Dead & Gone (9 page)

She had something embroidered on the front of her
shirt in white thread, but Benny could not make out the design.

He and his friends had not met a living person in weeks, and out here in the badlands they were more likely to meet a violently hostile loner than a friendly stranger. He waited to see if the woman had spotted him.

She walked a few paces into the field and stared down the slope toward a line of tall bristlecone pines. Even from this distance Benny could tell that the woman was beautiful. Regal, like pictures of queens he had seen in old books. Olive-skinned, with masses of gleaming black hair that fluttered in the same breeze that stirred the crimson streamers.

Sunlight struck silver fire from an object she raised from where it hung on a chain around her neck. Benny was too far away to tell what it was, though he thought it looked like a whistle. However, when the woman put it to her lips and blew, there was no sound at all, but suddenly the birds and monkeys in the trees began twittering with great agitation.

Then something else happened, and it sent a thrill of fear through Benny and drove all other thoughts out of his mind. Three men stepped out of the woods behind the woman. Their clothes also fluttered in the wind, but for them it was because the things they wore had been ripped to rags by violence, by weather, and by the inexorable claws of time.

Zoms.

Benny got to his feet very slowly. Quick movements attracted the dead. The zoms were a dozen feet behind the woman and lumbering toward her. She seemed totally unaware of their presence as she continued to try and make sounds from her whistle.

Several more figures stepped out of the shadows under the trees. More of the dead. They kept emerging into the light as if conjured from nightmares by his growing fear. There was no choice. He had to warn her. The dead were almost upon her.

“Lady!” he yelled. “Run!”

The woman’s head jerked up, and she stared across the swaying grass to where he stood. For a moment all the zoms froze in place as they searched for the source of the yelling voice.

“Run!” yelled Benny again.

The woman turned away from him and looked at the zoms. There were at least forty of them, and more were materializing from the darkness under the trees. The zoms moved with the jerky awkwardness that Benny always found so awful. Like badly manipulated puppets. Their hands rose as they reached out for fresh meat.

However, the woman turned slowly away from them and faced Benny once more. The zoms reached her.

“No . . . ,” Benny gasped, unable to bear the sight of another death.

And the zombies lumbered past her. She stood there as a tide of them parted to move around her. They did not grab her, did not try to bite her. They ignored her except to angle their line of approach to avoid her and continue walking down the slope.

Toward Benny.

Not one of them touched the woman or even looked in her direction.

Confusion rooted Benny to the spot, and the sword hung almost forgotten in his hand.

Was he wrong about her? Was she one of the dead and
not a living person at all? Was she wearing cadaverine? Or was there something else about her that made the dead forgo the feast at hand for the one that stood gaping at them down the slope?

Run!

The word exploded inside his mind, and for a crazy moment Benny thought that it was Tom’s voice shouting at him.

He staggered as if punched, and then he wheeled around and ran.

H
E RAN LIKE HELL
.

This was no time to contemplate mysteries. He pounded down the slope faster than a jackrabbit as the mass of the dead growled out a moan of hunger and followed.

A zom rose up out of the tall grass directly in his path. There was no way to avoid the thing, not with all the momentum of the downward run, so he tucked his head and drove his shoulder into it like he was trying to bust through a line of offensive backs on the school football field. The zom went flying backward, and Benny leaped over the thrashing creature.

More zoms came at him, rising up out of the weeds and staggering out from behind tumbled boulders. Benny still held Tom’s sword, but he hated using it on zoms. Not unless he had no choice. These creatures were not evil, they were dead. Mindless. Unless he could completely quiet one of them, chopping at them seemed . . . wrong. He knew they couldn’t feel pain and wouldn’t care, but Benny felt like some kind of malicious bully.

On the other hand, there was that whole survival thing. As three zoms closed in on him in a line he could not bull his way through, the hand holding the sword moved almost
without conscious thought. The blade swept upward through one set of reaching arms, and the hands flew high above, grasping nothing but air. With a deft twist of his shoulder, he flicked the blade sideways and a zom’s head went flying into the bushes. Another cut left the third zom toppling to one side with one leg suddenly missing from mid-thigh.

