Rot and Ruin (Benny Imura #1)

Where the hell is Tom? When the walls had exploded, Benny had lost all sight of his brother, and he risked a single backward glance and saw nothing but brown smoke that obscured the entire cliff wall.

Panic flared for a moment in his chest, threatening to dampen the fires of his anger, but as the white hands reached for him again, his fury swelled, and he raised the sword and brought it down, again and again.

Something flashed blue and bright. The creek! It had wound around the far side of the cliffs and here it was, running within a hundred yards of the crowded road. Benny jerked the reins to one side and kicked again, and the horse cried out in an almost human voice. The muscles in its thick haunches bunched, and the animal leaped forward, smashing aside more of the dead. Benny flattened himself against Apache’s neck, and together they raced across the field toward the water. There were dips and small valleys hidden by the tall grass, and Benny realized that it was a longer, harder run that he thought, and there were at least fifty zoms between him and the safety of the fast blue water.

He caught movement to one side and saw a man—a man, not a zombie—entering the treeline on the far side of the field.

The Motor City Hammer.

It had to be the Hammer who’d set off the dynamite. A second sooner, and the blast would have dropped half the mountain on Benny. And on Tom.

Tom.

Benny knew he was trapped on this side of the cliff wall. There was no way back, and he didn’t dare race for the treeline. If the Hammer was there, then so was Charlie. Maybe the Mekong brothers, too, and they all had guns. Nix was there, too, but she might as well be on the far side of the moon for all that Benny could do about it right now. His—and her— only hope lay in his survival. And the only route to safety lay on the far side of Coldwater Creek. Zoms don’t have the coordination to wade through fast water. That’s what Tom had told him.

A zom lurched into his path, and Apache had no time to swerve, so he ran the creature down. Brittle bones made a sickening sound as the horse crushed them into the grass.

Two others, a fireman and a man wearing only boxer shorts, closed in on him, blocking their way. Benny steered with his knees, and the horse angled just slightly to the left as Benny slashed down to the right, hitting the fireman on the side of the head and knocking him into the other man. They fell in a tangle of pale limbs.

As they crested the last of a series of rolling hills, Benny felt his blood freeze. The valley beyond was shallow, no more than a dozen feet deep at the end of a long, gradual slope. The horse could easily make the run, but the valley was thick with the living dead. Zoms that Benny hadn’t even seen. Maybe a hundred of them, and half of them were children.

Children.

The kids were dressed in school uniforms, and there was a male zom in the middle of them who still wore the rags of a school bus driver. He looked like a shepherd in the midst of a flock of grotesque sheep. Some of the children’s faces were wrinkled and blackened. Had their school bus crashed and burned? Benny gagged at the thought, and again his resolve wavered. Sweat weakened his grip on the sword. He knew that these creatures were dead, that they were reanimated echoes who wore the disguise of the people they had once been, but Tom’s words rang in his mind.

They used to be people.

How could he strike them? How could he hurt them?

Children, women, old people. Lost souls.

Apache pounded down the slope; the blue water beckoned.

Something burned through the air an inch from his nose, and for a moment he had the crazy notion that it was a bee or wasp. Then, almost like an afterthought, the crack of a gunshot echoed across the plain.

And then he heard a girl scream.

“BENNY!”

Benny turned toward the sound and saw a tiny figure break from the trees and run out into the field. She was too far away to be sure, but Benny was sure.

“Nix!” he yelled.

Nix jumped over a fallen tree, stopped, snatched up a thick branch, and as one of the men leaped over the tree after her, she swung so hard that Benny could hear the crack all the way across the field. But then three more men ran after her, and she fled and then was out of sight behind a cluster of trees. A fifth man stepped to the top of a small ridge and aimed something at Benny that glinted with blue fire in the sunlight. Without realizing that he was going to do it, Benny ducked down, and he felt the bullet sear the air just above the back of his neck. The sharp bang of the shot chased the bullet through the empty air. There was another shot, and another. Something plucked at his pack, and he waited, listening inside his body for the pain, but there was nothing. Fifty feet away a zom spun and fell, a black hole punched through its stomach, but even as the horse raced past, the zombie was struggling back to its feet.

