Chong said he had to get ready for work. He was scheduled for a six-hour shift in his tower, and looked pleased about it. Benny and Morgie found their friend Nix Riley, a redheaded girl with more freckles than anyone could count, sitting on a rock down by the creek, writing in her leather-bound notebook. She had her shoes off and her feet in the water. The red nail polish on her toes looked like rubies under the rippling water.
“Hello, Benny,” said Nix with a smile, peering at him from under her wild red-gold curls. “How’s the job hunting going?”
Benny grunted and kicked off his shoes. The cold water was like a happy party on his hot feet. Morgie slouched around and sat on Nix’s other side, and began untying his clunky work boots.
They told Nix about Charlie and the Hammer, and about the mayor rousting them.
“My mom won’t let me anywhere near those guys,” said Nix. She and her mother lived alone in a tiny house by the west wall, over in the poorest part of town. Up until this past winter, Nix had always been a skinny, gangly kid who was more one of the guys than a girl. Like Chong, Nix was a bookworm and always had several books in her satchel, but unlike Chong, Nix wanted to write books of her own. She was always scribbling poems and short stories in her journal. Of all of them she’d always been the real geek, but that had changed over the last ten months. Now Nix wasn’t a stick figure anymore, and Benny found it weird being around her. Especially on hot days when she wore a tight T-shirt and shorts. He kept wanting to look at her—especially at what she was doing to that T-shirt—but it made him feel really awkward. Nix had always been like Morgie and Chong. Now she was a girl. There was no way to ignore that fact anymore.
What made it worse was that Benny was pretty sure Nix had a crush on him. He liked her, too, though he’d rather have an arm cut off than say so. Even to Chong. Dating a friend was an old taboo among his crew. He and Chong had sworn a blood oath on it when they were nine or ten. Nix was really cute, and he liked looking at her, but dating her would be like dating Chong. Besides, with a girl who he’d known since they were just out of diapers, there was no chance at all that she’d think he was mysterious and interesting. Sure, she already liked him, but what would happen if they started dating and she tried to discover his secrets, only to find out that he didn’t have any? Or, worse, what would happen if he asked her out and found out that Nix really didn’t have a thing for him? Benny couldn’t imagine dealing with rejection from someone who knew everything about him and who he’d be seeing all the time. The whole thing made Benny want to bang his head against a wall.
“How come?” asked Morgie. The question brought Benny back to the conversation.
“It’s complicated,” Nix said, looking down at the sunlight on the rippling water. “And Mom won’t tell me all of it, but I think she and Charlie had some kind of fight or something. She really doesn’t like him. I’m not allowed to be around him unless Mom’s there. Or Mayor Kirsch or Tom.”
She nudged Benny with her foot while she talked.
Benny pretended not to notice the nudge. He asked, “Why Tom?”
“Mom likes Tom.”
“Likes? You mean likes him like she likes your dog, Pirate, or likes likes?”
“Likes likes.” She cut him a sideways look. “Tom’s hot.”
“That’s sick,” Benny said.
“You look a lot alike, you know,” said Nix.
“Please kill me now,” Benny asked the heavens.
“Why can’t you be around Charlie without your mom or Tom?” Morgie asked. Unlike Benny, Morgie had become infatuated with Nix. And with more than her new figure. He actually liked her. Morgie had never made that oath about never dating friends, and Benny couldn’t quite grasp how he was able to fixate on Nix without feeling weird about it.
“She says that he doesn’t treat girls the right way sometimes.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Benny, his voice sharper than intended.
Nix gave him a long considering stare. “You can be so naive sometimes.”
“I repeat, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that guys like Charlie seem to think that anything they put their hands on belongs to them. Mom’s afraid to be alone with either of them, and I wouldn’t want to be caught in a dark alley with them either.”
“You’re nuts.”
“You’re not a girl,” Nix said. “Or let me put it another way: You’re a boy, so therefore you’re probably incapable of understanding.”
“I understand,” said Morgie, but Nix and Benny both ignored him.
“Is your mom just saying this stuff or did something actually happen?” asked Benny. His voice was heavy with skepticism, and Nix simply shook her head and turned away. She kept staring off at the distant fence line.
