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A year ago that word actually meant something to him. Safe was a concept he could grasp. Safe was his town of Mountainside. Safe was the chain-link fence, the tower guards, the armed men of the town watch. Safe was a sturdy oak door and good locks. Safe was shutters on the windows.
Safe was an illusion.
That illusion had been shattered when death came to town on a stormy night as a lightning-struck tree smashed part of the fence down. The concept of safety was battered by a zombie coming for him inside his own house.
The last fragments of the lie of safety had been ground to dust by the heavy boots of evil men—living men, not zoms—who’d brutalized Morgie Mitchell, one of Benny’s best friends, when he tried to protect Nix Riley and her mother.
The men had killed Mrs. Riley and kidnapped Nix.
Benny and his brother, Tom, had gotten her back, but not easily. Not in any way that rebuilt the walls of safety, or that put a fresh coat of paint on the illusion that everything would be okay again.
It wouldn’t be okay again.
It couldn’t be.
Mrs. Riley was dead.
Morgie was gone too. In a way. He and Benny had traded hard words on the day Tom had left town. Benny and Nix had gone with him, along with Lou Chong and Lilah, the Lost Girl. All of Morgie’s friends left town, and Morgie sent Benny on the road with a wish that they’d all die out here in the great Rot and Ruin.
Benny knew that Morgie was talking from a hurt place, not from his heart. But it was the last thing that had been said; it was the last memory.
Not even lifelong friendships were safe.
Not in the real world.
Not anymore.
Nothing was safe.
Tom was gone now too. Gone forever and for good.
His smile, his wisdom, his power.
Gone.
Benny looked beyond the closest ranks of zoms to a squat white blockhouse of a building that rose into the hot Nevada air. In there, behind those featureless walls, another of his friends was gone too.
Chong.
Infected, dying. Maybe already dead.
Maybe already returned from death as something inhuman. Something that, despite all their years of friendship, would try to kill Benny.
Try to eat his flesh.
No, he thought as tears burned in his eyes, nothing is safe.
He felt the weight of the sword he wore slung across his back. It was Tom’s kami katana, a perfectly balanced weapon. It had been Tom’s.
Had been.
Then, in a moment that was unavoidable and terrible and wild, Tom had used the last of his strength to try to draw that sword in order to stop a madman from slaughtering everyone. But Tom was already dying, and his strength failed him at last—but in that instant Benny reached for the handle, taking it from Tom, brushing his brother’s fingers, drawing the weapon, completing the action. Doing what had to be done. Fighting the monster.
Saving Nix and Chong and Lilah.
Losing Tom.
And, in the act of killing to save lives—even with all the moral and cosmic justification that carried—Benny lost a little of himself. That blade cut more than the flesh of an evil man. It sliced away a piece of Benny’s childhood and left it to die in the bloody grass around where Tom knelt.
