they were dead. Mindless. Unless he could completely quiet one of them, chopping at them seemed… wrong. He knew they couldn’t feel pain and wouldn’t care, but Benny felt like some kind of malicious bully.
On the other hand, there was that whole survival thing. As three zoms closed in on him in a line he could not bull his way through, the hand holding the sword moved almost without conscious thought. The blade swept upward through one set of reaching arms, and the hands flew high above, grasping nothing but air. With a deft twist of his shoulder, he flicked the blade sideways and a zom’s head went flying into the bushes. Another cut left the third zom toppling to one side with one leg suddenly missing from mid-thigh.
“Sorry!” Benny yelled as he burst through the now disintegrating line of three zoms.
But there were more.
So many more, coming at him from all directions. Cold fingers fumbled at his face and tried to grab his hair, but Benny jagged and dodged and dove through them toward open ground.
His foot hit a rock and he sprawled forward; the sword flew from his hand and clattered thirty feet down the slope.
“No!” he cried as the sword vanished in the tall, dry grass.
Before Benny could get up, a zom grabbed a loose pocket flap on his vest and another grabbed his cuff.
“Get away!” Benny yelled as he thrashed and kicked and fought his way free. He scrambled to his feet, but his balance was bad and the slope was steep, so he ran like a sloppy dog on hands and feet for a dozen paces until he could get fully upright again.
More and more of the living dead staggered down the hill after him. Benny had no idea where they had come from, or why there were so many here. Even before Gameland, the zoms had started moving in packs rather than alone as they’d always done before. A month ago Benny, Lilah, and Nix had been under siege by thousands of them at a monk’s way station. How and why this flocking behavior was happening was another of the mysteries that no one had an answer for.
“Tom,” Benny said, gasping his brother’s name as he ran. He didn’t know why he spoke the name. Maybe it was a prayer for guidance from the best zombie hunter who had ever worked the Ruin. Or maybe it was a curse, because now everything Tom had taught him seemed to be in question. The world was changing beyond the lessons Tom had given.
“Tom,” Benny growled as he ran, and he tried to remember those lessons that could not change. The ways of the samurai, the ways of the warrior.
He saw sunlight glitter on metal ten paces downslope, and Benny leaped at the fallen sword, grabbing it by the handle with his left hand, switching it into a two-handed grip even while his legs continued to run at full speed. Zoms came at him, and the sword seemed to move with its own will.
Arms and legs and heads flew into the hot sunlight.
Everywhere he looked he saw another withered figure lurching toward him from beneath the shade of the big trees or from between tall shrubs. He knew — he knew — that this was not a coordinated trap. Zoms couldn’t think. It wasn’t that…. He must have simply had the bad luck to run into a swarm of them that was spread out across the whole width of the slope.
He wanted to tell his inner voice to stop offering stupid advice and maybe instead come up with some sort of plan. Something that didn’t involve ending up in the digestive tracts of a hundred zoms.
Run.
Then he saw that the tall grass twenty yards down the slope hid the dark cleft of a small ravine. It ran the entire width of the slope, which was bad news, but it was less than ten feet across, which was good.
Could he jump it? Could he build up the momentum to leap across the opening?
His inner voice yelled,
Benny set his teeth, called on every possible ounce of speed, and threw himself into the air, his feet still running through nothingness as he hurtled over the deep ravine. He landed hard on the far slope, bending his knees just as Tom had taught him, letting his leg muscles absorb the shock of impact.
He was safe!
Benny laughed out loud and spun toward the wave of zoms that still staggered toward him. They were so completely focused on him that they did not notice — or understand — the danger of the ravine.
“Yo! Deadheads,” he yelled, waving his sword to taunt them. “Nice try, but you’re messing with Benny- freaking-Imura, zombie killer. Booyah!”
And then the lip of the ravine buckled and collapsed under his weight, and Benny-freaking-Imura instantly plummeted into the darkness below.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
It is one month and one day since Tom died.
Night before last, while we were all sitting around the campfire, Chong told a joke that made Benny laugh. I think it was the first time Benny laughed since Gameland.
It was so good to hear him laugh. His eyes are still sad, though. I guess mine probably are too.
I never thought any of us would ever want to laugh again.
4
BENNY FELL FROM SUNLIGHT INTO DARKNESS AND HIT THE BOTTOM OF THE ravine so hard that his legs buckled and he pitched forward onto his face. Loose soil, tree roots, and small stones rained down on him. Fireworks detonated inside his head, and every single molecule of his body hurt.
He groaned, rolled onto his side, spat dirt out of his mouth, and clawed spiderwebs out of his eyes.
“Yeah, warrior smart,” he muttered.
The bottom of the ravine was much wider than the top and thick with mud, and Benny quickly understood that it was not a true ravine but a gorge cut by water runoff from the mountains. During the times of heaviest runoff, the flowing water had undercut edges of the slope above, creating the illusion of solid ground.
If he had kept running after he had leaped the gorge he would be safe. Instead he’d turned to gloat. Not exactly warrior smart.
As he lay there, his mind began to play tricks on him. Or at least he thought it was doing something twisted and weird. He heard sounds. First it was his own labored breathing and the moans of the dead above him, but, no… there was something else.
It was a distant roar that sounded — impossible as that was — like the hand-crank generator that ran the power in the hospital back home. Still half-buried in the dirt, he cocked his head to listen. The sound was definitely there, but it wasn’t exactly like the hospital generator. This whined at a higher pitch, and it surged and fell away, surged and fell away.
Then it was gone.
He strained to hear it, trying to decide if it was really a motor sound or something else. There were all kinds
