Rot and Ruin

Page 23

“What’s the alternative?”
“Well, if Rob didn’t turn that doorknob, then someone else did. That same person, or persons, brought Rob over here. I’ll maybe buy Rob having enough brain power left to jiggle a doorknob, but no way I’ll buy that he turned zom and then walked all the way across town specifically to target us. Aside from the fact that zoms don’t do that, there are hundreds of people living between us and the reservoir. No. This was as deliberate as if someone pointed a gun at us and pulled the trigger.”
“But … why?”
Tom’s lip curled into an almost feral grimace of anger. “‘Why,’ in this case, is the same as ‘who.’”
“What do you mean?”
“I would have thought it was obvious, kiddo. Whoever did this doesn’t want us to find the Lost Girl.”
That was all Benny needed. The pieces fell into place.
“Charlie?” he asked incredulously.
“Charlie. And Marion Hammer.”
“They weren’t out at Mr. Sacchetto’s house by accident, were they? They must have found out that the new set of Zombie Cards came out. Zak Matthias bought a dozen packs. He must have gotten one of the Lost Girl cards, too, and showed it to his uncle.”
“I’d bet on it.”
“Zak was at the store when I found my card. Maybe he went home and told his uncle. But even so, why would Charlie care about Lilah? He doesn’t even know her.” He paused and stared at Tom. “Does he?”
“Yes, he does,” said Tom. “And considering how tight Charlie is with Big Zak and your friend Zak Junior, Charlie probably has them primed to report back to him with any mention of the Lost Girl. Even something as apparently innocent as her picture on a Zombie Card. I can imagine it gave Charlie quite a start to learn that my little brother found a picture of Lilah in his Zombie Cards.” He glanced down at the body, then cocked his head to listen. “The rain’s almost stopped. Listen, Benny. I want to leave at first light, and I want you to go with me.”
“Leave? For where?”
“For the Rot and Ruin, kiddo.”
“But … why?”
“Because we have to save the Lost Girl from Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer,” said Tom. “And just pray that we’re not already too late.”
28
BUT THE NIGHT WAS NOT DONE WITH THE IMURA BROTHERS.
First they had to remove the artist’s body from the house and turn it over to the town watch. Two men came with a horse-drawn cart to remove the body, accompanied by Captain Strunk, who looked haggard and worn from the night’s activities. Once upon a time Strunk had been an acting teacher and director, but during the madness of First Night, he’d stepped up and organized the defense of a school that was attacked by zombies during a late rehearsal of a new play. The students held out for three weeks against the dead, always hoping that help would arrive. It never did, but eventually the zoms outside were drawn off by other distractions—people fleeing, animals trying to escape the small town in which the school was set. When there were fewer than a dozen of the dead in the schoolyard, Strunk dressed his kids in heavy coats and choir gowns; armed them with golf clubs, hockey sticks, and baseball bats from the gym; and led his makeshift army out of the danger zone. Of the thirty-seven kids and four other adults who left the building with him, twenty-eight kids and two adults were still alive and uninfected by the time they discovered another group of refugees who were bound for a fenced-in settlement in central California. Strunk helped organize the town’s defenses and served as its first mayor, and now he commanded the fence patrols and the town watch. And although he and Tom agreed on many things, Strunk had no inclination to expand the town or reclaim the world. He was haunted by those kids he had not been able to save.
Strunk watched as the artist’s body was loaded onto the cart by a cluster of deputies, and he listened to Tom’s account of what happened. Mayor Kirsch came out of his house next door and joined them.
“And you think this was Charlie and the Hammer?” Strunk asked, running his fingers though his thick, curly gray hair.
“Yeah, Keith, I do.”
Mayor Kirsch sighed. “I don’t know, Tom. You’ve got nothing but circumstantial evidence, and pretty thin evidence at that. Guesswork isn’t the same as proof.”
“I know,” said Tom. “But the pieces fit as far as I’m concerned.”
