Flesh-&-Bone(21)

14

FOR LILAH, READING TRACKS ON THE GROUND WAS AS EASY AS READING words on a page. Her sharp eyes missed nothing, and as she moved deeper into the desert forest, she began cataloging the marks she found. Eve’s were easy to spot, and they wandered out of the east along a crooked path.

As for the rest, Lilah slowed from a run to a walk as she studied them.

The forest was denser than she’d expected. She knelt and pawed at the sandy soil and quickly found darker, wetter soil beneath. She sniffed it.

There was water here. An underground stream or some other source beyond what the wind towers pulled in. Eve had mentioned a creek; and the footprints seemed to be coming from the densest part of the forest. That made sense. People tended to camp near water. Especially in a climate like this.

Lilah bent forward onto all fours and studied the ground. In some spots, like this one, there were many footprints, and they varied. Several men, a few women. From the spacing and gait, it was clear that these were humans. Most of the shoes, even the crudely made ones, were in good repair, and there was none of the aimless shambling typical of zoms.

Not that she didn’t find signs of wandering zoms. They were out here too.

Lilah straightened, eyes alert.

So far they had seen no zoms on this side of the ravine, but the footprints didn’t lie.

She turned and glanced back the way she’d come as if she could see little Eve sitting there with Nix and the others. The girl must be charmed, she thought, to have made it safely from where her parents were camped to where Benny had rescued her. She had no bites on her, no marks to indicate that zoms had tried to hurt her.

That was a great relief to Lilah, one she had not shared with Chong. If Eve had been bitten . . .

If she was infected and needed to be quieted . . .

Lilah did not know if she could do that.

Not to a little girl who looked so much like Annie.

Not again.

She adjusted her grip on the spear and moved on.

A few minutes later she stopped again and knelt down by a different set of tracks. Not human footprints, and not the scuffling marks of zoms. No, these were straight lines of serrated tracks, like wheel marks.

But . . . wheels belonging to what? If they were made by a cart or wagon, then there was no sign of what pulled it.

She cleared away some loose debris and studied the patterns. The impressions were cut deep into the ground. Whatever made them was heavy, and it had four wheels. She thought of the many abandoned cars and trucks she’d seen over the years, and these marks didn’t fit. For one thing, the wheels were too close together.

It was a mystery.

Lilah moved on.

The ground became increasingly moist. Soon she smelled water on the breeze, and then within a few minutes she heard the soft burble of a stream. The footprints and the wheel marks all came from that way.

Five minutes later Lilah stepped out onto the banks of a narrow, shallow stream that ran out of the northeast and jagged off due south. The water was clear and clean, with the kind of mineral taste that confirmed her suspicion that the source was an underground river. She drank handfuls of it and refilled her canteen.

Despite the potential for zoms and the mystery of the tracks, Lilah felt relaxed, content in her skills and in her solitude. She welcomed any opportunity to be alone. Being alone was when she felt most like herself. She felt powerful and normal. For months now, Lilah had felt anything but normal. Except when she went ahead to scout out a path for Nix, Benny, and Chong, she was seldom alone. That bothered her.

Benny and Nix often said things like, “It must be great not to be all alone anymore.” And, “You’ll never have to be alone again.”

On a practical level, Lilah could understand that they meant well. That they thought she had been rescued from loneliness. To a degree, she had.

Mostly, though, the ties between her and her new friends, the responsibility of protecting them, caring for them, felt like tethers holding her down. She did not want to care for anyone. The last person she’d cared for was Annie.

She knew that she was not like other people. Not like Benny, Nix, or Chong, even though they were all her friends. Their life experience was completely alien to her, as hers was no doubt bizarre to them.

Lilah had been two years old on First Night. Her mother was pregnant with Annie, and they were caught up in the mad exodus from Los Angeles as the dead rose. A handful of survivors managed to find a safe house hundreds of miles from the city, but that house was soon under siege by zombies. None of the other survivors realized that the pregnant woman had been bitten. Just as her mother gave birth to Annie, the infection took her and she died, only to reanimate moments later as a monster.