Dust & Decay Read online

  “We’re dead,” Nix said again, her voice rising to a hysterical pitch.

  “Yes,” said the Lost Girl. “We’re dead.”

  34

  TOM IMURA WAS AT HOME IN THE ROT AND RUIN. HE LOVED THE WOODS, even as night came cascading down to turn the green world into an almost impenetrable black gloom. Ever since that terrible night fifteen years ago, Tom had spent nearly a third of his life in these woods. Unlike Mountainside, with its stifled boundaries and pervasive fear, the Ruin was a simpler place. You knew where you stood.

  Tom reckoned that it was no different than the way the world had been before humans settled the first cities. Back then there had been predators of all kinds, and life was hardscrabble at best. Every day was a fight for survival, but it was that struggle that had inspired humans to become problem solvers. The inventiveness of the human race was one of the most crucial tools of survival, and it was the cornerstone of all civilization. Without it, man would never have turned fire into a tool, or carved a wheel from a piece of wood.

  Tom knew that there were zoms out here, but didn’t fear them. He respected and accepted them as a physical threat the way he respected and accepted the bears and cougars and wolves that roamed these hills. His philosophy was based on the natural order of things. If a problem came up, he would use every resource to handle it. So far he’d been successful with that strategy, which included saving Benny during First Night, burning the first Gameland to the ground a few years ago, and giving closure to many hundreds of zoms. If, on the other hand, a problem arose that was beyond his mental and physical abilities, and if he died as a result of it, he was at peace with that. It was the way of things. Survival of the fittest, and no one was “the fittest” all the time.

  He ran lightly, ducking under branches, leaping small gullies, running no faster than his ability to perceive what the forest had to tell him. Tom had stopped calling out Chong’s name. The boy had clearly wanted to run, and calling him might make him hide. In this gloom the best hunter in the world couldn’t find someone deliberately hiding. It was getting hard enough to follow Chong’s trail. Luckily, the boy had tried that old trick of using a piece of brush to wipe out his footprints. Sure, it wiped out the prints, but it left behind very distinct striations in the dirt and moss. Tom almost smiled when he saw it.

  Eventually he reached the point where Chong had stopped trying to cover his trail and his distinctive waffle-soled shoe prints were clear in the fading light.

  There were other prints along the path too. Most were animal tracks that were of no concern to Tom. He found some human—or perhaps zom—prints, but most of these were days old, and Chong’s tracks overlaid them. One set of tracks made him freeze in place and even touch the butt of his holstered pistol. Old-world hiking boots with worn treads and a crescent-shaped nick out of the right heel.

  Tom bent low and studied the prints. Preacher Jack’s without doubt, but it was clear that these had been made on his way to the encounter that had happened a few hours ago.

  Tom continued his hunt. The forest was growing quiet, and he moved only as fast as he could go silently. It was a tracker’s trick: Never make more noise than what you’re tracking.

  Crack.

  There was a sound, soft and close, and within three steps Tom slipped into the shadows between two ancient elms. He listened. Sound was deceptive. Without a second noise it was often difficult to reliably determine from which direction the sound had come. Ahead and to the left? Off the trail?

  A rustle. Definitely off to the left. Tom peered through the gloom. The second sound had been like a foot moving through stiff brush. A long pause, and then another crunch.

  Tom saw a piece of shadow detach itself and move from left to right through an open patch. It was a quick, furtive movement. Something that walked on two legs. Not a zom, though, he was sure about that.

  Preacher Jack? If so, Tom was determined to have a different kind of chat with him than they’d had back on the road.

  The figure was coming his way, but from the body language it was clear the person had not seen him. The head was turned more toward the north, looking farther along the game trail.

  Judging where Tom should have been if he’d kept moving.

  Tom nodded approval. A pretty good tracker, he guessed.

  “Tom!” called a voice. A very familiar voice. “Tom Imura. I know you’re up there behind one of those trees. Don’t make me have to walk all the way up the slope.”

