He backed away, then spun and ran.
And skidded to an immediate stop.
The ravine ahead was not empty. Out of the dusty darkness came a swaying, moaning line of the living dead.
He was trapped.
5
“COME ON,” BENNY SAID AS THE DEAD ADVANCED TOWARD HIM, BUT even to his own ears there was no passion in his tone. No real challenge. No life.
And no way out.
The steep walls of the ravine were too high and the dirt too soft; and the narrow, snaking passage was blocked at both ends by the dead. All he had left were the few seconds it would take for them to climb over broken bodies and heaps of dirt to reach him.
This is it.
Those words banged like firecrackers in his head, loud and bright and terribly real.
There were too many of them and no real way to fight through; and even if he did, what then? He was still trapped down here in the dark. He had already killed ten of them and crippled another dozen, and in a stand-up fight he believed that he could cut at least five or six more of them down in the time he had left. Maybe as many as ten if he could somehow keep moving.
Sounded great, sounded very heroic, but Benny knew the irrefutable truth that swinging a sword required effort, and each time he delivered a killing blow he would spend some of the limited resources he had.
Zoms never tired.
Even if he killed thirty of them, the thirty-first or thirty-second would get him. They had the patience of eternity, and he was living flesh. Fatigue and muscle strain were as deadly to him as the teeth of the dead.
The knowledge of that, the shocking awareness of it, did not spark him into action. It did exactly the opposite. It took the heart from him, and with that went all the power in his muscles. He sagged back against the mud wall. His knees wanted to buckle.
Benny looked into the faces of the zoms as they shuffled closer to him. In those last moments he saw past the sun-bleached skin and desiccated flesh; past the rotting death and milky eyes. For just a moment he saw the people they had been. Not monsters. Real people. Lost people. People who had gotten sick, or who had been bitten, and who had died only to be reborn into a kind of hell beyond anything anyone should suffer.
But they eat people! Benny had once said to his brother, yelling the words during an argument on their first trip to the Ruin.
Tom had replied with five of the most damaging words Benny had ever heard.
They used to be people.
God.
“Nix,” he said, feeling a wave of wretched guilt because he knew how much his death would hurt her. And how much it would disappoint her; but there did not seem to be anything he could do about that.
All of the zoms were close now. A knot of dead-pale faces fifteen feet away. Monsters coming for him in the dark, and yet the faces were not evil. Merely hungry. The mouths worked, but the eyes were as empty as windows that looked into abandoned houses.
“Nix,” he said again as the dead came closer and closer.
Each face that Benny saw looked . . . lost. Blank and without direction or hope. Farmers and soldiers, ordinary citizens, and one man dressed in a tuxedo. Beyond him was a girl in the rags of a dress that must once have been pretty. Peach silk with lace trim. She and the zom in the tuxedo looked like they had been about Benny’s age. Maybe a year or two older. Kids going to a prom when the world ended.
Benny looked from them to the sword he held, and he thought about what it would be like to be dead. When these zombies killed him and ate him, would there be enough of him left to reanimate? Would he join their company of wandering dead? He looked around at the ravine. There was no visible way out of this pit. Would he and all these dead be trapped down here, standing silently as the years burned themselves out above?
Yes.