“Good. Now, follow me. When I move, you move. When I stop, you stop. Step only where I step. Got it? Good.”
Tom led the way through the tall grass, moving slowly, shifting his position in time with the fluctuations of the wind. When Benny realized this, it became easier to match his brother’s movement, step for step. They entered the trees, and Benny could more easily hear the laughter of the three men. They sounded drunk. Then he heard the whinny of a horse.
A horse?
The trees thinned, and Tom hunkered down and pulled Benny down with him. The scene before them was something out of a nightmare. Even as Benny took it in, a part of his mind was whispering to him that he would never forget what he was seeing. He could feel every detail being burned into his brain.
Beyond the trees was a clearing bordered on two sides by switchbacks of the deep stream. The stream vanished around a sheer sandstone cliff that rose thirty feet above the treeline and reappeared on the opposite side of the clearing. Only a narrow dirt path led from the trees in which the Imura brothers crouched to the spit of land framed by stream and cliff. It was a natural clearing that gave the men a clear view of the approaches on all sides. A wagon with two big horses stood in the shade thrown by the birch trees. The back of the wagon was piled high with zombies that squirmed and writhed in a hopeless attempt to flee or attack. Hopeless, because beside the wagon was a growing pile of severed arms and legs. The zombies in the wagon were limbless cripples.
A dozen other zombies milled by the sandstone wall of the cliff, and every time one of them would lumber after one of the men, it was driven back by a vicious kick. It was clear to Benny that two of the men knew some kind of martial art, because they used elaborate jumping and spinning kicks. The more dynamic the kick, the more the others laughed and applauded. As Benny listened, he realized that as one stepped up to confront a zombie, the other two men would name a kick. The men shouted bets to one another and then rated the kicks for points. The two kick fighters took turns while the third man kept score by drawing numbers in the dirt with a stick.
The zombies had little hope of any effective attack. They were clustered on a narrow and almost water-locked section of the clearing. Far worse than that, each and every one of them was blind. Their eye sockets were oozing masses of torn flesh and almost colorless blood. Benny looked at the zombies on the wagon and saw that they were all blind as well.
He gagged, but clamped a hand to his mouth to keep the sound from escaping.
The standing zombies were all battered hulks, barely able to stay on their feet, and it was clear that this game had been going on for a while. Benny knew the zombies were already dead, that they couldn’t feel pain or know humiliation, but what he saw seared a mark on his soul.
“That one’s ’bout totally messed up!” yelled a dark-skinned man with an eye patch. “Load him up.”
The man who apparently didn’t know the fancy kicks picked up a sword with a heavy, curved blade. Benny had seen pictures of one in the book The Arabian Nights. A scimitar.
“Okay,” said the swordsman, “what’re the numbers?”
“Denny did his in four cuts in three point one seconds,” said Eye-patch.
“Oh, hell … I got that beat. Time me.”
Eye-patch dug a stopwatch out of his pocket. “Ready … Steady … Go!”
The swordsman rushed toward the closest zombie—a teenage boy who looked like he’d been about Benny’s age when he died. The blade swept upward in a glittering line that sheared through the zombie’s right arm at the shoulder, and then he checked his swing and sliced down to take the other arm. Instantly he pivoted and swung the sword laterally and chopped through both legs, an inch below the groin. The zombie toppled to the ground, and one leg, against all odds, remained upright.
The three men burst out laughing.