Flesh-&-Bone(106)

“No way.”

“Yes. He was going to marry my mom, but my mom died. He would have stayed in town and raised you and maybe helped raise me, but I wanted to leave. He knew—knew—that no matter what happened, even if he tried to stop me, I would leave town. So he created our big Road Trip so he could watch over me. For my mom, maybe. And because you were in love with me. Benny—you left town because of me, and Tom left town because of you and me . . . and now Tom’s dead. If we don’t find that jet and find something real, a place that shows that we’re all still alive, then Tom will have died for nothing. And it will be all my fault.”

Benny stared into her eyes, and now he understood.

The size of it, the jagged edges of it, the skewed and destructive logic of it.

That knowledge gouged out a massive hole in his chest.

“Nix,” Benny said gently, “you can’t do this to yourself.”

“It’s true!”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t. Listen to me. Tom didn’t leave Mountainside because of you. Or me. He left because your mom wasn’t there anymore, and he couldn’t stand that. He left because he wanted to find the same kind of place you want to find. A place where people are alive. He wanted that for me and for you and for himself. There was no chance in hell that Tom wouldn’t leave town. Remember what he said after Danny Houser’s funeral? He said, ‘I can’t stand this damn town anymore.’ He said that, and he moved up the time we were scheduled to leave. Tom needed to escape that town.”

“But he died!”

Benny bent forward and pressed his forehead against Nix’s. “He died, Nix, but you didn’t kill him and neither did I. Even though I think I did almost every night. I think about all the things I’ve done wrong and how if I’d done this or done that, you and I would never have wound up at Gameland. And yeah, I can make myself crazy too. But we didn’t kill Tom. An evil man did that. Preacher Jack shot Tom in the back and that is the truth.”

Nix sniffed but said nothing.

“Nix . . . what would Tom tell us if he could hear this conversation?”

She shook her head.

“No . . . tell me,” Benny insisted.

She sat back and wiped at her eyes. “He—he’d say what you just said. That Preacher Jack . . . ”

“Right. Preacher Jack. An evil man who did an evil thing.”

Nix looked at the broken windows. “And now we have Saint John and Mother Rose. Is that all there is, Benny? Just corruption and evil?”

Fifty conciliatory lies rose to Benny’s lips. But this was not the time to placate Nix.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

Panic flared in her eyes, but he smiled.

“I don’t know what’s out here,” Benny said, “but I can’t believe that there’s nothing left worth finding. I won’t believe it. I don’t. We met Eve, Nix. She has a family.”

“Who tried to kill us.”

“No. I don’t see it that way, not anymore. Think about it. They were out of their minds worrying about Eve, and then they find her with us. They don’t know us from a can of paint, and I think it’s pretty clear that they’re on the run. They see us and they’re terrified that we’re reapers. In their places we might have made the same mistake. But look at it another way—they’re running from evil. They aren’t the reapers. They were willing to fight and kill to protect their little girl. What does that tell you? And there’s all that talk about Sanctuary. Despite what Mother Rose and those other freak jobs said, it doesn’t exactly sound like an abode of evil, does it?”

“No,” she admitted hesitantly.

“No,” he agreed.

“And the people who flew this plane. They were scientists working to understand the plague and maybe cure it. Again, not the definition of evil.”

“No.”

“The American Nation,” Benny said, testing the name and nodding approval. “I say we gather up some of these papers, check out the rest of the plane, then get out of here and find Lilah and Chong.”

“And then what?”

“I’m working on that,” he admitted.

They looked at each other for a long moment.

“I do love you, Benny,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

“Even though I’m a nut?”