  Tom stepped out from behind the tree with his pistol in his hand. The shadowy figure emerged into a slightly brighter spot of light. From the soles of her boots to the top of her orange Mohawk, the woman was tall and solidly built, with knife handles and pistol butts jutting out in all directions like an old-time pirate. In her right fist she carried a huge bowie knife with a wicked eighteen-inch blade.

  Something black gleamed on the blade, and though it looked like oil in the bad light, Tom knew that it was blood. The woman’s face and clothes seemed to be smeared with it. She tottered into view, and Tom saw that her left arm hung limp and dead at her side.

  Tom stepped out from behind the tree. “Sally?”

  Sally Two-Knives grinned at him with bloody teeth. “You alone, Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” she said, and pitched forward onto her face.

  35

  “BACK … BACK!” CRIED NIX IN A FIERCE WHISPER. AS SHE SAID IT she walked backward, herding Lilah and Benny toward the open door. Lilah stumbled along as if her brain had shut itself off. Benny had to push her into the way station. Nix was last in. She tossed down her bokken, grabbed Lilah’s pistol, and stood for a moment in the doorway, tracking the barrel left and right, but she did not fire. There was no point. If she had a barrel filled with bullets it would not be enough. Nix lowered the pistol and retreated inside.

  “We’re dead,” Lilah said again, and her voice already sounded dead.

  Benny closed and locked the door. “It won’t hold for long,” he said quietly. “Same with the windows. That glass is old. It might last if a couple of them beat on it … but there are hundreds of them out there.”

  “Thousands,” said Nix. “There had to be five hundred of them just coming down over the rocks. It’s insane.”

  It was insane. Last year Benny had seen three thousand of them in the Hungry Forest, but the seething mass of the living dead outside had to number twice that many. It was an army of rotting flesh-eaters. “Where did they come from?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” said Nix. “It doesn’t make sense. We weren’t that loud. And I don’t think they could see our cooking fire from outside. Not all the way into the forest and up the mountains.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” said Lilah in a hollow voice.

  “What about the cans? Zoms couldn’t do that,” said Benny.

  “I know, Benny,” said Nix. She scraped a match and lit the little oil lantern.

  “Don’t!” gasped Benny.

  “Why?” she said softly. The flaring match revealed a crooked smile. “Are you afraid it’ll attract zoms?”

  Her voice was way too calm. Benny had heard people talk like that right before they went off the deep end. And yet, what could he say? He turned to Lilah for help, but the Lost Girl truly looked lost. She stared at the pistol and knife she still held and then numbly put them into their holsters.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Lilah said, repeating the phrase in a lost whisper.

  Benny shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. If this was something normal, Tom would have told us about it. Besides, Brother David’s lived here for over a year, and he said there were never more than a few wandering zoms in the area. This is … this is insane.”

  “Insane,” echoed Lilah.

  Benny did not like what he was seeing in her face any more than he liked what he heard in Nix’s voice. Not one little bit. It made him wonder how crazy he looked and sounded.

  Crazy or not, they had to do something. Benny loo
ked at the three carpet coats that hung from pegs by the door. He grabbed the coats belonging to Sister Shanti and Sister Sarah and tossed them to the girls. “Put these on!”

  Nix immediately slipped into hers, but Lilah let hers drop to the floor. Benny picked it up and pressed it to her.

  “Put it on!” he yelled.

  Lilah took it but did nothing with it. Finally Nix took it and put it on Lilah the way a mother dresses a child.

  “We have to get out of here,” Benny said as he belted on Brother David’s coat. He lifted the blankets and peered outside. The closest of the zoms was still about fifty feet away. “We can still run.”

  That made Lilah’s face twitch. “Run where?”

  Nix said, “She’s right, Benny. They’re coming from every direction. We’re safer here.”

  “This isn’t safety.” Benny waved his hands around at the way station. “This is a freaking lunch pail. They’re going to close in around us, open this place up, and—”

  “Stop!” hissed Lilah, pressing her hands to her ears.

  “If we run, at least we have some chance.” Benny fished in his pocket and pulled out the bottles of cadaverine. “We have these.”

