“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.
38
MILES AND MILES AWAY . . .
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.”