Benny caught Chong under the armpit and hauled him roughly to his feet.
“Where’s your helmet?” yelled Benny.
Chong looked around but couldn’t see it.
Suddenly Chong was snatched backward and up and Benny reeled in horror as he saw the giant, on its knees holding Chong in both hands, pulling the screaming teen toward a mouth filled with jagged, broken teeth.
Lilah and Benny both screamed as they rushed in, but another zom—smaller but just as fast as the giant—launched itself through the air and bore Lilah down. A fallen zom caught Benny by the ankle, using the grip to hold him while pulling itself forward for a bite. Benny let it bite, feeling the pain of teeth closing around his calf but trusting to the heavy indoor-outdoor carpet to protect his flesh. He used the pain of that bite to fuel his next slash, and the edge of the kami katana sheared through the giant’s leg above the knee. Cutting tendons wasn’t enough—he wanted to chop off the leg. That should do it. But the blade chunked into the heavy femur and jolted to a stop so abrupt it tore the handle from Benny’s grasp.
The giant toppled sideways and crashed down backward, dragging Chong with it. Benny turned and stamped down on the biting zom, crushing its skull and ending its unnatural life. Then he darted forward, grabbed the katana again, and worked the blade out of the giant’s leg bone with a careful but fast seesaw motion. Samurai swords were tough when cutting or slashing, but brittle when turned at the wrong angle. The blade came free, but as it did the giant reached up and smashed a huge right hand into Benny’s back. He fell, losing the sword again, losing all the air in his lungs. The slow zoms weren’t smart enough to punch, and Benny had spent too much of the last year fighting them. It was stupid to forget that some of the fast ones could really fight back.
It was maybe a fatal mistake on his part.
The giant rolled over onto its side and swung again. The carpet coat could stop a bite, but it did next to nothing to smother the foot-pounds of impact. Benny felt crushed, unable to drag in a spoonful of air. Helpless. He felt the world spin around him in a sick, dizzying dance. There was suddenly too much light, and it was all swirling like a cluster of fireflies while everything around that light was fading into blackness.
Another punch came that he had no power to block, and this time the giant’s fist struck the side of Benny’s helmet with such shocking force that he heard the dense plastic shatter and a crack jagged through his visor. It looked like the whole world had broken in half.
I’m going to die, he thought weakly, feeling himself fading. Leaving. Going. His neck hurt and his head felt like it was full of bees, all swarming frantically and escaping through splits and fissures in his skull.
The snarling monster zombie raised its fist once more, and Benny could no more evade or block the attack than he could leap into the air to fly. He felt as helpless as a scarecrow that had fallen from its perch.
The huge fist swung again.
I’m dead.
But there was something wrong with the giant’s fist. It seemed to be rising rather than falling. And . . .
And it wasn’t connected to anything.
Benny’s dazed brain struggled to make sense of something that made no sense. Not to him, anyway.
Something thumped across his chest and Benny raised his head as far as he could—maybe half an inch—and looked down to see what it was.
An arm lay there. Still attached to a shoulder, but without a forearm, or wrist, or hand. He forced his head to turn sideways and watched with helpless fascination as Chong, standing wide-legged, his bokken gripped in thin hands, bashed the head of the giant over and over again.
“Well . . . ,” said Benny in a voice only he could hear, “that’s good. . . .”
Then he collapsed, and all the lights in the world went out.
35
THE DAY DARKENED FOR BENNY, the lights went out. He felt himself tumble backward and downward into a darkness that was at first terrifying and then soft and gentle and sweet.
If I’m dying, he thought, then this is okay. It’s not bad.
He fell down and down.
Is Tom down there? Or up there? Or out there?
He fell and fell and never felt himself land.
And then the lights clicked back on. It felt like only a moment to Benny.
It wasn’t, though, and somehow he now understood that with a strange clarity. With the insight of someone who had been close to death before. Very close.
He could see the light through his closed eyelids and did not want to open them. Not yet.
What will I see if I look? he wondered. Tom?
A soft hand touched his cheek.
Nix . . . ?
Like an after-echo, he heard his voice say her name aloud. It surprised him. He thought he’d only thought it. It confused him too, because Tom belonged to the land of the dead, and no one was more alive than red-haired, green-eyed Phoenix Riley.
His eyelids opened. Blinked. Saw.
He stared upward, not at the blue sky but at a ceiling made from yellowed acoustic tiles and strips of metal. The light flickered, and when he turned to his left he saw a small fire burning in a metal trash can.
“He’s awake,” said a voice, and he turned to his right to see Nix and Chong standing there. Their faces wore identical expressions, which were equal parts concern and relief. There were wet tear tracks cut through the road dust on Nix’s cheeks. They overlaid older tear tracks, as if she had been crying off and on for a long time.
“Say something,” said Chong. “Do you know your name?”
“Of course I know my name,” said Benny. His voice sounded like it belonged to an old man who’d spent his entire life chain-smoking cigarettes. He coughed to clear his throat. “I know my name.”
Better.
“Well . . . ,” said Chong, “what is it?”
