Dust & Decay (37 page)

“Everyone’s been there,” said the Greenman. “First Night wasn’t the only crisis. We’ve all had our moments of weakness and failure. All of us. We’ve all suffered through dark nights of the soul.”

“So is that it? Will I have to live the rest of my life like this? Not doing the right thing? Not saying the right words?”

“That’s your choice. You can’t change the past. Ah, but the future … you own the future.” The Greenman smiled. “So, you tell me … what choice do you want to make now?”

D
IGGER AND
H
EAP HERDED
B
ENNY AND
N
IX INTO THE HOTEL, GUIDING
them with slaps and kicks. Preacher Jack walked behind them, humming to himself. Benny was sure it wasn’t a hymn.

They entered the main lobby, which was piled high with crates of goods scavenged from local towns. Sturdy shelves had been erected on every inch of wall space, and these were crammed with canned goods, sacks of grain, jars of spices, and bottles of everything from extra-virgin olive oil to Kentucky whiskey. One wall had a rack of guns running from floor to ceiling: shotguns, rifles, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, and every kind of handgun. Most of these Benny had seen only in books. And there were barrels filled with bayonets, machetes, swords, spears, axes, and clubs. Against one wall were six crates labeled
C
4. Benny had never heard of it, but on each case, in big red letters, three words were stenciled:
DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES
. He swallowed.

There were enough weapons to start a war … or to reclaim the wastelands from the living dead. Benny saw Nix staring longingly at the collection.

Digger noticed and slapped the back of her head. “Don’t even think about it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Nix said under her breath.

Benny ground his teeth and swore on the graves of his parents that he would make these men pay for touching Nix.

They pushed Benny and Nix through the hotel and up several sets of stairs until they stood in the doorway of a dusty attic. The room was empty except for cobwebs.

“Make yourselves comfy,” said Heap as he shoved them into the room. “Call room service if you want anything.” The men were laughing as they slammed the door shut and locked it.

Benny pressed his ear to the door and listened until he couldn’t hear their footfalls on the steps anymore. Then he tried the door handle. It jiggled, but the lock was tough and the door was too solid to kick open. With a sigh of resignation he turned to Nix.

“We’ll get out of this,” he promised.

She looked dazed and small in the dusty light. “How? Benny—they’re going to put us in the zombie pits! They did that to my mom!”

“I know … but she survived, Nix … and she wasn’t a fighter. We are. Warrior smart, remember?”

Nix sniffed. “I don’t feel like a warrior right now.”

Benny forced a grin. “Then we’ll have to concentrate on being smart. Remember what Tom said. ‘When you’re in a dangerous situation’—”

“—‘immediately assess your resources.’”

They looked around. The room was completely empty. Bare floor, bare walls with cracked plaster that had crumbled in places to reveal the thin wooden bones of the walls, a light fixture that hadn’t worked in fifteen years hanging from the
ceiling, and a cracked window that looked out into the horse corral.

“Okay,” Benny said, “so … we’re not big on supplies.” But when he looked at Nix, she was smiling. “What?”

She told him. Then he was smiling too.

T
OM
I
MURA STOOD JUST INSIDE THE SPILL OF SHADOWS CAST BY THE TALL
willows that bordered the old hotel. Anyone standing three feet away would not have seen him. He might have been a ghost, or a layer of the deepening twilight shadows. Only his mind was in motion, and that was a howling firestorm of rage and frustration and self-hatred. Despite all logic to the contrary, his mind kept shrieking out that he was responsible for this. For all of this. For Chong. For Benny and Nix. For Gameland. All of it.

This is my fault. I should have seen this coming.

No, that wasn’t quite right. He had seen this coming. He had been warned. By Basher and Sally, by Captain Strunk and Mayor Kirsch. Warned that he could not just walk away, that perhaps it was his destiny to stop Gameland once and for all.

He was sure that Benny and Nix were being held inside. After he’d left the dead bounty hunters, he had gone racing back to the way station, found it in ashes, then saw footprints leading toward Wawona. Benny and Nix’s shoes, no doubt about it. And Preacher Jack’s following them. Tom had raced along the path and only paused a moment when he saw that
Preacher Jack’s prints veered away from a straight pursuit and took a shortcut toward the hotel.

