“Sorry!” Benny yelled as he burst through the now disintegrating line of three zoms.
But there were more.
So many more, coming at him from all directions. Cold fingers fumbled at his face and tried to grab his hair, but Benny jagged and dodged and dove through them toward open ground.
His foot hit a rock and he sprawled forward; the sword flew from his hand and clattered thirty feet down the slope.
“No!” he cried as the sword vanished in the tall, dry grass.
Before Benny could get up, a zom grabbed a loose pocket flap on his vest and another grabbed his cuff.
“Get away!” Benny yelled as he thrashed and kicked and fought his way free. He scrambled to his feet, but his balance was bad and the slope was steep, so he ran like a sloppy dog on hands and feet for a dozen paces until he could get fully upright again.
More and more of the living dead staggered down the hill after him. Benny had no idea where they had come from, or why there were so many here. Even before Gameland, the zoms had started moving in packs rather than alone as they’d always done before. A month ago Benny, Lilah, and Nix had been under siege by thousands of them at a monk’s way station. How and why this flocking behavior was happening was another of the mysteries that no one had an answer for.
“Tom,” Benny said, gasping his brother’s name as he ran. He didn’t know why he spoke the name. Maybe it was a prayer for guidance from the best zombie hunter who had ever worked the Ruin. Or maybe it was a curse, because now everything Tom had taught him seemed to be in question. The world was changing beyond the lessons Tom had given.
“Tom,” Benny growled as he ran, and he tried to remember those lessons that could not change. The ways of the samurai, the ways of the warrior.
He saw sunlight glitter on metal ten paces downslope, and Benny leaped at the fallen sword, grabbing it by the handle with his left hand, switching it into a two-handed grip even while his legs continued to run at full speed. Zoms came at him, and the sword seemed to move with its own will.
Arms and legs and heads flew into the hot sunlight.
I am warrior smart, thought Benny as he ran and fought. I am an Imura. I have Tom’s sword.
I am a bounty hunter.
Right.
You’re about to be lunch, you moron, muttered his inner voice. For once Benny could not muster a convincing argument.
Everywhere he looked he saw another withered figure lurching toward him from beneath the shade of the big trees or from between tall shrubs. He knew—he knew—that this was not a coordinated trap. Zoms couldn’t think. It wasn’t that. . . . He must have simply had the bad luck to run into a swarm of them that was spread out across the whole width of the slope.
Run! yelled his inner voice. Faster!
He wanted to tell his inner voice to stop offering stupid advice and maybe instead come up with some sort of plan. Something that didn’t involve ending up in the digestive tracts of a hundred zoms.
Run.
Yeah, he thought. Good plan.
Then he saw that the tall grass twenty yards down the slope hid the dark cleft of a small ravine. It ran the entire width of the slope, which was bad news, but it was less than ten feet across, which was good.
Could he jump it? Could he build up the momentum to leap across the opening?
His inner voice yelled, Go . . . GO!
Benny set his teeth, called on every possible ounce of speed, and threw himself into the air, his feet still running through nothingness as he hurtled over the deep ravine. He landed hard on the far slope, bending his knees just as Tom had taught him, letting his leg muscles absorb the shock of impact.
He was safe!
Benny laughed out loud and spun toward the wave of zoms that still staggered toward him. They were so completely focused on him that they did not notice—or understand—the danger of the ravine.
“Yo! Deadheads,” he yelled, waving his sword to taunt them. “Nice try, but you’re messing with Benny-freaking-Imura, zombie killer. Booyah!”
And then the lip of the ravine buckled and collapsed under his weight, and Benny-freaking-Imura instantly plummeted into the darkness below.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
It is one month and one day since Tom died.
Night before last, while we were all sitting around the campfire, Chong told a joke that made Benny laugh. I think it was the first time Benny laughed since Gameland.
It was so good to hear him laugh. His eyes are still sad, though. I guess mine probably are too.
