It all seemed like a thousand years ago. Gameland was still out there, and now they knew where. However, if Benny thought that hearing Lilah’s story would change the people in town or spark them to action, he was disappointed. They were shocked, they were sympathetic … but they said that it was too far away. That it wasn’t their concern. That it was too dangerous to mount a raid on it. After a couple of days they even stopped talking about it.
“It’s just like everything beyond the fence,” Benny complained. “They act like it’s all happening on a different planet. ”
“To them it is,” said Nix. “My mom told them about the first Gameland, and they didn’t do anything then, either. ”
Nothing would be done, and that was the ugliest truth.
But when he said this to Tom, his brother’s eyes became distant, and he changed the subject. Each day, however, he spent at least an hour in his workroom making bullets, and he had maps pinned to the walls.
Benny, Nix, and Tom spent every evening talking about things. Not about the fight or the dreadful things each of them had been forced to do. No. They talked about the jumbo jet. Tom had seen it too. He’d watched it fly out of the east and then turn slowly over the mountains and fly back.
“What do you think is out there?” Benny asked Nix one night after Tom went to bed. “Out where the jet went?”
“I don’t know. It won’t be my islands,” she said. “It’ll be something … different. Something that isn’t here. ”
“Here isn’t that bad. Not now that Charlie’s gone. ”
Her green eyes were full of shadows. “‘Here,’ Benny, they accept that Gameland exists and won’t do anything about it. ” She shook her head. “Here isn’t enough, Benny. Not for me. Not anymore. ”
Later, when Benny told Tom that Nix wanted to go find where the jet came from, Benny had expected Tom to scoff at the idea. Tom hadn’t. Next morning there was a stack of maps on the kitchen table. There was one for every state.
On the fifteenth day since the camp, Tom told Benny that he had one more closure job he had to do. “I want you to go with me. ”
Benny sighed.
“I don’t know if I can,” he said.
Tom sat down with him at the table. “Please,” he said. “Just this last one, and then I’m done. I … can’t do it alone. ”
Benny studied his brother for a long time and then nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “But after this, I’m done, too. ”
Nix went with them, but only for the first part of the trip. She was harder than before, less apt to smile, which Benny understood. Much of her softness was gone, and Benny hoped that with time it would return. The toughness, he knew, would remain. Nix spent hours writing in her book of zombie lore. She practiced with Benny every day with the wooden swords. When she trained, her beautiful face was set and grim, and Benny was sure that each time she swung the sword, she wasn’t seeing him. She was seeing the faces of the men who would have put her into a pit with zoms.
“Give her time,” Tom said one day after practice.
“I plan on it,” said Benny, and Tom smiled. “All the time she needs. ”
They left Mountainside on a gray morning in late September. Tom led the way, often walking alone as a way of dealing with his own sadness and loss. Benny and Nix followed behind, vigilant of the world around them and the threats it offered, but feeling safe and strong in each other’s company. Even if neither of them was ready to say so.
They found the way station where Brother David and the two young women lived. Over lunch Benny and Tom and Nix told their story. The monk and the girls exchanged long looks, their faces sometimes sad at the news of pain and death, and sometimes hopeful as they considered a future without Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer.
“Nix,” Benny said, “do you mind staying here?”
“No,” she said. “Tom told me that you have a job to do. ”
“He told you?”
She gave him a funny look. Deep and penetrating. “He told me everything, Benny. I understand about what he does … what you do. About the family business. About the need for closure. ”
Benny touched her face. “Nix, I—”
“Benny Imura,” she said with a rare flicker of a smile on her mouth, “if you are going to say something like ‘I love you’ and you choose here, in a way station out in the Rot and Ruin to do it, so help me, I will kick your ass. ”
There was a fragile quality about her smile and a glimmer of the old Nix woven into the complexity of this new Nix. He loved both versions, but he valued his butt and had no doubts that she could kick it completely and with great enthusiasm.
“As if I would say something so stupid,” he said.