Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(39)

it. The woman must have been bitten when we were breaking through the crowds of zombies. None of us noticed.”

“What happened?”

“Well, the infection had already taken hold. We missed it because she was already sweating and moaning from the hard delivery, and we still didn’t understand what we were up against. When

they started cleaning her up, she just … died. She fell back against the bed and let out this long, sputtering exhale. It was horrible to hear. It was a series of clicks in the throat as

that last breath came out of her. They call that sound a death rattle, but that’s too ordinary a phrase for the sound that I heard. It sounded more like fingernails scraping on a hardwood

floor, like her spirit was clawing at life, trying to stay in her body.”

Benny felt the skin of his arms rise with ripples of goose flesh.

“By that time I’d seen hundreds of people die and had seen thousands of zombies … but that death was the worst,” said the artist. “And after all these years it’s still the worst. That

poor woman had fought her way out of Los Angeles, had saved her daughter and struggled to survive long enough to bring her baby into the world, and when she’d succeeded—when she was safe—

death just dragged her away.”

He abruptly stood and walked over to the counter, snatched up the bottle, and stared at it. He set it down again, thumping the heavy glass against the countertop.

“That baby?” Benny asked tentatively. “Did she live? And … is she the girl on the card? Is she the Lost Girl?”

Sacchetto turned, surprised. “No. She was too young. She’d be only fourteen now.”

“Then I don’t understand. …”

“It was her sister,” said the artist. “The little girl who was on the run with her mother. Lilah.”

“Lilah,” Benny echoed. The name was a cool breeze in the middle of the heat of Sacchetto’s terrible story.

“She watched her sister being born, and she watched her mother die. Poor little kid. She was only two, so all the screaming and the blood must have hit her really hard. Before, while we

were still running, while I was carrying her, she was talking. Some words, but mostly nonsense stuff. Kid stuff. After that last breath … the little girl screamed for five minutes. She

screamed herself raw, and then she stopped talking.”

“For how long?”

The artist looked away again.

“I don’t know. The rest of that night is kind of a blur. The dead surrounded the place. I think they were drawn to the cottage because of the screams. And after … by the smell of blood.”

“What happened to the mother?”

Sacchetto still didn’t meet his eyes. “She woke up, of course. She woke up, and for an insane moment we thought that she was still alive, you know? That she hadn’t died, that we were

wrong about it.” He laughed a short, ugly laugh. “She bit one of the men. He was bent forward, trying to talk to her, trying to reach her … and she craned her neck forward and bit him.

Then we knew.”

“What did you do?”

“What we had to do.” He came slowly back to the table and sat down. “We still had our weapons. The sticks, the rocks, the empty guns. We …”

He could not say it, and Benny did not need it said. They sat together for a while, listening to the wind-up clock on the wall chip seconds off the day.

“Near dawn,” the artist said at length, “one of the others said that he was going to try and make a break for it. He said that the creatures outside were slow and stupid. He was a big

guy, he’d played football in high school and was in really good shape. He said that he was going to break through their lines and find some help. Everyone tried to talk him out of it, but

not as hard as we could have. It was the only plan anyone had. In the end, we all went to the living room and banged on the doors and walls, yelling real loud. The zombies came shuffling

from all sides of the house. I don’t know how many. Fifty? A hundred? When the back was mostly clear, the young guy went out through the back door at a dead run. He was fast, too. I closed

the door and looked through the crack and watched him in the light of the false dawn as he knocked the zombies away and rushed into the darkness.”

“What happened to him?”

“What do you think?” Sacchetto snapped, then softened his tone. “There was nowhere to run to. We never saw him again.”

“Oh.”


“It was almost a full day later when another one of us tried it. A small guy who used to manage a Starbucks in Burbank. He made a torch out of a table leg and some sheets that he’d soaked

in alcohol. He didn’t run fast enough, though. And that myth about the zombies being afraid of fire? That’s stupid. They can’t think or feel. They’re not afraid of anything. They

surrounded him. Before he fell, the little guy must have set fire to a dozen of them. But the others got him.”

Benny looked down at the card that lay on the table before him. “You said that seven of you made it to the cottage.”

“Six adults, plus the little girl. And the baby made eight. The mother … died. So did the guy she bit. And you know what’s really sad? I never learned either of their names. The little