The house was on a green slope and there was a big oak tree in the yard, but the town wasn’t Mountainside.
Mountainside was gone.
The oil-soaked houses had been left to rot. There were some sketchy plans to destroy them with controlled burns, but that was someone else’s problem. Morgie and Chong were involved, so it would probably go wrong in one way or another.
Benny’s new house was a gift from the Nine Towns.
They still called themselves that. Nine Towns. Haven was being rebuilt. And Benny’s new town was just being built too. The sound of hammers and saws was constant, and there was a sense of “aliveness” to it, though Benny wasn’t sure that was a real word. He’d have to ask Chong.
This new town had the awkward and unpopular name of Reclamation. It was the kind of name thought up by a committee, and it made the town sound like a landfill.
New names were a big thing.
Haven was going to be New Haven.
And the Ruin?
This part of it, the area that stretched from the Nine Towns to the far side of Yosemite, was going to be called Tomsland. That was a name Benny liked a lot.
Movement across the yard nudged Benny out of his reverie, and he saw Nix Riley open the garden gate. She wore a pretty yellow dress with lots of flowers stitched onto it. She did not carry Dojigiri. She had no weapons at all with her. Benny’s sword was on the porch, laid across the arms of the rocker. He still carried it once in a while.
When he went out into the Ruin.
No. He had to start using its new name.
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?”
“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.
Benny looked around at all the people who’d come to the party. He saw Fluffy McTeague—for once without his pink carpet coat—talking with Captain Strunk and Sally Two-Knives. Solomon Jones was grilling steaks on a fire pit made from an old fifty-gallon drum that had been split down the middle. The two surfer dudes, J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, had started a make-it-up-as-you-go game called “goofball,” and they had half the kids in town running around and laughing.
Mayor Kirsch and his wife, Fran, sat at the head table, drinking beers and listening to Captain Joe Ledger explain how he’d survived that day after the fall of Sanctuary. Benny had heard the story. There wasn’t a whole lot to it—zoms, even the fast ones, can’t eat through a helicopter. The ranger simply waited them out, chowing on military-issue ready-to-eat meals and singing old blues songs until the staff from the blockhouse were sufficiently recovered to rescue him. It was a long five days. He said that the hardest part of it all was the fact that neither he nor Grimm could step outside to relieve themselves. Joe said the helicopter had to be cleaned out with a high-pressure hose.
The zoms at Sanctuary were all gone, collapsed into rotting heaps as the mutagen burned through them.
At the same table, Dr. McReady and Colonel Reid sat and listened and nodded. The doctor had brought enough of the mutagen to give the Freedom Riders a lot of work—spreading the chemical and then dealing with the faster, though doomed, zoms. Everyone’s best guess was that the zoms would be a problem for years. Maybe decades. There were, after all, seven billion zombies in the world. No one was dropping their guard. There would still be gates and fences and doors and fear.
It would end one day, though.
As for the infected like Chong . . . there was heartbreak there. McReady was working on a real cure, but who knew how long that would take. Or if there ever would be a cure. Until then, Chong took his pills and he lived a careful life. But he lived.
The colonel must have felt Benny’s eyes on her, because she turned and looked at him. They nodded to each other.
Before leaving Sanctuary, Nix had asked the colonel not to forget the people in the Nine Towns. It was as much a challenge as a plea, and the officer had risen to it. Two days after the surrender of the reapers, the morning sky had been shaken by the thunder of helicopter rotors.
Forty of them.
Colonel Reid’s people had managed to fix one of the radios, and she’d sent an urgent call to the nearest American Nation base. Her call was passed all the way up to the commander of the army and then to the president, Sarah Fowler. Reid had begged for help to stop the reapers from destroying the Nine Towns. For help in protecting citizens of the new nation, even those who had become disenfranchised and almost forgotten. There was almost a full day of inaction as the highest ranking military advisers and the political advisers wrangled over it. But in the end, Reid’s plea hit its mark. The Air Cavalry was dispatched. Had things worked out differently, those helicopters would still have arrived too late to save Mountainside, but they would have been able to save the other towns.
Instead the army’s role was not combative but administrative. They helped process the tens of thousands of reapers.
That was an awkward part of this, Benny knew. Many of the reapers claimed to have sided with Saint John only out of fear for their own lives. But there were still some true believers among them. These zealots refused to lay down their arms or remove their wings. There were some clashes, a few skirmishes, but the army, backed by the Freedom Riders, won out. The surviving zealots were not imprisoned or executed—Solomon and Benny argued ferociously for this, pushing hard on the message that the time for killing was over. Instead these reapers would be transported to islands off the California coast. They would be given some simple tools, seed for planting, and materials for building shelters. As long as they wore the angel wings of the Night Church, they were barred from setting foot on the mainland.