The water was there, the crowd of dead school children spread out before him.

Which would kill him, he wondered. The zombies or the bullets of the bounty hunters?

“BENNY!” Nix’s voice carried as clear as a bell over the hills. He turned to see her running toward him with five men only yards behind her. “RUN!”

He was running. Thirty yards now. Twenty.

He heard Nix scream once more, and when he turned again, he saw that the largest of the men had grabbed her, snatching her up as if she were a toddler. The five men immediately turned and ran back toward the trees as a wave of zoms shambled after them.

“NO!” Benny yelled, reaching one hand impotently toward the retreating figures.

And then something flashed past him and slammed into the wall of zoms. Benny saw silver fire dancing in the sunlight, and the zoms fell away, coming apart in desiccated sections, arms and heads flying away from the screaming thing that plowed through them.

“Benny!” Tom bellowed. “Follow me!”

It was impossible, but there he was. Covered in blood and dust, his sword glittering like flowing mercury, Chief’s eyes rolling with insane fear as Tom smashed aside the living dead and splashed into the blue water.

Benny’s horse leaped over the last of the dead, his hooves caving in the head of the bus driver, and then they were in the water. The cold current struck them, and Apache neighed and blew, and Benny gasped as icy water bit his ribs and chest. Forty or more of the zoms followed them into the water, but the powerful current plucked them up and swept them away.

Benny turned and looked toward the treeline. There was no sign of Nix, but for a moment—perhaps it was his imagination or the shimmer of the heat or even a wandering zom—but Benny thought he saw another small figure moving across the field toward the treeline, heading in the same direction that the men had taken Nix. She ran fast, bent low, and she carried something in her hands that glinted like steel. Benny blinked sweat out of his eyes, and when he looked again, the small running figure was gone.

The treeline was an unbroken line of oaks and maples, with no sign of human life. The field was covered with the living dead—thousands upon thousands of them—and that way was as blocked and useless as the collapsed pass through the cliff. Their horses clambered up onto the far bank.

They were safe.

But Nix was gone.

And they could not follow.

36

BITTER, EXHAUSTED, AND ANGRY, THEY MOVED AWAY FROM THE CREEK as fast as their horses could go, heading into the hills, seeking the safety of the high ground. When they were safe in a thick copse of trees, and when Tom was convinced that there were no zoms nearby, they slid from the saddles and collapsed onto the thick grass. For several long minutes they lay there, unable to move, gasping like beached fish, running with sweat, barely able to think. Apache and Chief stood nearby, their legs trembling with tension and fear.

“Are you okay?” Tom asked when he had the breath.

“No.” Benny groaned.

Tom turned his head so sharply that it looked like it was unscrewing from his shoulders. “Where are you hurt? Are you bit—?”

“No … it’s not me. It’s Nix!”

“At least we know she’s alive, Benny. That’s something. Hold on to that.”

“They also know we’re coming.”

Tom managed to sit up. He was bleeding from a dozen small cuts, but he assured Benny they were from the sharp fragments of stone that pelted him when the cliffs blew. He crawled over and pulled the canteen from his saddle, drank deeply, and then handed it to Benny. “They knew long before now,” he said. “You can’t rig charges like that and bring down that much stone without taking time to set it up. No, kiddo. … They knew we were onto them, and they set a very smart trap.”

The water opened up Benny’s parched throat, but he coughed and gagged on it.

“You sure you’re okay?” Tom asked, peering curiously at him, his eyes darting to Benny’s arms and legs. “You’re positive you didn’t—”

“I’m not bit,” snapped Benny. “I want to go find Nix.”

“We will,” Tom promised. “But the horses are a step away from dead. Unless you want to chase them on foot, we have to rest.”

“How long?”

“At least an hour. Two would be better.”

“Two hours!”

“Shhh … keep your voice down. Listen to me, Ben,” Tom said, and his face was tight. “If we rest for two hours, we can catch up with them in maybe two more hours. If we don’t rest, it’ll take all day, if we catch up at all. This is a situation where slow is faster.”

Benny glared at him, but then he growled and turned away. He knew that Tom was right, but every second they sat there felt like it was one less second for Nix. Seconds burned away into minutes, and it took centuries for enough minutes to gather into an hour, and then two. By the time Tom said that they were ready to go, Benny was a half tick away from screaming insanity.

