Rot & Ruin (30 page)

“Benny!” Tom bellowed. “Follow me!”

It was impossible, but there he was. Covered in blood and dust, his sword glittering like flowing mercury, Chief’s eyes rolling with insane fear as Tom smashed aside the living dead and splashed into the blue water.

Benny’s horse leaped over the last of the dead, his hooves caving in the head of the bus driver, and then they were in the water. The cold current struck them, and Apache neighed and blew, and Benny gasped as icy water bit his ribs and chest. Forty or more of the zoms followed them into the water, but the powerful current plucked them up and swept them away.

Benny turned and looked toward the treeline. There was no sign of Nix, but for a moment—perhaps it was his imagination or the shimmer of the heat or even a wandering zom—but Benny thought he saw another small figure moving across the field toward the treeline, heading in the same direction that the men had taken Nix. She ran fast, bent low, and she carried something in her hands that glinted like steel. Benny
blinked sweat out of his eyes, and when he looked again, the small running figure was gone.

The treeline was an unbroken line of oaks and maples, with no sign of human life. The field was covered with the living dead—thousands upon thousands of them—and that way was as blocked and useless as the collapsed pass through the cliff. Their horses clambered up onto the far bank.

They were safe.

But Nix was gone.

And they could not follow.

36

B
ITTER, EXHAUSTED, AND ANGRY, THEY MOVED AWAY FROM THE CREEK
as fast as their horses could go, heading into the hills, seeking the safety of the high ground. When they were safe in a thick copse of trees, and when Tom was convinced that there were no zoms nearby, they slid from the saddles and collapsed onto the thick grass. For several long minutes they lay there, unable to move, gasping like beached fish, running with sweat, barely able to think. Apache and Chief stood nearby, their legs trembling with tension and fear.

“Are you okay?” Tom asked when he had the breath.

“No.” Benny groaned.

Tom turned his head so sharply that it looked like it was unscrewing from his shoulders. “Where are you hurt? Are you bit—?”

“No … it’s not me. It’s Nix!”

“At least we know she’s alive, Benny. That’s something. Hold on to that.”

“They also know we’re coming.”

Tom managed to sit up. He was bleeding from a dozen small cuts, but he assured Benny they were from the sharp fragments of stone that pelted him when the cliffs blew. He
crawled over and pulled the canteen from his saddle, drank deeply, and then handed it to Benny. “They knew long before now,” he said. “You can’t rig charges like that and bring down that much stone without taking time to set it up. No, kiddo. … They knew we were onto them, and they set a very smart trap.”

The water opened up Benny’s parched throat, but he coughed and gagged on it.

“You sure you’re okay?” Tom asked, peering curiously at him, his eyes darting to Benny’s arms and legs. “You’re positive you didn’t—”

“I’m not bit,” snapped Benny. “I want to go find Nix.”

“We will,” Tom promised. “But the horses are a step away from dead. Unless you want to chase them on foot, we
have
to rest.”

“How long?”

“At least an hour. Two would be better.”

“Two hours!”

“Shhh … keep your voice down. Listen to me, Ben,” Tom said, and his face was tight. “If we rest for two hours, we can catch up with them in maybe two more hours. If we don’t rest, it’ll take all day, if we catch up at all. This is a situation where slow is faster.”

Benny glared at him, but then he growled and turned away. He knew that Tom was right, but every second they sat there felt like it was one less second for Nix. Seconds burned away into minutes, and it took centuries for enough minutes to gather into an hour, and then two. By the time Tom said that they were ready to go, Benny was a half tick away from screaming insanity.

“How come Charlie and the others didn’t just hide behind rocks and shoot us?”

Tom busied himself by putting the carpet coats back onto the horses.

“Tom?”

“I guess they didn’t like their chances in a shoot-out,” Tom said.

“Are you kidding? Six or seven against one?”

All Tom gave as a reply was a shrug, and Benny stared at his brother. What the hell did that mean?

“Besides,” Tom said as he tightened the last of the straps, “the dynamite was a big bang, big enough to draw most of the dead toward the pass, which meant that it drew them away from the forest. If we’d been killed, they would never have risked shooting at us. It was a stupid risk even if he’d hit us, because it drew some of the zoms toward them. I expect Charlie’s going to be pretty upset with the shooter.”

