Bits & Pieces (17 page)

Benny turned and gave Chong a high five. “Oh, man, I have soooo wanted this card. Now I have both Charlie
and
the Hammer.”

Chong was grinning too. “Just remember, I get the doubles.”

“Yeah, cool, no problem.”

They stared at the card for a long time. The Motor City Hammer was so dangerous, so tough, so
everything
that Benny wanted to be. Not like Tom. Nothing like Tom, even if they both did the same thing. It made Benny laugh to think that Tom considered himself a bounty hunter. As if he could ever be as tough or cool as the Hammer. What a joke. Tom the Coward couldn't hold a candle to the Hammer. Or Charlie.

Never in a million years.

Benny turned over the next card, which was a double he already had, and he handed it to Chong. The Bride of Coldwater Creek. One of the most famous of the zoms still active in the Ruin outside town. He flipped over the next card, and the next, thinking about Charlie and the Hammer.

How insanely outstanding would it be to get a job with them? To apprentice with the toughest bounty hunters in the entire Ruin?

Benny kept grinning and nodding to himself.

Yeah,
he thought,
that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to be exactly like them.

The other day, when we were all at Chong's house for dinner after training with Tom, Mrs. Chong said something strange. It was at the beginning of dinner, during grace. Only, instead of a regular grace prayer for food and abundance and all, she said this:

“Lord, thank you for the blessing of these young heroes. Thank you for letting us know that honor has not vanished from our green Earth. Thank you for restoring hope to those who need it.”

I guess it was meant as a compliment, because before dinner she and Mr. Chong bullied Tom and Benny into telling the whole story—
again
—of how they rescued me from Charlie Pink-eye, how we met Lilah, and how the bunch of us took back
the kids Charlie's gang was taking to Gameland.

So, sure, she was trying to be nice, but it felt really weird. No one said much of anything all the way through dinner. Except for when Benny asked Chong to pass the mashed potatoes, I don't think anyone said two words until Mr. Chong cut the apple pie Tom brought.

I know I couldn't speak at all. My face burned all night. And Benny didn't look at anyone. Only Lilah seemed unaffected by it, but she didn't say much because she never says much.

Over pie, Mrs. Chong tried to apologize, but I don't think she really understood what there was to apologize for. She'd been trying to be nice.

Here's the thing about that, though. Okay, so we rescued those kids, and that's pretty great. And we stopped Charlie and the Hammer from kidnapping more kids to take to Gameland, and that's cool too.

But what Mrs. Chong doesn't really get is how we did all that. I mean, she doesn't
understand what we had to do that night.

She thinks we were all being heroes.

We weren't.

We were being killers.

That's the thing nobody gets.

Maybe I don't even understand it. Sometimes in order to be a hero, you have to do some really terrible things. Maybe that's why guys like Tom, who really is a hero, hate being called one.

It reminds him of the things he's had to do.

I know that I don't consider myself a hero. I never will.

I killed people that night.

Bad guys, sure, but people.

How can I possibly want to cheer about that?

How could anyone?

(One year after First Night; thirteen years before
Rot & Ruin
)

The poster on the wall read:

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.

BOOKS CONTAIN KNOWLEDGE.

READ.

BECOME POWERFUL.

Walker paused to read it every time he came into the library.

Even when he was dog-tired.

Even when he was covered in black gore from killing zoms.

It was because of those words, and the truth behind them, that Walker was still alive. Him and Keaton and their dog, Dewey. Not that the dog could read it, but the boys had saved the dog's life with animal first aid they'd found in a book.

They lived according to those words, and month after month, year after year, they survived.

The others?

Well . . . some folks are so darn stubborn that they get in the way of their own best interests. They
can
learn, the knowledge is there, but they won't stop long enough to learn something new. Or they refuse to admit that what they do know is either faulty, outdated, or wrong.

Like that guy, Smithwick, who crashed here at the library last year.

