Dust & Decay(33)

At the break they paused for a moment, looking around for Tom and Lilah. Benny spotted them, but they were on the other side of the rhino. Lilah was climbing into a cottonwood tree. Tom was circling to try and cut the animal’s line of approach to the wall of pines.

“Hey!” Tom yelled. “Here!” He jumped up and down, waving his arms. When he got no reaction, he fired a shot into the air. That did it. The rhino skidded to a stop and turned its vicious eye on this new target. Benny was hoping that the animal would be getting tired by now, chasing one thing and then another. No such luck.

“It looks really, really mad,” said Nix.

The rhinoceros snorted a challenge, pawed the ground like a bull, tensed, and then launched itself straight for Tom.

“Oh, crap,” said Benny, but he wasn’t talking about the danger Tom was in. Tom apparently had a plan. Tom always had a plan. No, he caught movement from the pines and saw Chong break cover to watch what Tom and the rhino were doing. The rhino twitched its head as it noticed Chong.

“Oh for the love of—,” Benny began, then saved his breath for running.

Chong was smarter than Benny, but in his panic he wasn’t using that brain. Rhinos were not like people, cats, dogs, and hunting birds. They weren’t predators. Despite the creature’s formidable strength and size, it was built for protection. Predators have eyes that look forward. Prey animals have eyes on the sides of their head. Usually that was to allow them to see threats creeping up from all sides. In this case …

Once more the rhino wheeled and circled back toward Chong, who screeched, wheeled, and ran back toward the screen of pines.

“Why does it keep going after Chong?” asked Nix as they ran.

“’Cause he keeps heading for those pines,” grunted Benny.

“Yeah, but why?”

Tom fired another shot. The rhino ignored him this time and kept charging toward Chong. Tom yelled louder and jumped up and down, but the rhino had its eyes fixed on Chong. “Not that way!”

Chong either couldn’t hear or was too scared to pay attention.

Benny and Nix headed into the overgrown firebreak, crashing through the chest-high weeds, heading at a sharp angle to cut into the pines behind Chong so they could lead him out. The edge of the pine screen was fifty yards away. Benny saw that the shrubs and plants around here were already flattened down by the rhino’s massive feet, as if it had passed that way a hundred times.

Benny was only a half step behind Nix. Then she screamed and suddenly pitched forward into the grass five feet in front of him. Benny had no way of stopping himself in time, and his foot caught on something and he was falling too. He landed on her legs, the impact punching a yelp of pain out of her.

“Oooof! Sorry!” he said as he rolled quickly to his left.

And looked right into the eyes of a zom.





20


BENNY SCREAMED.



Nix looked up. She saw the zombie … and screamed.

The zom lay in the tall weeds inches from them. It did not scream. It snarled.

Then it lurched forward and tried to bite Benny’s face.

Nix grabbed his shoulder and hauled him back, and the creature’s teeth bit only empty air where Benny’s cheek had been. Benny flung himself backward, pushing Nix and himself away from the rotting teeth of the zom and the reaching white hands, but he wasn’t fast enough. One hand closed around his left sneaker, and the teeth chomped down on the rubber toe. Benny howled in agony as his toe was crunched between the zom’s jagged teeth.

God! Am I bit? Am I bit? Am I bit? The litany of dread played over and over in his head.

He swung his right foot and kicked the zom in the face, once, twice, again and again. The creature was dressed in farmer’s coveralls and had huge hands and shoulders. Even crippled and dead, it was immensely strong. Benny kept kicking, putting all his weight and fear into it, feeling the shock of each impact shoot like hot needles up his shin. Old bone cracked and rotted teeth snapped and then he was free.

He pushed Nix away from the monster. She got to her feet and started to run, and immediately she screamed and fell. Benny scrabbled backward and turned to see a sight that threatened to tear the soul out of him. A second zom had crawled out of the weeds and attacked Nix. It had once been a huge woman, and it wore the black-and-white rags of a nun’s habit. There were two bullet holes in its cheeks, but they were ancient and the bullets had missed spine or brain. The zom had Nix pinned to the ground by the shoulders and was bending to take a bite that would destroy everything good and wonderful in Benny’s world.