Benny read the letter. His breath caught 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 that 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 came and hugged him and kissed his head.
Then Tom stepped away, took a breath, and opened his knife again. 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 in 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 and placed it on the table so that the dead man’s palms held the letter in place.
‘Be at peace, brother,’ said Tom Imura.
He wiped and folded his knife and stepped back. He looked at Benny, who was openly sobbing.
‘This is what I do, Benny.’
XII
They left by the back door, and there were no problems. Benny’s tears slowed and stopped, but it took a while. They walked in silence, side by side, heading southeast. Miles fell away behind them. They passed another gas station, where Tom greeted another monk. They didn’t linger, though. The day was burning away.
‘We’ll be back in an hour,’ Tom said to the monk after gifting him with vials of cadaverine and a wrapped package of jerky. ‘We’ll need to stay the night.’
‘You’re always welcome, brother,’ said the monk.
They walked on for another fifteen minutes, through a grove of trees that were heavy with late season oranges. Tom picked a few, and they peeled and ate them and said almost nothing until they reached the wrought-iron gate of a community that was embowered by a high red-brick wall. A sign over the gate read SUNSET HOLLOW.
Outside of the gate there were trash and old bones and a few burned shells of cars. The outer walls were pocked with bullet scars. To the right of the gate someone had used white paint to write THIS AREA CLEARED. KEEP GATES CLOSED. KEEP OUT. Below that were the initials T. I.
Benny pointed. ‘You wrote that?’ It was the first time he’d spoken a full sentence since leaving the house of Harold Simmons.
‘Years ago,’ Tom said.
The gates were closed, and a thick chain had been threaded through the bars and locked with a heavy padlock. The chain and the lock looked new and gleamed with oil.
‘What is this place?’ Benny asked.
Tom tucked his hands into his back pockets and looked up at the sign. ‘This is what they used to call a gated community. The gates were supposed to keep unwanted people out and keep the people inside safe.’
‘Did it work? I mean . . . during First Night?’
‘No.’
‘Did all the people die?’
‘Most of them. A few got away.’
‘Why is it locked?’
‘For the same reason as always,’ Tom said. He blew out his cheeks and dug into his right front jeans pocket for a key. He showed it to Benny and then opened the lock, pushed the gates open, restrung the chain, and clicked the lock closed with the keyhole on the inside now.
They walked along the road. The houses were all weather damaged, and the streets were pasted with the dusty remnants of fifteen years of falling leaves. Every garden was overgrown, but there were no zombies in them. Some of the doors had crosses nailed to them, around which hung withered garlands of flowers.
‘Your other job’s here?’ Benny asked.
‘Yes,’ said Tom. His voice was soft and distant.
‘Is it like the other one?’
‘Sort of.’
‘That was . . . hard,’ said Benny.
‘Yes it was.’
‘Doing this over and over again would drive me crazy. How do you do it?’
Tom turned to him as if that was the question he’d been waiting for all day. ‘It keeps me sane,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’
Benny thought about it for a long moment. Birds sang in the trees and the cicadas buzzed continually. ‘Is it because you knew what the world was before?’
Tom nodded.
‘Is it because if you didn’t do it . . . then maybe no one would?’
Tom nodded again.
‘It must be lonely.’
‘It is.’ Tom glanced at him. ‘But I always hoped you’d want to join me. To help me do what I do.’
‘I . . . don’t know if I can.’
‘That’s always going to be your choice. If you can, you can. If you can’t, then believe me, I’ll understand. It takes a lot out of you to do this. And it takes a lot out of you to know that the bounty hunters are out there doing what they do.’
‘How come none of them ever came here?’
‘They did. Once.’
‘What happened.’
Tom shrugged.
‘What happened?’ Benny asked again.
‘I was here when they came. Pure chance.’
‘What happened?’
‘Maybe it’s better that I don’t tell you.’
Benny looked at him. ‘You killed them,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you?’
