“Shoot him,” whispered Morgie under his breath, and Benny turned to look at him. Morgie’s face was wet with nervous sweat. “Shoot him.”
Tom’s gun was still in its holster.
Lilah gave him a single cold shake of her head. “No. It’s a waste of a bullet.”
Suddenly there was quick movement on the porch as Tom’s body seemed to blur. He grabbed the zombie’s shoulders and spun him around, then pivoted so that Grandpa Houser flipped over Tom’s hip and hit the porch boards. Tom climbed on top of him, grabbing for the pale wrists, bringing them behind the man’s back, securing them with cord that he pulled from his pocket. The whole thing was over in the blink of an eye.
“Take him,” he barked, and two burly men crept nervously forward to lift the old zom to his feet and drag him away. “Put him in the toolshed. Don’t quiet him yet.”
When Tom said that, he ticked his head toward the upstairs windows.
One of the other men began climbing the steps, but Tom stopped him. “No … we still don’t know where Jack, Michelle, and Danny are.”
Benny swallowed a lump the size of a hen’s egg.
“Should we help?” asked Chong in a voice that clearly showed that he hated his own suggestion.
“Definitely not warrior smart,” said Morgie under his breath.
“I’ll help,” said Lilah in her icy whisper of a voice, and she pushed her way through the crowd. Most of the townsfolk shied back away from her as if she was something wild and dangerous, and Benny realized she was exactly that.
Lilah exchanged a nod with Tom, and they crept cautiously into the house.
“She’s definitely warrior smart,” observed Chong, “but crazy as a loon.”
“Should we go in too?” asked Morgie. “Maybe they could use our help.”
“Tom and Lilah? Need our help? Don’t be stupid,” replied Nix.
Nix, Chong, and Benny turned their heads in unison to face him.
Morgie colored. “Yeah … okay,” he conceded. “Kinda dumb, huh?”
Chong laid a consoling hand on his arm. “No, Morgie,” he said, “not ‘kinda.’”
Benny caught movement again at the Matthias place. He saw Zak turn away from the window, but something about Zak’s face made Benny stare. Zak’s eyes were surrounded by dark rings. As if his whole face looked bruised. Maybe a couple of black eyes. Big Zak?
“Damn,” Benny said under his breath.
Nix caught the direction of his stare. “What—?”
“It’s Zak,” he said quietly. “I think he’s hurt. He keeps looking out here.”
Nix opened her mouth to say something stinging about Zak, but then she clamped her jaws shut.
Benny looked at the front of the Houser place, and everything was quiet. People were starting to edge carefully up to the porch. He turned back to Zak’s house, chewing his lip in indecision.
Then, before he knew he was going to do anything, he was walking toward Zak Matthias’s house.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
First Night
That’s what people call the day the dead rose. According to Tom, it started in the morning in a few places, but by night it had spread all over.
No one knows why it started.
No one knows where it started. Tom says that the first report he heard of was a news story out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
By dawn of the next day it had spread all over the world. A state of emergency was declared. Tom says that it was too little and too late.
By noon of the following day all communication was lost from over sixty cities in the United States, and more than three hundred worldwide. No one was counting how many towns and villages were overrun.
The radios and TV stations stopped broadcasting on the fifth day. Cell phones were already dead by then.
After that there was no way to know how bad things were.
6
BENNY WALKED AROUND TO ZAK’S BACK DOOR. HE KNEW THAT WHEN Big Zak got drunk he usually passed out on the living room couch, so the back of the house seemed like the best place to steal a peek inside.
“Benny!” Nix called as she ran to catch up. “What’s going on?”
“I—,” he began, but he had nowhere to go with it. How could Nix, of all people, understand and accept that Benny wanted to see if Zak Matthias was okay? This house represented everything she’d lost. Benny believed that if their roles were reversed she’d feel the same.
He gave her a meaningless smile—almost a wince—and stepped up onto Zak’s back porch. Nix stayed on the grass by the steps. Benny set his bokken down—no way Zak would open the door if Benny was standing there with a big stick—and cupped his hands around his eyes so he could peer in through the kitchen window. There were no lanterns lit.
