Tooth & Nail

9

It took twenty-five grueling, exhausting, sweaty minutes to climb all the way up to the goat path. For most of that time the goat stood there, quietly chewing on a tough piece of vegetable root, watching him with placid curiosity. Each time Benny slipped, he could swear there was a look of pitying amusement on the goat’s face.

Only when Benny climbed onto a flat shelf near the goat did the animal move away. Even then it was at so leisurely a pace that it was as if the goat was daring Benny to give chase. The path it took was less than a hand’s-width wide. Giving chase was very low on Benny’s list of things to do in this lifetime.

Following, however, was another thing. He didn’t want to catch the goat, but he definitely wanted to know how it had gotten into Sanctuary. On his climb he’d figured out what was bothering him.

If a goat could climb over the mountains and reach Sanctuary, so could a person.

Or a lot of people.

The dead would never be able to manage it, of course. They were too clumsy and mindless, and climbing required strength, coordination, observation, sharp wits, and good judgment.

The reapers had all those things.

Benny smiled grimly. If he was able to prove that Sanctuary was unsafe, that it was vulnerable to a sneak attack because of goat trails like this, then he would be able to throw that right in Captain Ledger’s face.

This was being warrior smart.

That’s what Benny’s brother Tom called it. Warrior smart. Using training and good judgment, courage and determination to confront an obstacle and overcome it. The same rules of common sense and education applied. Faced with anything from finding food in the wasteland, avoiding the zoms, preparing a battle plan, to escaping a trap, or defeating an enemy.

Warrior smart was a better way of thinking than the gung-ho stuff Ledger wanted to teach.

Grinning, he began moving slowly and carefully along the goat path.

His courage and confidence stayed with him for almost three hundred yards, but after the first time the walkway cracked beneath his shoes, he began to doubt the wisdom of this plan.

Half an hour later he was only a third of the way to the crest of this broken hill, but the ground looked like it was a thousand miles down. Hot sweat ran down his face, but cold sweat tickled in lines beneath his clothes. His breath came in ragged gasps, and he tried to drill his fingers into the rock wall.

Once, when he closed his eyes, he thought he heard his brother Tom speaking to him.

Yo! Boy genius, said Tom. Exactly what do you think you’re doing?

“Shut up,” breathed Benny. “I’m trying not to die here.”

How hard are you trying?

“Bite me.”

Not even if I was alive.

They both laughed, but the laughs were ghostly and unreal. What Benny really wanted to do was sob. The ache he felt for his lost brother was almost unbearable at times. He kept seeing a hole in the world in the shape of Tom Imura, and he couldn’t imagine anything filling it.

However, he believed that he was supposed to fill it. He was supposed to become the next Tom Imura.

Him.

Not some old guy who used to be a soldier back when something like that mattered. Before the dead rose and humanity fell. Now — and especially to Benny — meeting an actual soldier was like being handed proof that the old system was never good enough, that it wasn’t strong enough. That it wasn’t warrior smart enough. The world still ended.

Hot wind whistled past Benny, flapping the cuffs of his jeans and stinging his face.

“Tom…?” murmured Benny.

Yeah, kiddo?

“I… I don’t know if I can do it.”

Tom laughed. A gentle laugh. It’s easy. Put one foot in front of the other and try not to fall.

“That’s not what I meant.”

For a moment Benny could really see Tom, standing there in the shade under the big oak that anchored one corner of their gated yard back home. Tom standing with a cup of iced tea. The smell of hot apple pie wafting out through the kitchen window. Really good pie too. With walnuts and raisins, the way Tom made it. Sour apples so it wasn’t too sweet.

“That’s not what I meant,” Benny said again.

I know what you meant, answered Tom.

“Tom, I—”

But Tom was gone.

The wind howled as it tore through the crags of the red rock wall.

Benny took as deep a breath as he could and sighed it out. Took another. And another. And then he continued climbing.

It took almost forty minutes to reach the top of the crest. By the time he did, his body was trembling with fatigue and jumpy from the residue of adrenaline in his blood. He staggered away from the edge onto a flat section that was covered with withered grass and strewn with huge boulders left over from the last glacier. Benny took two wobble-kneed steps and then sank down onto his knees.

His exhaustion was the only thing that kept him alive as something whipped over his head.

Benny flung himself sideways, thinking that it was the goat lashing out with hooves to defend its territory.

It wasn’t a goat.

It wasn’t an animal.

The thing that had nearly cut his head off was a broad-bladed field scythe.

And it was held in the fists of a reaper.

All around him, others reapers were emerging from hiding places among the glacial boulders.