Rot and Ruin

“For what?” Vin demanded, and Benny thought he sounded genuinely outraged.

“For what you did to Jessie Riley.”

Silence. Then, “You’re jerking us around, Tom. We didn’t do anything to Jessie.”

“Evidence says different.”

“Well, then ask Jessie. She’ll tell you.”

Tom’s face wore a twisted smile. Hard and predatory. “Jessie’s dead, Vin. You and your ‘brother’ beat her so bad that she died.”

The ensuing silence was broken only by the low moans of the dead.

“Three hundred yards,” said Benny.

“You’re trying some kind of sick con on me, Tom,” protested Vin.

“Not much in the mood for games, Vin. Jessie died in my arms, and your coin was on the floor. You’re a wanted man, Vin. You and Joey. Do you know what the people in town will do to you if they catch you? When they catch you?”

“No way, man … no way in hell.” Vin’s voice was filled with doubt now. And fear. “You gotta believe me here, Tom.”

“Why should I believe you about anything? You’re trying to feed me and my brother to the zoms. That doesn’t build a good case for innocence.”

“Almost two hundred feet, Tom.”

The closest zoms were a mix of ordinary people in everyday clothes and soldiers in the burned remains of their uniforms. One wore the black slicker and helmet of a firefighter.

“That’s your brother?” Vin called. “That’s little Benny. Oh … hell, man.”

“Yeah, you’re really racking up the points, Vin. Beating on women, kidnapping little girls, and now you’re thinking about murdering a teenager. Yeah, you’re innocent, Vin. You’re a real saint.”

“You got it wrong, Tom. This stuff out here … This is just business. You, me, Joey—we’re pros. We know the risks, we know how it works out in the Ruin. No rules, no slack. It’s all part of the job.”

“Is murder part of the job?”

“Out here? Hell, you know it is.”

“Tom,” Benny said urgently. Tom turned and saw more zoms emerging from the forest. The terrified horses nickered and tossed their heads, pulling at the tethers that held them to the axle.

“Okay, Vin, but how’s the girl fit into all of this?”

“She’s Charlie’s niece. Or cousin. Something like that. He said so.”

“And you believed him?”

No answer. Even Benny knew that Vin probably didn’t believe that story, but like most people, Vin Trang was not in the habit of calling Charlie Matthias a liar.

“Didn’t you think it was strange that he should take his niece away from her mom by force and in the middle of the night?”

No answer.

“The coin, Vin … what about the coin?”

“Someone must have put it there.”

“Why?”

“To frame me.”

Tom smiled and winked at Benny. “And why would they do that, Vin? Who would want to go those lengths to throw suspicion on you?”

It was a long and ugly silence. The zoms were almost at the hundred-foot line. Benny counted sixteen of them in the first wave. Cold sweat ran down his face and back, and pooled like slush at the base of his spine. He had his bokken in his hands, but the hard wood felt like a toothpick against what was coming for them.

“Charlie wouldn’t do that,” Vin protested. “He’d know that we’d clear our names once we got back.”

“You mean if you got back. You said it yourself, Vin. No rules out here in the Ruin.”

“Hundred feet,” Benny said, and edged backward, raising the sword in both hands. “We have to go!”

“Vin,” called Tom. “I have to get Benny out of here. You let us walk, and I promise to help you with Captain Strunk and the court.”

“How do I know you’ll keep your word?” Vin said after a pause.

“Because you know what my word’s worth,” said Tom.

The moans of the dead were as loud as the shouting men. Tom whirled and saw that the firefighter and one other zom were out in front of the pack. With a snarl he leaped toward them, and the silver blade of his katana flashed in the sunlight. Tom backpedaled as the zoms fell one way and their heads crunched and rolled the other.

“Clock’s ticking on that offer, Vin.”

“I could just let the zoms have you and take my chances with the court. Joey and I never broke no laws in town. We have a clean record.”

“Tell that to the court when Strunk gives them the only piece of evidence found at the scene. They’ll hang you just to have someone to vent on.”

