Rot & Ruin (Rot & Ruin, #1)(64)

desk. Benny bent and picked it up. It was her diary. He pressed it to his chest.

“Nix,” he whispered.

“In here,” someone called, and Benny rushed out of Nix’s room to see the guards clustered around the entrance to Jessie Riley’s room. Benny pushed his way through the throng, but Strunk

grabbed his shoulder.

“You don’t want to go in there, kid.”

“Let me go. Tom!” With a wrench he tore free of Strunk’s grip and charged into the room. And stopped.

It was a small room. When he and Nix had been little, they’d played hide-and-seek in this house, and Nix’s mom’s room had always been too neat, too sparse to offer any good hiding places.

Now it was a ruin. The cheap dresser had been kicked to pieces, and all of Mrs. Riley’s clothes—pants and blouses, stockings and underwear—lay scattered on the floor, trampled by heavy

feet and stained with blood.

Tom sat on one corner of the collapsed bed. His pistol lay on the floor next to him. Jessie Riley lay curled against him. Benny could see that her face—always a kind and pretty face—was an

unrecognizable mass of bruises and torn flesh. One eye was puffed closed, the other with bright and glassy with shock. She clung to Tom, holding his chest and sleeve, as if they were all

that tethered her to this world. Her knuckles were red and torn. Like Nix, she had fought back, and fought hard.

“Mrs. Riley,” Benny said, but the woman showed no sign of having heard.

“Not now, Benny,” Tom murmured. “She needs to sleep.”

“Tom,” said Benny, “will she be okay?”

Tom slowly raised his head, and from the lost and broken look in his eyes, Benny knew that nothing was ever going to be okay. That time had passed when men with brutal fists and empty hearts

had invaded this home.

“We have medics, Tom,” said the captain.

Tom shook his head. “Give me a sliver.”

A sliver. A simple word, and yet to Benny, it was so ugly that it made him want to scream. The thing Tom wanted was a six-inch length of polished metal, flat on one end for pushing, sharp

and narrow on the other for piercing. Everyone on the town watch had a holster full of them. Tom never carried one. He used the black-bladed dagger he kept in his boot. Benny had seen him do

it, but Tom did not want to use that knife now. Not for this.

“Oh, no …,” Benny protested as Captain Strunk slid one out of a pack strapped to his gun belt and offered it to Tom.

Tom nodded, and then glanced at the door and back up at Strunk. Immediately the captain turned and ushered everyone outside, although they lingered in the hall. Benny stayed right where he

was.

He said to Tom, “Maybe she’ll get better, Tom. Maybe you’re wrong.”

“No,” said Tom in a ragged voice. “She’s already gone.”


And Benny saw it then. The hands that clutched Tom were held in place only by the fingers caught in the folds of his shirt, but the knuckles were slack and the elbows sagged under their own

empty weight. Tom hugged her closer to him, and as he did so, her dead hands fell away, opening like dying flowers on the edge of the bed. Tom held her with one hand and reached around

behind her to place the tip of the sliver against the base of her skull.

Everyone who died came back as a zombie. No matter how, no matter who. Everyone.

“Go outside, Benny.”

“I … can’t.”

“Benny … please!”

Benny backed away only as far as the doorway, but he could not make himself leave.

Tom closed his eyes, first lightly, as if asleep. And then he squeezed them shut with all of his might, as if lost in a terrible nightmare in which he was unable to scream. His lips curled

back from his teeth, and his chest heaved—once, twice—and then there was a flash of silver.

Jessie Riley never returned from death. She had suffered enough and would be spared that last indignity.

Benny stood in the doorway for several minutes as Tom sat on the edge of the bed and rocked her back and forth in his arms. Tom did not weep, did not cry out. Instead he ate his pain, biting

down on it hard enough to drive all of the poison deep into his soul. Benny understood that. Maybe there would be some other time when that rage could be allowed out. But not now, and not

here.

Not with Nix out there somewhere.

After a long time, Tom lay Jessie down and tugged the sheets around her, so that she was completely covered. He got shakily to his feet and stood over her, head bowed, and Benny saw his

brother’s lips moving. Was it a prayer or a promise?

Benny said nothing. He knew that he was an outsider to this, an intruder into Tom’s privacy … but he could not leave. He could not abandon his brother any more than Tom could abandon Nix’

s mother.

When Tom turned to him, his face was calm. Or at least it appeared to be calm. Benny wasn’t sure if his brother’s air of unshakeable poise was genuine or a mask he wore when he needed to

fend off the rest of the world. Before now, that calm demeanor had annoyed Benny; now it unnerved him. It seemed so alien, so unnatural.

Tom passed Benny and went out into the living room, where the town watch was making a thorough examination of the crime scene. One of them, the short Navajo named Gorman, snapped his