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After seven months of Tom’s insane pre-trip fitness regimen, he was no longer the skinny kid he’d been when he had first ventured out into the Rot and Ruin. He actually had muscle definition and even the beginnings of six-pack abs. He made sure that he took his shirt off in front of Nix as often as he could reasonably justify it, usually after hard training sessions. He worked hard to make it look casual, but it was disheartening how often Nix giggled or didn’t appear to notice instead of swooning with lust.
Now he looked at his arms and chest, at the muscles earned through all those hours of training with swords and jujitsu and karate; at the tone acquired from endless repetitions with weights, from running five to ten miles five times a week, from climbing ropes and trees and playing combat games. He bent closer, wondering how much of that face belonged to the man he was becoming or to the boy he still believed himself to be. The face seemed to fit more with his inner voice than with Benny’s perception of his current self.
That was the problem, and it was at the core of everything. On one hand he wanted to be fifteen and go fishing and play baseball and get in trouble swiping apples from Snotty O’Malley’s orchard. On the other hand, he wanted to be a man. He wanted to be as strong as Tom, as powerful as Tom. He wanted people to show him the fear and respect they showed Tom.
Benny knew that once they left Mountainside he would have to become tougher. There would be challenges that would toughen him and strengthen his “legend,” just as Tom’s many adventures as the region’s most feared zombie hunter had built his legend. No doubt Nix would find him irresistibly sexy the farther from town they got and the tougher he became.
For Nix, everything that mattered was out there.
Benny was more than half sure that if Nix actually loved him, then it was because he had agreed to go with her into the Ruin. Maybe not completely, but in a large part. He would have bet everything he had on it.
So he didn’t dare tell her that he wasn’t really sure he wanted to go.
Tell her, said the inner voice. Don’t lie to her.
Benny ignored the suggestion.
The Ruin was dangerous and it was uncertain, and everyone he’d talked to in town said that no one had ever gone past Yosemite Park and come back. Nix wanted to go all the way across the country, if that was what it would take to find the jet. Tom, too; and Lilah.
He stared into his brown eyes and studied the doubt and fear that he saw there.
“Some hero,” he said under his breath. “Some legend.”
Nix believed that to stay in town was to be stifled and die behind walls, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. Nearly everyone in Mountainside feared the Ruin with a dread that was so profound that they almost never mentioned anything beyond the fence line. A few went out, visiting other towns, but even then they traveled in metal-reinforced wagons with the shades pulled down to block out any sight of the Ruin. Only the drivers and their bounty-hunter guards rode outside the wagons. Benny imagined that even in the early spring those wagons had to be sickeningly hot, but the travelers seemed to prefer that discomfort rather than the fresh air that came with looking out the window at the real world. It drove Benny nuts. He wondered what the passengers thought when they were inside the wagon but outside the fence. Did they just shut down their higher reasoning? Did they drug themselves so they slept through the journey? Or was the denial so deep that they somehow regarded entering and exiting the shuttered wagons in the same way they would passing through a doorway? Maybe to them there simply was nothing in between.
It was like a plague, but different from the one that had destroyed the world. This was an emotional pandemic that blinded the eye and deafened the ear and darkened the mind so that there simply was no world other than what existed inside each fenced town.
Most people had long ago stopped talking about First Night; and although no one said it aloud, it was pretty clear that they felt that they were all just waiting for everything else to end. Society had collapsed, the military and government were gone, nearly seven billion people had died, and the zombie plague was still running at full strength. They all knew that their fellow citizens of Mountainside believed that the world had ended and what was left was just the clock winding down to a final and inevitable silence.
It was a horrible thought, and until the big fight at Charlie’s camp last year, Benny had been as adamant as Nix in wanting to break free of the town and find someplace where people wanted to be alive. Someplace where people believed that there was a future.
Then there had been that fight. Benny had been forced to kill people.
To kill.
People.
Not just zoms.
How was that going to open the way to a future?
There were so few people left. Barely thirty thousand left in California, and no way to know if there were any more anywhere else. How was killing going to increase that number? It was insane.
Only here, only when he was alone and looking into the eyes of the person he was becoming, could Benny admit the truth to himself.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said.
His mirror image and his inner voice repeated that truth, word for word. They were all in total agreement.
He got dressed and went downstairs and stood for a long time looking at the map of Mariposa County and Yosemite National Park. He heard voices and went to the back door and listened. Tom was in the yard, talking across the rail fence to Mayor Kirsch and Captain Strunk. Benny cracked the door so he could hear what they were saying.
“It’s not just a few people, Tom,” said the mayor. “Everyone’s talking about it.”
“It’s not a secret, Randy,” Tom said. “People have known I was leaving since Christmas.”
“That’s my point,” replied Captain Strunk. “The scouts and traders are saying that a bunch of rough-looking characters have been moving into the area since Charlie died.”
“Everyone in the Ruin is a rough-looking character. Goes with the territory.”
