Helpless.
The word hung in the air. Ugly and full of dreadful new meaning.
“What do we do with him?” Benny asked. “I mean … after?”
“Nothing. We leave him here.”
“Shouldn’t we bury him?”
“Why? This was his home. The whole world is a graveyard. If it was you, would you rather be in a little wooden box under the cold ground or in the place where you lived? A place where you were happy and loved.”
Neither thought was appealing to Benny. He shivered even though the room was stiflingly hot.
Tom removed the envelope from his pocket. Apart from the folded erosion portrait, there was also a piece of cream stationery on which were several handwritten lines. Tom read through it silently, sighed, and then turned to his brother.
“Restraining the dead is difficult, Benny, but it isn’t the hardest part.” He held out the letter. “This is.”
Benny took the letter.
“My clients—the people who hire me to come out here—they usually want something said. Things they would like to say themselves but can’t. Things they need said, so they can have closure. Do you understand?”
Benny read the letter. His breath caught unexpectedly in his throat, and he nodded as the first tears fell down his cheeks.
His brother took the letter back. “I need to read it aloud, Benny. You understand?”
Benny nodded again.
Tom angled the letter into the dusty light, and read:
My dear Harold. I love you and miss you. I’ve missed you so desperately for all these years. I still dream about you every night, and each morning I pray that you’ve found peace. I forgive you for what you tried to do to me. I forgive you for what you did to the children. I hated you for a long time, but I understand now that it wasn’t you. It was this thing that happened. I want you to know that I took care of our children when they turned. They are at peace, and I put flowers on their graves every Sunday. I know you would like that. I have asked Tom Imura to find you. He’s a good man, and I know that he will be gentle with you. I love you, Harold. May God grant you His peace. I know that when my time comes, you will be waiting for me. Waiting with Bethy and little Stephen, and we will all be together again in a better world. Please forgive me for not having the courage to help you sooner. I will always love you.
Yours forever,
Claire
Benny was weeping when Tom finished. He turned away and covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Tom went over and hugged him and kissed his head.
Then Tom stepped away, took a breath, and pulled a second knife from his boot. This one, Benny knew, was Tom’s favorite: a double-edge, black dagger with a ribbed handle and a six-and-a-half-inch-long blade. Benny didn’t think he would be able to watch, but he raised his head and saw Tom as he placed the letter on the table in front of Harold Simmons and smoothed it out. Then he moved behind the zombie and gently pushed its head forward, so that he could place the tip of his knife against the hollow at the base of the skull.
“You can look away if you want to, Benny,” he said.
Benny did not want to look, but he didn’t turn away.
Tom nodded. He took another breath and then thrust the blade into the back of the zombie’s neck. The blade slid in with almost no effort into the gap between spine and skull, and the razor-sharp edge sliced completely through the brain stem.
Harold Simmons stopped struggling. His body didn’t twitch; there was no death spasm. He just sagged forward against the silken cords and was still. Whatever force had been active in him, whatever pathogen or radiation or whatever had taken the man away and left behind a zombie, was gone.
Tom cut the cords that held Simmons’s arms and raised each hand, placing it on the table, so that the dead man’s palms held the letter in place.
“Be at peace, brother,” said Tom.
He wiped his knife and stepped back. He looked at Benny, who was openly sobbing.
“This is what I do, Benny.”
13
FOR FIVE DAYS AFTER THEY GOT BACK, BENNY DID NOTHING. In the mornings he sat in the backyard, invisible in the cool shade of the house as the sun rose in the east. When the sun was overhead, Benny went inside and sat in his room and stared out the window. As the sun set he’d go downstairs and sit on the top step of the porch. He didn’t say more than a dozen words. Tom cooked meals and laid them out, and sometimes Benny ate and sometimes he didn’t.
Tom did not try to force a conversation. Each night he gave Benny a hug and said, “We can talk tomorrow if you want to.”
