“What about walkers?” Benny asked, referring to mobile zombies.
“Most of them must have followed survivors out of town. But … there were still plenty of zoms in town. As I walked along the streets I could see some inside of stores or houses. I counted about twenty of them that had fallen into empty swimming pools and couldn’t climb out. Plus there were a lot of them stuck inside of cars. A few banged against the glass as I passed, but they couldn’t do anything to me … though I moved away fast, so the noise didn’t attract the walkers. The worst, though, were zoms who were trapped under the wheels of cars, their legs or hips crushed, so that they were alive from the waist up but stuck there forever.”
“God …,” Benny said. “Did you find the Rileys?”
“Sure. They were in their house, just like Jessie said they were. Front and back doors were closed. The family had owned a couple of big dogs—two German shepherds—and there’d been a terrible fight in the living room. The Rileys must have turned on the animals, and the dogs fought like dogs will. They had old bites all over them. The father was missing his hands, and the oldest son, Danny, had almost no throat left. The dogs made a fight of it, but …” He left the rest unsaid. “Because of the damage, the zoms were very weak. I tied them up and quieted them without a fuss. I was in and out in twenty minutes.”
“Did you have to read a letter? From Nix’s mom?”
“Yes. She wrote a long letter. It was very …” Tom stopped, shook his head. “Jessie really loved her husband and sons. The letter was almost too hard to read, you know? By the time I was finished, I was telling myself that I was done, that I would never—could never—do that sort of thing again.”
“But you still do.”
“I still do.”
“Do you like this stuff?”
Tom winced. “‘Like’? Only a psychopath would like to do what I do.”
“So why do it?”
“Because it needs being done. Someone has to—someone will—and if I don’t, then the people who do won’t necessarily bring any compassion to it. You’ve seen that. I’ve seen a whole lot of it. Way too much.”
There was a burst of lightning and an immediate crack of thunder so loud that Benny jumped. Tom got up and peered through the slats in the shutters. “That was definitely a hit, but it was in town.”
“Do you need to go out?”
“No,” Tom said as he returned to the table. “Not unless I’m called. Where were we?”
“You finished the job at the Riley house.”
“Right. I headed out of town as fast as I could. I was pretty upset—not quite the stoic your big brother has become, I guess—and I needed some time to sort things out, to make some decisions about my life. About our lives, really. I took a different route back, sticking more to the high ground, because there are fewer zoms up there.”
“How come?”
“It’s a gravity thing. Unless a zom is following prey, if it’s walking, it’ll follow the path of least resistance. They don’t walk well, as you know. It’s more of a stagger, like they’re constantly falling forward and catching themselves with their next step. So if there’s any kind of slant to the ground, they’ll naturally follow it. In the Ruin we have to be careful in valleys and downlands. You’re ten times more likely to see a zom on the lowlands than in the hills, so I went high, almost to the snow line. I camped out in a barn one night and in the cab of an eighteen-wheel truck the next. Funny thing … The truck had been hauling a load of microwave ovens. Scavengers had torn through the boxes; the road was littered with ovens someone had smashed. Definitely humans at work there, because zoms wouldn’t be attracted to that kind of cargo.”
“What are microwave ovens?”
“Ovens that run on electricity,” Tom said. “Something I hope you’ll actually get to use one day if people can shake off the superstitious nonsense they’ve associated with electricity. Now, listen close, because this is where the story takes a turn.”
He and Benny both leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands curled around fresh cups of tea.
“That morning, after I left the truck, I found a dead zom in the middle of the road. Nothing too surprising about that, but it was the way it had been killed that intrigued me. Someone had come up on the zom from behind and slashed the back of one knee and the ankle of the other leg. Crude cuts, but effective. Took out the tendons and brought the zom down, and once it was down, they drove a knife into the back of its skull. As I said, this wasn’t a skillful job, but it was smart. An hour later I found another one, and then another. By the end of that day, I’d found eighteen zoms killed the same way. Some of the kills were weeks old, a couple were very fresh, but the method was always the same. Tendon cuts from behind and then the knife in the back of the skull. After about the fifth or sixth kill, I was pretty sure I knew something about this particular zombie hunter. Everyone who works out in the Ruin, anyone who kills on a regular basis, develops a style. They find a method that works for them, a way to get the job done easiest and with the least amount of risk, and they stick to it. After all, it’s not like the zoms can become aware of how hunters work, and change their tactics.”
“So … who was doing this?”
“Ah,” said Tom, “you just sailed past an obvious question.”
“What?”
“Think about it.”
Benny did, and then he got it. “Wait … you said that there weren’t many zoms in the high country, but you found a whole bunch of dead ones. So, why were there so many up there?”
“Right. That had been worrying me all day. At first I thought there was a community up there that had been overrun. If that was the case, I could be walking into real trouble. But then something occurred to me. When I thought back to each of the zoms that this particular hunter had killed, I realized they were all very similar. They were all men. Adult men, all over thirty, all fairly big—or as big as a desiccated zom can be.”
“Were they from a team or something? Or guys from an army base?”
“Good guesses, kiddo, but no. I went back to the most recent kills and followed their trails, backtracking them down to the lowlands. One was from a farm, the other from a service station. I climbed back into the hills and found another kill. A fairly fresh one, blood all over the place.”
“Blood?” Benny said. “Zoms don’t bleed.”
“No, they don’t,” Tom agreed. “Now how about that?”
“This was a murdered person?”
“It was a dead person. ‘Murder’ is a relative term.”
“Then I don’t get it. I can see where you’re going with this. These are kills the Lost Girl made, right? I mean, that’s the surprise twist in your story.”