“Well, I think Charlie and them are really cool,” said Benny.
The moment stretched too thin to support any more conversation, at least on that topic, so they let it go and said nothing. After a while a cool breeze came along, and they all laid back and closed their eyes. The breeze blew the tension away like fine grains of sand.
Without looking at Benny, Nix said, “Did you get a job yet?”
“Nah.” He told them about all the jobs he’d applied for and how each one had turned out.
Nix and Morgie were not yet fifteen. They hated the thought of getting jobs nearly as much as Benny hated the process of finding one, but at least they had a couple of months before they had to go looking.
“What are you going to do?” Nix asked, propping herself up on her elbows. The sunlight on the water flickered like flecks of gold in her green eyes, and when Benny realized he was thinking that, he made himself look away.
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you ask your brother for a job?” she said.
“I’d rather be tied down over an anthill.”
“What is it with you two?”
“Why does everyone ask me that?” Benny snapped. “Tom’s a loser, okay? He walks around like he’s Mr. High and Mighty, but I know what he really is.”
“What?” asked Morgie.
Benny almost said it, almost called his brother a coward to his friends. But that was a line he hadn’t ever crossed. On some level he felt that if he called Tom a coward, then it might make people wonder if he was one too. They were only half brothers, but they were still related, and Benny didn’t know if cowardice was something that could be passed on through blood.
“Just leave it alone” was all he said. He sat up and fished on the bank for stones that he could throw. He found a few, but none of them were flat enough to skip, so he plunked them far out into the stream. Morgie heard the noise, sat up, and joined him.
Nix grabbed her notebook and wrote for a while. Benny tried very hard not to look at her. He mostly succeeded, but it took effort.
“Well,” said Nix sometime later, “summer’s almost over, and if you don’t get a job by the start of school, they’ll cut—”
“My rations,” he barked. “I know, I know. Geez.”
Nix fell silent. Morgie pretended to kick her foot, but she kicked him back for real, and they got into a loud argument. Benny, disgusted with them and with everything, got up and stalked away, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched under the August heat.
4
SEPTEMBER WAS TEN DAYS AWAY, AND BENNY STILL HADN’T FOUND A JOB. He wasn’t good enough with a rifle to be a fence guard; he wasn’t old enough to join the town watch; he wasn’t patient enough for farming; and he wasn’t strong enough to work as a hitter or a cutter—not that smashing in zombie heads with a sledgehammer or cutting them up for the quarry wagons was much of a draw for him, even with his strong hatred for the monsters. Yes, it was killing, but it also looked like hard work, and Benny wasn’t all that interested in something described in the papers as “demanding physical labor.” Was that supposed to attract applicants?
So, after soul-searching for a week, during which Chong lectured him pretty endlessly about detaching himself from preconceived notions and allowing himself to become part of the cocreative process of the universe (or something like that), Benny went and asked Tom to take him on as an apprentice.
At first Tom studied him with narrow-eyed suspicion.
Then his eyes widened in shock when he realized Benny wasn’t playing a joke.
As the reality sank in, Tom looked like he wanted to cry. He tried to hug Benny, but that wasn’t going to happen in this lifetime, so they shook hands on it.
Benny left a smiling Tom and went upstairs to take a nap before dinner. He sat down and stared out the window, as if he could see tomorrow and the tomorrow after that and the one after that. Just him and Tom.
“This is really going to suck,” he said.
5
THAT EVENING TOM AND BENNY SAT ON THE FRONT STEPS AND WATCHED the sun set over the mountains. Benny was depressed. He looked at the sunset as if it was a window into the future, and all he saw was forced closeness with Tom and the problems that went with it. He also didn’t understand Tom. He knew Tom had run away and yet he now made his living killing zoms. Tom never talked about it at home. He never bragged about his kills, didn’t hang out with the other bounty hunters, didn’t do anything to show how tough he was.
On one hand, zoms were not supposed to be hard to kill in a one-on-one situation—not against a smart and well-armed person. On the other hand, there was no room for mistakes with them. They were always hungry, always dangerous. No matter how he tried to work it out in his head, Benny could not see Tom as the kind of person who could or would hunt the living dead. It was like a henhouse chicken hunting foxes.