“Sorry!” Benny yelled as he burst through the now disintegrating line of three zoms.

But there were more.

So many more, coming at him from all directions. Cold fingers fumbled at his face and tried to grab his hair, but Benny jagged and dodged and dove through them toward open ground.

His foot hit a rock and he sprawled forward; the sword flew from his hand and clattered thirty feet down the slope.

“No!” he cried as the sword vanished in the tall, dry grass.

Before Benny could get up, a zom grabbed a loose pocket flap on his vest and another grabbed his cuff.

“Get away!” Benny yelled as he thrashed and kicked and fought his way free. He scrambled to his feet, but his balance was bad and the slope was steep, so he ran like a sloppy dog on hands and feet for a dozen paces until he could get fully upright again.

More and more of the living dead staggered down the hill after him. Benny had no idea where they had come from, or why there were so many here. Even before Game-land, the zoms had started moving in packs rather than alone as they’d always done before. A month ago Benny, Lilah, and Nix had been under siege by thousands of them at a monk’s way station. How and why this flocking
behavior was happening was another of the mysteries that no one had an answer for.

“Tom,” Benny said, gasping his brother’s name as he ran. He didn’t know why he spoke the name. Maybe it was a prayer for guidance from the best zombie hunter who had ever worked the Ruin. Or maybe it was a curse, because now everything Tom had taught him seemed to be in question. The world was changing beyond the lessons Tom had given.

“Tom,” Benny growled as he ran, and he tried to remember those lessons that could not change. The ways of the samurai, the ways of the warrior.

He saw sunlight glitter on metal ten paces downslope, and Benny leaped at the fallen sword, grabbing it by the handle with his left hand, switching it into a two-handed grip even while his legs continued to run at full speed. Zoms came at him, and the sword seemed to move with its own will.

Arms and legs and heads flew into the hot sunlight.

I am warrior smart,
thought Benny as he ran and fought.
I am an Imura. I have Tom’s sword.

I am a bounty hunter.

Right.

You’re about to be lunch, you moron,
muttered his inner voice. For once Benny could not muster a convincing argument.

Everywhere he looked he saw another withered figure lurching toward him from beneath the shade of the big trees or from between tall shrubs. He knew—he knew—that this was not a coordinated trap. Zoms couldn’t think. It wasn’t that. . . . He must have simply had the bad luck to run into a swarm of them that was spread out across
the whole width of the slope.

Run!
yelled his inner voice.
Faster!

He wanted to tell his inner voice to stop offering stupid advice and maybe instead come up with some sort of plan. Something that didn’t involve ending up in the digestive tracts of a hundred zoms.

Run.

Yeah,
he thought.
Good plan.

Then he saw that the tall grass twenty yards down the slope hid the dark cleft of a small ravine. It ran the entire width of the slope, which was bad news, but it was less than ten feet across, which was good.

Could he jump it? Could he build up the momentum to leap across the opening?

His inner voice yelled,
Go . . . GO!

Benny set his teeth, called on every possible ounce of speed, and threw himself into the air, his feet still running through nothingness as he hurtled over the deep ravine. He landed hard on the far slope, bending his knees just as Tom had taught him, letting his leg muscles absorb the shock of impact.

He was safe!

Benny laughed out loud and spun toward the wave of zoms that still staggered toward him. They were so completely focused on him that they did not notice—or understand—the danger of the ravine.

“Yo! Deadheads,” he yelled, waving his sword to taunt them. “Nice try, but you’re messing with Benny-freaking-Imura, zombie killer. Booyah!”

And then the lip of the ravine buckled and collapsed under his weight, and Benny-freaking-Imura instantly plummeted into the darkness below.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

It is one month and one day since Tom died.

Night before last, while we were all sitting around the campfire, Chong told a joke that made Benny laugh. I think it was the first time Benny laughed since Gameland.

It was so good to hear him laugh. His eyes are still sad, though. I guess mine probably are too.

I never thought any of us would ever want to laugh again.

Also by Jonathan Maberry

Rot & Ruin

Dust & Decay