Dust & Decay (22 page)

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?

T
OM WAS FAST, BUT
S
ALLY
T
WO
-K
NIVES 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. Besides, Benny’s half Irish American.”

“What do I know? It’s dark, he’s a kid, I’m shot for Pete’s sake.” She squinted at him. “That who you’re looking for? The Chinese kid?”

Tom filled her in on what he was doing.

“So … you’re really going to leave?” she asked.

“That’s the plan, but we seem to be off to a bad start.”

“So—asking me to meet you at Brother David’s … that was what? A good-bye?”

He nodded.

“Damn,” said Sally. “Things won’t be the same around here without our knight in shining armor.”

Tom snorted. “I’m a lot of things, Sally, but I’m no one’s idea of a shining knight.”

Sally didn’t laugh. “If that’s what you think, Tom, then you’re a bigger damn fool than I thought. There’s no one in this whole chain of mountains who doesn’t know who you are and what you do. And I mean before you served Charlie and the Hammer to the zoms on a silver plate.” She paused. “A lot of people look up to you. No … they look to you. For how to act. For how to be.”

“Come on, Sal, let’s not—”

“Listen to me, Tom. You matter to people. During First
Night, and in the years after, a lot of us did some pretty wild things to survive. You don’t know. Or … maybe you do. Maybe you did some wild things too, but the thing is that since then you’ve been the kind of guy people can look at and say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s how people are supposed to act.’ There aren’t a lot of examples around since the zoms, man, but you …” She smiled and shook her head.

Tom cleared his throat. “Listen, Sally, I’m thinking that this is pain and shock talking here, so let’s get to the point. Where did they take Chong and how’d you get hurt?”

Sally laughed. “Modest, too. Real shame you’re leaving town. Jessie Riley was the luckiest woman in California, and strike me down if that’s a lie.”

“Chong …,” Tom prompted.

“Okay, okay. It was about two hours ago. I was heading to Brother David’s when I heard someone yelling. I snuck up and saw this kid trying to fight off a couple of goons. Kid was doing okay at first. Had a wooden version of that sword you carry. The goons were trying to take the sword away from him barehanded, making a game of it. Pretending they were zoms and that sort of stuff. You’ve seen it before.”

“Yes,” he said coldly, “I’ve seen it. What happened?”

“Kid managed to land a good one on one of the guys. Hit him on the shoulder, and I could hear the thwack all the way up the hill. Then the guys stopped playing and laid into the kid with a will. Whipped the sword out of his hands and beat the living crap out of him.”

“Damn.” Tom thought about the ascetic and intellectual Chong fighting for his life. How brave he must have been, and how terrified.

“By that time I’d had enough, and I’d pretty much figured that the kid must have been your brother. So I came down the hill with a war whoop and sliced myself a piece of those two butt-wipes. Wasn’t all girly about it either. Would have just messed them up some and let the pair of them limp out of here, but they tried to get all fancy on me. It didn’t end well for ’em, and no loss to the world.”

“Wait … you said you took them out?”

“Two freaks like them against me? I coulda done that back in my Roller Derby days, and that was before I learned how to ugly-fight.”

“No, I mean, if you nailed them, then who—?”

“Must have been a third guy. Never saw him coming. I was about to quiet the two freaks when suddenly something hit my arm from behind and knocked me into a tree. Tried to shake it off, but someone came at me from my blind side, spun me and stabbed me. All I saw was a big man with white hair, and then I blacked out.”

“White hair? Sally—could it have been Preacher Jack?”

“The loony-tune from Wawona?” She thought about it. “No, this guy was way bigger. Anyway … I passed out, and when I woke up, the kid was gone and so was the big guy.”

“What about the other two?”

“Still there. Whoever shot me must have quieted ’em and left ’em for the crows.”

Tom sat back and thought about it. “Could the big man have been White Bear?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. This guy was as big as Charlie Pink-eye and his face was all messed up. Burned and all nasty-lookin’.”

“Could it have been Charlie?”

Sally narrowed her eyes. “Charlie’s dead. You killed him.”

“Not exactly,” Tom said. He told her about what had happened after Benny hit Charlie with the Motor City Hammer’s pipe.

“Well, hell … that’s not the kind of news a gal wants to hear when she’s already feeling poorly. You think Charlie’s alive?”

“I don’t know. Did the guy who attacked you do it to avenge the men you killed, or was he after the boy?”

“I … don’t know. But wouldn’t Charlie know this kid’s not your brother?”

Tom nodded. “He knows Benny and Chong both.”

Sally took another swig from the canteen and chewed her lip for a moment. “Before I attacked them, I heard some of what the two punks said to the kid. I heard where they said they were taking him.”

Tom knew what she was going to say and he closed his eyes as if he, rather than she, was in physical pain. “Say it.”

“Gameland,” said Sally Two-Knives. “They were going to try and sell him to the people running that place. Put him in the zombie pits.”

“But you don’t know if the man who shot you is taking him there?”

“No idea.”

“Terrific,” Tom said sourly. “They’ve moved Gameland twice since we took down Charlie’s crew. I’ve been trying to find it … and I don’t have a damn clue where it is. It could be all the way over in Utah for all I know.”

“I don’t think so, Tom,” she said with a cold smile. “When those boys were taunting the kid, one of them told him that he’d be fighting in the pits by dawn’s early light. His words.”

Tom looked out at the darkness. “Damn,” he said softly.

B
ENNY RAN RIGHT INTO A ZOM
. T
HE CREATURE TURNED WITH A SNARL,
and white fingers scrabbled for his face. He could feel the edges of broken fingernails scratch him, the dry pads of dead fingers slide over his nose and mouth; and then Benny shoved the zom aside with a cry of disgust. It fell against a second zom and they went down. Others tumbled over them in what could have been comedy if the world was not broken and insane. Zoms snarled and bit at him as he ran.

Slow down,
warned his inner voice. He tried to slow himself; he ordered his feet to walk instead of run, but they disobeyed. Nix was sixty paces ahead. Fifty.

Lilah was nowhere in sight. Had she run out on them? Had the zoms gotten her? No … there would have been screams if they’d attacked her. First her war cries, and then … other screams. These thoughts tumbled through his head as he ran. He ducked under white hands, jinked and dodged around zombies who tried to wrap their arms around him. The whole crowd of them was becoming agitated, their awareness drawn to the running meat.

Slow down!

Nix heard him coming and turned to see Benny collide
with another zom and have to bash his way out of its embrace. Other zoms turned at the motion, their moans rising in pitch as their worm-white fingers clawed the air for him.

Slow DOWN!

“Benny!” cried Nix in a fierce whisper. “What are you doing?”

He jerked to a stop by the gas pump. The zoms that had been turning toward him suddenly turned to Nix as she began heading toward Benny.
You’re going to get Nix killed.
He didn’t need his inner voice to tell him that. The zoms nearest to her were already starting to close in. Nix tensed to run.