Rot & Ruin

1

BENNY IMURA COULDN’T HOLD A JOB, SO HE TOOK TO KILLING.

It was the family business. He barely liked his family-and by family he meant his older brother, Tom-and he definitely didn’t like the idea of “business.” Or work. The only part of the deal that sounded like it might be fun was the actual killing.

He’d never done it before. Sure, he’d gone through a hundred simulations in gym class and in the Scouts, but they never let kids do any real killing. Not before they hit fifteen.

“Why not?” he asked his Scoutmaster, a fat guy named Feeney who used to be a TV weatherman back in the day. Benny was eleven at the time and obsessed with zombie hunting. “How come you don’t let us whack some real zoms?”

“Because killing’s the sort of thing you should learn from your folks,” said Feeney.

“I don’t have any folks,” Benny countered. “My mom and dad died on First Night.”

“Ouch. Sorry, Benny-I forgot. Point is, you got family of some kind, right?”

“I guess. I got ‘I’m Mr. Freaking Perfect Tom Imura’ for a brother, and I don’t want to learn anything from him.”

Feeney had stared at him. “Wow. I didn’t know you were related to him. He’s your brother, huh? Well, there’s your answer, kid. Nobody better to teach you the art of killing than a professional killer like Tom Imura.” Feeney paused and licked his lips nervously. “I guess being his brother and all, you’ve seen him take down a lot of zoms.”

“No,” Benny said with huge annoyance. “He never lets me watch.”

“Really? That’s odd. Well, ask him when you turn thirteen.”

Benny had asked on his thirteenth birthday, and Tom had said no. Again. It wasn’t a discussion. Just “No.”

That was more than two years ago, and now Benny was six weeks past his fifteenth birthday. He had four more weeks grace to find a paying job before town ordinance cut his rations by half. Benny hated being in that position, and if one more person gave him the “fifteen and free” speech, he was going to scream. He hated that as much as when people saw someone doing hard work and they said crap like, “Holy smokes, he’s going at that like he’s fifteen and out of food.”

Like it was something to be happy about. Something to be proud of. Working your butt off for the rest of your life. Benny didn’t see where the fun was in that. Okay, maybe it was marginally okay because it meant only half days of school from then on, but it still sucked.

His buddy Lou Chong said it was a sign of the growing cultural oppression that was driving postapocalyptic humanity toward acceptance of a new slave state. Benny had no freaking idea what Chong meant or if there was even meaning in anything he said. But he nodded agreement because the look on Chong’s face always made it seem like he knew exactly what was what.

At home, before he even finished eating his dessert, Tom had said, “If I want to talk about you joining the family business, are you going to chew my head off? Again?”

Benny stared venomous death at Tom and said, very clearly and distinctly, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Work. In. The. Family. Business.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’ then.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little late now to try and get me all excited about it? I asked you a zillion times to-”

“You asked me to take you out on kills.”

“Right! And every time I did you-”

Tom cut him off. “There’s a lot more to what I do, Benny.”

“Yeah, there probably is, and maybe I would have thought the rest was something I could deal with, but you never let me see the cool stuff.”

“There’s nothing ‘cool’ about killing,” Tom said sharply.

“There is when you’re talking about killing zoms!” Benny fired back.

That stalled the conversation. Tom stalked out of the room and banged around the kitchen for a while, and Benny threw himself down on the couch.

Tom and Benny never talked about zombies. They had every reason to, but they never did. Benny couldn’t understand it. He hated zoms. Everyone hated them, though with Benny it was a white-hot consuming hatred that went back to his very first memory. Because it was his first memory-a nightmare image that was there every night when he closed his eyes. It was an image that was seared into him, even though it was something he had seen as a tiny child.

Dad and Mom.

Mom screaming, running toward Tom, shoving a squirming Benny-all of eighteen months-into Tom’s arms. Screaming and screaming. Telling him to run.

While the thing that had been Dad pushed its way through the bedroom door that Mom had tried to block with a chair and lamps and anything else she could find.

Benny remembered Mom screaming words, but the memory was so old and he had been so young that he didn’t remember what any of them were. Maybe there were no words. Maybe it was just her screaming.

Benny remembered the wet heat on his face as Tom’s tears fell on him as they climbed out of the bedroom window. They had lived in a ranch-style house. One story. The window emptied out into a yard that was pulsing with red and blue police lights. There were more shouts and screams. The neighbors. The cops. Maybe the army. Thinking back, Benny figured it was probably the army. And the constant popping of gunfire, near and far away.

But of all of it, Benny remembered a single last image. As Tom clutched him to his chest, Benny looked over his brother’s shoulder at the bedroom window. Mom leaned out of the window, screaming at them as Dad’s pale hands reached out of the shadows of the room and dragged her back out of sight.

That was Benny’s oldest memory. If there had been older memories, then that image had burned them away. Because he had been so young the whole thing was little more than a collage of pictures and noises, but over the years Benny had burned his brain to reclaim each fragment, to assign meaning and sense to every scrap of what he could recall. Benny remembered the hammering sound vibrating against his chest that was Tom’s panicked heartbeat, and the long wail that was his own inarticulate cry for his mom and his dad.

He hated Tom for running away. He hated that Tom hadn’t stayed and helped Mom. He hated what their dad had become on that First Night all those years ago. Just as he hated what Dad had turned Mom into.

In his mind they were no longer Mom and Dad. They were the things that had killed them. Zoms. And he hated them with an intensity that made the sun feel cold and small.

“Dude, what is it with you and zoms?” Chong once asked him. “You act like the zoms have a personal grudge against you.”

“What, I’m supposed to have fuzzy bunny feelings for them?” Benny had snapped back.

“No,” Chong had conceded, “but a little perspective would be nice. I mean… everybody hates zoms.”

“You don’t.”

Chong had shrugged his bony shoulders and his dark eyes had darted away. “Everybody hates zoms.”

The way Benny saw it, when your first memory was of zombies killing your parents, then you had a license to hate them as much as you wanted. He tried to explain that to Chong, but his friend wouldn’t be drawn back into the conversation.

A few years ago, when Benny found out that Tom was a zombie hunter, he hadn’t been proud of his brother. As far as he was concerned, if Tom really had what it took to be a zombie hunter, he’d have had the guts to help Mom. Instead, Tom had run away and left Mom to die. To become one of them.

Tom came back into the living room, looked at the remains of the dessert on the table, then looked at Benny on the couch.

“The offer still stands,” he said. “If you want to do what I do, then I’ll take you on as an apprentice. I’ll sign the papers so you can still get full rations.”

Benny gave him a long, withering stare.

“I’d rather be eaten by zoms than have you as my boss,” Benny said.

Tom sighed, turned, and trudged upstairs. After that they didn’t talk to each other for days.

2

THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND BENNY AND CHONG HAD PICKED UP THE Saturday edition of the Town Pump, because it had the biggest help wanted section. All of the easy jobs, like working in stores, had been long-since snapped up. They didn’t want to work on the farms, because that meant getting up every morning at the crack of “no way, José.” Besides, it meant dropping out of school completely. They didn’t love school, but it wasn’t too bad, and school had softball, free lunches, and girls. The ideal fix was a part-time job that paid pretty good and got the ration board off their backs, so over the next several weeks, they applied for anything that sounded easy.

Benny and Chong clipped out a bunch of want ads and tackled them one at a time, having first categorized them by “most possible money,” “coolness,” and “I don’t know what it is, but it sounds okay.” They passed on anything that sounded bad right from the get-go.

The first on their list was for a locksmith apprentice.

That sounded okay, but it turned out to be humping a couple of heavy toolboxes from house to house at the crack of frigging dawn while an old German guy who could barely speak English repaired fence locks and installed dial combinations on both sides of bedroom doors, as well as installing bars and wire grilles.

It was kind of funny watching the old guy explain to his customers how to use the combination locks. Benny and Chong began making bets on how many times per conversation a customer would say “what,” “could you repeat that,” or “beg pardon.”

The work was important, though. Everyone had to lock themselves in their rooms at night and then use a combination to get out. Or a key; some people still locked with keys. That way, if they died in their sleep and reanimated as a zom, they wouldn’t be able to get out of the room and attack the rest of the family. There had been whole settlements wiped out because someone’s grandfather popped off in the middle of the night and then started chowing down on the kids and grandkids.

“I don’t get this,” Benny confided to Chong when they were alone for a minute. “Zoms can’t work a combination lock any more than they can turn a doorknob. They can’t work keys, either. Why do people even buy this stuff?”

Chong shrugged. “My dad says that locks are traditional. People understand that locked doors keep bad things out, so people want locks for their doors.”

“That’s stupid. Closed doors will keep zoms out. Zoms are brain-dead. Hamsters are smarter.”

Chong spread his hands in a “hey, that’s people for you” gesture.

The German guy installed double-sided locks, so that the door could be opened from the other side in a real, nonzombie emergency; or if the town security guys had to come in and do a cleanup on a new zom.

Somehow, Benny and Chong had gotten it into their heads that locksmiths got to see this stuff, but the old guy said that he hadn’t ever seen a single living dead that was in any way connected to his job. Boring.

To make it worse, the German guy paid them a little more than pocket lint and said that it would take three years to learn the actual trade. That meant that Benny wouldn’t even pick up a screwdriver for six months and wouldn’t do anything but carry stuff for a year. Screw that.

“I thought you didn’t want to actually work,” said Chong as they walked away from the German with no intention of returning in the morning.

“I don’t. But I don’t want to be bored out of my freaking mind either.”

Next on their list was for a fence tester.

That was a little more interesting, because there were actual zoms on the other side of the fence that kept the town of Mountainside separate from the great Rot and Ruin. Most of the zoms were far away, standing in the field or wandering clumsily toward any movement. There were rows of poles with brightly colored streamers set far out in the field, and with every breeze the fluttering of the streamers attracted the zoms, constantly drawing them away from the fence. When the wind calmed, the creatures began lumbering in the direction of any movement on the town side of the fence. Benny wanted to get close to a zom. He’d never been closer than a hundred yards from an active zom before. The older kids said that if you looked into a zom’s eyes, your reflection would show you how you’d look as one of the living dead. That sounded very cool, but there was a guy with a shotgun dogging Benny all through the shift, and that made him totally paranoid. He spent more time looking over his shoulder than trying to find meaning in dead men’s eyes.

The shotgun guy got to ride a horse. Benny and Chong had to walk the fence line and stop every six or ten feet, grip the chain links, and shake it to make sure there were no breaks or rusted weak spots. That was okay for the first mile, but afterward the noise attracted the zoms, and by the middle of the third mile, Benny had to grab, shake, and release pretty fast to keep his fingers from getting bit. He wanted a close-up look, but he didn’t want to lose a finger over it. If he got bit, the shotgun guy would blast him on the spot. Depending on its size, a zom bite could turn someone from healthy to living dead in anything from a few hours to a few minutes, and in orientation, they told everyone that there was a zero-tolerance policy on infections.

“If the gun bulls even think you got nipped, they’ll blow you all to hell and gone,” said the trainer, “so be careful!”

By late morning Benny got his first chance to test the theory about seeing his zombified reflection in the eyes of one of the living dead. The zom was a squat man in the rags of what had once been a mail carrier’s uniform. Benny stood as close to the safe side of the fence as he dared, and the zom lumbered toward him, mouth working as if chewing, face as pale as dirty snow. Benny thought the zom must have been Hispanic. Or was still Hispanic. He wasn’t sure how that worked with the living dead. Most of the zoms still retained enough of their original skin color for Benny to tell one race from another, but as the sun continued to bake them year after year, the whole mass of them seemed to be heading toward a uniform grayness as if “the Living Dead” was a new ethnic category.