The kitchen was empty. No sign of Zak.
Benny gave the door a faint tap-tap.
Nothing. Benny hesitated. What did he really want to say to Zak? Zak’s uncle had murdered Nix’s mom. Benny had killed Charlie. Well, probably killed him. He’d hit him with the Motor City Hammer’s black iron pipe and watched Charlie fall a hundred feet into darkness.
How would any of that open a doorway into a conversation?
Gee, Zak, anyone get murdered today?
He knocked again anyway.
A figure moved behind the curtain and turned the handle. The door opened, and Benny drew a breath, not sure which words were going to come out of his mouth.
It wasn’t Zak.
It was Big Zak.
Not as big as Charlie Pink-eye, but big enough. He wasn’t an albino like Charlie, but he had pale skin and pale blond hair. He was every bit as scary as Charlie, though.
Especially now.
The whole front of Big Zak’s shirt glistened with bright red blood.
“I—I—,” Big Zak croaked, but there wasn’t enough left of his throat to manage more. He took a single trembling step out onto the porch and then fell right on top of Benny. The big man’s weight crushed Benny to the porch boards, driving all the air from his lungs, banging his head hard enough to fill the world with fireworks.
“Benny!” Nix screamed.
He heard his own voice screaming too.
Benny stared up at Big Zak’s face, which was an inch from his. There were scrapes and cuts all over it, and his eyes were wild with pain and terror. Benny struggled to push the crushing weight off of him.
“H-help … me …,” the man croaked. “P-please …”
And then the mad light went out of Big Zak’s eyes. All his weight sagged down, empty of tension, of control. Of life.
Benny panicked, wanting that slack, dead weight off him. He desperately shifted his hip under Big Zak and twisted his hips to move the dead man’s mass. As he worked the wrestling move, he wondered why Nix wasn’t helping. She was right there… .
As if on cue, Nix yelled, “Benny! Watch out!”
Big Zak’s body slid partially off him, and Benny kicked his way out. “It’s a little late for ‘watch out’!” he snapped. “I already—”
But Nix was rushing at him with her bokken held high, her face twisted into a mask of mingled hate and fear.
“No!” he yelled. He scrambled backward and collided …
… into Zak.
Benny whirled and looked into the face of his former friend.
Into the pale, dark-eyed, and blood-smeared face of the thing that been Zak Matthias.
With a snarl of insatiable hunger, Zak lunged for Benny’s throat.
7
EVERYTHING SEEMED TO HAPPEN MUCH TOO FAST.
Zak grabbed the front of Benny’s shirt with icy white fingers and pulled. Benny jammed his palms against Zak’s chest just in time. Zak’s teeth snapped together an inch from Benny’s windpipe. Benny shrieked in terror. Zak moaned in hunger and frustration.
“Benny! Down!”
Suddenly there was a flash of brown hardwood and a sound like a watermelon falling off a wagon onto asphalt. Zak and Benny fell in opposite directions. Benny’s head hit the floor again, harder. Zak pitched backward away from him, his face gone, replaced by an inhuman mask of blood and damaged tissue.
Benny felt like his own head was shattered. He heard a voice screaming his name.
Nix?
Benny tried to say her name, but the world spun around him and all his internal lights went dark.
8
“BENNY—GET UP!”
The voice was a million miles away.
“Benny!”
His numb brain gave the voice a name. Nix. And … she was yelling at him. Why was she yelling? He tried to ask her, but it came out as a mumble of soft nonsense words.
Then she was pulling at him. Shaking him.
He cranked open one eye. It was like lifting a hundred pounds of bricks.
“Good morning, Nix,” he said in a completely reasonable tone of voice. “Would you like some toast?”
Nix slapped him across the face. Hard.
“Hey—OW!”
The slap cleared his battered brain, and he realized that Nix was bending over him, screaming right in his face.
“ZOMS!”
That did it.
His brain snapped back to full awareness. As Nix hauled him upright there was movement to his left, and Benny turned to see Big Zak getting slowly to his feet, blood dripping from rubbery lips and a ruined throat. The zom turned his slack face toward Benny and moaned like a lost soul.
