Rot and Ruin

Benny nodded.



“So the footprints we’re seeing here are almost certainly human. Question is whether these are older prints that were mostly, but not entirely, erased by runoff, or prints left by men moving fast but not carrying heavy loads. The last of the runoff blurred the edges and in this area here, the topsoil is thinner, because we’re coming to some rocky areas.”



“Okay, but if people came through here recently, then it has to be Charlie and the Hammer, right?”



Tom didn’t answer right away. “What bothers me most about it is that I’m not seeing small footprints.”



“Nix’s?”



He nodded. “We saw her prints earlier, but I haven’t seen one in the last hour. Not one.”



“What if one of them’s carrying her?”



Tom considered. “If the ground was softer, we could make that call, because one of the male footprints would be deeper. You might be right, but I’m not sure, because the footprints I’m seeing here look like they’re from several different pairs of shoes.”



“More than Charlie and the Hammer?”



“Yes.”



“The Mekong brothers?”



“Could be them, which means we’re hunting four men rather than two.” Tom started to say something else, but stopped himself. Benny caught it, though.



“What?”



“There are a couple of other options, Benny, and we have to be ready for them.”



“What are they?”



“The option I like is that Nix somehow escaped. If that’s the case, her trail could have split off at any time. If she’s free, let’s hope she continues to head for high ground instead of trying to go back to town.”



“Because there aren’t as many zoms high up, right?”



“That, and higher up, there’s always the chance of finding food and shelter. There are some monks out here. If she runs into one of them, she’ll be fine. They’ll take care of her and get word to me.”



“What’s the other option? The one you don’t like.”



Tom met his eyes. “There are a lot of places out here to hide a body, Benny.”



There was nothing Benny wanted to say to that. On some superstitious level, he felt that to respond to it would be to increase the chances that it might be possible, and he could not allow that thought to take hold in either his heart or head. Nix’s notebook was still in his back pocket, and he touched it like it was a talisman, to ward off any evil possibility.



His throat was so dry that his voice was a dusty croak. “So what do we do now? What can we do?”



“If I was Charlie and I wanted to lay low … I’d either head for the trader’s compound on the eastern slopes, or …” He frowned.



“Or what?”



“Gameland.”



“Do you have any idea where the new location is?”



“No. But there’s an old fire access road that we can use to cut across country to a spot where they’d have to pass no matter where they’re going. It’s a pass through to areas that have more or less been cleared of zoms, and it’s the route all travelers take.”



As they walked, Tom said, “I never finished my story about how I found the Lost Girl. We’ll talk about it more at length later, but just in case we have to try and find Gameland, there are some things you should know. After finding the human that Lilah had killed, I was able to pick up her trail. It took about four days, but I finally tracked her to one of the mountains not too far from here. There was a ranger station up on stilts, built high on the mountain, and I climbed that and used my binoculars to scan the whole area. I guess I was up there for two or three hours when I saw her. She walked out from under some trees and stood in a clearing for a couple of minutes, eating an ear of raw corn. She was dressed like she was on the Zombie Card. Not the one you have, but the earlier one.”



“Earlier one? What do you mean? I have nearly the whole set. …”



Tom shook his head. “You don’t understand, Benny, but the Zombie Cards weren’t intended for kids to collect. That came later, when the printers wanted to make some extra ration bucks. No, the original purpose of them was so that bounty hunters could carry pictures of the dead that had been reliably sighted, so that people could reach out to arrange for closure.” Still holding Chief’s reins, Tom reached into his pack, pulled out a soft leather pouch, and handed it to Benny.



Benny opened the pouch and removed a thick stack of the cards. He began riffling through them. “I never saw most of these. And … they’re different.” The cards didn’t have the Zombie Cards logo or the sensationalist writing on the back. The images were more like the standard erosion portraits that people put up on the walls near the Red Zone. On the backs were names, probable locations, and some brief biographical information. In the lower left corner was a price—the amount of ration dollars to be paid for a confirmed closure; and in the lower right corner on some of them was a date starting with either an S, L, SU, or Q.



“S for ‘spotted,’ L is for ‘living,’ but most people use it to designate ‘loners.’ Q for ‘quieted,’” Tom said. “SU means ‘status unknown.’ Lilah’s card is in there.”



Benny shuffled through until he found the card marked with both L and SU. The picture was that of an eleven-year-old girl with wild snow-white hair, wearing ratty jeans and a bulky UCLA men’s sweatshirt. She carried the same long spear she’d held in the more recent card. The Lost Girl. Benny turned the card over and silently read the back.



This apparently uninfected girl was



spotted in the mountains by Tom



Imura. If found, please contact Tom in



Mountainside, or pass word to “George



Goldman” via the way-station networks.



She may answer to the name Lilah or



Annie. Approach with caution, she is



considered dangerous and may suffer from



post traumatic stress disorder.



“Who’s George?”



“Remember the story Sacchetto told you?”



“Right! George was the guy who stayed behind with the girls. … But I assumed he’d died.”



“After I spotted the girl, I climbed down from the guard station as fast as I could, but she was gone by the time I reached the clearing. I looked for a few more days, but found nothing. I don’t know whether she somehow spotted me and cleared out or just moved on. Next time I went out, I ran into George Goldman at the way station where we met Brother David. He was a nice guy, but he was just about used up and maybe more than a little crazy.”



“Didn’t he stay with the girls? Lilah and the baby?”