Benny looked right into the creature’s eyes, but all he saw were dust and emptiness. No reflections of any kind. No hunger or hate or malice either. There was nothing. A doll’s eyes had more life.

He felt something twist inside of him. The dead mail carrier was not as scary as he had expected. He was just there. Benny tried to get a read on him, to connect with whatever it was that drove the monster, but it was like looking into empty holes. Nothing looked back.

Then the zom lunged at him and tried to bite its way through the chain links. The movement was so sudden that it felt much faster than it actually was. There was no tension, no twitch of facial muscles, none of the signs Benny had been taught to look for in opponents in basketball or wrestling. The zom moved without hesitation or warning.

Benny yelped and backpedaled away from the fence. Then he stepped in a steaming pile of horse crap and fell hard on his butt.

All of the guards burst out laughing.

Benny and Chong quit at lunch.

The next morning Benny and Chong went to the far side of town and applied as fence technicians.

The fence ran for hundreds of miles and encircled the town and its harvested fields, so this meant a lot of walking while carrying yet another grumpy old guy’s toolbox. In the first three hours they got chased by a zom who had squeezed through a break in the fence.

“Why don’t they just shoot all the zoms who come up to the fence?” Benny asked their supervisor.

“’Cause folks would get upset,” said the man, a scruffy-looking guy with bushy eyebrows and a tic at the corner of his mouth. “Some of them zoms are relatives of folks in town, and those folks have rights regarding their kin. Been all sorts of trouble about it, so we keep the fence in good shape, and every once in a while one of the townsfolk will suck up enough intestinal fortitude to grant permission for the fence guards to do what’s necessary.”

“That’s stupid,” said Benny.

“That’s people,” said the supervisor.

That afternoon Benny and Chong walked what they were sure were a million miles, had been peed on by a horse, stalked by a horde of zoms-Benny couldn’t see anything at all in their dusty eyes-and yelled at by nearly everyone.

At the end of the day, as they shambled home on aching feet, Chong said, “That was about as much fun as getting beaten up.” He thought about it for a moment. “No… getting beaten up is more fun.”

Benny didn’t have the energy to argue.

There was only one opening for the next job-“carpet coat salesman”-which was okay because Chong wanted to stay home and rest his feet. Chong hated walking. So Benny showed up, neatly dressed in his best jeans and a clean T-shirt, and with his hair as combed as it would ever get without glue.

There wasn’t much danger in selling carpet coats, but Benny wasn’t slick enough to get the patter down. Benny was surprised they’d be hard to sell, because everybody had a carpet coat or two. Best thing in the world to have on if some zoms were around and feeling bitey. What he discovered, though, was that everyone who could thread a needle was selling them, so the competition was fierce, and sales were few and far between. The door-to-door guys worked on straight commission, too.

The lead salesman, a greasy joker named Chick, would have Benny wear a long-sleeved carpet coat-low knap for summer, shag for winter-and then use a device on him that was supposed to simulate the full-strength bite of an adult male zom. This metal “biter” couldn’t break the skin through the coat-and here Chick rolled into his spiel about human bite strength, throwing around terms like PSI, avulsion, and postdecay dental-ligament strength-but it pinched really hard, and the coat was so hot, the sweat ran down under Benny’s clothes. When he went home that night, he weighed himself to see how many pounds he’d sweated off. Just one, but Benny didn’t have a lot of pounds to spare.

“This one looks good,” said Chong over breakfast the next morning.

Benny read out loud from the paper. “‘Pit Thrower.’ What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Chong said with a mouth full of toast. “I think it has something to do with barbecuing.”

It didn’t. Pit throwers worked in teams, dragging dead zoms off the backs of carts and tossing them into the constant blaze at the bottom of Brinkers Quarry. Most of the zoms on the carts were in pieces. The woman who ran orientation kept talking about “parts,” and went on and on about the risk of secondary infection; then she pasted on the fakest smile Benny had ever seen and tried to sell the applicants on the physical fitness benefits that came from constant lifting, turning, and throwing. She even pulled up her sleeve and flexed her biceps. She had pale skin with freckles as dark as liver spots, and the sudden pop of her biceps looked like a swollen tumor.

Chong faked vomiting into his lunch bag.

The other jobs offered by the quarry included ash soaker-“because we don’t want zom smoke drifting over the town, now, do we?” asked the freckly muscle freak. And pit raker, which was exactly what it sounded like.

Benny and Chong didn’t make it through orientation. They snuck out during the slide show of smiling pit throwers handling gray limbs and heads.

One job that was neither disgusting nor physically demanding was crank generator repairman. Ever since the lights went out in the weeks following First Night, the only source of electrical power was hand-cranked portable generators. There were maybe fifty in all of Mountainside, and Chong said that they were left over from the mining days of the early twentieth century. Town ordinance forbade the building of any other kind of generator. Electronics and complex machines were no longer allowed in town, because of a strong religious movement that associated that kind of power with the “Godless behavior” that had brought about “the end.” Benny heard about it all the time, and even some of his friends’ parents talked that way.

It made no sense to Benny. It wasn’t electric lights and computers and automobiles that had made the dead rise. Or, if it was, then Benny had never heard anyone make a logical or sane connection between the two. When he asked Tom about it, his brother looked pained and frustrated. “People need something to blame,” Tom said. “If they can’t find something rational to blame, then they’ll very happily blame something irrational. Back when people didn’t know about viruses and bacteria, they blamed plagues on witches and vampires. But don’t ask me how exactly the people in town came to equate electricity and other forms of energy with the living dead.”

“That doesn’t make even a little bit of sense.”

“I know. But what I think is the real reason is that if we start using electricity again, and building back up again, then things will kind of go back the way they were. And that this whole cycle will start over again. I guess to their way of thinking-if they even consciously thought about it-it would be like a person with a badly broken heart deciding to risk falling in love again. All they can remember is how bad the heartbreak and grief felt, and they can’t imagine going through that again.”

“That’s stupid, though,” Benny insisted. “It’s cowardly.”

“Welcome to the real world, kiddo.”

The town’s only professional electrician, Vic Santorini, had long since taken to drinking his way through the rest of his life.

When Benny and Chong showed up for the interview at the house of the guy who owned the repair shop, he sat them down in the shade of an airy porch and gave them glasses of iced tea and mint cookies. Benny was thinking that he would take this job no matter what it was.

“Do you know why we only use hand-cranked generators in town, boys?” the man asked. His name was Mr. Merkle.

“Sure,” said Chong. “The army dropped nukes on the zoms, and the EMPs blew out all of the electronics.”

“Plus Mr. Santorini’s always sauced,” said Benny. He was about to add something biting about the bizarre religious intolerance to electricity when Mr. Merkle’s face creased into a weird smile. Benny shut his mouth.

Mr. Merkle smiled at them for a long time. A full minute. Then the man shook his head. “No, that’s not quite right, boys,” Merkle said. “It’s because hand-cranked machines are simple, and those other machines are ostentatious.” He pronounced each syllable as if it was a separate word.

Benny and Chong glanced at each other.

“You see, boys,” said Mr. Merkle, “God loves simplicity. It’s the devil who loves ostentation. It’s the devil who loves arrogance and grandiosity.”

Uh-oh, Benny thought.

“Mr. Santorini spent the first part of his life installing electrical appliances into people’s homes,” said Mr. Merkle. “That was the devil’s work, and now he’s sought the oblivion of demon rum to try and hide from the fact that he’s facing a long time in hell for helping to incur the wrath of the Almighty. If it wasn’t for Godless men like him, the Almighty would not have opened the gates of hell and sent the legions of the damned to overthrow the vain kingdoms of mankind.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Benny could see Chong’s fingers turning bone white as he gripped the arms of his chair.

“I can see a little doubt in your eyes, boys, and that’s fair enough,” said Merkle, his mouth twisted into a smile that was so tight, it looked painful. “But there are a lot of people who have embraced the righteous path. There are more of us who believe than don’t.” He sniffed. “Even if all of them don’t yet have the courage of their faith to say so.”

He leaned forward, and Benny could almost feel the heat from the man’s intense stare.

“The school, the hospital-even the town hall-run on electricity from hand-cranked generators, and as long as right-minded people draw breath under God’s own heaven, there won’t be any ostentatious machinery in our town.”

There was a whole pitcher of iced tea on the table, as well as quite a pile of cookies, and Benny realized that Mr. Merkle probably had a lot to say on the subject and wanted his audience comfortable for the whole ride. Benny endured it for as long as he could and then asked if he could use the bathroom. Mr. Merkle, who had now shifted from simple electricity to the soul-crushing blasphemy that was hydroelectric power, was only mildly thrown off his game, and told Benny where to go inside the house. Benny went inside and all the way through and out the back door. He waved to Chong as he vaulted the wooden fence.

Two hours later Chong caught up with him outside of Lafferty’s, the local general store. He gave Benny a long and evil look.

“You’re such a good friend, Benny, I’ll really miss you when you’re dead.”

“Dude, I gave you an out. When I didn’t come back, didn’t he go looking for me?”

“No. He saw you go over the fence, but he kept smiling that smile of his and said, ‘Your little friend is going to burn in hell, do you know that? But you wouldn’t spit in God’s eye like that, would you?’”

“And you stayed?”

“What could I do? I was afraid he’d point at me and say ‘Him!,’ and then lightning bolts would hit me or something.”

“Scratch that job off the list?”

“You think?”

Spotter was the next job, and that proved to be a good choice, but only for one of them. Benny’s eyesight was too poor to spot zoms at the right distance. Chong was like an eagle, and they offered him a job as soon as he finished reading the smallest numbers off a chart. Benny couldn’t even tell they were numbers.

Chong took the job, and Benny walked away alone, throwing dispirited looks back at his friend sitting next to his trainer in a high tower.

Later, Chong told Benny that he loved the job. He sat there all day, staring out over the valleys, into the Rot and Ruin that stretched from California, all the way to the Atlantic. Chong said that he could see twenty miles on a clear day, especially if there were no winds coming his way from the quarry. Just him up there, alone with his thoughts. Benny missed his friend, but privately he thought that the job sounded more boring than words could express.

Benny liked the sound of bottler, because he figured it for a factory job of filling soda bottles. Benny loved soda, but it was sometimes hard to come by. Some pop was old stuff brought in by traders, but that was too expensive. A bottle of Dr Pepper cost ten ration dollars. The local stuff came in all sorts of recycled bottles-from jelly jars to bottles that had actually once been filled with Coke or Mountain Dew. Benny could see himself manning the hand-cranked generator that ran the conveyor belt or tapping corks into the bottlenecks with a rubber mallet. He was positive they would let him drink all the soda he wanted. But as he walked up the road, he met an older teenager-his pal Morgie Mitchell’s cousin Bert-who worked at the plant. When Benny fell into step with Bert, he almost gagged. Bert smelled awful, like something found dead behind the baseboards. Worse. He smelled like a zom.

Bert caught his look and shrugged. “Well… what do you expect me to smell like? I bottle this stuff eight hours a day.”

“What stuff?”

“Cadaverine. What, you think I work making soda pop? I wish! Nah, I work a press to get the oils from the rotting meat.”

Benny’s heart sank. Cadaverine was a nasty-smelling molecule produced by protein hydrolysis during putrefaction of animal tissue. Benny remembered that from science class, but he didn’t know that it was made from actual rotting flesh. Hunters and trackers dabbed it on their clothes to keep the zoms from coming after them, because the dead were not attracted to rotting flesh.

Benny asked Bert what kind of flesh was used to produce the product, but Bert hemmed and hawed and finally changed the subject. Just as Bert was reaching for the door to the plant, Benny spun around and walked back to town.

