Rot & Ruin (27 page)

Benny opened the pouch and removed a thick stack of the cards. He began riffling through them. “I never saw most of these. And … they’re different.” The cards didn’t have the Zombie Cards logo or the sensationalist writing on the back. The images were more like the standard erosion portraits that people put up on the walls near the Red Zone. On the backs were names, probable locations, and some brief biographical information. In the lower left corner was a price—the amount of ration dollars to be paid for a confirmed closure; and in the lower right corner on some of them was a date starting with either an
S
,
L
,
SU
, or
Q
.

“
S
for ‘spotted,’
L
is for ‘living,’ but most people use it to designate ‘loners.’
Q
for ‘quieted,’” Tom said. “
SU
means ‘status unknown.’ Lilah’s card is in there.”

Benny shuffled through until he found the card marked with both
L
and
SU
.
The picture was that of an eleven-year-old girl with wild snow-white hair, wearing ratty jeans and a bulky UCLA men’s sweatshirt. She carried the same long spear she’d held in the more recent card. The Lost Girl. Benny turned the card over and silently read the back.

This apparently uninfected girl was

spotted in the mountains by Tom

Imura. If found, please contact Tom in

Mountainside, or pass word to “George

Goldman” via the way-station networks.

She may answer to the name Lilah or

Annie. Approach with caution, she is

considered dangerous and may suffer from

post traumatic stress disorder.

“Who’s George?”

“Remember the story Sacchetto told you?”

“Right! George was the guy who stayed behind with the girls. … But I assumed he’d died.”

“After I spotted the girl, I climbed down from the guard station as fast as I could, but she was gone by the time I reached the clearing. I looked for a few more days, but found nothing. I don’t know whether she somehow spotted me and cleared out or just moved on. Next time I went out, I ran into George Goldman at the way station where we met Brother David. He was a nice guy, but he was just about used up and maybe more than a little crazy.”

“Didn’t he stay with the girls? Lilah and the baby?”

“Yes,” said Tom. “George was with them for years. They
stayed at the cottage, surrounded by zombies, for almost two years. At first they had plenty of food, and George made sure the girls ate most of it. When it was about to run out completely, George made a very tough decision and went out. He locked the children in the bathroom, made sure they had the last of the food and some water. Then he imitated what Rob had done: He wrapped himself in torn strips of carpet, took the heaviest golf club he could find, and snuck out of the house. He was nearly killed a dozen times that night
and
the following day, but he managed to get to another farmhouse.

“The people who lived there were dead, and he had to fight his way through a few of them, but once he did, George was able to gather up a lot of food. He packed as much as he could into two big suitcases on wheels and pulled them down the road, back to the cottage. Getting through the zoms around the cottage was very hard, and it took him nearly a full day of trying one trick and then another, of running and hiding and sneaking around, before he was able to manage it. That became the pattern of their lives. About twice a month, George would go out, foraging for food, raiding all the places where people once lived, hoping to find help, hoping to find someone else alive. He didn’t see another living soul for years. Imagine that.” Tom shook his head. “Eventually George cleared out most of the zoms in the immediate area, and that allowed him a little more freedom. He would go foraging and bring back a wheelbarrow filled with books, clothes, toys—anything he could find to make the lives of the girls easier. He taught them how to read, schooled them the best he could. He wasn’t a teacher, wasn’t a scholar. He was a simple, middle-aged guy; an average and ordinary man.”

“He doesn’t sound ordinary,” Benny said. “He sounds like a hero.”

Tom smiled. “Yes, he does. I’ve heard a lot of survival stories about First Night and the times that followed, and even though a lot of people died, a lot of heroes were born. Often it was the most unlikely of people who found within themselves a spark of something greater. It was probably always there, but most people are never tested, and they go through their whole lives without ever knowing that when things are at their worst, they are at their best. George Goldman was one of those, and I doubt he would ever accept that anyone would think that he was a hero.”

“What happened to him?”

“As Lilah got older, he taught her how to take down zoms. She’s small and fast, so George taught her to come up behind them and cut their leg tendons to drop them, then spike them when they’re down. George worked it out for her, teaching her and practicing with her until she was faster than he was. He said that she had a natural talent for it.”

“That’s half cool and half sad,” Benny said. “Maybe more than half sad.”

“Yes, but it meant that she survived.”

“What about the baby?”

Tom’s face tightened. “This is where we get into the darkest part of the story. George had named the baby Annie, after his own sister who had been living in Philadelphia when the dead rose. He taught Annie the same way he taught Lilah, and the little girl grew up to be a lot like her sister. Strong, smart, and vicious when she had to be.”

They stopped for a few minutes to let the horses drink from a
stream. Normally Tom would have steered well clear of the running water, but now they were forced to follow the trail. Even though the forest was quiet, Tom’s eyes never stopped roving over the terrain as they continued their hunt. The horses’ ears constantly shifted around, and both of them pranced nervously. Chief, though bigger, was more skittish, and he kept jerking his head up to look off into the woods, although each time the movement he tracked was a rabbit or a bird. Apache looked around slowly, but his whole body rippled with tension.

“Let’s keep moving,” he said. “Another ten minutes, and we’ll be able to ride again.”

Benny nodded, although again he touched Nix’s book in his pocket to ward off bad luck.

Tom picked up the thread of his story. “It was about eight years after First Night when George first found a living person. It was a man walking through the woods near where we are now. The man was dressed like a hunter and smelled like a corpse, and George nearly attacked him, thinking he was a zom.”

“The guy was wearing cadaverine?”