“It’s not a twist. You asked me to tell you about her, so there’s no surprise. What I’m doing, little brother, is giving it to you as close as I can to the way I came into it. Laying out the evidence.” Tom grinned. “Remember, I was in the police academy before First Night. I was studying to be a cop. Granted, I never spent time on the street, but I learned the basics of investigation and something about psychological profiling. When I bedded down that night, I looked at the evidence I had and made some basic deductions. Not assumptions, mind you. Do you know the difference?”
“One’s based on evidence and the other’s based on guesswork,” Benny said. “We had the whole ‘when you assume you make an ass out of you and me’ speech in school.”
“Okay, so make some deductions.”
“Aside from the fact that this was the Lost Girl?”
“That’s guesswork because I was telling her story.”
“Okay. Well, describe the man she killed. The human, I mean.”
“Not as big as the dead zoms, but sturdy.”
“Was he a farmer or something?”
“No. From his weapons and equipment, it seemed pretty clear that he was a bounty hunter.”
Benny sat back and thought about it, and Tom let him. The more he thought about it, the less he liked what he was thinking.
“She’d have been, what … eleven, twelve?”
“About that.”
“And she was only killing men?”
“Yes.” Tom was no longer smiling.
“Men who kind of fit a ‘type’?”
“Yes.”
Benny stared at Tom’s hard, dark eyes for as long as he could. Thunder beat furiously on the walls.
“God,” he said. “What did they do to her out there?”
But he already knew the answer, and it hurt his heart to know it. He thought of what Tom had said, of the fighting pits at Gameland, and tried to imagine a young girl down in the dark, armed with only a knife or a stick, the dead gray hands reaching for her. Even if she survived it, she would have scars cut deep into her mind. Benny and Tom sat together and listened to the storm punish the town.
“There’s more to the story,” said Tom. “A lot more.”
But he never got to tell it. Not that night, anyway. A moment later there was a flash of lightning so long and bright that even through the shutters, it lit the whole kitchen to an unnatural whiteness, and immediately there was a crack of thunder that was the loudest sound Benny had ever heard.
And then the screaming began.
25
TOM WAS UP, AND HAD THE BACK DOOR OPEN BEFORE BENNY WAS EVEN out of his chair.
“What is it?” Benny asked.
Tom didn’t answer. The wind whipped the door inward toward him, driving him back a step. Even over the roar of the storm, they could hear people yelling. There were more screams, and then a gunshot. A second later there were more shots.
“Stay here,” Tom ordered. “Close and bar the door!”
“I want to go with you!”
“No!” Tom growled. He grabbed his rain slicker and pulled it on, looped the strap of his sword over his shoulder, and ran barefoot into the black downpour. Benny came out onto the back porch, but Tom was already gone, swallowed whole by the wind and blowing rain. In less than five seconds he was soaked to the skin. Lightning flashed again and again, each burst punctuated by a huge boom, and Benny wondered if this was what it must have been like during the battles on First Night. Darkness, screams, and the bang and flash of artillery. He moved backward into the house and forced the door shut. The locks were strong, but he realized that Tom had no keys. All his brother wore under his slicker was an undershirt and pajama bottoms. He hadn’t even taken a gun.
Benny looked at the heavy piece of square-cut oak that stood beside the door. There were two iron sleeves bolted to the wall on either side of the frame. The bar slid through them and completely barricaded the entrance. Benny had seen Tom install it years ago, and the bolts went all the way through the wall into steel plates on the outside of the house.
“You’d have to knock down the whole wall to get through that,” Tom had said.
Benny picked up the bar and hefted it. It was heavy and dense. Twenty zoms couldn’t crack it. He fitted one end into the closest sleeve and began sliding it across the door.
Tom was out there with nothing but a sword. No shoes, no gun, no light. If a tree had fallen over and torn a hole in the fence, who knows how many zoms could be out there.
There were more shots, a whole barrage of them. Someone was yelling, but Benny couldn’t make out any words. The hammering of the rain was too insistent.
He chewed his lip, torn by indecision.
On one hand, Tom had told him to bar the door. On the other, the door was already locked, and zoms couldn’t pick a lock. All of the windows were shuttered, and the front door was as sturdy as this one. He was safe.
But what about Tom?
If there was a full scale invasion of the town, Tom might have to come running back here for shelter. It could come down to seconds. How long would it take Benny to get to the back door, push the heavy bar out of the sleeves, and unlock the locks? Ten seconds? Eight?
Too long.
He pulled the bar from the sleeve and set it back against the wall.
Tom’s guns were locked up, and Tom wore the key on a chain around his neck. If he busted open the locker and this turned out to be nothing, Tom would fry him.
On the other hand …
Doubt was a hungry thing that chewed at him.
Something hit the wall outside. Hard and sharp. It wasn’t rain. He listened, trying to remember exactly what he had heard, trying to listen the way Tom listened when they were out in the Ruin. Had it been an acorn blown out of the oak tree? No, they had a different, lighter sound. Whatever had hit the outside wall had hit fast and with a lot of power.
A bullet?
He was almost positive that’s what it had been.
He crouched low and put his ear to the corner of the kitchen window. There were more screams and a whole bunch of gunshots. Then he heard footsteps on the back porch and a second later, the doorknob turned. Benny twisted around to see out the window, but all he could see was a flap of something glistening.
A slicker.
The doorknob turned again and again.
Tom!
Benny shot to his feet and threw open the locks. God … please let Tom be okay, he thought as he undid the four heavy dead bolts. Benny yanked the door open.
Tom staggered inside. Head bowed, his rain slicker torn and hanging in shreds, dark hair dripping with water.
Benny backed away.
It wasn’t Tom.
It was Rob Sacchetto, the erosion artist.
He was a zombie.
26