“You finished the job at the Riley house.”
“Right. I headed out of town as fast as I could. I was pretty upset—not quite the stoic your big brother has become, I guess—and I needed some time to sort things out, to make some decisions about my life. About our lives, really. I took a different route back, sticking more to the high ground, because there are fewer zoms up there.”
“How come?”
“It’s a gravity thing. Unless a zom is following prey, if it’s walking, it’ll follow the path of least resistance. They don’t walk well, as you know. It’s more of a stagger, like they’re constantly falling forward and catching themselves with their next step. So if there’s any kind of slant to the ground, they’ll naturally follow it. In the Ruin we have to be careful in valleys and downlands. You’re ten times more likely to see a zom on the lowlands than in the hills, so I went high, almost to the snow line. I camped out in a barn one night and in the cab of an eighteen-wheel truck the next. Funny thing … The truck had been hauling a load of microwave ovens. Scavengers had torn through the boxes; the road was littered with ovens someone had smashed. Definitely humans at work there, because zoms wouldn’t be attracted to that kind of cargo.”
“What are microwave ovens?”
“Ovens that run on electricity,” Tom said. “Something I hope you’ll actually get to use one day if people can shake off the superstitious nonsense they’ve associated with electricity. Now, listen close, because this is where the story takes a turn.”
He and Benny both leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands curled around fresh cups of tea.
“That morning, after I left the truck, I found a dead zom in the middle of the road. Nothing too surprising about that, but it was the way it had been killed that intrigued me. Someone had come up on the zom from behind and slashed the back of one knee and the ankle of the other leg. Crude cuts, but effective. Took out the tendons and brought the zom down, and once it was down, they drove a knife into the back of its skull. As I said, this wasn’t a skillful job, but it was smart. An hour later I found another one, and then another. By the end of that day, I’d found eighteen zoms killed the same way. Some of the kills were weeks old, a couple were very fresh, but the method was always the same. Tendon cuts from behind and then the knife in the back of the skull. After about the fifth or sixth kill, I was pretty sure I knew something about this particular zombie hunter. Everyone who works out in the Ruin, anyone who kills on a regular basis, develops a style. They find a method that works for them, a way to get the job done easiest and with the least amount of risk, and they stick to it. After all, it’s not like the zoms can become aware of how hunters work, and change their tactics.”
“So … who was doing this?”
“Ah,” said Tom, “you just sailed past an obvious question.”
“What?”
“Think about it.”
Benny did, and then he got it. “Wait … you said that there weren’t many zoms in the high country, but you found a whole bunch of dead ones. So, why were there so many up there?”
“Right. That had been worrying me all day. At first I thought there was a community up there that had been overrun. If that was the case, I could be walking into real trouble. But then something occurred to me. When I thought back to each of the zoms that this particular hunter had killed, I realized they were all very similar. They were all men. Adult men, all over thirty, all fairly big—or as big as a desiccated zom can be.”
“Were they from a team or something? Or guys from an army base?”
“Good guesses, kiddo, but no. I went back to the most recent kills and followed their trails, backtracking them down to the lowlands. One was from a farm, the other from a service station. I climbed back into the hills and found another kill. A fairly fresh one, blood all over the place.”