Rot & Ruin (29 page)

Around the bend, the view opened up, and Benny saw the roads that wandered from all directions over hills down to the crossroads.

“God!” Benny gasped, but immediately clamped a hand over his mouth.

It was neither the beauty of the vista of endless mountains nor the tens of thousands of silent cars crowding the road that tore a gasp from him. The crossroads and the fields surrounding it were crowded with the living dead. There were at least a thousand of them. Benny stared, searching for movement, waiting for the sea of monsters to turn and begin shambling toward them. But they did not. The zombies just stood there in one crowded mass. Others, alone or in small groups, stood along the roads or in the fields. All still, all silent.

The horses now showed their training, and in the actual presence of the dead, they made no sound, but Apache’s trembling terror vibrated through his entire body and up into Benny’s.

Benny tried to understand what he was seeing. He didn’t believe that all of them had just wandered here because the roads sloped down and they followed the unrelenting pull of gravity. There were too many for that. Maybe they chased some people down here and after the kills, they had nowhere to go and nothing to distract them. Some of the zoms were probably the people from the cars, who had been killed there and reanimated with no direction or purpose. The tough grass covered them to the waist, and some of them were completely wrapped in ivy and twists of wisteria and trumpet vines. There were soldiers, nurses, kids his own age, ordinary people, old people, many of them showing signs of the terrible bites that had killed
them. Just standing there in the midday sunlight. It was such a strange sight—all these dead standing there like statues.

No … that wasn’t it. They were like gravestones, using their own flesh to mark where they had died and where they would spend eternity. Not buried in a box but trapped in decaying tissue that could move, that
would
hunt and attack, but that, in the absence of something to attract it, would remain in place forever. The thought was as horrible as it was sad. Suddenly, Benny could feel something deep inside of him begin to undergo a process of change. His fear, which had been as big as the whole Rot and Ruin, seemed to shrink. Not completely, but enough so that he was consciously aware of it. He thought he understood why.

On their first trip into the Ruin, Tom had said that fear makes you smart, but Benny understood now that his brother had been talking about caution rather than fear. These zoms, every last one of them—even the smallest child—would kill him if they could, but not one of them
meant
him harm. Meaning, intention,
will
… None of that was part of their makeup. There was no more malice there than in a lightning strike or bacteria on a rusted nail, and as he sat there, he felt his terror of them give way to an awareness of them as something merely dangerous. The intense hatred of the dead he had once harbored was gone completely; burned out of him in Harold Simmons’s house. Only the fear had remained, and now that, too, was wavering in its intensity.

Charlie, on the other hand, was something still to be feared. Charlie was far more dangerous than any single zombie on the planet because his malice
was
deliberate.

Understanding the difference between these two types of
dangers—unthinking and deliberate—felt like a huge revelation, and Benny wanted to tell Tom about this, but he said nothing. Now was definitely not the time.

Tom turned sharply in his saddle, staring behind them. Benny saw a few of the zoms catch the movement and raise their withered faces.

“What?”

“Something’s burning,” Tom said, and that fast, Benny caught it, too. A sulfur stink that he knew very well. He’d smelled it a hundred times at the pit on the days when they set off dynamite to drop a layer of shale and loose rock down on the ashes and partly burned bones.

“Fuse!” Benny shouted. Or … thought he did. Anything he might actually have said was erased by an immense blast that tore half a million pounds of sandstone from the cliff walls. Fiery clouds of jagged debris burst from both walls, exploding into the pass from ground level and above. Apache screamed and reared and then bolted away from the tons of rock that smashed down all around them.

Benny kept screaming as the horse galloped at full speed, away from the collapsing walls … right toward the sea of zombies. Every single one of them turned toward him, a thousand black mouths opened, two thousand wax white hands reached for him as he raced without control toward them.

34

T
HERE ARE MOMENTS THAT DEFINE A PERSON’S WHOLE LIFE
. M
OMENTS IN
which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.