  Nix chewed her lip, caught in the terrible trap of indecision.

  Then abruptly Lilah’s hand darted out fast as a snake and snatched a bottle out of Benny’s hand. She opened it and began dribbling the thick liquid onto her sleeves. When Benny and Nix simply stood there staring at her, Lilah growled, “Now!”

  It was a freakish moment, as if there had been no disconnect in Lilah, as if she had been strong and in charge all the time. Benny and Nix shared a covert, worried look.

  Don’t say anything, warned Benny’s inner voice. She’s ready to break. Push now and she’ll shatter.

  Benny tossed his second bottle to Nix and dug the extras out of his pocket.

  “Will it be enough?” Nix asked as she smeared the noxious chemical on her coat.

  Benny didn’t answer. They each used a full bottle. The inside of the way station reeked as if it was stuffed to the rafters with rotting flesh.

  “Weapons and water only,” said Benny.

  “Good,” agreed Lilah.

  Nix nodded, but she grabbed her journal off the table and stuffed it into a big pocket inside her vest. Then she belted the carpet coat tightly around her. The coat protected her body and arms and had a high, stiff collar to shield the throat, but it was not a suit of armor. Even the fence guards back home said that enough zoms could eventually chew through one.

  Benny slung his canteen over his neck and pulled his bokken from its sheath.

  At the door, Lilah paused, took a deep breath, and without turning said, “We go slow. Don’t fight unless you have to. Run only if you have to.”

  “What if we get separated?” asked Nix.

  There was only one answer to that question, and Benny’s inner voice whispered it to him. Anyone who gets lost in the dark … is dead. Aloud he said, “We won’t.”

  It was somewhere between a lie and a gamble.

  Thump! A dead fist struck the window, rattling it in its frame.

  “Me, Nix, Benny,” whispered Lilah. “Ready?”

  Nix and Benny both lied. They both said they were. Lilah opened the door.

  A zombie stood there, arm raised to strike the glass. He was broad-shouldered, his once brown skin bleached to the color of milky tea. Most of his face was gone, and gnawed edges of white bone jutted from the bloodless flesh. The creature took a shambling step forward. It did not sniff the air—Benny had never seen zoms do that—yet through whatever senses it did possess, the creature took the measure of the pale girl with the white hair … and then shuffled past her into the room. For the moment it did not judge her as prey. She reeked of the dead, and the dead passed her by.

  Benny could see that Lilah’s whole body was trembling. This wasn’t like that time when she’d freed the zoms in the Hungry Forest. Back then she was on her home turf, and she’d known a thousand paths through those woods. No … this was beyond Lilah’s experience, and maybe that was what crippled her. She had no plan and lacked either the imagination or optimism to believe that some line of escape would present itself.

  Or maybe you screwed her up with what you said about Chong. Benny wished with all his strength that he could step back in time and unsay those cruel and stupid words.

  Lilah drew a ragged breath and stepped cautiously outside. Nix went next, turning to squeeze by a lumbering fat man with bullet holes in his stomach. As Benny stepped into the doorway his shoe scuffed the floor, and the fat man turned sharply, gray lips pulling back from green teeth. The zom snarled at Benny, then just as suddenly, the look of hunger and menace dropped away as if a curtain had fallen. Its dusty eyes slid away from Benny, and the monster turned awkwardly and trundled inside, followed by another zom, and another.

  Holding his bokken to his chest as if it was a magic charm, Benny slipped outside. Lilah had not waited for him. She was already thirty paces away, walking straight into the sea of shambling corpses. Nix was much closer, her steps slower and uncertain. Nix kept looking back for Benny. Lilah never looked back at all—she kept going. Did she see a way out? Benny wondered. She was moving faster and faster, and soon he couldn’t see her at all.

  Move or die, growled his inner voice. Benny began walking, moving disjointedly, trying to imitate the artless shamble of the zoms so as not to attract attention.

  Don’t stop.

