Rot & Ruin (9 page)

“Charlie said that he rounds up zoms, too. He told us about a place in the mountains where he has a couple hundred of them staked out. He said it was one of the ways he and the Hammer were making the Ruin a safer place.”

“Uh-huh,” Tom said sourly. “The traders call it the Hungry
Forest. I think Charlie cooked up that name. Very dramatic. But it’s not the same as what the Children do. Charlie rounds up zoms and ties them to trees, so that he can find them more easily when he gets a bounty job.”

“That sounds smart.”

“I never said Charlie wasn’t smart. He’s very smart, but he’s also very twisted and dangerous, and his motives are not exactly admirable. He also does a lot of bulk work—cleaning out small towns and such for the traders. That doesn’t make the people in town happy, because it confuses the issue of identification when you wipe out a whole town of zoms, but salvaging for stuff is more important. We’ve become an agricultural society. No one’s made much of an effort to restart industry, and people seem to think that we can salvage forever for almost everything we need. It’s like in the old days, when people drilled for oil for cars and factories without making much of an effort to find renewable sources for energy. It’s a pillage-and-plunder mentality, and it makes us scavengers. That’s not the best place to be on the food chain. Charlie’s happy with it, though, because a cleanup job is big money.” He looked back over his shoulder in the direction they’d come. “The Children, on the other hand … They may be crazy and they may be misguided, but they do what they believe is the right thing.”

“How do they round up zoms? Especially in a town full of them?”

“They wear carpet coats, and they know the tricks of moving quietly and using cadaverine to mask their living smells. Sometimes one or another of the Children will come to town to buy some, but more often guys like me bring some out to them.”

“Don’t they ever get attacked?”

Tom nodded. “All the time, sad to say. I know of at least fifty dead in this part of the country who used to be Children. I’d quiet them, but Brother David won’t let me. And I’ve even heard stories that some of the Children give themselves to the dead.”

Benny stared at him. “
Why?
”

“Brother David says that some of the Children believe that the dead are the meek who were meant to inherit the earth, and that all things under heaven are there to sustain them. They think that allowing the dead to feed on them is fulfilling God’s will.”

“That’s stupid,” Benny said.

“It is what it is. I think a lot of the Children are people who didn’t survive the Fall. Oh, sure, their bodies did, but I think some fundamental part of them was broken by what happened. I was there, I can relate.”

“You’re not crazy.”

“I have my moments, kiddo, believe me.”

Benny gave him a strange look. Then he smiled. “I think that redheaded woman, Sister Sarah, has the hots for you. As disgusting a concept as that seems.”

Tom shook his head. “Too young for me. Though … I thought she looked a bit like Nix. What do you think?”

“I think you should shove that right up your—”

And that’s when they heard the gunshots.

10

W
HEN THE FIRST SHOT CRACKED THROUGH THE AIR
, B
ENNY DROPPED
to a crouch, but Tom stood straight and looked away to the northeast. When Tom heard the second shot, he turned his head slightly more to the north.

“Handgun,” he said. “Heavy caliber. Three miles.”

Benny looked up at him through the arms he’d wrapped over his head. “Bullets can go three miles, can’t they?”

“Not usually,” said Tom. “Even so, they aren’t shooting at us.”

Benny straightened cautiously. “You can tell? How?”

“Echoes,” he said. “Those bullets didn’t travel far. They’re shooting at something close and hitting it.”

“Um … it’s cool that you know that. A little freaky, but cool.”

“Yeah, this whole thing is about me showing you how cool I am.”

“Oh. Sarcasm,” said Benny dryly. “I get it.”

“Shut up,” replied Tom with a grin.

“No, you shut up.”

They smiled at each other for the first time all day.

“C’mon,” said Tom, “let’s go see what they’re shooting at.” He set off in the direction of the gunshot echoes.

Benny stood watching him for a moment. “Wait … we’re going
toward
the shooting?”

Benny shook his head and followed as quickly as he could. Tom picked up the pace, and Benny, his stomach full of beans and the hated jerky, kept up. They followed a stream down to the lowlands, but Benny noticed that Tom never went closer than a thousand yards to the running water of Coldwater Creek. He asked Tom about this.

