The mocking grin froze on the guard’s face, and then slowly, slowly, it drained away. The guard’s eyes flicked from the teen to the red zone that separated the fence line and the broad green fields that flanked them from the town.
“Tom Imura?” echoed the guard in a small voice. “You’re Tom Imura’s kid brother . . . ?”
“Yes,” said Benny Imura. “My brother told me to come down here. He told me to do what I’m doing. Do you want me to go tell him that you said I couldn’t?”
It wasn’t said as a threat. Benny never raised his voice, never changed his expression. The guard stood near him, looking down at him, his mouth now working silently in an unconscious parody of the zombie.
“I’d like to be left alone,” said Benny. “If that’s not breaking any rules.”
“Um . . . no. No, that’s fine,” said the guard. He unconsciously backed away from Benny, and his beefy shoulders bumped lightly against the chain-link wall.
Instantly the zombie lunged at him, thrusting her withered fingers through the links, clawing at the guard’s shirt, biting at the chain-links with rotted gray teeth.
The guard cried out in alarm and tried to simultaneously pull himself away and close the shotgun breech; but before he could do either, Benny was out of his chair. Benny grabbed the guard’s shirt with both hands and yanked him forward, away from the fence, away from the twisting pale fingers. As the guard staggered forward, his weight crashed toward Benny, but the teenager pivoted his hips and shoved the guard away from him so that the man staggered several yards toward the red zone. The shotgun fell to the grass with a muffled thud.
The moment seemed to freeze in place. The guard lay shocked and wide-eyed on the ground near the shotgun; the zom stood erect and motionless, her hunting frenzy stilled with no prey to attack. Benny Imura stood between them, legs planted wide, arms wide, palms pointing calmingly out toward guard and zom.
The guard looked up at the teenager as Benny slowly lowered his arms.
“You have to be careful around them,” said the boy. “They bite.”
Then Benny offered his hand to the guard and helped him up. He didn’t touch the fallen shotgun, leaving it to the guard. Once he was up and dusted off, the guard checked the shotgun barrels and gave Benny a long, considering glare.
“I ought to chase you the heck out of here,” he said.
“Because zoms are dangerous?” asked Benny, and now there was definitely wry humor in his eyes. Humor and something else that the guard at first could not identify. Some bigger emotion.
“Yeah, yeah, very funny.”
They regarded each other for half a minute of silence, and then the guard chuckled and smiled. A small, rueful smile. Benny’s smile was slower in coming, and smaller. But it was there.
And it was then that the guard identified the other emotion that hid behind the kid’s green eyes. It was sadness. A vast and terrible sadness.
“You were out there,” said the guard quietly. “Weren’t you?”
Benny nodded.
“In the Ruin?”
Another nod.
“With Tom? When all that stuff happened to Charlie and the Hammer?”
One more nod, slower than the others.
The guard cleared his throat. He glanced at the chair, which had fallen over when Benny rushed in to save him from the zom. Without another word, the guard bent to pick up the chair. He righted it, glanced at the fence and the zom, then moved the chair back about six inches.
Benny watched him do it.
“You, um . . . you can never be too careful,” mumbled the guard. “You know?”
“Yeah,” said Benny. “I know.”
The fence guard stepped back and took a breath. He gave Benny a brief nod, and then turned and trudged along the fence line the way he’d come, his head lowered in troubled thought, shotgun crooked over his arm.
After a while, Benny sat down on his chair again and stared through the fence at the zombie.
The Quick and the Dead
(Set directly before the events of Dust & Decay)
1
The bounty hunter’s name was Solomon Jones. He was medium height, built like a wrestler, and bald as an egg, with chocolate-brown skin and a small goatee shot through with streaks of white. The handles of a pair of machetes rose above his shoulders from where they hung in slings across his back.
He crouched on the gnarled limb of an ancient elm, completely hidden by the deep shadows of the forest’s leafy canopy.