Benny Imura’s horse galloped toward death as certainly as if the path was marked with signs. If he did nothing, his crazed and panicked horse would crash into the sea of zombies, and Benny would die. If he tried to slow Apache down, the zoms would surround him and drag him out of the saddle. If he dismounted and ran, they would close around him and he would be lost. There was only one possible choice left, and it was as improbable as it was insane. The Benny Imura who had gone reluctantly out with his brother ten days ago could not have made that choice. The Benny Imura who had faced the reanimated corpse of the artist Sacchetto but had not yet faced the other horrors that last night had forced upon him would not have made that choice.

As Apache bore him toward the hungry mouths, Benny’s lips spoke a single word. It was not a cry for help. It was not his brother’s name. It was not a prayer. In his mind there was only one thing larger than his own death, only one thing more powerful than his fear of the living dead.

He screamed, “Nix!”

And he drew his wooden sword, kicked Apache’s flanks as hard as he could, and charged into the monsters.

35

T
HE HORSE RESPONDED TO THE KICK AND TO THE CONTROL THAT POWERED
that kick. Within three galloping steps his flight straightened from wobbling panic to determined attack. Benny screamed as Apache’s broad chest slammed into the front rank of the zombies. Benny’s right arm rose and fell, rose and fell, slamming the brutal edge of the hardwood sword down onto faces and hands and necks and shoulders. The dead reached for him, but he kicked with both feet, and struck and struck and struck. Apache, covered in his carpet coat, felt only the muffled pain of bites that could not tear through the carpet and did no harm. Instead it drove him into a towering fury. He reared up and lashed out with steel-shod hooves. Jaws shattered, skulls cracked, and then they were through the front rank and racing toward the line of stalled cars. The zoms turned and followed, and those in front of them shambled toward the horse.

Benny wheeled Apache around and tugged back on the reins to encourage him to rear up again and again. The hooves were backed with all the power and terror in the half-ton animal, and withered bodies crumpled before him. Benny’s carpet chaps protected his legs, but he wasn’t wearing his carpet coat. If he fell, or if the creatures grabbed a wrist, then only
the last bits of the cadaverine would protect him. At the speed with which things were happening, they did not seem to have the time to react to the presence of the noxious chemical, and if any of them were repelled by it, Benny could not tell.

“Go! Go!” Benny yelled, and Apache surged forward toward another line of the dead. Beyond that was open ground. The sword rose and fell, and Benny felt the shock tremble up his arm, but he used the pain to fuel his rage. He drew his hunting knife with his left hand and used it to stab and slash as the hands tried to drag him down, screaming inarticulate bellows that filled the air. But the blade hit bone, and the impact wrenched it from his hand, and he lost the knife.

They slammed through the second line, and one hand snagged in his pants cuff and nearly tore him from the saddle. Benny slewed halfway around and slashed backward at the clutching hand, feeling the forearm bones break as he struck down.

Where the hell is Tom?
When the walls had exploded, Benny had lost all sight of his brother, and he risked a single backward glance and saw nothing but brown smoke that obscured the entire cliff wall.

Panic flared for a moment in his chest, threatening to dampen the fires of his anger, but as the white hands reached for him again, his fury swelled, and he raised the sword and brought it down, again and again.

Something flashed blue and bright. The creek! It had wound around the far side of the cliffs and here it was, running within a hundred yards of the crowded road. Benny jerked the reins to one side and kicked again, and the horse cried out in an almost
human voice. The muscles in its thick haunches bunched, and the animal leaped forward, smashing aside more of the dead. Benny flattened himself against Apache’s neck, and together they raced across the field toward the water. There were dips and small valleys hidden by the tall grass, and Benny realized that it was a longer, harder run that he thought, and there were at least fifty zoms between him and the safety of the fast blue water.

He caught movement to one side and saw a man—a man, not a zombie—entering the treeline on the far side of the field.

The Motor City Hammer
.

