Rot and Ruin (Benny Imura 1)

Chong spread his hands in a “hey, that’s people for you” gesture.

The German guy installed double-sided locks, so that the door could be opened from the other side in a real, nonzombie emergency; or if the town security guys had to come in and do a cleanup on a new zom.

Somehow, Benny and Chong had gotten it into their heads that locksmiths got to see this stuff, but the old guy said that he hadn’t ever seen a single living dead that was in any way connected to his job. Boring.

To make it worse, the German guy paid them a little more than pocket lint and said that it would take three years to learn the actual trade. That meant that Benny wouldn’t even pick up a screwdriver for six months and wouldn’t do anything but carry stuff for a year. Screw that.

“I thought you didn’t want to actually work,” said Chong as they walked away from the German with no intention of returning in the morning.

“I don’t. But I don’t want to be bored out of my freaking mind either. ”

Next on their list was for a fence tester.

That was a little more interesting, because there were actual zoms on the other side of the fence that kept the town of Mountainside separate from the great Rot and Ruin. Most of the zoms were far away, standing in the field or wandering clumsily toward any movement. There were rows of poles with brightly colored streamers set far out in the field, and with every breeze the fluttering of the streamers attracted the zoms, constantly drawing them away from the fence. When the wind calmed, the creatures began lumbering in the direction of any movement on the town side of the fence. Benny wanted to get close to a zom. He’d never been closer than a hundred yards from an active zom before. The older kids said that if you looked into a zom’s eyes, your reflection would show you how you’d look as one of the living dead. That sounded very cool, but there was a guy with a shotgun dogging Benny all through the shift, and that made him totally paranoid. He spent more time looking over his shoulder than trying to find meaning in dead men’s eyes.

The shotgun guy got to ride a horse. Benny and Chong had to walk the fence line and stop every six or ten feet, grip the chain links, and shake it to make sure there were no breaks or rusted weak spots. That was okay for the first mile, but afterward the noise attracted the zoms, and by the middle of the third mile, Benny had to grab, shake, and release pretty fast to keep his fingers from getting bit. He wanted a close-up look, but he didn’t want to lose a finger over it. If he got bit, the shotgun guy would blast him on the spot. Depending on its size, a zom bite could turn someone from healthy to living dead in anything from a few hours to a few minutes, and in orientation, they told everyone that there was a zero-tolerance policy on infections.

“If the gun bulls even think you got nipped, they’ll blow you all to hell and gone,” said the trainer, “so be careful!”

By late morning Benny got his first chance to test the theory about seeing his zombified reflection in the eyes of one of the living dead. The zom was a squat man in the rags of what had once been a mail carrier’s uniform. Benny stood as close to the safe side of the fence as he dared, and the zom lumbered toward him, mouth working as if chewing, face as pale as dirty snow. Benny thought the zom must have been Hispanic. Or was still Hispanic. He wasn’t sure how that worked with the living dead. Most of the zoms still retained enough of their original skin color for Benny to tell one race from another, but as the sun continued to bake them year after year, the whole mass of them seemed to be heading toward a uniform grayness as if “the Living Dead” was a new ethnic category.

Benny looked right into the creature’s eyes, but all he saw were dust and emptiness. No reflections of any kind. No hunger or hate or malice either. There was nothing. A doll’s eyes had more life.

He felt something twist inside of him. The dead mail carrier was not as scary as he had expected. He was just there. Benny tried to get a read on him, to connect with whatever it was that drove the monster, but it was like looking into empty holes. Nothing looked back.

Then the zom lunged at him and tried to bite its way through the chain links. The movement was so sudden that it felt much faster than it actually was. There was no tension, no twitch of facial muscles, none of the signs Benny had been taught to look for in opponents in basketball or wrestling. The zom moved without hesitation or warning.

Benny yelped and backpedaled away from the fence. Then he stepped in a steaming pile of horse crap and fell hard on his butt.

All of the guards burst out laughing.

Benny and Chong quit at lunch.

The next morning Benny and Chong went to the far side of town and applied as fence technicians.

The fence ran for hundreds of miles and encircled the town and its harvested fields, so this meant a lot of walking while carrying yet another grumpy old guy’s toolbox. In the first three hours they got chased by a zom who had squeezed through a break in the fence.

“Why don’t they just shoot all the zoms who come up to the fence?” Benny asked their supervisor.

“’Cause folks would get upset,” said the man, a scruffy-looking guy with bushy eyebrows and a tic at the corner of his mouth. “Some of them zoms are relatives of folks in town, and those folks have rights regarding their kin. Been all sorts of trouble about it, so we keep the fence in good shape, and every once in a while one of the townsfolk will suck up enough intestinal fortitude to grant permission for the fence guards to do what’s necessary. ”

“That’s stupid,” said Benny.

“That’s people,” said the supervisor.

That afternoon Benny and Chong walked what they were sure were a million miles, had been peed on by a horse, stalked by a horde of zoms—Benny couldn’t see anything at all in their dusty eyes—and yelled at by nearly everyone.

At the end of the day, as they shambled home on aching feet, Chong said, “That was about as much fun as getting beaten up. ” He thought about it for a moment. “No … getting beaten up is more fun. ”

Benny didn’t have the energy to argue.

There was only one opening for the next job—“carpet coat salesman”—which was okay because Chong wanted to stay home and rest his feet. Chong hated walking. So Benny showed up, neatly dressed in his best jeans and a clean T-shirt, and with his hair as combed as it would ever get without glue.

There wasn’t much danger in selling carpet coats, but Benny wasn’t slick enough to get the patter down. Benny was surprised they’d be hard to sell, because everybody had a carpet coat or two. Best thing in the world to have on if some zoms were around and feeling bitey. What he discovered, though, was that everyone who could thread a needle was selling them, so the competition was fierce, and sales were few and far between. The door-to-door guys worked on straight commission, too.

The lead salesman, a greasy joker named Chick, would have Benny wear a long-sleeved carpet coat—low knap for summer, shag for winter—and then use a device on him that was supposed to simulate the full-strength bite of an adult male zom. This metal “biter” couldn’t break the skin through the coat—and here Chick rolled into his spiel about human bite strength, throwing around terms like PSI, avulsion, and postdecay dental-ligament strength—but it pinched really hard, and the coat was so hot, the sweat ran down under Benny’s clothes. When he went home that night, he weighed himself to see how many pounds he’d sweated off. Just one, but Benny didn’t have a lot of pounds to spare.

“This one looks good,” said Chong over breakfast the next morning.