She heard the sound of what she was forced by fate and love to do. It was a dreadful sound. Lilah knew it would echo inside her head forever.
Lilah spent the next five years in silence.
There was conversation, but it was always in her head. With Annie, with George. Lilah rehearsed the words she wanted to say when she was strong enough to hunt down the Motor City Hammer. Now he was dead too. And George.
Annie.
Tom.
Lilah walked the trench, hour after hour, mile after mile. She was so much stronger now than she had been. She knew that if she could take this body and these skills and step back to that moment on the rainy road, it would have been the Hammer gasping out his last breaths in the darkness.
Lilah made sure that she was strong. Fast, and skillful and vicious.
Heartless.
That had been her goal. To become heartless. A machine fine-tuned for the purpose of slaughter. Not of zoms — they were incidental to her — but of the evil men in the world. Like the Hammer, like Charlie Pink-eye and Preacher Jack. Like Brother Peter and Saint John and the reapers. She willed herself to become merciless because if she accomplished that, then she would never know fear and she would never know love. Love was a pathway to cruel pain. It was the arrow that Fate always kept aimed at your back. Love would interfere; love would create a chink in her armor.
No, she would never allow herself to love.
As she walked, she thought about that. That promise was as vain and as fragile as the promise she’d given Annie to return and free her.
When Lilah rescued Benny and Nix from bounty hunters in the mountains, she had stepped across a line. When she met Tom and saw that a man could be good and decent, compassionate and strong, Lilah had felt her resolve weaken. George had been the only good man she’d ever known. A total stranger who’d been the last of a group of refugees from the zombie outbreak. He’d raised Annie and Lilah. He’d loved them like a father, fed them, cared for them, taught them. And had been murdered by the men who took the girls to Gameland.
Lilah had believed that he was the only decent man left alive, that all the others were like the Hammer.
Then Tom.
Whom she fell in love with. Who refused her love in the gentlest, kindest way.
Tom… who died.
She stopped and let her gaze drift across the trench to the blockhouse. To where Chong crouched in the darkness.
Lilah had never wanted to feel anything for Chong. He was a town boy. Weak and unskilled in any of the ways of survival. She had not wanted to like him. Falling in love with him was so obviously wrong that sometimes she laughed at herself. And when the absurdity of it struck her, she lashed out at Chong.
Stupid town boy.
“Chong,” she whispered.
What is the good of becoming strong if love bares your flesh to the teeth of misfortune? Why risk loving anyone or anything when life is so frail a thing that a strong wind can blow it out of your experience? She wanted to go back to her silence and her solitude. To find her cave and hide there among the stacks of dusty books. With the waterfall roaring, no one could hear her scream, she was sure of it.
How long would it take, how many weeks or months or years, before she could think of Chong’s name and not feel a knife in her heart?
The reapers had taken Chong from her.
Forever? Or just for now?
She didn’t know, and neither did the scientists in the blockhouse.
If it was forever, then a cold voice in Lilah’s mind told her what the future would be — an endless, relentless hunt to find and kill every reaper. In books the heroines vow to hunt an enemy to the ends of the earth. But she was already there. This was the apocalypse, and the future was awash in blood and silence.
“Chong,” she said to the desert sky, and tried to will her heart to turn to stone.
CHAPTER 6
“Good morning, Mr. Imura,” said a cold, impersonal female voice through the wall-mounted speaker. “How do you feel today?”
“Angry,” said Benny.
There was a pause. “No,” said the voice, clearly thrown off track, “how do you feel?”
“I told you.”
“You don’t understand. Are you feeling unwell? Are—”
“I understood the question.”
“Have you been experiencing any unusual symptoms?”
“Sure,” said Benny. “My head hurts.”
“When did these headaches begin?”
“ ’Bout a month ago,” said Benny. “A freako mutant zombie hit me in the head with a stick.”
“We know about that injury, Mr. Imura.”
“Then why ask?”
“We asked if you had any unusual symptoms.”
“Zombie-inflicted stick wounds to the head actually aren’t all that usual, doc. Look it up.”
The scientist sighed — the kind of short nostril sigh people do when they’re losing their patience. Benny grinned in the shadows.
The next question wiped the smile off his face. “What happened in the holding cell today?”
“He… tried to grab me.”
“Did he touch your skin with his hands?”
“No.”
“Did he bite you?”
“No.”
“Did he get any bodily fluids on you?”
“Eww. And, no.”
“Are you running a fever?”
“I don’t know, why don’t you let me in there so you can take my temperature?”
A pause. “There is a safety protocol—”
“—in place,” completed Benny. “Yeah, I know. I’ve heard that forty million times.”
“Mr. Imura, we need you to tell us if the infected—”
“His name is Lou Chong,” barked Benny. “And I wish you’d tell me what you’ve done to him.”
A longer pause this time. “Mr. Chong has been treated.”
“I know that, genius. I want to know how. I want to know what’s going on with him. When’s he going to get better?”
“We… don’t have those answers.”
Benny punched the small metal speaker mounted on the wall. “Why not?”
“Mr. Imura,” said the woman, “please, you’re being difficult.”
“I’m being difficult? We gave you all that stuff we found in that wrecked transport plane, all those medical records. Why can’t you do something for us?”
When there was no immediate answer, Benny tried to shift topics, hoping that might nudge them into an actual exchange of information.
“What about that pack of wild boars that tried to chow down on my friend Lilah? Where’d they come from? I thought that only humans could turn into zoms.”
“We are aware of a limited infection among a small percentage of the wild boar population.”
“What does that mean? What’s a ‘small percentage’? How many is that?”
“We don’t have an exact number….”
Benny sighed. They were always evasive like this.
After a moment the woman asked, “Are you experiencing any excessive sweating, Mr. Imura? Double vision? Dry mouth?”
The questions ran on and on. Benny closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. After a while the voice accepted that Benny wasn’t going to cooperate.
“Mr. Imura—?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m still here.”
“Why are you making this so difficult?”
“I keep telling you — I’m not. I’m trying to communicate with you people, but you keep stonewalling me. What’s that about? ’Cause the way I figure it, you guys owe me and my friends. If we hadn’t told Captain Ledger about the weapons on the plane, that reaper army would have come in here and killed everyone — you, all the sick people, the monks, and everyone in this stupid blockhouse.”