Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(28)

Benny nodded again.

Tom angled the letter into the dusty light, and read:

My dear Harold. I love you and miss you. I’ve missed you so desperately for all these years. I still dream about you every night, and each morning I pray that you’ve found peace. I forgive

you for what you tried to do to me. I forgive you for what you did to the children. I hated you for a long time, but I understand now that it wasn’t you. It was this thing that happened. I

want you to know that I took care of our children when they turned. They are at peace, and I put flowers on their graves every Sunday. I know you would like that. I have asked Tom Imura to

find you. He’s a good man, and I know that he will be gentle with you. I love you, Harold. May God grant you His peace. I know that when my time comes, you will be waiting for me. Waiting

with Bethy and little Stephen, and we will all be together again in a better world. Please forgive me for not having the courage to help you sooner. I will always love you.

Yours forever,

Claire

Benny was weeping when Tom finished. He turned away and covered his face with his hands, and sobbed. Tom went over and hugged him and kissed his head.

Then Tom stepped away, took a breath, and pulled a second knife from his boot. This one, Benny knew, was Tom’s favorite: a double-edge, black dagger with a ribbed handle and a six-and-a-

half-inch-long blade. Benny didn’t think he would be able to watch, but he raised his head and saw Tom as he placed the letter on the table in front of Harold Simmons and smoothed it out.

Then he moved behind the zombie and gently pushed its head forward, so that he could place the tip of his knife against the hollow at the base of the skull.

“You can look away if you want to, Benny,” he said.

Benny did not want to look, but he didn’t turn away.

Tom nodded. He took another breath and then thrust the blade into the back of the zombie’s neck. The blade slid in with almost no effort into the gap between spine and skull, and the

razor-sharp edge sliced completely through the brain stem.

Harold Simmons stopped struggling. His body didn’t twitch; there was no death spasm. He just sagged forward against the silken cords and was still. Whatever force had been active in him,

whatever pathogen or radiation or whatever had taken the man away and left behind a zombie, was gone.

Tom cut the cords that held Simmons’s arms and raised each hand, placing it on the table, so that the dead man’s palms held the letter in place.

“Be at peace, brother,” said Tom.

He wiped his knife and stepped back. He looked at Benny, who was openly sobbing.

“This is what I do, Benny.”





13


FOR FIVE DAYS AFTER THEY GOT BACK, BENNY DID NOTHING. In the mornings he sat in the backyard, invisible in the cool shade of the house as the sun rose in the east. When the sun was overhead,

Benny went inside and sat in his room and stared out the window. As the sun set he’d go downstairs and sit on the top step of the porch. He didn’t say more than a dozen words. Tom cooked

meals and laid them out, and sometimes Benny ate and sometimes he didn’t.

Tom did not try to force a conversation. Each night he gave Benny a hug and said, “We can talk tomorrow if you want to.”

Nix came over on the third day. When Benny saw her standing on the other side of the garden gate, he just gave her a single small nod. She came in and sat down next to him.

“I didn’t know you were back,” she said.

Benny said nothing.

“Are you okay?”

Benny shrugged, but kept silent.

Nix sat with him for five hours and then went home.

Chong and Morgie came by with gloves and a ball, but Tom met them at the garden gate.

“What’s up with Benny?” Chong asked.

Tom sipped from a cup of water and squinted at sun-drowsy honeybees, hovering over the hedge. “He needs a little time, is all.”

“For what?” asked Morgie.

Tom didn’t answer. The three of them looked across to where Benny sat staring at the grass that curled around the edges of his sneakers.

“He just needs some time,” Tom repeated.

They went away.

Nix came again the next day. And the next.

On the sixth morning she brought a straw basket filled with blueberry muffins that were still hot from the oven. Benny accepted one, sniffed it, and ate it without comment.

A pair of crows landed on the fence, and Benny and Nix watched them for almost an hour.

Benny said, “I hate them.”

Nix nodded, knowing that the comment wasn’t about the crows or anything else they could see. She didn’t know who Benny meant, but she understood hate. Her mother was crippled by it. Nix

could not remember a single day when her mother didn’t find some reason to curse Charlie Pink-eye or damn him to hell.

Benny bent and picked up a stone, and for a moment he looked at the crows, as if he was going to throw the rock at them, the way he and Morgie always did. Not to hurt the birds, but to scare

a noise from them. Benny weighed the stone in his palm, then opened his fingers to let it tumble to the grass.

“What happened out there?” Nix said, asking the question that had hung burning in the air for a week.

It took Benny ten minutes to tell her about the Rot and Ruin. But Benny didn’t just talk about zoms. Instead he talked about three bounty hunters on a rocky cleft by a stream in the