Rot and Ruin (Benny Imura 1)

Tom almost smiled. “You think?”

“So you know it’s a trap?”

“Benny, this whole thing is a trap. Everything Charlie’s done since he attacked Rob Sacchetto has been a trap. ”

Tom stopped and suddenly pointed to the trail of footprints that led off around the bend. The prints were mostly those of a man with big feet. Charlie. However, at one point, another set of prints suddenly appeared beside his. Small bare feet.

“Nix?” Benny asked.

Tom put a finger to his lips and whispered, “It looks like Charlie was carrying her and set her down here. See? Their prints go all the way around the bend. Right toward the crossroads. ”

“Maybe they don’t know how close we are,” Benny suggested. He looked for confirmation in Tom’s face, but didn’t see any. Benny started to draw his knife, but Tom shook his head.

“Wait until you need to,” Tom cautioned. “Steel reflects sunlight, and that’ll attract zoms as much as movement. Now, I need you to stay steady, kiddo. Once we round this bend, it’s going to get weird. Maybe it’s a trap, maybe not; but even if it isn’t, this is one of the most dangerous spots out here. You’ll see why. ”

“Great pep talk, coach. ”

Tom grinned.

Moving very slowly, careful not to make a sound, they rounded the bend in the road, hugging close to the wall and staying in the shade of the rocks. Apache and Chief were trained for this, and they moved only when and where they were steered.

Around the bend, the view opened up, and Benny saw the roads that wandered from all directions over hills down to the crossroads.

“God!” Benny gasped, but immediately clamped a hand over his mouth.

It was neither the beauty of the vista of endless mountains nor the tens of thousands of silent cars crowding the road that tore a gasp from him. The crossroads and the fields surrounding it were crowded with the living dead. There were at least a thousand of them. Benny stared, searching for movement, waiting for the sea of monsters to turn and begin shambling toward them. But they did not. The zombies just stood there in one crowded mass. Others, alone or in small groups, stood along the roads or in the fields. All still, all silent.

The horses now showed their training, and in the actual presence of the dead, they made no sound, but Apache’s trembling terror vibrated through his entire body and up into Benny’s.

Benny tried to understand what he was seeing. He didn’t believe that all of them had just wandered here because the roads sloped down and they followed the unrelenting pull of gravity. There were too many for that. Maybe they chased some people down here and after the kills, they had nowhere to go and nothing to distract them. Some of the zoms were probably the people from the cars, who had been killed there and reanimated with no direction or purpose. The tough grass covered them to the waist, and some of them were completely wrapped in ivy and twists of wisteria and trumpet vines. There were soldiers, nurses, kids his own age, ordinary people, old people, many of them showing signs of the terrible bites that had killed them. Just standing there in the midday sunlight. It was such a strange sight—all these dead standing there like statues.

No … that wasn’t it. They were like gravestones, using their own flesh to mark where they had died and where they would spend eternity. Not buried in a box but trapped in decaying tissue that could move, that would hunt and attack, but that, in the absence of something to attract it, would remain in place forever. The thought was as horrible as it was sad. Suddenly, Benny could feel something deep inside of him begin to undergo a process of change. His fear, which had been as big as the whole Rot and Ruin, seemed to shrink. Not completely, but enough so that

he was consciously aware of it. He thought he understood why.

On their first trip into the Ruin, Tom had said that fear makes you smart, but Benny understood now that his brother had been talking about caution rather than fear. These zoms, every last one of them—even the smallest child—would kill him if they could, but not one of them meant him harm. Meaning, intention, will … None of that was part of their makeup. There was no more malice there than in a lightning strike or bacteria on a rusted nail, and as he sat there, he felt his terror of them give way to an awareness of them as something merely dangerous. The intense hatred of the dead he had once harbored was gone completely; burned out of him in Harold Simmons’s house. Only the fear had remained, and now that, too, was wavering in its intensity.

Charlie, on the other hand, was something still to be feared. Charlie was far more dangerous than any single zombie on the planet because his malice was deliberate.

Understanding the difference between these two types of dangers—unthinking and deliberate—felt like a huge revelation, and Benny wanted to tell Tom about this, but he said nothing. Now was definitely not the time.

Tom turned sharply in his saddle, staring behind them. Benny saw a few of the zoms catch the movement and raise their withered faces.

“What?”

“Something’s burning,” Tom said, and that fast, Benny caught it, too. A sulfur stink that he knew very well. He’d smelled it a hundred times at the pit on the days when they set off dynamite to drop a layer of shale and loose rock down on the ashes and partly burned bones.

“Fuse!” Benny shouted. Or … thought he did. Anything he might actually have said was erased by an immense blast that tore half a million pounds of sandstone from the cliff walls. Fiery clouds of jagged debris burst from both walls, exploding into the pass from ground level and above. Apache screamed and reared and then bolted away from the tons of rock that smashed down all around them.

Benny kept screaming as the horse galloped at full speed, away from the collapsing walls … right toward the sea of zombies. Every single one of them turned toward him, a thousand black mouths opened, two thousand wax white hands reached for him as he raced without control toward them.

34

THERE ARE MOMENTS THAT DEFINE A PERSON’S WHOLE LIFE. MOMENTS IN which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.

Benny Imura’s horse galloped toward death as certainly as if the path was marked with signs. If he did nothing, his crazed and panicked horse would crash into the sea of zombies, and Benny would die. If he tried to slow Apache down, the zoms would surround him and drag him out of the saddle. If he dismounted and ran, they would close around him and he would be lost. There was only one possible choice left, and it was as improbable as it was insane. The Benny Imura who had gone reluctantly out with his brother ten days ago could not have made that choice. The Benny Imura who had faced the reanimated corpse of the artist Sacchetto but had not yet faced the other horrors that last night had forced upon him would not have made that choice.

As Apache bore him toward the hungry mouths, Benny’s lips spoke a single word. It was not a cry for help. It was not his brother’s name. It was not a prayer. In his mind there was only one thing larger than his own death, only one thing more powerful than his fear of the living dead.