Rot & Ruin (12 page)

He got up and slapped dirt from his jeans, then looked up at the yellow August moon that hung in the sky beyond the garden fence. It was the same moon, but it looked different now. He knew it always would.

14

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING WAS COOL FOR THE FIRST DAY OF
S
EPTEMBER.
Benny lay in bed and stared out the window at the dense white clouds stacked tall above the mountains. The air was moist with the promise of rain.

Benny was awake for more than an hour before he realized that he felt better. Not completely. Maybe not even a lot. Just … better.

It was the last week of summer break. School started next Monday, although with his new job, that would only be half days. He lay there, listening to the birds singing in the trees. Tom once told him that birds sing differently before and after a storm. Benny didn’t know if that was true, but he could understand why they would.

He got up, washed, dressed, and went downstairs for breakfast. Tom set out a plate of eggs for him, and Benny ate them all and then scavenged the frying pan for leftovers. They ate in silence almost to the last bite before Benny said, “Tom … the way you do it … Does anyone else do it that way? Closure, I mean.”

Tom sipped his coffee. “A few. Not many. There’s a husband-and-wife team up north in Haven. And there’s a
guy named Church who does it in Freeland. No one else here in Mountainside.”

“Why not?”

Tom hesitated, then shrugged. “It takes longer.”

“No,” Benny said. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Sugarcoat it. If this is the way it is, if I’m going to have to be a part of it, don’t jerk me around. Don’t lie to me.”

Tom set down his cup of coffee and then nodded. “Okay. Most don’t do it this way, because it hurts too much. It’s too …” He fished for a word.

“Real?” Benny suggested.

“I guess so,” said Tom. He tasted the word. “‘Real.’ Yeah … that about says it.”

Benny nodded and ate the last piece of toast.

After a while Tom said, “If you’re going to do this with me—”

“I didn’t say I was. I said ‘if.’”

“So did I.
If
you’re going to do this with me, then you have to learn how to handle yourself. That means getting in better shape and learning how to fight.”

“Guns?”

“Hand to hand first,” Tom said. “And swords. Wooden swords in the beginning. We’ll start right after school.”

“Okay,” Benny said.

“Okay … what?”

“Okay.”

They didn’t speak again that morning.

When Benny got to the garden gate, he stood looking at it, as if it was a dividing line between who he had been before Tom had taken him out into the Ruin and who he was going to be from now on. For a week he had been unable to open that gate, and even now, his hand trembled a little as he reached for the latch.

It opened without a crash of drums or ominous lightning forking through the clouds. Benny grinned ruefully, then headed down the lane toward Chong’s house.

15

“T
HE ZOMBIES ARE COMING!”

Morgie Mitchell yelled that at the top of his voice, and everyone ran. Morgie ran side-by-side with Benny and Chong, the three of them blocking the pavement to keep the other kids from getting there first. It was a disaster, though. Zak Matthias deliberately tripped Morgie, who went flying and whose flailing fingers caught the back of Moby’s pants and accidentally pulled them down to his knees.

Moby wore stained drawers, and with his pants around his knees, he couldn’t manage the next step, and he went down. So did Morgie. The crowd of kids hit the pair, who were already on the ground, but they were in motion, and everyone knew there was no hope. They all went down.

Only Benny, Chong, and Zak were still running. Zak was halfway down the block. Benny looked back, hesitated, grabbed Chong by the sleeve, mentally said
Screw it
, and ran even faster.

In the direction of the zombies.

They were at Lafferty’s General Store. The Zombie Cards had arrived.

“Too bad about Morgie,” said Chong.

“Yeah,” agreed Benny. “Nice kid. He’ll be missed.”

They sat on the top step of the wooden porch in front of Lafferty’s. A shadow fell across them.

“You guys are a couple of total jerks,” said Morgie.

“Eek!” said Chong dryly. “It’s a zom. Quick, run for your life.”

Benny sipped from a bottle of pop and burped eloquently.

Morgie kicked Chong’s foot, hard, and sat on the wooden step between his two friends. He looked at the stack of cards that lay on the step between Chong’s sneakered feet. There was a similar stack—two packs still unopened—in front of Benny. Waxed-paper wrappers were crumpled on the top step.

“The guy said they’re sold out already,” he complained grumpily.

“Yeah. Those darn kids, huh?” murmured Benny.

“He said you two monkey-bangers bought the last couple of packs.”

“Guy’s lying,” said Benny.

Morgie brightened. “What? He has some—?”

“We bought the last
twelve
packs,” said Chong.

“I kinda hate you guys.”

“He’s going to start crying,” Chong said to Benny in a stage whisper.

“He’s going to embarrass himself,” agreed Benny.

“What he’s going to do,” said Morgie, “is start kicking your asses.”

“Eek,” said Chong through a yawn.

Benny pretended to scratch his ankle, but then he moved his sneaker, and there were four packs of Zombie Cards in
a neat stack, the waxed-paper wrappers still sealed. Morgie made a grab for them, ignoring the grins on his friends’ faces.

“I still hate you,” he said as he tore open the first pack.

“And yet,” said Chong, “we’ll find a way to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and struggle on.”

Morgie made a very rude gesture as he sorted through the cards.

Zombie Cards were one of the few luxuries the boys could afford. In the next town—forty miles away, along the line of mountains—two brothers had set up a printing business. All hand-crank stuff, because no one trusted electricity anymore, even when they could get it to work.