Tom asked, “Can you hear the water?”

Benny strained to hear. “No.”

“There’s your answer. Flowing water is constant noise. It masks other sounds, which means it isn’t safe unless you’re traveling on it in a fast canoe, and this water isn’t deep enough for that. We’ll only go near it to cross it or to fill our canteens. Otherwise, quiet is better for listening. Always remember that if we can hear something, then it can probably hear us. And if we can’t hear something, then it might still be able to hear us, and we won’t know about it until it’s too late.”

However, as they followed the gunshot echoes, their path angled toward the stream. Tom stopped for a moment and then shook his head in disapproval. “Not bright,” he said, but didn’t explain his comment. They ran on.

As they moved, Benny practiced being quiet. It was harder than he thought, and for a while it sounded—to his ears—as if he was making a terrible racket. Twigs broke like firecrackers under his feet, his breath sounded like a wheezing dragon, the legs of his jeans whisked together like a crosscut saw. Tom told him to focus on quieting one thing at a time.

“Don’t try to learn too many skills at once. Take a new skill and learn it by using it. Go from there.”

By the time they were close to where they thought the gunshots were being fired, Benny was moving more quietly and found that he enjoyed the challenge. It was like playing ghost tag with Chong and Morgie.

Tom stopped and cocked his head to listen. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for Benny to remain still. They were in a field of tall grass, which led to a dense stand of birch trees. From beyond the trees they could hear the sound of men laughing and shouting, and the occasional hollow crack of a pistol shot.

“Stay here,” Tom whispered, and then he moved as quick and quiet as a sudden breeze, vanishing into the tall grass. Benny lost track of him almost at once. More gunshots popped in the dry air.

A full minute passed, and Benny felt a burning constriction in his chest and realized that he was holding his breath. He let it out and gulped in another.

Where was Tom?

Another minute. More laughter and shouts. A few scattered gunshots. A third minute. A fourth.

Then something large and dark moved quickly toward him through the tall grass.

“Tom!” Benny almost screamed the name, but Tom shushed him. His brother stepped close and bent to whisper.

“Benny, listen to me. On the other side of those trees is something you need to see. If you’re going to understand how things really are, you need to see.”

“What is it?”

“Bounty hunters. Three of them. I’ve seen these three before, but never this close to town. I want you to come with me. Very quietly. I want you to watch, but don’t say or do anything.”

“But—”

“This will be ugly. Are you ready?”

“I—”

“Yes or no? We can head northeast and continue on our way. Or we can go home.”

Benny shook his head. “No … I’m ready.”

Tom smiled and squeezed his arm. “If things get serious, I want you to run and hide. Understand?”

“Yes,” Benny said, but the word was like a thorn caught in his throat. Running and hiding. Was that the only strategy Tom knew?

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Good. Now, follow me. When I move, you move. When I stop, you stop. Step only where I step. Got it? Good.”

Tom led the way through the tall grass, moving slowly, shifting his position in time with the fluctuations of the wind. When Benny realized this, it became easier to match his brother’s movement, step for step. They entered the trees, and Benny could more easily hear the laughter of the three men. They sounded drunk. Then he heard the whinny of a horse.

A horse?

The trees thinned, and Tom hunkered down and pulled Benny down with him. The scene before them was something out of a nightmare. Even as Benny took it in, a part of his
mind was whispering to him that he would never forget what he was seeing. He could feel every detail being burned into his brain.

Beyond the trees was a clearing bordered on two sides by switchbacks of the deep stream. The stream vanished around a sheer sandstone cliff that rose thirty feet above the treeline and reappeared on the opposite side of the clearing. Only a narrow dirt path led from the trees in which the Imura brothers crouched to the spit of land framed by stream and cliff. It was a natural clearing that gave the men a clear view of the approaches on all sides. A wagon with two big horses stood in the shade thrown by the birch trees. The back of the wagon was piled high with zombies that squirmed and writhed in a hopeless attempt to flee or attack. Hopeless, because beside the wagon was a growing pile of severed arms and legs. The zombies in the wagon were limbless cripples.

