Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

But even that’s not written in stone, is it?

PART THREE

ADRIFT IN THE ROT AND RUIN

Stay Calm and Be Warrior Smart!

In the Land of the Dead

The Fence

(Between the events of Rot & Ruin and Dust & Decay)

The teenager sat on a folding chair and stared through the fence at the zombie.

He was there most mornings. Sometimes in the afternoons, too.

At first the fence guards tried to chase him away.

“What the heck are you doing there, kid?” growled one, a new guard who didn’t know who the boy was. The guard had come along the fence, a shotgun open at the breech crooked over one arm, a wad of pink chewing gum in his open mouth. When the kid did not move or even look at him, the guard came and stood right in front of him, blocking out the sun, blocking eye contact with the dead thing on the other side of the chain-link wall. “Hey? You deaf or dead?” the guard demanded.

Only then did the teenager raise his eyes to the big guard with the polished steel shotgun. He had dark-green eyes and brown hair, and the sunlight revealed streaks of red in his dark hair. A good-looking kid, fit and lean; the kind of kid the guard thought should be fishing for trout up at the stream or trying to lay some lumber on a breaking ball down at McGoran Field. He didn’t look like the morbid kind of teen he sometimes met here at the fence; the kind who dressed in rags and painted their faces gray and pretended to be zoms. The Gonnz, they called themselves. No, this kid looked like any other teenager from town.

“You okay?” the guard asked, his tone still sharp.

The teen did not say a word. He simply stared into the guard’s eyes.

“You got to be careful around zoms, kid. They bite.”

Something flicked through the kid’s eyes; an emotion or reaction that the guard could not identify.

The guard was tough, big-chested and unshaven, a former trade route rider who had recently moved to Mountainside from Haven. The guard was used to staring down other people. He was that kind of man. He’d been out in the Ruin, he’d fought zoms, killed more than a few. No boy had ever stared him down, not even when the guard had been a boy. He met the boy’s stare and stood his ground.

But it was the guard whose eyes broke contact first and slid away.

Before he did, the man’s stern face changed, the harsh lines of his scowl softening into an uncertain frown. As he broke eye contact, he tried to hide it by pretending to turn and look at the zombie the kid had been staring at.

“What’s so special about this one?” demanded the guard. “You know her?”

The zombie was dressed in the tattered rags of a party dress. Most people who worked the fence or ran the trade routes were pretty good at guessing how old a person had been before they’d zommed out, and this one looked to have been forty or fifty. A middle-aged woman dressed for some event. Maybe a graduation, maybe a wedding. The relentless California suns and fourteen brutal winters had bleached her rags to a paleness in which only the ghosts of wildflowers could still be seen. The dress must have been vibrant and pretty once. Expensive, too.

The guard turned back to the kid on the chair.

“Who was she?” he asked, and much of the gruffness was gone from his voice. He suddenly thought he knew, and he didn’t want to know. “She your mom, kid?”

The teenager stood up and moved his chair a few feet to the left so that he had a clear view of the dead woman in the party dress.

“Hey,” said the guard. “Did you hear me? I asked—”

“No,” said the kid. “She’s not my mother.”

The guard’s frown deepened. “Aunt?”

“No.”

“Someone from your family—?”

“I don’t know her,” said the teen.