Rot & Ruin (32 page)

“Shouldn’t we follow?” Benny asked, but he didn’t need an answer. Between them and the fleeing Mekong brothers were at least a hundred zoms. And more came shuffling out of the woods. Not just hundreds but thousands.

All around the truck, white hands reached up toward them. They were safe only as long as they stood in the center of the truck’s overturned side. But they couldn’t stay there forever. Tom looked up and down the row.

“What do we do?” Benny whispered, although in truth there was no longer any reason for silence. Every zom in the region knew where they were. For once Tom did not have a ready answer. His face was almost as pale as the monsters that reached and moaned for their flesh.

“We have no choice,” Tom said. “We have to run down the tops of the cars, as far and as fast as we can. We have to get to a point where the zoms are thin on the ground and then make a break for the meadow. I think I know where Vin and Joey are going. Charlie’s camp is up on that mountain.” He pointed to a craggy lump of granite in the distance.

Benny looked at the row of cars. Some of them were compact cars that were so low to the ground that even standing on the roof, they’d be within grabbing range.

“We’ll never make it,” he said.

Tom shook his head. “We have to try, Ben. No other choice. You go first. It’ll be easier if I’m behind you, in case you get into trouble. Run fast; plan your jumps to land in the
widest, flattest places; and keep moving.” He drew his sword. “I’ll be right behind you.”

A cold hand closed around his ankle, and Benny screamed and kicked his foot loose. It was all the incentive he needed. He looked down the row. Past the Escalade there was a mix of sedans and SUVs. They looked like a miniature mountain range. There were zoms on both sides of the outer row of cars, but fewer on the inner rows. He pointed this out to Tom, who nodded.

“Good call, kiddo. Now, go, go, GO!”

Benny took two running steps and jumped over a sea of reaching hands. He heard and felt the dry rasp of desiccated fingers brushing against his ankles and shoes. He landed with a thump on the hood of the Escalade, barely remembering to bend his knees to absorb the shock. Zoms lunged over the hood at him, but Benny swatted their hands away with a fierce slash of his
bokken
and ran up the windshield, along the roof, and then jumped onto a burned-out shell of a Subaru. Then onto a boxy Scion that was high enough to keep the hands away from him, but the next three cars were compacts. He ran and slashed, ran and slashed, feeling the shock as his sword connected with dried tendon and brittle bone. One zom rose up in front of him, its mouth open to reveal two rows of broken and jagged teeth. Benny swung the
bokken
, and the mouth disintegrated into white chips of bone. He had a lingering image of empty black eyes glaring at him as the zombie fell away into the hands of its fellow inmates of the living hell to which they belonged.

He heard Tom’s feet pounding behind him and the occasional clean whoosh of the
katana
as it did its deadly work.

Then three things happened all at the same time that changed everything in Benny’s life, then and forever.

First, out of the corner of his eye, he saw two shapes break from the cover of the fields to his left. One was huge and burly, with skin as pale as any zom and one eye that burned with red fire. Charlie Pink-eye. And the other was slim and sun-freckled, with masses of red curls and bare feet that slapped the ground, heedless of rocks and nettles.

“NIX!” Benny yelled and at the same time she screamed his name.

“BENNY!” she cried. “IT’S A TRAP!”

It was such an absurd thing to say, because he already
knew
that this was a trap.

The second thing that happened proved to him how little he knew about the evil and devious twists of Charlie Pink-eye’s mind, because the Motor City Hammer rose up out of the side window of an overturned police cruiser and pointed a shotgun at him. Two other men—bounty hunters Benny recognized as Turk and Skins Harris; friends of Charlie’s—stood up from behind cars farther down the road. They also had shotguns.

Nix’s voice was one long continuous scream that blended with Benny’s as he twisted out of the way as the Hammer pulled the trigger. Benny dove for the second lane of cars, leaping across a gap that was filled with the undead. He made a jump he would never have believed possible for him, landing on the hood of a Ford pickup truck, tucking, rolling, falling into the back bed, and twisting around to look at where he’d been.