Tom had found the scene of slaughter by the barn, had read the tale in the scuff marks and knew that J-Dog and Dr. Skillz had been with Benny and Nix for a time. But he also saw that the two surfers had turned and gone back into the hills. Their path must have missed Tom’s by no more than half a mile.

Now Tom was at Gameland, and now he knew the full horror of things. White Bear had taken over the old hotel and transformed it into a killing ground. There were single zombie pits all around the building, and a cluster of larger ones out back in an enclosure made from a line of trade wagons and a circus tent. There were dozens of guards and hundreds of people—traders and others—so Tom had backed away and now stood watching from the edge of the woods.

Preacher Jack was here. The footprints had led right to a spot where they had encountered Benny and Nix again. There were clear signs of a struggle and drops of blood. Tom’s mind ground on itself, lashing him for not seeing this sooner. For not acting preemptively instead of going off on this road trip.

Any innocent blood that falls is on me
, he told himself.

The Matthias clan was moving in because of Charlie’s death and because Tom was leaving. It was a double power vacuum, and White Bear was making his bid to fill it. Tom didn’t yet know how Preacher Jack fit into this, but he and White Bear would make a formidable team. The people of Mountainside were not going to do anything to stop it. That was obvious, but who else was there? Sally? J-Dog and Dr. Skillz? Basher? Solomon Jones? There were plenty of fighters
who could make a serious stand against White Bear, but only if they were a unified front, and that was a million miles from likely.

Rage was building in his chest, and he could feel his body start to tremble. He wanted to scream. He needed to give a war cry, draw his sword, and go charging into the hotel and kill White Bear, Preacher Jack, and as many of their people as he could. That would feel good. It would feel right. It would also be suicide … and it probably wouldn’t save Benny, Nix, or Chong. Rage was sometimes a useful ally in the heat of a fight, but it was a trickster. It made everything seem possible.

He needed to go in there cold. So he closed his eyes and murmured the words he had drilled into his brother and the others. “Warrior smart.” He breathed in and out slowly, letting the rhythm vent the darker emotions from him. Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices. With each inhalation he made himself think of happier times, of things that had filled his heart with peace and hope and optimism. Benny and his future. That day last year when Tom realized that Benny no longer hated him, that maybe his brother understood him. Rescuing Nix. Finding Lilah. Training the teenagers. Laughing with them in the sunlight. Eating apple pie in the cool of the evening.

They were simple memories, but their simplicity was the source of their power. As Tom remembered smiles and laughter and Benny’s goofy jokes, the rage began to falter within him. As he recalled watching from afar as Benny and Nix fell in love, the reckless anger cracked and fell apart. And as he remembered the promise he’d made to Jessie Riley as she lay
dying in his arms—that he would protect Nix—his resolve rose up in his mind like a tower of steel.

He stood in the shadows and found himself again. He found the Tom Imura that he wanted and needed to be. He took another breath and held it for a long moment, then let it out slowly. He opened his eyes. Then he made himself a promise. “I do this one thing and then I’m done. I do this and then I take Benny and the others and we go east.”

Tom adjusted his sword and checked his knives and his pistol. If there had been anyone there to see his face, they would have seen a man at peace with himself and the world. And if they were wise, they would know that such a man was the most dangerous of all opponents—one who fights to preserve love rather than perpetuate hatred.

When he moved, he seemed to melt into the darkness.

L
OU
C
HONG HEARD A SCREAM.
N
OT A WARRIOR’S CRY.
I
T HAD BEEN
high and wet and filled with pain; and it had ended abruptly. Laughter and shouts rose up immediately and washed the scream away. Chong knew what it meant. Someone else had been fighting a zom, and had lost.

The thought threatened to take the strength out of his arms, but he set his jaw and held on. Literally held on. For the last two hours he had been using the Motor City Hammer’s black pipe club to chop divots out of the packed earth walls of the pit. It was grueling work, and to do it he had to gouge divots deep enough for his feet so he could stand in them and reach high to chop fresh holes. His muscles ached. Sweat poured down his body. His toes were numb with cold from standing in the holes, and his arm trembled between each strike.