Nix came over on the third day. When Benny saw her standing on the other side of the garden gate, he just gave her a single small nod. She came in and sat down next to him.
“I didn’t know you were back,” she said.
Benny said nothing.
“Are you okay?”
Benny shrugged, but kept silent.
Nix sat with him for five hours and then went home.
Chong and Morgie came by with gloves and a ball, but Tom met them at the garden gate.
“What’s up with Benny?” Chong asked.
Tom sipped from a cup of water and squinted at sun-drowsy honeybees, hovering over the hedge. “He needs a little time, is all.”
“For what?” asked Morgie.
Tom didn’t answer. The three of them looked across to where Benny sat staring at the grass that curled around the edges of his sneakers.
“He just needs some time,” Tom repeated.
They went away.
Nix came again the next day. And the next.
On the sixth morning she brought a straw basket filled with blueberry muffins that were still hot from the oven. Benny accepted one, sniffed it, and ate it without comment.
A pair of crows landed on the fence, and Benny and Nix watched them for almost an hour.
Benny said, “I hate them.”
Nix nodded, knowing that the comment wasn’t about the crows or anything else they could see. She didn’t know who Benny meant, but she understood hate. Her mother was crippled by it. Nix could not remember a single day when her mother didn’t find some reason to curse Charlie Pink-eye or damn him to hell.
Benny bent and picked up a stone, and for a moment he looked at the crows, as if he was going to throw the rock at them, the way he and Morgie always did. Not to hurt the birds, but to scare a noise from them. Benny weighed the stone in his palm, then opened his fingers to let it tumble to the grass.
“What happened out there?” Nix said, asking the question that had hung burning in the air for a week.
It took Benny ten minutes to tell her about the Rot and Ruin. But Benny didn’t just talk about zoms. Instead he talked about three bounty hunters on a rocky cleft by a stream in the mountains. He spoke without emotion, almost monotone, but long before he was finished, Nix was crying. Benny’s eyes were hard and dry, as if all of his tears had been burned away by what he’d seen. Nix put her hand on Benny’s, and they sat like that for more than an hour after he was done, watching as the day grew older.
As they sat Nix waited for Benny to turn his hand, to take hers in his, to curl his fingers or thread them through hers. She had never felt closer to him, never believed in the possibility of them more than she did then. But the hour burned away and turned to ash, and Benny did not return her grip. He merely allowed it.
When the evening crickets began singing, Nix got up and went out through the garden gate. Benny had not said another word since he’d finished telling his tale. Nix really wasn’t sure that he knew she’d held his hand. Or that she’d left.
She cried all the way home. Quietly, to herself, without drama. Not because she had lost Benny, but because she now knew that she had never had him. She wept for the hurt that he owned, a hurt she could never hope to remove.
Benny sat outside until it was fully dark. Twice he looked at the garden gate, at the memory of Nix carefully opening it and closing it behind her. He ached. Not for her, but because she ached for him—and he could feel it now. He’d always known it was there, but now—somehow, for some indefinable reason—he could feel it. And he knew he wanted her. He wanted to break his oath with Chong and forget that they were just friends and …
He wanted a lot of things. But the world had changed, and when he had the chance to take her hand, he hadn’t.
Why not?
He knew that it had nothing to do with the oath. Or with friendship. He knew that much, but the rest of his mind was draped in weird shadows that blinded his inward eye. Nothing made sense anymore.
He could feel the heat of her touch on his hand even though she was now out of sight.
“Nix,” he said. But she was gone, and he had let her go.
He got up and slapped dirt from his jeans, then looked up at the yellow August moon that hung in the sky beyond the garden fence. It was the same moon, but it looked different now. He knew it always would.
14
THE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS COOL FOR THE FIRST DAY OF SEPTEMBER. Benny lay in bed and stared out the window at the dense white clouds stacked tall above the mountains. The air was moist with the promise of rain.