I never thought any of us would ever want to laugh again.
4
BENNY FELL FROM SUNLIGHT INTO DARKNESS AND HIT THE BOTTOM OF THE ravine so hard that his legs buckled and he pitched forward onto his face. Loose soil, tree roots, and small stones rained down on him. Fireworks detonated inside his head, and every single molecule of his body hurt.
He groaned, rolled onto his side, spat dirt out of his mouth, and clawed spiderwebs out of his eyes.
“Yeah, warrior smart,” he muttered.
The bottom of the ravine was much wider than the top and thick with mud, and Benny quickly understood that it was not a true ravine but a gorge cut by water runoff from the mountains. During the times of heaviest runoff, the flowing water had undercut edges of the slope above, creating the illusion of solid ground.
If he had kept running after he had leaped the gorge he would be safe. Instead he’d turned to gloat. Not exactly warrior smart.
Warrior dumb-ass, he thought darkly.
As he lay there, his mind began to play tricks on him. Or at least he thought it was doing something twisted and weird. He heard sounds. First it was his own labored breathing and the moans of the dead above him, but, no . . . there was something else.
It was a distant roar that sounded—impossible as that was—like the hand-crank generator that ran the power in the hospital back home. Still half-buried in the dirt, he cocked his head to listen. The sound was definitely there, but it wasn’t exactly like the hospital generator. This whined at a higher pitch, and it surged and fell away, surged and fell away.
Then it was gone.
He strained to hear it, trying to decide if it was really a motor sound or something else. There were all kinds of birds and animals out there, weird stuff that had escaped zoos and circuses, and Benny had read about exotic animal sounds. Was that what he’d heard?
No, said his inner voice, it was a motor.
Suddenly there was a soft sound from above, and a huge pile of loose dirt cascaded down on Benny, burying him almost to the neck. He began fighting his way out, but then he heard another sound and he looked, expecting to see more of the wall collapsing on him, but what he saw was far, far worse. The leading wave of pursuing zoms had reached the edge of the ravine, and the land had crumbled under their combined weight. Four zombies pitched over the edge and fell into the darkness with jarring crunches, the nearest one landing only six feet away.
Then another zombie—a teenage girl dressed in the rags of a cheerleader outfit—dropped right in front of Benny, striking the ground with a thud that was filled with the brittle crunch of breaking bones. The cheerleader’s gray and dusty eyes were open, and her mouth bit the air.
Broken bones wouldn’t kill a zom. Benny knew that all too well, and he dug through the loose dirt to find the hilt of his sword.
The zombie lifted a pale hand toward him. Cold fingertips brushed his face, but suddenly a second body—a huge man in coveralls—slammed down on top of her. The impact was massive, and it shattered even more bones.
Benny cried out in horror and disgust and began digging his way out like a mad gopher, clawing at the dirt, kicking his feet free.
Another zom fell nearby, ribs and arm bones snapping with firecracker sounds. The sounds were horrible, and Benny dreaded one of those limp, fetid corpses landing on him before he could get free. Overhead more of the living dead toppled over the edge and plummeted toward him. A soldier slammed into the gro
und to his right, a schoolkid to his left, their moans following them down as they fell, only to be cut off with a dry grunt as they crunched atop their fellows. Farmers and tourists, a man in swim trunks covered in starfish, an old woman in a pink cardigan, and a bearded man in a Hawaiian shirt—all striking mercilessly down. The impact sounds of moistureless bodies filled the air with an awful symphony of destruction.
Another zom fell. And another.
The cheerleader, broken and twisted now by the impacts, still growled at Benny and clamped gnarled fingers around both his ankles.
Benny screamed and tried to pull his legs away, but the grip was too strong. He immediately stopped trying to wriggle free and sat up.
“Let me go!” he bellowed as he punched the zom in the face.
