Rot & Ruin

“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