Rot & Ruin (11 page)

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.”

13

F
OR FIVE DAYS AFTER THEY GOT BACK
, B
ENNY DID NOTHING.
In the mornings he sat in the backyard, invisible in the cool shade of the house as the sun rose in the east. When the sun was overhead, Benny went inside and sat in his room and stared out the window. As the sun set he’d go downstairs and sit on the top step of the porch. He didn’t say more than a dozen words. Tom cooked meals and laid them out, and sometimes Benny ate and sometimes he didn’t.

Tom did not try to force a conversation. Each night he gave Benny a hug and said, “We can talk tomorrow if you want to.”

Nix came over on the third day. When Benny saw her standing on the other side of the garden gate, he just gave her a single small nod. She came in and sat down next to him.

“I didn’t know you were back,” she said.

Benny said nothing.

“Are you okay?”

Benny shrugged, but kept silent.

Nix sat with him for five hours and then went home.

Chong and Morgie came by with gloves and a ball, but Tom met them at the garden gate.

“What’s up with Benny?” Chong asked.

Tom sipped from a cup of water and squinted at sun-drowsy honeybees, hovering over the hedge. “He needs a little time, is all.”

“For what?” asked Morgie.

Tom didn’t answer. The three of them looked across to where Benny sat staring at the grass that curled around the edges of his sneakers.

“He just needs some time,” Tom repeated.

They went away.

Nix came again the next day. And the next.

On the sixth morning she brought a straw basket filled with blueberry muffins that were still hot from the oven. Benny accepted one, sniffed it, and ate it without comment.

A pair of crows landed on the fence, and Benny and Nix watched them for almost an hour.

Benny said, “I hate them.”

Nix nodded, knowing that the comment wasn’t about the crows or anything else they could see. She didn’t know who Benny meant, but she understood hate. Her mother was crippled by it. Nix could not remember a single day when her mother didn’t find some reason to curse Charlie Pink-eye or damn him to hell.

Benny bent and picked up a stone, and for a moment he looked at the crows, as if he was going to throw the rock at them, the way he and Morgie always did. Not to hurt the birds, but to scare a noise from them. Benny weighed the stone in his palm, then opened his fingers to let it tumble to the grass.

“What happened out there?” Nix said, asking the question
that had hung burning in the air for a week.

It took Benny ten minutes to tell her about the Rot and Ruin. But Benny didn’t just talk about zoms. Instead he talked about three bounty hunters on a rocky cleft by a stream in the mountains. He spoke without emotion, almost monotone, but long before he was finished, Nix was crying. Benny’s eyes were hard and dry, as if all of his tears had been burned away by what he’d seen. Nix put her hand on Benny’s, and they sat like that for more than an hour after he was done, watching as the day grew older.

As they sat Nix waited for Benny to turn his hand, to take hers in his, to curl his fingers or thread them through hers. She had never felt closer to him, never believed in the possibility of
them
more than she did then. But the hour burned away and turned to ash, and Benny did not return her grip. He merely allowed it.

When the evening crickets began singing, Nix got up and went out through the garden gate. Benny had not said another word since he’d finished telling his tale. Nix really wasn’t sure that he knew she’d held his hand. Or that she’d left.

She cried all the way home. Quietly, to herself, without drama. Not because she had lost Benny, but because she now knew that she had never had him. She wept for the hurt that he owned, a hurt she could never hope to remove.

Benny sat outside until it was fully dark. Twice he looked at the garden gate, at the memory of Nix carefully opening it and closing it behind her. He ached. Not for her, but because she ached for him—and he could feel it now. He’d always known it was there, but now—somehow, for some indefinable reason—he could
feel
it.
And he knew he wanted her. He wanted to break his oath with Chong and forget that they were just friends and …

He wanted a lot of things. But the world had changed, and when he had the chance to take her hand, he hadn’t.

Why not?

He knew that it had nothing to do with the oath. Or with friendship. He knew that much, but the rest of his mind was draped in weird shadows that blinded his inward eye. Nothing made sense anymore.

He could feel the heat of her touch on his hand even though she was now out of sight.

“Nix,” he said. But she was gone, and he had let her go.