Tom turned to him as if that was the question he’d been waiting for all day. “It keeps me sane,” he said. “Do you understand?”
Benny thought about it for a long moment. Birds sang in the trees and the cicadas buzzed continually. “Is it because you knew what the world was before?”
Tom nodded.
“Is it because if you didn’t do it … then maybe no one would?”
Tom nodded again.
“It must be lonely.”
“It is.” Tom glanced at him. “But I always hoped you’d want to join me. To help me do what I do.”
“I … don’t know if I can.”
“That’s always going to be your choice. If you can, you can. If you can’t, then believe me, I’ll understand. It takes a lot out of you to do this. And it takes a lot out of you to know that the bounty hunters are out there, doing what they do.”
“How come none of them ever came here?”
“They did. Once.”
“What happened?”
Tom shrugged.
“What happened?” Benny asked again.
“I was here when they came. Pure chance.”
Benny looked at him. “You … killed them,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
Tom walked a dozen steps before he said, “Not all of them.” A half dozen steps later he added, “I let one of them go.”
“That was Charlie, wasn’t it? That’s what he was talking about.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you let him go?”
“To spread the word,” Tom said. “To let the other bounty hunters know that this place was off-limits.”
“And they listened? The bounty hunters?”
Tom smiled. It wasn’t boastful or malicious. It was a thin, cold knife-blade of a smile that was there and gone. “Sometimes you have to go to some pretty extreme lengths to make a point and to make it stick. Otherwise you find yourself having to make the same point over and over again.”
Benny stared at him. “How many were there?”
“Ten.”
“And you let one go.”
“Yes.”
“And you killed nine of them?”
“Yes.” The late afternoon sunlight slanting through the trees threw dappled light on the road and painted the sides of all of the houses to their left with purple shadows. A red fox and three kits scampered across the street ahead of them. “I let the wrong one go.”
“How could you have known? With one of the other guys, even Vin or Joey … It might not have been any different.”
“Maybe. But I don’t get to play that game. I made a choice, and a lot of people suffered because of it.”
“Tom … when you made that choice, you’d already beaten Charlie, right?”
“Yes. He was hurt and disarmed.”
“Then you did the right thing, I think. You can’t know the future. You believed him when he said that he’d change his ways, right?”
Tom nodded.
Benny said, “I would have done the same thing, Tom, because I don’t ever want to live in a world where something like mercy … or maybe it’s compassion … is the wrong choice. Just ’cause Charlie said you were wrong to let him live, it doesn’t make him right.”
Tom didn’t answer, but he nodded and gave his brother a small, sad smile. They stood there, taking each other’s measure perhaps for the very first time. Taking each other’s measure and getting the right values.
Tom pointed, and Benny turned toward the front door of a house with peach trees growing wild in the yard. “This is it.”
“There’s a zombie in there?”
“Yes,” Tom said. “There are two.”
“We have to tie them up?”
“No. That’s already been done. Years ago. Nearly every house here has a dead person in it. Some have already been quieted, the rest wait for family members to reach out and want it done.”