The printers did it old school. Offset printing in four colors, and they did a quality job. The Zombie Cards were printed on heavy card stock, ten cards to a pack. On the front of each card was a portrait of famous bounty hunters, like J-Dog, Dr. Skillz, Sally Two-knives, or the Mekong brothers; heroes of First Night, like Big Mike Sweeney, Billy Christmas, or Captain Ledger; someone from the zombie war, like the Historian or the Helicopter Pilot; famous zoms, like Machete-head, the Bride of Coldwater Spring, or the Monk; or random cards of famous people who had become zoms. On the back of each card was a short bio and the name of the artist. Benny’s favorite card was of Ben, a tall African American man who was painted in a heroic pose, swinging a torch at a swarm of zoms who were trying to get past him to attack a blond woman who cowered behind him. The bio said that the image was based on “an eyewitness account of a valiant but tragically futile struggle against zoms in Pennsylvania.” The artist had
captured the nobility of the man with the torch and had made the zoms look particularly menacing, an effect enhanced by the stark shadows and light from the torch’s flaring flame. It was one of the rarest cards, and Benny was the only one of his friends who had it. He also had a complete set of the bounty hunters, including Charlie Matthias and the Motor City Hammer. He still liked Charlie and the Hammer, but as much as he denied it to himself, reserve bubbled inside him when he looked at their cards. He’d already sorted through his collection, looking for the three bounty hunters he’d seen in the Ruin, but they weren’t there. It reinforced Benny’s belief that their actions were not in any way typical of the bounty hunters Benny knew personally. Tom had to be wrong about that.

He said nothing to his friends about what Tom had said, but he shot a quick glance at Zak, who sat on the store’s porch, fanning through the dozen packs of cards he’d bought. Zak saw him watching and gave him a strange smile, then bent over his cards.

Benny shrugged, absorbed in his memories of the Ruin. So far he’d only told Nix, and he hadn’t seen her since she’d left the garden the day before. Her absence was like an empty hole in his gut, but he refused to think about it.

Chong had the largest collection of Zombie Cards, mostly because he had two cousins who collected them, and they traded doubles. Morgie and Benny had a good-size set. Nix only had a few. She was poor and wouldn’t take handouts, although if Benny gave her his doubles, she always accepted.

“Are you going to save any for Nix?” Chong asked as Morgie tore open his second pack.

“Why?” Morgie asked absently as he peered at the writing on the back of a card that showed a police officer in San Antonio, firing at zoms as he crashed his patrol car through a knot of them. The figures were tiny on the card, but the action was explosive, and Morgie was totally absorbed by it.

Chong and Benny exchanged a look over his bowed head, then shrugged. Morgie could be as dense as a mud wall sometimes.

They opened all of their packs of cards and sat in the shade of the porch, organizing them and reading the backs, swapping doubles with one another, bragging about cards they had and that the others didn’t. Benny smiled and joked and chatted with the others, but as he sorted through the cards, he could feel how false and fragile his smile was. He wanted to feel the way he used to feel, and hated that he had to fake it.

“Hey, you even listening?” Morgie asked, and Benny turned to him, hearing the question as if it were an echo but not remembering what he was asked.

“What?”

“Joe Attentive,” murmured Chong.

“I asked, what’s with you and Nix?”

“Nix?” Benny tensed. “What about me and Nix?”

“She was over your house every day this week, and now she’s not hanging around with us. She hasn’t missed a card day all summer. What’s up?” Morgie wore a smile, but it went about a millimeter deep.

Benny forced his shoulders to give a nonchalant shrug. “No, it’s cool. She was just being a friend.”

“What kind of friend?”

“Just a friend, Morgie.” But Benny could see that answer wasn’t going to cut it. He sighed. “Look, we all know Nix has a thing for me and you have a thing for Nix. Big news flash. I
don’t
have a thing for Nix, and the reason you haven’t seen her around the last two days is that I think she knows it, and her feelings are hurt. I’m sorry, but there it is. So, if you want to make your move, now would be a pretty good time.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” said Chong without looking up from a card he was reading. The others looked at him. “Nix is probably feeling like total crap right about now. She could use a friend, but what she doesn’t need is someone breathing down her neck or following her like a horny dog.”

“What are you saying?” said Morgie, eyes narrowed.

Chong turned to him. “What part of that was unclear?”

“I don’t just horndog after her. I
like
Nix. A lot.”

Chong merely grunted and continued to read his card.

Morgie punched Benny’s shoulder.

“Ow! What the hell was that for?” Benny demanded.

“For screwing with Nix’s head!” Morgie shouted. “Now she’s going to be all moody and girly, crying in her room and writing in that stupid diary of hers.”

“Good God,” said Benny, appealing to Chong, and the universe, for help. Chong tried to hide a smile as he pretended to read the Zombie Cards.

They sat in silence for five minutes, each of them absorbed with the cards to varying degrees, each thinking about Nix but pretending not to.

Chong tapped him with an elbow, and when he turned, his friend held out a card, so he could see the picture. “You’re almost famous,” he said.

The picture was that of a young man, standing with his back to a bullet-scarred wall, but instead of a gun, he held a
katana
in his hands.

Tom.

“Oh, man, don’t do this to me,” Benny said.

Chong smiled. “I thought you and Tom kissed and made up. I thought you were best buds now.”