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“He did,” cried Morgie, pointing at Chong. “He’s infected with the zombie virus.”
Lilah stiffened and pointed a finger at him. “Be careful,” she warned. The Lost Girl’s throat had been torn raw from screaming when she was little, and the scar tissue on her larynx had changed her voice permanently to a ghostly whisper. When she spoke, though, people tended to stop and listen.
“I’m not cutting up on him,” said Morgie quickly, “but face facts—what happens if we go looking for Captain Ledger and it takes so long Chong runs out of pills?”
“I’ll take plenty of them with me,” said Chong.
“What happens if he loses them? Or someone takes them away?”
“If someone tries to do that,” said Lilah, “I’ll kill them and take the pills back.”
Benny had to turn away to hide a smile. Lilah wasn’t joking. She barely knew how to joke. She also had about the same protective instincts as a mother cougar. If anyone so much as looked at Chong funny, she’d do very, very bad things to them. Benny knew because he’d seen it.
Morgie tried it from another direction. “Chong could fall into a river. Whatever.” He shook his head and pointed in the direction of the fence. “Hey, man, I love you and all, but you shouldn’t be allowed out there.”
Chong turned away and stared at the birds in the yard. Lilah reached over and squeezed his knee, but Chong did not react.
It hurt Benny to know that Morgie was right. There was no way on earth to justify Chong leaving the town. He had been frail before being infected, and he was a scarecrow now. He also screamed at night sometimes. They all knew it, but nobody ever mentioned it. That was heartbreaking, but it was also something you wouldn’t want a traveling companion to do if you were camping out in the Rot and Ruin.
Even though the townsfolk had renamed the zom-infested wilderness “Tomsland,” it would always be the Rot and Ruin to Benny. To all his friends.
“We have to do something,” said Nix after a long silence.
“Asheville’s all the way across the Ruin,” insisted Morgie. “And you know what people are saying about new mutations and infected animals.”
“People say all kinds of things,” countered Nix. “Doesn’t make it true.”
“Doesn’t make it a lie, either,” said Riot. She spoke with a slow Cajun accent, which was deceptive because of how quick she was in wits and reflexes. Like Lilah, Riot had spent a lot of her life fighting and was nearly as vicious as the feral Lost Girl. “I seen some weird stuff and I’ve been farther east than any of y’all. Saw a bear once that I was pretty sure was turned. Had half a dozen arrows in him and one eye missing and he kept moving like that was nothing to him. Tell me that’s natural. Y’all want to run smack into a zombie bear?”
“There’s no zombie bears,” said Lilah.
“How would you know?”
“I lived in the forest. The only zom animals we saw were boars, and that was in Nevada.”
“Okay, sure,” said Riot, “but I saw the bear in New Mexico. You ever go that far?”
“No.”
“Then I guess you don’t know for sure, do you?”
Lilah merely snorted. She and Riot had a lot of similarities in that they had lived rough, but they had never bonded.
Morgie said, “None of that really matters, because we don’t even know how to get to Asheville. We don’t know what route Captain Ledger took and he was flying, so he didn’t need to worry about mountains, rivers, or overrun cities. We’d need to stick to roads, which means we won’t be going in as straight a line. You’re pretty good at math, Nix. Want to tell me what the odds are of us finding a safe route? And what if we get there and Captain Ledger’s dead? Or turned into a zom?”
“It’s not just about finding Joe Ledger,” said Benny, though it caused a twinge of pain to say it. “We can use maps to plan a route to Asheville. If he took a helicopter, then we can follow as straight a line as we can, but either way, we’ll make for North Carolina. We can take the quads and drive most of the way.”
Quads were small four-wheeled vehicles that wer
e, currently, the only working motorized transportation anywhere. While all the other machines had been rendered useless by EMPs, a clever mechanic in Nevada had figured out a way to repair the sporty two-stroke engines of recreational quads. Saint John’s reapers had used them to create a kind of mobile cavalry, and Benny and his friends had stolen several and driven all the way back to Mountainside to warn of the impending invasion. Now the Nine Towns had a small fleet of them and would soon have gas-powered cars and trucks.
“What if we can’t find gas for them?” asked Morgie.
“Then we walk the rest of the way. Or we find horses or bicycles. Look, Morgie, it’s not about how tough it’ll be. We know it won’t be easy. No, this is all about getting to Asheville.”
“Yeah? What if it’s been overrun?”
“Then it’s been overrun,” said Nix. “Benny’s right, we have to know. As far as we know, Asheville is where the world is starting back up again. People, government, industry, the military.” She shook her head. “We have to find out.”
