“No, you don’t. I hope you will, though.”
“You talk about respect for the dead and yet you kill them.”
“This isn’t about the killing. It isn’t, and never should be, about the killing.”
“Then what?” Benny sneered. “The money?”
“Are we rich?”
“No.”
“Then it’s obviously not about the money.”
“Then what?”
“It’s about the why of the killing. For the living … for the dead,” Tom said. “It’s about closure.”
Benny shook his head.
“Come with me, kiddo. It’s time you understood how the world works. It’s time you learned what the family business is all about.”
8
THEY WALKED FOR MILES UNDER THE HOT SUN. THE PEPPERMINT GEL RAN off with their sweat, and had to be reapplied hourly. Benny was quiet for most of the trip, but as his feet got sore and his stomach started to rumble, he turned cranky.
“Are we there yet?”
“No.”
“How far is it?”
“A bit.”
“I’m hungry.”
“We’ll stop soon.”
“What’s for lunch?”
“Beans and jerky.”
“I hate jerky.”
“You bring anything else?” Tom asked.
“No.”
“Jerky it is, then.”
The roads Tom picked were narrow and often turned from asphalt to gravel to dirt.
“We haven’t seen a zom in a couple of hours,” Benny said. “How come?”
“Unless they hear or smell something that draws them, they tend to stick close to home.”
“Home?”
“Well … to the places they used to live or work.”
“Why?”
Tom took a couple of minutes on that. “There are lots of theories, but that’s all we have—just theories. Some folks say that the dead lack the intelligence to think that there’s anywhere other than where they’re standing. If nothing attracts them or draws them, they’ll just stay right where they are.”
“But they need to hunt, don’t they?”
“‘Need’ is a tricky word. Most experts agree that the dead will attack and kill, but it’s not been established that they actually hunt. Hunting implies need, and we don’t know that the dead need to do anything.”
“I don’t understand.”
They crested a hill and looked down a dirt road to where an old gas station sat beneath a weeping willow.
“Have you ever heard of one of them just wasting away and dying of hunger?” Tom asked.
“No, but—”
“The people in town think that the dead survive by eating the living, right?”
“Well, sure, but—”
“What ‘living’ do you think they’re eating?”
“Huh?”
“Think about it. There’re more than three hundred million living dead in America alone. Throw in another thirty-odd million in Canada and a hundred ten million in Mexico, and you have something like four hundred and fifty million living dead. The Fall happened fourteen years ago. So—what are they eating to stay alive?”
Benny thought about it. “Mr. Feeney says they eat each other.”
“They don’t,” said Tom. “Once a body has started to cool, they stop feeding on it. That’s why there are so many partially eaten living dead. They won’t attack or eat one another even if you locked them in the same house for years on end. People have done it.”
“What happens to them?”
“The trapped ones? Nothing.”
“Nothing? They don’t rot away and die?”
“They’re already dead, Benny.” A shadow passed over the valley and momentarily darkened Tom’s face. “But that’s one of the mysteries. They don’t rot. Not completely. They decay to a certain point, and then they just stop rotting. No one knows why.”
“What do you mean? How can something just stop rotting? That’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid, kiddo. It’s a mystery. It’s as much a mystery as why the dead rise in the first place. Why they attack humans. Why they don’t attack one another. All mysteries.”