He chewed his lip, torn by indecision.
On one hand, Tom had told him to bar the door. On the other, the door was already locked, and zoms couldn’t pick a lock. All of the windows were shuttered, and the front door was as sturdy as this one. He was safe.
But what about Tom?
If there was a full scale invasion of the town, Tom might have to come running back here for shelter. It could come down to seconds. How long would it take Benny to get to the back door, push the heavy bar out of the sleeves, and unlock the locks? Ten seconds? Eight?
Too long.
He pulled the bar from the sleeve and set it back against the wall.
Tom’s guns were locked up, and Tom wore the key on a chain around his neck. If he busted open the locker and this turned out to be nothing, Tom would fry him.
On the other hand …
Doubt was a hungry thing that chewed at him.
Something hit the wall outside. Hard and sharp. It wasn’t rain. He listened, trying to remember exactly what he had heard, trying to listen the way Tom listened when they were out in the Ruin. Had it been an acorn blown out of the oak tree? No, they had a different, lighter sound. Whatever had hit the outside wall had hit fast and with a lot of power.
A bullet?
He was almost positive that’s what it had been.
He crouched low and put his ear to the corner of the kitchen window. There were more screams and a whole bunch of gunshots. Then he heard footsteps on the back porch and a second later, the doorknob turned. Benny twisted around to see out the window, but all he could see was a flap of something glistening.
A slicker.
The doorknob turned again and again.
Tom!
Benny shot to his feet and threw open the locks. God … please let Tom be okay, he thought as he undid the four heavy dead bolts. Benny yanked the door open.
Tom staggered inside. Head bowed, his rain slicker torn and hanging in shreds, dark hair dripping with water.
Benny backed away.
It wasn’t Tom.
It was Rob Sacchetto, the erosion artist.
He was a zombie.
26
THE CREATURE LIFTED ITS WHITE FACE TO BENNY AND OPENED ITS MOUTH. Blood ran over the artist’s broken teeth and dripped onto the front of the slicker.
“Mr. Sacchetto … ?”
The zombie took a shambling step toward him, raising fingers that were bone white and looked strangely disjointed, as if all of the knuckles were broken. Benny was frozen in place. He had never known anyone who had become a zom—not since the disease had taken his mother from him. He and Chong and Nix had talked about it, wondered about it, even joked about it, but even to them, even in this world, it was slightly unreal. Zoms were out there, real life was here in town, and deep inside, in a flash of understanding, Benny realized he had been just as detached from the realities of the world as everyone else. Even with people talking about quieting a relative who’d died. Even with all of the incontrovertible evidence in his face every day, Benny realized he never quite equated zombies with people. Not even his trip into the Ruin had done that, not completely. But now, as this zombie—this person—reached for him, the horrible truth of it hit him with full force.
For a dreadful moment Benny was frozen to the spot and frozen into this state of awareness. The creature’s eyes met his, and for a moment—for the strangest, twisted fragment of a moment—Benny could swear that there was some splinter of recognition, that some piece of Sacchetto looked out in blind panic through the eyes of the dead thing that he had become.
“Mr. Sacchetto,” Benny said again, and this time his voice was full of cracks, ready to break.
The zom’s mouth moved, trying to form words, and against all evidence and sense, Benny hoped that somehow the artist was in there. That he had been able, through some unimaginable way, to fight the transition from man to monster. But all that came from the dead throat was a low moan that possessed no meaning other than that of a hunger it could never understand and never assuage.
It nearly broke Benny’s heart. To see the husk of the person and to know that what had made him human was … gone. Benny felt like his head would break if he tried to hold that truth inside.