21
THEY CROUCHED LIKE FRIGHTENED BIRDS IN THE TREE, WATCHING THE forest and seeing only trees. There was no sign of Tom or the rhinoceros. Benny peered at Nix. Her red hair was pasted to the right side of her face by a film of drying blood. Her cheek was bruised, and she didn’t meet Benny’s eyes. When he reached out to push her hair from her face, she batted his hand away. “Don’t.”
“I want to see how bad it is.”
“It’s not bad. Don’t worry about it.”
The others went instantly silent. Nix looked at them and then glared at Benny.
“It’s not a bite,” she said. “I hit my head on something when I fell.”
“Show us,” demanded Lilah, and when Nix hesitated, she snapped, “Now.”
With a trembling hand, Nix touched her forehead, and then slowly pushed the hair back. It wasn’t nothing, and it was still bleeding … but it wasn’t a bite, and Benny breathed a vast sigh of relief. Then his face clouded with concern. There was a jagged cut that ran from Nix’s hairline down her cheek almost to her jaw. It wasn’t bone deep, but like most head wounds it had bled furiously.
“Oh, man.” Benny hastily dug some clean cotton squares from his first aid kit. He tried to apply them, but Nix snatched them from him and pressed them in place.
“I know,” she snarled. “It’s ugly.”
Benny smiled at her. “No,” he said, “it’s not that. I’m just sorry you got hurt.”
Her eyes were hard to read in the shadows under the leaves. She turned away without saying anything.
“We have to go find Tom,” whispered Benny.
Nix touched her face. “When he sees this, he’s going to make us go back home.”
“That doesn’t matter, Nix. Right now we have to find him and—”
“He said to stay here,” she insisted. “If he’s looking for us and we’re looking for him, we might never find each other.”
“Yes,” agreed Chong hastily. He was green with sick fear and sweating badly. He clutched the trunk of the tree as if it was trying to pull away from him. “Staying here is good.”
Lilah nodded. “Tom is a good hunter. He’ll find us.”
“But what if he doesn’t?” demanded Benny.
“He will.”
“What if he can’t?”
“He will.”
A voice said, “He has.”
Benny whipped his head around so fast that he nearly fell out of the tree. “Tom!”
Tom Imura stood in the waist-high grass at the base of the tree. He was covered with mud and streaked with grass stains. His black hair hung in sweaty rattails, but he didn’t even look out of breath, and he held Lilah’s spear in his hands.
“Come on down,” he suggested with a grin.
One by one they crawled down to the lowest limb and then dropped. Chong was last, and his legs were visibly trembling.
Benny ran over to Tom. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, and then gave his brother a quick, fierce hug. He abruptly let Tom go and pushed him back like he was radioactive. “Okay, we’re done.”
Nix came in for a hug too.
“Heck of a start,” Tom said. It was meant as a joke, but Nix’s eyes flashed with concern.
“Tom … I don’t want to go back!”
“I do,” said Chong.
She wheeled around, and Benny saw that she was about to fry the flesh from Chong’s bones with an acid comment, but then she saw the look of complete despair on his face. Her own expression softened and she left her comment unspoken. Instead she turned back to Tom and reinforced her earlier comment. “I do not want to go back.”
“We’ll talk about that in a minute,” Tom said gently. “Let’s catch our breath first.”
“The animal?” asked Lilah, accepting her spear back from Tom. There was no blood on it. “Didn’t even pierce the skin.”
“Yeah, well, for what it’s worth, my bullets didn’t seem to do her much harm either.”
“You could have shot it in the eye,” said Benny.
“I would have if I couldn’t get Chong and the rest of you out of there. Otherwise it would have been wrong to kill her.”
Lilah grunted and then nodded. Nix was less certain. “Will it come after us?”
“It won’t. This is her territory. She has a calf hidden back beyond the clearing.”
“A calf?” Benny asked. “That thing’s a mother rhino?”
“So she was just protecting her baby?” asked Nix.
“Seems so.”
“And you never saw it before? I thought you were up in these mountains all the time.”
“I haven’t been in this particular pass for a while. That calf can’t be more than three or four months old. I don’t know much about rhinos, but my guess is that Big Mama came looking for a quiet place to have her baby and settled here. Nobody else lives on this side of the mountain.”
