Riot said, “See, I was right about you, Benny. You are smarter than you look.”
It was a lame joke, but it broke the bubble of tension that had been expanding to crowd the moment.
“I’m sorry,” Nix said. “I needed to say that much. I really am.”
Benny kissed her.
Nix kissed him back.
Riot made gagging sounds. “Y’all better get a room or name the baby after me.”
Benny made a covert and very rude gesture.
Then he leaned back to catch his breath. “Listen,” he said, “I need to tell you a bunch of things, but first I want to hear everything about yesterday. All I really heard, Nix, was that you and Lilah got jumped by some zoms….”
Nix told him the full story. Benny’s heart sank.
“Fast zoms? Four of them?”
“Three fast ones and one that might not have been,” corrected Nix.
“Even so,” said Riot, “that’s crooked math. Y’all were lucky to walk out of there with skin still on your bones.”
“Tell me about it,” Nix said, rolling her eyes.
“What was that bit with the red powder?” asked Benny.
“I don’t know,” Nix admitted. “I showed Joe and he kind of freaked. I haven’t seen him since.”
“Wonder what it is,” said Riot.
“Listen,” Benny said, changing the subject. “I had a crazy day too. I need to tell you guys, and then I need your help with something. I’d ask Joe, but nobody knows where he is and we’re running out of time. So… I need both of you to help me do something incredibly dangerous and incredibly stupid.”
“Dangerous and stupid?” asked Nix, and her pretty face wore its first smile in over a day. “Sounds like one of your plans.”
“I’m on the hook already,” said Riot. “I haven’t done anything dangerous or stupid in weeks. I’m about due.”
He explained everything that had happened yesterday. The story of the fight with the reaper wiped the smiles away. The account of the Teambook raised their eyebrows. The tally of the reaper forces stole the color from their faces. But the thing that filled their eyes with fear was when Benny explained where he had seen Sergeant Ortega.
“You want us to go where?” demanded Riot. “You’re touched in the head, boy.”
“You’re absolutely out of your mind,” said Nix. “I mean seriously, Benny, you’re deranged.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “But are you in?”
Nix and Riot stared at him and then at each other, and then at him again.
“We’re in,” said Nix.
CHAPTER 38
Captain Strunk sat on an overturned bucket, resting heavily with his forearms on his knees. The trade wagon stood ten feet away. On the ground, covered with pieces of canvas, lay four bodies. Fifty feet away, just inside the fence line, lay three more. All of them had been quieted.
Two figures stood in front of him. A short man and a tall boy.
The man was Deputy Gorman, Strunk’s second in command.
The boy was Morgie Mitchell.
On the ground between Morgie and Captain Strunk was a length of wood. A bokken. Smeared with blood, broken in two.
“I checked him, Cap,” said Gorman. “No bites, no scratches.”
Strunk nodded.
“I told you that I wasn’t hurt,” said Morgie. “You could have taken my word for it.”
“You fought four zoms with a stick, kid,” said Strunk. “I wouldn’t take anyone’s word that they did that without a scratch.”
Morgie said nothing.
“Tom taught you all those moves?”
Morgie nodded.
“You ever fight a zom before?”
“No.”
“You ever fight anyone before?”
Morgie shrugged. “Nothing serious.”
In his mind, though, he remembered his last act of violence. No one had been physically hurt, but it had been a terrible moment. Shoving Benny and knocking him down, right there in Morgie’s yard. The day Benny left town. The day Morgie had killed his friendship with Benny. And Nix. Chong, too. The day he lost all his friends.
Nothing serious. Except that it ended everything.
Strunk said, “The tower guard tells me you kept your head when those zoms came rushing out of that wagon.”
Morgie shrugged.
“He says that after you took down the zoms from the wagon, you went out to help Tully and Hooper.”
“I wasn’t fast enough. By the time I got out there they were already dead.”
“ ‘Wasn’t fast enough,’ ” echoed Gorman. “Jeez.”
“The tower guard says that you quieted Tully and got Hooper inside the gate while he was still alive.”
“I didn’t quiet him, though,” said Morgie. “The other guards—”
“I know,” interrupted Strunk. “I’m not criticizing you. Just laying out the facts.”
Morgie said nothing.
“Your supervisor tells me that you only took the fence job because you were too young for the town watch.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How young?”
“I’ll be sixteen in eight months.”
Strunk glanced at Gorman, who smiled faintly and shook his head.
A shadow fell across Morgie, and he turned to see someone standing just behind him, a person he had only ever seen on the painted fronts of Zombie Cards. The man wasn’t tall, but he was powerfully built, with a shaved head and a gray goatee. He had dark-brown skin and he wore a red Freedom Riders sash across his chest. He wore a pair of matched machetes in low-slung scabbards that hung from crossed leather belts.
Morgie’s mouth went absolutely dry.
The man nodded to Strunk. “This is the boy, Cap?”
“This is him. Morgan Mitchell.”
The newcomer studied Morgie. “You trained with Tom.”
“Yes, sir,” Morgie said.
“You friends with Tom’s brother? You one of Benny’s friends?”
The question was worse than a knife in Morgie’s guts. It took him a long time before he trusted his voice enough to answer the man.
“Benny was my best friend.” His voice almost—almost—broke. “I wish I’d gone with him and Tom.”
The man nodded. “From what I heard just now, Morgie, Tom would be proud of you. Benny, too.”
Morgie turned away to hide his eyes.
The man put his hand on Morgie’s shoulder. “I don’t think you have a future in the town watch.”
Morgie snapped his head around and stared in hurt and horror at the man. But he was smiling. So were Strunk and Gorman.
“I think you need to come and train with me,” said the man.
“W-what…?”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, sir. You’re Solomon Jones.”
“I’m building something important. Something Tom would approve of,” said Solomon. “And I’m looking for some real warriors.”
Morgie stared at him.
Solomon held out a muscular hand.
“Want to join me?”
CHAPTER 39
There was one thing they had to do first, and it was Nix who said it. They stood in the shade behind the mess hall.
“We have to tell Lilah,” Nix said, and Benny winced.
“Good luck with that,” murmured Riot.
Any conversation with Lilah was difficult. The Lost Girl had spent many years living alone and wild in the Ruin, killing zoms and preying on the bounty hunters working for Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. During those long years she had had no personal contact at all. No conversations, no interactions. Not even a hug, a handshake, or a kind word; and in that social vacuum she’d grown strange. Even now, after months of living with the Chong family in Mountainside, training with Tom, and traveling with Nix, Benny, and Chong on their search for the jet, Lilah was still strange. It was impossible to predict exactly how she would react to anything, though any bet laid a little heavier on the possibility of a violent reaction had a better chance of a return. For a while she’d started coming out of her shell when, against all logic and probability, she and Chong had fallen in love — but with Chong’s injury and infection, Lilah had gotten stranger still. She rarely spoke, and when she did, it was brief and terse. Benny doubted that he’d exchanged as many as two hundred words with Lilah in the last three weeks.