Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(54)

“Sounds weird, right? But I’ve seen it a couple of times. It’s another one of the variations, and I can’t explain it any more than I can explain why they don’t rot away completely.”

Tom took a muffin and bit off a piece, chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then continued. “There were some military vehicles there, too, and I could tell there had been a huge battle.

Everything had been chopped by heavy caliber rounds or blasted by grenades and rockets. Even with that there were very few bodies, of course, because the dead would have reanimated. That’s

why we didn’t win the war. By the time the authorities realized that it was only damage to the motor cortex of the brain or to the brain stem that could permanently put them down, a lot of

the combat units had been overwhelmed by zoms they’d hit with body shots. I saw a couple of those early fights, and I saw machine gunners emptying their weapons at the walking dead,

chopping off arms and legs and tearing out huge chunks of hips and torsos, and the zoms just got back up and kept coming. Or they crawled toward the troops. I guess the soldiers permanently

dropped half of the zoms they faced, but some of the dead got up three, four times, advancing a little closer each time until … well, you know. We lost. There were plenty of bones, though,

skeletons from people that had been attacked by crowds of zombies and devoured, or from zoms that had been killed by head shots.”

“What about walkers?” Benny asked, referring to mobile zombies.

“Most of them must have followed survivors out of town. But … there were still plenty of zoms in town. As I walked along the streets I could see some inside of stores or houses. I counted

about twenty of them that had fallen into empty swimming pools and couldn’t climb out. Plus there were a lot of them stuck inside of cars. A few banged against the glass as I passed, but

they couldn’t do anything to me … though I moved away fast, so the noise didn’t attract the walkers. The worst, though, were zoms who were trapped under the wheels of cars, their legs or

hips crushed, so that they were alive from the waist up but stuck there forever.”

“God …,” Benny said. “Did you find the Rileys?”

“Sure. They were in their house, just like Jessie said they were. Front and back doors were closed. The family had owned a couple of big dogs—two German shepherds—and there’d been a

terrible fight in the living room. The Rileys must have turned on the animals, and the dogs fought like dogs will. They had old bites all over them. The father was missing his hands, and the

oldest son, Danny, had almost no throat left. The dogs made a fight of it, but …” He left the rest unsaid. “Because of the damage, the zoms were very weak. I tied them up and quieted them

without a fuss. I was in and out in twenty minutes.”

“Did you have to read a letter? From Nix’s mom?”

“Yes. She wrote a long letter. It was very …” Tom stopped, shook his head. “Jessie really loved her husband and sons. The letter was almost too hard to read, you know? By the time I was

finished, I was telling myself that I was done, that I would never—could never—do that sort of thing again.”

“But you still do.”

“I still do.”

“Do you like this stuff?”

Tom winced. “‘Like’? Only a psychopath would like to do what I do.”

“So why do it?”

“Because it needs being done. Someone has to—someone will—and if I don’t, then the people who do won’t necessarily bring any compassion to it. You’ve seen that. I’ve seen a whole lot

of it. Way too much.”

There was a burst of lightning and an immediate crack of thunder so loud that Benny jumped. Tom got up and peered through the slats in the shutters. “That was definitely a hit, but it was

in town.”

“Do you need to go out?”

“No,” Tom said as he returned to the table. “Not unless I’m called. Where were we?”

“You finished the job at the Riley house.”

“Right. I headed out of town as fast as I could. I was pretty upset—not quite the stoic your big brother has become, I guess—and I needed some time to sort things out, to make some

decisions about my life. About our lives, really. I took a different route back, sticking more to the high ground, because there are fewer zoms up there.”

“How come?”

“It’s a gravity thing. Unless a zom is following prey, if it’s walking, it’ll follow the path of least resistance. They don’t walk well, as you know. It’s more of a stagger, like they

’re constantly falling forward and catching themselves with their next step. So if there’s any kind of slant to the ground, they’ll naturally follow it. In the Ruin we have to be careful

in valleys and downlands. You’re ten times more likely to see a zom on the lowlands than in the hills, so I went high, almost to the snow line. I camped out in a barn one night and in the

cab of an eighteen-wheel truck the next. Funny thing … The truck had been hauling a load of microwave ovens. Scavengers had torn through the boxes; the road was littered with ovens someone

had smashed. Definitely humans at work there, because zoms wouldn’t be attracted to that kind of cargo.”