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
“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.
They rode their horses to the outside edge of the shoulder and stopped. The animals did not like the endless line of cars, although Benny didn’t see any zoms hiding among the dead machines.
Bones, however… There were plenty of those. Skeletons-long since picked clean by zoms, scavengers, and the elements-were scattered everywhere. Thousands upon thousands of skulls and rib cages, leg and arm bones, bleached white by the merci-less California sun. The cars themselves were slammed and smashed together. Some had burned, some were skewed sideways or overturned. A few had rolled off the highway and lay half hidden in the tall grass beside the road. Benny could see that the windows of all the cars were broken. Some had been smashed out by people escaping-or trying to-and some were smashed in by fresh zoms who still had enough of a functioning brain to pick up stones. There were plenty of stones. The roadbed was edged with countless white plum-sized rocks, placed for drainage, Benny knew, but used as weapons.
Benny nudged a cracked thigh bone with his toe. “Tom, how come there are so many bones? Didn’t most people turn into zoms?”
“Most did, sure, but there were still hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who died fighting. Died in ways that kept them from rising. Broken necks, crushed skulls, bullets in the brain. Arms and legs torn off. It’s not like back in town where we bury the dead. Here… Those that truly die just rot away until bones are all that’s left.”
Hundreds of the cars were pocked with bullet holes, and it was clear that at one point the helicopter had fired on the stalled vehicles. Tom saw where Benny was looking, and he pointed out a black shape rising from the side door of the crashed Black Hawk.
“They used their minigun. It’s a 7.62 mm, multibarrel machine gun that could fire three thousand rounds per minute.”
“Wasn’t enough,” Benny said.
“No,” Tom agreed.
On the far side of the line of vehicles was a vast meadow of tall grass and wild wheat that stretched into green and brown forever. Scattered here and there were hundreds of young trees-scrub pines, oaks, poplars, maples- rising above the sea of waving grass. The trees made it impossible to tell if the meadow was free of zoms, an