The third thing that happened in that same splintered second was the
sight of Tom twisting away in a spray of blood. The echo of the shotgun was as loud as thunder, but Benny’s scream was louder as Tom pitched off of the roof of the car and fell out of sight, right into the hands of the living dead.

“TOM!”

Benny got to his feet as a zombie crawled over the tailgate of the truck, and he swung the
bokken
with so much force that it tore the creature’s head half off. Benny was still screaming Tom’s name.

“BENNY!”

He whirled, and there was Nix, running over the tops of the cars on the next lane. Her clothes were torn, and there was blood on her face. Benny jumped over the gap just as she reached him, and for a moment everything stopped as he pulled her into his arms. They hugged with such force that it crushed the breath from both of them.

The sound of the Hammer racking the pump of the shotgun snapped them both back to their senses, and they spun and ran back the way Benny had come, dipping and dodging as they ran up windshields and leaped from hood to trunk.

“Get them!” bellowed Charlie, and the Hammer fired shot after shot. Turk and Skins began firing, and even though they were too far away for accuracy, the buckshot they fired filled the air with broken glass and metal splinters. The Hammer was closer, and his next shot exploded car windows all around them. But Benny and Nix were running toward the setting sun, and the Hammer was firing into the glare. There were several sharper cracks as Charlie emptied his pistol at them, but Benny pulled Nix down behind a tall flower delivery van. Bullets pinged and whanged, but none of the shots found them.

“We have to go back for Tom!” Nix said.

Benny looked back to the spot where Tom had fallen. There were at least fifty zoms clustered there, and his heart plummeted in his chest.

“He’s gone,” he said in a desolated voice.

“Benny,” she said, tears boiling from her eyes, “I’m so sorry.”

The truck canted slightly to one side, and Benny peered around to see five zoms awkwardly climbing up the side. “We have to go.
Now!
”

She looked and saw and nodded. Although it broke their hearts to do it, they turned and ran down the long line of cars. Charlie and the Hammer kept firing, but soon they had to turn their guns on the zoms who staggered toward them. Benny and Nix ran and jumped, climbed and dodged. The sun was a great glaring eye that stared accusingly at Benny, condemning him for failing his brother, for running … as his brother had once run. But he could
not
go back. Not with Nix here. He had to save her … and it was already too late to save Tom.

Pain was sewn through the fabric of his heart and stitched deep into his sides as they ran and ran and ran.

38

B
ENNY HAD NO IDEA HOW LONG THEY RAN
. A
MILE, MAYBE TWO.
His legs felt like lead and his chest burned, but he held onto Nix’s hand on every jump and never once let her fall. With every step, his heart lifted with the knowledge that Nix was alive and safe. And then it fell as he thought of Tom.

“Look!” Nix said, pulling him to a stop on the roof of a Chevy Suburban. She pointed to a path that wound like a snake and vanished into the tall grass. “It’s empty.”

She was right. The last of the zoms were hundreds of yards behind them. In their panic they’d far outrun the immediate threat.

“What about Charlie?” Benny stood on his toes and looked back the way they’d come, but the bounty hunters were nowhere to be seen.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But let’s get off these cars.”

They jumped down to the ground and froze there for a moment, checking forward and backward for any sign of movement or for zombies standing still, whose appetites would be triggered by their own movement. They saw nothing but empty cars, carrion birds, the waving grass, and the bones of a thousand dead people.

Benny dragged a forearm across his eyes, although he didn’t know if he was wiping away sweat or tears.

“Let’s go,” he whispered. “Move slowly. Follow me, do what I do, move when I move, stop when I stop.”

They were Tom’s words on his lips, and it hurt him to say them, but he knew that he had to draw on everything his brother had showed him if he and Nix were going to survive.

Together, still holding hands, they moved slowly from the shelter of the endless line of cars. Benny waited for the wind to stir the grass and tall stalks of wild wheat, and when they bent to the left, he moved that way. When the wind stopped, so did he. When the grasses stood back up again, he moved to the right. Stop and start, taking his time. Doing it right. It took them five minutes to move from the highway to the path and then they were inside the tall grass. The shadows of early twilight cast the trail in shades of purple, and in that velvet gloom Benny and Nix vanished entirely.

