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She had something embroidered on the front of her shirt in white thread, but Benny could not make out the design.
He and his friends had not met a living person in weeks, and out here in the badlands they were more likely to meet a violently hostile loner than a friendly stranger. He waited to see if the woman had spotted him.
She walked a few paces into the field and stared down the slope toward a line of tall bristlecone pines. Even from this distance Benny could tell that the woman was beautiful. Regal, like pictures of queens he had seen in old books. Olive-skinned, with masses of gleaming black hair that fluttered in the same breeze that stirred the crimson streamers.
Sunlight struck silver fire from an object she raised from where it hung on a chain around her neck. Benny was too far away to tell what it was, though he thought it looked like a whistle. However, when the woman put it to her lips and blew, there was no sound at all, but suddenly the birds and monkeys in the trees began twittering with great agitation.
Then something else happened, and it sent a thrill of fear through Benny and drove all other thoughts out of his mind. Three men stepped out of the woods behind the woman. Their clothes also fluttered in the wind, but for them it was because the things they wore had been ripped to rags by violence, by weather, and by the inexorable claws of time.
Zoms.
Benny got to his feet very slowly. Quick movements attracted the dead. The zoms were a dozen feet behind the woman and lumbering toward her. She seemed totally unaware of their presence as she continued to try and make sounds from her whistle.
Several more figures stepped out of the shadows under the trees. More of the dead. They kept emerging into the light as if conjured from nightmares by his growing fear. There was no choice. He had to warn her. The dead were almost upon her.
“Lady!” he yelled. “Run!”
The woman’s head jerked up, and she stared across the swaying grass to where he stood. For a moment all the zoms froze in place as they searched for the source of the yelling voice.
“Run!” yelled Benny again.
The woman turned away from him and looked at the zoms. There were at least forty of them, and more were materializing from the darkness under the trees. The zoms moved with the jerky awkwardness that Benny always found so awful. Like badly manipulated puppets. Their hands rose as they reached out for fresh meat.
However, the woman turned slowly away from them and faced Benny once more. The zoms reached her.
“No . . . ,” Benny gasped, unable to bear the sight of another death.
And the zombies lumbered past her. She stood there as a tide of them parted to move around her. They did not grab her, did not try to bite her. They ignored her except to angle their line of approach to avoid her and continue walking down the slope.
Toward Benny.
Not one of them touched the woman or even looked in her direction.
Confusion rooted Benny to the spot, and the sword hung almost forgotten in his hand.
Was he wrong about her? Was she one of the dead and not a living person at all? Was she wearing cadaverine? Or was there something else about her that made the dead forgo the feast at hand for the one that stood gaping at them down the slope?
Run!
The word exploded inside his mind, and for a crazy moment Benny thought that it was Tom’s voice shouting at him.
He staggered as if punched, and then he wheeled around and ran.
3
HE RAN LIKE HELL.
This was no time to contemplate mysteries. He pounded down the slope faster than a jackrabbit as the mass of the dead growled out a moan of hunger and followed.
A zom rose up out of the tall grass directly in his path. There was no way to avoid the thing, not with all the momentum of the downward run, so he tucked his head and drove his shoulder into it like he w
as trying to bust through a line of offensive backs on the school football field. The zom went flying backward, and Benny leaped over the thrashing creature.
More zoms came at him, rising up out of the weeds and staggering out from behind tumbled boulders. Benny still held Tom’s sword, but he hated using it on zoms. Not unless he had no choice. These creatures were not evil, they were dead. Mindless. Unless he could completely quiet one of them, chopping at them seemed . . . wrong. He knew they couldn’t feel pain and wouldn’t care, but Benny felt like some kind of malicious bully.
On the other hand, there was that whole survival thing. As three zoms closed in on him in a line he could not bull his way through, the hand holding the sword moved almost without conscious thought. The blade swept upward through one set of reaching arms, and the hands flew high above, grasping nothing but air. With a deft twist of his shoulder, he flicked the blade sideways and a zom’s head went flying into the bushes. Another cut left the third zom toppling to one side with one leg suddenly missing from mid-thigh.
“Sorry!” Benny yelled as he burst through the now disintegrating line of three zoms.
