Rot and Ruin (Benny Imura 1)

“Stop,” Tom hissed. “If we have to make a run for it, head into the house. We can lock o

urselves in and wait until they calm down. ”

The old lady and the man in the bathrobe faced them, but did not advance.

The tableau held for a minute that seemed an hour long.

“I’m scared,” said Benny.

“It’s okay to be scared,” said Tom. “Scared means you’re smart. Just don’t panic. That’ll get you killed. ”

Benny almost nodded, but caught himself.

Tom took a slow step. Then a second. It was uneven, his body swaying, as if his knees were stiff. The bathrobe zombie turned away and looked at the shadow of a cloud moving up the valley, but the old lady still watched. Her mouth opened and closed, as if she was slowly chewing on something.

But then she too turned away to watch the moving shadow.

Tom took another step and then another. Benny eventually followed. The process was excruciatingly slow, but to Benny it felt as if they were moving too fast. No matter how deliberately they went, he thought it was all wrong, that the zombies—all of them up, and down the street—would suddenly turn toward them and moan with their dry and dusty voices, and that a great mass of the hungry dead would surround them.

Tom reached the door and turned the handle.

The knob turned in his hand, and the lock clicked open. Tom gently pushed open the door and stepped into the gloom of the house. Benny cast a quick look at the window to make sure the zombie was still there.

Only he wasn’t.

“Tom!” Benny cried. “Look out!”

A dark shape lunged at Tom out of the shadows of the entrance hallway. It clawed for him with wax-white fingers and moaned with an unspeakable hunger. Benny screamed.

Then something happened that Benny could not understand. Tom was there and then he wasn’t. His brother’s body became a blur of movement as he pivoted to the outside of the zombie’s right arm, ducked low, grabbed the zombie’s shins from behind, and drove his shoulder into the former Harold Simmons’s back. The zombie instantly fell forward onto its face, knocking clouds of dust from the carpet. Tom leaped onto the zombie’s back and used his knees to pin both shoulders to the floor.

“Close the door!” Tom barked as he pulled a spool of thin silk cord from his jacket pocket. He whipped the cord around the zombie’s wrists and shimmied down to bring both its hands together to tie behind the creature’s back. He looked up. “The door, Benny—now!”

Benny came out of his daze and realized there was movement in his peripheral vision. He turned to see the old lady, the two little girls, and the zombie in his bathrobe, lumbering up the garden path. Benny slammed the door and shot the bolt, then leaned against it, panting, as if he had been the one to wrestle a zombie to the ground and hog-tie it. With a sinking feeling he realized that it had probably been his own shouted warning that had attracted the other zombies.

Tom flicked out a spring-bladed knife and cut the silk cord. He kept his weight on the struggling zombie while he fashioned a large loop, like a noose. The zombie kept trying to turn its head to bite, but Tom didn’t seem to care. Maybe he knew that the zom couldn’t reach him, but Benny was still terrified of those gray rotted teeth.

With a deft twist of the wrist, Tom looped the noose over the zombie’s head, catching it below the chin, and then he jerked the slack, so the closing loop forced the creature’s jaws shut with a clack. Tom wound more silk cord around the zombie’s head, so that the line passed under the jaw and over the crown. When he had three full turns in place, he tied the cord tightly. He shimmied down the zombie’s body and pinned its legs and then tied its ankles together.

Then Tom stood up, stuffed the rest of the cord into his pocket, and closed his knife. He slapped dust from his clothes as he turned back to Benny.

“Thanks for the warning, kiddo, but I had it. ”

“Um … holy sh—!”

“Language,” Tom interrupted quietly.

Tom went to the window and looked out. “Eight of ’em out there. ”

“Do … do we … I mean, shouldn’t we board up the windows?”

Tom laughed. “You listen to too many campfire tales. If we started hammering nails into boards, the sound would call every living dead in the whole town. We’d be under siege. ”

“But we’re trapped. ”

Tom looked at him. “‘Trapped’ is a relative term,” he said. “We can’t go out the front. I expect there’s a back door. We’ll finish our business here and then we’ll sneak out nice and quiet, and head on our way. ”

Benny stared at him and then at the struggling zombie that was thrashing and moaning.