A dozen other zombies milled by the sandstone wall of the cliff, and every time one of them would lumber after one of the men, it was driven back by a vicious kick. It was clear to Benny that two of the men knew some kind of martial art, because they used elaborate jumping and spinning kicks. The more dynamic the kick, the more the others laughed and applauded. As Benny listened, he realized that as one stepped up to confront a zombie, the other two men would name a kick. The men shouted bets to one another and then rated the kicks for points. The two kick fighters took turns while the third man kept score by drawing numbers in the dirt with a stick.

The zombies had little hope of any effective attack. They were clustered on a narrow and almost water-locked section
of the clearing. Far worse than that, each and every one of them was blind. Their eye sockets were oozing masses of torn flesh and almost colorless blood. Benny looked at the zombies on the wagon and saw that they were all blind as well.

He gagged, but clamped a hand to his mouth to keep the sound from escaping.

The standing zombies were all battered hulks, barely able to stay on their feet, and it was clear that this game had been going on for a while. Benny knew the zombies were already dead, that they couldn’t feel pain or know humiliation, but what he saw seared a mark on his soul.

“That one’s ’bout totally messed up!” yelled a dark-skinned man with an eye patch. “Load him up.”

The man who apparently didn’t know the fancy kicks picked up a sword with a heavy, curved blade. Benny had seen pictures of one in the book
The Arabian Nights
. A scimitar.

“Okay,” said the swordsman, “what’re the numbers?”

“Denny did his in four cuts in three point one seconds,” said Eye-patch.

“Oh, hell … I got that beat. Time me.”

Eye-patch dug a stopwatch out of his pocket. “Ready … Steady …
Go!
”

The swordsman rushed toward the closest zombie—a teenage boy who looked like he’d been about Benny’s age when he died. The blade swept upward in a glittering line that sheared through the zombie’s right arm at the shoulder, and then he checked his swing and sliced down to take the other arm. Instantly he pivoted and swung the sword laterally and chopped through both legs, an inch below the groin. The
zombie toppled to the ground, and one leg, against all odds, remained upright.

The three men burst out laughing.

“Time!” yelled Eye-patch, and read the stopwatch. “Holy crap, Stosh. That’s two point nine-nine seconds!”

“And three cuts!” shouted Stosh. “I did it in three cuts!”

They howled with laughter, and the third man, Denny, squatted down, wrapped his burly arms around the limbless zombie’s torso, picked it up with a grunt, and carried it over to the wagon. Eye-patch tossed him the limbs—one-two-three-four—and Denny added them to the pile.

The kicking game started up again. Stosh drew a pistol and shot one of the remaining zombies in the chest. The bullet did no harm, but the creature turned toward the impact and began lumbering in that direction. Denny yelled, “Jump-spinning back kick!”

And Eye-patch leaped into the air, twisted, and drove a savage kick into the zombie’s stomach, knocking it backward into the others. They all fell, and the men laughed and handed around a bottle while the zombies clambered awkwardly to their feet.

Tom leaned close to Benny and whispered, “Time to go.”

He moved away, but Benny caught up to him and grabbed his sleeve. “What the hell are you doing? Where are you going?”

“Away from these clowns,” said Tom.

“You have to
do
something!”

Tom turned to face him. “What is it you expect me to do?”

“Stop them!” Benny said in an urgent whisper.

“Why?”

“Because they’re … because …,” Benny sputtered.

“You want me to save the zombies, Benny? Is that it?”

Benny, caught in the fires of his own frustration, glared at him.

“They’re bounty hunters, Benny,” said Tom. “They get a bounty on every zombie they kill. Want to know why they don’t just cut the heads off? Because they have to prove that it was they who killed the zombies and that they didn’t just collect heads from someone else’s kill. So they bring the torsos back to town and do the killing in front of a bounty judge, who then pays them a half day’s rations for every kill. Looks like they have enough there for each of them to get almost five full days’ rations.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Keep your voice down,” Tom hissed. “And, yes, you do believe me. I can see it in your eyes. The game these guys are playing—that’s ugly, right? It got you so upset that you wanted me to step in and do something. Am I right?”