They lost track of how long or how far they ran. Benny took every upward sloping road, remembering what Tom said about there being fewer zombies in the high mountain passes. They passed burned-out houses and houses where zombies stood in the yard, but when Nix and Benny saw them, they slipped into the deepest foliage and moved without a sound. Terror made them cautious, and with each encounter, they refined the skills of not being seen and not being hunted.

By the time the last of the day’s light was melting into shadows, Benny realized that it had been more than an hour since the last time they’d see a zom.

“How did you get away from them?” he asked Nix.

“I kicked one of the other bounty hunters in the groin and ran.”

Benny grinned at her. “You are one tough chick.”

“Call me a chick again and I’ll show you how tough I am.” It was meant as a joke, but it was weak. Even so, Benny gave her a big grin, and they headed higher up the mountain slope.

Then Nix grabbed his arm and pointed to something. Benny looked up. Just ahead was a building on stilts that rose a hundred feet above a steep rocky slope. Sunlight still touched its eaves. They raced to the foot of the ladder.

“Can you climb?” he asked. Nix didn’t have the breath to answer, but she nodded and they grabbed the rusted rungs and began to ascend. After the long uphill run it was torture to scale the ladder. Their muscles burned and their limbs trembled, but they never stopped, never faltered.

The ladder rose to a narrow catwalk that surrounded the boxy wooden structure of the ranger outpost. The catwalk was red with rust and littered with old birds nests and animal droppings. The windows were white with dust and grime, and Benny couldn’t see in. He pulled his
bokken
out of his belt,

“Stay here,” he told Nix, and she crouched down at the top of the ladder. She had no weapon, and Benny thought that her eyes looked terrified and maybe a little crazy. He couldn’t blame her. How could she
not
be whacked out after everything she’d been through?

With the
bokken
poised to thrust or strike, he moved slowly and quietly along the catwalk. Darkness was closing its hands around them, and the last golden touch of sunlight was melting from the peaked roof of the tower. The walls and windows were pitted from weather, and none of it looked
safe, and here and there were smudges that might have been old mud. Or it might have been something else.

At the corner he paused and looked around the edge, but the catwalk was empty and the door to the station stood ajar.

Was that a good thing or a bad thing? He didn’t know.

He crept forward, breathing shallowly, sweat running down his hot face.

Three soft steps took him to the door, and he paused, drew a breath, and then kicked the door open. The ancient hinges squealed, as if they were in pain, and the door swung inward and stopped, jammed against something soft that crunched like leaves. Benny waited for an attack, for movement. Saw nothing.

He moved inside and looked quickly around … and then lowered his sword.

Except for leaves and branches from some creature that had long ago made a nest in the corner behind the door, and a few rotting sticks of furniture, the place was empty. There was a door set in the back wall with a sign marked
RESTROOM
, and Benny moved to it and gingerly opened it. The light was so bad that he couldn’t see a thing, so he took a match from his pocket and scraped the sulfur on the doorframe. In the sudden glow, Benny saw that the tiny cubicle held only a toilet and sink, but the water had long ago evaporated, and the corners were filled with trash and rags.

Benny froze. He held the flickering match out to take a second, longer look at the pile of rags. It was crammed into the corner between the wall and the toilet. Leaves and other debris covered it, and the chitinous carcasses of dead bugs were littered around.

The match flame gleamed dully from the barrel of a pistol that lay on the floor in a tangle of old twigs.

No … not twigs. Bones.

He set his sword down and used his thumb and fore-finger to lift a bit of the fabric, and as he did, he understood what this was. The rags were the remnants of clothes—a brown uniform trimmed with gold cord. An old flat-brimmed hat lay under the remains. A tarnished badge was pinned to the crown. Benny had never met one, but he’d seen pictures of forest rangers in books. This was the ranger. Had he been bitten and crawled in here to die? No … that made no sense. He’d have turned. Then Benny considered the pistol, and he understood. The man had been bitten, and he’d come in here to do what was necessary to keep himself from becoming a monster. Even though Benny knew this sort of thing had probably happened hundreds of thousands of times around the world, seeing it here, firsthand, made it almost unbearably sad.