Solomon had once been a writer in the days before First Night. Now he was sure that there was no one alive who knew him as anything but a bounty hunter. He was a killer of the dead. There were no publishing houses anymore, no bookstores. And the only printing presses—old hand-crank jobs—were used to make bounty flyers, Zombie Cards, pamphlets of town rules, and religious tracts. No one printed novels anymore. It was too costly, and besides, there were millions of them lying unused in empty houses, deserted stores, and warehouses. Traders brought them by the wagonload, and they were as valuable to the people in the towns as food and water. The books were escape hatches, doorways out of the apocalypse.
He wished that he had the time and opportunity to write. Not anymore. Now he hunted in the Rot and Ruin, working bounty jobs on the zoms, guarding trade wagons, taking the occasional clean-out job. It was physical work. Horrible work.
Killing the dead.
The concept was absurd. It was so wild he wouldn’t have put it in one of his novels. His readers would have thought he’d gone nuts.
Killing the already killed.
There was no phrasing in English—or any other language—that permitted a statement like that to make sense.
And yet . . .
He crouched on the tree limb, watching a spectacle unfold below him that was more real than anything he had ever put on the page, and yet even after all these years he felt that it was not real. That it, and he, were fantasies in the fevered dream of some madman.
But the firmness of the limb under his feet was real. The sweat that trickled down the sides of his face was real. The weight of the weapons strapped across his back and holstered at his hip. All real.
As was the madness below.
Zoms.
Not one or two of them. Not even the rare pack of half a dozen. Below him, shambling along the grass-choked country road, or staggering through the brush on the verge, were dozens of them. Many dozens.
He had rarely seen so many of them at once, and never moving with such purpose, such apparent focus. But . . . why? They were not following any prey. The woodland road wound through the forest, fed by a larger road that came west through farmlands. Beyond those farms was the vastness of the Yosemite National Park, and beyond that . . . the rest of America. The rest of the Rot and Ruin.
These zoms were coming from the east.
Coming in packs. Flocking like decaying birds.
Heading west.
Heading toward the line of small towns that huddled against the protection of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, here in Mariposa County and farther north. The small towns in which lived virtually everyone who was still alive. The last of humanity. Twenty-eight thousand people, give or take. All that was left of seven billion.
For fourteen years the zombies had followed a simple pattern. They hunted what they saw, and when there was no prey, they simply stood still. Like rotting tombstones to mark the place of their death.
Why were these zoms on the move?
What was drawing them toward the towns? Surely they could not smell the living flesh so many miles away. That was impossible, even in an age of impossible things. And with the dense forest and towering mountains, the zoms could not see the towns. What was drawing them?
Solomon did not move as the horde of the dead passed below him. He could handle himself against a small pack. He’d done it. More than once. But this was an army of the dead.
What was drawing them?
As he chewed on that, another th
ought occurred to him. Another question. An ugly, terrible question, and he rose slightly and looked out over the tops of the trees that covered the mountain slope down toward the farmlands.
Perhaps the question was not what was drawing them. Perhaps it was more frightening than that.
Maybe it was . . .
“What’s chasing them?” he murmured aloud.
Was there something out there in the east that was driving all these zoms westward?
If so . . . dear God, what could it be?
Solomon Jones tried to swallow, but his throat had gone dry. Below him the last of the zoms lurched past.
He waited five more minutes, and then he dropped to the ground, landing in a tense crouch, eyes cutting left and right, looking for stragglers.
But the forest had become deathly quiet.
There was a bounty job waiting to be finished, but that was up north. However, Solomon turned to the southwest. He had to tell someone about this. People had to know. The right people.
He nodded to himself and set out at a run through the forest.
Looking for Tom Imura.
2
Girls
(Mountainside)
Lou Chong wondered if throwing himself off the guard tower would be better than going home. If he jumped over the rail, the worst that could happen would be a crushing impact on the ground, after which he’d be devoured by zoms.
