Dust & Decay (14 page)

“Crap,” Benny said acidly, and sat down on the grass to pull his shoe off. His sock was soaked with blood.

“Oh no,” breathed Chong. “This is all my fault.”

Benny made a face. “Oh, please. You didn’t bite me.”

“The rhino chased us because I startled it. Then I ran the wrong way and made everything worse.”

Tom started to say something but Lilah cut in. “Yes. You were stupid.”

“She’s got your number,” said Benny with a grin.

Chong gave him an evil stare. “You’re the one whose toe got bitten off by a zom.”

Benny muttered under his breath as he pulled his sock off. His big toenail was cracked and bleeding, and the toe was swollen, but there was no bite. Lilah snatched up his shoe to examine it, but Tom took it out of her hands and peered at the toe.

“It’s a pressure injury.” He blew out his cheeks and handed the shoe back to Benny. “That’s twice you dodged the bullet.”

“That’s a metaphor, right?”

Tom’s smile was less reassuring than it could have been.

“Right?” insisted Benny.

“Rinse your sock out,” said Tom as he turned away.

“Hey … right?”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Some of the traders and bounty hunters claim that the zoms on the other side of the Rocky Mountains are faster than the zoms we have here. There’s a girl in my grade—Carmen—who says that her uncle, who is a trader, saw zombies running after people during First Night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A couple of other people from back east said the same thing, but most people don’t believe them.

I hope this is not true!!!

“W
ELL … GO AHEAD AND SAY IT
,” N
IX DEMANDED.

Tom squatted in front of her, gently touching the edges of the long gash on her face. His lips were pursed, and he made a small downbeat grunting noise. “You’re going to need stitches.”

“I know. Go ahead.”

He shook his head. “No … I can stitch a wound well enough, but this needs fine work. Otherwise—”

“I’ll look like a hag.”

“I wouldn’t go that far … but a deft hand with a needle will reduce the scar to a pencil-thin line. Doc Gara—”

“No!” She brushed his hand away. “I’m not going back to town.”

“Nix, c’mon,” prodded Benny, who hovered over Tom’s shoulder like a worried aunt.

She gave him two seconds of a lethal green stare and then refocused on Tom. “You’re not my dad, Tom, and I—”

Tom made a face. “Oh, please, Nix. You’re not a petulant little kid, so don’t try that act on me. Benny still tries it and it never works.”

“It works sometimes,” Benny said. They ignored him.

“We can be home in four hours,” Tom said. “The doc can stitch you up, we rest up a day or two, and—”

“No.”

“Would you rather have a bad scar?”

“If it’s a choice between going back and that, then I’ll take the scar.”

“Why?”

It was Chong who asked the question, and they turned to look at him. He was pale and still looked badly shaken by what had happened. His eyes were dark and filled with guilt.

“Look,” Nix said slowly, “if we go back because of this, then what will be the next thing that takes us back? I know how things work with people. If something stops us this soon, then all we’ll find out here are reasons to stop and start over.”

“No way,” said Benny.

“No,” agreed Tom.

She picked up the first aid kit and thrust it toward Tom. “You do it.”

“Please,” whispered Chong. “Don’t. This is my fault. I … I can’t be responsible for you being all messed up.”

“Let’s not add more drama,” said Tom. “I’m not that bad with a needle.”

“Nix is beautiful,” said Chong. “She should always be beautiful.”

Benny held up a hand. “Um … going out on a philosophical limb here, but scar or no scar, Nix is always going to be beautiful.”

“No doubt,” agreed Tom.

Nix flushed, but her expression was still hard.

Chong gave a stubborn shake. “Please. I can’t deal with it knowing that it’s my—”

“As God is my witness,” snarled Nix, “if you say it’s your fault one more time, Chong, I will beat you unconscious and leave you for the zoms.”

Chong’s mouth remained open, the sentence half said but now dead on his tongue.

He turned away and stalked to the edge of the clearing, then squatted down in the grass and laced his fingers over his bowed head.

The first aid kit was still in Nix’s hand. Tom hesitated, but then Lilah suddenly leaned in to snatch up the kit.

“She will die of old age before you make up your mind,” she said coldly. “I’ll do it.”

