Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(53)

“Yeah,” he said, “okay.”

“Good. Now we get to what you want to hear, because the story of Nix’s family is tied to the Lost Girl.”

“Wait!” said Benny, “In the story the artist guy told me, there was a woman who had a baby. Was that baby Nix?”

Tom sat back and cocked his head to one side. “How long ago was First Night?”

“Almost fourteen years ago and … oh. Right. Nix will be fifteen in a couple of months. Can’t be her.”

“My brother, the math genius.”

“Sorry.”

“There is a connection, though, but it’s not a blood link, not a family tie,” Tom said. “I was doing the closure job for Jessie Riley. Rob had done erosion portraits of Mike Riley and

the boys, Greg and Danny, and Jessie said that when she fled her house, she’d slammed the door behind her. Very few zoms can turn doorknobs, and most of them don’t have the coordination to

climb out of a window. So unless someone else opened the door, there was a good chance they’d still be there.”

“How long ago was this?”

“About five years ago. Remember the first time I left you with Fran and Randy Kirsch? I left on a Sunday, as I remember, heading northeast. There were a lot more zoms roaming free back

then, and the farther I went from Mountainside, the more of them I saw. Most of them were singles, walking along, following some movement—a deer, a rabbit, whatever—but there were groups

of them, too. Biggest group I saw was about fifty, standing in the middle of an intersection. Probably they’d come down different roads and met at the intersection and had nowhere else to

go. Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But that’s what happens if there’s nothing for them to hunt and nothing to attract them. They just stop.”

“What about the noms?”

“Good question and I don’t have a good answer. They’re different. The nomads keep wandering and never seem to stop, but they’re rare. Maybe one out of every couple thousand will roam.”

“I thought all zoms were the same,” said Benny, unnerved by Tom’s story.

“Not all of anything is the same. There are always differences, always changes.”

“Zombie evolution?” Benny joked, but Tom shrugged.

“Maybe. We don’t know.”

“How can we not know?”

“Benny … it’s not like anyone’s made a formal scientific study of zombies. Get real. Who would do that? How would they do it? Mind you, I think they should do it, but as I already said,

the people around here don’t spend much active thought on what happens beyond the fence line. Any information on differences in zombies comes from the kind of people who go out into the

Ruin. Bounty hunters, the way-station monks, the traders who go from town to town. A few others. And the loners.”

“Loners?”

“There are people who live out in the Ruin. They’re individuals who want to be alone and would rather deal with the threat of the zoms than rejoin society.”

“Why?”

“That’s hard to answer, because they’re not a ‘type,’ if you know what I mean. Each one of them has their own reasons. I know some of them. A few are friends. Some never make contact

with anyone with a pulse.” He inhaled through his nose. “And a few of them are very bad people. I know of some that I wouldn’t come within fifty yards of without a weapon in my hand.”

“Why?”

“Because some of them will kill anyone they meet. Human or zom, they don’t care. They’ve staked out a spot, and I guess it’s their version of paradise, or maybe their corner of hell, and

it’s more than your life’s worth to trespass.”

“How can you tell what are the no-trespass zones?”

“Smart question. The borders are usually marked. Staked out, so to speak. It’s very tribal. I know of a family, living high in the hills, who have driven a line of stakes into the ground

all around their place and topped each stake with a head.”

“Human heads or zoms?”

“After the crows have been at them, it’s hard to say, but I wouldn’t want to bet a torn ration dollar that they only kill zoms.”

“Is that how the Lost Girl lives?”

Tom didn’t answer immediately, but instead shifted back to his narrative. “I kept moving, following an old travel map that Jessie had marked for me. By nightfall on the third day, I

reached the town where the Rileys lived. The place had been hit hard by First Night and what happened after. There was a big road—an interstate highway that ran past it—and it was choked

with rusted vehicles. Zoms had been smashed by cars and trucks; run over by people trying to flee or by people who were trying to kill zoms. Even after all that time, you could see where

cars skidded away from an impact with a zom and went off the road, or collided with other cars. I guess once a few accidents blocked the road, the cars behind them got jammed up and then the

zoms must have closed in and attacked. It was strange, too, because there were clear signs that some of the zoms used stones and heavy sticks to smash through the windows.”

“Zoms using tools?”