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“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Chong, and nudged her with his elbow. She grinned and nudged him back, harder.
Tom said, “We don’t know how far we’ll have to go to find the jet. If we find it. We saw it fly east, but it could have landed anywhere.”
Benny winced. “Ouch.”
“No, don’t worry about that part. We’ll find some clues. Other people will have seen it too, and there are people out here. We’ll ask everyone we see … but a lot of those folks live in the downlands, and there are large parts of the country that don’t have mountains. So it’s pretty likely we’ll be where the zoms are. No way to avoid it.”
“So learn how to be with the dead,” added Lilah. It wasn’t an eloquent statement, but they all understood her meaning.
Tom clapped Chong on the arm. “You ready to go? The next part is a leisurely walk in the country.”
“That’s better.”
“No, it’s not,” said Lilah, laying her spear over her shoulder. “Everything out here wants to kill you.”
She walked along the path, and Chong stared after her. “Honestly,” he said, “I already got the message. That last part? Not necessary.”
Nix was laughing as she followed Lilah. Benny laid his bokken across his shoulder, and in a fair imitation of Lilah’s whispery voice said, “Everything wants to kill out-of-shape monkey-bangers named Chong. Everything.”
He strolled off.
Chong took a deep breath and followed.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Tools of the Zombie Hunter Trade, Part Two
LILAH’S SPEAR. The shaft of the spear is made from a six-foot length of three-quarter-inch black pipe. There are brown doeskin leather bands around both ends and on two places in the middle where she usually holds it. The blade is from a Marine Corps bayonet. The blade is black and eight inches long.
She says this is the fourth spear she’s made. She lost one when she was first taken to Gameland (she was eleven, and that spear was five feet long). She lost the second one while running from the Motor City Hammer three years ago. The third one bent while she was breaking into an old library to get books. The fourth one is a year old.
18
BENNY WALKED ALONGSIDE TOM FOR A WHILE. “I OVERHEARD YOU talking with Basher yesterday.”
Tom gave him a brief look. “What did you hear?”
“Bunch of stuff. Mostly about trouble out here in the Ruin. About people coming in to take over Charlie Pink-eye’s territory.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So … ?”
“What do you mean? So … what?”
“Well,” Benny said, “aren’t we going to do something about it?”
“‘We’?”
“Yes, ‘we.’ You, me, Lilah, Nix … I mean, before we leave the area?”
Tom shook his head. “No.”
“Why not? These are your woods, man. You spent years out here cleaning them up and stuff.”
“No, I spent years out here as a bounty hunter and closure specialist. It was never my job or my intention to ‘clean things up.’ Not then and definitely not now.” He paused and looked back at the others, who were a hundred yards down the road. Nix and Chong were talking together—probably continuing their argument about the mysteries of the zombie plague; Lilah was bringing up the rear, content to keep company with herself. “Look at them, Benny. Lilah’s not even seventeen. Nix just turned fifteen. You and Chong will be sixteen in a few months. You’re tough, but let’s face it … you’re not an army. I can’t even say with total conviction that you’re all tough enough to do what we’re attempting, and it scares me green to think that I might be leading you to your deaths. I’m not going to make that a certainty by taking you into a pitched battle with fifty or sixty armed bounty hunters.”
“But what about Gameland? If they’ve moved it somewhere closer to town, then they might be grabbing more kids from town. Like they tried to do with Nix. We can’t just—”