“They’ll sneak off the island and come back,” said Nix as they watched the helicopter transports lift off.
Benny did not think so. What he feared—what saddened him to think about—was that those lost souls would find a different escape. Into the darkness through mutual murder and suicide.
The rest of the reapers were given a choice. They could join the construction teams who were rebuilding New Haven and Reclamation, or they could enlist in the American Nation’s Rebuild Now corps and work to spread the mutagen and reclaim the zombie-occupied territories. The only other choice was to join the zealots on the islands.
Not one of them chose exile.
It would be impossible to ever identify former reapers who had killed in the name of Thanatos, but when Benny watched these new “citizens” at work and saw the passion with which some of them helped to heal the damage done . . . he thought he knew. For many, the question of redemption would be a very personal thing.
Over the weeks since the Battle of Mountainside, the American Nation sent more troops, engineers, medical teams, and others to help integrate the Nine Towns into the new country.
The war was over.
Maybe all wars were over. Just as the old world was over. The new world wasn’t going to be built on a foundation of misery and pain.
Solomon Jones, head of the Freedom Riders, was appointed by President Fowler to serve as the interim governor of California. His first act was to appoint Sally Two-Knives as his lieutenant. Benny wondered how that would look in some future history book.
Someone snapped fingers under his nose, and he realized that people had been speaking to him while his mind wandered. He turned to Chong. “What?”
“I said the new Zombie Cards come out tomorrow.”
“Big whoop.”
“We’re all on them,” said Morgie. “Even me.”
“Let me rephrase that . . . big freaking whoop.”
“We saw the proofs the other day,” said Chong. “I look heroic . . . though they’re still making my skin look too green.”
“That’s because you’re a half-zee,” said Morgie. Lilah punched him on the arm. Very hard.
“Owww.”
“He’s not a zombie,” she said.
“I didn’t say he was a zom, I said he was a half—”
Lilah pulled her knife and drove it into the tabletop in front of Morgie.
“Point taken,” said Morgie. He turned to Riot and offered her the plate of corn. She took an ear, hiding a smile.
Benny noted that Riot seemed to smile at everything Morgie said and did. And he seemed to find whatever she did endlessly fascinating. Benny smiled too as he spread butter on an ear of roasted corn.
“What are you smiling at?” asked Nix.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just smiling.”
Nix pushed her knee against his. But it was under the table, where nobody but Benny knew about it.
Benny took a bite of the corn and chewed as he thought about all that had happened. Next Tuesday would make one year since he’d agreed to apprentice with Tom. It seemed impossible that so little time had passed. A year.
He thought about the kid he’d been. The Benny of one year ago had been so mired in assumptions and inflexible opinions, few of which were valid. That Benny had hated Tom, and believed him to be a coward.
Tom. A coward.
Benny smiled and shook his head.
A year ago Nix’s mother had been alive. A year ago Benny, Chong, and Morgie idolized Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. A year ago none of them had ever set foot outside the gates. A year ago zoms were the most frightening thing Benny could even imagine.
So much had happened since.
So much.
Pain and loss. Heartache and blood. Tears and death.
And so, so much had been gained.
More than Benny thought was possible.
The world was not at all what he’d thought it was. And he still didn’t know what else was out there. Europe, Asia, and so many other places were still unknowns, still silent and ominous places. There was a whole new world to explore. Benny wanted to explore it. Nix did too. They weren’t town kids anymore. They weren’t yet adults, either; Benny knew that and accepted it. That would come.
So what was he? Benny knew the answer to that question, and he knew that this answer would be a defining characteristic from now on and all through his life. For him, and for Nix, Lilah, Chong, Morgie, and Riot.
They were samurai.
And even now, as everyone celebrated peace, Benny could feel the pull of the road. He could hear the siren call of unknown places sing to him.
He turned and saw Nix staring at him the way she often did. The way she looked at him when she was tapping into his thoughts.
She smiled and nodded to him.
He nodded back. There was no need to say anything. They both understood on a level that Benny no longer tried to define.
He looked around at all the people he knew, and at all the strangers. There was so much laughter, so many smiles. He didn’t remember it ever being like this. He wished Tom were here to see it. To share it.
This was a better place. Not just this new town, but this new world. So much brighter and cleaner than the old world of rot and ruin, fire and ash.
