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Benny watched him do it.
“You, um . . . you can never be too careful,” mumbled the guard. “You know?”
“Yeah,” said Benny. “I know.”
The fence guard stepped back and took a breath. He gave Benny a brief nod, and then turned and trudged along the fence line the way he’d come, his head lowered in troubled thought, shotgun crooked over his arm.
After a while, Benny sat down on his chair again and stared through the fence at the zombie.
The Quick and the Dead
(Set directly before the events of Dust & Decay)
1
The bounty hunter’s name was Solomon Jones. He was medium height, built like a wrestler, and bald as an egg, with chocolate-brown skin and a small goatee shot through with streaks of white. The handles of a pair of machetes rose above his shoulders from where they hung in slings across his back.
He crouched on the gnarled limb of an ancient elm, completely hidden by the deep shadows of the forest’s leafy canopy.
Solomon had once been a writer in the days before First Night. Now he was sure that there was no one alive who knew him as anything but a bounty hunter. He was a killer of the dead. There were no publishing houses anymore, no bookstores. And the only printing presses—old hand-crank jobs—were used to make bounty flyers, Zombie Cards, pamphlets of town rules, and religious tracts. No one printed novels anymore. It was too costly, and besides, there were millions of them lying unused in empty houses, deserted stores, and warehouses. Traders brought them by the wagonload, and they were as valuable to the people in the towns as food and water. The books were escape hatches, doorways out of the apocalypse.
He wished that he had the time and opportunity to write. Not anymore. Now he hunted in the Rot and Ruin, working bounty jobs on the zoms, guarding trade wagons, taking the occasional clean-out job. It was physical work. Horrible work.
Killing the dead.
The concept was absurd. It was so wild he wouldn’t have put it in one of his novels. His readers would have thought he’d gone nuts.
Killing the already killed.
There was no phrasing in English—or any other language—that permitted a statement like that to make sense.
And yet . . .
He crouched on the tree limb, watching a spectacle unfold below him that was more real than anything he had ever put on the page, and yet even after all these years he felt that it was not real. That it, and he, were fantasies in the fevered dream of some madman.
But the firmness of the limb under his feet was real. The sweat that trickled down the sides of his face was real. The weight of the weapons strapped across his back and holstered at his hip. All real.
As was the madness below.
Zoms.
Not one or two of them. Not even the rare pack of half a dozen. Below him, shambling along the grass-choked country road, or staggering through the brush on the verge, were dozens of them. Many dozens.
He had rarely seen so many of them at once, and never moving with such purpose, such apparent focus. But . . . why? They were not following any prey. The woodland road wound through the forest, fed by a larger road that came west through farmlands. Beyond those farms was the vastness of the Yosemite National Park, and beyond that . . . the rest of America. The rest of the Rot and Ruin.
These zoms were coming from the east.
Coming in packs. Flocking like decaying birds.
Heading west.
Heading toward the line of small towns that huddled against the protection of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, here in Mariposa County and farther north. The small towns in which lived virtually everyone who was still alive. The last of humanity. Twenty-eight thousand people, give or take. All that was left of seven billion.
For fourteen years the zombies had followed a simple pattern. They hunted what they saw, and when there was no prey, they simply stood still. Like rotting tombstones to mark the place of their death.
Why were these zoms on the move?
What was drawing them toward the towns? Surely they could not smell the living flesh so many miles away. That was impossible, even in an age of impossible things. And with the dense forest and towering mountains, the zoms could not see the towns. What was drawing them?
