Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(6)

Working very fast, Benny snatched up a thick branch, broke it over his knee, and rammed one end deep into the closest wall slightly below waist height. He spun away and repeated the action with the other half of the branch on the opposite wall. Then he tied the silk cord to one stick and stretched it to the other and pulled it taut, tying it off as tightly as he could.

The zoms reached the silk cord and it stalled them for a moment. They rebounded and collided. Some reached for him with some residual cleverness, fingers trying to snag his clothes.

Most of the zoms were still twelve feet away, their progress slowed by the uneven surface and the broken bodies of their fellows over whom they had to step.

Benny had to smack and bash at the reaching hands, but he managed to slip free of their grasp. As he staggered away, he ran a few yards down the ravine, searching for more branches. There were none thick enough. He cursed under his breath but then found a chunk of broken rock about twice the size of a baseball. He snatched it up and turned back to his enemies.

Benny dashed forward and slammed downward with the rock.

“I’m sorry!” he cried as the rock shattered the skull and smashed the brain. The zombie died without a further twitch. Benny whirled as a second zom fell over the trip wire, and a third. He darted over to them and slammed down with the rock over and over again.

“I’m sorry,” he yelled each time he gave final death to one of the ghouls.

The passage was choked with zoms now. Two more fell and he killed them, but the effort of smashing skulls was difficult, and it was very quickly draining his strength.

The silk line creaked as a crowd of the living dead pressed against it.

Benny knew that it could not hold. There were too many of them, and the dirt walls were not densely packed enough to hold the branches. He drew his sword and began chopping at the dead behind the line, lopping off hands and arms, squatting to cut through ankles, rising to take heads. He tried to build a bulwark of bodies that would at least slow the advance of the entire horde.

Then, with a groan of splintering wood, the line gave and the whole mass of them surged forward in a collapsing melee. The zoms Benny had maimed and killed crashed down, and the others flopped down on them. He kept cutting, trying to bury the active zoms under the weight of as many quieted ones as possible.

The sword was incredibly sharp and Benny was a good swordsman, but this was work for a butcher’s cleaver. Time and again the blade rebounded from bone and tangled in loose clothing.

Benny’s arms began to ache and then to really hurt. His breath came in labored gasps, but still the dead kept coming.

So many of them. So many that Benny ran out of breath to apologize to them. He needed every bit of breath just to survive. He staggered backward, defeated by the sheer impossibility of the task of defeating so many zoms in such a confined space. Running seemed like the only option left. With any luck the ravine would narrow to a close at some point and a tight corner would allow for handholds to climb out.

He backed away, then spun and ran.

And skidded to an immediate stop.

The ravine ahead was not empty. Out of the dusty darkness came a swaying, moaning line of the living dead.

He was trapped.





5

“COME ON,” BENNY SAID AS THE DEAD ADVANCED TOWARD HIM, BUT even to his own ears there was no passion in his tone. No real challenge. No life.

And no way out.

The steep walls of the ravine were too high and the dirt too soft; and the narrow, snaking passage was blocked at both ends by the dead. All he had left were the few seconds it would take for them to climb over broken bodies and heaps of dirt to reach him.

This is it.

Those words banged like firecrackers in his head, loud and bright and terribly real.

There were too many of them and no real way to fight through; and even if he did, what then? He was still trapped down here in the dark. He had already killed ten of them and crippled another dozen, and in a stand-up fight he believed that he could cut at least five or six more of them down in the time he had left. Maybe as many as ten if he could somehow keep moving.

Sounded great, sounded very heroic, but Benny knew the irrefutable truth that swinging a sword required effort, and each time he delivered a killing blow he would spend some of the limited resources he had.

Zoms never tired.

Even if he killed thirty of them, the thirty-first or thirty-second would get him. They had the patience of eternity, and he was living flesh. Fatigue and muscle strain were as deadly to him as the teeth of the dead.

The knowledge of that, the shocking awareness of it, did not spark him into action. It did exactly the opposite. It took the heart from him, and with that went all the power in his muscles. He sagged back against the mud wall. His knees wanted to buckle.

Benny looked into the faces of the zoms as they shuffled closer to him. In those last moments he saw past the sun-bleached skin and desiccated flesh; past the rotting death and milky eyes. For just a moment he saw the people they had been. Not monsters. Real people. Lost people. People who had gotten sick, or who had been bitten, and who had died only to be reborn into a kind of hell beyond anything anyone should suffer.

But they eat people! Benny had once said to his brother, yelling the words during an argument on their first trip to the Ruin.

Tom had replied with five of the most damaging words Benny had ever heard.

They used to be people.

God.