“You are a total chicken,” observed Benny Imura, who was sitting on a wooden crate in the far corner of the tower.
“Obviously,” agreed Chong. “What’s your point?”
Benny shook his head. “Dude, it’s so easy. She lives at your house. You see her every day. All you have to do is say something to her.”
“Really,” replied Chong as he folded his arms and leaned against the rail. “That’s all I have to do. I go up to a girl who is a year older than me; a girl who has lived alone for years doing nothing but killing zombies and rogue bounty hunters; a girl who knows more ways to kill me than I know how to die; a girl who fought in the zombie pits at Gameland when she was eleven; a girl—I might add—who is skilled with every kind of lethal weapon from handguns to swords . . . you want me to go up to that girl and just ask her to the summer dance? That’s what you think is easy?”
“Sure.”
“So, I was right all along. You are brain dead.”
“Hey, I—”
“I mean, are you trying to get me killed?”
“You have to admit that she’s hot.”
Chong cocked his head to one side. “No, I don’t think ‘hot’ is really adequate, do you?”
“And we both know that she doesn’t have a boyfriend.”
“She’s never had a boyfriend,” corrected Chong. “Because she is a feral zombie killer. She’s killed everyone who ever tried to get near her.”
“She didn’t kill me.”
“Hope springs eternal,” murmured Chong.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” demanded Benny.
Chong began ticking items off on his fingers. “Being beaten viciously about the head and shoulders. Comprehensive humiliation. Thrusting of sharp objects through my flesh . . .”
Benny made loud clucking sounds.
Chong stared at him through narrowed eyes. “I said I was afraid of Lilah,” he said evenly. “I never said I was afraid of you. In fact, some recreational Benny-maiming might take the edge off the day.”
“Ha! I’m a professional zombie hunter now. My body is a weapon, my arms are spears, my legs are swords.”
He faked a kick at Chong, but the motion knocked Benny off his crate, and he crashed down onto the tower floor.
“Yes, a living weapon. I see,” observed Chong drily.
Benny came off the floor and tackled him, and they wrestled from one end of the guard tower to the other, making loud fighting sounds like they had in old comic books. POW! and KRUNCH!
Chong was pretending to bash Benny’s head against the wall when the shift supervisor bellowed up at them in a leather-throated voice. “What the bloody ’ell you two monkey-bangers doing up there? Do I have to come up and teach you how to act like adults?”
“We’re not adults,” Benny yelled, but before the words could get out, Chong clamped a hand over his mouth. All that escaped was a muffled nothing.
“Sorry!” Chong called down through the ladder hole. “There . . . um . . . was a wasp up here, and we were trying to swat it and—”
“Yeah, yeah,” growled the supervisor. “Whatever you two delinquents are doing—don’t.”
He stalked away, and the boys peered over the edge of the tower to watch him go.
“Thanks for getting me in trouble,” complained Chong.
“Happy to help.”
They got to their feet, and Chong dug a couple of apples out of his backpack, which hung on a wooden peg. He and Benny ate them noisily as they watched the cloud shadows sweep with dark majesty across the field of tall grass and silent zoms.
After a long time, Chong asked, “How are things with you and Nix?”
Benny took his time with that. “She’s going through some stuff. Her mom. Getting kidnapped. The fight. She’s . . .”
He let his words drift away with the clouds.
Beside him, Chong nodded. He had not been with Benny and Tom when the brothers had gone out hunting for the men who had murdered Nix’s mother and kidnapped Nix. Chong had stayed in Mountainside and spent a lot of time with Morgie Mitchell, who had been badly injured trying to protect Nix. Morgie had a skull fracture and concussion and was unconscious for four long, terrible days. All that time, Chong sat beside Morgie’s hospital bed and read to him. Adventure stories from old books. The Mortal Instruments, Harry Potter, The Maze Runner. Books Chong knew that Morgie liked.