He never stopped, though. Every time pain or exhaustion or fear tried to coax him down the wall and away from what he was doing, he held a picture in his mind. It wasn’t a picture of himself fighting another zom. It wasn’t even a picture of
running free from this place. Chong knew that he had been bitten. He knew that he was going to die.

No, the picture he held in his mind was that of a girl with honey-colored eyes and snow-white hair and a voice like a whisper. A crazy girl. A fierce and violent girl. A lost girl who didn’t even like him.

Lilah.

If he was going to die, then he was going to die as a warrior. If Lilah didn’t—or couldn’t—love the weak and intellectual Chong, then perhaps she would have a softer heart when remembering the warrior Chong who fought his way out of Gameland. As Lilah herself had fought her way out years ago.

And maybe … just maybe … he could save some of the other kids trapped here in Gameland. Like Benny and Nix and Lilah had done last year. If he couldn’t go with them on their journey, if he was to die sometime in the next few hours or days, then he wanted his life to mean something. He wanted to matter.

He reached and slid his fingers into the hole he’d just chopped, and pulled. His muscles screamed at him, but his mind screamed back at them. The rim of the pit was only three feet above him now.

One more hole to go.

T
HE DOOR TO THE DUSTY ROOM OPENED, AND
D
IGGER AND
H
EAP CAME
in. The two thugs looked at the wires that had been torn down from the ceiling fixture and at the hole in the wall, which was bigger than it had been and revealed broken laths. Piles of torn plaster and broken lath littered the floor by the wainscoting. Benny and Nix were covered with plaster dust. The two men cracked up laughing.

“What’d you two morons try to do?” asked Digger between brays of laughter. “You try to chew your way outta here?”

“Yeah,” said Benny with a sneer. “We were hungry.”

Heap laughed, but Digger hit Benny across the face with a backhand blow. Benny saw it coming and turned with it, a move Tom had taught him to shake off some of the power of a hit. It made it look like Benny took the blow and shook it off.

Digger and Heap exchanged a look. “Tougher than you look, boy,” murmured Digger, getting up in Benny’s face. “You make it out of the pits with a whole skin, you and I might have to go out behind the barn and dance a bit. Bet you ain’t nearly as tough as you think you are.”

“Save it for later,” warned Heap, and they all turned as Preacher Jack entered the room, followed by a stranger who
was taller than the old man and more massive than Charlie Pink-eye had been. The man’s face was a ruin of melted flesh. One eye was a black pit, and the other as blue as lake water. He wore heavy cloak of white bearskin. Even though Benny had never seen him before, he knew at once who this had to be. White Bear.

“So this is Tom Imura’s kid brother and Jessie Riley’s daughter,” said White Bear with a grin. “Well, I’ll be a dancing duck if they ain’t cute as puppies, the both of ’em.”

Heap and Digger chortled, and Preacher Jack smiled his ugly smile. “Figured you’d want to have a word with them before we get started,” murmured the preacher.

“Oh yes indeed,” said the big man, and he entered the room. Beneath the cloak of bear fur he wore hand-stitched leather pants and moccasins. His bare chest was marked with large burned patches too. He wore at least a dozen necklaces of oyster shells, beads, and feathers, and he had silver rings on every finger. He stood in the center of the room and exuded so much personal power that he appeared to fill the place, dwarfing the others. Only Preacher Jack seemed undiminished. The big man grinned at Benny and Nix. “You two know who I am?”

“White Bear,” said Nix.

“That’s right,” said the big man, obviously pleased. “But do you know who I am?”

They shook their heads.

“I am the spirit of the Rot and Ruin. I’m the old medicine reborn to save the world from itself. I’m the immortal White Bear, born in fire and born of fire.” He glared at them for a long moment, and then he cracked up laughing. The other men joined him, and the four of them howled at a
joke neither Benny nor Nix understood. Finally White Bear dabbed at a tear at the corner of his remaining eye. “Okay, okay … so that’s the public relations line. That’s what we tell the rubes to get them all excited. Works pretty well, too. Misinformation and disinformation make the world go round.”