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 breath 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.