The fourteen remaining zoms were now only fifty feet away. Tom stared at them and then at the horses. “Damn it!” he said with a growl, and with a flick of his wrist, he cut the reins that held the horses to the overturned truck. With his free hand he slapped their rumps and yelled at them. Chief needed no urging and was already racing away. Apache ran a few steps, then stopped and looked back at Benny. He was just starting to turn to come back when a zom made a grab for him. Apache reared up and kicked the corpse in the face, then with a whinny of protest he wheeled around and galloped after Chief. They headed for the trees, but Benny saw that the woods were filled with the hungry dead. Even with the carpet coats, how could the horses hope to survive?

And how could he and Tom survive without them?

“Benny!” Tom snapped. “Climb!” He pushed Benny toward the Escalade, and Benny scrambled up onto the hood and then turned and scaled the mangled front of the panel truck. Tom pivoted in place and hacked at the zoms who were closing in on them now. Hands and parts of arms and heads flew, but there were far too many of them. Tom slammed his sword into its sheath and jumped onto the Escalade, just as the living dead reached for him. He kicked backward and then Benny was there, reaching down a hand to pull his brother to safety.

They crouched on the overturned truck, completely exposed. On the far side of the road, Vin Trang stood with his pistol raised.

Tom slowly straightened, and in a movement so smooth that it looked like flowing water, Tom pulled his pistol and pointed it at Vin. The range was too great for accurate handgun shooting, but Tom’s hand was rock steady. Even from that distance Benny could see that Vin’s whole arm trembled.

“If you take a shot, Vin,” Tom warned, “you’d better pray you kill me with the first round.”

Vin tried to meet Tom’s stare, tried to man it out, but after a few seconds he lowered his gun.

“Where’s Charlie taking the girl, Vin?” Tom asked.

But Vin shook his head. His will was broken enough to refuse to fight, but his fear of Charlie was greater than his fear of Tom. Still shaking his head, he backed away and then turned and ran full-tilt into the deep grass. Benny could hear him yelling in Vietnamese to Joey, and soon Joey Duk broke from the woods and ran in Vin’s wake.

“Shouldn’t we follow?” Benny asked, but he didn’t need an answer. Between them and the fleeing Mekong brothers were at least a hundred zoms. And more came shuffling out of the woods. Not just hundreds but thousands.

All around the truck, white hands reached up toward them. They were safe only as long as they stood in the center of the truck’s overturned side. But they couldn’t stay there forever. Tom looked up and down the row.

“What do we do?” Benny whispered, although in truth there was no longer any reason for silence. Every zom in the region knew where they were. For once Tom did not have a ready answer. His face was almost as pale as the monsters that reached and moaned for their flesh.

“We have no choice,” Tom said. “We have to run down the tops of the cars, as far and as fast as we can. We have to get to a point where the zoms are thin on the ground and then make a break for the meadow. I think I know where Vin and Joey are going. Charlie’s camp is up on that mountain.” He pointed to a craggy lump of granite in the distance.

Benny looked at the row of cars. Some of them were compact cars that were so low to the ground that even standing on the roof, they’d be within grabbing range.

“We’ll never make it,” he said.

Tom shook his head. “We have to try, Ben. No other choice. You go first. It’ll be easier if I’m behind you, in case you get into trouble. Run fast; plan your jumps to land in the widest, flattest places; and keep moving.” He drew his sword. “I’ll be right behind you.”

A cold hand closed around his ankle, and Benny screamed and kicked his foot loose. It was all the incentive he needed. He looked down the row. Past the Escalade there was a mix of sedans and SUVs. They looked like a miniature mountain range. There were zoms on both sides of the outer row of cars, but fewer on the inner rows. He pointed this out to Tom, who nodded.

“Good call, kiddo. Now, go, go, GO!”

Benny took two running steps and jumped over a sea of reaching hands. He heard and felt the dry rasp of desiccated fingers brushing against his ankles and shoes. He landed with a thump on the hood of the Escalade, barely remembering to bend his knees to absorb the shock. Zoms lunged over the hood at him, but Benny swatted their hands away with a fierce slash of his bokken and ran up the windshield, along the roof, and then jumped onto a burned-out shell of a Subaru. Then onto a boxy Scion that was high enough to keep the hands away from him, but the next three cars were compacts. He ran and slashed, ran and slashed, feeling the shock as his sword connected with dried tendon and brittle bone. One zom rose up in front of him, its mouth open to reveal two rows of broken and jagged teeth. Benny swung the bokken, and the mouth disintegrated into white chips of bone. He had a lingering image of empty black eyes glaring at him as the zombie fell away into the hands of its fellow inmates of the living hell to which they belonged.

