But Vin shook his head. His will was broken enough to refuse to fight, but his fear of Charlie was greater than his fear of Tom. Still shaking his head, he backed away and then turned and ran full-tilt into the deep grass. Benny could hear him yelling in Vietnamese to Joey, and soon Joey Duk broke from the woods and ran in Vin’s wake.
“Shouldn’t we follow?” Benny asked, but he didn’t need an answer. Between them and the fleeing Mekong brothers were at least a hundred zoms. And more came shuffling out of the woods. Not just hundreds but thousands.
All around the truck, white hands reached up toward them. They were safe only as long as they stood in the center of the truck’s overturned side. But they couldn’t stay there forever. Tom looked up and down the row.
“What do we do?” Benny whispered, although in truth there was no longer any reason for silence. Every zom in the region knew where they were. For once Tom did not have a ready answer. His face was almost as pale as the monsters that reached and moaned for their flesh.
“We have no choice,” Tom said. “We have to run down the tops of the cars, as far and as fast as we can. We have to get to a point where the zoms are thin on the ground and then make a break for the meadow. I think I know where Vin and Joey are going. Charlie’s camp is up on that mountain.” He pointed to a craggy lump of granite in the distance.
Benny looked at the row of cars. Some of them were compact cars that were so low to the ground that even standing on the roof, they’d be within grabbing range.
“We’ll never make it,” he said.
Tom shook his head. “We have to try, Ben. No other choice. You go first. It’ll be easier if I’m behind you, in case you get into trouble. Run fast; plan your jumps to land in the widest, flattest places; and keep moving.” He drew his sword. “I’ll be right behind you.”
A cold hand closed around his ankle, and Benny screamed and kicked his foot loose. It was all the incentive he needed. He looked down the row. Past the Escalade there was a mix of sedans and SUVs. They looked like a miniature mountain range. There were zoms on both sides of the outer row of cars, but fewer on the inner rows. He pointed this out to Tom, who nodded.
“Good call, kiddo. Now, go, go, GO!”
Benny took two running steps and jumped over a sea of reaching hands. He heard and felt the dry rasp of desiccated fingers brushing against his ankles and shoes. He landed with a thump on the hood of the Escalade, barely remembering to bend his knees to absorb the shock. Zoms lunged over the hood at him, but Benny swatted their hands away with a fierce slash of his bokken and ran up the windshield, along the roof, and then jumped onto a burned-out shell of a Subaru. Then onto a boxy Scion that was high enough to keep the hands away from him, but the next three cars were compacts. He ran and slashed, ran and slashed, feeling the shock as his sword connected with dried tendon and brittle bone. One zom rose up in front of him, its mouth open to reveal two rows of broken and jagged teeth. Benny swung the bokken, and the mouth disintegrated into white chips of bone. He had a lingering image of empty black eyes glaring at him as the zombie fell away into the hands of its fellow inmates of the living hell to which they belonged.
He heard Tom’s feet pounding behind him and the occasional clean whoosh of the katana as it did its deadly work.
Then three things happened all at the same time that changed everything in Benny’s life, then and forever.
First, out of the corner of his eye, he saw two shapes break from the cover of the fields to his left. One was huge and burly, with skin as pale as any zom and one eye that burned with red fire. Charlie Pink-eye. And the other was slim and sun-freckled, with masses of red curls and bare feet that slapped the ground, heedless of rocks and nettles.
“NIX!” Benny yelled and at the same time she screamed his name.
“BENNY!” she cried. “IT’S A TRAP!”