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The cry came echoing up from the darkness, and instantly Benny staggered to his feet. His limbs trembled and his hands were puffed and red, but he was safe. Across the black gash of the gorge a hundred zombies stared at him with eternal hunger and endless patience. No more of them fell into the gorge, and Benny thanked God for that.
“Nix! Climb out. I’ll pull. Hurry!”
As soon as he felt her take up the slack, Benny began pulling hand over hand. The rope burned his palms and his muscles screamed, but he planted his feet wide and put everything he had into it. Nix’s wild red hair appeared at the edge of the ravine, and then her beautiful face, tight with effort and fear.
Nix climbed out and wiped sweat from her eyes.
“Is Chong hurt?” asked Benny.
“Not as hurt as he’s going to be when Lilah gets out of there. She’s furious with him for going down into the ravine.”
“He fell in. It wasn’t intentional,” Benny said, coming immediately to his friend’s defense.
“Yeah, well, she’s not happy with you, either.”
“Swell.” Benny tossed the rope into the hole. “How about you? You mad at me too?”
She gave him a wicked grin and punched his chest. Which hurt.
Chong came puffing and wheezing up into the sunlight. He did not weigh much more than Nix, but Benny was beyond exhausted, and it felt like hauling a bull out of the pit.
“I’m sorry,” Chong began, but Benny cut him off.
“Grab some rocks.”
“Rocks?”
“Rocks. Anything we can throw. We have to give Lilah some cover. Go!”
Chong understood at once and ran to collect fist-size stones.
Benny tossed the rope down again. “Lilah! Listen to me.”
She didn’t answer, but he heard her grunts as she fought.
“We’ve got some rocks. When I say ‘go,’ drop a couple of zoms with leg cuts to stall the others and—”
Something flashed past him, missing his head by inches. Benny recoiled from it and saw that it was Lilah’s spear. Before he could even speak, the line went taut and Lilah came swarming up the side of the wall, as fast and nimble as an acrobat. She grabbed his shirt as she came out of the hole and used his weight to catapult her body over the edge. She pitched forward, rolled effortlessly, and came to a rest on the balls of her feet. She pivoted and looked at Benny, who lay flat, and Chong, who crouched a few feet away with one arm raised to throw a rock. Benny and Chong gaped at her, unable to manage a single coherent comment between them.
Lilah reached around behind her and removed an item that she’d thrust through one of the straps of her vest, then tossed it onto the grass in front of Benny’s goggling eyes.
Tom’s sword.
Lilah stood above them, tall and beautiful, her white hair whipping in the fresh breeze, her clothes streaked with gore, her hazel eyes glowing with fire.
She turned slowly to Nix and in her ghostly whisper of a voice said, “I hate boys.”
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Warrior Smart.
That’s what Tom called the training program he put together to get us ready for our trip into the Ruin. He said that he based it on a few different things. First were the martial arts he’d been involved with ever since he was a kid. Before First Night there were thousands of different kinds of martial arts. Karate, tae kwon do, kung-fu, aikido, judo. I don’t know much about them. Tom used to study something called jujutsu (which I’ve seen in books spelled a bunch of different ways: jiujitsu, jujitsu, etc.). Tom said that jujutsu was an old Japanese system that his family had practiced for hundreds of years. He said that the name means “art of nonresistance,” and a lot of it involves using the opponent’s attack against him.
Tom also included some of the things he learned while he was in the police academy. And a lot of stuff he learned since, including tracking and hunting, which he mostly learned from bounty hunters like Solomon Jones, Old Man Church, and the Greenman.
The training was hard, and sometimes we all hated Tom because he never cut us a break.
Now I understand. Sometimes I wish he’d been even harder on us.
