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He watched her as she worked it through. Every angle of her body seemed jagged and sharp, her posture charged with tension. Benny could only imagine what horrors were playing out in Nix’s mind. The man who had beaten and murdered her mother and then kidnapped her. The thought that somehow Charlie had orchestrated the zombie assault on the way station was horrible. It also made a queer kind of sense, since a swarm of zombies had been used to destroy Charlie’s team. An eye for an eye?
“Nix?”
She ignored him, standing stiff and trembling under the unrelenting sun. Benny waited for her. Three minutes passed. Four. Five. Gradually, by slow and painful degrees, the harsh lines of tension drained from Nix’s shoulders and back. When she turned around, Benny could see unshed tears in the corners of her eyes. She looked at him blankly for a moment, and then her eyes snapped wide.
She screamed.
Her warning was a half second too late, as cold hands clamped onto Benny from behind and dragged him backward over the stone wall. Benny twisted wildly around and saw the face of the zom who had him. A tall, thin man dressed in a tunic that looked like it had been made from an old bedsheet.
“No!” Benny cried.
It was Brother David.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Notes from Mrs. Griswold’s science lecture on how cadaverine is made:
The cadaverine used in the Rot and Ruin is actually a mixture of cadaverine, putrescine, spermidine, and other vile ptomaines. The pure compounds are caustic, toxic stuff although they can be easily diluted in water or ethanol (but not really diluting the aroma).
Making these compounds is not a project for a home basement chem lab or even a high school lab. The glassware, equipment, and chemicals are usually found in college level or industrial labs, and that equipment has been scavenged and brought to Mountainside.
The original method comes from a German journal dating back to about 1890. This method for reacting dichloropropane with sodium cyanide (a deadly poison) followed by reaction with zinc powder and hydrochloric acid. This gives cadaverine. Yuck.
51
TOM KNELT BY A COLD CAMPFIRE AND STUDIED THE GROUND. THIS WAS the second place where he’d found Chong’s footprints and signs of violence. The first time had been the spot where Sally Two-Knives had tried to rescue Chong. There were indeed two dead men there, and Tom recognized them. Denny Spurling and Patch Lewis, bounty hunters of the low-life variety who usually ran with a third man named Stosh Lowinski. These were two of the three men Benny had seen torturing and brutalizing zoms on their first trip into the Ruin. Stosh, a beefy man who used a replica Arabian scimitar to kill zoms, was not here. Sally had given them a little taste of their own medicine. Rough justice, but justice of a kind.
Tom knew Sally’s history. She’d been a rough, hard-edged Roller-Derby blocker with one of the Rat City Rollergirl teams out of Seattle when First Night changed the world. Sally had been the mother of two little kids, and she’d fought her way across Seattle to her small apartment where her mother was minding April and Toby. By the time Sally got to the apartment building, the lobby was splashed with blood. It took her a couple of years to tell Tom the whole story. It came out in broken fragments, and none of it was pretty. There were no happy endings, and when she reached her tenth-floor apartment, all she found was heartbreak.
Broken and more than half-crazy from loss, Sally headed south in a Humvee she took out of a used car lot. The salesmen at the dealership were long past caring. Sally made it as far as Portland before the electromagnetic pulses released by the nukes killed her car. She raided a sporting goods store for weapons. Previous looters had already taken the guns, so she loaded up with knives, including the two bowie knives that eventually became her trademark and her name.
It was nearly two years before she made it into Mariposa County, where she met Tom and discovered that there were towns filled with survivors. Tom remembered the Sally he’d first met: filthy, wild-eyed, almost feral, and more than half-dead from a bacterial infection she’d picked up from drinking bad water. He had gotten her first to Brother David’s and then into town.
Tom knew that Sally felt she owed him a debt, but in his view, if she help
ed someone else, then a different kind of infection would spread. Generosity could be as contagious as the zombie plague as long as enough people were willing to be carriers.
Tom rose from where he’d been crouching as he studied the scene.
The two men had indeed been quieted and left to rot. Tom wasted no sympathy on them. However, something caught his eye, and he parted some weeds and saw Chong’s bokken lying there. He picked it up. It was undamaged. Tom rigged a sling and hung the sword across his chest. As he did so he walked slowly around the clearing, looking at the prints. There were five distinct sets. Chong’s waffle-soled shoes. Sally’s cross-grained hiking boots. Prints that matched the shoes of the two dead men. And a fifth set that entered the camp from upslope. Tom placed his foot into one of the prints, and it dwarfed his. Tom was not a big man, and he wore a size nine-and-a-half shoe. This print had to be at least a fourteen extra wide, and the impression was ground well into the topsoil. A big man. Tall and heavy.
Like Charlie. Charlie Pink-eye had worn size fourteens.
Tom continued to walk the edges of the clearing until he found an even deeper set of footprints leading away. Same shoes, but clearly a heavier footfall. The answer was there to be read. There were no traces of Chong’s waffle soles, which meant that the big man had carried the boy off.
That gave Tom some hope. If Chong was dead, he would have been quieted and left for the crows. If he was alive and being carried, then even a big man could not move at top speed. And it was virtually impossible to cover your tracks while carrying a burden.
Tom was not carrying a burden. He could move very fast, and even a blind man could follow those tracks. He set out, moving quickly. He had the kind of lean and wiry body that was built for running, and he knew how to run. Two hours later he found the remains of a campfire and the clear and distinct marks of Chong’s waffle soles. The campfire was almost cold. Dirt had been kicked over the small blaze, and it had cooled more slowly than if it had been doused with water. Tom judged that he was now no more than four hours behind the big man. He was making up the time he’d lost by tending to Sally last night; and the big man had stopped to rest. When they’d started out again, Chong was walking instead of being carried. Good.
“Hold on, Chong,” he murmured aloud. “I’m coming for you.”
52
CHONG FLUNG HIMSELF TO ONE SIDE AS THE BIG ZOMBIE LUNGED. He hit the ground in a sloppy roll, coming up too fast, slamming into the opposite wall. He’d tried to snatch the pipe as he rolled, but his fingers merely brushed the cold length of it, sending it rolling away from him.
The crowd cheered, though Chong couldn’t tell if they were in favor of his attempt or its failure.
The zom turned, much faster than Chong thought it could, and instead of a dead moan, the creature hissed at him. The sound was full of hatred. Chong’s mind stalled. Hatred was an emotion. Zoms didn’t have any. But he could see the menace and malevolence etched into the snarling face of the living dead thing.
