‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ 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. 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 snarled. ‘You just shut your damn mouth!’
Benny was shocked to silence.
‘You don’t know who I am or what I am,’ Tom growled, giving him a shake. ‘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 ass, 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 first.
Tom’s smile was slower in coming, though.
‘You’re a total pain in my butt, little brother.’
‘You’re a big dork.’
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.
‘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 be an Erosion Artist,’ said Tom. He dug into a jacket pocket and removed an envelope, opened it, and removed a piece of paper, which 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 were a zombie. The name Harold was handwritten in one corner.
‘This is what people do with those pictures?’
‘Not always, but a lot of the time. People have the 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 he took out the vial of cadaverine and sprinkled some on his clothes. He handed it to Benny and then gave him the mint gel after he dabbed some on his upper lip.
‘You ready?’
‘Not even a little bit,’ said Benny.
Tom drew his pistol and led the way. Benny shook his head, unsure of how exactly the day had brought him to this moment, and then he followed.
XI
‘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 the whole town. 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 who 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 he did. They passed two houses at which zombies stood in the yard. The first, 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 pistol ready, 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 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 h
ad.
Benny wanted to turn and run. His mouth was as dry as paste, and sweat ran down his back and into his underwear.
They moved steadily down the street, always slowly. The sun was heading toward the western part of the sky, and it would be dark in four or five hours. Benny knew that 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 at the house with the red door. A man stood looking out of the big bay window. He 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 leather tightness.
Tom stopped outside of the paint-peeling white picket fence. He looked from the erosion portrait to the man in the window and 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 he had been waiting there all these years for a visitor to come to his 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 over two minutes. Nervous sweat ran down Benny’s face, and he couldn’t take his eyes off of the zombie.
Tom pushed on the gate with his knee, and it opened now.
‘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,’ hissed Tom. He held the pistol close to his chest, his finger lying straight along the trigger guard. ‘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 he 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 another, and eventually Benny followed. The process was excruciatingly slow, but to Benny it felt as if they were moving too fast. No matter how slowly they went, he thought that 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 then a great mass of the hungry dead would surround them.
Tom reached the door and grasped the handle.
The knob turned in his hand, and the lock clicked open. Tom gently pushed it open 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 his 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 be able to bring both of the zombie’s hands together and tie them behind the creature’s back. He looked up. ‘The door, Benny - now!’
Benny came out of his daze and realized that 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-blade 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 him, but Tom didn’t seem to care. The biting teeth were nowhere near him - though Benny was still terrified of those grey, 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 that the closing loop forced the creature’s jaws shut with a clack. Tom wound 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 it tight. He shimmied farther down the zombie’s body and pinned its legs and then tied its ankles together.
Then Tom stood up, stuffed 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’ve listened to too many campfire tales. If we started hammering nails into boards, the sound would call every living dead person 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, who was on the carpet.
‘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 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. He was light - far lighter than Benny expected - and they half carried, half dragged him 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 him in a chair, and Tom produced the spool of cord and bound him 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.
Tom removed the envelope from his pocket. Apart from
the folded erosion portrait, there was also a piece of cream-colored stationery on which were several handwritten lines. Tom read through them 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 that they can have closure. Do you understand?’
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Page 22
