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“Maybe,” said Benny. “That’s what it kind of looked like.”
“For calling zoms?”
“I never said she called the zoms. I’m telling you what I saw.”
“Okay,” said Chong.
“Okay,” said Benny.
They watched the zoms.
“Real question,” said Chong, “so don’t hit me.”
“Okay.”
“How was it down there? Was it bad?”
“It was bad.”
“Are . . . you okay?”
Benny shrugged.
“Did you see any fast ones?” asked Chong.
“A couple.”
“Jeez.”
“Yeah.”
All their lives there had been only one kind of living dead. Slow, mindless, shuffling zoms. It was the way it was—a zom was a zom was a zom. Then last month, while Benny and Nix were on the way to Gameland, they had encountered zombies who moved faster. Not really as fast as a healthy human, but at least twice as fast as any zom Benny had ever heard about.
That ugly fact was just one of several things about the zoms that was changing the world as Benny knew it. The people back in town had only survived this long because they began to understand what zoms could and could not do. Knowledge of them did not make the dead less of a threat, but it increased the chances of survival in a world where zoms were everywhere.
Now that was changing. Now nothing that had previously been known about them could be relied on. Some zombies were faster. The few advantages people had over zoms seemed to be crumbling.
What if the dead started thinking? There were seven billion of them, and barely enough humans to fill a small city.
They stood in the silence of their own thoughts for a long time. The zombies watched them with unblinking eyes. Birds sang in the trees on Benny’s side of the divide, but there was movement in the sky above the zoms. Benny shielded his eyes from the glare and peered at a dozen large black birds drifting in slow circles high above the far side of the field. Chong noticed him looking and cupped his hands around his eyes too. He turned and saw even more of them over the forest behind them.
“Turkey vultures,” observed Chong.
“I know.”
They watched the dark, ugly birds glide without sound on the thermal currents above the endless miles of pinyon pines.
“There are a lot of them out today,” Chong said. “Seem to be everywhere.”
Benny looked at him. He could feel the blood drain from his face.
“Oh, crap . . .”
“Yeah. Carrion birds don’t eat zoms . . .”
“ . . . so what are they circling?” Benny finished.
It was one of the great mysteries of the Ruin that vermin did not feed on the zoms, even though they smelled of decay. No one understood it, and as Mr. Lafferty at the general store once said, “Kind of a shame, too, ’cause in about a month we’d have had a zillion fat crows and no zoms at all.”