It had to be the Hammer who’d set off the dynamite. A second sooner, and the blast would have dropped half the mountain on Benny. And on Tom.

Tom.

Benny knew he was trapped on this side of the cliff wall. There was no way back, and he didn’t dare race for the treeline. If the Hammer was there, then so was Charlie. Maybe the Mekong brothers, too, and they all had guns. Nix was there, too, but she might as well be on the far side of the moon for all that Benny could do about it right now. His—and
her—
only hope lay in his survival. And the only route to safety lay on the far side of Coldwater Creek. Zoms don’t have the coordination to wade through fast water. That’s what Tom had told him.

A zom lurched into his path, and Apache had no time to swerve, so he ran the creature down. Brittle bones made a sickening sound as the horse crushed them into the grass.

Two others, a fireman and a man wearing only boxer shorts, closed in on him, blocking their way. Benny steered
with his knees, and the horse angled just slightly to the left as Benny slashed down to the right, hitting the fireman on the side of the head and knocking him into the other man. They fell in a tangle of pale limbs.

As they crested the last of a series of rolling hills, Benny felt his blood freeze. The valley beyond was shallow, no more than a dozen feet deep at the end of a long, gradual slope. The horse could easily make the run, but the valley was thick with the living dead. Zoms that Benny hadn’t even seen. Maybe a hundred of them, and half of them were children.

Children
.

The kids were dressed in school uniforms, and there was a male zom in the middle of them who still wore the rags of a school bus driver. He looked like a shepherd in the midst of a flock of grotesque sheep. Some of the children’s faces were wrinkled and blackened. Had their school bus crashed and burned? Benny gagged at the thought, and again his resolve wavered. Sweat weakened his grip on the sword. He knew that these creatures were dead, that they were reanimated echoes who wore the disguise of the people they had once been, but Tom’s words rang in his mind.

They used to be people.

How could he strike them? How could he
hurt
them?

Children, women, old people. Lost souls.

Apache pounded down the slope; the blue water beckoned.

Something burned through the air an inch from his nose, and for a moment he had the crazy notion that it was a bee or wasp. Then, almost like an afterthought, the crack of a gunshot echoed across the plain.

And then he heard a girl scream.

“BENNY!”

Benny turned toward the sound and saw a tiny figure break from the trees and run out into the field. She was too far away to be sure, but Benny
was
sure.

“Nix!” he yelled.

Nix jumped over a fallen tree, stopped, snatched up a thick branch, and as one of the men leaped over the tree after her, she swung so hard that Benny could hear the
crack
all the way across the field. But then three more men ran after her, and she fled and then was out of sight behind a cluster of trees. A fifth man stepped to the top of a small ridge and aimed something at Benny that glinted with blue fire in the sunlight. Without realizing that he was going to do it, Benny ducked down, and he felt the bullet sear the air just above the back of his neck. The sharp bang of the shot chased the bullet through the empty air. There was another shot, and another. Something plucked at his pack, and he waited, listening inside his body for the pain, but there was nothing. Fifty feet away a zom spun and fell, a black hole punched through its stomach, but even as the horse raced past, the zombie was struggling back to its feet.

The water was there, the crowd of dead school children spread out before him.

Which would kill him, he wondered. The zombies or the bullets of the bounty hunters?

“BENNY!” Nix’s voice carried as clear as a bell over the hills. He turned to see her running toward him with five men only yards behind her. “RUN!”

He was running. Thirty yards now. Twenty.

He heard Nix scream once more, and when he turned again, he saw that the largest of the men had grabbed her, snatching her up as if she were a toddler. The five men immediately turned and ran back toward the trees as a wave of zoms shambled after them.

“NO!” Benny yelled, reaching one hand impotently toward the retreating figures.

And then something flashed past him and slammed into the wall of zoms. Benny saw silver fire dancing in the sunlight, and the zoms fell away, coming apart in desiccated sections, arms and heads flying away from the screaming thing that plowed through them.