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“I—I—,” Big Zak croaked, but there wasn’t enough left of his throat to manage more. He took a single trembling step out onto the porch and then fell right on top of Benny. The big man’s weight crushed Benny to the porch boards, driving all the air from his lungs, banging his head hard enough to fill the world with fireworks.
“Benny!” Nix screamed.
He heard his own voice screaming too.
Benny stared up at Big Zak’s face, which was an inch from his. There were scrapes and cuts all over it, and his eyes were wild with pain and terror. Benny struggled to push the crushing weight off of him.
“H-help … me …,” the man croaked. “P-please …”
And then the mad light went out of Big Zak’s eyes. All his weight sagged down, empty of tension, of control. Of life.
Benny panicked, wanting that slack, dead weight off him. He desperately shifted his hip under Big Zak and twisted his hips to move the dead man’s mass. As he worked the wrestling move, he wondered why Nix wasn’t helping. She was right there… .
As if on cue, Nix yelled, “Benny! Watch out!”
Big Zak’s body slid partially off him, and Benny kicked his way out. “It’s a little late for ‘watch out’!” he snapped. “I already—”
But Nix was rushing at him with her bokken held high, her face twisted into a mask of mingled hate and fear.
“No!” he yelled. He scrambled backward and collided …
… into Zak.
Benny whirled and looked into the face of his former friend.
Into the pale, dark-eyed, and blood-smeared face of the thing that been Zak Matthias.
With a snarl of insatiable hunger, Zak lunged for Benny’s throat.
7
EVERYTHING SEEMED TO HAPPEN MUCH TOO FAST.
Zak grabbed the front of Benny’s shirt with icy white fingers and pulled. Benny jammed his palms against Zak’s chest just in time. Zak’s teeth snapped together an inch from Benny’s windpipe. Benny shrieked in terror. Zak moaned in hunger and frustration.
“Benny! Down!”
Suddenly there was a flash of brown hardwood and a sound like a watermelon falling off a wagon onto asphalt. Zak and Benny fell in opposite directions. Benny’s head hit the floor again, harder. Zak pitched backward away from him, his face gone, replaced by an inhuman mask of blood and damaged tissue.
Benny felt like his own head was shattered. He heard a voice screaming his name.
Nix?
Benny tried to say her name, but the world spun around him and all his internal lights went dark.
8
“BENNY—GET UP!”
The voice was a million miles away.
“Benny!”
His numb brain gave the voice a name. Nix. And … she was yelling at him. Why was she yelling? He tried to ask her, but it came out as a mumble of soft nonsense words.
Then she was pulling at him. Shaking him.
He cranked open one eye. It was like lifting a hundred pounds of bricks.