“Whoa,” yelped Benny, making a grab for the kit. “Do you even know how?”

Instead of answering, Lilah pulled up her shirt to show her midriff. There were three healed-over scars, one at least nine inches long. The scars were as thin as threads. Benny stared. Lilah had a flat, tanned stomach and the curved lines of superbly toned muscles. She was also holding the shirt a little too high for comfort, and Benny could feel his hair starting to sweat.

Tom, quietly amused, reached up and pushed Lilah’s hand down a few inches.

Nix gave Benny another of those deadly green stares and fired one at Lilah, who was oblivious to it. Her understanding of personal modesty was entirely from books and not at all from practical experience.

“You stitched those?” Tom asked.

“Who else?” She dropped the hem of her shirt and turned to show other scars on her legs. Benny hoped that an asteroid would fall on his head at the moment. It wasn’t that he wanted to look, but he didn’t know how not to look, because he thought that would be even more obvious.

“That’s very good work,” said Tom. “Better than I can do.”

“I know,” Lilah said bluntly. She squinted up at the sun. “Better to do it now. Light’s good but careful takes time.”

Nix turned to Tom. “If she can do it, then can we stay out here?”

Tom sighed and stood. “One step at a time. Let’s see how you feel when she’s done.”

“I feel fine.”

“We don’t have anesthesia, Nix,” Tom murmured. “It’s going to hurt. A lot.”

“I know.” Her eyes were hard.

Benny tried to read her expression and all the unspoken things it conveyed. Over the last year Nix had learned nearly every kind of hurt there was. Or at least every kind of hurt Benny could imagine.

Without saying another word to Tom, Nix turned to Lilah.

“Do it,” she said.

B
ENNY COULDN’T BEAR TO WATCH, BUT HE COULDN’T LEAVE
N
IX ALONE,
either. However, she threatened him if he didn’t leave, so he slunk away to stand in the shade of a tree with Tom.

“Heck of a start,” Tom said softly.

“I’d say ‘could be worse,’ but I’m kinda thinking that it couldn’t. So … basically this blows,” observed Benny.

“Yes it does,” agreed Tom.

They stared out at the endless green of the forest.

“She’s strong,” said Tom after a while.

“Nix? Yeah.”

Minutes passed, and Benny tried to think about anything instead of how it must feel to have a curved needle—like one of Morgie’s fishhooks—passed through the skin of your face, followed by the slow pull of surgical thread. The tug at the end to pull the stitch tight. The tremble in the flesh as it waited for the next stitch. And the next.

Benny was pretty sure he was going to go stark raving mad. He kept listening for Nix’s scream. And with each second he could not understand why she didn’t scream. He would have, and he made no apologies for it. Screaming seemed like a pretty good response to what Nix was going through.

There were no screams.

After what seemed like five hundred years, Tom repeated what he’d said.

“She’s strong.”

“Yeah,” Benny said again.

His fingernails were buried into his palms hard enough to gouge crescent-shaped divots.

“Girls are stronger than boys,” Tom said.

“Not a news flash,” Benny said.

“I’m just saying.”

They watched the forest.

“If this goes on any longer, Tom?”

“Yeah?”

“Shoot me.”

Tom smiled.

Benny looked at him and then over to where Chong still sat in the tall grass.

“Is this all really Chong’s fault?”

Tom shrugged.

“No, tell me.”

“If you really want an honest answer,” Tom said quietly, “then … yes. Chong didn’t listen when he was told to be quiet, and he didn’t listen when he was told what to do when the rhino was chasing us.”

“He’s scared.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Sure,” Benny said grudgingly, “but I’ve been out here before.”

“Don’t make excuses for him. You listened to me the first
time we came out here,” Tom reminded him. “And that was back when you couldn’t stand me.”

“I know.”

“Not everyone is built to be tough,” said Tom. “Sad fact of life. Chong is one of the nicest people I know. His folks, too. If our species is going to make it back from the brink and build something better than what we had, then we need to breed more people like them. It would be a saner, smarter, and far more civilized world.”

“But … ?”

“But I don’t think he’s cut out for this.”

“I guess.”

