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“I love you,” he said.
The face, grave with concern, flushed, and that made Benny smile.
“Benny,” said Nix, “you’re hurt. You hit your head.”
“A zom hit my head,” he said. “I was hit in the head by a zom.” He thought that was funny and laughed, but laughing hurt, so he stopped.
The other faces swam in and out of focus. Lilah. Chong.
“Are you dead?” he asked Chong.
Chong tried to smile, but it didn’t suit his face. “That’s open to debate,” he said.
Nix said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Chong said something, but Benny didn’t understand it. Thinking was so hard. His head felt like it was in a hollow metal box and someone kept banging on it.
He thought he heard Nix scream. Or cry. Or maybe she was laughing.
“Are you sleeping?” asked a tiny voice, and Benny realized that his eyes had closed. He open them to see a lovely little face.
“Eve?”
“You found me in a hole in the ground,” she said. At firs
t Benny thought it didn’t make sense, but then he realized it did.
“Yeah, just like a bunny rabbit.” He touched the tip of her nose. “You’re a little bunny.”
She giggled.
That sound seemed to screw one of the world’s hinges back into place.
A strange voice said, “Kid’s a mess. Skull fracture, concussion . . . ”
Benny looked toward the sound of the voice. A big man smiled down at him. One of those tight smiles people give when they don’t want you to know how bad things look through their eyes. It was almost a wince.
“I’m Joe,” he said.
“I know you,” said Benny as he raised a bloody finger and touched Joe’s face. “You’re on a Zombie Card. Captain Ledger, Hero of First Night. You’re number two-eighty-four. I have two of you. I was going to trade one of you to Morgie for his Sheriff Rick card.”
Riot’s face swam into view. “What the heck are Zombie Cards?”
“Kid’s delirious.”
Chong said, “The reapers are coming. We saw them.”
“Where and how many?” demanded Joe.
“Reaper, reaper . . . ,” Benny began, and tried to work it into a rhyme, but he couldn’t.
“There are a couple of hundred of them out on the desert, heading toward the hills,” said Riot. “But a bunch came running after us.”
“On foot or on quad?”
“Both. I lost them, but they’ll find us.”
Benny wondered what they were talking about. It began to occur to him that his head was not working properly, that his thoughts were silly. The word “delirious” triggered a response that went deeper than his understanding. A voice spoke inside his head.
