Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(98)

Lilah’s eyes twinkled. “Yes. Very funny. Your faces!” She laughed, and the sound of it drew another series of long moans from the dead.

“What is this place?” Nix demanded.

Benny told her. Lilah listened and nodded, and Nix looked horrified. Lilah pointed out a few trees where the ropes had been cut and the zoms taken.

“God …,” Nix said, “Charlie’s harvesting them.”

“Sometimes,” Lilah said, “I come here. Cut some loose. Let them go.”

“Why?”

“I do it when I think Charlie is coming.”

“An ambush. Sweet,” Benny said with a grin. “Sick and twisted … but sweet. Oh, and … sorry for calling you a bitch.”

She shrugged. “Been called worse. Don’t care much.”

Nix could not take her eyes off of the legions of living dead. “How many of them are in here?”

Lilah considered, shrugged. “Three thousand. More.”

“It’s horrible.”

Lilah shrugged again and turned to Benny. “You think it’s horrible?”

“I’m not sure what I think about it,” he said.

To Nix, Lilah said, “Two times I came here and let them go. Cut all ropes.”

“Why?”

“To free them. They followed me to the field. By the water.”

“Geez,” Benny said, “those were the zoms we ran into by Coldwater Creek. You let them go?”

Lilah nodded. “Sometimes … seeing them. Tied. Makes me sad. I untie and lead them away.”

“You lead them? How do you do that without getting chomped?” Benny asked.

She looked at him as if he was a moron. “They’re slow. I’m not slow.” Then she pinched the skin of her forearm. “They follow flesh.”

Benny swallowed hard, trying to imagine a horde of zombies, shambling along after this beautiful and crazy Lost Girl.

Lilah looked up through a small opening in the canopy of leaves at the position of the sun. “Time to go.”


With that, she turned and walked deeper into the Hungry Forest. Each zombie she passed craned its neck and tried to bite her, but the Lost Girl did not appear to notice. Or care.

Benny and Nix lingered a moment longer, caught up in all of the different ways in which this place was wrong. Whether the zoms were tied to the trees or taken for bounties or freed to

wander, the horror of it was overwhelming.

The zombies closest to them moaned incessantly, biting the air, as if aching to feed on just the smell of living flesh.

“Your girlfriend is deranged,” said Nix.

“She’s not my girlfriend, thank you very much. And I believe Tom said the expression was ‘touched by God.’”

“She’s touched all right. Come on, this place is way beyond creepy. Let’s get out of here, Benny,” Nix said. “Right now.”

“With you on that,” he agreed, but as they hurried along the path to catch up, Benny kept looking back, compelled to lock this image in his mind. There was something about it that was

starting to shove ideas around in his head. Weird and wicked ideas.

Nix caught the look on his face. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he lied. The thoughts running through his head were not thoughts he wanted to share with her. Not yet.





46


THEY CAME TO A SHELTERED CLEARING BY A ROCK CLIFF, THROUGH WHICH a million years of erosion had cut a waterfall that fed all the streams that ran down to Coldwater Creek. It was a strange

place. The woods were overgrown with vines and scrub pines, the ground was covered with a thick carpet of pine needles. At the base of the cliff was a pool of threshing water that looked as

clear as glass. However, all around the clearing, there were dead animals in various stages of decomposition. The stink was ungodly, and the air was thick with flies.

Nix gagged, and Benny dug the bottle of mint paste from his pocket, showing her how to dab it below her nose to kill the smell. As he did so, he marveled at the restraint with which she’d

managed to put up with his smell since last night. He realized that his clothes were probably still ripe with the stench of cadaverine.

Lilah stood at the point where the path reached the clearing.

“Here,” she said, pointing to the waterfall.

“What, through there?” Benny asked.

She nodded, then pointed to the open ground in front of them. “Feet where my feet go.”

Benny didn’t immediately understand what she meant, and when she set off across the clearing in a weird zigzag pattern, he started walking straight toward the cool water. Lilah turned

abruptly. “Stop!”

She hurried back, following the same twisted route.

“Stupid?” she asked harshly, then knelt in front of him and dug her fingers under the covering of pine needles and lifted a section of ground that proved to be a very thin, woven screen

with needles and other debris cleverly sewn onto it. Beneath the screen was a hole that was filled with the pointed ends of wickedly sharp sticks.

“Oh my God!” Benny said.

Nix gestured to the clearing. “Is the whole clearing like that?”

“Yes,” said Lilah in her graveyard whisper of a voice. “So, watch my feet. Where I walk only. Yes?”