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r /> The girls kept attempting to decapitate each other with the bright blue plastic disk. The day above and around them was picture perfect.
“That’s not boring, though,” said Benny. “Not even a little bit.”
He glanced at Chong and saw him watching the Frisbee slash through the air like a weapon hurled at an enemy. Chong frowned and nodded to himself.
“What . . . ?” asked Benny.
Before Chong could answer, a shadow fell across both of them and they turned to look up. Morgie Mitchell stood there, his gold Freedom Riders sash hung slantwise across his muscular chest. He had not gone with Benny, Chong, Nix, and Lilah on their expedition beyond the questionable safety of Mountainside’s fences. In fact, the last thing that had passed between Morgie and Benny were hard words and what seemed like a permanent breaking of their lifelong friendship. Benny and the others had gone looking for a jet they’d seen in the empty skies, searching for proof that Mountainside and the eight other small towns in central California were not all that remained of humanity. On that trip, Benny’s older brother, Tom, had died saving their lives; and the wasteland had proven to be filled with people, many of whom were vicious, violent, or insane. The fight for survival had changed the world as they all knew it, and now they knew that there were people out there, and even a government trying to build a new America down in Asheville, North Carolina. Not many people, but some. Maybe even enough to reclaim the world.
Morgie had stayed behind, at first bitter and then torn by grief and self-loathing at the words that he’d said to Benny that day. He threw himself into the samurai training Tom had given them all, becoming leaner and much tougher than ever before. He volunteered for dangerous jobs in town, including apprentice tower guard, and Morgie’s quick thinking and heroism had saved many lives. Now he rode with the legendary bounty hunter Solomon Jones and the Freedom Riders, the group that maintained order and kept the Nine Towns safe. Morgie was proud of the gold sash he wore that marked him as a “fighter” rather than an apprentice among the Riders. When Benny and his friends had returned to Mountainside hours ahead of an army of doomsday cultists led by the dangerous fanatic Saint John, Morgie stood beside his friends and there, in the fire and ash, in that furnace, a new and stronger friendship was forged.
Now he stood above them, silhouetted against the sun.
“Speak, apparition,” said Chong in a theatrical tone.
“Dude,” said Benny, “what’s with the sash? I thought you were off today. Grab some ground and sit yourself down.”
“Guys,” said Morgie quietly, “something’s happened. You need to come with me to the mayor’s office.”
“Hey, Benny,” said Chong, “maybe they’re going to name the town after you.” He spread his hands as if describing a big banner. “Fartsville.”
They both cracked up, but their laughter died away when Morgie stepped closer and sunlight showed his expression. His face was dead white; his eyes were wild with fear. Benny and Chong sat up.
“What’s wrong?” said Benny so sharply that Nix and Lilah paused in their game to look in their direction.
Morgie looked sick. “Guys,” he said again, “I just found out . . . we’ve lost contact with Asheville.”
“So?” said Chong. “The satellite phone’s been messing up for two weeks.”
“You don’t understand,” said Morgie. “Solomon got a distress call. All we could hear was shouting, some screams and gunfire, and then it went dead. They checked the sat phone and it’s working, but Asheville’s not answering.” His eyes were glassy and wet. “They think it might be gone.”
13
“HOW CAN IT BE GONE?” demanded Nix riley.
Solomon Jones winced because she said it really loud, and she had the kind of voice that could punch its way through any conversational chatter. It silenced the entire room. Solomon, who was both the head of the Freedom Riders for the Nine Towns and the interim governor of California, sat behind his desk in the communications center at the Reclamation Capitol Building. It was really a two-story wood building sandwiched between the general store and a feed-and-grain warehouse.
The town mayor, Randy Kirsch, stood beside the desk, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed, looking grim and worried. They were both middle-aged men, both of medium height, both bald, but that was where the similarities ended. Solomon was a muscular black man with very dark skin, a precisely trimmed gray goatee, and eyes that were both fierce and shrewd. The mayor was softer, with kinder eyes and less of an air of a hunting cat and more that of a golden retriever.
Aside from the two officials and Benny and his friends, there were at least fifty people crammed into the office. More choked the hallway, and Benny figured that by now everyone in town had heard the news. They’d all come swarming in. The brief silence following Nix’s outburst crumbled away as everyone began throwing fresh questions and demands for information everywhere.
Solomon held up his hands in a calm down gesture, and Benny saw Nix tense to launch another barrage of her own, but then she gave a harsh exhale and a curt nod. The others gradually settled down too. When there was quiet, Solomon nodded to the mayor.
“Some of you are new to Reclamation,” said the mayor, “so this is where we are and what we know.” He stepped over to a wall map of the United States. Hundreds of colored pushpins littered the map. He touched a green one stuck in the mountains of Mariposa County in central California. “Green pins indicate settled towns that we know about. As you can see, we have nine here in California, five in Nevada, seven in Arizona, and then nothing until we go all the way southeast to Georgia. There may be more—and hopefully many more—but we are still looking. Red pins indicate towns destroyed by Saint John’s armies.”
There were 107 red pins in the board, Benny knew. Chong had counted them one day and spent the rest of that week in a blue funk. And there were only twenty-eight green pins. Asheville was by far the biggest human settlement, with nearly a hundred thousand people, which was more than three times the combined population of the other towns. Asheville was the capital of the American Nation, the newly formed government that was trying to reclaim and rebuild America.
Most of the rest of the map was empty of pins because no one knew what was going on there. Same with Canada and Mexico and, well, the whole rest of the world. It depressed Benny to think about it, but also kindled a little fire of hope, too. He imagined what Tom would have said about it. Probably something Zen like, Just because you don’t know what’s out there, Benny, doesn’t mean there’s nothing good.
Thinking about that made Benny’s heart hurt. He missed his brother every single day.
“These blue pins,” continued Mayor Kirsch, bringing him back to the moment, “indicate places where it was clear people had settled but moved on, either to escape Saint John’s reaper army, or to avoid swarms of zoms. Most likely the latter, at least in recent months.”
Over the last couple of years, some of the zombies had begun hunting in packs, and in places those packs had combined into massive swarms. Genetic mutations in the parasites that created the zombie plague in the first place were believed to be the cause of that, but the American Nation scientists hadn’t yet mapped it all out. Scouts and scavengers were reporting new and bigger swarms, and they were getting closer to some of the Nine Towns. And there were other things—wild reports from travelers about different kinds of mutations coming from the east. Animals that some said had caught the zombie plague. That was scary because so far only wild hogs had been infected. Now there were stories—and no one in town had so far been able to prove if they were true—about monkeys and other animals who were said to be infected. Some stories hinted that there were even worse things out there, especially the farther east you went, but none of them had so far been proven. No one from Asheville, which was very far east, seemed to think those were anything more than tall tales. Benny wasn’t so sure. The world was broken and it kept getting stranger all the time.
“Now these pins,” said the mayor, touching some of the many black pins, “are areas where we’ve lost contact but haven’t yet verified whether it’s because the lines of communication failed—bad radios, swarms blocking the new Pony Express, or other issues—or if those towns have been overrun.”
The crowd stood in uneasy silence, watching as Solomon got up and crossed to the map, took a black pin from a tray on a side table, removed the green pin from Asheville, and replaced it with the black one.