Benny was awake for more than an hour before he realized that he felt better. Not completely. Maybe not even a lot. Just … better.
It was the last week of summer break. School started next Monday, although with his new job, that would only be half days. He lay there, listening to the birds singing in the trees. Tom once told him that birds sing differently before and after a storm. Benny didn’t know if that was true, but he could understand why they would.
He got up, washed, dressed, and went downstairs for breakfast. Tom set out a plate of eggs for him, and Benny ate them all and then scavenged the frying pan for leftovers. They ate in silence almost to the last bite before Benny said, “Tom … the way you do it … Does anyone else do it that way? Closure, I mean.”
Tom sipped his coffee. “A few. Not many. There’s a husband-and-wife team up north in Haven. And there’s a guy named Church who does it in Freeland. No one else here in Mountainside.”
“Why not?”
Tom hesitated, then shrugged. “It takes longer.”
“No,” Benny said. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Sugarcoat it. If this is the way it is, if I’m going to have to be a part of it, don’t jerk me around. Don’t lie to me.”
Tom set down his cup of coffee and then nodded. “Okay. Most don’t do it this way, because it hurts too much. It’s too …” He fished for a word.
“Real?” Benny suggested.
“I guess so,” said Tom. He tasted the word. “‘Real.’ Yeah … that about says it.”
Benny nodded and ate the last piece of toast.
After a while Tom said, “If you’re going to do this with me—”
“I didn’t say I was. I said ‘if.’”
“So did I. If you’re going to do this with me, then you have to learn how to handle yourself. That means getting in better shape and learning how to fight.”
“Guns?”
“Hand to hand first,” Tom said. “And swords. Wooden swords in the beginning. We’ll start right after school.”
“Okay,” Benny said.
“Okay … what?”
“Okay.”
They didn’t speak again that morning.
When Benny got to the garden gate, he stood looking at it, as if it was a dividing line between who he had been before Tom had taken him out into the Ruin and who he was going to be from now on. For a week he had been unable to open that gate, and even now, his hand trembled a little as he reached for the latch.
It opened without a crash of drums or ominous lightning forking through the clouds. Benny grinned ruefully, then headed down the lane toward Chong’s house.
15
“THE ZOMBIES ARE COMING!”
Morgie Mitchell yelled that at the top of his voice, and everyone ran. Morgie ran side-by-side with Benny and Chong, the three of them blocking the pavement to keep the other kids from getting there first. It was a disaster, though. Zak Matthias deliberately tripped Morgie, who went flying and whose flailing fingers caught the back of Moby’s pants and accidentally pulled them down to his knees.
Moby wore stained drawers, and with his pants around his knees, he couldn’t manage the next step, and he went down. So did Morgie. The crowd of kids hit the pair, who were already on the ground, but they were in motion, and everyone knew there was no hope. They all went down.
Only Benny, Chong, and Zak were still running. Zak was halfway down the block. Benny looked back, hesitated, grabbed Chong by the sleeve, mentally said Screw it, and ran even faster.
In the direction of the zombies.
They were at Lafferty’s General Store. The Zombie Cards had arrived.
“Too bad about Morgie,” said Chong.
“Yeah,” agreed Benny. “Nice kid. He’ll be missed.”
They sat on the top step of the wooden porch in front of Lafferty’s. A shadow fell across them.
“You guys are a couple of total jerks,” said Morgie.
“Eek!” said Chong dryly. “It’s a zom. Quick, run for your life.”
Benny sipped from a bottle of pop and burped eloquently.
Morgie kicked Chong’s foot, hard, and sat on the wooden step between his two friends. He looked at the stack of cards that lay on the step between Chong’s sneakered feet. There was a similar stack—two packs still unopened—in front of Benny. Waxed-paper wrappers were crumpled on the top step.
“The guy said they’re sold out already,” he complained grumpily.
“Yeah. Those darn kids, huh?” murmured Benny.
“He said you two monkey-bangers bought the last couple of packs.”