And looked right into the eyes of a zom.
20
BENNY SCREAMED.
Nix looked up. She saw the zombie … and screamed.
The zom lay in the tall weeds inches from them. It did not scream. It snarled.
Then it lurched forward and tried to bite Benny’s face.
Nix grabbed his shoulder and hauled him back, and the creature’s teeth bit only empty air where Benny’s cheek had been. Benny flung himself backward, pushing Nix and himself away from the rotting teeth of the zom and the reaching white hands, but he wasn’t fast enough. One hand closed around his left sneaker, and the teeth chomped down on the rubber toe. Benny howled in agony as his toe was crunched between the zom’s jagged teeth.
God! Am I bit? Am I bit? Am I bit? The litany of dread played over and over in his head.
He swung his right foot and kicked the zom in the face, once, twice, again and again. The creature was dressed in farmer’s coveralls and had huge hands and shoulders. Even crippled and dead, it was immensely strong. Benny kept kicking, putting all his weight and fear into it, feeling the shock of each impact shoot like hot needles up his shin. Old bone cracked and rotted teeth snapped and then he was free.
He pushed Nix away from the monster. She got to her feet and started to run, and immediately she screamed and fell. Benny scrabbled backward and turned to see a sight that threatened to tear the soul out of him. A second zom had crawled out of the weeds and attacked Nix. It had once been a huge woman, and it wore the black-and-white rags of a nun’s habit. There were two bullet holes in its cheeks, but they were ancient and the bullets had missed spine or brain. The zom had Nix pinned to the ground by the shoulders and was bending to take a bite that would destroy everything good and wonderful in Benny’s world.
Nix’s face was covered in bright red blood. A black snake of terror reared up inside Benny’s chest. But his rage was bigger than his fear.
“NIX!”
He bellowed louder than a bull, louder than the rhino. He screamed a great unintelligible shriek of denial as he launched himself at the zom. His bokken lay forgotten in the weeds. He did not even think of pulling his knife. He crossed his arms over his face and slammed into the zom, hitting it like a thunderbolt.
“Get away from her!”
The impact knocked the zom backward, and they fell together in a hissing, snarling tangle, rolling over and over as Nix’s scream filled the air.
The creature was desiccated, however; its arms were strong, but as they rolled Benny felt the dead-weight thump of its torso and legs. The zom’s spine must have been shattered below the shoulder blades so that its legs truly were dead.
Its mouth, however, was not.
The zom moaned in desperate hunger as it snapped at him. Their roll ended with Benny on his back and the zom atop him—not at all the way he wanted this moment to end. He shoved a forearm under its chin to keep those teeth from his flesh. He saw movement over the zom’s shoulder and there was Nix, her face running with blood and her eyes wild with fear, but she had her bokken in her small, tanned fists.
“Now!” she screeched, and with a grunt of effort, Benny shoved his arms straight up, raising the snapping zom as Nix swung her wooden sword.
CRACK!
The top half of the zom’s head seemed to disintegrate, and the creature immediately went limp. With a snarl of disgust Benny threw it to one side.
“Thanks—,” he began, but then he felt Nix stiffen beside him.
“Oh my God!”
Benny scrambled to his feet and looked around, and he could feel the blood drain from his face as he beheld a scene out of his darkest nightmares.
The whole field of tall grass in which they stood was filled with zoms. Dozens of them. They lay between the weeds and snarls of wisteria, empty eyes fixed on them, hands reaching, mouths working. Their moans filled the air.
But they were all broken. Shattered legs and hips. Shattered spines. Missing limbs. Huge holes torn through their chests and stomachs. Benny and Nix were surrounded by a legion of crippled zombies. They wriggled forward on broken limbs or grabbed tufts of grass to haul their twisted wrecks of bodies toward the fresh meat.
“What is this?” Nix breathed, horrified.
Benny drew his bokken, and they stood back to back with no clear way out. There had to be two dozen of the monsters. No … more than that. Much more. Others were climbing like gray slugs over fallen logs or out of depressions in the ground. Fifty of them. Sixty. More. All those dusty eyes and black mouths and rotted teeth. The dead cried out in rusted voices as they pulled themselves toward the smell of fresh meat and flowing blood. The terrible need, the awful hunger in that moan made Benny’s blood turn to ice water in his veins. It was such an ancient sound, old as all the pain and misery in the world.
“We have to get out of here,” Benny whispered. He knew that the words were pointless, their meaning obvious, but there was a need in him to hear a human voice amid the dreadful wails of the dead.
A few hundred yards to their left, Benny and Nix could hear the shouts of Tom and Chong and the indignant snort of the huge animal that had chased them all from the road.