“That’s crazy.”
“White Bear is crazy, man. Plays it cool … but he’s totally out of his mind. Makes Charlie look like Joe Ordinary Citizen.”
“Swell. Okay, now tell me one more thing. Where’s Gameland?”
“If I tell you … will you do what you promised? Make it easy? Keep me down?”
“I promise.”
“Swear it, man. I … I used to be Catholic. Swear on the baby Jesus.”
Tom sighed and held his hand to heaven. He swore.
The man told Tom where Gameland was. Tom swore again, much louder.
The man tried to smile, but he was fading like a setting sun. “You know, man … I almost wish I could see you go up against White Bear and Gameland.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you’d like to see me fed to the zoms, too.”
Redhead gave him a strange look. “No … you … don’t have to believe me, man, but I’d kind of like to see you kick that crazy son of a bitch’s ass. Him and his whole damn family.”
A terrible coughing fit hit him, and he hacked and coughed until blood mottled his lips and his face turned the color of sour milk. Then his eyes flared wide and his mouth formed a small “Oh” and he stopped moving. His eyes stared upward into the vast blue forever. The forest was silent except for the buzzing of insects.
Tom’s face and body were as still as the dead man’s, but inside his heart was hammering with fear. “Gameland,” he murmured. “Oh God …”
He looked down at the dead man and drew his quieting dagger. Reanimation could take as long as five minutes, but not with traumatic injuries. They were always faster. Redhead’s face was slack, his eyes half-closed, and there was no sign at all of the jerks and twitches that signal reanimation. Tom counted out sixty seconds. Then another sixty. The man stayed silent and still. And dead. Inside Tom’s head the pounding was getting louder.
He was curious, though. After the man he’d found on the road, he needed to know if that was a total fluke or part of a pattern. It was crucial to understand as much as possible about the living dead.
But Gameland was waiting, and he knew that he had to go, and go now.
Tom counted out another sixty seconds. And another.
Go! Go! Go! screamed his inner voice.
“Damn it,” he snarled, and rolled the man over. He drove the blade in to sever the brain stem. He wiped the dagger clean and got to his feet, thinking, He was going to come back. It was just taking longer for some reason.
He thought it, but he wasn’t sure that he believed it.
With that burning in his mind, he turned in the direction of Gameland. There was no need for tracking now. It was no longer a hunt. It was a trap, and he was heading straight into it. But he had no choice.
He ran.
58
THEY FOUND A ROAD WITH A RUSTED SIGN THAT READ “WAWONA HOTEL, six miles.” The sign was pocked with old bullet holes and badly faded, but they could read it, and it filled them with new energy. A line of cumulus clouds swelled out of the west, their bottoms shaved flat by crosswinds and condensation, their tops reaching upward like puffy white mountains.
For a while they walked hand in hand, but as each of them drifted into their own thoughts they let go, content to be in their own space. They topped a rise and paused, watching a spectacle that was both funny and sad. Over the rise, the road wound like a snake through farm fields that had long since grown wild. A horse stood in the middle of the left-hand field, head down to munch the sweet grass, tail swishing at flies. Fifty yards away a lone zombie staggered awkwardly toward it. The zom wore a soiled pair of overalls with one torn shoulder strap. It marched unsteadily yet with clear purpose toward the horse, but when it was within a dozen yards the horse calmly lifted its head to regard the zom, then trotted out of the field and across the road before stopping a hundred yards into the middle of that field. The horse passed almost within grabbing distance of the zom, and the creature flailed at it, but the animal moved in a way that demonstrated an understanding of the danger. Once it was well into the next field—now a total distance of three hundred yards from where it had originally been—it flicked its tail and then lowered its head to continue eating. The zom began walking toward the road and the opposite field, arms reaching, legs carrying it along with the same awkward gait.
“I’ll bet that’s been happening all day,” Benny said to Nix.
She nodded, but her eyes were sad. There was a bit of comedy in the staging of all this: the patient, clever horse and the untiring, mindless zom—the two of them moving back and forth between the fields all day in a freakish pas de deux. A dance for two, probably played out on countless days here in the dust and decay of a broken world.
They did not speak at all for the next few miles. Not until the black peaked roof of the Wawona Hotel rose above the endless trees.
59
THE GREENMAN’S VOICE WAS QUIET, GENTLE. “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE,” he said. “Do you know who I am? I think you’ve seen me a few times. Here and there. People call me the Greenman, or just Greenman. No ‘the.’ Doesn’t matter. You can call me whatever you want. Or not.”