There was one job Benny already knew about: erosion artist. He’d seen erosion portraits tacked on every wall of the town’s fence outposts and on the walls of the buildings that lined the Red Zone, the stretch of open land that separated the town from the fence.

This job had some promise, because Benny was a pretty fair artist. People wanted to know what their relatives might look like if they were zoms, so erosion artists took family photos and zombified them. Benny had seen dozens of these portraits in Tom’s office. A couple of times he wondered if he should take the picture of his parents to an artist and have them redrawn. He’d never actually done it, though. Thinking about his parents as zoms made him sick and angry.

But Sacchetto, the supervising artist, told him to try a picture of a relative first. He said it provided better insight into what the clients would be feeling. So, as part of his audition, Benny took the picture of his folks out of his wallet and tried it.

Sacchetto frowned and shook his head. “You’re making them look too mean and scary.”

He tried it again with several photos of strangers the artist had on file.

“Still mean and scary,” said Sacchetto with pursed lips and a disapproving shake of his head.

“They are mean and scary,” Benny insisted.

“Not to customers they’re not,” said Sacchetto.

Benny almost argued with him about it, saying that if he could accept that his own folks were flesh-eating zombies-and that there was nothing warm and fuzzy about it-then why can’t everyone else get it through their heads?

“How old were you when your parents passed?” Sacchetto asked.

“Eighteen months.”

“So, you never really knew them.”

Benny hesitated, and that old image flashed in his head once more. Mom screaming. The pale and inhuman face that should have been Dad’s smiling face. And then the darkness as Tom carried him away.

“No,” he said bitterly. “But I know what they look like. I know about them. I know that they’re zoms. Or maybe they’re dead now, but, I mean-zoms are zoms. Right?”

“Are they?” the artist asked.

“Yes!” Benny snapped, answering his own question. “And they should all rot.”

The artist folded his arms across his chest and leaned against a paint-spattered wall, head cocked as he assessed Benny. “Tell me something, kid,” he said. “Everyone lost family and friends to the zoms. Everyone’s pretty torn up about it. You didn’t even really know the people you lost-you were too young-but you got this red-hot hate going on. I’ve only known you half an hour, and I can see it coming out of your pores. What’s that all about? We’re safe here in town. Have a life and let go of the stuff you can’t change.”

“Maybe I’m too smart to just forgive and forget.”

“No,” said Sacchetto, “that ain’t it.”

After the audition, he hadn’t been offered the job.

3

“IT WAS A 1967 PONTIAC LEMANS RAGTOP. BLOODRED AND SO souped-up that she’d outrun any damn thing on the road. And I do mean damned thing.”

That’s how Charlie Matthias always described his car. Then he’d give a big braying horselaugh, because no matter how many times he said it, he thought it was the funniest joke ever. People tended to laugh with him rather than at the actual joke, because Charlie had a seventy-inch chest and twenty-four-inch biceps, and his sweat was a soup of testosterone, anabolic steroids, and Jack Daniels. You don’t laugh, he gets mad and starts to think you’re messing with him. Something ugly usually followed Charlie becoming offended.

Benny always laughed. Not because he was afraid of what Charlie would do to him if he didn’t, but because Benny thought Charlie was hilarious. And cool. He thought there was no one cooler on planet Earth.

It didn’t matter to Benny that the car Charlie always talked about had run out of gas thirteen years ago and was a rusted piece of scrap metal somewhere out in the Rot and Ruin. Nor did it matter that the fact the car could even drive was at odds with history; not after the EMPs. In Charlie’s stories, that car had lived through the bombs and the ghouls and a thousand adventures, and could never be forgotten. Charlie said he’d been a real road warrior in the LeMans, cruising the blacktop and bashing zoms.

Everyone else at Lafferty’s General Store laughed too, though Benny was sure a couple of them might have been faking it. About the only person who didn’t laugh at the joke was Marion Hammer, known to everyone as the Motor City Hammer. He wasn’t as big as Charlie, but he was bulldog ugly and had pistol butts sticking out of every pocket, as well as a length of black pipe that hung like a club from his belt. The Hammer didn’t laugh much, but when he was in a mood, his eyes would twinkle like a merry pig, and one corner of his mouth would turn up in what could have been a smile but probably wasn’t.

Benny thought the Hammer was insanely cool too… Just not as insanely cool as Charlie. Of course, no one was as cool as Charlie Matthias. Charlie was a six-foot, six-inch albino with one blue eye and one pink one that was milky and blind. There was a rumor that when Charlie closed his blue eye, he could see into the realm of ghosts with his dead eye. Benny thought that was wicked, too… even if he privately wasn’t so sure it was true.

The pair of them-Charlie and the Hammer-were the toughest bounty hunters in the entire Rot and Ruin. Everyone said so. Except for a few weirdoes, like Mayor Kirsch, who said that Tom Imura was tougher. Benny thought that was a load of crap, because Charlie said Tom was “a bit too easy on zoms,” and he said it in a way that suggested Tom was either shy of a real fight or didn’t have the raw nerve necessary to be a first-class zombie-hunting, badlands badass. Besides, Tom wasn’t half as big as Charlie or as mean-looking as the Hammer. No, Tom was a coward. Benny knew that firsthand.

Working as a bounty hunter was a tough and dangerous business. None tougher, as far as Benny knew. Most of the hunters were paid by the town to clear zoms out of the areas around the trade route that linked Mountainside to the handful of other towns strung out along the mountain range. Others worked in packs as mercenary armies to clear out towns, old shopping malls, warehouses, and even a few small cities, so that the traders could raid them for supplies. According to Charlie the life expectancy of a typical bounty hunter was six months. Most of the young men who tried that job gave it a month or two and then quit, discovering that actually killing zoms was a lot different from what they learned from family members who had survived First Night, and a whole lot different from the stuff they were taught in school or the Scouts. Charlie and the Hammer had been the first of the hunters-again, according to Charlie-and they’d been at it since the beginning, making their first paid kills eight months after First Night.

“We kilt more zoms than the whole army, navy, air force, and marines put together,” the Hammer bragged at least once a month. “And that includes the pansy-ass National Guard.”

For all their bluster and bad odors and violent tendencies, Charlie and the Hammer were popular all around town, partly because they looked too tough and ugly to be scared of anything. Maybe even too ugly to kill. If even half of their reputation was to be believed, then they’d been in more close-combat tussles with the living dead than anyone, and certainly more than any of the other bounty hunters working this part of the Ruin. They were even tougher than legendary hunters, like Houston John, Wild Bill Fairchild, J-Dog and Dr. Skillz, or the Mekong brothers. Then again, Benny had to measure reputation against reality with only guesswork to go on, and in the end it probably didn’t matter who’d done the most killing or taken the most heads. According to Don Lafferty, owner of the general store, Charlie and the Hammer had bagged and tagged one hundred and sixty-three named heads and maybe two thousand nameless dead. Every single kill had been a paid job, too.

Charlie and the Hammer also did closure jobs-locating a zombified family member or friend for a client and putting them to final rest. Mayor Kirsch said they had as high a closure rate as Tom did, though Benny doubted it. No way Tom’s rate could be anywhere near Charlie’s tally. Tom never had extra ration dollars to spare, and Charlie was always buying beer, pop, and fried chicken wings for the crowd who gathered around to listen to his stories.

“When you gonna retire?” asked Wrigley Sputters, the mail carrier, as he poured Charlie another cup of iced tea. “You boys have to be rich as Midas by now.”

“Midas?” asked the Hammer. “Who’s he?”

“I think he sold mufflers,” offered Norbert, one of the traders who used armored horses to pull wagons of scavenged goods from town to town, “and then bought a kingdom.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie, nodding as if he knew that to be the truth. “King Midas. Definitely from Detroit. Made a fortune outta car parts and such.”

And everyone agreed with him, because that was the smart thing to do. Benny nodded, even though he had no clue what a muffler was. Lou Chong and Morgie Mitchell nodded too.

“Well, boys,” said Charlie with a wink. “I ain’t saying I’m as rich as a king, but me and the Hammer got us a whole pot of gold. The Ruin’s been good to us.”

“Yeah, it has,” agreed the Hammer, his purple lips pursed knowingly. “We kilt us a mess o’ zoms.”

“My uncle Nick said you killed the four Mengler brothers last month,” said Morgie from the back of the crowd.

Charlie and the Hammer burst out laughing. “Hell yes! We killed them deader’n dead. The Hammer snucked up on their place, half-past sunrise, and tossed a Molotov onto the roof. All four of them dead suckers come staggering out into the morning light. Streaked with old blood and horse crap and who knows what. Skinny and rotten, smelled worse than sweaty pigs, and we were fifty feet away.”

“Whatcha do?” asked Benny, his eyes ablaze.

The Hammer snorted. “We played some.”

Charlie snickered at that. “Yeah. We wanted to have some fun. This business is getting so’s killing these critters is way too easy. Am I right or am I right?”

A few people chuckled or nodded vaguely, but nobody said anything specific. It was one of those times when it wasn’t clear what the right answer would be.

Charlie plowed ahead. “So me and the Hammer decide to make this a bit more fair.”

“Fair,” agreed the Hammer.

“We laid down our weapons.”

“All of ’em?” Chong gasped.

“Every last one. Guns, knives, the Hammer’s favorite pipe, numchucks, even them ninja throwing stars that the Hammer took off that dead zom who used to run that karate school on the other side of the valley. We stripped down to our jeans and beaters and just went in, mano a mano.”

“Went in whut?” asked Morgie.

“It means ‘hand to hand,’” Chong said.

“It means ‘man to man,’” Charlie snapped.

Even Benny knew Charlie was wrong, but he didn’t say so. Not right to Charlie’s face, anyway. No one was that dumb.

Charlie threw Chong a quick, ugly look and plunged back into his story. “Anyways, we came up on them with just our knuckles and nerves, and we fair beat them zoms so bad, they died surprised, woke up, and died of shame all over again.”

Everyone burst out laughing.

Someone cleared his throat, and they all looked up to see Randy Kirsch, the town mayor, standing there, his arms folded, bald head cocked to one side as he looked from Benny to Chong to Morgie. “I thought you boys were supposed to be out job hunting.”

“I got a job,” Chong said quickly.

“I’m fourteen,” said Morgie.

“We just stopped in for a cold bottle of pop,” Benny said.

“And you’ve had it, Benjamin Imura,” said Mayor Kirsch. “Now you three run along.”

Benny thought Charlie was going to object, but the bounty hunter simply shrugged. “Yeah… you boys got to earn your rations just like grown folks. Skedaddle.”

Benny and the others got up and slouched past the mayor. Before they even reached the door Charlie was in full stride again, telling another of his stories, and everyone was laughing. The mayor followed the boys outside.

“Benny,” he said quietly, the hot sun glinting off the polished crown of his shaved head. “Does Tom know you’ve been hanging out here?”

“I don’t know,” Benny said evasively. He knew darn well that Tom had no idea that he spent a part of every afternoon listening to Charlie and the Hammer tell their stories.

“I don’t think he’d like it,” said Mayor Kirsch.

Benny met his stare. “I guess I really don’t care much what Tom likes and doesn’t like,” he said, then added “sir” to the end of it, as if that word could somehow improve the tone of voice he’d just used.

Mayor Kirsch scratched at his thick black beard. He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it again. Whatever he wanted to say, he kept to himself. That was fine with Benny, who wasn’t in the mood for a lecture.

“You boys run along now,” Kirsch said eventually. He stood on the porch of the general store for a while, but when Benny was all the way down the street and looked back, he saw the mayor go back into the store.