The punch broke the zombie’s nose and rocked its head back, but that was all it accomplished. Benny struck again and again. With pieces of broken teeth falling from between its pale lips, the cheerleader used its grip to pull itself forward, climbing along Benny’s legs; and all the time its mouth opened and closed as if rehearsing the feast that was now close at hand. The rotting-meat stench of the creature in this closed space was horrific.
The zom darted out and caught Benny’s trouser leg between the stumps of its teeth, pinching some skin as well. The pain was instantly intense. Benny howled. Other twisted and broken zoms clawed along the ground toward him, crawling over one another like maggots on a piece of bad meat.
While he fought, he could almost hear Tom whispering advice.
Be warrior smart.
“Go away!” Benny yelled, half to the zom and half to his brother’s ghost.
Benny . . . most people aren’t defeated—they lose!
It was something Tom had told him a dozen times during training, but Benny had barely paid attention, because it sounded like one of his brother’s annoying logic puzzles. Now he ached to know what Tom meant.
“Warrior smart,” Benny growled aloud, hoping that saying it would inspire understanding and action. It didn’t. He yelled it again, then followed it with every obscene word he knew.
Don’t fight an impossible fight. Fight the fight you can win.
Ah.
That time the lesson got through, and Benny realized that he was reacting rather than taking action. A rookie mistake, as Tom would say.
He hated it when his brother was right. It was even more irritating now that Tom was dead.
As the zombie climbed toward him, Benny stopped punching it and grabbed it by the filthy strands of its matted hair and the point of its withered chin. Then, with a shout of anger, he twisted the cheerleader’s head sharply on its spindly neck.
Crunch!
The zom immediately stopped moving; its biting mouth went slack, the cold fingers lost their hold, and the struggling figure sagged down into true dead-weight limpness.
Benny knew that it was always like that when a zom died. Break its neck, or use a steel sliver to cut the brain stem, and the effect was instant. All life, all animation, all aggression was gone. The zom was alive on one side of a thin second and totally dead as soon as that second was spent.
It was a small victory, considering the circumstances, but it put some iron back into Benny’s muscles. With another grunt he finally kicked his way out of the pile of dirt and crawled as fast as he could. A spill of dirt plumed down in front of him, and it was the only warning he had as a half dozen zoms toppled over a different section of the ravine. Benny threw himself sideways just in time.
He looked wildly back and saw that at least a dozen of the zoms had gotten to their feet. They would be on him in seconds. He scrambled to his feet too and took the sword in a two-handed grip.
“Come on,” he growled, baring his teeth as anger surged up in him.
The first of the zoms came at him, and Benny stepped into its lunge and swung. The wickedly sharp steel cut easily through dry tendon and old bones. The hands of the zom flew over Benny’s shoulder, and he ducked under the stumps, instantly straightened, and cut at the neck from behind the monster’s shoulder. He got the angle just right and felt almost no resistance as the katana cut through the bones of the neck. The zombie’s head toppled into the dirt five feet away, and its body collapsed in place.
Now two others were closing in, rushing at him shoulder to shoulder. Benny tried a single lateral cut to take two heads, but his angle was off by an inch on the first one, and even though he took that first head, his sword caromed off the cheekbone of the second zom and did no real harm. He corrected, and with his back-slash decapitated the zom.
He stepped back and gulped air. After running, then falling, and now fighting, he was already exhausted. He shook his head to whip sweat from his eyes.
“Okay, dumb-ass,” he told himself, “time to be warrior smart.”
He said it aloud, hoping that his voice would have all the strength and confidence he needed. It didn’t, but it would have to do.
The dead came forward, and Benny whirled and cut his way through the thinnest part of the circle of them. He jumped over the falling bodies and ran deeper into the ravine. As he did so he reached up and slid his sword back into its scabbard. His main supply of gear was in his backpack at the camp, but he had a few useful items with him. He dug into one of the bulky pockets of his canvas vest and removed a spool of silk cord. It was slender but very strong, and Tom had used it to restrain zoms before quieting them.