  He didn’t … until he reached the edge of the concrete pad by the gas pumps. From that angle he could see almost all the land around the way station. What he saw punched the air out of his lungs and nearly dropped him to his knees. There, in the thick of a seething mass of zoms—an army that numbered uncountable thousands—stood a tall figure with hair even whiter than Lilah’s, massive chest and shoulders, gun butts sprouting from holsters at hips and shoulder rigs, and a three-foot length of black pipe clutched in a nearly colorless hand. It was too far away to see his eyes, but Benny was sure—dead certain—that one would be blue and the other as red as flame.

  The figure stared right at him. It was smiling.

  The zoms shifted and shuffled around the figure. They did not attack him. They surged past him, heading toward the gas station, toward Lilah and Nix. Toward Benny. Then the sea of zoms closed around the figure, obscuring him from Benny’s sight.

  It didn’t matter. Benny had seen it.

  Seen him.

  “No …,” he whispered to himself. “No.”

  He turned and ran. Not walked, not shuffled like a zom. Benny Imura ran for all he was worth. He ran for his life. As he ran he could feel those eyes upon him, burning like cold fire into his back. God! Where was Tom? Benny thought he heard a sound threaded through the moan of the thousands of walking dead. He thought he heard the deep, rumbling, mocking laughter of the man he was positive he had just seen standing amid an army of the dead.

  Charlie Pink-eye.

  FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

  When I was real little, Mom was having a hard time earning enough ration dollars. Before First Night she’d been a production assistant in Hollywood (a place where they made movies, back before they nuked Los Angeles). She didn’t know how to farm or build stuff, and she tried to make a living doing sewing and cleaning people’s houses. It was hard, but she never complained and she never let me know how hard she had to work. Then she was sick for a few weeks and fell behind on all the bills.

  Then she met Charlie Matthias. He tried to get Mom to go out with him, but she wasn’t interested. AT ALL. Then Charlie told her there was a way for her to make a month’s worth of ration bucks in one day. It wasn’t sex stuff or anything like that. He said all she had to do was quiet a zom.

  Of course, he didn’t tell her that she would be thrown into a big pit with a zom with only a broom handle as a weapon. It was at a place called Gameland, hidden up in the mountains. People came from all over to bet on what they called Z-Games. Zombie games.
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  Mom was desperate to earn the money, so she went into the pit.

  She never told me about this, and I don’t know the details. All I know is that Charlie kept Mom in the pit for a week. I was real little, and Benny’s aunt Cathy took care of me.

  Then Tom brought Mom home. Tom was all cut up and burned, from what the neighbors told me later. He smelled of smoke and had bloodstains on his clothes. I learned a lot later that Tom had rescued Mom and destroyed Gameland. I think he had to hurt some people to do it. Maybe kill some people. Shame Charlie wasn’t one of them.

  When Charlie Matthias killed my mom last year, he was going to take me to Gameland. The new Gameland.

  God … how can people be so cruel?

  36

  TOM WAS FAST, BUT SALLY TWO-KNIVES WAS DOWN BEFORE HE GOT to her. He knelt beside her and checked her pulse, found a reassuring thump-thump-thump. Then he examined neck and spine before he gently eased her onto her back and brushed dirt and leaves from her face.

  “Oh boy, Sally,” he said, “you’re a bit of a mess here.” Her eyelids slowly fluttered open. Even in the bad light Tom could see that her face was taut with great pain. “Where are you hurt?” he asked.

  “Everywhere.”

  “Can you pin it down for me or do I have to go looking?”

  Sally snorted. “Since when did you become a prude?” Then she winced and touched her abdomen. “Stomach and arm.”

  Tom opened the bottom buttons of her shirt, saw what was clearly a knife wound. She wasn’t coughing up blood, so he didn’t think she had any serious internal injuries. Or he hoped she didn’t. He removed a small bottle of antiseptic and some cotton pads from a vest pocket and gently cleaned the wound and applied a clean bandage. He used his knife and cut open her sleeve to reveal a ragged black hole. Tom gently raised her arm and leaned to take a look at the back of it, saw a second, slightly smaller hole.