Over the last couple of years Benny had almost asked Tom about this, but each time, he’d left his questions unspoken. Maybe the answers would somehow show more of Tom’s weakness. Maybe Tom was lying and really doing something else. Benny had worked out a number of bizarre and unlikely scenarios to try and explain chickenshit Tom as a zombie killer. None of them held water. Now, with the reality of what they were going to do tomorrow morning as clear and real as the setting sun, Benny finally put the question out there.
“Why do you do this stuff?”
Tom cut a quick look at him, but he continued to sip his coffee and was a long time answering. “Tell me, kiddo, what is it you think I do?”
“Duh! You kill zoms.”
“Really?”
“That’s what you say,” Benny said, then grudgingly added, “That’s what everyone says. Tom Imura, the great zombie killer.”
Tom nodded, as if Benny had said something interesting. “So, far as you see it, that’s all I do? I just walk up to any zombie I see and pow!”
“Uh … yeah.”
“Uh … no.” Tom shook his head. “How can you live in this house and not know what I do, what my job involves?”
“What’s it matter? Everybody I know has a brother, sister, father, mother, or haggy old grandmother who’s killed zoms. What’s the big?” He wanted to say that he thought Tom probably used a high-powered rifle with a scope and killed them from a safe distance; not like Charlie and Hammer, who had the stones to do it mano a mano.
“Killing the living dead is a part of what I do, Benny. But do you know why I do it? And for whom?”
“For fun?” Benny suggested, hoping Tom would be at least that cool.
“Try again.”
“Okay … then for money … and for whoever’s gonna pay you.”
“Are you pretending to be a dope or do you really not understand?”
“What, you think I don’t know you’re a bounty hunter? Everybody knows that. Zak Matthias’s uncle Charlie is one too. I heard him tell stories about going deep into the Ruin to hunt zoms.”
Tom paused with his coffee cup halfway to his lips. “Charlie—? You know Charlie Pink-eye?”
“He gets mad if people call him that.”
“Charlie Pink-eye shouldn’t be around people.”
“Why not?” demanded Benny. “He tells the best stories. He’s funny.”
“He’s a killer.”
“So are you.”
Tom’s smile was gone. “God, I’m an idiot. I have to be the worst brother in the history of the world if I let you think that I’m the same as Charlie Pink-eye.”
“Well … you’re not exactly like Charlie.”
“Oh … that’s something then …”
“Charlie’s the man.”
“Charlie’s the man,” echoed Tom. He sat back and rubbed his eyes. “Good God. What could you possibly find interesting about a thug like Charlie?”
“Because he tells it like it is,” Benny said. “I mean, it’s kind of weird that we’re surrounded by, like, a zillion zoms, we learn about First Night and zombies in school, but they just talk around it for the most part. They don’t tell us about it. It’s crazy. We have all those salvaged textbooks from before First Night that tell us about the world—politics and cars and all that—but you know what we have for First Night? A pamphlet. Does that make any sense? I can tell you the make and model of every car that ever rolled out of Detroit, but I can’t tell you about how Detroit fell during First Night. I know about cell phones and computers and all that before stuff. … But I don’t know anything about what’s on the other side of the fence. … Except what I learn from Charlie. Twice a month we practice zombie killing in gym class by hitting straw targets with sticks, and we do some of that kind of crap in the Scouts, but nobody—I mean nobody—except Charlie and the Hammer ever really talks about zoms. Our teachers must think we’re all learning about zombies from our folks, but none of my friends have heard squat at home. You’re even worse because killing zoms is your job, and you never talk about it. Never. Yeah, you’ll help me with math and history and all that stuff, but when it comes to zoms … I learn more off the back of Zombie Cards than I ever do from you. Everyone over twenty years old in this stupid town acts like we’re living on Mars. I mean, how many people even go to the Red Zone let alone all the way to the fence? Even the fence guards don’t talk about the zoms. They talk about softball and what they had for dinner last night, but they all pretend the zoms aren’t even there.”