When he had three full turns in place, he tied the cord tightly. He shimmied down the zombie’s body and pinned its legs and then tied its ankles together.
Then Tom stood up, stuffed the rest of the cord into his pocket, and closed his knife. He slapped dust from his clothes as he turned back to Benny.
“Thanks for the warning, kiddo, but I had it.”
“Um… holy sh-!”
“Language,” Tom interrupted quietly.
Tom went to the window and looked out. “Eight of ’em out there.”
“Do… do we… I mean, shouldn’t we board up the windows?”
Tom laughed. “You listen to too many campfire tales. If we started hammering nails into boards, the sound would call every living dead in the whole town. We’d be under siege.”
“But we’re trapped.”
Tom looked at him. “‘Trapped’ is a relative term,” he said. “We can’t go out the front. I expect there’s a back door. We’ll finish our business here and then we’ll sneak out nice and quiet, and head on our way.”
Benny stared at him and then at the struggling zombie that was thrashing and moaning.
“You… you just…”
“Practice, Benny. I’ve done this before. C’mon, help me get him up.”
They knelt on opposite sides of the zombie, but Benny didn’t want to touch it. He’d never touched a corpse of any kind before, and he didn’t want to start with one that had just tried to bite his brother.
“Benny,” Tom said, “he can’t hurt you now. He’s helpless.”
The word “helpless” hit Benny hard. It brought back the image of Old Roger-with no eyes, no teeth, and no fingers-and the two young women who tended to him. And the limbless torsos in the wagon.
“Helpless,” he murmured. “God…”
“Come on,” Tom said gently.
Together they lifted the zombie. It was light-far lighter than Benny had expected-and they half-carried, half- dragged it into the dining room, away from the living room window. Sunlight fell in dusty slants through the moth- eaten curtains. The ruins of a meal had long since decayed to dust on the table. They put it in a chair, and Tom produced the spool of cord and bound it in place. The zombie continued to struggle, but Benny understood. The zombie was actually helpless.
Helpless.
The word hung in the air. Ugly and full of dreadful new meaning.
“What do we do with him?” Benny asked. “I mean…
“Nothing. We leave him here.”
“Shouldn’t we bury him?”
“Why? This was his home. The whole world is a graveyard. If it was you, would you rather be in a little wooden box under the cold ground or in the place where you lived? A place where you were happy and loved.”
Neither thought was appealing to Benny. He shivered even though the room was stiflingly hot.
Tom removed the envelope from his pocket. Apart from the folded erosion portrait, there was also a piece of cream stationery on which were several handwritten lines. Tom read through it silently, sighed, and then turned to his brother.
“Restraining the dead is difficult, Benny, but it isn’t the hardest part.” He held out the letter. “This is.”
Benny took the letter.
“My clients-the people who hire me to come out here-they usually want something said. Things they would like to say themselves but can’t. Things they need said, so they can have closure. Do you understand?”
Benny read the letter. His breath caught unexpectedly 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:
Benny was weeping when Tom finished. He turned away and covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Tom went over and hugged him and kissed his head.
Then Tom stepped away, took a breath, and pulled a second knife from his boot. This one, Benny knew, was Tom’s favorite: a double-edge, black dagger with a ribbed handle and a six-and-a-half-inch-long blade. 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 into 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, placing it on the table, so that the dead man’s palms held the letter in place.
“Be at peace, brother,” said Tom.
He wiped his knife and stepped back. He looked at Benny, who was openly sobbing.
“This is what I do, Benny.”
Part Two. Zombie Cards
13
FOR FIVE DAYS AFTER THEY GOT BACK, BENNY DID NOTHING. In the mornings he sat in the backyard, invisible in the cool shade of the house as the sun rose in the east. When the sun was overhead, Benny went inside and sat in his room and stared out the window. As the sun set he’d go downstairs and sit on the top step of the porch. He didn’t say more than a dozen words. Tom cooked meals and laid them out, and sometimes Benny ate and sometimes he didn’t.
