Dust & Decay (Rot & Ruin, #2)(60)
“Benny …”
“Shhh.”
“No,” she insisted. “Look.”
He turned the wrong way first, and then faced her and followed the line she indicated with her outstretched bokken.
They were on a slope that led up to a shadowy mass of trees that he could barely see by starlight. There were far fewer zoms up there, the lines of them visibly thinning. However, that was not what Nix was pointing to. A figure stood at the top of the path. Benny had to blink the stinging smoke out of his eyes to make it out. At first it looked like a tall shrubbery, but then it moved to stand more fully in the starlight, and Benny gasped.
From the height, he judged the figure to be a man, but otherwise it was impossible to tell. It seemed like he was wearing a small tree, but then Benny realized that the man wore a long coat onto which leaves and pinecones had been sewn. His face was entirely covered by a round mask made up of oak leaves. Benny knew who it was, even in the dark. He knew him from Tom’s description and from his own Zombie Cards.
It was the Greenman. Zoms walked past him, staggering out of the forest; a few even bumped into him as they stumbled down the grassy path. The Greenman did not move except to raise a slender finger to the “lips” of his mask.
Benny and Nix fell silent and stood as still as statues. Below them the wind was blowing the fire toward the fall of rocks. It was not spreading into the hills, and Benny was grateful for small mercies. He didn’t want to cause even more problems for Tom, and he certainly didn’t want to start a forest fire.
It took a long time for the zoms to pass. Benny tried to count off the seconds and minutes just to keep from going crazy. He wanted to gather Nix in his arms and hug her hard enough to make them both scream. He wanted noise and peace at the same time. Anything but what was all around them.
Then it was over. The last of the zoms—a sad-faced man wearing the stained rags of a house painter’s coveralls—tottered past. He had a butcher knife buried in his chest, but the blade was pitted with rust. The creature turned an empty face toward Benny for a long moment, and despite all the terror that still crouched in his chest, Benny felt sorry for him. He almost said as much. Then the zombie vanished into the smoke and gloom down on the field.
Nix tugged his sleeve, and Benny looked up to see that the Greenman was beckoning them with slow movements of his hand. Then he turned and walked toward the woods without waiting to see if Benny and Nix were following.
“Who is that?” Nix asked. “Is that Lilah? What’s she wearing?”
Benny shook his head. “It’s the Greenman.”
“Why’s he dressed like that?”
“Tom says that he found some way to blend into the forest. Even the zoms don’t see him.” He lowered his sword and reached out his hand. “Come on.”
Nix sniffed back tears and took his hand, giving him one of her fierce squeezes. “Where’s Lilah?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I saw her run … but then I lost her.”
“Do—do you think she got out?”
“Absolutely,” he said carefully. “Lilah’s used to taking care of herself.” Though as he said it he was remembering the mad, desperate look in her eyes. He wondered about his own sanity. After all, he had just set an enormous fire and was pretty sure he had seen Charlie Pink-eye standing alive but unharmed in the middle of a field of zoms. Benny debated for less than half a millisecond about whether to tell Nix about this now, and realized that it was something best saved for daylight. At the moment they needed safety and time to check for injuries. The burn on Benny’s shoulder felt white hot, and he was not 100 percent positive that the carpet coats had saved them from the teeth of the living dead. They could both be infected, and that thought nearly dropped Benny in his tracks.
Nix grabbed his arm and pulled him. “Come on,” she said, and they hurried up the hill after the Greenman. However, when they got to the top of the hill and entered the forest path, the strange figure was gone.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Zombies and fire
When some people tell stories of First Night, they say that they used fire to scare off the zoms. They say that zoms won’t cross a line of fire, that they’ll retreat from a torch. They say that if a zom catches fire, it will run away. Tom says this is wrong.
He says that a zom will walk through fire. He says that they are attracted to its light and movement. He says that he’s seen burning zoms walk as far as a hundred yards before the heat did so much damage to muscles and tendons that they couldn’t walk anymore.
And he says that when the army nuked the big cities, waves of radioactive zoms kept coming, and people sometimes died from the intense radioactivity before the zoms could bite them.
What ARE they?
40
“SOMETHING’S COMING!” WHISPERED SALLY TWO-KNIVES.
Tom Imura got quickly to his feet, his fingers curled around the handle of his sword. They were huddled together under the eaves of an olive tree that grew amid a cluster of tall boulders. As he crept to the edge of the largest boulder, Tom heard the soft hiss of Sally drawing one of her knives. He tuned that out and focused on the darkened woods beyond. Before setting up their temporary camp, Tom had gathered armloads of frail twigs and scattered them along any likely path of approach. The snap of a twig had brought them both to full alertness.