“Yes,” said Tom. “George was with them for years. They stayed at the cottage, surrounded by zombies, for almost two years. At first they had plenty of food, and George made sure the girls ate most of it. When it was about to run out completely, George made a very tough decision and went out. He locked the children in the bathroom, made sure they had the last of the food and some water. Then he imitated what Rob had done: He wrapped himself in torn strips of carpet, took the heaviest golf club he could find, and snuck out of the house. He was nearly killed a dozen times that night and the following day, but he managed to get to another farmhouse.



“The people who lived there were dead, and he had to fight his way through a few of them, but once he did, George was able to gather up a lot of food. He packed as much as he could into two big suitcases on wheels and pulled them down the road, back to the cottage. Getting through the zoms around the cottage was very hard, and it took him nearly a full day of trying one trick and then another, of running and hiding and sneaking around, before he was able to manage it. That became the pattern of their lives. About twice a month, George would go out, foraging for food, raiding all the places where people once lived, hoping to find help, hoping to find someone else alive. He didn’t see another living soul for years. Imagine that.” Tom shook his head. “Eventually George cleared out most of the zoms in the immediate area, and that allowed him a little more freedom. He would go foraging and bring back a wheelbarrow filled with books, clothes, toys—anything he could find to make the lives of the girls easier. He taught them how to read, schooled them the best he could. He wasn’t a teacher, wasn’t a scholar. He was a simple, middle-aged guy; an average and ordinary man.”



“He doesn’t sound ordinary,” Benny said. “He sounds like a hero.”



Tom smiled. “Yes, he does. I’ve heard a lot of survival stories about First Night and the times that followed, and even though a lot of people died, a lot of heroes were born. Often it was the most unlikely of people who found within themselves a spark of something greater. It was probably always there, but most people are never tested, and they go through their whole lives without ever knowing that when things are at their worst, they are at their best. George Goldman was one of those, and I doubt he would ever accept that anyone would think that he was a hero.”



“What happened to him?”



“As Lilah got older, he taught her how to take down zoms. She’s small and fast, so George taught her to come up behind them and cut their leg tendons to drop them, then spike them when they’re down. George worked it out for her, teaching her and practicing with her until she was faster than he was. He said that she had a natural talent for it.”



“That’s half cool and half sad,” Benny said. “Maybe more than half sad.”



“Yes, but it meant that she survived.”



“What about the baby?”



Tom’s face tightened. “This is where we get into the darkest part of the story. George had named the baby Annie, after his own sister who had been living in Philadelphia when the dead rose. He taught Annie the same way he taught Lilah, and the little girl grew up to be a lot like her sister. Strong, smart, and vicious when she had to be.”



They stopped for a few minutes to let the horses drink from a stream. Normally Tom would have steered well clear of the running water, but now they were forced to follow the trail. Even though the forest was quiet, Tom’s eyes never stopped roving over the terrain as they continued their hunt. The horses’ ears constantly shifted around, and both of them pranced nervously. Chief, though bigger, was more skittish, and he kept jerking his head up to look off into the woods, although each time the movement he tracked was a rabbit or a bird. Apache looked around slowly, but his whole body rippled with tension.



“Let’s keep moving,” he said. “Another ten minutes, and we’ll be able to ride again.”



Benny nodded, although again he touched Nix’s book in his pocket to ward off bad luck.



Tom picked up the thread of his story. “It was about eight years after First Night when George first found a living person. It was a man walking through the woods near where we are now. The man was dressed like a hunter and smelled like a corpse, and George nearly attacked him, thinking he was a zom.”



“The guy was wearing cadaverine?”



Tom nodded. “George followed him and watched him make a kill with a pistol, and then he knew the man was alive. For George it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt. He started yelling and ran down the hill toward the man, crying and babbling because he thought that the presence of this man meant that the long nightmare was over. The man spun and fired a shot at George, almost hitting him, but George hid behind a tree and yelled, telling him that he wasn’t a ghoul.”



Benny grunted at the word “ghoul.” It was what some of the older people called the zoms.



“The hunter, realizing that George wasn’t one of the dead, told him it was safe to come out. George ran to him and hugged him and shook his hand and—as he put it to me—‘acted like a total damn fool.’ The hunter was pleasant and kind. He gave George some food and told him that there was a whole town full of people not too far away, who were alive and thriving, and there were other towns all up and down this part of California. He offered to take him back to his own camp, saying he was part of a group of a dozen men who were clearing the zoms out of this region in order to allow people to reclaim it and rebuild.”



“But I thought—?”



“Wait, hear the rest of it. George told them about the two little girls, and the hunter got excited, saying that it was God’s own miracle that two children had survived for so long. He encouraged George to take him to where the girls were, so they could all go to the camp where it was completely safe. George agreed, of course. After all, this was the answer to years and years of prayers. They hurried through the woods to a farmhouse where George had been living with the girls for the last year. At first, the girls were terrified of the man. Lilah hadn’t seen another living adult since she was two, and Annie had never seen one. Lilah almost attacked the man, but George restrained her and took her weapons away. It took a long time to cajole and convince the girls that it was safe, and all the time the hunter sat on the floor and smiled and waited patiently, making sure to do nothing threatening.”



“He sounds like a good guy,” said Benny.



“Does he? Yes … I suppose that from this part of the story he does. Anyway, the hunter told George to gather up anything valuable and go with him to his camp. George brought the wheelbarrow filled with food, books, and other things that were useful or precious to them. It took four hours to follow the winding country roads to the camp, which had been set up in a big cornfield. The men in the camp all looked very hard, and everyone had weapons—and that much was okay, because of the nature of the world and what they were doing—but he didn’t like the way they smiled at him and his wheelbarrow or the way they looked at the girls. Even though he was delighted to see so many people, George began to get suspicious.”