“To get the card?”
Tom nodded.
“That’s a weird question, because it’s only a card, you know? I mean … so what? It was only dumb luck that I even got it. It could have been Charlie’s own nephew, Zak, who bought that pack. Or one of the other kids that Charlie doesn’t know. It could have been Chong or Morgie. Or Nix. ”
“Yeah, things happen in strange ways sometimes,” said Tom. He sipped his tea. “When you let go of the card, was that an accident or did you toss it to keep it away from him?”
“I dropped it. ”
“Why? Why not show him the card? Why not give it to him?”
“It was mine. ”
Tom shook his head. “No. You were willing to let it blow away in the wind instead of letting Charlie have it. That wasn’t about possession. So what was it about?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Benny said. “But when I first saw that card, when I saw her, I had this weird feeling that I knew her. Or … would know her. Does that make sense?”
“It’s a dark and stormy night, kiddo. Mystical seems kind of appropriate. ” As if in agreement, another crack of thunder rattled the crockery in the cupboards and pulled groans from the timbers of the house. “Go on. ”
“I don’t know. I felt like I needed to protect her. ”
“From Charlie?”
“From everyone. ”
Tom reached out and turned the card. The girl looked fierce, and the heap of zombie corpses behind her suggested that she was brutally tough. “She can take care of herself. ”
“You say that like you know her,” Benny said. “I was square with you, now it’s your turn. Tell me about the Lost Girl. Tell me everything. ”
“It’s not a nice story, Ben,” Tom said. “It’s sad and it’s scary and it’s full of bad things. ”
Thunder punched the house over and over again.
“Like you said, this is the night for that kind of thing. ”
“Yeah,” said Tom. “I guess it is. ”
And he told his tale.
24
“I FIRST SAW THE LOST GIRL FIVE YEARS AGO,” TOM SAID. “ROB SACCHETTO told me his story, of course, but I didn’t make the connection between the little girl he left in the cottage and the wild girl I saw in the Ruin. It’s hard to believe they’re the same person. Did Rob tell you about the search for the cottage?”
Benny nodded.
“There was more than one search. The first was made by the group that split off from the main rescue party that settled this town. That team never made it to the cottage. No one knows where they ended up. Maybe they gave up the search and found some other place to live or—more likely—they ran into trouble and died out there. It’s odd. … People talk about First Night as if it was just that one night, but when the dead rose, it took weeks for civilization to fall. There were lots of fights. Big ones with the military and smaller ones with families defending their homes, or people grouping together to defend their neighborhoods. In the end, though, we kind of lost the fight more than the dead won it. ”
“What do you mean?”
“We let fear rule us and guide us, and that’s never the way to win. Never. A long time ago a great man once said that ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself. ’ That was never truer than during First Night. It was fear that caused people to panic and abandon defenses. It was fear that made them squabble instead of working together. It was fear that inspired them to take actions they would never have taken if they’d given it a minute’s more cool thought. ”
“Like what?”
“Like dropping bombs on the cities. Nukes and regular bombs. A lot of the big cities were destroyed; all the people killed by shock or radiation sickness. Sure, some of the zoms were killed too, but those hundreds of thousands of people who were killed by the bombs came back as zoms. I remember one of the last news reports from Chicago, in which a reporter screamed and wept and prayed as she described waves of radioactive zombies crawling out of the ruins of the city. They were so hot with radiation that they were killing humans long before they made physical contact. ” Tom shook his head. “It was fear that caused those bombs to be dropped. ”
“That’s another thing they didn’t tell us in school. ”
“They wouldn’t,” said Tom. “Trust me, though, fear is the code we live by here in town, and in the other towns scattered along this mountain range. I suspect that if there are other towns still surviving elsewhere in the country or the world, then fear is what they live by too. ”