The mayor and his family lived next door to Benny, and he and Tom were friends. Mayor Kirsch was always talking about how tough Tom was and what a good hunter Tom was and what a fine example Tom set for all bounty hunters. Blah, blah, blah. It made Benny want to hurl. If Tom set such a fine example as a bounty hunter, then why didn’t the other bounty hunters ever tell stories about him? None of them bragged about how they’d seen Tom single-handedly kick the butts of four zombies at once. Even Tom didn’t talk about it. Not once had he ever told Benny about what he did out there in the Ruin. How boring was that? Benny thought the Mayor had a screw loose. Tom was no kind of role model to anyone.

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.”

“People do go to the Red Zone, Benny. They go there to post erosion portraits for the bounty hunters.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I know for a fact that most people pay kids to post the portraits for them. How do I know? Because I’ve put up about a hundred of them.”

“You-?”

“Zombie Cards don’t buy themselves, Tom. And when people ask kids to put the pictures up, they don’t even say what they are. I mean, we’re standing there, both looking at an erosion portrait, and no one ever mentions the word ‘zom.’ Most people just say, ‘Hey, kid, want to hang this for me?’ They never say where. They know that we know, but they can’t actually come out and say it. It’s freaking weird, man.”

“People are scared, Benny. They’re in denial. You’re only fifteen, so you and your friends don’t really understand what it was like during First Night.”

“No joke, Mr. Wizard. That’s my whole point! We want to know.”

Tom pursed his lips. “I guess… people probably want to shelter you from it.”

Benny wanted to throw something at Tom. He eyed a heavy book; that might wake him up. “How the heck can anyone shelter us? We live behind fences, surrounded by the Rot and Ruin. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Big place, used to be called America? Filled with zoms? It’s not fair that people don’t tell us the truth.”

“Benny, I-”

“It’s our world too,” Benny snapped. His words hit Tom like a slap. Then into the silence Benny dropped another bomb. “Don’t get on my case for listening to Charlie if he’s the only one who thinks we ought to know truth.”

Tom stared at him for a long time as different emotions flowed like water over his face. Finally he threw the last of his coffee into the bushes beside the porch, and stood up.

“Tell you what, Benny… Tomorrow we’re going to start early and head out into the Rot and Ruin. We’ll go deep, like Charlie does. I want you to see firsthand what he does and what I do, and then you can make your own decisions.”

“Decisions about what?”

“About a lot of things, kiddo.”

And with that Tom went inside and to bed.

6

TOM AND BENNY LEFT AT DAWN AND HEADED DOWN TO THE southeastern gate. The gatekeeper had Tom sign the usual waiver that absolved the town and the gatekeeping staff of all liability if anything untoward happened once they crossed into the Ruin. A vendor sold Tom a dozen bottles of cadaverine, which they sprinkled on their clothing, and a jar of peppermint goo that they dabbed on their upper lips, to kill their own sense of smell.

“Will this stuff stop the zoms?”

“Nothing stops them,” said Tom. “But this slows them down, makes most of them hesitate before biting. Even drives some away. It gives you an edge and a little breathing room, but don’t think you can stroll through a crowd of them with no risk.”

“That’s encouraging,” Benny said under his breath.

They were dressed for a long hike. Tom had instructed Benny to wear good walking shoes, jeans, a durable shirt, and a hat to keep the sun from boiling his brains.

“If it’s not already too late,” Tom said.

Benny made a rude gesture when Tom wasn’t looking.

Despite the heat, Tom wore a lightweight jacket with lots of pockets. He had an old army gun belt around his narrow waist, with a pistol snugged into a worn leather holster. Benny wasn’t allowed to have a gun yet.

“Eventually,” Tom said, then added, “Maybe.”

“I learned gun safety in school,” Benny protested.

“You didn’t learn it from me,” Tom said with finality.

The last thing Tom strapped on was a sword. Benny watched with interest as Tom slung a long strap diagonally across his body, from left shoulder to right hip, with the hilt standing above his shoulder so that he could reach up and over for a fast right-handed draw.

The sword was a katana, a Japanese long sword that Benny had seen Tom practice with every day for as long as he could remember. That sword was the only thing about his brother that Benny thought was cool. Benny’s mom, who was Tom’s adopted mother, was Irish, but their father had been Japanese. Tom once told Benny that the Imura family went all the way back to the samurai days of ancient Japan. He showed Benny picture books of fierce-looking Japanese men in armor. Samurai warriors.

“Are you a samurai?” Benny had asked when he was nine.

“There are no samurai anymore,” Tom said, but even back then Benny thought that Tom had a funny look on his face when he said that. Like maybe there was more to say on the subject, but he didn’t want to say it right then. When Benny brought the subject up a couple of times since, the answer was always the same.

Even so, Tom was pretty damn good with the sword. He could draw fast as lightning, and Benny had seen him do a trick once when Tom thought no one else was looking. He threw a handful of grapes into the air, then drew his sword and cut five of them in half before they fell to the grass. The blade was a blur. Later, after Tom had gone off to a store, Benny counted the grapes. Tom had thrown six into the air. He’d only missed one. That was sweet.

Of course, Benny would sooner eat broken glass than tell Tom how impressive he thought it was.

“Why are you bringing that?” he asked as Tom adjusted the lay of the strap.

“It’s quiet,” Tom said.

Benny understood that. Noise attracted zoms. A sword was quieter than a gun, but it also meant getting closer. Benny didn’t think that was a very smart idea. He said as much, and Tom just shrugged.

“Then why bring the gun?” Benny persisted.

“’Cause sometimes quiet doesn’t matter.” Tom patted his pockets to do a quick inventory to make sure he had everything he needed. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go. We’re burning daylight.”

Tom tipped a couple of fence runners to bang on drums six hundred yards north, and as soon as that drew away the wandering zoms, Tom and Benny slipped out into the great Rot and Ruin and headed for the tree line.

Chong waved to them from the corner tower.

“We need to move fast for the first half mile,” cautioned Tom, and he broke into a jog-trot that was fast enough to get them out of scent range but slow enough for Benny to match.

A few of the zombies staggered after them, but the fence runners banged on the drums again, and the zombies, incapable of holding on to more than one reaction at a time, turned back toward the noise. The Imura brothers vanished into the shadows under the trees.

When they finally slowed to a walk, Benny was sweating. It was a hot start to what would be a scorcher of a day. The air was thick with mosquitoes and flies, and the trees were alive with the sound of chattering birds. Far above them the sun was a white hole in the sky.

“We’re not being followed,” Tom said.

“Who said we were?”

“Well… ever since we left you keep looking back toward the fence line.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Or are you looking to see if any of your friends came to see you off? Other than Chong, I mean. Maybe a certain red-haired girl?”

Benny stared at him. “You are completely delusional.”

“You’re going to tell me that you don’t have a thing for Nix Riley?”

“A world of no.”

“How come I found a sheet of paper with her name written on it maybe a million times?”

“Must have been Morgie’s.”

“It was your handwriting.”

“Then I guess I was practicing my penmanship. What is it with you? I told you, I don’t have a thing for Nix. Let it go.”

Tom turned away without another word, but Benny caught his smile. He cursed under his breath for the next mile.

“How far are we going?” Benny asked.

“Far. But don’t worry, there are way stations where we can crash if we don’t make it back tonight.”

Benny looked at him as if he’d just suggested they set themselves on fire and go swimming in gasoline. “Wait-You’re saying we could be out all night?”

“Sure. You know I’m out there for days at a time. You’re going to have to do what I do. Besides, except for some wanderers, most of the dead in this area have long since been cleaned out. Every week I have to go farther away.”

“Don’t they just come to you?”

Tom shook his head. “There are wanderers-what the fence guards call ‘noms,’ short for ‘nomadic zombies’-but most don’t travel. You’ll see.”

The forest was old but surprisingly lush in the late August heat. Tom found fruit trees, and they ate their fill of sweet pears as they walked. Benny began filling his pockets with them, but Tom shook his head.

“They’re heavy and they’ll slow you. Besides, I picked a route that’ll take us through what used to be farm country. Lots of fruit growing wild. Some vegetables, too. Wild beans and such.”

Benny looked at the fruit in his hand, sighed, and let them fall.

“How come nobody comes out here to farm this stuff?” he asked.

“People are scared.”

“Why? There’s got to be forty guys working the fence.”

“No, it’s not the dead that scare them. People in town don’t trust anything out here. They think there’s a disease infesting everything. Food, the livestock that have run wild over the last fourteen years-everything.”

“Yeah…,” Benny said diffidently. He’d heard that talk. “So… it’s not true?”

“You ate those pears without a thought.”

“You handed them to me.”

Tom smiled. “Oh, so you trust me now?”

“You’re a dork, but I don’t think you want to turn me into a zom.”

“Wouldn’t have to get on you about cleaning your room, so let’s not rule it out.”

“You’re so funny, I almost peed my pants,” Benny said without expression, then said, “Wait, I don’t get it. Traders bring in food all the time, and all the cows and chickens and stuff… They were brought to town by travelers and hunters and people like that, right? So…”

“So, why do people think it’s safe to eat that stuff and not the food growing wild out here?”

“Yeah.”

“Good question.”

“Well, what’s the answer?”

“The people in town trust what’s inside the fence. Currently inside the fence. If it came from outside, they remark on it. Like, on the second Wednesday of every month, folks will say, ‘’Bout time for the wagons, ain’t it?,’ but they don’t really acknowledge where the wagons come from or why the wagons are covered in sheet metal and the horses wrapped in carpet and chain mail. They know, but they don’t know. Or don’t want to know.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Tom walked a bit before he said, “There’s town and then there’s the Rot and Ruin. Most of the time they aren’t in the same world, you know?”

Benny nodded. “I guess I do.”

He stopped and stared ahead with narrowed eyes. Benny couldn’t see anything, but then Tom grabbed his arm and pulled him quickly off the road and led him in a wide circle through the groves of trees. Benny peered between the hundreds of tree trunks and finally caught a glimpse of three zoms, shuffling slowly along the road. One was whole; the other two had ragged flesh where other zoms had feasted on them while they were still alive.

Benny opened his mouth and almost asked Tom how he knew they were there, but Tom made a shushing gesture and continued on, moving soundlessly through the soft summer grass.

When they were well clear, Tom took them back up to the road.

“I didn’t even see them!” Benny gasped, turning to look back.

“Neither did I.”

“Then how…?”

“You get a feel for this sort of thing.”

Benny held his ground, still looking back. “I don’t get it. There were only three of them. Couldn’t you have… you know…”

“What?”

“Killed them,” said Benny flatly. “Charlie Matthias said he’ll go out of his way to chop a zom or two. He doesn’t run from anything.”

“Is that what he says?” Tom murmured, then continued down the road.

Benny shrugged, then followed.

7

TWICE MORE TOM PULLED BENNY OFF THE ROAD SO THEY COULD CIRCLE around wandering zombies. After the second time, once they were clear of the creatures’ olfactory range, Benny grabbed Tom’s arm and demanded, “Whyn’t you just pop a cap in them?”

Tom gently pulled his arm free. He shook his head and didn’t answer.

“What, are you afraid of them?” Benny yelled.

“Keep your voice down.”

“Why? You afraid a zom will come after you? Big, tough zombie killer who’s afraid to kill a zombie.”

“Benny,” said Tom with thin patience, “sometimes you say some truly stupid things.”

“Whatever,” Benny said, and pushed past him.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Tom said when Benny was a dozen paces along the road.

“This way.”

“I’m not,” said Tom, and he began climbing the slope of a hill that rose gently from the left-hand side of the road. Benny stood in the middle of the road and seethed for a full minute. He was muttering the worst words he knew all the while he climbed up the hill after Tom.