“It wasn’t the Hammer?”

“No. Too skinny. Probably one of the Mekong brothers. Whoever it is, though, I want to have a chat with him.”

“A ‘chat’?” Benny said, grinning for the first time in hours.

“A meaningful chat,” Tom agreed. “C’mon, mount up. We’ll stay under the trees for a while. This side of the creek is all farms, so we can cut through and then cross the water a couple of miles upstream. If we’re lucky, we’ll hit the highway and cross that before they can reach it, and then we can see about laying our own trap. The highway’s the tough part, and I want to have time to figure it out, so let’s make tracks.”

“Good,” Benny said, reaching for the saddle horn and pulling himself up.

“This is probably the last leg of this chase, Ben,” said Tom. “I know what we just went through was rough, but there’s a big difference between fighting zoms and fighting people. When we find Nix, I’ll try to draw Charlie and the others off, and I want you to grab Nix and make a run for it. Don’t worry about where you go, I’ll find you. If you can, get to the water and wade as far south as you can before you come out on the bank. Try to leave no trail.”

“How will you find us then?”

“Don’t worry, kiddo. I’ve got a whole lot of sneaky I haven’t even used yet.” He gave Benny a reassuring smile as he swung back into the saddle. “Let’s go.”

They headed northeast, following a series of farm roads that were almost completely reclaimed by the relentless forest. As they rode, Tom pulled a bottle of cadaverine from his pocket, dabbed some onto his clothes, and then handed the bottle to Benny. Apache nickered irritably from the stench. Benny considered the bottle for a moment.

“Tom … do you think this is why we got away?”

“It helped. It made the zoms hesitate. Remember, they won’t bite something that already smells dead.”

“I don’t understand that,” Benny said as he sprinkled some of the foul-smelling liquid onto his jeans.

“No one does. It’s another of the mysteries associated with the living dead. Just be glad it works. Hey—not so much. Save some for later. We only have two bottles.”

Benny put the cap back on and tossed the bottle to Tom, but the cap was still loose, and as Tom caught the bottle, the liquid splashed out and splattered his shirt.

“Oh, crap, man,” Benny cried. “Sorry!”

Wincing at the odor rising from his clothes, Tom fitted the cap back on. “Well … that ought to about do it. I could probably square dance with a zom and not get bitten right now.” He leaned over and handed the bottle back to Benny. “There’s still half a bottle left. Keep it. I’ll hold on to the other.”

“What if we run out?”

“Let’s hope we don’t.”

The last of the farm roads ended by a curve in the creek, and they splashed across, moving slow to keep the noise down, each of them scanning the terrain. Everything was still. They came up from the stream bed and found a highway that was entirely blocked by cars. Four lanes and both shoulders, stretching away around a bend in the road a mile to their right and off into the misty horizon to their left. An army helicopter that Tom identified as a UH-60 Black Hawk lay crashed in the meadow that ran along the road, the huge propeller blades broken and twisted and hung with creeper vines. Benny wondered how the chopper had come to crash. Had one of the crew been infected? Were they airlifting victims and took the wrong kind? Or had they run out of fuel and were too far from home? Maybe it had been caught by the EMP. There was no way to know, and no matter what had brought the powerful machine down, it stood as a monument to a war in which technology and sophistication had served no purpose, had ultimately accomplished nothing.

They rode their horses to the outside edge of the shoulder and stopped. The animals did not like the endless line of cars, although Benny didn’t see any zoms hiding among the dead machines.

Bones, however … There were plenty of those. Skeletons—long since picked clean by zoms, scavengers, and the elements—were scattered everywhere. Thousands upon thousands of skulls and rib cages, leg and arm bones, bleached white by the merci-less California sun. The cars themselves were slammed and smashed together. Some had burned, some were skewed sideways or overturned. A few had rolled off the highway and lay half hidden in the tall grass beside the road. Benny could see that the windows of all the cars were broken. Some had been smashed out by people escaping—or trying to—and some were smashed in by fresh zoms who still had enough of a functioning brain to pick up stones. There were plenty of stones. The roadbed was edged with countless white plum-sized rocks, placed for drainage, Benny knew, but used as weapons.