Tom nodded. “George followed him and watched him make a kill with a pistol, and then he knew the man was alive. For George it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt. He started yelling and ran down the hill toward the man, crying and babbling because he thought that the presence of this man meant that the long nightmare was over. The man spun and fired a shot at George, almost hitting him, but George hid behind a tree and yelled, telling him that he wasn’t a ghoul.”

Benny grunted at the word “ghoul.” It was what some of the older people called the zoms.

“The hunter, realizing that George wasn’t one of the dead, told him it was safe to come out. George ran to him and hugged him and shook his hand and—as he put it to me—‘acted like a total damn fool.’ The hunter was pleasant and kind. He gave George some food and told him that there was a whole town full of people not too far away, who were alive and thriving, and there were other towns all up and down this part of California. He offered to take him back to his own camp, saying he was part of a group of a dozen men who were clearing the zoms out of this region in order to allow people to reclaim it and rebuild.”

“But I thought—?”

“Wait, hear the rest of it. George told them about the two little girls, and the hunter got excited, saying that it was God’s own miracle that two children had survived for so long. He encouraged George to take him to where the girls were, so they could all go to the camp where it was completely safe. George agreed, of course. After all, this was the answer to years and years of prayers. They hurried through the woods to a farmhouse where George had been living with the girls for the last year. At first, the girls were terrified of the man. Lilah hadn’t seen another living adult since she was two, and Annie had never seen one. Lilah almost attacked the man, but George restrained her and took her weapons away. It took a long time to cajole and convince the girls that it was safe, and all the time the hunter sat on the floor and smiled and waited patiently, making sure to do nothing threatening.”

“He sounds like a good guy,” said Benny.

“Does he? Yes … I suppose that from this part of the story he does. Anyway, the hunter told George to gather up anything
valuable and go with him to his camp. George brought the wheelbarrow filled with food, books, and other things that were useful or precious to them. It took four hours to follow the winding country roads to the camp, which had been set up in a big cornfield. The men in the camp all looked very hard, and everyone had weapons—and that much was okay, because of the nature of the world and what they were doing—but he didn’t like the way they smiled at him and his wheelbarrow or the way they looked at the girls. Even though he was delighted to see so many people, George began to get suspicious.”

“Wait. Were these guys bounty hunters?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?” Benny asked with a sinking feeling.

“Things went wrong pretty much right away. The hunter made some remark about the girls looking tough, and when George explained they had both hunted and killed zoms, the hunter really perked up. He said that the girls were worth their weight in gold for ‘the games,’ and when George turned to him to ask what that remark meant, someone hit him from behind. George woke up hours later, but the cornfield was empty and everyone was gone. He had no weapons or food and no idea what had happened to the girls. He searched every inch of that field and the woods beyond, but the girls were gone.

“He found horse tracks and footprints, but the best he could determine was that when the camp broke up, the men went in different directions. He said he went a little insane, and I can’t blame him. His whole life had been built around protecting those girls, and at the moment when he thought that they were really and truly saved from the monsters, it was
people
who took them away. It turned his whole world inside
out. George staggered away and finally found a deserted house where he found some old cans of food. At first light he started searching for the girls. It became his obsession, and it consumed every waking second of every day.”

“What happened to the girls?”

“George looked everywhere, and along the way he met more and more people. He met the way-station monks and told them what had happened, and they started spreading the word. He started to hear rumors. One set of rumors talked about a place called Gameland that a bunch of bounty hunters and travelers had built in the mountains. The things people said about that place really tore George apart. When he described the girls and the men who had taken them, a lot of people suddenly stopped talking to him. Their fear of the men who ran Gameland was greater even than their compassion for a couple of lost children. Soon people were actively shunning George. Only the monks tried to help him, and some of those who went out to try to find the girls went missing.”

“And you don’t think it was zoms who got them?”

“Do you?”

Benny shook his head.

“By the time I ran into George, he was worn out. I told him that I’d spotted one girl, and when I described her, he said that it was Lilah. He begged me to say that I’d also seen Annie, but I didn’t. … And when I found the spot where I’d seen the girl standing, there was only one set of prints.”

“What happened to Annie?”

“I don’t know for sure. Some of the travelers I met were more willing to talk to me than they were to George. A few of them told me that there was an old rumor about a couple of
girls who had been taken to Gameland and that something bad had happened and only one little girl escaped.”

“No …,” Benny said softly. “Were Charlie and the Hammer involved?”

“George gave me pretty good descriptions of several of the men in the camp. He wasn’t clear about which one hit him or who actually took the girls, but Charlie and the Hammer were definitely there.”

Benny nodded. The respect he once had for Charlie had transformed into a murderous hatred.

“What happened to George?”

“I don’t know. Brother David said there was a rumor that George had hanged himself, but I don’t believe that. George might be dead, and he might have hanged, but I don’t believe for a minute that he would have killed himself. Not as long as Lilah was still out there.”

“Somebody killed him?”

“Murder is easy out here.”

They walked on. The horses were looking better, less haggard, and Benny hoped that they’d be able to ride them again and make up the distance he felt they were losing with every minute they stayed on foot. “If we find Lilah … what do we do?”

“Try to get her to come to Mountainside with us. The kid needs a life, needs people.”

Benny took the card out of his pocket and stared at it, trying to imagine that wild creature going to school, being
normal.
His mind wouldn’t fit around the concept.

“Come on,” Tom said tersely. “The horses are rested enough. Let’s ride. … Let’s see if we can catch those animals.”

32

B
OTH HORSES WERE SPITTING FOAM AGAIN BY THE TIME THEY REACHED
the top of the mountain; then the ground leveled out, and they found the fire access road. Like all roads in the Ruin, it was badly overgrown, but Benny could see footprints, wheel ruts, and dried horse dung that looked recent.