There was a narrower road at the top of the hill, and they followed that in silence. By ten o’clock they’d entered a series of steeper hills and valleys that were shaded by massive oak trees with cool green leaves. Tom cautioned Benny to be quiet as they climbed to the top of a ridge that overlooked a small country lane. At the curve of the road was a small cottage with a fenced yard and an elm tree so gnarled and ancient that it looked like the world had grown up around it. Two figures stood in the yard, but they were too small to see. Tom flattened out at the top of the ridge and motioned for Benny to join him.

Tom pulled his field glasses from a belt holster and studied the figures for a long minute.

“What do you think they are?” He handed the binoculars to Benny, who snatched them with more force than was necessary. Benny peered through the lenses in the direction Tom pointed.

“They’re zoms,” Benny said.

“No kidding, boy genius. But what are they?”

“Dead people.”

“Ah.”

“Ah… what?”

“You just said it. They’re dead people. They were once living people.”

“So what? Everybody dies.”

“True,” admitted Tom. “How many dead people have you seen?”

“What kind of dead? Living dead, like them, or dead dead, like Aunt Cathy?”

“Either. Both.”

“I don’t know. The zombies at the fence… and a couple of people in town, I guess. Aunt Cathy was the first person I ever knew who died. I was, like, six when she died. I remember the funeral and all.” Benny continued to watch the zombies. One was a tall man, the other a young woman or teenage girl. “And… Morgie Mitchell’s dad died after that scaffolding collapsed. I went to his funeral too.”

“Did you see either of them quieted?”

“Quieted” was the acceptable term for the necessary act of inserting a metal spike, called a “sliver,” into the base of the skull to sever the brain stem. Since First Night, anyone who died would reanimate as a zombie. Bites made it happen too, but really any recently deceased person would come back. Every adult in town carried at least one sliver, though Benny had never seen one used.

“No,” he said. “You wouldn’t let me stay in the room when Aunt Cathy died. And I wasn’t there when Morgie’s dad died. I just went to the funerals.”

“What were the funerals like? For you, I mean.”

“I dunno. Kind of quick. Kind of sad. And then everyone went to a party at someone’s house and ate a lot of food. Morgie’s mom got totally shitfaced-”

“Language.”

“Morgie’s mom got drunk,” Benny said in way that suggested having his language corrected was as difficult as having his teeth pulled. “Morgie’s uncle sat in the corner singing Irish songs and crying with the guys from the farm.”

“That was a year, year and a half ago, right? First spring planting?”

“Yeah. They were building a corn silo, and Mr. Mitchell was using the rope hoist to send some tools up to the crew working on the silo roof. One of the scaffolding pipes broke, and a whole bunch of stuff came crashing down on him.”

“It was an accident.”

“Well, yeah, sure.”

“How’d Morgie take it?”

“How do you think he took it? He was fu-I mean, he was screwed up.” Benny handed back the glasses. “He’s still a little screwed up.”

“How’s he screwed up?”

“I don’t know. He misses his dad. They used to hang out a lot. Mr. Mitchell was pretty cool, I guess.”

“Do you miss Aunt Cathy?”

“Sure, but I was little. I don’t remember that much. I remember she smiled a lot. She was pretty. I remember she used to sneak me extra ice cream from the store where she worked. Half an extra ration.”

Tom nodded. “Do you remember what she looked like?”

“Like Mom,” said Benny. “She looked a lot like Mom.”

“You were too little to remember Mom.”

“I remember her,” Benny said with an edge in his voice. He took out his wallet and showed Tom the image behind the glassine cover. “Maybe I don’t remember her really well, but I think about her. All the time. Dad, too. I can even remember what she wore on First Night. A white dress with red sleeves. I remember the sleeves.”

Tom closed his eyes and sighed, and his lips moved. Benny thought he echoed the words “red sleeves.” Tom opened his eyes. “I didn’t know you carried this.” His smile was small and sad. “I remember Mom. She’s was more of a mother to me than my mom ever was. I was so happy when Dad married her. I can remember every line on her face. The color of her hair. Her smile. Cathy was a year younger, but they could have been twins.”

Benny sat up and wrapped his arms around his knees. His brain felt twisted around. There were so many emotions wired into memories, old and new. He glanced at his brother. “You were older than I am now when, y’know, it happened.”

“I turned twenty a few days before First Night. I was in the police academy. Dad married your mom when I was sixteen.”

“You got to know them. I never did. I wish I…” He left the rest unsaid.

Tom nodded. “Me too, kiddo.”

They sat in the shade of their private memories.

“Tell me something, Benny,” said Tom. “What would you have done if one of your friends-say, Chong or Morgie-had come to Aunt Cathy’s funeral and took a leak in her coffin?”

Benny was so startled by the question that his answer was unguarded. “I’d have jacked them up. I mean, jacked them up.”

Tom nodded.

Benny stared at him. “What kind of question is that, though?”

“Indulge me. Why would you have freaked out on your friends?”

“Because they dissed Aunt Cathy, why do you think?”

“But she’s dead.”

“What the hell does that matter? Pissing in her coffin? I would so kick their asses.”

“But why? Aunt Cathy was beyond caring.”

“This is her funeral! Maybe she’s still, I don’t know, there in some way. Like Pastor Kellogg always says.”

“What does he say?”

“That the spirits of those we love are always with us.”

“Okay. What if you didn’t believe that? What if you believed that Aunt Cathy was only a body in a box? And your friends peed on her?”

“What do you think?” Benny snapped. “I’d still kick their asses.”

“I believe you. But why?”

“Because,” Benny began, but then hesitated, unsure of how to express what he was feeling. “Because Aunt Cathy was mine, you know? She’s my aunt. My family. They don’t have any right to disrespect my family.”

“No more than you’d go take a crap on Morgie Mitchell’s father’s grave. Or dig him up and pour garbage on his bones. You wouldn’t do anything like that?”

Benny was appalled. “What’s your damage, man? Where do you come up with this crap? Of course I wouldn’t do anything sick like that! God, who do you think I am?”

“Shhh… keep your voice down,” cautioned Tom. “So… you wouldn’t disrespect Morgie’s dad… alive or dead?”

“Hell, no.”

“Language.”

Benny said it slower and with more emphasis. “Hell. No.”

“Glad to hear it.” Tom held out the field glasses. “Take a look at the two dead people down there. Tell me what you see.”

“So we’re back to business now?” Benny gave him a look. “You’re deeply weird, man.”

“Just look.”

Benny sighed and grabbed the binoculars out of Tom’s hand, put them to his eyes. Stared. Sighed.

“Yep. Two zoms. Same two zoms.”

“Be specific.”

“Okay. Okay, two zoms. One man, one woman. Standing in the same place as before. Big yawn.”

Tom said, “Those dead people…”

“What about them?”

“They used to be somebody’s family,” said Tom quietly. “The male looks old enough to have been someone’s granddad. He had a family, friends. A name. He was somebody.”

Benny lowered the glasses and started to speak.

“No,” said Tom. “Keep looking. Look at the woman. She was, what? Eighteen years old when she died. Might have been pretty. Those rags she’s wearing might have been a waitress’s uniform once. She could have worked at a diner right next to Aunt Cathy. She had people at home who loved her…”

“C’mon, man, don’t-”

“People who worried when she was late getting home. People who wanted her to grow up happy. People-a mom and a dad. Maybe brothers and sisters. Grandparents. People who believed that girl had a life in front of her. That old man might be her granddad.”

“But she’s one of them, man. She’s dead,” Benny said defensively.

“Sure. Almost everyone who ever lived is dead. More than six billion people are dead. And every last one of them had family once. Every last one of them were family once. At one time there was someone like you who would have kicked the crap out of anyone-stranger or best friend-who harmed or disrespected that girl. Or the old man.”

Benny was shaking his head. “No, no, no. It’s not the same. These are zoms, man. They kill people. They eat people.”

“They used to be people.”

“But they died!”

“Sure. Like Aunt Cathy and Mr. Mitchell.”

“No… Aunt Cathy got cancer. Mr. Mitchell died in an accident.”

“Sure, but if someone in town hadn’t quieted them, they’d have become living dead, too. Don’t even pretend you don’t know that. Don’t pretend you haven’t thought about that happening to Aunt Cathy.” He nodded down the hill. “Those two down there caught a disease.”

Benny said nothing. He’d learned about it in school, though no one knew for sure what had actually happened. Some sources said it was a virus that was mutated by radiation from a returning space probe. Others said it was a new type of flu that came over from China. Chong believed it was something that got out of a lab somewhere. The only thing everyone agreed on was that it was a disease of some kind.

“That guy down there was probably a farmer,” Tom said. “The girl was a waitress. I’m pretty sure neither of them was involved in the space program. Or worked in some lab where they researched viruses. What happened to them was an accident. They got sick, Benny, and they died.”

Benny said nothing.

“How do you think Mom and Dad died?”

No answer.

“Benny-? How do you think?”

“They died on First Night,” Benny said irritably.

“They did. But how?”

Benny said nothing.

“How?”

“You let them die!” Benny said in a savage whisper. Words tumbled out of him in a disjointed sputter. “Dad got sick and… and… then Mom tried to… and you… you just ran away!”

Tom said nothing, but sadness darkened his eyes, and he shook head slowly.

“I remember it,” Benny growled. “I remember you running away.”

“You were a baby.”

“I remember it.”

“You should have told me, Benny.”

“Why? So you could make up a lie about why you just ran away and left my mom like that?”

The words “my mom” hung in the air between them. Tom winced.

“You think I just ran away?” he said.

“I don’t think it, Tom. I remember it.”

“Do you remember why I ran?”

“Yeah, ’cause you’re a freaking coward is why!”

“Jesus,” Tom whispered. He adjusted the strap that held the sword in place, and sighed again. “Benny, this isn’t the time or place for this, but sometime soon we’re going to have a serious talk about the way things were back then and the way things are now.”

“There’s nothing you can say that’s going to change the truth.”

“No. The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we’re willing to believe.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

“If you ever want to know my side of things,” said Tom, “I’ll tell you. There’s a lot you were too young to know then, and maybe you’re still too young now.”

Silence washed back and forth between them.

“For right now, Benny, I want you to understand that when Mom and Dad died, it was from the same thing that killed those two down there.”

Benny said nothing.

Tom plucked a stalk of sweet grass and put it between his teeth. “You didn’t really know Mom and Dad, but let me ask you this: If someone was to piss on them or abuse them-even now, even considering what they had to have become during First Night-would it be okay with you?”

“Screw you.”

“Tell me.”

“No. Okay? No, it wouldn’t freaking be okay with me. You happy now?”

“Why not, Benny?”

“Because.”

“Why not? They’re only zoms.”

Benny abruptly got up and walked down the hill, away from the farm and away from Tom. He stood looking back along the road they’d traveled, as if he could still see the fence line. Tom waited a long time before he got up and joined him.

“I know this is hard, kiddo,” he said gently, “but we live in a pretty hard world. We struggle to live. We’re always on our guard, and we have to toughen ourselves just to get through each day. And each night.”

“I hate you.”

“Maybe. I doubt it, but it doesn’t matter right now.” He gestured toward the path that led back home. “Everybody west of here has lost someone. Maybe someone close or maybe a distant cousin three times removed. But everybody lost someone.”

Benny said nothing.

“I don’t believe that you would disrespect anyone in our town or in the whole west. I also don’t believe-I don’t want to believe-that you’d disrespect the mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers who live out here in the great Rot and Ruin.”

He put his hands on Benny’s shoulders and turned him around. Benny resisted, but Tom Imura was strong. When they were both facing east, Tom said, “Every dead person out there deserves respect. Even in death. Even when we fear them. Even when we have to kill them. They aren’t ‘just zoms,’ Benny. That’s a side effect of a disease or from some kind of radiation or something else that we don’t understand. I’m no scientist, Benny. I’m a simple man doing a job.”

