“Why? What happened? Is Nix okay?”
“She’s not hurt,” said Joe evasively. “Talk to her, talk to Lilah, and then maybe we’ll all have a conversation later. I’m going over to the blockhouse. You have to promise me — swear to me — that you won’t leave Sanctuary again. Not unless I’m with you.”
“Sure,” said Benny, though he was pretty sure he was lying to the man.
CHAPTER 32
“Heads up and eyes forward,” called the guard in the tower. “Trade wagon’s coming in.”
The three fence guards glanced up at him and then followed the direction of his outthrust arm.
“Trade wagon?” wondered Tully, the oldest of the guards. “This time of day?”
His shift partner, Hooper, lifted the binoculars that hung around his neck on a leather strap and stared through the fence. The sun was almost down, and the slanting rays painted the big field and the distant tree line in shades of bloodred, vermilion, and Halloween orange.
“Trade wagon, all right,” he said. “Half a day late and… wait… I think something’s wrong.”
The youngest of the three, a fence guard trainee, raised his own binoculars. They were an old but expensive pair that had once belonged to his father. His dad was dead, though, killed in a construction accident while helping to build a corn silo. He adjusted the focus.
“The driver’s hurt,” he said.
“How can you tell?” asked Hooper.
“He’s bleeding,” said the young man.
The older men stared and then grunted. “You got good eyes, Morgie,” said Tully.
Morgie Mitchell did not acknowledge the compliment. His eyesight had qualified him as a tower guard, but he wanted to work down here on the ground. In another year they’d let him join the town watch as a cadet. And after that… well, when Morgie looked into the future, he saw himself sitting on a tall horse, a shotgun across his lap and a real steel katana slung over his shoulder in the rear fast-draw style Tom always used. That future Morgie wore a Freedom Riders sash and worked the roads from New Eden to Haven and every town in between.
For now he was only an apprentice fence guard. A job of no distinction and long hours.
Morgie was fine with that.
Now was now, and the future was something he’d get to.
The longer the shift, the less time he would have to be alone. And he didn’t believe that he deserved any distinction of any kind. Not yet. He didn’t want the borrowed celebrity that came from having studied with Tom Imura. That was Tom’s fame.
And Tom was dead. Buried out in the Ruin near the charred bones of the evil place Tom had destroyed. Gameland.
Morgie wished he’d been there. He should have been there.
Even if it meant that he would have died there. Even an unmarked grave on that field would mean something.
Tom had changed the world that day. Everyone knew it.
Until Morgie had the age, the strength, the power to change even a splinter of the world, he’d work the jobs he could get.
He continued to study the scene that was unfolding beyond the fence.
The field between Mountainside and the forest was more than half a mile wide. It was thick with weeds except for a few select paths that laborers dressed in heavy carpet coats and football helmets kept clear. The trade roads had to be in good order or the flow of supplies into town would dry up.
The field, however, was not empty. There were zoms. There were always zoms. Sometimes only a few dozen scattered along this part of the fence, sometimes as many as two hundred. Some of them had been there since the town was created. Those were the ones whose relatives lived behind the fence; relatives who could not bring themselves to authorize a bounty hunter to quiet their beloved dead. The others were wandering zoms who had come this way following prey. Often they came in a slow, ragged line behind a trade wagon or a bounty hunter returning from the great Rot and Ruin.
Today was one of the in-between days. Morgie counted about seventy zoms out there.
The road from the forest to the gate was straight as an arrow, but the wagon wandered on and off it. At least a dozen zoms followed, and more were staggering toward the wagon, arms outstretched. It kept ahead of them only because a zombie could not lead its target or plan a path of interception. The zom always went directly for where something was at the moment, adjusting only as it moved away.
“What’s that driver doing?” breathed Hooper as the wagon rolled out of the well-worn ruts and into the thick weeds.
They all stared at the wagon as it came closer. The horses were heavily protected with light carpet coats covered by a net of steel washers linked with metal wire. Their legs were wrapped in padded canvas, and their tails were bobbed. Unless the horse stopped and stood in place, a zom would never manage a bite. They kept moving forward, trail wise enough to know the route home and frightened enough of the dead to keep moving despite the erratic control from the driver.
Tully cupped his hands around his mouth. “At the gate!” he bellowed, and the team there turned toward him. “Wagon’s coming in. Driver’s hurt. Get the quarantine pen ready and call the field medics. C’mon, hop to it!”
The gate crew fetched their rifles, and a half-dozen apprentices snatched metal pots and spoons from where they hung on the fence. They ran fifty yards up the fence line and began banging and clanging. Most of the zoms turned toward this new and louder sound.
“Let’s go bring him in,” said Tully.
Hooper dropped his binoculars to let them hang and unslung the pump shotgun he carried. He jacked a round into the breach.
The wagon was a quarter mile out now and the horses were picking up speed, determined to get inside the safety of the fence line.
Tully tapped Hooper on the arm. “Let’s go.”
The three of them jogged over to the gate, and as soon as the crowd of zoms outside had thinned, Tully nodded for the big gates to be swung open. They started to head outside when Tully suddenly slapped a stiff forearm across Morgie’s chest.
“Whoa! Not you, son.”
“But I’m a—”
“You’re a trainee, Morgan Mitchell,” said Tully. “And all you have is a wooden sword. You stay here and let the professionals handle it.”
“But—”
“Pay attention and learn something,” said Hooper with a grin.
They headed out, first at a light trot. Then, as their path cleared, they ran at full speed toward the wagon.
Morgie adjusted the focus on his glasses. As the wagon drew closer, he could see the blood splashes on the man’s arms and chest. He could see the pale face and dark eyes. The reins were wrapped around his hands, but those hands jerked and swung with no apparent sense.
Hooper reached the wagon first. He held his shotgun in one hand and waved toward the driver, calling to him to slow down so he could climb aboard.
The driver turned to him, and the reins slipped from his hands.
Morgie watched all this through his binoculars, and he saw the expression on the driver’s face. One moment it was slack with fatigue from his serious injuries, and then as Hooper reached up toward him, the lips suddenly peeled back from bloody teeth.
“Wait!” cried Morgie. “No!”
But it was too late.
The driver flung himself from the wagon and slammed into Hooper, driving the man down to the ground in an ugly way. The impact caused Hooper to jerk the trigger, and the buckshot blasted the front of the wagon. Some of the pellets struck the flank of one of the horses. It screamed and reared and then bolted forward, spooking the other horse into instant flight. Tully tried to get out of the way, but he never had a chance as steel-shod hooves ground him into the dirt. His screams were as shrill as a heron’s until the wheels crushed him to silence.