Working very fast, Benny snatched up a thick branch, broke it over his knee, and rammed one end deep into the closest wall slightly below waist height. He spun away and repeated the action with the other half of the branch on the opposite wall. Then he tied the silk cord to one stick and stretched it to the other and pulled it taut, tying it off as tightly as he could.
The zoms reached the silk cord and it stalled them for a moment. They rebounded and collided. Some reached for him with some residual cleverness, fingers trying to snag his clothes.
Most of the zoms were still twelve feet away, their progress slowed by the uneven surface and the broken bodies of their fellows over whom they had to step.
Benny had to smack and bash at the reaching hands, but he managed to slip free of their grasp. As he staggered away, he ran a few yards down the ravine, searching for more branches. There were none thick enough. He cursed under his breath but then found a chunk of broken rock about twice the size of a baseball. He snatched it up and turned back to his enemies.
Benny dashed forward and slammed downward with the rock.
“I’m sorry!” he cried as the rock shattered the skull and smashed the brain. The zombie died without a further twitch. Benny whirled as a second zom fell over the trip wire, and a third. He darted over to them and slammed down with the rock over and over again.
“I’m sorry,” he yelled each time he gave final death to one of the ghouls.
The passage was choked with zoms now. Two more fell and he killed them, but the effort of smashing skulls was difficult, and it was very quickly draining his strength.
The silk line creaked as a crowd of the living dead pressed against it.
Benny knew that it could not hold. There were too many of them, and the dirt walls were not densely packed enough to hold the branches. He drew his sword and began chopping at the dead behind the line, lopping off hands and arms, squatting to cut through ankles, rising to take heads. He tried to build a bulwark of bodies that would at least slow the advance of the entire horde.
Then, with a groan of splintering wood, the line gave and the whole mass of them surged forward in a collapsing melee. The zoms Benny had maimed and killed crashed down, and the others flopped down on them. He kept cutting, trying to bury the active zoms under the weight of as many quieted ones as possible.
The sword was incredibly sharp and Benny was a good swordsman, but this was work for a butcher’s cleaver. Time and again the blade rebounded from bone and tangled in loose clothing.
Benny’s arms began to ache and then to really hurt. His brea
th came in labored gasps, but still the dead kept coming.
So many of them. So many that Benny ran out of breath to apologize to them. He needed every bit of breath just to survive. He staggered backward, defeated by the sheer impossibility of the task of defeating so many zoms in such a confined space. Running seemed like the only option left. With any luck the ravine would narrow to a close at some point and a tight corner would allow for handholds to climb out.
He backed away, then spun and ran.
And skidded to an immediate stop.
The ravine ahead was not empty. Out of the dusty darkness came a swaying, moaning line of the living dead.
He was trapped.
5
“COME ON,” BENNY SAID AS THE DEAD ADVANCED TOWARD HIM, BUT even to his own ears there was no passion in his tone. No real challenge. No life.
And no way out.
The steep walls of the ravine were too high and the dirt too soft; and the narrow, snaking passage was blocked at both ends by the dead. All he had left were the few seconds it would take for them to climb over broken bodies and heaps of dirt to reach him.
This is it.
Those words banged like firecrackers in his head, loud and bright and terribly real.
There were too many of them and no real way to fight through; and even if he did, what then? He was still trapped down here in the dark. He had already killed ten of them and crippled another dozen, and in a stand-up fight he believed that he could cut at least five or six more of them down in the time he had left. Maybe as many as ten if he could somehow keep moving.
Sounded great, sounded very heroic, but Benny knew the irrefutable truth that swinging a sword required effort, and each time he delivered a killing blow he would spend some of the limited resources he had.
Zoms never tired.
Even if he killed thirty of them, the thirty-first or thirty-second would get him. They had the patience of eternity, and he was living flesh. Fatigue and muscle strain were as deadly to him as the teeth of the dead.