Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(27)

dust from the carpet. Tom leaped onto the zombie’s back and used his knees to pin both shoulders to the floor.

“Close the door!” Tom barked as he pulled a spool of thin silk cord from his jacket pocket. He whipped the cord around the zombie’s wrists and shimmied down to bring both its hands

together to tie behind the creature’s back. He looked up. “The door, Benny—now!”

Benny came out of his daze and realized there was movement in his peripheral vision. He turned to see the old lady, the two little girls, and the zombie in his bathrobe, lumbering up the

garden path. Benny slammed the door and shot the bolt, then leaned against it, panting, as if he had been the one to wrestle a zombie to the ground and hog-tie it. With a sinking feeling he

realized that it had probably been his own shouted warning that had attracted the other zombies.

Tom flicked out a spring-bladed knife and cut the silk cord. He kept his weight on the struggling zombie while he fashioned a large loop, like a noose. The zombie kept trying to turn its

head to bite, but Tom didn’t seem to care. Maybe he knew that the zom couldn’t reach him, but Benny was still terrified of those gray rotted teeth.

With a deft twist of the wrist, Tom looped the noose over the zombie’s head, catching it below the chin, and then he jerked the slack, so the closing loop forced the creature’s jaws shut

with a clack. Tom wound more silk cord around the zombie’s head, so that the line passed under the jaw and over the crown. When he had three full turns in place, he tied the cord tightly.

He shimmied down the zombie’s body and pinned its legs and then tied its ankles together.

Then Tom stood up, stuffed the rest of the cord into his pocket, and closed his knife. He slapped dust from his clothes as he turned back to Benny.

“Thanks for the warning, kiddo, but I had it.”

“Um … holy sh—!”

“Language,” Tom interrupted quietly.

Tom went to the window and looked out. “Eight of ’em out there.”

“Do … do we … I mean, shouldn’t we board up the windows?”

Tom laughed. “You listen to too many campfire tales. If we started hammering nails into boards, the sound would call every living dead in the whole town. We’d be under siege.”

“But we’re trapped.”

Tom looked at him. “‘Trapped’ is a relative term,” he said. “We can’t go out the front. I expect there’s a back door. We’ll finish our business here and then we’ll sneak out nice

and quiet, and head on our way.”

Benny stared at him and then at the struggling zombie that was thrashing and moaning.

“You … you just …”

“Practice, Benny. I’ve done this before. C’mon, help me get him up.”

They knelt on opposite sides of the zombie, but Benny didn’t want to touch it. He’d never touched a corpse of any kind before, and he didn’t want to start with one that had just tried to

bite his brother.

“Benny,” Tom said, “he can’t hurt you now. He’s helpless.”

The word “helpless” hit Benny hard. It brought back the image of Old Roger—with no eyes, no teeth, and no fingers—and the two young women who tended to him. And the limbless torsos in

the wagon.

“Helpless,” he murmured. “God …”

“Come on,” Tom said gently.

Together they lifted the zombie. It was light—far lighter than Benny had expected—and they half-carried, half-dragged it into the dining room, away from the living room window. Sunlight

fell in dusty slants through the moth-eaten curtains. The ruins of a meal had long since decayed to dust on the table. They put it in a chair, and Tom produced the spool of cord and bound it

in place. The zombie continued to struggle, but Benny understood. The zombie was actually helpless.

Helpless.

The word hung in the air. Ugly and full of dreadful new meaning.

“What do we do with him?” Benny asked. “I mean … after?”

“Nothing. We leave him here.”

“Shouldn’t we bury him?”

“Why? This was his home. The whole world is a graveyard. If it was you, would you rather be in a little wooden box under the cold ground or in the place where you lived? A place where you

were happy and loved.”

Neither thought was appealing to Benny. He shivered even though the room was stiflingly hot.

Tom removed the envelope from his pocket. Apart from the folded erosion portrait, there was also a piece of cream stationery on which were several handwritten lines. Tom read through it

silently, sighed, and then turned to his brother.

“Restraining the dead is difficult, Benny, but it isn’t the hardest part.” He held out the letter. “This is.”

Benny took the letter.

“My clients—the people who hire me to come out here—they usually want something said. Things they would like to say themselves but can’t. Things they need said, so they can have closure.

Do you understand?”

Benny read the letter. His breath caught unexpectedly in his throat, and he nodded as the first tears fell down his cheeks.

His brother took the letter back. “I need to read it aloud, Benny. You understand?”