Benny nudged a cracked thigh bone with his toe. “Tom, how come there are so many bones? Didn’t most people turn into zoms?”

“Most did, sure, but there were still hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who died fighting. Died in ways that kept them from rising. Broken necks, crushed skulls, bullets in the brain. Arms and legs torn off. It’s not like back in town where we bury the dead. Here … Those that truly die just rot away until bones are all that’s left.”

Hundreds of the cars were pocked with bullet holes, and it was clear that at one point the helicopter had fired on the stalled vehicles. Tom saw where Benny was looking, and he pointed out a black shape rising from the side door of the crashed Black Hawk.

“They used their minigun. It’s a 7.62 mm, multibarrel
machine gun that could fire three thousand rounds per minute.”

“Wasn’t enough,” Benny said.

“No,” Tom agreed.

On the far side of the line of vehicles was a vast meadow of tall grass and wild wheat that stretched into green and brown forever. Scattered here and there were hundreds of young trees—scrub pines, oaks, poplars, maples—rising above the sea of waving grass. The trees made it impossible to tell if the meadow was free of zoms, an assessment further spoiled by the constant breeze that made everything sway and shift.

A bird cawed, and Benny turned to see a threadbare crow perched on the broken vane of the downed helicopter.

“Which way do we go?”

“That’s the problem,” said Tom. “We need to cut across this road if we’re going to catch them before they reach their camp. God knows how many of their cronies they have there. If we cut the road here and then cross that big meadow, we can get ahead of them. On horseback … Yeah, we can get ahead of them.” He nodded toward the northeast corner of the big meadow where a mountain rose, green and gray. “Charlie’s camp is on the other side of that mountain. There’s half a dozen trails—man-made and game trails. I’m pretty sure I know which one they’d take. You know, the second time I saw Lilah was right over there. Halfway up the mountain. Rob Sacchetto and I were out here together. I wanted him to do sketches of some zoms I thought might be related to folks in town. We were up on the catwalk of that old ranger station, and I had a big high-powered telescope with me this time. I’d picked up Lilah’s
trail that morning, and I left him there and went through the woods. I found her, and it took me half the day to first convince her that I didn’t want to hurt her and the rest of the afternoon convincing her that she didn’t want to hurt me.”

“You talked with her?”

“I talked. She didn’t say much, and just when I thought that she was going to open up, something spooked her and she vanished. God only knows where she went, because I lost her trail.”

“You found her twice around here,” Benny said. “She must live near here.”

“Maybe. She might have moved on since then. But let’s deal with first things first. We have to get the horses across this road.”

“But how?” Benny walked up and down the row of cars. There were some spots where he could squeeze through, and certainly he and Tom could climb over the vehicles … but he did not see one spot where a horse could pass. “Can we go around?”

“We’d lose half a day.” There was an overturned panel truck jammed at a right-angle to a big car that was riddled with bullet holes. “Escalade” was written on the fender in tarnished silver letters.

In the cleft formed by the two vehicles, there was a shaded spot big enough for the Imura brothers and their horses. They dismounted, and Tom looped the reins around the rear axle of the truck. “Stay here. I’m going to find us a way through. Keep your eyes and ears open. Watch for zoms, but more importantly, watch for Charlie Pink-eye and his crew.”

But Tom hadn’t gone a dozen steps before he suddenly stopped and crouched.

“Benny!” he hissed, and Benny ran over to see what Tom had found. On the blacktop, drying in the hot sun, was a small puddle of water. It was no larger than a dinner plate, but it was clear from the faded edges that it had been bigger and was shrinking in the heat. Tom touched it, sniffed his fingers.

“It’s not rainwater. Last night’s rain had a bit of a saltwater smell. This doesn’t smell at all. I think this is filtered drinking water.”

Benny could see it now—someone stopping in the sweltering afternoon to gulp down some water, letting the cold liquid splash on his throat and chest and fall to the ground. Tom stood and held his own canteen out at about six feet, tilted it, and let a little fall. The splash pattern was just about the same, even to how far the rebounding drops fell from the main impact point.

“Tall man. Charlie or the Hammer,” said Tom. “The Mekong brothers are both short.”