“What do you expect me to do?” asked Strunk.
“How about arresting them?” said Benny.
“And charge them with what?”
“Murder. Torture. How much do they have to do before you’ll do something?”
“Hush, Ben,” cautioned Tom. To the others he said, “I know you can’t do much based on my say-so, but I have to do something.”
“Whoa now, Tom, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” the mayor said quickly.
“Don’t worry, Randy, I’m not going to do anything in town. Not without proof.”
“We have to do something!” Benny said, and then realized he was yelling. He dropped his voice to an urgent whisper. “Tom, we have to do something. You said—”
“I know what I said, kiddo. Go inside and get washed up. Try to get some sleep.”
“Sleep? Sleep? What are the chances that I’m ever going to be able to sleep again?”
“Try,” said Tom.
“And what are you going to be doing?”
“Your brother asks a fair question, Tom,” said Strunk. He had his thumbs hooked into a Western-style gun belt, and it made him look like a gunslinger that Benny had seen in a book about the old West. Benny realized that Strunk was willing to use force, or at least imply that he would, to keep Tom from taking the law into his own hands. Benny wanted to knock Strunk’s teeth out. How could the man want to give Tom a hard time when Charlie Matthias was walking around free? When he opened his mouth to say something, he caught Tom’s eye, and his brother gave him a small shake of the head.
Reluctantly Benny lapsed into silence.
To Strunk, Tom said, “I’m going to go over and take a look at Rob’s place. I can do that alone or you can come with me. Rob was tortured, and I’m betting it was done there. Who knows what we’ll find?”
“And then what?”
“Then tomorrow morning, at first light, Benny and I are going out into the Ruin to try and find that girl.”
Mayor Kirsch snorted. “Every bounty hunter and way-station monk for five hundred miles has looked for the Lost Girl, and nobody’s found her yet.”
“I found her,” said Tom. “Twice. And I can find her again.”
The other men gaped at him. From their expressions it was clear they didn’t want to believe him, but Benny knew that Tom never bragged. He had his faults, but lying wasn’t one of them.
“Why would anybody care?” asked one of the deputies.
“Gameland,” said Tom.
“That burned down.”
Strunk sighed. “Tom thinks they rebuilt it and that they’re dragging kids off to play in some kind of zombie games. He thinks the Lost Girl knows where it is.”
The men looked at one another and shifted uncomfortably. Benny noticed that not one of them asked Tom to verify this, and no one asked where Gameland might be. They said nothing. Tom made a disgusted noise.
Strunk nodded. “Okay, Tom. Let’s do it your way. Let’s go over to poor Rob’s house and see what we can see.”
“I want to go too,” said Benny.
“You need to sleep.”
“We already covered that. Maybe—maybe—I’ll sleep when I’m forty, but I just killed a zombie who used to be someone I know. If I close my eyes, he’s going to be right there. I’d rather stay awake.”
It wasn’t said as a joke, and no one took it that way. All three men nodded their understanding.
“Okay, Ben,” Tom said.
Before they left, Tom went inside, dressed in cowboy boots and jeans, strapped on a pistol belt, clipped his double-edged commando dagger inside his right boot, and slung his katana across his back.
“What the hell, Tom? The fight’s over,” said Mayor Kirsch.
Tom didn’t dignify that with an answer.
They walked down the middle of the street—Tom on one side, Strunk on the other, with Benny in the middle. Tom had given him back the wooden sword.
“How about a real one?”
“How about no? You’d cut my head off, or your own. And besides, you already know you can do enough damage with this.”
“How about a gun?” Benny asked hopefully.
“How about you stay home?”
“Okay, okay. Geez.”