“Yeah? You’re trying to sound all noble, but you kill them.” Benny had tears in his eyes.

“Yes,” Tom said softly, “I do. I’ve killed hundreds of them. If I’m smart and careful-and lucky-I’ll kill hundreds more.”

Benny shoved him with both hands. It only pushed Tom back a half step. “I don’t understand!”

“No, you don’t. I hope you will, though.”

“You talk about respect for the dead and yet you kill them.”

“This isn’t about the killing. It isn’t, and never should be, about the killing.”

“Then what?” Benny sneered. “The money?”

“Are we rich?”

“No.”

“Then it’s obviously not about the money.”

“Then what?”

“It’s about the why of the killing. For the living… for the dead,” Tom said. “It’s about closure.”

Benny shook his head.

“Come with me, kiddo. It’s time you understood how the world works. It’s time you learned what the family business is all about.”

8

THEY WALKED FOR MILES UNDER THE HOT SUN. THE PEPPERMINT GEL RAN off with their sweat, and had to be reapplied hourly. Benny was quiet for most of the trip, but as his feet got sore and his stomach started to rumble, he turned cranky.

“Are we there yet?”

“No.”

“How far is it?”

“A bit.”

“I’m hungry.”

“We’ll stop soon.”

“What’s for lunch?”

“Beans and jerky.”

“I hate jerky.”

“You bring anything else?” Tom asked.

“No.”

“Jerky it is, then.”

The roads Tom picked were narrow and often turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt.

“We haven’t seen a zom in a couple of hours,” Benny said. “How come?”

“Unless they hear or smell something that draws them, they tend to stick close to home.”

“Home?”

“Well… to the places they used to live or work.”

“Why?”

Tom took a couple of minutes on that. “There are lots of theories, but that’s all we have-just theories. Some folks say that the dead lack the intelligence to think that there’s anywhere other than where they’re standing. If nothing attracts them or draws them, they’ll just stay right where they are.”

“But they need to hunt, don’t they?”

“‘Need’ is a tricky word. Most experts agree that the dead will attack and kill, but it’s not been established that they actually hunt. Hunting implies need, and we don’t know that the dead need to do anything.”

“I don’t understand.”

They crested a hill and looked down a dirt road to where an old gas station sat beneath a weeping willow.

“Have you ever heard of one of them just wasting away and dying of hunger?” Tom asked.

“No, but-”

“The people in town think that the dead survive by eating the living, right?”

“Well, sure, but-”

“What ‘living’ do you think they’re eating?”

“Huh?”

“Think about it. There’re more than three hundred million living dead in America alone. Throw in another thirty-odd million in Canada and a hundred ten million in Mexico, and you have something like four hundred and fifty million living dead. The Fall happened fourteen years ago. So-what are they eating to stay alive?”

Benny thought about it. “Mr. Feeney says they eat each other.”

“They don’t,” said Tom. “Once a body has started to cool, they stop feeding on it. That’s why there are so many partially eaten living dead. They won’t attack or eat one another even if you locked them in the same house for years on end. People have done it.”

“What happens to them?”

“The trapped ones? Nothing.”

“Nothing? They don’t rot away and die?”

“They’re already dead, Benny.” A shadow passed over the valley and momentarily darkened Tom’s face. “But that’s one of the mysteries. They don’t rot. Not completely. They decay to a certain point, and then they just stop rotting. No one knows why.”

“What do you mean? How can something just stop rotting? That’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid, kiddo. It’s a mystery. It’s as much a mystery as why the dead rise in the first place. Why they attack humans. Why they don’t attack one another. All mysteries.”

“Maybe they eat, like, cows and stuff.”

Tom shrugged. “Some do, if they can catch them. A lot of people don’t know that, by the way, but it’s true… They’ll eat anything alive that they can catch. Dogs, cats, birds-even bugs.”

“Well, then, that explains-”

“No,” Tom interrupted. “Most animals are too fast. Ever try to catch a cat who doesn’t want to be caught? Now imagine doing that if you’re only able to shuffle along slowly and can’t strategize. If a bunch of the dead came upon cows in a pen or fenced field, they might be able to kill them and eat. But all the penned animals have either long-since escaped or they died off in the first few months. No… the dead don’t need to feed at all. They just exist.”

“Morgie says that out here wild animals turn into zoms.”

“Nope. As far as anyone’s been able to tell, only humans turn into the living dead. We don’t have the science to try and figure out why, and I don’t know if it’s true everywhere, but we know it to be true here. Otherwise every time you bit into a chili dog, it’d bite back.”

They reached the gas station. Tom stopped by the old pump and knocked on the metal casing three times, then twice, and then four more times.

“What are you doing?”

“Saying hello.”

“Hello to…?”

There was a low moan, and Benny turned to see a gray-skinned man shuffling slowly around the corner of the building. He wore ancient coveralls that were stained with dark blotches and, incongruously, a garland of fresh flowers around his neck. Marigolds and honeysuckle. The man’s face was shaded for a few steps, but then he crossed into the sunlight, and Benny nearly screamed. The man’s eyes were missing, and the sockets gaped emptily. The moaning mouth was toothless, the lips and cheeks sunken in. Worst of all, as the zombie raised its hands toward them, Benny saw that all of its fingers had been clipped off at the primary knuckles.

Benny gagged and stepped back, his muscles tensed to turn and run, but Tom put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a reassuring squeeze.

“Wait,” said Tom.

A moment later the door to the gas station opened, and a pair of sleepy-eyed young women came outside, followed by a slightly older man with a long, brown beard. They were all thin and dressed in tunics that looked like they had been made from old bed sheets. Each wore a thick garland of flowers. The trio looked at Benny and Tom and then at the zombie.

“Leave him be!” cried the youngest, a black girl in her late teens, as she ran across the dirt to the dead man and stood between him and the Imura brothers, her feet planted, her arms spread to shield the zombie.

Tom raised a hand and took his hat off so they could see his face.

“Peace, little sister,” he said. “No one’s here to do harm.”

The bearded man fished eyeglasses from a pocket beneath his tunic, and squinted through dirty lenses.

“Tom…?” he said. “Tom Imura?”

“Hey, Brother David.” He put his hand on Benny’s shoulder. “This is my brother, Benjamin.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Passing through,” said Tom. “But I wanted to pay my respects. And to teach Benny the ways of this world. He’s never been outside of the fence before.”

Benny caught the way Tom put emphasis on the word “this.”

Brother David walked over, scratching his beard. Up close he was older than he looked. Maybe forty, with deep brown eyes and a few missing teeth. His clothing was clean but threadbare. He smelled of flowers, garlic, and mint. The man studied Benny for a long moment, during which Tom did nothing and Benny fidgeted.

“He’s not a believer,” said Brother David.

“Belief is tough to come by in these times,” said Tom.

“You believe.”

“Seeing is believing.”

Benny thought that their exchange had the cadence of a church litany, as if it was something the two of them had said before and would say again.

Brother David bent toward Benny. “Tell me, young brother, do you come here bringing hurt and harm to the Children of God?”

“Um… no?”

“Do you bring hurt and harm to the Children of Lazarus?”

“I don’t know who they are, mister. I’m just here with my brother.”

Brother David turned toward the women, who were using gentle pushes to steer the zombie back around the far side of the building. “Old Roger there is one of Lazarus’s Children.”

“What? You mean he’s not a zom-”

Tom made a noise to stop him.

A tolerant smile flickered over Brother David’s face. “We don’t use that word, little brother.”

Benny didn’t know how to answer that, so Tom came to his rescue.

“The name comes from Lazarus of Bethany, a man who was raised from the dead by Jesus.”

“Yeah, I remember hearing about that in church.”

The mention of church brightened Brother David’s smile. “You believe in God?” he asked hopefully.

“I guess…”

“In these times,” said Brother David, “that’s better than most.” He threw a covert wink at Tom.

Benny looked past Brother David to where the girls had taken the zombie. “I’m, like, totally confused here. That guy was a… you know. He’s dead, right?”

“Living dead,” corrected Brother David.

“Right. Why wasn’t he trying to… you know.” He mimed grabbing and biting.

“He doesn’t have teeth,” said Tom. “And you saw his hands.”

Benny nodded. “Did you guys do that?” he asked Brother David.

“No, little brother,” Brother David said with a grimace. “No, other people did that to Old Roger.”

“Who?” demanded Benny.

“Don’t you mean ‘why?’”

“No… who. Who’d do something like that?”

Brother David said, “Old Roger is only one of the Children who have been tortured like that. You can see them all over this county. Men and women with their eyes cut out, their teeth pulled, or jaws shot away. Most of them missing fingers or whole hands. And I won’t talk about some of the other things I’ve seen done. Stuff you’re too young to know about, little brother.”

“I’m fifteen,” said Benny.

“You’re too young. I can remember when being fifteen meant you were still a child.” Brother David turned and watched the two young women return without the old zombie.

“He’s in the shed,” said the black girl.

“But he’s agitated,” said the other, a pale-skinned redhead in her mid-twenties.

“He’ll quiet down after a spell,” said Brother David.

The women stood by the gas pump and eyed Tom, although Tom seemed to suddenly find something fascinating about the movement of the clouds. Benny’s usual inclination was to make a joke at Tom’s expense, but he didn’t feel like it. He turned back to the bearded man.

“Who’s doing all this stuff you’re talking about? To that old man. To those… others you mentioned. What kind of dirtbags are out here doing that stuff?”

“Bounty hunters,” said the redhead.

“Killers,” said the black girl.

“Why?”

“If I had an answer to that,” said Brother David, “I’d be a saint instead of a way-station monk.”

Benny turned to Tom. “I don’t get it… You’re a bounty hunter.”

“I guess to some people that’s what I am.”

“Do you do this kind of stuff?”

“What do you think?” Tom asked, but Benny was already shaking his head. Tom queried, “What do you even know about bounty hunters?”

“They kill zombies,” Benny said, then flinched as he saw the looks of distaste on the faces of Brother David and the two women. “Well… they do! That’s what bounty hunters are there for. They go out here into the Rot and Ruin, and they hunt the, um, you know… the living dead.”

“Why?” asked Tom.

“For money.”

“Who pays them?” asked Brother David.

“People in town. People in other towns,” said Benny. “I heard the government pays them sometimes. Mostly for clearing out zoms on trade routes and stuff life that.”

“Who’d you hear that from?” asked Tom.

“Charlie Matthias.”

Brother David turned a questioning face to Tom, who said, “Charlie Pink-eye.”

The faces of the monk and the two women fell into sickness. Brother David closed his eyes and shook his head slowly from side to side.

“What’s wrong?” asked Benny.

“You can stay to dinner,” Brother David said stiffly, eyes still closed. “God requires mercy and sharing from all of His children. But… once you’ve eaten, I’d like you to leave.”

Tom put his hand on the monk’s shoulder. “We’re moving on now.”

The redhead stepped toward Tom. “It was a lovely day until you came.”

“You should get out of here,” said the younger woman.

“No,” said Brother David sharply, then repeated it more gently. “No, Sarah,” he said to the redhead. “No, Shanti,” he said to the black teenager. “Tom’s our friend, and we’re being rude.” He opened his eyes, and Benny thought that the man now looked seventy. “I’m sorry, Tom. Please forgive the sisters, and please forgive me for-”

“No,” said Tom. “It’s okay. Sarah’s right. It was a lovely day, and saying that man’s name here was wrong of me. I apologize to you, to her, to Sister Shanti, and to Old Roger. This is Benny’s first time out here in the Ruin. He met… that man… and had heard a lot of stories. Stories of hunting out here. He’s a boy, and he doesn’t understand. I brought him out here to let him know how things are. How things fall out.” He paused. “I haven’t taken him to Sunset Hollow yet. You understand?”

