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And another.
“Wherever they’re going,” said Benny, “I’m glad we’re not going anywhere near them.”
They slept badly and th
e night was long.
56
THEY DROVE ALL MORNING AND reached the banks of the Rio Grande by noon.
It was a wild area and much more overgrown than Benny expected, considering the barren terrain through which they’d ridden for many miles. It was as if nature had gathered all its strength and burst forth with lush new life on both sides of the winding river.
Down here they saw all kinds of wild animals, many clearly the descendants of creatures that had either escaped from zoos or been turned loose. A small herd of zebras grazed on dandelions. Monkeys screamed and taunted them from the branches of a thousand trees. Tapirs rooted in the grass, kangaroos stood in clusters and watched them with dark eyes. Pythons slithered away from the sound of their motors, while an old, bony, weary-looking tiger watched from within the shadows beneath a towering pine. A huge tortoise crossed the road in front of them, and they all stopped to allow it to pass. Then they drove on without comment.
A weathered sign told them they were entering the Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area, and as they approached the edge of the forest, the last of the crumbling towns faded away completely and the huge woods loomed up like something out of one of the fantasy novels Benny loved to read. Fangorn Forest, maybe. Shadows seemed to crouch beneath the boughs of those trees. It looked like a hungry place to Benny, and even as they thundered toward it he felt as if they were making a very bad decision. He did not know why he said nothing to the others. Maybe because it had been his plan to come this way and he felt trapped by the decision. Or maybe this was where all his roads inevitably led. To this dark and unforgiving place.
They drove into the forest and it swallowed them whole as shadows turned bright day into purple gloom. The road was long since gone, cracked apart by roots and choked with dead tree limbs and nameless debris. They saw a single zom wandering toward them, but Riot used her slingshot to fire a ball bearing at it from fifteen feet. The zombie’s head snapped back and it fell into the undergrowth, vanishing as completely as if it had never existed. The six of them moved on, slowing to little more than a fast walk.
Inside the forest the air felt different, much more humid and alive with buzzing insects. Birds sang in the trees, though only in front and behind them, with their songs falling silent as the quads rolled along. The birds yielded grudgingly to the noisy machines and resumed their gossip as soon as the engine roars faded.
Nix came up and rode side by side with Benny. Her face was bright with sweat, and the flush darkened her freckles and the two long scars. On another face, on someone with less personal power, those scars might have been ugly; they might have been something for her to turn away to hide. Or hide behind. Not Nix, though. She owned them as proof of what she had been through and of how she had come through it. She was, as Chong once phrased it, the best example of herself. Aware of her own strengths and weaknesses. The quiet and introverted girl she’d been once upon a time had burned off, or been shucked like a cocoon to reveal a more evolved person. Loss had stolen some of her laughter, and trauma had ignited strange lights in her eyes, but experience had taught her that she owned courage, and situations had revealed her compassion.
Benny loved her with his whole heart. And if that heart was in danger of being broken because there was no certainty of any shared future, then he knew he was luckier than he deserved for the time they had together.
“It’s beautiful here,” she said, shaking him from his thoughts. “Not how I imagined Texas.”
Benny looked around, trying to see the forest through her eyes. She had never liked growing up behind the fences of Mountainside. It had been her need, her desire that had fueled the quest to leave home last year to find out if there was anything beyond the fence. She viewed the world differently than he did. Differently than Chong or Morgie or anyone did, but once in a while Benny caught a glimpse of Nix’s version of the world. Sometimes it was beautiful. Sometimes it was scary and frightening.
They drove for half a mile in silence, each of them looking at the forest and seeing it, which was never quite the same thing. Stones in the veil of tree-thrown shadows were soft with moss. Vines hung in soft curves between neighboring tree trunks. Little puffs of mist coiled up from deep inside clefts in the ground, and a gentle breeze brushed the grass and weeds so they leaned over as if weary.
“Yeah,” Benny finally replied, “it’s pretty.”
She cut him a look but didn’t comment. They drove on.
After half an hour, though, the light was beginning to fail and it became harder to determine whether objects ahead were zoms or tree stumps, so Benny began looking for a place to camp. It was Lilah who found it, zooming past them and cutting off to the right, going deeper into the woods. At first Benny couldn’t understand why, but then he saw light dancing in the shadows and realized that it was flowing water, and that she’d found a small tributary to the larger Rio Grande. He signaled to the others and they all turned that way, following the Lost Girl’s quad for several dozen yards over lumpy ground. Then one by one they pulled to a stop and cut their engines.
The scene before them was truly beautiful, and even Benny had to admit it without reservation. A ribbon of blue meandered past them, the waters kissed by beams of sunlight that slanted between the tall pines. Blue-white wading birds of a kind Benny had never seen before stalked through the rushes on the far bank, and bullfrogs thrummed from their hiding places in the mud. There was enough moisture in the air that the sunlight looked like bars of gold leaning slantwise on the tree limbs.
“Wow,” said Morgie. “This is incredible.”
“It’s defensible,” said Lilah bluntly. She dismounted, plucked her spear from the makeshift rack on the back of the quad, and began stalking along the bank. Riot, without saying a word, headed in the other direction. Both of them had spent a lot of the last few years living in the wild. Benny had no illusions about the gulf between what he knew—and what he’d learned from his short trips with Tom—and what they knew. He stayed where he was until they came back and said that it was safe.
Then they got to work.
Each of them had brought long spools of plastic-coated wire scavenged from an old store that sold radio and computer equipment. They created a network of trip wires around the camp, so that it formed a half circle, with the stream at their backs. Chong collected the empty tin cans everyone had in their saddlebags, filled them with pebbles, and hung them on the wire, using small black metal binder clips to secure them. One set of wires was strung at waist level, the other at knee height. A small animal could pass without creating a racket, but a zom of any size would be heard even in the dead of the darkest night.
Morgie and Riot were the best cooks, and they began preparing a simple meal of beans and beef. Lilah slung a game pouch over her shoulder and vanished into the forest, returning forty minutes later with the pouch filled with summer berries, edible roots, and some nuts. They sat to eat.
Benny noticed that Chong turned half away when he took his pills. It hurt Benny that Chong was embarrassed by what he called his “condition.” He caught Benny looking and gave him a weak smile. Benny shook his head to tell him that it was all good, no judgment. Chong looked down at the campfire and did not meet his eyes again.
Since leaving the prison, there had been very little conversation among them. However, as the sky turned black and the stars came out, they began to talk.
It was Lilah, usually the least talkative of them, who broke the silence.
“Captain Ledger is alive,” she said in her spooky whisper of a voice. She said it with such certainty that for a moment no one seemed willing to offer a contrary opinion.
Until Riot did. “Look, I like the old geezer as much as y’all do, but I don’t know that I’d bet a broke-leg hunting dog on that, Lilah. Maybe Captain Ledger got to Asheville and it was all so bad he couldn’t get out. I mean, c’mon, if someone like him was okay, then wouldn’t he have found some way of reaching out?”
