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“No, damn it,” protested Chong. “That’s not how this works.”
His statement made no sense, and he knew it. But what else could he say? The arrow had gone all the way through him, pushing the infected matter deep into his flesh, into his bloodstream. The sickness was already at work within him. His skin was cool and clammy to the touch and yet sweat poured down his face. In his chest, his heart was beating with all the urgent frenzy of a trapped rabbit.
He was infected.
He was dying.
He was, by any standard of life here in the Rot and Ruin, already dead.
It was too real, too big, too wrong.
“No,” Chong said again.
Riot sniffed back some tears. “I’m sorry.”
She got up and walked to the open doorway of the old shack and stood there, staring silently out at the desert, fists balled tightly at her sides.
Chong turned away and put his face in his hands. Even when the first sob broke in his chest, the arrow wounds, which should have screamed with pain, merely ached. Even his pain was dying.
Sorry.
So small a word for so enormous a thing.
Lilah.
He cried out her name in his mind, and he saw her, standing tall and beautiful, leaning on her spear, her honey-colored eyes always aware. If she saw him right here and now, would she even wait before quieting him? Would her feelings for him make her pause even for a second before she drove her spear into the back of his neck? Would she grieve afterward? Would the unsurprising death of a clumsy town boy break her heart, or merely add another layer of callus to it?
I’m so sorry, he thought. Oh, Lilah, I’m so sorry.
He squeezed his eyes shut in pain that was deeper than his physical wounds. He thought about his parents. The last time they’d seen him, he was heading out with Tom for a simple overnight camping trip in the Ruin. It had been allowed only because Tom and Lilah would both be there, and they were the most experienced zombie hunters anyone k
new. And they’d allowed it because his folks knew that Chong needed to say good-bye to Benny and Nix. And Lilah.
I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry, Pop.
I’m sorry for everything.
Chong heard a small, soft sound and turned to see Eve in the middle of the room. She was pink-faced from sleep and jumpy-eyed from bad dreams and waking realities.
Chong sniffed and hastily wiped away his tears.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said, and he even conjured a smile. “How are you?”
Eve came over and stood in front of him. The trauma of everything she’d experienced had regressed her. The child she had become was younger still, and Chong could see that so little of her was left—and that was hanging by a thread.
She reached out a finger and almost touched the burn on Chong’s stomach. The flesh around it was livid and veined with black lines.
“Hurt?” she asked in the tiniest of voices. Looking into her eyes was like looking into a haunted house.
“No, honey . . . it’s not bad,” lied Chong. “Hardly hurts at all.”
He reached out and gently stroked Eve’s tangled blond hair. She flinched at first, but he waited, showed her that his hand was empty, and tried again. This time Eve allowed it. Then she knelt down and laid her head against his chest.
“I had a bad dream,” she murmured.
That thought—that Eve believed this was a dream she would or could wake up from—came close to breaking Chong’s heart. He continued to stroke her hair while he lay there and tried not to be afraid of what he was becoming.
He hoped Lilah would never find him.