He heard Tom’s feet pounding behind him and the occasional clean whoosh of the katana as it did its deadly work.

Then three things happened all at the same time that changed everything in Benny’s life, then and forever.

First, out of the corner of his eye, he saw two shapes break from the cover of the fields to his left. One was huge and burly, with skin as pale as any zom and one eye that burned with red fire. Charlie Pink-eye. And the other was slim and sun-freckled, with masses of red curls and bare feet that slapped the ground, heedless of rocks and nettles.

“NIX!” Benny yelled and at the same time she screamed his name.

“BENNY!” she cried. “IT’S A TRAP!”

It was such an absurd thing to say, because he already knew that this was a trap.

The second thing that happened proved to him how little he knew about the evil and devious twists of Charlie Pink-eye’s mind, because the Motor City Hammer rose up out of the side window of an overturned police cruiser and pointed a shotgun at him. Two other men—bounty hunters Benny recognized as Turk and Skins Harris; friends of Charlie’s—stood up from behind cars farther down the road. They also had shotguns.

Nix’s voice was one long continuous scream that blended with Benny’s as he twisted out of the way as the Hammer pulled the trigger. Benny dove for the second lane of cars, leaping across a gap that was filled with the undead. He made a jump he would never have believed possible for him, landing on the hood of a Ford pickup truck, tucking, rolling, falling into the back bed, and twisting around to look at where he’d been.

The third thing that happened in that same splintered second was the sight of Tom twisting away in a spray of blood. The echo of the shotgun was as loud as thunder, but Benny’s scream was louder as Tom pitched off of the roof of the car and fell out of sight, right into the hands of the living dead.

“TOM!”

Benny got to his feet as a zombie crawled over the tailgate of the truck, and he swung the bokken with so much force that it tore the creature’s head half off. Benny was still screaming Tom’s name.

“BENNY!”

He whirled, and there was Nix, running over the tops of the cars on the next lane. Her clothes were torn, and there was blood on her face. Benny jumped over the gap just as she reached him, and for a moment everything stopped as he pulled her into his arms. They hugged with such force that it crushed the breath from both of them.

The sound of the Hammer racking the pump of the shotgun snapped them both back to their senses, and they spun and ran back the way Benny had come, dipping and dodging as they ran up windshields and leaped from hood to trunk.

“Get them!” bellowed Charlie, and the Hammer fired shot after shot. Turk and Skins began firing, and even though they were too far away for accuracy, the buckshot they fired filled the air with broken glass and metal splinters. The Hammer was closer, and his next shot exploded car windows all around them. But Benny and Nix were running toward the setting sun, and the Hammer was firing into the glare. There were several sharper cracks as Charlie emptied his pistol at them, but Benny pulled Nix down behind a tall flower delivery van. Bullets pinged and whanged, but none of the shots found them.

“We have to go back for Tom!” Nix said.

Benny looked back to the spot where Tom had fallen. There were at least fifty zoms clustered there, and his heart plummeted in his chest.

“He’s gone,” he said in a desolated voice.

“Benny,” she said, tears boiling from her eyes, “I’m so sorry.”

The truck canted slightly to one side, and Benny peered around to see five zoms awkwardly climbing up the side. “We have to go. Now!”

She looked and saw and nodded. Although it broke their hearts to do it, they turned and ran down the long line of cars. Charlie and the Hammer kept firing, but soon they had to turn their guns on the zoms who staggered toward them. Benny and Nix ran and jumped, climbed and dodged. The sun was a great glaring eye that stared accusingly at Benny, condemning him for failing his brother, for running … as his brother had once run. But he could not go back. Not with Nix here. He had to save her … and it was already too late to save Tom. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">