Rot and Ruin

“Guy’s lying,” said Benny.



Morgie brightened. “What? He has some—?”



“We bought the last twelve packs,” said Chong.



“I kinda hate you guys.”



“He’s going to start crying,” Chong said to Benny in a stage whisper.



“He’s going to embarrass himself,” agreed Benny.



“What he’s going to do,” said Morgie, “is start kicking your asses.”



“Eek,” said Chong through a yawn.



Benny pretended to scratch his ankle, but then he moved his sneaker, and there were four packs of Zombie Cards in a neat stack, the waxed-paper wrappers still sealed. Morgie made a grab for them, ignoring the grins on his friends’ faces.



“I still hate you,” he said as he tore open the first pack.



“And yet,” said Chong, “we’ll find a way to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and struggle on.”



Morgie made a very rude gesture as he sorted through the cards.



Zombie Cards were one of the few luxuries the boys could afford. In the next town—forty miles away, along the line of mountains—two brothers had set up a printing business. All hand-crank stuff, because no one trusted electricity anymore, even when they could get it to work.



The printers did it old school. Offset printing in four colors, and they did a quality job. The Zombie Cards were printed on heavy card stock, ten cards to a pack. On the front of each card was a portrait of famous bounty hunters, like J-Dog, Dr. Skillz, Sally Two-knives, or the Mekong brothers; heroes of First Night, like Big Mike Sweeney, Billy Christmas, or Captain Ledger; someone from the zombie war, like the Historian or the Helicopter Pilot; famous zoms, like Machete-head, the Bride of Coldwater Spring, or the Monk; or random cards of famous people who had become zoms. On the back of each card was a short bio and the name of the artist. Benny’s favorite card was of Ben, a tall African American man who was painted in a heroic pose, swinging a torch at a swarm of zoms who were trying to get past him to attack a blond woman who cowered behind him. The bio said that the image was based on “an eyewitness account of a valiant but tragically futile struggle against zoms in Pennsylvania.” The artist had captured the nobility of the man with the torch and had made the zoms look particularly menacing, an effect enhanced by the stark shadows and light from the torch’s flaring flame. It was one of the rarest cards, and Benny was the only one of his friends who had it. He also had a complete set of the bounty hunters, including Charlie Matthias and the Motor City Hammer. He still liked Charlie and the Hammer, but as much as he denied it to himself, reserve bubbled inside him when he looked at their cards. He’d already sorted through his collection, looking for the three bounty hunters he’d seen in the Ruin, but they weren’t there. It reinforced Benny’s belief that their actions were not in any way typical of the bounty hunters Benny knew personally. Tom had to be wrong about that.



He said nothing to his friends about what Tom had said, but he shot a quick glance at Zak, who sat on the store’s porch, fanning through the dozen packs of cards he’d bought. Zak saw him watching and gave him a strange smile, then bent over his cards.



Benny shrugged, absorbed in his memories of the Ruin. So far he’d only told Nix, and he hadn’t seen her since she’d left the garden the day before. Her absence was like an empty hole in his gut, but he refused to think about it.



Chong had the largest collection of Zombie Cards, mostly because he had two cousins who collected them, and they traded doubles. Morgie and Benny had a good-size set. Nix only had a few. She was poor and wouldn’t take handouts, although if Benny gave her his doubles, she always accepted.



“Are you going to save any for Nix?” Chong asked as Morgie tore open his second pack.



“Why?” Morgie asked absently as he peered at the writing on the back of a card that showed a police officer in San Antonio, firing at zoms as he crashed his patrol car through a knot of them. The figures were tiny on the card, but the action was explosive, and Morgie was totally absorbed by it.



Chong and Benny exchanged a look over his bowed head, then shrugged. Morgie could be as dense as a mud wall sometimes.



They opened all of their packs of cards and sat in the shade of the porch, organizing them and reading the backs, swapping doubles with one another, bragging about cards they had and that the others didn’t. Benny smiled and joked and chatted with the others, but as he sorted through the cards, he could feel how false and fragile his smile was. He wanted to feel the way he used to feel, and hated that he had to fake it.