“How come Charlie and the others didn’t just hide behind rocks and shoot us?”

Tom busied himself by putting the carpet coats back onto the horses.

“Tom?”

“I guess they didn’t like their chances in a shoot-out,” Tom said.

“Are you kidding? Six or seven against one?”

All Tom gave as a reply was a shrug, and Benny stared at his brother. What the hell did that mean?

“Besides,” Tom said as he tightened the last of the straps, “the dynamite was a big bang, big enough to draw most of the dead toward the pass, which meant that it drew them away from the forest. If we’d been killed, they would never have risked shooting at us. It was a stupid risk even if he’d hit us, because it drew some of the zoms toward them. I expect Charlie’s going to be pretty upset with the shooter.”

“It wasn’t the Hammer?”

“No. Too skinny. Probably one of the Mekong brothers. Whoever it is, though, I want to have a chat with him.”

“A ‘chat’?” Benny said, grinning for the first time in hours.

“A meaningful chat,” Tom agreed. “C’mon, mount up. We’ll stay under the trees for a while. This side of the creek is all farms, so we can cut through and then cross the water a couple of miles upstream. If we’re lucky, we’ll hit the highway and cross that before they can reach it, and then we can see about laying our own trap. The highway’s the tough part, and I want to have time to figure it out, so let’s make tracks.”

“Good,” Benny said, reaching for the saddle horn and pulling himself up.

“This is probably the last leg of this chase, Ben,” said Tom. “I know what we just went through was rough, but there’s a big difference between fighting zoms and fighting people. When we find Nix, I’ll try to draw Charlie and the others off, and I want you to grab Nix and make a run for it. Don’t worry about where you go, I’ll find you. If you can, get to the water and wade as far south as you can before you come out on the bank. Try to leave no trail.”

“How will you find us then?”

“Don’t worry, kiddo. I’ve got a whole lot of sneaky I haven’t even used yet.” He gave Benny a reassuring smile as he swung back into the saddle. “Let’s go.”

They headed northeast, following a series of farm roads that were almost completely reclaimed by the relentless forest. As they rode, Tom pulled a bottle of cadaverine from his pocket, dabbed some onto his clothes, and then handed the bottle to Benny. Apache nickered irritably from the stench. Benny considered the bottle for a moment.

“Tom … do you think this is why we got away?”

“It helped. It made the zoms hesitate. Remember, they won’t bite something that already smells dead.”

“I don’t understand that,” Benny said as he sprinkled some of the foul-smelling liquid onto his jeans.

“No one does. It’s another of the mysteries associated with the living dead. Just be glad it works. Hey—not so much. Save some for later. We only have two bottles.”

Benny put the cap back on and tossed the bottle to Tom, but the cap was still loose, and as Tom caught the bottle, the liquid splashed out and splattered his shirt.

“Oh, crap, man,” Benny cried. “Sorry!”

Wincing at the odor rising from his clothes, Tom fitted the cap back on. “Well … that ought to about do it. I could probably square dance with a zom and not get bitten right now.” He leaned over and handed the bottle back to Benny. “There’s still half a bottle left. Keep it. I’ll hold on to the other.”

“What if we run out?”

“Let’s hope we don’t.”

The last of the farm roads ended by a curve in the creek, and they splashed across, moving slow to keep the noise down, each of them scanning the terrain. Everything was still. They came up from the stream bed and found a highway that was entirely blocked by cars. Four lanes and both shoulders, stretching away around a bend in the road a mile to their right and off into the misty horizon to their left. An army helicopter that Tom identified as a UH-60 Black Hawk lay crashed in the meadow that ran along the road, the huge propeller blades broken and twisted and hung with creeper vines. Benny wondered how the chopper had come to crash. Had one of the crew been infected? Were they airlifting victims and took the wrong kind? Or had they run out of fuel and were too far from home? Maybe it had been caught by the EMP. There was no way to know, and no matter what had brought the powerful machine down, it stood as a monument to a war in which technology and sophistication had served no purpose, had ultimately accomplished nothing.