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Then Gaynor got heavily, awkwardly to his feet and came forward again. Reaching for Benny.
Tom kicked him again. Same spot, even harder.
This time Gaynor didn’t even go down to one knee. He tottered backward, caught his balance, and moved forward again.
Tom cursed at him. Shrieked every foul thing he could muster at him.
Benny squealed each time Tom kicked, and he hoped he wasn’t crushing his brother as he exerted himself to lash out at the things around him.
He kicked once more, changing it from a front thrust to a side thrust. Lower. To the knee instead of the groin. The femur broke with the sound of a batter hitting a hard one down the third-base line.
Sharp.
Gaynor went down that time. Not in pain, not yelling. But down. Bone speared through the cotton of his trousers, jagged and white. Tom stared at him, watching the man try to get back up again. Saw gravity pull him down, saw how the ruined scaffolding of shattered bone denied him the chance to stand.
Not pain.
Just broken bone.
Tom backed away, spun. Ran. Holding Benny, who kept screaming.
He dodged between parked cars, jumped over a fallen bike, blundered through a narrow gap in a row of privet hedges, staggered onto the pavement. Two teenagers, strangers, were there on their knees, faces buried in something that glistened and steamed.
A stomach.
Tom couldn’t tell who it had been. But he saw the dead hands twitch. The teenagers recoiled from their meal, staring briefly with vacuous stupidity as the half-consumed body began shivering. The corpse tried to sit up, but there were no abdominal muscles left to power that effort. Instead it rolled onto its side, sloshing out intestines like dead snakes. The teenagers got to their feet, turned, looked, and sniffed the night.
Then they turned toward Tom.
And Benny.
Benny screamed and screamed and screamed.
It was then, only then, that the shape of this fit into Tom’s mind. Not the cause, not the sense, not the solution.
The shape.
He backed away, turned, and ran again.
The lawns behind him were filled with slow bodies. Some sprawled on the grass like broken starfish, lacking enough of their muscles or tendons to move in any useful way. Others staggered along, relentless and slow.
Tom ran fast, clenching Benny to him, feeling the flutter of his brother’s heart against his own chest.
The street ahead was filled with the people who had lived here in Sunset Hollow.
So many of them now.
All of them now.
6
Then another figure stepped out from behind a hedge.
Short, female, pretty. Wearing a torn dress. Wild eyes in a slack face.
She said, “Tom—?”
“Sherrie,” he said. Sherrie Tomlinson had gone all through school with him. Second grade through high school. He’d wanted to date her, but she was always a little standoffish. Not cold, just not interested.
