When he went out into Tomsland.
Nix carried a basket that she held out to him. Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She never tried to hide the two scars—the long one that ran from hairline to jaw, and the smaller one that bisected it. He loved that about her.
“What’s in the basket?”
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“Muffins,” she said. “Blueberry.”
Benny cocked an eyebrow. “Who made them?”
“I did. First batch ever.”
“Really?” He sniffed them. They smelled like old socks.
“You don’t have to eat them,” she said. “They’re nasty.”
“Then why—?”
“They’re a peace offering.”
He took another sniff. “You trying to start a war?”
“No,” she said with a shy smile, “I’m trying to ask you out.”
It took him a couple of beats to catch up to that. “You . . . wait, I’m sorry . . . what?”
“Should I say it slower?”
“It might help,” he admitted.
“I would like to ask you out on a date.”
“But . . . I thought the agreement was that when this was all over, I’d ask you out.”
Nix folded her arms. “Um . . . it is over, and you haven’t asked me out.”
“Yet,” he said.
“At all,” she said.
“I was going to get around to it.”
“The world could end before you got around to it.”
“Could have,” he said. “But it didn’t.”
“No,” she agreed, smiling. “It didn’t.”
- 2 -
THE NEXT AFTERNOON BENNY AND his friends sat at a picnic table whose timbers were so green that pine sap stuck to their plates. It was a party—the first American Nation Day that would be celebrated by the people in the Nine Towns. Most of those citizens were still in some aspect of shock, and Benny could sympathize. The day before Saint John brought his reaper army to California, all those people thought that they were the last people left alive on earth, the last survivors. None of them knew about the American Nation, or the drive to reclaim and rebuild the world. They didn’t know that an army was out there fighting back the hordes of zoms—fighting, and winning. They didn’t know that science hadn’t died with the old world, and that a cure to the zombie plague existed.
There were so many things they didn’t know. Or . . . hadn’t known. Now they had to make as dramatic a readjustment to their lives, their worldview, their expectations of the future as they had when the dead first rose. Now it was the living who were rising to conquer the world.
It was all so strange, even to Benny.
There was a world again, a real world; and that world had a future.