Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

It was because of those words, and the truth behind them, that Walker was still alive. Him and Keaton and their dog, Dewey. Not that the dog could read it, but the boys had saved the dog’s life with animal first aid they’d found in a book.

They lived according to those words, and month after month, year after year, they survived.

The others?

Well . . . some folks are so darn stubborn that they get in the way of their own best interests. They can learn, the knowledge is there, but they won’t stop long enough to learn something new. Or they refuse to admit that what they do know is either faulty, outdated, or wrong.

Like that guy, Smithwick, who crashed here at the library last year.

Smithwick was a loner trying to make his way in a destroyed world, surviving by the skin of his teeth, always on the edge of starvation. The boys brought him in, fed him, and treated the man’s injuries. After a week, when Smithwick was able to talk, he described the hardships he’d encountered in the great Rot and Ruin. The boys brought him stacks of books to read. Books on survival skills, on foraging for food, on hunting, on first aid, even a book on which edible plants offered the best nutrition.

Smithwick leafed through the books but never read them. Not one.

“I already know what I need to know,” he said.

“Are you kidding?” asked Keaton. “You were half-dead when we found you.”

“I was doing just fine,” the man insisted, then waved his hands at the towering stacks of books that filled nearly every inch of what had once been a school library. “These books didn’t save the world, did they?”

Keaton wanted to argue, but Walker gave a discreet shake of his head. A don’t bother thing. They’d met too many people like this. The kind who would defend a bad choice simply because it was his choice. The boys figured it was a kind of teenage oppositional defiant disorder that fueled adult narcissistic behavior in someone suffering from PTSD. Or possibly a simple maladaptive coping method. Something like that.

There were a lot of books on psychology in the library. They read everything they could about trauma and damage.

And loss.

The boys were survivors who’d been born into a ruined world. Everyone they’d ever met was damaged. They knew that they were damaged too. It was the way of this world.

The difference was that Keaton and Walker accepted it.

Explored it.

Worked on it.

Individually and as friends.

They didn’t leave it to fester like a wound of the soul. Understanding it helped them through the dark days after the last of the adults died off. Despair was the real enemy. Knowledge was their weapon. It helped them have the optimism to keep going.

Smithwick was a lost cause.

They tried.

But . . .

Walker and Keaton sat on the roof of the Kamiakin High School Library, drinking cups of rainwater they’d caught in plastic bags, eating chicken they’d raised and roasted. Dewey, their blue heeler, lay sprawled between them, chewing his way through a mound of scraps. The dog had rings around his eyes that looked like glasses, and that seemed appropriate for a library.

Down below, the living dead milled in the hundreds.

Lost souls.

They weren’t even evil. They just . . . were.

Smithwick wandered in a slow circle directly below them, his flesh faded to gray and withered to a leathery toughness. Both boys wished he would leave, wander away, go elsewhere. But the dead didn’t wander off unless they were following prey. Otherwise, they stayed where they were. Some of the zoms stood still as statues, their limbs wrapped in creeper vines.

Keaton picked up the book he’d been reading and opened it. I Am Legend, a postapocalyptic tale, which seemed appropriate to Keaton. Vampires, though; not zombies. Even so, it featured a hero who was very practical when managing his own survival. Keaton liked that. Emotions were good, and even random craziness, but survival depended on smarts, on common sense, and on applying knowledge. Keaton had read over three hundred books about surviving the end of the world. Some were very helpful. Some were silly. Some merely entertaining. There were even some written as instruction manuals for what to do in the event of a global disaster.

Of course, none of those books had accurately predicted a zombie apocalypse, but that was to be expected. After all, zombies. Who knew?

Beside him, Walker was reading a book on handcrafting body armor.