He pushed Nix away from the monster. She got to her feet and started to run, and immediately she screamed and fell. Benny scrabbled backward and turned to see a sight that threatened to tear the soul out of him. A second zom had crawled out of the weeds and attacked Nix. It had once been a huge woman, and it wore the black-and- white rags of a nun’s habit. There were two bullet holes in its cheeks, but they were ancient and the bullets had missed spine or brain. The zom had Nix pinned to the ground by the shoulders and was bending to take a bite that would destroy everything good and wonderful in Benny’s world.
Nix’s face was covered in bright red blood. A black snake of terror reared up inside Benny’s chest. But his rage was bigger than his fear.
“NIX!”
He bellowed louder than a bull, louder than the rhino. He screamed a great unintelligible shriek of denial as he launched himself at the zom. His bokken lay forgotten in the weeds. He did not even think of pulling his knife. He crossed his arms over his face and slammed into the zom, hitting it like a thunderbolt.
“Get away from her!”
The impact knocked the zom backward, and they fell together in a hissing, snarling tangle, rolling over and over as Nix’s scream filled the air.
The creature was desiccated, however; its arms were strong, but as they rolled Benny felt the dead-weight thump of its torso and legs. The zom’s spine must have been shattered below the shoulder blades so that its legs truly were dead.
Its mouth, however, was not.
The zom moaned in desperate hunger as it snapped at him. Their roll ended with Benny on his back and the zom atop him-not at all the way he wanted this moment to end. He shoved a forearm under its chin to keep those teeth from his flesh. He saw movement over the zom’s shoulder and there was Nix, her face running with blood and her eyes wild with fear, but she had her bokken in her small, tanned fists.
“Now!” she screeched, and with a grunt of effort, Benny shoved his arms straight up, raising the snapping zom as Nix swung her wooden sword.
The top half of the zom’s head seemed to disintegrate, and the creature immediately went limp. With a snarl of disgust Benny threw it to one side.
“Thanks-,” he began, but then he felt Nix stiffen beside him.
“Oh my God!”
Benny scrambled to his feet and looked around, and he could feel the blood drain from his face as he beheld a scene out of his darkest nightmares.
The whole field of tall grass in which they stood was filled with zoms. Dozens of them. They lay between the weeds and snarls of wisteria, empty eyes fixed on them, hands reaching, mouths working. Their moans filled the air.
But they were all broken. Shattered legs and hips. Shattered spines. Missing limbs. Huge holes torn through their chests and stomachs. Benny and Nix were surrounded by a legion of crippled zombies. They wriggled forward on broken limbs or grabbed tufts of grass to haul their twisted wrecks of bodies toward the fresh meat.
“What is this?” Nix breathed, horrified.
Benny drew his bokken, and they stood back to back with no clear way out. There had to be two dozen of the monsters. No… more than that. Much more. Others were climbing like gray slugs over fallen logs or out of depressions in the ground. Fifty of them. Sixty. More. All those dusty eyes and black mouths and rotted teeth. The dead cried out in rusted voices as they pulled themselves toward the smell of fresh meat and flowing blood. The terrible need, the awful hunger in that moan made Benny’s blood turn to ice water in his veins. It was such an ancient sound, old as all the pain and misery in the world.
“We have to get out of here,” Benny whispered. He knew that the words were pointless, their meaning obvious, but there was a need in him to hear a human voice amid the dreadful wails of the dead.
A few hundred yards to their left, Benny and Nix could hear the shouts of Tom and Chong and the indignant snort of the huge animal that had chased them all from the road.
And then he understood. “God!” he gasped. “The rhino!”
“What?” Nix asked, and then she got it. “Oh!”
“Let’s get out of here.”
She dragged her forearm over her face to clear the blood from her eyes. “How?”
Benny licked his lips and took a firmer grip on his sword. “Fast and hard,” he said.
He swung his sword and smashed the closest of the zoms, cracking the hardwood edge of the bokken against its temple. It flopped to one side, and Benny jumped over it. A dozen withered hands grabbed at his sneakers and pants cuffs, but Benny kicked and stamped as if he was being swarmed by cockroaches.
“Come on!” he shouted, but Nix was already running past him. Her sword swished down and cracked and another zombie spun away, its jaw crushed.
They ran and struck and ran. The blood on Nix’s face scared Benny so much his heart felt like ice.
Had she been bitten?
His toe hurt terribly.
He bit down on his fear and swung the sword. It cracked against a reaching hand and shattered the wrist. He swung again and a zom who looked like he might have been a soldier flopped over on his back, his neck knocked askew. Benny swung and hit; Nix swung and hit; and all the time they screamed and moved and fought.
“That way!” cried Nix, shoving him with her shoulder. Benny pivoted to see a narrow gap in the sea of crawling monsters. He pushed her in front of him.
“Go!”
She went, running and jumping, her sword flashing in a brown blur, the
A pair of zoms-a grocery store clerk and a man in the tattered remains of a business suit-grabbed at him at the same time, each one clamping on to one of his ankles.
Benny staggered and fell. But as he landed he twisted as Tom had shown him, rotating his shins so that the angles of his bones exerted leverage on the thumbs of the grabbing hands. The businessman lost his grip, and Benny pivoted hard to shake loose the clerk, emphasizing his need with a crushing downward blow with the flat end of the sword handle. The zom’s skull shattered, and his hand opened with a dying twitch.
Benny scrambled to his feet and ran. Nix was fifty yards ahead of him, but he ran so fast that he’d nearly caught up by the time she reached the narrow gap.
“Go! Go!” he yelled, and together they crashed through the circle of broken zombies and into the trampled area where Chong had run. It felt like escaping from the arms of Death itself.
But the problem was far from over.
There was still the rhinoceros.
Chong was there, dodging in and around a stand of oaks as the rhino lunged between the trunks, trying to gore him with its horns. Only the lucky chance of the trees having grown so close together was keeping Chong alive.
Then they saw Tom standing with his pistol in a two-handed shooter’s grip.
“Shoot it in the eye!” Benny yelled as they closed in on where he stood.
Tom ignored him and called out to Chong, “I’m going to fire twice, and then I want you to run behind the trees. Head to your left and go as deep into the forest as you can.”
“No!” cried Nix.
Tom cut her a sharp look. “Why not?”
“We just came from there,” she panted. “Zoms!”
“Damn.”
“Tom! I need to get out of here!” begged Chong as he twisted away from the horn. This time it missed him by inches.
“Benny, Nix… head back to the road. Cross it and go into the other side. Find a tree you can climb and wait for me.”