The three Children of God studied him for a while, and then one by one they nodded.

“What’s Sunset Hollow?” Benny asked, but Tom didn’t answer.

“And I thank you for your offer of a meal,” said Tom, “but we’ve got miles to go, and I think Benny’s going to have a lot of questions to ask. Some of them are better asked elsewhere.”

Sister Sarah reached up and touched Tom’s face. “I’m sorry for my words.”

Sister Shanti touched his chest. “Me too.”

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” Tom said.

The women smiled at him and caressed his cheek. Shanti turned and placed her hands on either side of Benny’s face. “May God protect your heart out here in the world.” With that she kissed him on the forehead and walked away. Sister Sarah smiled at the brothers and followed Shanti.

Benny turned to Tom. “Did I miss something?”

“Probably,” said Tom. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s roll.”

Brother David shifted to stand in Tom’s path. “Brother,” he said. “I’ll ask once and then be done with it.”

“Ask away.”

“Are you sure about what you’re doing?”

“Sure? No. But I’m set on doing it.” He fished in his pocket and brought out three vials of cadaverine. “Here, Brother. May it help you in your work.”

Brother David nodded his thanks. “God go with you and before you and within you.”

They shook hands, and Tom stepped back onto the dirt road. Benny, however, lingered for a moment longer.

“Look… mister,” he began slowly, “I don’t know what I said or did that was wrong, but I’m sorry, you know? Tom brought me out here, and he’s a bit crazy, and I don’t know what…” He trailed off. There was no road map in his head to guide him through this conversation.

Brother David offered his hand and gave him the same blessing he bestowed upon Tom.

“Yeah,” said Benny. “You too. Okay?”

He hurried to catch up to Tom, who was fifty yards down the road. When he looked back the monk was standing by the rusting gas pump. Brother David lifted his hand, but whether it was some kind of blessing or a gesture of farewell, Benny didn’t know. Either way it creeped him out.

9

WHEN THEY WERE FAR DOWN THE ROAD, BENNY ASKED, “WHAT WAS THAT all about? Why’d that guy get so jacked about me mentioning Charlie?”

“Not everyone thinks Charlie’s ‘the man,’ kiddo.”

“You jealous?”

Tom laughed. “God! The day I’m jealous of someone like Charlie Pink-eye is the day I’ll cover myself in steak sauce and walk out into a crowd of the living dead.”

“Hilarious,” said Benny sourly. “What’s with all that Children of God, Children of Lazarus stuff? What are they doing out here?”

“Brother David and his group are all over the Ruin. I’ve met travelers who’ve seen them as far east as Pennsylvania. Even all the way down to Mexico City. I first saw them about a year after the Fall. A whole bunch of them heading across the country in an old school bus pulled by horses, with Scripture passages painted all over it. Not sure how they got started or who chose the name. Even Brother David doesn’t know. To him it’s like they always were.”

“Is he nuts?”

“I think the expression used to be ‘touched by God.’”

“So that would be a yes.”

“If he’s nuts, then at least his heart’s in the right place. The Children don’t believe in violence of any kind.”

“But they’re okay with you, even though you kill zoms?”

Tom shook his head. “No, they don’t like what I do. But they accept my explanation for why I do it, and Brother David and a few others have seen how I do it. They don’t approve, but they don’t condemn me for it. They think I’m misguided but well-intentioned.”

“And Charlie? What do they think of him? Can’t be anything good.”

“They believe Charlie Pink-eye to be an evil man. Him and his jackass buddy, the Motor City Hammer. Bunch of others. Most of the bounty hunters, in fact, and I can’t fault the Children for those beliefs.”

Benny said nothing. He still thought Charlie Matthias was cool as all hell.

“So… these Children, what do they actually do?”

“They tend to the dead. If they find a town, they’ll go through the houses and look for photos of the people who lived there, and then they try and round them up if they’re still wandering around the town. They put them in their houses, seal doors, write some prayers on the walls, and then move on. Most of them keep moving. Brother David’s been here for a year or so, but I expect he’ll move on too.”

“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

WHEN THE FIRST SHOT CRACKED THROUGH THE AIR, BENNY 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?”

Benny said nothing. His fists were balled into knuckly knots at his sides.

“Well, as bad as that is… I’ve seen worse. A whole lot worse. I’m talking pit fights where they put some dumb-ass kid-maybe someone your age-in a hole dug in the ground and then push in a zom. If the kid’s lucky, maybe they’ll give him a knife or a sharpened stick or a baseball bat. Sometimes the kid wins, sometimes he doesn’t, but the oddsmakers haul in a fortune either way. And where do the kids come from? They volunteer for it.”

“That’s bull…”

“No, it’s not. If I wasn’t around, and you lived with Aunt Cathy when she was sick with the cancer, what would you have done? How much would you have risked to make sure she got enough food and medicine?”

Benny shook his head, but Tom’s face was stone.

“Are you going to tell me that you wouldn’t take a shot at winning maybe a month’s worth of rations-or a whole box of meds-for ninety seconds in a zom pit?”

“That doesn’t happen.”

“No?”

“I’ve never heard about anything like that.”

Tom snorted. “If you did something like that… would you tell anyone? Would you even tell Chong and Morgie?”

Benny didn’t answer.

Tom pointed. “I can go back there and maybe stop those guys. Maybe even do it without killing them or getting killed myself, but what good would it do? You think they’re the only ones doing this sort of thing? This is the great Rot and Ruin, Benny. There’s no law out here, not since First Night. Killing zoms is what people do out here.”

“That’s not killing them! It’s sick…”

“Yes, it is,” Tom said softly. “Yes, it is, and I can’t tell you how relieved and happy I am to hear you say it. To know that you believe it.”

There were more shouts and laughter from behind them. And another gunshot.

“I can stop them if you want me to. But it won’t stop what’s happening out here.”

Tears burned in Benny’s eyes, and he punched Tom hard in the chest. “But you do this stuff! You kill zombies.”

Tom grabbed Benny and pulled him close. Benny struggled, but Tom pulled his brother to his chest and held him. “No,” he whispered. “No. Come on… I’ll show you what I do.”

He released Benny, placed a gentle hand on his brother’s back, and guided him back through the trees to the tall grass.

11

They didn’t speak for several miles. Benny kept looking back, but even he didn’t know if he was checking to see if they were being followed or looking with regret that they’d done nothing about what was happening. His jaw ached from clenching.

They reached the crest of the hill that separated the field of tall grass from an upslope that wound around the base of a huge mountain. There was a road there, a two-lane blacktop that was cracked and choked with weeds. The road spun off toward a chain of mountains that marched into the distance and vanished into heat haze far to the southeast. There were old bones among the weeds, and Benny kept stopping to look at them.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” said Benny.

Tom kept walking.

“I don’t want to do what you do. Not if it means doing… that sort of stuff.”

“I already told you. I don’t do that sort of stuff.”

“But you’re around it. You see it. It’s part of your life.” Benny kicked a rock and sent it skittering off the road and into the grass. Crows scolded him as they leaped into the air, leaving behind a rabbit carcass on which they’d been feeding.

Tom stopped and looked back. “If we turn back now, you’ll only know part of the truth.”

“I don’t care about the truth.”

“Too late for that now, Benny. You’ve seen some of it. If you don’t see the rest, it’ll leave you-”

“Leave me what? Unbalanced? You can stick that Zen crap up your-”

“Language.”

Benny bent and snatched up a shinbone that had been polished white by scavengers and weather. He threw it at Tom, who sidestepped to let it pass.

“Screw you and your truth and all of this stuff!” screamed Benny. “You’re just like those guys back there! You come out here, all noble and wise and with all that bull, but you’re no different. You’re a killer. Everyone in town says so!”

Tom stalked over to him and grabbed a fistful of Benny’s shirt and lifted him to his toes. “Shut up!” he said with a snarl. “You just shut your damn mouth!”

Benny was shocked into silence.

“You don’t know who I am or what I am.” Tom shook Benny hard enough to rattle his teeth. “You don’t know what I’ve done. You don’t know the things I’ve had to do to keep you safe. To keep us safe. You don’t know what I-”

He broke off and flung Benny away from him. Benny staggered backward and fell hard on his butt, legs splayed among the weeds and old bones. His eyes bugged with shock, and Tom stood above him, different expressions warring on his face. Anger, shock at his own actions, burning frustration. Even love.

“Benny…”

Benny got to his feet and dusted off his pants. Once more he looked back the way they’d come and then stepped up to Tom, staring up at his big brother with an expression that was equally mixed and conflicted.

“I’m sorry,” they both said.

They stared at each other.

Benny smiled.

Tom’s smile was slower in coming.

“You’re a total pain in my butt, little brother.”

“You’re a world-class jerk.”

The hot breeze blew past them. Tom said, “If you want to go back, then we’ll go back.”

Benny shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Do I have to have an answer?”

“Right now? No. Eventually? Probably.”

“Yeah,” said Benny. “That’s okay, I guess. Just tell me one thing. I know you said it already, but I really need to know. Really, Tom.”

Tom nodded.

“You’re not like them. Right? Swear on something.” He pulled out his wallet and held up the picture. “Swear on Mom and Dad.”

Tom nodded. “Okay, Benny. I swear.”

“On Mom and Dad.”

“On Mom and Dad.” Tom touched the picture and nodded.

“Okay,” said Benny. “Then let’s go.”

The afternoon burned on, and they followed the two-lane road around the base of the mountain. Neither spoke for almost an hour and then Tom said, “This isn’t just a walk we’re taking, kiddo. I’m out here on a job.”

Benny shot him a look. “You’re here to kill a zom?”

Tom shrugged. “It’s not the way I like to phrase it, but… yes, that’s the bottom line.”

They walked another half mile.

“How does this work? The… job, I mean.”

“You saw part of it when you applied to that erosion artist,” said Tom. He dug into a jacket pocket and removed an envelope, opened it, and took out a piece of paper that he unfolded and handed to Benny. There was a small color photograph clipped to one corner that showed a smiling man of about thirty, with sandy hair and a sparse beard. The paper it was clipped to was a large portrait of the same man as he might be now if he was a zombie. The name “Harold” was handwritten in one corner.

“This is why erosion portraits are so useful. People have pictures done of wives, husbands, children… anyone they loved. Someone they lost. Sometimes they can even remember what a person was wearing on First Night, and that makes it easier for me, because as I said, the dead seldom move far from where they lived. Or worked. Guys like me find them.”

“And kill them?”

Tom answered that with a shrug. They rounded a bend in the road and saw the first few houses of a small town built onto the side of the mountain. Even from a quarter mile away Benny could see zombies standing in yards or on the sidewalks. One stood in the middle of the road with his face tilted toward the sun.

Nothing moved.

Tom folded the erosion portrait and put it in his pocket, then took out the vial of cadaverine and sprinkled some on his clothes. He handed it to Benny, then dabbed some mint gel on his upper lip and passed the jar to his brother.

“You ready?”

“Not even a little bit,” said Benny.

Tom loosened his sword in its scabbard, and led the way. Benny shook his head, unsure of how exactly the day had brought him to this moment, and then followed.

12

“WON’T THEY ATTACK US?” BENNY WHISPERED.

“Not if we’re smart and careful. The trick is to move slowly. They respond to quick movements. Smell, too, but we have that covered.”

“Can’t they hear us?”

“Yes, they can,” Tom said. “So once we’re in the town, don’t talk unless I do, and even then-less is more, and quieter is better than loud. I found that speaking slowly helps. A lot of the dead moan… so they’re used to slow, quiet sounds.”

