Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(72)

rose. He taught Annie the same way he taught Lilah, and the little girl grew up to be a lot like her sister. Strong, smart, and vicious when she had to be.”


They stopped for a few minutes to let the horses drink from a stream. Normally Tom would have steered well clear of the running water, but now they were forced to follow the trail. Even

though the forest was quiet, Tom’s eyes never stopped roving over the terrain as they continued their hunt. The horses’ ears constantly shifted around, and both of them pranced nervously.

Chief, though bigger, was more skittish, and he kept jerking his head up to look off into the woods, although each time the movement he tracked was a rabbit or a bird. Apache looked around

slowly, but his whole body rippled with tension.

“Let’s keep moving,” he said. “Another ten minutes, and we’ll be able to ride again.”

Benny nodded, although again he touched Nix’s book in his pocket to ward off bad luck.

Tom picked up the thread of his story. “It was about eight years after First Night when George first found a living person. It was a man walking through the woods near where we are now. The

man was dressed like a hunter and smelled like a corpse, and George nearly attacked him, thinking he was a zom.”

“The guy was wearing cadaverine?”

Tom nodded. “George followed him and watched him make a kill with a pistol, and then he knew the man was alive. For George it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt. He started yelling and

ran down the hill toward the man, crying and babbling because he thought that the presence of this man meant that the long nightmare was over. The man spun and fired a shot at George, almost

hitting him, but George hid behind a tree and yelled, telling him that he wasn’t a ghoul.”

Benny grunted at the word “ghoul.” It was what some of the older people called the zoms.

“The hunter, realizing that George wasn’t one of the dead, told him it was safe to come out. George ran to him and hugged him and shook his hand and—as he put it to me—‘acted like a

total damn fool.’ The hunter was pleasant and kind. He gave George some food and told him that there was a whole town full of people not too far away, who were alive and thriving, and there

were other towns all up and down this part of California. He offered to take him back to his own camp, saying he was part of a group of a dozen men who were clearing the zoms out of this

region in order to allow people to reclaim it and rebuild.”

“But I thought—?”

“Wait, hear the rest of it. George told them about the two little girls, and the hunter got excited, saying that it was God’s own miracle that two children had survived for so long. He

encouraged George to take him to where the girls were, so they could all go to the camp where it was completely safe. George agreed, of course. After all, this was the answer to years and

years of prayers. They hurried through the woods to a farmhouse where George had been living with the girls for the last year. At first, the girls were terrified of the man. Lilah hadn’t

seen another living adult since she was two, and Annie had never seen one. Lilah almost attacked the man, but George restrained her and took her weapons away. It took a long time to cajole

and convince the girls that it was safe, and all the time the hunter sat on the floor and smiled and waited patiently, making sure to do nothing threatening.”

“He sounds like a good guy,” said Benny.

“Does he? Yes … I suppose that from this part of the story he does. Anyway, the hunter told George to gather up anything valuable and go with him to his camp. George brought the

wheelbarrow filled with food, books, and other things that were useful or precious to them. It took four hours to follow the winding country roads to the camp, which had been set up in a big

cornfield. The men in the camp all looked very hard, and everyone had weapons—and that much was okay, because of the nature of the world and what they were doing—but he didn’t like the

way they smiled at him and his wheelbarrow or the way they looked at the girls. Even though he was delighted to see so many people, George began to get suspicious.”

“Wait. Were these guys bounty hunters?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?” Benny asked with a sinking feeling.

“Things went wrong pretty much right away. The hunter made some remark about the girls looking tough, and when George explained they had both hunted and killed zoms, the hunter really

perked up. He said that the girls were worth their weight in gold for ‘the games,’ and when George turned to him to ask what that remark meant, someone hit him from behind. George woke up

hours later, but the cornfield was empty and everyone was gone. He had no weapons or food and no idea what had happened to the girls. He searched every inch of that field and the woods

beyond, but the girls were gone.

“He found horse tracks and footprints, but the best he could determine was that when the camp broke up, the men went in different directions. He said he went a little insane, and I can’t

blame him. His whole life had been built around protecting those girls, and at the moment when he thought that they were really and truly saved from the monsters, it was people who took them

away. It turned his whole world inside out. George staggered away and finally found a deserted house where he found some old cans of food. At first light he started searching for the girls.