Zoms can’t work a combination lock. They can’t work keys either.
The German guy installed double-sided locks, so that the doors 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 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 ‘Fence Tester’.
That was a little more interesting because there were actual zoms on the other side of the fence. Benny wanted to get close to one. 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 he never got the chance for a close-up look, because there was always a guy with a shotgun dogging him all through the shift.
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 the fence to make sure there were no breaks or rusted weak spots. That was okay for the first mile, but after that the noise attracted the zoms, and by the middle of the third mile he had to grab, shake, and release pretty damn fast to keep his fingers from getting bitten. 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, 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!’
They quit at lunch.
Next morning they went to the far side of town and applied as ‘Fence Technicians’.
The fence ran for hundreds of miles and encircled the town and the harvested fields, so this meant a lot of walking, mostly 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 were sure they’d walked 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 trudged home on aching feet, Chong said, ‘That was about as much fun as getting beaten up in recess.’ 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 that 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 would 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
post-decay dental-ligament strength
- but it pinched really hard, and the coat was so hot the sweat ran down inside 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, “‘Pit Thrower.” What’s that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Chong said, with a mouthful of toast. ‘I think it has something to do with barbecuing.’
It didn’t. Pit Throwers worked in teams to drag dead zoms off the back of carts and toss 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 that looked like 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 grey limbs and heads.
‘Spotter’ was next, 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 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 filling soda bottles. Benny loved soda, but it was sometimes hard to come by. 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. 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 up all over town, and there were thousands of them on every wall of each of the town’s fence outposts.
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 would be flesh-eating zombies - and that there was nothing warm and fuzzy about that - then why couldn’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 once more in his head. 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 looked like. I know
about
them. I know that they’re zoms. Or maybe they’re dead now, but I mean - zoms are zoms. Right?’
After the audition, he hadn’t been offered the job.
III
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 patient enough for farming, and he wasn’t strong enough to work as Hitter or 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 co-creative process of the universe or something like that, Benny asked Tom to take him on as an apprentice.
At first Tom studied him with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
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 life, so Tom and he 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.