“It’s better that he’s not coming with us.”

Benny said nothing.

“Do you agree, kiddo?”

“I don’t know.” Benny sighed. “Chong’s my best friend.”

“That’s why he’s here. He only came out here because he’s your friend, and because he doesn’t quite know how to say good-bye,” said Tom. “Saying good-bye is one of the hardest things people ever have to do. Back before First Night, I remember how hard it was just to say good-bye to my friends when I was done with high school. We wrote a lot of promises in each other’s yearbooks about how we’d always stay in touch, but even then we knew that for the most part they were lies. Well-intentioned and hopeful lies, but still lies.”

“That was different.”

“Sure, but things are relative. Just like pain. What Nix is going through is not the worst pain she’s ever felt, which
is why she can deal with it. For me, saying good-bye to my friends from high school was terrible. We all were going off to colleges in different parts of the country. The old gang I grew up with was falling apart. It felt like dying. It was grief.”

Benny thought about the way he had left things with Morgie. He nodded.

“I guess I’m having a hard time adjusting to the fact that leaving is so final.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” said Tom.

“For Nix it does.”

Tom nodded.

“What are we going to do about Chong?” asked Benny.

Tom ticked his chin toward the southeast. “There’s a back road to Brother David’s way station. My friend Sally Two-Knives will be coming through here today or tomorrow. I’m going to wait at the way station until she shows, and then I’ll ask her to take Chong back home.”

Benny had the Zombie Card for Sally Two-Knives. She was a bounty hunter who worked mostly out of the towns farther north. She was a tall, dark-skinned woman with a Mohawk and a matched pair of army bayonets strapped to her thighs. The text on the back of her Zombie Card read:

Card No. 239: Sally Two-Knives. This former Roller-Derby queen has become one of the toughest and most reliable bounty hunters and guides in the Ruin. Don’t cross her or you’ll find out just how good she is with her two razor-sharp knives!

Like most of the Zombie Cards, it didn’t give a lot of information, but Benny always liked the fierce woman’s smiling face. She wasn’t pretty, but there was humor in her brown eyes.

Brother David, on the other hand, was a way-station monk, one of the Children of God who lived out in the Ruin and did what he could to tend to the living dead. Brother David and the others of his order called the zombies the Children of Lazarus and believed them to be the “meek” who were meant to inherit the earth. Benny couldn’t quite grasp the concept, especially after what he and Nix had encountered in the field.

“You and Chong can say your good-byes in the morning.”

“Will Chong be safe? I mean … will Sally Two-Knives be enough protection for him?”

Tom laughed. “More than enough. She doesn’t like killing zoms, so she knows all the routes that are clear and safe.”

They were silent for a while, each cutting looks over at Lilah, who was still working on Nix.

When Tom next spoke he deliberately made his tone light. “If we’re lucky we’ll catch up with Greenman, maybe stay a couple days at his place.”

“Greenman, really? Cool! I can’t wait to meet him,” said Benny. He had the Greenman card too. The image on the card was that of a tall, thin man wearing clothes entirely covered in green leaves, berries, and pinecones. The artist had depicted him wearing a mask made from oak leaves and acorns. The card read:

Card No. 172: The Greenman. Little is known about this mysterious figure seen haunting the forests between Magoon Hill and Yosemite. Is he a myth? A ghost? Or is he a dangerous madman waiting to pounce on unwary travelers? Beware the Greenman!

“Sounds like someone from a story.”

“He’s real enough,” said Tom, “but he is a bit of a character. His real name’s Artie Mensch. Used to be a forest ranger over in Yosemite, but since First Night the Ruin has become a real home to him. Never comes into town, doesn’t talk to too many people. Prefers to be alone.”

“Does he really dress like that?”

“Sometimes. When he has his camouflage on you can walk right past him and not see him. Fools the zoms, too. And he’s been experimenting with mixtures of herbs to get the same effect as cadaverine. Not sure if he’s worked it out yet.”

“The Zombie Card says that he might be crazy,” Benny said.

Tom shrugged. “Most people are a little crazy, especially since First Night, and doubly so if they live out here. But Greenman’s a good man, and he’s a friend to the right kind of traveler.”