Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(51)

“You say that like you know her,” Benny said. “I was square with you, now it’s your turn. Tell me about the Lost Girl. Tell me everything.”

“It’s not a nice story, Ben,” Tom said. “It’s sad and it’s scary and it’s full of bad things.”

Thunder punched the house over and over again.

“Like you said, this is the night for that kind of thing.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I guess it is.”

And he told his tale.





24


“I FIRST SAW THE LOST GIRL FIVE YEARS AGO,” TOM SAID. “ROB SACCHETTO told me his story, of course, but I didn’t make the connection between the little girl he left in the cottage and the

wild girl I saw in the Ruin. It’s hard to believe they’re the same person. Did Rob tell you about the search for the cottage?”

Benny nodded.

“There was more than one search. The first was made by the group that split off from the main rescue party that settled this town. That team never made it to the cottage. No one knows where

they ended up. Maybe they gave up the search and found some other place to live or—more likely—they ran into trouble and died out there. It’s odd. … People talk about First Night as if

it was just that one night, but when the dead rose, it took weeks for civilization to fall. There were lots of fights. Big ones with the military and smaller ones with families defending

their homes, or people grouping together to defend their neighborhoods. In the end, though, we kind of lost the fight more than the dead won it.”

“What do you mean?”

“We let fear rule us and guide us, and that’s never the way to win. Never. A long time ago a great man once said that ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ That was never truer than

during First Night. It was fear that caused people to panic and abandon defenses. It was fear that made them squabble instead of working together. It was fear that inspired them to take

actions they would never have taken if they’d given it a minute’s more cool thought.”

“Like what?”

“Like dropping bombs on the cities. Nukes and regular bombs. A lot of the big cities were destroyed; all the people killed by shock or radiation sickness. Sure, some of the zoms were killed

too, but those hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by the bombs came back as zoms. I remember one of the last news reports from Chicago, in which a reporter screamed and wept and

prayed as she described waves of radioactive zombies crawling out of the ruins of the city. They were so hot with radiation that they were killing humans long before they made physical

contact.” Tom shook his head. “It was fear that caused those bombs to be dropped.”

“That’s another thing they didn’t tell us in school.”


“They wouldn’t,” said Tom. “Trust me, though, fear is the code we live by here in town, and in the other towns scattered along this mountain range. I suspect that if there are other

towns still surviving elsewhere in the country or the world, then fear is what they live by too.”

“Not everyone’s afraid, though. …”

“No. You’re right. … There are some people who don’t let fear rule their actions, and I suspect it’ll be your generation that turns things around. Most of the people my age or older are

lost in fear, and they’ll never find their way back. But you and your friends, especially those young enough to not remember First Night … You’re the ones who will choose whether to live

in fear or not.”

“Last week, when you said that people in town didn’t trust anything out in the Ruin, that they think everything’s diseased …”

Tom nodded. “You’re on the right track. We—our town—could reclaim most of central California. Not Los Angeles, of course; that’s lost for good. But we could retake hundreds of thousands

of square miles of farmland. We could reclaim whole towns. Like that town where Harold Simmons lived. Don’t you think three or four hundred armed people could retake that town?”

“We wouldn’t need anywhere near that many. Fifty people in carpet coats, with rifles, axes, and swords could do it. It isn’t a big town.”

“Right. And there are a dozen towns within a day’s walk from here. Hundreds just a few days away, with farmable land where we could grow more food than we could eat. No one would go

hungry.”

Benny looked at the muffin he held between his fingers, and it struck him that if Nix and her mother were as poor as everyone said they were, then just the ingredients for the muffins must

have cut into their own rations. He set the muffin down.

His brother leaned his forearms on the table and said quietly, “Let me tell you a secret, Benny. The first secret you and I will share, okay?”

Benny nodded.

“I’ll never let Jessie and Nix Riley go hungry. Haven’t you noticed that we don’t have meat on our table seven days a week, even though we can afford it?”

Another nod.

“That’s so there’s meat on their table. Nix doesn’t know, and you have to swear to me that you’ll never tell her.”