“Thomas Imura,” Benny said. He saw their expressions sharpen into unfiltered anxiety. “Wait. No. I . . . I, um, don’t know why I said that. My name’s Benny. Benny Imura. Tom is . . . no . . . Tom was my brother.”
Nix looked marginally relieved; Chong not so much.
“What town do you live in?”
Benny had to think about that. “Mountainside? No . . . that burned down. I mean we burned it down. We, um, live in . . . Reclamation?” It came out as a question.
Chong sighed. “Okay. Here’s a hard one to find out if you remember everything. Was Tom your only brother?”
“Yes. Wait . . . no. He was the only brother I ever knew, but I had another half brother. Sam. He was a lot older than me. I never met him. He was a soldier and I think he died during First Night. Not in California; back in Pennsylvania. He called Tom and told him what was happening. Told him to get home to Mom and Dad.”
“He remembers,” said Nix. She touched his cheek again.
He tried to sit up, messed it up badly, and had to wait for Nix and Chong to each take an arm and help him do it. “Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch,” he said.
He swung his legs over the edge of what he realized was a desk. The room did a wild and sickening dance around him and he had to hold on to the desktop to keep from sliding onto the floor. His stomach tried real hard to do a backflip, and it took a lot of what little strength he had not to throw up everything he’d ever eaten in his entire life.
Nix poured water from a canteen into a small plastic cup and offered it to him.
“There is no way I can drink that,” he said. Then he took the cup and drank all of it. And two more cupfuls. The room stopped doing its dance, and his stomach grudgingly and slowly settled down.
Benny looked around.
“Are we . . . ? I mean . . . where are we?”
“What do you remember?” asked Nix, taking and holding one of his hands. Her fingers were cold. The room was cold too, but Benny knew that her hands always got icy when she was scared.
It took Benny a long time to figure that out. His body hurt, but nothing seemed to actually be broken. He touched h
is stomach and felt deep bruising in his abdomen, and some tender spots between his ribs. His chest burned, but the sternum seemed to be all there. When he touched his head, it was like doing an inventory of all the ways the individual parts could hurt. Gums, teeth, the hinge of his jaw, cheekbones, all around his eyes, his brow, the top of his head, and his nose. The only things that didn’t hurt were his ears and his hair.
“I . . . I remember stopping on the road,” he said, then glanced around. “I don’t remember this place. Where are we? And what happened?”
“Do you remember the fight in the field outside the prison?” asked Nix.
Benny stared at her. “Um. No. That sounds like something I should remember, though. I mean . . . prison? What prison is—?”
Before he could finish, Nix leaned in to kiss him. It was very, very nice, and it made him not care much about his aches.
Chong seemed to become interested in the pattern of the wallpaper. “Oh, look,” he said as if holding a conversation with someone, “wildflowers. How interesting. Very detailed.”
Nix stopped kissing Benny but ignored Chong. She held Benny’s face in both hands and whispered, “Don’t you ever, ever—ever—do that again.”
“But what did I do?” Benny gasped.
“You almost died, you idiot,” she growled. “And you’re not allowed.”
Then she kissed him again.
When she was done kissing him, and while he caught his breath, Nix and Chong told Benny everything, starting with when they’d stopped on the road all the way up to them breaking the locks on the gate and using the quads to bring Benny inside.
“Lilah and the others had to quiet a few more zoms so we could get the fence closed and secured,” explained Nix.
“Is everyone else okay?”
Chong nodded and half smiled. “Lilah lost her shirt and Nix yelled at her for not wearing a carpet coat. She told Lilah that you getting hurt was her fault. Lilah was pissed because you helped her instead of helping me, and said that that’s why you got your head bashed in. They had a real doozy of a fight.”
“Cut it out,” muttered Nix.
“People accuse us of using foul language,” continued Chong, “but I was taking notes during that exchange, I can tell you. Nix has a real mouth on her. I’m seriously impressed. Wow. She called Lilah a—”
“Cut it out,” warned Nix again, and this time there was serious menace in her tone.
Chong pretended to zip his mouth shut, but then leaned close and said to Benny, “I’ll tell you later.”
They bumped fists. Nix glared at them so hard it made her freckles glow.
Benny looked around. “So . . . what’s this? The warden’s office?”
“Yes,” said Nix. “We couldn’t get into the infirmary. It’s locked, and they have steel doors with wire mesh over the windows. We came in here thinking there might be some keys, but there weren’t.”
“Riot’s looking for them,” said Chong.
“What about the quads?”
“All good,” said Chong. “We have five inside the fence and the sixth—yours—is still out there, but we figure the zoms aren’t going to ride off with it. Not even the fast ones.”
“Yeah, speaking of which,” said Benny, “were there really fast ones out there?”
“Four of them,” said Nix, shivering at the memory. “And two that were smarter than the others. R2’s and R3’s.”
Benny’s blood went cold.
“Oh my God,” he breathed.
36
R2’S SCARED BENNY. R3’S ABSOLUTELY terrified him. And for good reason.
