Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(70)

hunter was tracking him.”

“Are you sure he doesn’t?” Benny said, and for a moment Tom’s smile flickered.

Tom looked at his brother for a second, pursed his lips, and then turned in a slow circle, re-examining the trails. “We have three possible routes through these hills that are safe. And by

that I mean that the zoms have been pretty well cleared out. This pass has become a kind of trade route, and the armed guards the traders use usually go through here and chop down any of the

dead they find. They’re quiet about it, too, so as not to draw more zoms into the area. Follow me?”

Benny nodded.

“So the footprints we’re seeing here are almost certainly human. Question is whether these are older prints that were mostly, but not entirely, erased by runoff, or prints left by men

moving fast but not carrying heavy loads. The last of the runoff blurred the edges and in this area here, the topsoil is thinner, because we’re coming to some rocky areas.”


“Okay, but if people came through here recently, then it has to be Charlie and the Hammer, right?”

Tom didn’t answer right away. “What bothers me most about it is that I’m not seeing small footprints.”

“Nix’s?”

He nodded. “We saw her prints earlier, but I haven’t seen one in the last hour. Not one.”

“What if one of them’s carrying her?”

Tom considered. “If the ground was softer, we could make that call, because one of the male footprints would be deeper. You might be right, but I’m not sure, because the footprints I’m

seeing here look like they’re from several different pairs of shoes.”

“More than Charlie and the Hammer?”

“Yes.”

“The Mekong brothers?”

“Could be them, which means we’re hunting four men rather than two.” Tom started to say something else, but stopped himself. Benny caught it, though.

“What?”

“There are a couple of other options, Benny, and we have to be ready for them.”

“What are they?”

“The option I like is that Nix somehow escaped. If that’s the case, her trail could have split off at any time. If she’s free, let’s hope she continues to head for high ground instead of

trying to go back to town.”

“Because there aren’t as many zoms high up, right?”

“That, and higher up, there’s always the chance of finding food and shelter. There are some monks out here. If she runs into one of them, she’ll be fine. They’ll take care of her and get

word to me.”

“What’s the other option? The one you don’t like.”

Tom met his eyes. “There are a lot of places out here to hide a body, Benny.”

There was nothing Benny wanted to say to that. On some superstitious level, he felt that to respond to it would be to increase the chances that it might be possible, and he could not allow

that thought to take hold in either his heart or head. Nix’s notebook was still in his back pocket, and he touched it like it was a talisman, to ward off any evil possibility.

His throat was so dry that his voice was a dusty croak. “So what do we do now? What can we do?”

“If I was Charlie and I wanted to lay low … I’d either head for the trader’s compound on the eastern slopes, or …” He frowned.

“Or what?”

“Gameland.”

“Do you have any idea where the new location is?”

“No. But there’s an old fire access road that we can use to cut across country to a spot where they’d have to pass no matter where they’re going. It’s a pass through to areas that have

more or less been cleared of zoms, and it’s the route all travelers take.”

As they walked, Tom said, “I never finished my story about how I found the Lost Girl. We’ll talk about it more at length later, but just in case we have to try and find Gameland, there are

some things you should know. After finding the human that Lilah had killed, I was able to pick up her trail. It took about four days, but I finally tracked her to one of the mountains not

too far from here. There was a ranger station up on stilts, built high on the mountain, and I climbed that and used my binoculars to scan the whole area. I guess I was up there for two or

three hours when I saw her. She walked out from under some trees and stood in a clearing for a couple of minutes, eating an ear of raw corn. She was dressed like she was on the Zombie Card.

Not the one you have, but the earlier one.”

“Earlier one? What do you mean? I have nearly the whole set. …”

Tom shook his head. “You don’t understand, Benny, but the Zombie Cards weren’t intended for kids to collect. That came later, when the printers wanted to make some extra ration bucks. No,

the original purpose of them was so that bounty hunters could carry pictures of the dead that had been reliably sighted, so that people could reach out to arrange for closure.” Still

holding Chief’s reins, Tom reached into his pack, pulled out a soft leather pouch, and handed it to Benny.

Benny opened the pouch and removed a thick stack of the cards. He began riffling through them. “I never saw most of these. And … they’re different.” The cards didn’t have the Zombie