“Where’d she come from?” asked Benny.
“A zoo, I guess, or a circus. People used to have private collections, too. And animals were used in the film industry. Must be a lot of wild animals out in the Ruin. My friend Solomon Jones saw a dead bear over in Yosemite that looked like it had been mauled by something that had big teeth and claws. And there’s that guy lives out at Wawona—Preacher Jack—who swears he’s seen tigers. If the zoo animals got out, it could have been anything. Lion or tiger …”
“Maybe they’ll be cowardly lions,” said Lilah under her breath.
Benny laughed. It was the first time he’d ever heard her make any kind of joke.
Tom nodded back the way he’d come. “Before First Night, there were more tigers in America—in zoos, circuses, and private collections—than in all of Asia. As for Big Mama, she was simply doing what any mother does. Protecting her young.”
“Not just from us,” said Nix.
Tom nodded. “I know. I saw all the zoms. Bottom line … don’t mess with Big Mama.”
Benny nodded and told the others about it. “It was really weird,” he concluded. “All those crawling zoms. Scarier than the walking ones.”
“No,” said Lilah, “it’s not. You haven’t faced enough of the walkers.”
Benny thought back to Zak and Big Zak, and to the zoms he’d faced last year while looking for Nix. “I’ve had my moments.”
Chong cleared his throat. “Zoms couldn’t hurt that rhino, could they?”
“Not a chance.” Tom laughed. “Maybe the baby, though. I didn’t get a good look at it, but if it is still vulnerable, it won’t be for long. Those things are like tanks.”
He saw the blood on Nix’s face and brushed her hair back to examine her. She nodded and pulled her face away from his touch.
“That looks nasty. It needs to be cleaned off.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“That isn’t a request, Nix. Out here we don’t have Doc Gurijala and we don’t have antibiotics. Infection is as much our enemy as the zoms. So, you’ll clean that off now, and then I’ll take a closer look at it. You might even need stitches. If so, either I’ll do it or we’ll go back to town. Either way, all wounds will be tended to with the utmost care. End of discussion.”
Nix heaved a great sigh, made a big show of pulling out her first aid kit and canteen, and trudged away to sit on a fallen tree and do as she was told.
“I’ll help,” Benny said, and limped after her, but Tom snaked out a hand and caught his shoulder.
“Whoa, hold on, sport … you’re limping and there’s blood on your shoe. Where are you hurt?”
Benny swallowed, shooting a wary look at Lilah, whose attention had sharpened and was now focused on him. Her fingers tightened on the haft of her spear.
“Hey—don’t even think about it,” Benny said, pointing a finger at her. “One of the zoms tried to bite through my sneaker, but he—”
“Take your shoe off.” Lilah and Tom said it at the same time.
“I—”
“Now,” said Tom. His voice was heavy with quiet command. Benny looked at Nix, who had paused in the act of sponging blood from her face. Her eyes flashed with sudden concern.
“Crap,” Benny said acidly, and sat down on the grass to pull his shoe off. His sock was soaked with blood.
“Oh no,” breathed Chong. “This is all my fault.”
Benny made a face. “Oh, please. You didn’t bite me.”
“The rhino chased us because I startled it. Then I ran the wrong way and made everything worse.”
Tom started to say something but Lilah cut in. “Yes. You were stupid.”
“She’s got your number,” said Benny with a grin.
Chong gave him an evil stare. “You’re the one whose toe got bitten off by a zom.”
Benny muttered under his breath as he pulled his sock off. His big toenail was cracked and bleeding, and the toe was swollen, but there was no bite. Lilah snatched up his shoe to examine it, but Tom took it out of her hands and peered at the toe.
“It’s a pressure injury.” He blew out his cheeks and handed the shoe back to Benny. “That’s twice you dodged the bullet.”
“That’s a metaphor, right?”
Tom’s smile was less reassuring than it could have been.
“Right?” insisted Benny.
“Rinse your sock out,” said Tom as he turned away.
“Hey … right?”
Some of the traders and bounty hunters claim that the zoms on the other side of the Rocky Mountains are faster than the zoms we have here. There’s a girl in my grade—Carmen—who says that her uncle, who is a trader, saw zombies running after people during First Night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A couple of other people from back east said the same thing, but most people don’t believe them.
I hope this is not true!!!