More movement made Benny turn, and there was Danny Houser and his mother shambling across the lawn toward the porch. Both of them were mangled by bites. Both of them were dead. Zoms. Beyond them, inside the Houser place, there were shouts and screams and gunshots.
“Catch!” Nix scooped up Benny’s sword and threw it to him. Benny snatched it out of the air as Big Zak took a lumbering step toward him. Nix jumped off the porch and ran to intercept Danny, her sword held high.
Big Zak was too close for a perfect swing, so Benny changed direction and hit him with the heavy handle of the wooden sword. The blow caught Big Zak on the point of his jaw, and the impact sent shocks up through Benny’s wrists. Big Zak staggered backward.
Benny cut a look at Nix just in time to see her swing at Mrs. Houser and knock her sideways, but at the same instant Danny rushed forward and grabbed a fistful of Nix’s red hair. Benny took a reflexive step toward her, but then Big Zak grabbed his sweatshirt and jerked him off his feet. The zom dragged him forward and up, first to his toes and then completely off the floor. Even dead, Big Zak Matthias was a powerful man. Benny dangled from the zombie’s fists and for a moment he stared straight into the unblinking eyes of the dead man.
There was a story kids told one another, that if you looked into a zom’s eyes you would see a reflection of what you would look like as one of the living dead. Benny had stopped believing that after that nightmare adventure last September; but now, staring into the empty eyes of Big Zak, Benny knew exactly how he would look as a zom. Small and washed-out and lost, with all trace of his humanity and personality snuffed out like a match.
“No!” he cried, and as the zom lunged in for a bite, Benny rammed the shaft of the wooden sword into the creature’s gaping mouth.
Big Zak bit down with a huge crunch that chopped splinters off the sword and snapped the tips off the zom’s incisors.
Then Big Zak flung Benny away as he pawed the bokken out of his mouth. The sword clattered to the floorboards. As the zom turned toward him, Benny pivoted on his hip and kicked out with both feet, slamming his heels into the zom’s knees. The impact knocked the zom backward so that Big Zak’s heels caught on Zak Junior’s fallen body, and the monster fell down with a huge crash. Benny scrambled to his feet, raised the wooden sword, and brought it down with every ounce of strength he had.
CRACK!
The wooden sword snapped in half right where Big Zak had bitten into it, but the blow itself shattered the zom’s skull. Big Zak dropped facedown on the boards, moaning and twisting and clutching at nothing. Benny stared at the eighteen inches of jagged hickory in his hands, then reversed it, raised it high in a two-hand grip, and plunged it down at the base of Big Zak’s skull. There is a narrow opening where the spine enters the skull. Tom called it the “sweet spot,” and it was where the brain stem was most vulnerable. Sever that and the zom was dead forever. Quieted.
He put everything he had into the blow.
And missed. The tip of the spike hit the hard back of the skull and skittered off and finally crushed itself flat on the floorboards beside the zom’s ear.
“Oh, crap,” Benny said.
Big Zak’s twitching fingers scrabbled for Benny’s ankles, but there seemed to be no strength left. Benny stepped backward out of reach. The zom moaned softly.
Immediately Benny whirled, looking for Nix. As he leaped off the porch he saw Danny Houser fall, his head tilting on a cracked—but not broken—neck. Nix backed away from him, her chest heaving with fear and exertion.
“Watch out!” Benny yelled as Mrs. Houser rushed at Nix from her blind side. Just as Nix spun, Benny knocked Danny’s mother over with a flying tackle that sent them both into a rolling, tumbling sprawl. The zom twisted and hissed like a cat and buried her teeth in his shoulder. He managed to shift as her jaws clamped shut, and all she bit off was a mouthful of soggy sweatshirt.
There was a sudden muffled thump and a shudder went through the zom; then another and another, and Benny realized that Nix was pounding on the monster with her sword, trying to distract or dislodge her.
“Nix!” yelled a voice. “Get back.”
The thumping stopped, and a second later the zom’s body was lifted off him and Benny looked up to see Tom there. He hooked one powerful arm around the zom’s throat, and though the creature thrashed and fought, she was helpless.