The stories filled the still air of the hospital room, but Morgie slept through most of it, and when he finally woke up, he said that he couldn’t remember anything from the last few days. All of it was a blank, he insisted.
Chong looked in Morgie’s eyes when he asked if his friend truly did not remember the bounty hunters taking Nix. Morgie swore that he did not, but there was a frightened, furtive look in his eyes that made Chong wonder.
That was a few days ago, and the world seemed to have changed since then.
“Benny?” Chong asked after a few moments.
“Yeah.”
“About Nix. You falling in love?”
Benny didn’t answer. Chong nodded to himself.
A few minutes later, Benny asked, “Chong?”
“Uh-huh?”
“What about you and Lilah? You falling in love with her?”
Chong sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You think she likes you?”
“Not a chance.”
They thought about that. “She’s been alone most of her life,” said Benny. “She only knows about people ’cause she’s read a million books.”
“I know. We talk about books all the time.”
“There’s a lot of romantic stuff in books.”
“Uh-huh.”
Benny said, “Learning about that stuff in books isn’t the same as knowing it, you know that, right?”
“Not being actually stupid, yes.”
“Give her time.”
“Yeah.” Chong cut a look at him. “Nix, too.”
“Oh yeah.”
They stood side by side and watched the late afternoon shadows creep out from under the trees, hiding one by one the hundreds of living dead who stood like silent sentinels in the field beyond the fence.
3
Swords
(The Imura house, next day)
Benny Imura screamed like a ten-year-old girl.
He dodged, too, and the sword missed him by inches. Then he froze as the affect-echo of his shriek rolled back to him after bouncing off the line of trees. He looked around at the faces. Nix Riley, Morgie Mitchell, Lilah, Tom, Chong. All staring at him.
“Wow,” said
Chong, “that was manly.”
Benny flushed a brilliant crimson and brought his wooden sword up in a defensive posture.
“I didn’t hit you,” said Nix Riley, who stood five feet away, the tip of her wooden sword pointing to the grass between them. Her pretty, freckled face glowed with effort and intensity. The wooden bokken and the insanely fast and accurate way she handled it were totally at odds with her short stature and curly ponytail. “No need to cry.”
“I am not crying,” growled Benny. “That was my kiai.”
“Your kiai,” echoed Chong. A smile trembled on his lips. “That’s the spirit shout that’s supposed to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies. You’re going with a little-girl scream?”
“It wasn’t a scream,” insisted Benny. “It was a high-pitched yell.”
“Uh-huh,” said Chong.
“A hunting call.”
“Right,” said Nix.
“Like eagles use.”
“Sure,” said Tom.
“It was a battle cry—”
“Dude,” said Morgie, who sat on the bench, his shaved head still bandaged. “You screamed like a little girl. I’m kind of embarrassed to know you.”
“No,” said Lilah before Benny could reply. The Lost Girl, with her snow-white hair and feral eyes, stood leaning on her spear. “Not like a little girl.”
“Ha!” declared Benny. “You see? I told you it was a—”
“It was like a pig,” said Lilah.
Benny whirled toward her. “No, it wasn’t—”
“A little pig,” she said. “They squeal like that when you try to catch them.”
Benny turned away from her and saw this information register on the faces of each of the others. Even Tom was losing the battle to hide a smile.
“It’s a war cry,” Benny said between gritted teeth.
“The war cry of a ferocious piglet,” suggested Nix.
Benny raised his sword and waited for Nix to do the same.
Tom called, “Hajime!” The Japanese command to begin.
Instantly both wooden swords flashed out, and there was a sharp klack! as blade met blade. Nix attacked with a flurry of overhand and lateral cuts, and Benny shifted in a circle, taking many small steps in order to keep his feet balanced and in constant contact with the ground. The blades slithered and crunched and tokked over and over again as they moved. Benny ignored Morgie’s constant oinking sounds and the fake eagle cries from Chong.