The men looked at one another and shifted uncomfortably. Benny noticed that not one of them asked Tom to verify this, and no one asked where Gameland might be. They said nothing. Tom made a disgusted noise.
Strunk nodded. “Okay, Tom. Let’s do it your way. Let’s go over to poor Rob’s house and see what we can see. ”
“I want to go too,” said Benny.
“You need to sleep. ”
“We already covered that. Maybe—maybe—I’ll sleep when I’m forty, but I just killed a zombie who used to be someone I know. If I close my eyes, he’s going to be right there. I’d rather stay awake. ”
It wasn’t said as a joke, and no one took it that way. All three men nodded their understanding.
“Okay, Ben,” Tom said.
Before they left, Tom went inside, dressed in
cowboy boots and jeans, strapped on a pistol belt, clipped his double-edged commando dagger inside his right boot, and slung his katana across his back.
“What the hell, Tom? The fight’s over,” said Mayor Kirsch.
Tom didn’t dignify that with an answer.
They walked down the middle of the street—Tom on one side, Strunk on the other, with Benny in the middle. Tom had given him back the wooden sword.
“How about a real one?”
“How about no? You’d cut my head off, or your own. And besides, you already know you can do enough damage with this. ”
“How about a gun?” Benny asked hopefully.
“How about you stay home?”
“Okay, okay. Geez. ”
They walked on through the shadows. Now that the storm was over, the lamplighters had come out to relight the torches that served as streetlights. Captain Strunk took one of the torches to light their way through town. Mountainside was laid out on a broad, flat piece of ground. The mountains rose up impossibly sheer behind them, and the great fence line stretched in a rough three-sided box from cliff wall to cliff wall. Most of the oldest homes in town were little more than shotgun shacks that were a dozen feet wide and built like long, narrow rectangles with doors at both ends. There were several hundred motor homes, most of which had been dragged into town by teams of horses. Some, of course, had arrived before the EMP blew out the ignitions and electronics on the vehicles. Roughneck traders occasionally brought wagon trains of building supplies to town—along with clothing, books, tools, and other precious items recovered from abandoned farms and towns throughout that part of the Ruin—and those materials had gone into the construction of some of the two-story houses. The Imura house was a tiny two-story that Tom had built himself.
The artist’s house, one of the very first that had been built, was narrow. It would have been ugly except for the rainforest murals Sacchetto had painted on the exterior walls. As they stopped outside, Benny studied the art and felt a deep sadness spear through him. He’d only met the man twice, but he had liked him.
Tom must have sensed his feelings, because he put a brotherly hand on Benny’s shoulder.
“Gate’s open,” Strunk said. “Rob could have walked out after he turned. ”
“And bright blue pigs might fly out of my ass,” muttered Benny. Strunk shot him a stern look, and Tom turned aside to hide a grin.
“My point is that we shouldn’t make assumptions,” Strunk snapped.
Benny felt another joke coming on, but he restrained himself as Tom drew his gun—a Beretta nine millimeter—racked the slide, and stepped carefully through the open gate. Strunk drew his gun and followed, holding the torch high. Benny, feeling enormously underdressed for this party, took a firmer grip on his wooden sword and crept after them.
Tom walked beside the path rather than on it, and bent low to examine the mud, but he shook his head. “There are plenty of footprints here, but there was too much rain. ”
They moved to the top step, but the story was the same. Just meaningless smudges. Tom placed a finger on the front door and pushed lightly. It swung open, and as Strunk moved beside him, they could see that the lock was splintered.
“No zom did that,” said Benny.
Even Strunk didn’t argue.
Tom pushed the door all the way open, and Captain Strunk angled the torch to spill maximum firelight inside.
The house was a ruin. Even from outside they could see that the whole place had been trashed. They went in, careful not to step on anything that looked like a footprint. It was a mess. Every canvas had been slashed, all of the sketches had been torn from the walls and ripped to confetti, the pots of paint had been thrown against the walls or poured onto the floor.