“Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn’t make us civilized, Chong. That’s organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn’t exist at all.”
Then Chong spotted something that made him yelp. He ran across the room to a big urn in which long-handled weapons stood like a bouquet of militant flowers. He slid two items from the urn: a pair of wooden swords.
Tom took the bokkens from him. “Son of a-”
They both froze as they heard a sound from somewhere else in the hotel. A sharp cry. A child’s yelp of pain.
Tom turned and looked at the broad staircase.
“That’s not Benny or Nix. Too young,” gasped Chong in a horrified voice.
“I know,” Tom said bitterly, and headed up the stairs. “Stay behind me and let me handle things.”
They moved up the stairs as quickly as they could, but the building was old and the stairs creaked. Luckily, the laughter from outside was so loud that most of the noise was hidden. However, when they were near the top step, one board creaked louder than all the others. The hallway was empty and poorly lit by lanterns set on shelves along the walls, with doors leading to rooms on both sides. One door stood ajar, and from that there was a sharp call.
“I’ll be right back,” said a man as he stepped into the hall. Chong estimated that he was at least twenty feet from where Tom crouched on the top step. It seemed like a mile. The man looked up and down the hall and was starting to turn back to the room when he saw the figures crouched in the shadows of the stairway.
“Hey,” he said, his voice rising an octave in alarm. It was the last thing he said. Tom surged forward, racing at full speed toward the man. His rush was so sudden that the twenty feet melted into nothing. Steel flashed and red sprayed and then the man was falling. Without a second’s pause, Tom kicked open the door and leaped into the room.
Chong was running now.
There were screams and the rasp of knives being drawn, then a single muffled gunshot. The bullet punched through the plaster wall a foot behind Chong, making him jump. He crouched low and peered inside the room. The sight was one that he knew he would never forget.
It was a big room, a suite. Along the far wall was an old iron radiator, and through its metal structure the guards had run three lines of chains. The chains were connected to iron rings that were bolted and locked around the necks of at least forty children. The oldest was Chong’s age, an Indian girl with one eye puffed shut and a split lip. The youngest was no older than six. All of the kids were bruised, and each one looked absolutely terrified. A smoking pistol lay on the floor with a man’s severed hand still attached to it.
The rest of the room was a slaughterhouse. Five men lay on the floor, or sprawled over furniture, or in a heap on the bed. Three men were still on their feet. Tom was one; the other two were guards. One of the guards was wandering away from the fight, hands clamped to a ruined throat, eyes already fading into emptiness. The remaining guard held a machete in his hands but he, too, was backing away from this man, this thing that had burst into the room in a storm of death. The machete dropped to the floor as he brought his hands up in total surrender.
The entire fight was over already.
Chong stared at Tom. Benny’s brother looked as cold and calm as if he was watering his rosebushes or cutting a slice of pie, even though his face was splashed with fresh blood.
“Is the hallway clear?” Tom asked in a disturbingly serene voice.
Chong stammered an affirmative.
Tom nodded. He extended his sword toward the remaining guard. “Are there any other guards on this floor?”
“N-n-no! Two on the porch and us… I mean me. God… don’t kill me, please… I got kids of my own.”
Tom stepped forward and touched the bloody sword tip to the guard’s cheek. “Do your kids have to fight in the pits?” The curl of his lip was the only clue to the emotion he was keeping in check behind his bland face.
The man flicked a guilty look at the children huddled by the wall.
“These kids… I mean… hey, man, I was just doing what I was told. White Bear and his old man call the shots around here.”
Tom flicked the blood off his sword, careful not to let a single drop go anywhere near the kids, all of whom were locked into a moment of traumatized silence. He resheathed his sword.
“Keys,” he said. The man very carefully dug into his pocket and then gingerly held out a ring of keys. Tom snatched them from him and tossed the ring to Chong. “Get them into the hall.”
While Chong rushed to free the captives, Tom walked forward, making the guard stumble backward until the man’s back hit the wall. Tom stopped, his face an inch from the terrified guard’s. “You know who I am?”
“Yes… oh God… please don’t… I know who you are… don’t…”
Tom bared his teeth. “Where’s my brother?”
74
BENNY PRESSED NIX BACK AGAINST THE WALL AS THE FIRST OF THE DARK shapes moved toward them. The pit they were in was thirty feet across, with large blank sections of wall interspersed with side tunnels. The torches were too high to reach.
“Mattress!” Nix blurted, and they rushed over to the stack of rotten old mattresses and began dragging them toward the tunnel with the zoms.
Benny squatted and upended one and used it to block them from view. “Might not stop them,” he warned. “And my cadaverine’s worn off.”
“Better than nothing,” she grunted as she dragged another one over and pulled it upright. There were only three mattresses, but they nicely blocked half the tunnels. “Maybe it’ll confuse them, slow them down.”
Benny jerked his head toward one of the open tunnels. There was no movement in that one, but torchlight spilled down from another opening around the far bend. Benny pulled Nix inside, and they peered up to see if White Bear or the crowd could see them. The crowd booed and yelled for the dead to go fetch their dinner.
“I think we’re good,” whispered Nix. Immediately she pulled out the tails of her shirt and reached inside her clothes. Benny did the same, and they knelt down and placed several hidden items on the ground. When the guards had locked them in the empty hotel room, they had thought that the two teenagers were helpless; but Tom had spent the last seven months teaching them to never be helpless. He said that in ancient times a samurai warrior was never unarmed, even if he had no sword, knives, or spear.
“All weapons are made,” he once told them. “They’re fabricated from the things we find: wood, metal, rope, leather, stone. Nature always provides, but only a smart warrior can look at what circumstance offers and see the potential.”
While waiting for White Bear to come and take them to the pits, Benny and Nix had looked at what the room had to offer: an old light fixture, crumbling plaster walls, dry laths, a window. Now on the ground in front of them they examined what circumstance had provided. They had several lengths of broken lath-thin, narrow strips of some straight-grained wood; several yards of copper-cored electrical wire; and long pieces of jagged window glass wrapped in torn strips from their shirts-strips whose absence was hidden by their vests. All their pockets were filled with plaster dust.
There was a loud moan from around the bend. One of the zoms had reached the end of the first tunnel. The crowd began cheering. Benny hoped the wall of mattresses would confuse the zoms. Every second mattered to Benny and Nix.
“Hurry,” breathed Nix.
They worked as fast as they could. They placed layers of jagged glass between strips of lath and used the wire to bind it in place. Benny wrapped the wire around and around as tightly as he could. While he did that, Nix used another piece of glass to slash strips from their pant legs and then poured the white plaster powder into pouches made from those strips. When she was done, she and Benny swapped jobs. She took the makeshift glass-bladed hatchets and used more strips of their jeans to bind the laths from end to end, wrapping them the way an ancient
