Dust & Decay(123)

“Keys,” he said. The man very carefully dug into his pocket and then gingerly held out a ring of keys. Tom snatched them from him and tossed the ring to Chong. “Get them into the hall.”

While Chong rushed to free the captives, Tom walked forward, making the guard stumble backward until the man’s back hit the wall. Tom stopped, his face an inch from the terrified guard’s. “You know who I am?”

“Yes … oh God … please don’t … I know who you are … don’t …”

Tom bared his teeth. “Where’s my brother?”





74


BENNY PRESSED NIX BACK AGAINST THE WALL AS THE FIRST OF THE DARK shapes moved toward them. The pit they were in was thirty feet across, with large blank sections of wall interspersed with side tunnels. The torches were too high to reach.



“Mattress!” Nix blurted, and they rushed over to the stack of rotten old mattresses and began dragging them toward the tunnel with the zoms.

Benny squatted and upended one and used it to block them from view. “Might not stop them,” he warned. “And my cadaverine’s worn off.”

“Better than nothing,” she grunted as she dragged another one over and pulled it upright. There were only three mattresses, but they nicely blocked half the tunnels. “Maybe it’ll confuse them, slow them down.”

Benny jerked his head toward one of the open tunnels. There was no movement in that one, but torchlight spilled down from another opening around the far bend. Benny pulled Nix inside, and they peered up to see if White Bear or the crowd could see them. The crowd booed and yelled for the dead to go fetch their dinner.

“I think we’re good,” whispered Nix. Immediately she pulled out the tails of her shirt and reached inside her clothes. Benny did the same, and they knelt down and placed several hidden items on the ground. When the guards had locked them in the empty hotel room, they had thought that the two teenagers were helpless; but Tom had spent the last seven months teaching them to never be helpless. He said that in ancient times a samurai warrior was never unarmed, even if he had no sword, knives, or spear.

“All weapons are made,” he once told them. “They’re fabricated from the things we find: wood, metal, rope, leather, stone. Nature always provides, but only a smart warrior can look at what circumstance offers and see the potential.”

While waiting for White Bear to come and take them to the pits, Benny and Nix had looked at what the room had to offer: an old light fixture, crumbling plaster walls, dry laths, a window. Now on the ground in front of them they examined what circumstance had provided. They had several lengths of broken lath—thin, narrow strips of some straight-grained wood; several yards of copper-cored electrical wire; and long pieces of jagged window glass wrapped in torn strips from their shirts—strips whose absence was hidden by their vests. All their pockets were filled with plaster dust.

There was a loud moan from around the bend. One of the zoms had reached the end of the first tunnel. The crowd began cheering. Benny hoped the wall of mattresses would confuse the zoms. Every second mattered to Benny and Nix.

“Hurry,” breathed Nix.

They worked as fast as they could. They placed layers of jagged glass between strips of lath and used the wire to bind it in place. Benny wrapped the wire around and around as tightly as he could. While he did that, Nix used another piece of glass to slash strips from their pant legs and then poured the white plaster powder into pouches made from those strips. When she was done, she and Benny swapped jobs. She took the makeshift glass-bladed hatchets and used more strips of their jeans to bind the laths from end to end, wrapping them the way an ancient weapons maker would wrap the haft of a war ax. Benny took the pouches and tied loose knots in them and began stuffing them in his pockets.

There was a soft thud as one of the mattresses fell into the main pit. A second later a white hand grabbed the corner of the mattress wall, and then a lifeless face moved into view. Black eyed and black mouthed, it moved past the temporary obstruction, then turned toward them and moaned. The sound was answered by other moans behind it.

Benny and Nix snatched up their weapons and began backing away. There was another chorus of moans. This time the sounds were behind them, coming from another tunnel. Benny turned sharply and saw three zombies stagger around the far bend, their dead faces painted yellow by torchlight.

Far above the crowd howled, and a commentator began calling out what was happening to those members of the crowd who couldn’t see. “Looks like we’re coming up on round one, folks,” he yelled in a fast-paced, high-pitched voice. “And oh! Here’s a twist: Somehow our two competitors have managed to sneak in some weapons.”