They walked on through the shadows. Now that the storm was over, the lamplighters had come out to relight the torches that served as streetlights. Captain Strunk took one of the torches to light their way through town. Mountainside was laid out on a broad, flat piece of ground. The mountains rose up impossibly sheer behind them, and the great fence line stretched in a rough three-sided box from cliff wall to cliff wall. Most of the oldest homes in town were little more than shotgun shacks that were a dozen feet wide and built like long, narrow rectangles with doors at both ends. There were several hundred motor homes, most of which had been dragged into town by teams of horses. Some, of course, had arrived before the EMP blew out the ignitions and electronics on the vehicles. Roughneck traders occasionally brought wagon trains of building supplies to town—along with clothing, books, tools, and other precious items recovered from abandoned farms and towns throughout that part of the Ruin—and those materials had gone into the construction of some of the two-story houses. The Imura house was a tiny two-story that Tom had built himself.
The artist’s house, one of the very first that had been built, was narrow. It would have been ugly except for the rainforest murals Sacchetto had painted on the exterior walls. As they stopped outside, Benny studied the art and felt a deep sadness spear through him. He’d only met the man twice, but he had liked him.
Tom must have sensed his feelings, because he put a brotherly hand on Benny’s shoulder.
“Gate’s open,” Strunk said. “Rob could have walked out after he turned.”
“And bright blue pigs might fly out of my ass,” muttered Benny. Strunk shot him a stern look, and Tom turned aside to hide a grin.
“My point is that we shouldn’t make assumptions,” Strunk snapped.
Benny felt another joke coming on, but he restrained himself as Tom drew his gun—a Beretta nine millimeter—racked the slide, and stepped carefully through the open gate. Strunk drew his gun and followed, holding the torch high. Benny, feeling enormously underdressed for this party, took a firmer grip on his wooden sword and crept after them.
Tom walked beside the path rather than on it, and bent low to examine the mud, but he shook his head. “There are plenty of footprints here, but there was too much rain.”
They moved to the top step, but the story was the same. Just meaningless smudges. Tom placed a finger on the front door and pushed lightly. It swung open, and as Strunk moved beside him, they could see that the lock was splintered.
“No zom did that,” said Benny.
Even Strunk didn’t argue.
Tom pushed the door all the way open, and Captain Strunk angled the torch to spill maximum firelight inside.
The house was a ruin. Even from outside they could see that the whole place had been trashed. They went in, careful not to step on anything that looked like a footprint. It was a mess. Every canvas had been slashed, all of the sketches had been torn from the walls and ripped to confetti, the pots of paint had been thrown against the walls or poured onto the floor.
“You still think this was zombies, Keith?” Tom asked quietly.
Strunk cursed continuously for more than a minute without repeating himself once. Benny was impressed, and he agreed with the captain’s sentiments. Killing the artist had not been enough. The murderers had destroyed every last bit of the man’s work. There was not one single piece of undamaged art in the whole place. And the carnage went beyond that. Every plate was broken, every bottle smashed, every piece of furniture kicked apart and broken into kindling.
“This is rage,” Strunk said.
“Yes, it is,” said Tom. “And it makes me wonder if maybe Rob didn’t give them what they wanted.”
“What is it they wanted, Tom?” Strunk asked.
Tom eased the hammer down and slid his gun into its holster. In the torch’s yellow glow his face looked older, harsher. “I told only a couple of people where I last saw the Lost Girl. Rob was one, and today Charlie saw Rob talking to Benny about the Lost Girl. I think they tried to torture the information out of him.”
Benny stiffened and grabbed his brother’s arm. “Wait! You said that there were only a couple of people you told about the Lost Girl. Who else did you tell?”
Tom’s face went white, and his eyes snapped wide. “I’m a bloody fool!”
“What is it?” Strunk demanded.
“God, I hope I haven’t gotten them killed!”
Tom shoved past Strunk and bolted from the house. Benny and the captain ran after him, but by the time they were on the top step, Tom was a block away and running full tilt for the poor side of town.
“Where’s he going?” Strunk asked, grabbing Benny’s shoulder.
Benny shook off the grab and ran after his brother without answering. He already knew where Tom was going. There was only one other person Tom trusted that much.