“Hey, you even listening?” Morgie asked, and Benny turned to him, hearing the question as if it were an echo but not remembering what he was asked.



“What?”



“Joe Attentive,” murmured Chong.



“I asked, what’s with you and Nix?”



“Nix?” Benny tensed. “What about me and Nix?”



“She was over your house every day this week, and now she’s not hanging around with us. She hasn’t missed a card day all summer. What’s up?” Morgie wore a smile, but it went about a millimeter deep.



Benny forced his shoulders to give a nonchalant shrug. “No, it’s cool. She was just being a friend.”



“What kind of friend?”



“Just a friend, Morgie.” But Benny could see that answer wasn’t going to cut it. He sighed. “Look, we all know Nix has a thing for me and you have a thing for Nix. Big news flash. I don’t have a thing for Nix, and the reason you haven’t seen her around the last two days is that I think she knows it, and her feelings are hurt. I’m sorry, but there it is. So, if you want to make your move, now would be a pretty good time.”



“No, it wouldn’t,” said Chong without looking up from a card he was reading. The others looked at him. “Nix is probably feeling like total crap right about now. She could use a friend, but what she doesn’t need is someone breathing down her neck or following her like a horny dog.”



“What are you saying?” said Morgie, eyes narrowed.



Chong turned to him. “What part of that was unclear?”



“I don’t just horndog after her. I like Nix. A lot.”



Chong merely grunted and continued to read his card.



Morgie punched Benny’s shoulder.



“Ow! What the hell was that for?” Benny demanded.



“For screwing with Nix’s head!” Morgie shouted. “Now she’s going to be all moody and girly, crying in her room and writing in that stupid diary of hers.”



“Good God,” said Benny, appealing to Chong, and the universe, for help. Chong tried to hide a smile as he pretended to read the Zombie Cards.



They sat in silence for five minutes, each of them absorbed with the cards to varying degrees, each thinking about Nix but pretending not to.



Chong tapped him with an elbow, and when he turned, his friend held out a card, so he could see the picture. “You’re almost famous,” he said.



The picture was that of a young man, standing with his back to a bullet-scarred wall, but instead of a gun, he held a katana in his hands.



Tom.



“Oh, man, don’t do this to me,” Benny said.



Chong smiled. “I thought you and Tom kissed and made up. I thought you were best buds now.”



“Yeah, and pigs can tap dance,” muttered Benny, taking the card. He flipped it over and read the back aloud. “‘Card number 113: Tom Imura. Tom, a resident of Mountainside, is a first-class bounty hunter who prefers to be called a “closure specialist.” He’s known throughout the Rot and Ruin for his quiet manner and lightning fast sword.’”



Benny handed the card back. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he said.



Chong pretended to read off the back of the card. “‘Tom’s brother, Benny, is known throughout the world for his noxious farts and lack of personality.’ Man, they got your number.”



“Get stuffed,” Benny suggested.



Morgie took the card and tried to riff off Chong’s remark, but beyond a few disjointed vulgarities, could come up with nothing biting.



“I am so going to bust Tom on this,” said Benny. “On a Zombie Card for God’s sake. Who does he think he is?”



Chong slid the card into his thick pack. “What’s with you? You’re supposed to be working with him. Didn’t you guys go on some kind of vision-quest thing out into the Ruin? You came back all moody and introspective. What happened?”



“I got over it,” said Benny.



“No, I mean, what happened out there?”



Benny just shook his head.



“Come on, dude,” said Morgie. “Give us all the gory details.”



It was the wrong choice of words, and Benny felt his stomach turn, and his brain started flashing overlapping images of Harold Simmons, the blind eyes of Old Roger, and the squirming torsos of the dismembered zoms in the wagon. Chong caught his change of expression, and before Morgie could say anything, he handed the last unopened pack to Benny.



“Do the honors. Maybe this one will have your own ugly face on it.”



