Dust & Decay (Rot & Ruin, #2)(9)

“Lilah!” growled Tom.

“Look at his shoulder! He’s been bitten,” she snapped back.

“No …,” Benny croaked. “No!” cried Nix.

Tom handed Mrs. Houser off to Captain Strunk and two other men from the town watch. They gagged and bound her with practiced ease, though their faces were twisted into masks of fear and revulsion. Tom moved to Lilah’s side and touched the arm holding the dagger.

“No,” he said more gently, looking from her to Benny and back. “If he’s bitten, then it’s mine to deal with. It’s a family thing.”

“I didn’t get bitten,” Benny insisted, but no one seemed to be paying attention to him.

Lilah had eyes the color of honey, but at that moment Benny thought they looked as cold as ice. There was no trace of compassion or humanity on her face. All he could see was the hunter, the loner. The legendary Lost Girl who had killed humans as well as zoms in the Rot and Ruin.

The knife felt like a branding iron against his skin.

Then it was gone, and she stepped back.

“Be sure,” she said to Tom. “Or I will.”

Benny sagged back against the grass, more exhausted by the last few seconds than by the fight with the zoms.

Nix edged past Lilah, her eyes hooded and angry, and she moved to stand between them. Morgie crept closer until he was shoulder to shoulder with Nix; after a slight hesitation, so did Chong. Their bodies formed a screen. Lilah looked at them with a calculating stare, as if she was sizing them up and deciding how much—or how little—effort it would take to get past them to Benny.

Benny got shakily to his feet.

“I didn’t get bit,” he yelled. To prove it he pulled off his shirt and flung it on the grass at Lilah’s feet. Anger was rising in him now, replacing his terror inch by inch. “See?”

“I see,” was all Lilah said. She lowered her knife and turned away. Everyone watched as she walked over to the porch, mounted the steps, and without a pause drove the tip of the blade into the back of Big Zak’s skull. Unlike Benny, she did not miss.

“Holy crap,” said Morgie.

“Uh-huh,” breathed Chong, pale and shaken.

Tom bent and picked up Benny’s shirt, examined the bite hole on the shoulder, and handed it back to him. “You sure you’re okay?”


Benny looked over to the porch, where Big Zak lay sprawled a few feet from his son. From the thing that had once been a boy the same age as Benny. A friend once. A victim recently.

“I said I wasn’t bitten,” Benny said, shaking his head slowly as he turned away, “but I’m a billion miles from okay.”

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Before First Night the United States Census Bureau estimated that there were 6,922,000,000 people alive on planet Earth.





Tom said that news reports claimed that more than two billion people died in the first two days after First Night.





By the time the Internet went down, the estimates of the global death toll were at four billion and climbing.





People in town believe that following First Night more than six billion people died. Most people think the whole rest of the world is dead.





We know that the total population of the nine towns here in central California is 28,261 as of last New Year’s census.





9


THEY ALL SAT ON THE PICNIC TABLE IN BENNY’S YARD, DRINKING COLD TEA and eating enormous slices of apple pie with raisins and walnuts in it. The sun was a golden ball in a flawless blue sky, and birds chattered in the trees. However, this rampant beauty did nothing to lighten the mood of sadness and horror that hovered like fog around them.



Lilah sat apart, cross-legged on the grass. She had not spoken a single word since the confrontation in Zak’s yard. No one had, except for some ordinary comments mostly related to the serving and eating of Tom’s apple pie. Benny nibbled at his, but he had no appetite. Neither did Nix, though she poked angrily at the dessert until it was a mangled beige lump of goo on her plate. Chong and Morgie ate theirs, though Chong seemed to be eating on autopilot, his eyes focused on Lilah’s stern but beautiful profile.

Tom sat on a tree stump, looking angry and unhappy.

“What happened back there?” Benny finally asked. “With Danny and Zak … and …”

Tom sighed and ran his hands over his face. “It was Grandpa Houser. Looks like he died sitting on the living room couch, reading the Town Pump. Michelle probably thought he was asleep. Maybe she tried to shake him awake and he reanimated and bit her. Looks like she ran out of the house to get away. Or maybe to get help. The twins said that they were out with their dad all morning, so maybe Michelle went to get Zak or Big Zak to help her. Not sure what happened next. There’s a lot of blood in the kitchen, so it looked like maybe Grandpa attacked them when they came back in. Or maybe Michelle was hurt worse than she thought. Zak must have been bitten there and ran home. I looked inside their house too. There was a lot of blood in the dining room, so Zak must have bled out there, and when he reanimated …”

“… he attacked his dad,” Benny said.

Tom nodded.

Benny thought about mentioning his suspicions that Big Zak had been knocking Zak around, but there didn’t seem much point to it now. Even so, an ugly thought was forming in his mind. What if Zak had been bitten—by Mrs. Houser or Grandpa Houser—and, knowing that he was infected, had gone home to make sure that was where he’d be when he died and reanimated? Would Zak have done that as a twisted way to pay back the abuse?