They saw Tom on the porch, peering into the open doorway. Then he backed away as something moved toward him from the shadows of the unlit living room.
Benny’s breath caught in his throat as he saw the figure emerge from the doorway in a slow, uncertain gait, his legs moving stiffly, his hands out and reaching for Tom. It was Grandpa Houser.
“No!” Benny cried, but Tom was still backing away.
Grandpa Houser’s eyes were as dark and empty as holes, and his dentures clacked together as if he was trying to bite the air.
A deep sadness opened in Benny’s chest. He liked Danny’s grandfather. The old man was always kind, and he told the funniest fishing stories. Now Grandpa Houser was gone, and in his place was a thing that had no conscious thought, no humor or intelligence. No trace of humanity other than the lie of its appearance. It was a zombie, driven by an unconquerable hunger for human flesh. Even from forty feet away Benny could hear the creature’s low moan of endless need.
“He must have died in his sleep,” Nix breathed.
Chong nodded. “And he didn’t lock his bedroom door.”
It was a sad and terrible fact of life that everyone who died came back as a zom, so everyone locked themselves in their rooms at night. It was a rare zom who could turn a doorknob, and none of them could work a padlock or turn a key. Someone dying in their sleep and reanimating was one of the constant fears for people in town.
Because this kind of thing could happen.
Benny caught movement to his right and saw Zak Matthias looking at him out of the side window of the adjoining house. Zak had never exactly been a friend, but for the most part he and Benny had been able to get along. They were the same age and had been all through school and the Scouts together. They played on the same baseball team, wrestled in the same weight class, and even sometimes went fishing together if Morgie and Chong were busy. But all that had been before last September.
Zak Matthias was Charlie Pink-eye’s nephew. Although they didn’t know for sure, Benny and Nix believed that it had been Zak who’d told Charlie what Benny had found in a pack of Zombie Cards: a picture of the Lost Girl.
Lilah.
Charlie had come after Benny and tried to take the card from him. Benny hadn’t understood why at the time, but soon learned that Charlie was afraid that Lilah would tell people what was going on out in the Ruin. About the bounty hunters like Charlie who kidnapped kids and took them to fight in the zombie pits at Gameland so evil people like them could gamble on who would win or lose.
Charlie’s attempt to erase all knowledge of the Lost Girl and Gameland had led to the murders of Nix’s mom and a local erosion artist, Rob Sacchetto-the man who had painted the Lost Girl card.
Zak didn’t go to school anymore. His father, Big Zak, kept him home, and the whole family was mostly shunned by the town. Benny had heard rumors that Zak’s dad knocked him around, somehow blaming him for what happened to Charlie.
In a strange way Benny felt sorry for Zak. He looked so lost as he stood there behind the glass and lace curtains, pale from always hiding in the house. Benny wanted to hate him, but he was sure that Zak had had no idea of the terrible things Charlie Pink-eye would do with the little bit of information his nephew had given him.
“Be careful, Tom!” someone cried, and Benny whipped his head back to see that Tom had retreated to the edge of the porch.
“Shoot him, Tom!” yelled the town postman.
“No!” screamed two voices in unison, and Benny looked up to see the Houser twins at the upstairs window. “Grandpa!” they cried, their voices as shrill as frightened birds.
“Shoot him,” whispered Morgie under his breath, and Benny turned to look at him. Morgie’s face was wet with nervous sweat. “Shoot him.”
Tom’s gun was still in its holster.
Lilah gave him a single cold shake of her head. “No. It’s a waste of a bullet.”
Suddenly there was quick movement on the porch as Tom’s body seemed to blur. He grabbed the zombie’s shoulders and spun him around, then pivoted so that Grandpa Houser flipped over Tom’s hip and hit the porch boards. Tom climbed on top of him, grabbing for the pale wrists, bringing them behind the man’s back, securing them with cord that he pulled from his pocket. The whole thing was over in the blink of an eye.
“Take him,” he barked, and two burly men crept nervously forward to lift the old zom to his feet and drag him away. “Put him in the toolshed. Don’t quiet him yet.”
When Tom said that, he ticked his head toward the upstairs windows.
One of the other men began climbing the steps, but Tom stopped him. “No… we still don’t know where Jack, Michelle, and Danny are.”
Benny swallowed a lump the size of a hen’s egg.
“Should we help?” asked Chong in a voice that clearly showed that he hated his own suggestion.
“Definitely not warrior smart,” said Morgie under his breath.
“I’ll help,” said Lilah in her icy whisper of a voice, and she pushed her way through the crowd. Most of the townsfolk shied back away from her as if she was something wild and dangerous, and Benny realized she was exactly that.
Lilah exchanged a nod with Tom, and they crept cautiously into the house.
“She’s definitely warrior smart,” observed Chong, “but crazy as a loon.”
“Should we go in too?” asked Morgie. “Maybe they could use our help.”
“Tom and Lilah? Need our help? Don’t be stupid,” replied Nix.
Nix, Chong, and Benny turned their heads in unison to face him.
Morgie colored. “Yeah… okay,” he conceded. “Kinda dumb, huh?”
Chong laid a consoling hand on his arm. “No, Morgie,” he said, “not ‘kinda.’”
Benny caught movement again at the Matthias place. He saw Zak turn away from the window, but something about Zak’s face made Benny stare. Zak’s eyes were surrounded by dark rings. As if his whole face looked bruised. Maybe a couple of black eyes. Big Zak?
“Damn,” Benny said under his breath.
Nix caught the direction of his stare. “What-?”
“It’s Zak,” he said quietly. “I think he’s hurt. He keeps looking out here.”
Nix opened her mouth to say something stinging about Zak, but then she clamped her jaws shut.
Benny looked at the front of the Houser place, and everything was quiet. People were starting to edge carefully up to the porch. He turned back to Zak’s house, chewing his lip in indecision.
Then, before he knew he was going to do anything, he was walking toward Zak Matthias’s house.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
First Night
That’s what people call the day the dead rose. According to Tom, it started in the morning in a few places, but by night it had spread all over.
No one knows why it started.
No one knows where it started. Tom says that the first report he heard of was a news story out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
By dawn of the next day it had spread all over the world. A state of emergency was declared. Tom says that it was too little and too late.
By noon of the following day all communication was lost from over sixty cities in the United States, and more than three hundred worldwide. No one was counting how many towns and villages were overrun.
The radios and TV stations stopped broadcasting on the fifth day. Cell phones were already dead by then.