Tom walked a dozen steps before he said, ‘Not all of them.’ A half dozen steps later he added, ‘I let two of them go.’
‘Why?’
‘To spread the word,’ Tom said. ‘To let the other bounty hunters know that this place was off-limits.’
‘And they listened? The bounty hunters?’
Tom smiled. It wasn’t boastful or malicious. It was a thin, cold knife-blade of a smile that was there and gone. ‘Sometimes you have to go to some pretty extreme lengths to make a point and to make it stick. Otherwise you find yourself having to make the same point over and over again.’
Benny stared at him. ‘How many were there?’
‘Ten.’
‘And you let two go.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you killed eight of them?’
‘Yes.’ The late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the trees threw dappled light on the road and painted the sides of all of the houses to their left with purple shadows. A red fox and three kits scampered across the street ahead of them.
Benny opened his mouth to say something to Tom but didn’t. Tom stopped in the middle of the stree
t.
‘Benny, I don’t really want to talk about that day. Not now, not here, and maybe not ever. I did what I thought I had to do, but I’m not proud of it. Telling you the details would feel like bragging, and I think that would make me sick. It’s already been a long day.’
‘I won’t ask, Tom,’ said Benny.
They stood there, taking each other’s measure perhaps for the very first time. Taking each other’s measure and getting the right values.
Tom pointed, and Benny turned toward the front door of a house with peach trees growing wild in the yard. ‘This is it.’
‘There’s a zombie in there?’
‘Yes,’ Tom said. ‘There are two.’
‘We have to tie them up?’
‘No. That’s already been done. Years ago. Nearly every house here has a dead person in it. Some have already been released, the rest wait for family members to reach out and want it done.’
‘I know this sounds gross, but why don’t you just go house to house and do it to every one of them? You know . . . release them.’
‘Because most of the people here have family living in our town. It takes a while, but people usually get to the point where they want someone to go and do this the way I do it. With respect, with words read to their dead family. Closure isn’t closure until someone’s ready to close the door. Do you understand what I mean?’
Benny nodded.
‘Do you have a picture of the . . . um . . . people in there? So we know who they are? So we can make sure.’
‘There are pictures inside. Besides, I know the names of everyone in Sunset Hollow. I come here a lot. I was the one who went house to house and tied the dead up. Some monks helped, but I knew everyone here.’ Tom walked to the front door. ‘Are you ready?’
Benny looked at Tom and then at the door.
‘You want me to do this, don’t you?’
Tom looked sad. ‘Yes. I guess I do.’
‘If I do, then I’ll be like you. I’ll be doing this kind of thing.’
‘Yes.’
‘Forever?’
‘I don’t know, Benny. I hope not. But for a while? Yeah.’
‘What if I can’t?’
‘I told you. If you can’t, then you can’t, and we go to the way station for tonight and head home in the morning.’
‘Tom, why don’t people from town come out to places like this and just take them back? We’re so much stronger than the zoms. Why don’t we take everything back?’
Tom shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I ask myself that every day. The people on the other side of the fence - for the most part they don’t even want to admit to themselves that the rest of the world exists. They feel safe over there.’
‘That’s stupid.’
‘Yes,’ Tom said, ‘it surely is.’
He turned the doorknob and opened the door. ‘Are you coming?’
Benny came as far as the front step. ‘It’s not safe in there, is it?’
‘It’s not safe anywhere, Benny.’
They were both aware in that moment that they were having a different discussion than the words they exchanged.
The brothers went into the house.
Tom led the way down a hall and into a spacious living room that had once been light and airy. Now it was pale and filled with dust. The wallpaper had faded, and there were animal tracks on the floor. There was a cold fireplace and a mantel filled with picture frames. The pictures were of a family. Mother and father. A smiling son in a uniform. A baby in a blue blanket. Brothers and cousins and grandparents. Two sisters who looked like they might have been twins but weren’t. Everyone was smiling. Benny stood looking at the pictures for a long time and then reached up and took one down. A wedding picture.
