12
“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 everything. 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 that 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 Tom did. They passed two houses in which zombies stood in the yard. The first house, 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 hand touching the handle of his sword, 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 that 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 had.
Benny wanted to turn and run. His mouth was as dry as sand, and sweat ran down his back and into his underwear.
They moved steadily down the street, always slow. The sun was heading toward the western part of the sky, and it would be dark in four or five hours. Benny knew 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 toward the house with the red door. A man stood inside, looking out of the big bay window. He once 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 leathery tightness.
Tom stopped outside of the paint-peeling white picket fence. He looked from the erosion portrait to the man in the window and then 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 it had been waiting there all these years for a visitor to come to the 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 more than two minutes. Nervous sweat ran down Benny’s face, and he couldn’t take his eyes off the zombie.
Tom pushed on the gate with his knee, and it opened.
“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,” Tom hissed. “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 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 then another. Benny eventually followed. The process was excruciatingly slow, but to Benny it felt as if they were moving too fast. No matter how deliberately they went, he thought 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 that a great mass of the hungry dead would surround them.
Tom reached the door and turned the handle.
The knob turned in his hand, and the lock clicked open. Tom gently pushed open the door 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 its 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 bring both its hands together to tie behind the creature’s back. He looked up. “The door, Benny-
Benny came out of his daze and realized 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-bladed 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, but Tom didn’t seem to care. Maybe he knew that the zom couldn’t reach him, but Benny was still terrified of those gray 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 the closing loop forced the creature’s jaws shut with a
