The men goggled at him for a few moments, and Captain Strunk said, in a dry, amused voice, “Kid, if it turns out that you well and truly understand love, I will personally nominate you for King of the World, and I can guarantee that every man here will vote for you.”
Everyone burst out laughing. Chong had turned as red as a radish.
As he walked, Benny could almost hear the echoes of that laughter. He’d been confused by the exchange back then, but he wasn’t anymore.
Three minutes later Lilah called, “Here!”
They came running to where she stood on the edge of the ravine, using her spear to point down into the darkness. A zom, taller than the others, big-armed and big-chested, stood in a middle of a pack. They could see only his shoulders and head, but it was enough to recognize the pattern of the camouflage of the American Nation. And to see a strap across his chest — a strap Benny vaguely remembered was attached to a satchel. He had taken only peripheral note of it before, ascribing no more importance to it than to the man’s shoes or belt or other items. At the time his entire focus had been on fighting this man. He’d tried a big lateral sword slash of the kind he’d seen Tom use to cut through the legs of a zom. Only the angle of Benny’s cut had been bad, and the blade had stuck fast in the zom’s heavy thigh bone. The sword handle had been torn from Benny’s hands, and the blade might have been lost had Lilah not somehow managed to recover it. Until today, Benny had assumed she’d quieted the zom in order to take back the sword, but that wasn’t so. The zom looked as powerful and deadly as ever.
Benny crouched on the lip of the ravine. “Hello, Sergeant Ortega,” he said.
CHAPTER 43
“How do we get him out of there?” asked Nix.
“Good question, Red,” murmured Riot. “There’s more dead down there than wood ticks on a coon.”
“How many do you figure?” asked Benny.
“Rough guess,” said Riot, squinting into the gloom, “near on about—”
“It’s 261,” said Lilah.
“Oh, crap.” Benny sighed. “On the bright side, that’s only sixty-five each.”
No one laughed at the joke. Not even Benny.
Riot fingered the silver dog whistle she wore around her throat. Each of them had one. “I had a crazy idea about two of us calling the gray people from different ends of the ravine, to thin the herd, but that plain won’t work. Too darn many of ’em.”
“So what’s plan B?” asked Nix. “Do we go down at one end and try some kind of systematic quieting thing? I mean, the ravine’s narrow enough that only three or four of them could come at us at a time.”
“Stupid,” said Lilah dismissively.
Nix colored. “I know, I was thinking out loud.”
Lilah eyed her. “Don’t. Unless you have a smart plan.”
“Thank you, queen of tact,” said Benny under his breath.
They began hashing out an idea that involved using the quads to pull big branches, small fallen trees, and other bulky debris, then pushing that stuff down on either side of Sergeant Ortega. Push enough stuff down and they could create temporary walls that would lock in Ortega — and probably a few other zoms standing close to him. The end result would be a much smaller number of zoms they’d have to deal with in order to gain access to Sergeant Ortega’s pockets and that satchel.
Then they began picking holes in the plan.
“The more we use the quads, the more chance other zoms will hear us,” said Nix.
“Reapers, too,” added Riot. “It ain’t all that far from where Benny got jumped yesterday.”
“Besides,” said Benny, pointing down into the ravine, “if we block off the tunnel, that’ll still leave Ortega and a bunch of zoms in a tight little space. If one person went down, the zoms would have a feast. If all four of us went down, we’d be so crowded we’d get in each other’s way. And we can’t shoot the zoms because of the noise.”
“We can come back tomorrow with Chong’s bow and arrows,” suggested Nix.
“No,” said Lilah. “Too much time. I can lean down with my spear, try and stab them in the head…”
“And probably fall in,” said Riot. “Ground’s too iffy, and you wouldn’t have squat for leverage.”
They stood there and stared.
Benny sucked thoughtfully at the inside of his cheek. An idea occurred to him, and he looked at the coil of rope looped slantways across Lilah’s body. “Huh,” he grunted softly.
“What?” asked Nix.
“Riot — you said something a couple of minutes ago,” he said slowly. “About herding the zoms?”
“Sure, but the whistles won’t do the trick,” she said.
“No, but I read enough Western novels to know a little bit about how cowboys herded strays.” He removed the coil of rope. “Anyone here know how to throw a lasso?”
As it turned out, they all did.
Nix knew a little bit about it from the Scouts back in Mountainside. Lilah had handled rope while struggling to survive — lassoing trees to climb and roping wounded animals she was hunting. But Riot was the real expert.
“After I skedaddled from the Night Church,” she said as she began fashioning a lariat, “I fell in with a group of scavengers. Called themselves the Rat Pack. They were a crazy bunch of kids who raided towns and tagged buildings that had good supplies. The kids were all into extreme sports — or I guess what had been extreme sports before the Fall. Skateboarders, BMX bikers, in-line skaters, and free runners.”
“What’s that?” asked Nix.
“It’s a kind of sport where you do all sorts of acrobatics over obstacles and up walls and suchlike. Looks like a bunch of crazy monkeys, but it’s amazing. Fun, too.”
“You did that?”
She shrugged. “I learned me a few tricks. There was a boy named Jolt who taught me a lot of things.”
A dreamy and distant look floated through Riot’s eyes, and Benny glanced at Nix, who clearly saw it too.
“Was Jolt your boyfriend?” Nix asked carefully.
“We had a little thing going,” Riot said coyly, but didn’t elaborate.
“What happened to him?” asked Benny, though he was afraid of what the answer would be.
“I don’t rightly know. ’Bout a year ago, while I was running some people out to Sanctuary, the Rat Pack’s camp was overrun by reapers. I got there maybe two days after it happened and found half the people I knew slaughtered and the rest gone. They lit out in every possible direction, and from the tracks it looked like there were reapers in hot pursuit of every single person.” She sighed heavily. “I quieted the dead. Near on twenty of them. Some little ones, too. Only a few reapers, though. The scavengers ain’t much into killing, even in self-defense.”
“Stupid,” said Lilah, and Riot shot her a hard look.
“You’re welcome to keep your opinions to your damn self, missy,” snapped Riot, throwing down the rope and getting nose to nose with Lilah. “That Rat Pack was the closest thing I had to a real family, and I won’t hear a word against them.”
Lilah looked genuinely surprised by Riot’s reaction.
“But they let themselves die,” insisted Lilah.
“So do the way-station monks,” interjected Nix. “Not everyone believes in killing.”
Lilah pushed Riot back, but not with anger. Just to create distance. “You were with them? A scavenger?”
“Yes,” said Riot.
“And you kill.”
Riot looked down at the ground. After a moment, she sighed and picked up the rope.
“Jolt and the others? They were better than me. All they wanted to do was find food and supplies, and have some fun while the rest of the clock ticked down.” She glanced again at Lilah. “You want to tell me that’s wrong?”