Benny faked a smile and tore open the wax paper. The first few cards were doubles they all had. There was one new one—a celebrity zom that the bio said was Larry King, but Benny couldn’t tell the difference between the before and after pictures. He turned over the last card. It wasn’t a bounty hunter or a famous person who’d gone zom and been bagged and tagged. No, this was one of the elusive Chase Cards—one of only six special cards that showed up so rarely that Benny, Chong, Morgie, and Nix had only two between them.



“What is it?” Morgie asked as he tried to lean closer, but Benny moved the card away. It was a weird reflex action, and even as he did it, Benny suddenly felt as if he stepped out of this moment, this place, and stood somewhere else. Someplace where the wind blew hot and dry, and the birds did not sing in the dying trees; where bones lay bright white on the ground, and the sky was as hard and dark as the bluing on a gun barrel.



Benny stared at the card. Not at the words, but at the image. It was a girl about his own age, maybe a year older. She wore the rags of old blue jeans and roughly made leather moccasins. Her blouse was torn and patched and too small for her, and the pattern had once been bright with wildflowers, but now was so faded that it looked like flowers seen through mist. She had hair that was so thoroughly sun-bleached, it looked snow-white, and her skin was tanned to a honey brown. The girl wore a man’s leather gun belt, which held a small pistol below her left hip and a knife in a weather-stained sheath on her right. She carried a spear, crudely made from a long piece of quarter-inch black pipe wrapped in leather and topped with the blade from a Marine Corps bayonet. Behind her was a heap of dead zombies. The painting was incredibly lifelike—more like a photo than a painting, but there hadn’t been a working camera for years.



What held Benny’s attention—what riveted him—was her expression. The artist must have known her, because he caught her with a blend of emotions on her beautiful face. Anger, or perhaps defiance, tightened her full lips into an inflexible line. Pride lifted her chin. But her hazel eyes held such a deep and ancient sadness that Benny’s breath caught in his throat. He knew that sadness. It haunted his brother’s eyes every day, and since returning from the small village on the mountainside, that sadness darkened the eyes that looked back at him from the bathroom mirror, morning and night.



This girl knew. This girl must have seen some of the things he’d seen. Maybe worse. She’d seen them with eyes that could never see things the way the bounty hunters did. This girl knew, and Benny knew that she knew. She knew in ways that Nix couldn’t.



There was no name in the caption bar at the bottom of the card. Just these words: “The Lost Girl.”



Chong leaned over. He started to make a joke, but he caught Benny’s expression and kept his words to himself.



Morgie was a few steps slower to the plate than Chong. He snatched the card out of Benny’s hand. “Mmm, nice rack. Almost as big as Nix’s.”



Benny’s hand moved so fast that it surprised everyone. One second his fingers were open and empty, and the next they were knotted in the front of Morgie’s shirt.



“Give it back,” Benny said in a voice that was more like Tom’s. Older, uncompromising. Hard.



Morgie wore half a smile for half a second, then he saw the look in Benny’s eyes and surprise—tinged with fear and a spoonful of hurt—blossomed in his eyes.



“I … I mean … sure, man,” he said, tripping over the words. “Sure … I was just …”



Benny took the card from between Morgie’s fingers. It was bent but not creased, and Benny smoothed it on his thigh.



“I’m sorry,” Morgie said, completely confused by what had just happened. Benny looked at him without seeing him, then leaned over to peer at the card. Morgie started to say something else, but Chong—out of Benny’s line of sight—gave a tiny shake of his head.



A shadow fell over them, and they looked up to see Zak standing on the top step, staring down at the card. He grunted once, mumbled something unintelligible as he shoved his own cards into his pocket, then clumped down the stairs and headed home.



They ignored him. To Benny, Chong said, “Who is she?”



Benny just shook his head.



“Read the back.”



Benny turned it over and slowly read the small block of printed text.



“‘Chase Card number 3: The Lost Girl. Legends persist about a beautiful girl living wild and alone in the Rot and Ruin. Many have tried to find her, but none have. And some never returned. Who is … the Lost Girl?’”