‘Where are they?’ he asked softly.
‘In here,’ said Tom.
Still holding the picture, Benny followed Tom through a dining room and into a kitchen. The windows were open and the yard was filled with trees. Two straight-backed chairs sat in front of the window, and in the chairs were two withered zombies. Both of them turned their heads toward the sound of footsteps. Their jaws were tied shut with silken cord. The man was dressed in the tatters of an old blue uniform; the woman wore a tailored suit and frilly white blouse. Benny came around front and looked from them to the wedding picture and back again.
‘It’s hard to tell.’
‘Not when you get used to it,’ said Tom. ‘The shape of the ears, the height of the cheekbones, the angle of the jaw, the distance between the nose and upper lip. Those things won’t change even after years.’
‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ Benny said again.
‘That’s up to you.’ Tom took his knife from his pocket and opened it. ‘I’ll do one, and you can do the other. If you’re ready. If you can.’
Tom went to stand behind the man. He gently pushed the zombie’s head forward and placed the tip of the knife in place, doing everything slowly, reminding Benny of how it had to be done.
‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’ said Benny.
‘I’ve already said it,’ said Tom. ‘A thousand times. I waited because I knew that you might want to say something. ’
‘I didn’t know them,’ said Benny.
A tear fell from Tom’s eye onto the back of the struggling zombie’s neck.
He plunged the blade and the struggles stopped. Just like that.
Tom hung his head for a moment as a sob broke in his chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and then, ‘Be at peace.’
He sniffed and held the knife out to Benny.
‘I can’t!’ Benny said, backing away. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t!’
Tom stood there, tears rolling down his cheeks, holding the knife out. He didn’t say a word.
‘God . . . please don’t make me do this,’ said Benny.
Tom shook his head.
‘Please, Tom.’
Tom lowered the knife.
The female zombie threw her weight against the cords and uttered a shrill moan that was like a dagger in Benny’s mind. He covered his ears and turned away. He dropped into a crouch, face tucked into the corner between the back door and the wall, shaking his head.
Tom stood where he was.
It took Benny a long, long time. He stopped shaking his head and leaned his forehead against the wood. The zombie in the chair kept moaning. Benny turned and dropped onto his knees. He dragged a forearm under his nose and sniffed.
‘She’ll be like that forever, won’t she?’
Tom said nothing.
‘Yes,’ said Benny, answering his own question. ‘Yes.’
He climbed slowly to his feet.
‘Okay,’ he said, and held out his hand. His hand and arm trembled. Tom’s trembled, too, as he handed over the knife.
Benny stood behind the zombie, and it took six or seven tries before he could bring himself to touch her. Eventually he managed it. Tom guided him, touching the spot where the knife had to go. Benny put the tip of the knife in place.
‘When you do it,’ said Tom, ‘do it quick.’
‘Can they feel pain?’
‘I don’t know. But you can. I can. Do it quick.’
Benny took a ragged breath and said, ‘I love you, Mom.’
He did it quickly.
And it was over.
He dropped the knife, and Tom gathered him up, and they sank down to their knees together on the kitchen floor, crying so loud that it threatened to break the world. In the chairs, the two dead people sat slumped, their heads tilted toward one another, their withered mouths silent.
The sun was tumbling behind the edge of the mountain by the time they left the house. Together they’d dug graves in the backyard. Tom locked up the house and then relocked the chain on the front gate. Side by side they walked back the way they had come. The knife was in Benny’s pocket. He had asked Tom if he could keep it.
‘Why?’ his brother asked.
Benny’s eyes were puffy from crying
but they were dry. ‘I guess I’ll need it,’ he said.
Tom studied him for a long time. His smile was sad but his eyes were filled with love. And with pride.
The New Dead: A Zombie Anthology Page 23