“This is like the Scouts,” Benny said. “Mr. Feeney told us that when we’re in nature we should act like we’re part of nature.”

“For better or worse, Benny… this is part of nature too.”

“That doesn’t make me feel good, Tom.”

“This is the Rot and Ruin, kiddo… Nobody feels good out here. Now hush and keep your eyes open.”

They slowed their pace as they neared the first houses. Tom stopped and spent a few minutes studying the town. The main street ran upward to where they stood, so they had a good view of everything. Moving very slowly, Tom removed the envelope from his pocket and unfolded the erosion portrait.

“My client said that it was the sixth house along the main street,” Tom murmured. “Red front door and white fence. See it? There, past the old mail truck.”

“Uh-huh,” Benny said without moving his lips. He was terrified of the zombies that stood in their yards not more than twenty paces away.

“We’re looking for a man named Harold Simmons. There’s nobody in the yard, so we may have to go inside.”

“Inside?” Benny asked, his voice quavering.

“Come on.” Tom began moving slowly, barely lifting his feet. He did not exactly imitate the slow, shuffling gait of the zombies, but his movements were unobtrusive. Benny did his best to mimic everything Tom did. They passed two houses in which zombies stood in the yard. The first house, on their left, had three zombies on the other side of a hip-high chain-link fence. Two little girls and an older woman. Their clothes were tatters that blew like holiday streamers in the hot breeze. As Tom and Benny passed by them, the old woman turned in their direction. Tom stopped and waited, his hand touching the handle of his sword, but the woman’s dead eyes swept past them without lingering. A few paces along, they passed a yard on their right in which a man in a bathrobe stood, staring at the corner of the house as if he expected something to happen. He stood among wild weeds and creeper vines that had wrapped themselves around his calves. It looked like he had stood there for years, and with a sinking feeling of horror, Benny realized that he probably had.

Benny wanted to turn and run. His mouth was as dry as sand, and sweat ran down his back and into his underwear.

They moved steadily down the street, always slow. The sun was heading toward the western part of the sky, and it would be dark in four or five hours. Benny knew they could never make it home by nightfall. He wondered if Tom would take them back to the gas station… or if he was crazy enough to claim an empty house in this ghost town for the night. If he had to sleep in a zombie’s house, even if there was no zombie there, then Benny was sure he’d go completely mad-cow crazy.

“There he is,” murmured Tom, and Benny looked toward the house with the red door. A man stood inside, looking out of the big bay window. He once had sandy hair and a sparse beard, but now the hair and beard were nearly gone, and the skin of his face had shriveled to a leathery tightness.

Tom stopped outside of the paint-peeling white picket fence. He looked from the erosion portrait to the man in the window and then back again.

“Benny?” he said under his breath. “You think that’s him?”

“Mm-hm,” Benny said with a low squeak.

The zombie in the window seemed to be looking at them. Benny was sure of it. The withered face and the dead pale eyes were pointed directly at the fence, as if it had been waiting there all these years for a visitor to come to the garden gate.

Tom nudged the gate with his toe. It was locked.

Moving very slowly, Tom leaned over and undid the latch. The process took more than two minutes. Nervous sweat ran down Benny’s face, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the zombie.

Tom pushed on the gate with his knee, and it opened.

“Very, very slowly,” he said. “Red light, green light-all the way to the door.”

Benny knew the game, though, in truth, he had never seen a working stoplight. They entered the yard. The old woman in the first garden suddenly turned toward them. So did the zombie in the bathrobe.

“Stop,” Tom hissed. “If we have to make a run for it, head into the house. We can lock ourselves in and wait until they calm down.”

The old lady and the man in the bathrobe faced them, but did not advance.

The tableau held for a minute that seemed an hour long.

“I’m scared,” said Benny.

“It’s okay to be scared,” said Tom. “Scared means you’re smart. Just don’t panic. That’ll get you killed.”

Benny almost nodded, but caught himself.

Tom took a slow step. Then a second. It was uneven, his body swaying, as if his knees were stiff. The bathrobe zombie turned away and looked at the shadow of a cloud moving up the valley, but the old lady still watched. Her mouth opened and closed, as if she was slowly chewing on something.

But then she too turned away to watch the moving shadow.

Tom took another step and then another. Benny eventually followed. The process was excruciatingly slow, but to Benny it felt as if they were moving too fast. No matter how deliberately they went, he thought it was all wrong, that the zombies-all of them up, and down the street-would suddenly turn toward them and moan with their dry and dusty voices, and that a great mass of the hungry dead would surround them.

Tom reached the door and turned the handle.

The knob turned in his hand, and the lock clicked open. Tom gently pushed open the door and stepped into the gloom of the house. Benny cast a quick look at the window to make sure the zombie was still there.

Only he wasn’t.

“Tom!” Benny cried. “Look out!”

A dark shape lunged at Tom out of the shadows of the entrance hallway. It clawed for him with wax-white fingers and moaned with an unspeakable hunger. Benny screamed.

Then something happened that Benny could not understand. Tom was there and then he wasn’t. His brother’s body became a blur of movement as he pivoted to the outside of the zombie’s right arm, ducked low, grabbed the zombie’s shins from behind, and drove his shoulder into the former Harold Simmons’s back. The zombie instantly fell forward onto its face, knocking clouds of dust from the carpet. Tom leaped onto the zombie’s back and used his knees to pin both shoulders to the floor.

“Close the door!” Tom barked as he pulled a spool of thin silk cord from his jacket pocket. He whipped the cord around the zombie’s wrists and shimmied down to bring both its hands together to tie behind the creature’s back. He looked up. “The door, Benny-now!”

Benny came out of his daze and realized there was movement in his peripheral vision. He turned to see the old lady, the two little girls, and the zombie in his bathrobe, lumbering up the garden path. Benny slammed the door and shot the bolt, then leaned against it, panting, as if he had been the one to wrestle a zombie to the ground and hog-tie it. With a sinking feeling he realized that it had probably been his own shouted warning that had attracted the other zombies.

Tom flicked out a spring-bladed knife and cut the silk cord. He kept his weight on the struggling zombie while he fashioned a large loop, like a noose. The zombie kept trying to turn its head to bite, but Tom didn’t seem to care. Maybe he knew that the zom couldn’t reach him, but Benny was still terrified of those gray rotted teeth.

With a deft twist of the wrist, Tom looped the noose over the zombie’s head, catching it below the chin, and then he jerked the slack, so the closing loop forced the creature’s jaws shut with a clack. Tom wound more silk cord around the zombie’s head, so that the line passed under the jaw and over the crown. When he had three full turns in place, he tied the cord tightly. He shimmied down the zombie’s body and pinned its legs and then tied its ankles together.

Then Tom stood up, stuffed the rest of the cord into his pocket, and closed his knife. He slapped dust from his clothes as he turned back to Benny.

“Thanks for the warning, kiddo, but I had it.”

“Um… holy sh-!”

“Language,” Tom interrupted quietly.

Tom went to the window and looked out. “Eight of ’em out there.”

“Do… do we… I mean, shouldn’t we board up the windows?”

Tom laughed. “You listen to too many campfire tales. If we started hammering nails into boards, the sound would call every living dead in the whole town. We’d be under siege.”

“But we’re trapped.”

Tom looked at him. “‘Trapped’ is a relative term,” he said. “We can’t go out the front. I expect there’s a back door. We’ll finish our business here and then we’ll sneak out nice and quiet, and head on our way.”

Benny stared at him and then at the struggling zombie that was thrashing and moaning.

“You… you just…”

“Practice, Benny. I’ve done this before. C’mon, help me get him up.”

They knelt on opposite sides of the zombie, but Benny didn’t want to touch it. He’d never touched a corpse of any kind before, and he didn’t want to start with one that had just tried to bite his brother.

“Benny,” Tom said, “he can’t hurt you now. He’s helpless.”

The word “helpless” hit Benny hard. It brought back the image of Old Roger-with no eyes, no teeth, and no fingers-and the two young women who tended to him. And the limbless torsos in the wagon.

“Helpless,” he murmured. “God…”

“Come on,” Tom said gently.

Together they lifted the zombie. It was light-far lighter than Benny had expected-and they half-carried, half-dragged it into the dining room, away from the living room window. Sunlight fell in dusty slants through the moth-eaten curtains. The ruins of a meal had long since decayed to dust on the table. They put it in a chair, and Tom produced the spool of cord and bound it in place. The zombie continued to struggle, but Benny understood. The zombie was actually helpless.

Helpless.

The word hung in the air. Ugly and full of dreadful new meaning.

“What do we do with him?” Benny asked. “I mean… after?”

“Nothing. We leave him here.”

“Shouldn’t we bury him?”

“Why? This was his home. The whole world is a graveyard. If it was you, would you rather be in a little wooden box under the cold ground or in the place where you lived? A place where you were happy and loved.”

Neither thought was appealing to Benny. He shivered even though the room was stiflingly hot.

Tom removed the envelope from his pocket. Apart from the folded erosion portrait, there was also a piece of cream stationery on which were several handwritten lines. Tom read through it silently, sighed, and then turned to his brother.

“Restraining the dead is difficult, Benny, but it isn’t the hardest part.” He held out the letter. “This is.”

Benny took the letter.

“My clients-the people who hire me to come out here-they usually want something said. Things they would like to say themselves but can’t. Things they need said, so they can have closure. Do you understand?”

Benny read the letter. His breath caught unexpectedly in his throat, and he nodded as the first tears fell down his cheeks.

His brother took the letter back. “I need to read it aloud, Benny. You understand?”

Benny nodded again.

Tom angled the letter into the dusty light, and read:

My dear Harold. I love you and miss you. I’ve missed you so desperately for all these years. I still dream about you every night, and each morning I pray that you’ve found peace. I forgive you for what you tried to do to me. I forgive you for what you did to the children. I hated you for a long time, but I understand now that it wasn’t you. It was this thing that happened. I want you to know that I took care of our children when they turned. They are at peace, and I put flowers on their graves every Sunday. I know you would like that. I have asked Tom Imura to find you. He’s a good man, and I know that he will be gentle with you. I love you, Harold. May God grant you His peace. I know that when my time comes, you will be waiting for me. Waiting with Bethy and little Stephen, and we will all be together again in a better world. Please forgive me for not having the courage to help you sooner. I will always love you.

Yours forever,

Claire

Benny was weeping when Tom finished. He turned away and covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Tom went over and hugged him and kissed his head.

Then Tom stepped away, took a breath, and pulled a second knife from his boot. This one, Benny knew, was Tom’s favorite: a double-edge, black dagger with a ribbed handle and a six-and-a-half-inch-long blade. Benny didn’t think he would be able to watch, but he raised his head and saw Tom as he placed the letter on the table in front of Harold Simmons and smoothed it out. Then he moved behind the zombie and gently pushed its head forward, so that he could place the tip of his knife against the hollow at the base of the skull.

“You can look away if you want to, Benny,” he said.

Benny did not want to look, but he didn’t turn away.

Tom nodded. He took another breath and then thrust the blade into the back of the zombie’s neck. The blade slid in with almost no effort into the gap between spine and skull, and the razor-sharp edge sliced completely through the brain stem.

Harold Simmons stopped struggling. His body didn’t twitch; there was no death spasm. He just sagged forward against the silken cords and was still. Whatever force had been active in him, whatever pathogen or radiation or whatever had taken the man away and left behind a zombie, was gone.

Tom cut the cords that held Simmons’s arms and raised each hand, placing it on the table, so that the dead man’s palms held the letter in place.

“Be at peace, brother,” said Tom.

He wiped his knife and stepped back. He looked at Benny, who was openly sobbing.

“This is what I do, Benny.”