and guards fell screaming into the open pits.
“That’s our cue,” said Tom. “This whole place is about to blow itself into orbit. We have to go now!”
“But we can’t go! Chong…”
“Here,” came a painful reply, and they turned to see a bloody, limping Chong running alongside Lilah-who looked strangely distracted despite the carnage. Nix ran to embrace Chong and Lilah, but Benny looked from Tom to the burning wagons to the hotel.
Chong asked, “Did I hear something about this place blowing up?”
“All to hell and gone,” said Tom, grabbing them and shoving them toward the smoking hole in the wall of wagons. “There’s five hundred pounds of C4 in the hotel lobby, and I rigged it. MOVE!”
And they were running. As they raced Benny cut a last look around. Many of the bounty hunters were down; the rest were already leaping over flaming wreckage.
Tom yelled, “Go… GO!” They ran into the smoke and through flaming wreckage and out into the cool darkness of the big field. Behind them the last of the guards and spectators were still fighting the zoms. Benny wondered if they were all crazy. Did they think they could win? Or were they so locked into the moment that violence was the only response they were capable of? He hated them and pitied them and ran from them.
Benny ran with his arm wrapped around Nix. Lilah dragged Chong with her. Fluffy McTeague ran with Sally Two-Knives in his arms like a baby doll. J-Dog and Dr. Skillz were racing each other and laughing; and a whole phalanx of the surviving bounty hunters followed them off to the left, into the woods. Tom was heading right, straight for the hedgerows and the road.
Benny opened his mouth to shout at Tom, to ask him if he was sure that he knew how to rig an explosion, when the world seemed to detonate around them and the entire Wawona Hotel leaped high into the night sky. A massive glowing fireball punched hundreds of feet into the air, igniting the surrounding trees, vaporizing the water in the ponds, and flinging the armored wagons far out into the fields. Benny and Nix zigged and zagged as flaming debris crashed down all around them with the force of a meteor shower. The grass caught fire and superheated winds pursued them like a host of demons.
Benny heard Tom cry out in pain and saw him stumble, but his brother picked himself up and staggered on. Debris struck the ground all around them.
“Go!” Tom growled through bared teeth.
They ran all the way to the gates and beyond, and down the road into darkness. Debris continued to fall for a full five minutes, as if the ghosts of Gameland were hurling artillery at them. They ran and ran until they could not run any more. They were all spread out across a mile of firelit landscape, Benny and his friends in the field, the bounty hunters deep in the forest.
80
TOM SLOWED TO A WALK AND THEN A SHAKY STAGGER AND FINALLY stopped, waving at the rest to stop. Chong and Lilah stumbled and collapsed to their knees, shocked that they were alive. Tom bent forward and rested his hands on his thighs. He looked totally spent. Benny sank to his knees and hugged Nix, and she clung to him. She smelled of smoke and blood. He kissed her face and hair and the tears on her cheeks.
Then Benny heard a sound and saw Tom walking slowly toward them.
“We made it!” said Benny, fighting a crazy laugh that threatened to break from his chest.
“Yes,” said Tom in a whisper of a voice. “We made it.”
“Benny…,” Nix said softly, and he turned as Chong and Lilah came walking toward him. They both looked like they’d been through a war, and Benny figured that was a pretty fair assessment. There was an awkward moment when the four of them stood and stared at one another. Everything that had happened since they’d left town-could it really only be two days ago?-floated like embers in the air between them.
Benny smiled first and punched Chong lightly in the chest. “You stupid monkey-banger!”
Chong grinned, and despite the dirt and blood on his face, it made him glow. He arched his eyebrows in best “wise sage” style and observed, “As usual, you opt for an erudite and insightful comment that is entirely appropriate to the moment.”
“Bite me.”
“Not even if I was a zom.”
They burst out laughing, and Benny grabbed his best friend and gave him a hug so fierce that it made them both yelp with pain, which made them laugh harder. Then Benny stopped and cut a look at Lilah. The moment stalled. His inner voice was trying to feed him clever lines, but he mentally told it to shut up. Aloud he said, “I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry.”
Lilah glared at him. Nix shifted to stand next to her, and took her hand.
“Yeah,” Benny said, “that’s cool. If you guys want to team up and beat the crap out of me, go for it. I deserve it after what I said.”
“Why? What did you say?” asked Chong, but no one answered him.
“It’s okay, Benny,” Lilah said in her icy whisper. “I’ll kill you later.”
Benny’s throat went dry. “Hey, wait… I-I-”
Then Nix and Lilah burst out laughing. Chong, who had no idea what was going on, laughed anyway.
“God!” cried Nix. “Did you see the look on his face?”
“Wait,” Benny said again, “did you… just make a joke?” That made the others laugh harder.
“I can make jokes,” said Lilah, and then playfully punched him in the chest the same way Benny had to Chong. Except her playful punch was about fifty times harder.
“Ow!” he yelped. The others kept laughing, at him, at everything, at the realization that they had all survived. Rubbing the fiery bruise in his chest, Benny laughed too.
They turned to Tom, beckoning him over, wanting him to laugh, needing to see the grim sadness washed off his face. Benny hugged his brother. “We did it, man! Now can we finally get the heck out of this place. Ready for a road trip?”
Tom didn’t laugh. His eyes were fixed on the burning hotel. “Yes,” he said again, his voice even quieter. “I guess it’s time to leave…”
“God, yes,” agreed Nix. “I think we just saw the last of our bad luck go up in smoke.”
Tom sighed, and then he suddenly dropped to his knees. The others stared at him in surprise.
“Tom?” asked Lilah.
Tom gingerly opened the flaps of his vest. “Damn,” he murmured.
Nix screamed.
Benny saw it then. Blood. So much blood. He screamed too.
Tom coughed and slumped forward. Nix and Benny caught him and lowered him carefully to the ground. Benny ripped open Tom’s shirt. What they saw tore a sharper cry from Benny and another scream from Nix. When Tom had stumbled during the flight from the hotel, Benny thought he had been hit by a piece of flaming debris. But that wasn’t it… it was a thousand times worse than that.
Tom had been shot.
“We have to stop the bleeding!” Nix cried. She no longer had her first aid kit, so she dug through Tom’s vest pockets and grabbed rolls of bandages to uses as compresses.
“What happened?” demanded Chong.
“Benny,” Nix said urgently as she worked, “this is bad. I can’t stop the bleeding.”
“Let me help,” said Lilah as she pulled the first aid kit from Tom’s vest and removed several cotton squares.
“IMURA!”
The voice that roared out of the darkness seemed to belong to a monster, a demon from out of hell itself. They all turned to see a tall figure emerge from the smoke, with fires burning the world behind him.
