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CHONG LOOKED UP AS BENNY’S SHADOW FELL ACROSS HIM. BENNY WAS grinning like a ghoul as he softly chanted, “Chong and Lilah sitting in a tree . . .”
“Although I’m a moral person,” began Chong as he climbed to his feet, “I would have no compunction about killing you in your sleep.”
“Just saying . . .”
Chong squatted down in front of Nix, who held a sleeping Eve. The little girl twitched every now and then, as if flinching away from shadows in her dreams.
Chong reached out to stroke Eve’s silky hair. “I’ll sit with her for a while if you want.”
“You sure?” asked Nix.
“Sure, you know me and kids.”
Nix nodded. Unlike Benny, who was often clumsy around kids and old people, Chong was completely comfortable with them. His inner calm seemed to work magic on the little ones, and he told the best stories. Chong knew all of Aesop’s fables, Mother Goose, Oz, and Narnia, and a huge number of silly, funny stories culled from the countless books he’d read.
With a grateful sigh, Nix handed Eve to Chong, who took her with such care that the little girl never even stirred. Chong crossed his legs and sat back against the tree.
Benny touched Nix’s arm. “Want to take a walk?”
She nodded, and they set off at a slow stroll toward the forest and then turned just before the line of junipers and walked north in the shade.
The forest itself was a strange holdover from before First Night. It had once been an elaborate golf course that someone had plunked down in the middle of an inhospitable desert. Wind-driven turbines had been erected to pump in water from some distant place in order to keep the grass green; but after First Night, the wind turbines began to fail. Benny and his friends had passed a line of them on the way here. Of the fifty they counted, only three still turned sluggishly, and they must have been enough to allow some trees and plants to flourish. But there was clear evidence that the more water-hungry vegetation was dying and the more desert-hardy junipers and pinyons were taking over. Soon only the desert plants would be left, and another of man’s structures that had been imposed on the land would be reclaimed by nature.
They walked in silence through the green trees, leaving the stench of the crowd of zoms behind. A few small white butterflies fluttered past. A black-tailed jackrabbit sat shoulder-deep in the grass, munching on a stem, and paused to watch them with a nervous eye, but soon went back to its foraging. All around them the desert birds flitted and sang. Benny loved birds and pointed out some of his favorites to Nix.
“That one there’s a sage grouse,” he said. “And see, on that branch? That’s a horned lark. And I think I saw a meadowlark earlier and . . .”
His voice trailed off as he realized that she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even giving him the usual courtesy nods and grunts people give when they’re pretending to listen. Nix was deep inside her own thoughts, and Benny was on the other side of that wall. He lapsed into silence, and they walked without talking for ten minutes.
“I asked Eve about where she came from,” Nix said eventually.
“Oh?”
“A lot of it is confusing. She’s little, and she doesn’t understand most of what’s happened, and I think she’s a bit out of it, you know? Like, in shock? Some of the things she says don’t make much sense. I think she’s confusing stuff from dreams, or maybe nightmares, with things that are actually happening.”
Benny nodded toward the zoms on the other side of the long ravine. “That’s not too hard to understand. Sometimes I can’t believe it myself. Sometimes I think I’m going to wake up and smell Tom’s cooking, and then I’ll go down to breakfast. Scrambled eggs with peppers and mushrooms. Your mom’s corn muffins. Fresh-pressed apple juice and a big glass of milk.” He sighed.
Nix nodded but didn’t comment on that. “Eve said she used to live in a house up in a town called Treetops. I don’t know if that’s real or something she made up.”
“That’s actually not a bad idea. Zoms can’t climb.”
“She said that one night the trees all caught fire and everyone ran. And here’s the really strange part: She said that it was angels who came and set fire to the trees.”
“She mentioned angels before. Is that another name for zoms?”
“I don’t think so. She said the angels came riding in on what she called ‘growly horses.’ Isn’t that strange?”
“Yeah.”
“According to her, the angels had wings on their chests.”
“On their chests?” Benny grinned at the thought. “Wouldn’t that make them fly upside down?”
“It’s not funny,” said Nix. “Eve was really scared of them.”
They stopped and picked some tart early-season elderberries.
As Benny ate, he thought about the idea of wings on the chests of angels, and it made him think about the woman he’d seen in the field right before the horde of zoms attacked him. What was it embroidered on the front of her shirt? Could that have been angel wings?
