Dust & Decay (Rot & Ruin, #2)(29)

“We have to get out of here,” Benny whispered. He knew that the words were pointless, their meaning obvious, but there was a need in him to hear a human voice amid the dreadful wails of the dead.

A few hundred yards to their left, Benny and Nix could hear the shouts of Tom and Chong and the indignant snort of the huge animal that had chased them all from the road.

And then he understood. “God!” he gasped. “The rhino!”

“What?” Nix asked, and then she got it. “Oh!”

“Let’s get out of here.”

She dragged her forearm over her face to clear the blood from her eyes. “How?”

Benny licked his lips and took a firmer grip on his sword. “Fast and hard,” he said.

He swung his sword and smashed the closest of the zoms, cracking the hardwood edge of the bokken against its temple. It flopped to one side, and Benny jumped over it. A dozen withered hands grabbed at his sneakers and pants cuffs, but Benny kicked and stamped as if he was being swarmed by cockroaches.

“Come on!” he shouted, but Nix was already running past him. Her sword swished down and cracked and another zombie spun away, its jaw crushed.

They ran and struck and ran. The blood on Nix’s face scared Benny so much his heart felt like ice.

Had she been bitten?

His toe hurt terribly.

Are we bitten?

Are we dead? “Benny!” Nix screamed. “Fight!”

He bit down on his fear and swung the sword. It cracked against a reaching hand and shattered the wrist. He swung again and a zom who looked like he might have been a soldier flopped over on his back, his neck knocked askew. Benny swung and hit; Nix swung and hit; and all the time they screamed and moved and fought.

“That way!” cried Nix, shoving him with her shoulder. Benny pivoted to see a narrow gap in the sea of crawling monsters. He pushed her in front of him.

“Go!”

She went, running and jumping, her sword flashing in a brown blur, the crack! against old bone sounding like gunshots.

A pair of zoms—a grocery store clerk and a man in the tattered remains of a business suit—grabbed at him at the same time, each one clamping on to one of his ankles.

Benny staggered and fell. But as he landed he twisted as Tom had shown him, rotating his shins so that the angles of his bones exerted leverage on the thumbs of the grabbing hands. The businessman lost his grip, and Benny pivoted hard to shake loose the clerk, emphasizing his need with a crushing downward blow with the flat end of the sword handle. The zom’s skull shattered, and his hand opened with a dying twitch.

Benny scrambled to his feet and ran. Nix was fifty yards ahead of him, but he ran so fast that he’d nearly caught up by the time she reached the narrow gap.

“Go! Go!” he yelled, and together they crashed through the circle of broken zombies and into the trampled area where Chong had run. It felt like escaping from the arms of Death itself.

But the problem was far from over.

There was still the rhinoceros.

Chong was there, dodging in and around a stand of oaks as the rhino lunged between the trunks, trying to gore him with its horns. Only the lucky chance of the trees having grown so close together was keeping Chong alive.

Then they saw Tom standing with his pistol in a two-handed shooter’s grip.

“Shoot it in the eye!” Benny yelled as they closed in on where he stood.

Tom ignored him and called out to Chong, “I’m going to fire twice, and then I want you to run behind the trees. Head to your left and go as deep into the forest as you can.”

“No!” cried Nix.

Tom cut her a sharp look. “Why not?”

“We just came from there,” she panted. “Zoms!”

“Damn.”

“Tom! I need to get out of here!” begged Chong as he twisted away from the horn. This time it missed him by inches.

“Benny, Nix … head back to the road. Cross it and go into the other side. Find a tree you can climb and wait for me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just do it!”


Benny and Nix obeyed, but they ran only a dozen yards and then slowed to watch as Tom took a few steps toward the enraged rhino and aimed his gun.

“Sorry about this, old girl,” Tom said aloud.

The sound of the shot was strangely hollow. A pok! Benny expected it to be louder. The bullet hit the rhino in the shoulder. The creature howled, more in anger than in pain, but a second later it lunged at Chong.

Tom fired again, aiming at the creature’s muscular haunch. The rhino shrieked, and this time there was pain in its cry.

It turned with mad fury in its eyes … and charged Tom.

“Why doesn’t he shoot it in the eye?” demanded Nix, but Benny shook his head.

As the rhino rumbled past where they stood, Benny and Nix waved with silent urgency at Chong. He saw them, hesitated, looked at the retreating back of the rhino, and did nothing.

“Crap!” growled Benny. “He’s too scared to move.”

Then something pale rose up out of the weeds behind Chong.

“Lilah!” gasped Nix.

“Why didn’t you idiots climb a tree?” she demanded. “What was all that running around?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, and instead grabbed Chong’s shoulder and fairly dragged him along behind her. The four of them ran through the grass and shrubs toward the trees and then out onto the road.