Rot and Ruin (Benny Imura 1)

But Morgie was persistent. “What? You’re saying I don’t have anything to worry about?”

Chong considered. “Knowing you, your personal habits, your general hygiene, and your raw intelligence, I think you have a lot to worry about. ”

“Hey!”

Chong grunted and closed his eyes.

Thunder rumbled again in the west.

After a while Nix took her journal out of her satchel, used a pocket knife to sharpen her pencil, and began writing. Benny watched her while pretending not to. He was particularly interested in the way her sweaty T-shirt molded to her when she stretched to grab the bag. And the way the sunlight brought out gold flecks in her green eyes. He banged his head against the rough bark of the tree. Twice. Hard.

What the hell is wrong with me? he wondered, and not for the first time.

Nix either didn’t notice him watching or—even at fourteen and three-quarters—was too practiced at being a young woman to allow anything to show on her face. She bent over the book and wrote for nearly twenty minutes, only pausing long enough to whittle a new point at the end of each full page.

When she stopped again to reach for the knife, Benny said, “Why do you write in that thing?”

“I’m writing a book,” she said, deftly shaving off a fleck of wood.

“About what? Love and bunnies? Do I get eaten by your attack bunnies?”

“Don’t tempt me. No, it’s not a novel. It’s nonfiction. ” She blew on the sharpened pencil point. “About zombies. ”

Benny laughed. “What, you want to kill zoms? I thought you guys were doing this sword stuff for fun. ”

“I don’t particularly want to kill zoms,” she said. “But I do want to understand them. ”

“What’s to understand?” Benny said, though even as he said it he knew it was a stupid thing to say. The real truth was, things had now changed between him and Nix, and he didn’t know the territory. It had a new feel to it, a new language, and he felt immensely awkward. He tried it again. “I mean … why?”

Instead of answering directly, Nix said, “Do you want to live in Mountainside your whole life?”

“Got to live somewhere,” he began, but he saw disappointment blossom in her eyes. Nix shook her head and bent over her book, pencil poised to pick up the thread of her argument. Before she’d finished half a paragraph, a ragged line of seagulls flew overhead, their stomachs as white as snow, their wings tipped with black. Nix nodded toward them. “They probably sleep on the coast, right by the ocean. According to the maps we’re less than two hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean, but I’ve never seen it. No one our age has. The way things are going, no one will. It might as well be on another world. ”

“Why do you want to see it?”

“Why don’t you?”

“I …” He knew he was on some dangerous ground here. There were all kinds of deadfalls and rabbit holes built into her question. He didn’t know where she was going with this, but he was smart enough to know he was about to put his foot somewhere that would hurt him. “I never really thought about it,” he said, and that was true enough. “Look, I kind of get your point. You’re frustrated because this town’s our world, it’s all we have. Okay. That sucks and I don’t like it either. But how are we going to change that by studying zoms?”

“Do you remember in history class when Mr. West-Mensch talked about war? He said that history shows that it’s easier to conquer than to control. What was the line Chong likes so much?”

“‘They won the war but lost the peace,’” Benny supplied. “But I forget which war Mr. West-Mensch was talking about. ”

“He might as well have been talking about this one. The last one. First Night was like a sneak attack, followed by a systematic invasion. Like the Germans in the early part of the Second World War. We lost because we were totally unprepared for the attack, and by the time we understood the nature of the attackers, it was too late to organize a counterattack. ”

“Are you quoting someone?”

“No. Why?”

“I don’t know. … It just sounds pretty sophisticated. ”

“For a girl?” The challenge was making her freckles glow again.

“No,” Benny said. “For someone younger than me. Or … even someone older than me. ”

She ignored the implied compliment and went back to her point. “Right now we hold our own. We’re not losing the war anymore, because the enemy has reached the limits of how it can come at us. We build fences, and they can’t dismantle fences. We know that anyone who dies will come back as a zom, and so we have all these precautions around the sick and dying. We have guns and weapons, we have carpet coats, cadaverine. We have the beginnings of a whole new science of warfare against the enemy. ”

“Okay. So?”