Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(4)

The next morning Benny and Chong went to the far side of town and applied as fence technicians.

The fence ran for hundreds of miles and encircled the town and its harvested fields, so this meant a lot of walking while carrying yet another grumpy old guy’s toolbox. In the first three

hours they got chased by a zom who had squeezed through a break in the fence.

“Why don’t they just shoot all the zoms who come up to the fence?” Benny asked their supervisor.

“’Cause folks would get upset,” said the man, a scruffy-looking guy with bushy eyebrows and a tic at the corner of his mouth. “Some of them zoms are relatives of folks in town, and those

folks have rights regarding their kin. Been all sorts of trouble about it, so we keep the fence in good shape, and every once in a while one of the townsfolk will suck up enough intestinal

fortitude to grant permission for the fence guards to do what’s necessary.”

“That’s stupid,” said Benny.

“That’s people,” said the supervisor.

That afternoon Benny and Chong walked what they were sure were a million miles, had been peed on by a horse, stalked by a horde of zoms—Benny couldn’t see anything at all in their dusty

eyes—and yelled at by nearly everyone.

At the end of the day, as they shambled home on aching feet, Chong said, “That was about as much fun as getting beaten up.” He thought about it for a moment. “No … getting beaten up is

more fun.”

Benny didn’t have the energy to argue.

There was only one opening for the next job—“carpet coat salesman”—which was okay because Chong wanted to stay home and rest his feet. Chong hated walking. So Benny showed up, neatly

dressed in his best jeans and a clean T-shirt, and with his hair as combed as it would ever get without glue.

There wasn’t much danger in selling carpet coats, but Benny wasn’t slick enough to get the patter down. Benny was surprised they’d be hard to sell, because everybody had a carpet coat or

two. Best thing in the world to have on if some zoms were around and feeling bitey. What he discovered, though, was that everyone who could thread a needle was selling them, so the

competition was fierce, and sales were few and far between. The door-to-door guys worked on straight commission, too.

The lead salesman, a greasy joker named Chick, would have Benny wear a long-sleeved carpet coat—low knap for summer, shag for winter—and then use a device on him that was supposed to

simulate the full-strength bite of an adult male zom. This metal “biter” couldn’t break the skin through the coat—and here Chick rolled into his spiel about human bite strength, throwing

around terms like PSI, avulsion, and postdecay dental-ligament strength—but it pinched really hard, and the coat was so hot, the sweat ran down under Benny’s clothes. When he went home

that night, he weighed himself to see how many pounds he’d sweated off. Just one, but Benny didn’t have a lot of pounds to spare.

“This one looks good,” said Chong over breakfast the next morning.

Benny read out loud from the paper. “‘Pit Thrower.’ What’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Chong said with a mouth full of toast. “I think it has something to do with barbecuing.”

It didn’t. Pit throwers worked in teams, dragging dead zoms off the backs of carts and tossing them into the constant blaze at the bottom of Brinkers Quarry. Most of the zoms on the carts

were in pieces. The woman who ran orientation kept talking about “parts,” and went on and on about the risk of secondary infection; then she pasted on the fakest smile Benny had ever seen

and tried to sell the applicants on the physical fitness benefits that came from constant lifting, turning, and throwing. She even pulled up her sleeve and flexed her biceps. She had pale

skin with freckles as dark as liver spots, and the sudden pop of her biceps looked like a swollen tumor.

Chong faked vomiting into his lunch bag.

The other jobs offered by the quarry included ash soaker—“because we don’t want zom smoke drifting over the town, now, do we?” asked the freckly muscle freak. And pit raker, which was

exactly what it sounded like.

Benny and Chong didn’t make it through orientation. They snuck out during the slide show of smiling pit throwers handling gray limbs and heads.

One job that was neither disgusting nor physically demanding was crank generator repairman. Ever since the lights went out in the weeks following First Night, the only source of electrical

power was hand-cranked portable generators. There were maybe fifty in all of Mountainside, and Chong said that they were left over from the mining days of the early twentieth century. Town

ordinance forbade the building of any other kind of generator. Electronics and complex machines were no longer allowed in town, because of a strong religious movement that associated that

kind of power with the “Godless behavior” that had brought about “the end.” Benny heard about it all the time, and even some of his friends’ parents talked that way.

It made no sense to Benny. It wasn’t electric lights and computers and automobiles that had made the dead rise. Or, if it was, then Benny had never heard anyone make a logical or sane

connection between the two. When he asked Tom about it, his brother looked pained and frustrated. “People need something to blame,” Tom said. “If they can’t find something rational to