Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

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.