When the American Nation was getting itself together, one of their most important projects involved researching reports of mutated zoms. For Benny and the other people from the Nine Towns, there was only ever one kind of living dead—the slow shufflers. They had been designated as R1’s by the American Nation scientists. Reaper One was the official label, because they were the result of the dispersal of a mutagenic biological weapon called Reaper, which the scientists hoped would combat the older bioweapon, codenamed Lucifer 113, which had been accidentally released in Pennsylvania and spread by storm winds and the movement of populations around the world.
Lucifer 113 had originally been created during something called the “Cold War”—when the old United States and Russia, then called the Soviet Union, teetered on the brink of nuclear war. Bioweapons research had been done, against all international laws, on both sides. The Soviet scientists had developed Lucifer 113 as a weapon to be dropped into enemy territory. It had a 100 percent infection rate and an equally high mortality rate. You got it, you died. The kicker was that the dead reanimated as aggressive hosts for a cluster of genetically engineered parasites. The plan was for the infected to continue attacking everyone around them until all of the enemy were infected. Then the parasites were supposed to die off, leaving all physical assets—property, missile bases, computers—undamaged. It was intended to be a weapon more effective than nuclear bombs but without the radiation and devastation.
That was bad enough.
Then fifteen years ago a former Soviet scientist who had defected to the United States and been given a job as a prison doctor after the Cold War ended decided to play God with the bioweapon. He tweaked it so that the parasites did not die off and would actually keep the dead host in a state of living death for decades by reducing all unnecessary body functions. The host occasionally had to eat living tissue to get the protein to sustain itself.
The doctor’s intention had been to use the disease to punish serial killers so that after their executions they would reanimate in their coffins and be trapped but alive, so their suffering would go on and on. It was a sick, twisted, and cruel plan, and like most bad ideas, it failed in a spectacular way. Homer Gibbon, the first death-row inmate infected with Lucifer 113, was not buried fast enough. His body was claimed by a relative and reanimated in a county funeral home. He woke up very confused, very frightened, very angry, and very hungry.
The plague, having mutated once more after passing through Homer Gibbon’s bloodstream, was now communicable by bite, or by exposure of infected blood to mucous membranes or open wounds on the victim. It had become a serum transfer disease, spread through saliva or blood.
That was where the zombie plague started. In a small county called Stebbins in western Pennsylvania. That was where Sam Imura, Tom’s older brother, had gone with his team of special ops soldiers known by the nickname the Boy Scouts. It was where Sam vanished as the plague spread uncontrollably.
Years after the end of nearly everything, the last living scientists began looking for a way back from the edge of human extinction. When reports of mutated zoms began coming in, they sent teams to capture and study them, and discovered that Lucifer 113, long believed to be an absolutely stable engineered disease, was changing. Apart from the slow and predictable R1’s, there were the quicker and more coordinated R2’s, and the far deadlier R3’s, who were capable of problem solving, coordinated action, and even using simple tools.
Surviving scientists from the American Nation later learned that the mutation was not Mother Nature’s long-hoped-for response to the plague, but was yet another bioweapon, this one created by Dr. Monica McReady and her team, hidden away in a secured facility at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, California. They had infected some hogs with the plague and then exposed them to an experimental compound that hyperaccelerated the life cycles of the parasites. This made the infected zoms faster for a short period of time but then burned them out, killing the parasites before they could mature and reproduce. The zoms would then begin to decompose and fall apart.
“How many more zoms are out there?” asked Benny.
Nix and Chong took too long to answer.
“Guys . . . ?”
“Too many,” said Nix.
She went over to the window at the other end of the office. Benny stood up to follow but swayed and would have fallen if Chong hadn’t caught him. Nix whirled
and rushed over to take his other arm. Together they walked Benny to the window so he could look out.
The sun was lower in the sky than he thought it should be, which told him that he’d been unconscious for a while. That was scary, and his head felt bruised and wrong. A concussion, almost certainly.
Then he looked out through the tough wire mesh that covered the windows, and all concern for his own pain dried up and blew away. His mouth went dry too, and inside his battered head he could hear his pulse hammering and hammering.
Outside he could see the field and all the way back to the road.
“Oh no . . . ,” he whispered.
There were zoms out there.
There were thousands of zoms out there.
Interlude Three
KICKAPOO CAVERN STATE PARK
ONE WEEK AGO
The hunter did not move. Not a muscle, not an eyelid.
“I want you to use two fingers to take your sidearm out of its holster and place it on the ground,” said the man who held a gun to the hunter’s neck. “You’re going to keep your other hand on your head and do everything with your left. We clear on this, sparky?”
“Yes,” said the hunter, lifting the Sig Sauer gingerly.
“Good. We’re doing fine here. Place it on the ground.” He repeated the process with the hunter’s other weapons—hunting knives, a bayonet, and a slender steel strangle wire. He missed absolutely nothing, and that both impressed and frightened the hunter. It also reinforced the hunter’s belief that this soldier was not a member of a ravager wolf pack. A ravager would have shot the hunter or cut his throat.
“I’m going to take three steps back,” said the soldier. “You move, you’re dead. You so much as sneeze, you’re dead. Are we communicating here?”
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