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“Bite me.”
Not even if I was alive.
They both laughed, but the laughs were ghostly and unreal. What Benny really wanted to do was sob. The ache he felt for his lost brother was almost unbearable at times. He kept seeing a hole in the world in the shape of Tom Imura, and he couldn’t imagine anything filling it.
However, he believed that he was supposed to fill it. He was supposed to become the next Tom Imura.
Him.
Not some old guy who used to be a soldier back when something like that mattered. Before the dead rose and humanity fell. Now—and especially to Benny—meeting an actual soldier was like being handed proof that the old system was never good enough, that it wasn’t strong enough. That it wasn’t warrior smart enough. The world still ended.
Hot wind whistled past Benny, flapping the cuffs of his jeans and stinging his face.
“Tom . . . ?” murmured Benny.
Yeah, kiddo?
“I . . . I don’t know if I can do it.”
Tom laughed. A gentle laugh. It’s easy. Put one foot in front of the other and try not to fall.
“That’s not what I meant.”
For a moment Benny could really see Tom, standing there in the shade under the big oak that anchored one corner of their gated yard back home. Tom standing with a cup of iced tea. The smell of hot apple pie wafting out through the kitchen window. Really good pie too. With walnuts and raisins, the way Tom made it. Sour apples so it wasn’t too sweet.
“That’s not what I meant,” Benny said again.
I know what you meant, answered Tom.
“Tom, I—”
But Tom was gone.
The wind howled as it tore through the crags of the red rock wall.
Benny took as deep a breath as he could and sighed it out. Took another. And another. And then he continued climbing.
It took almost forty minutes to reach the top of the crest. By the time he did, his body was trembling with fatigue and jumpy from the residue of adrenaline in his blood. He staggered away from the edge onto a flat section that was covered with withered grass and strewn with huge boulders left over from the last glacier. Benny took two wobble-kneed steps and then sank down onto his knees.
His exhaustion was the only thing that kept him alive as something whipped over his head.
Benny flung himself sideways, thinking that it was the goat lashing out with hooves to defend its territory.
It wasn’t a goat.
It wasn’t an animal.
The thing that had nearly cut his head off was a broad-bladed field scythe.
And it was held in the fists of a reaper.
All around him, others reapers were emerging from hiding places among the glacial boulders.
10
Rattlesnake Valley
Southern California