Smithwick was a loner trying to make his way in a destroyed world, surviving by the skin of his teeth, always on the edge of starvation. The boys brought him in, fed him, and treated the man's injuries. After a week, when Smithwick was able to talk, he described the hardships he'd encountered in the great Rot and Ruin. The boys brought him stacks of books to read. Books on survival skills, on foraging for food, on hunting, on first aid, even a book on which edible plants offered the best nutrition.

Smithwick leafed through the books but never read them. Not one.

“I already know what I need to know,” he said.

“Are you kidding?” asked Keaton. “You were half-dead when we found you.”

“I was doing just fine,” the man insisted, then waved his hands at the towering stacks of books that filled nearly every inch of what had once been a school library. “These books didn't save the world, did they?”

Keaton wanted to argue, but Walker gave a discreet shake of his head. A
don't bother
thing. They'd met too many people like this. The kind who would defend a bad choice simply because it was
his
choice. The boys figured it was a kind of teenage oppositional defiant disorder that fueled adult narcissistic behavior in someone suffering from PTSD. Or possibly a simple maladaptive coping method. Something like that.

There were a lot of books on psychology in the library. They read everything they could about trauma and damage.

And loss.

The boys were survivors who'd been born into a ruined world. Everyone they'd ever met was damaged. They knew that they were damaged too. It was the way of this world.

The difference was that Keaton and Walker accepted it.

Explored it.

Worked on it.

Individually and as friends.

They didn't leave it to fester like a wound of the soul. Understanding it helped them through the dark days after the last of the adults died off. Despair was the real enemy. Knowledge was their weapon. It helped them have the optimism to keep going.

Smithwick was a lost cause.

They tried.

But . . .

Walker and Keaton sat on the roof of the Kamiakin High School Library, drinking cups of rainwater they'd caught in plastic bags, eating chicken they'd raised and roasted. Dewey, their blue heeler, lay sprawled between them, chewing his way through a mound of scraps. The dog had rings around his eyes that looked like glasses, and that seemed appropriate for a library.

Down below, the living dead milled in the hundreds.

Lost souls.

They weren't even evil. They just . . .
were
.

Smithwick wandered in a slow circle directly below them, his flesh faded to gray and withered to a leathery toughness. Both boys wished he would leave, wander away, go elsewhere. But the dead didn't wander off unless they were following prey. Otherwise, they stayed where they were. Some
of the zoms stood still as statues, their limbs wrapped in creeper vines.

Keaton picked up the book he'd been reading and opened it.
I Am Legend
, a postapocalyptic tale, which seemed appropriate to Keaton. Vampires, though; not zombies. Even so, it featured a hero who was very practical when managing his own survival. Keaton liked that. Emotions were good, and even random craziness, but survival depended on smarts, on common sense, and on applying knowledge. Keaton had read over three hundred books about surviving the end of the world. Some were very helpful. Some were silly. Some merely entertaining. There were even some written as instruction manuals for what to do in the event of a global disaster.

Of course, none of those books had accurately predicted a zombie apocalypse, but that was to be expected. After all, zombies. Who knew?

Beside him, Walker was reading a book on handcrafting body armor.

Walker had built five separate generations of body armor so far. The two of them could stroll through a sea of zoms without getting bitten. Walker was always looking for improvements. Better mobility, lighter weight.

Below them the dead moaned. Keaton could swear he could hear the high, reedy sound of Smithwick's voice. Sad.

Suddenly the zombies stopped moaning.

They froze for a moment, and then they began turning toward the east, raising their heads, staring with dead eyes at the empty sky. Keaton and Walker stared too.

“What the—”
began Walker, but his voice trailed off.

“It's coming back,” gasped Keaton.

They looked at each other for a moment; then both of them burst into huge grins. They jumped up from their chairs and ran across the roof, laughing with excitement.

They'd prepared for this.

Researched it.

Done everything by the book. Step by step.

Keaton dug a pack of all-weather matches from his pocket and thrust the flame into a small pile of rags soaked in combustible chemicals. The rags caught at once, and bright fire raced along the lines they'd laid out in fireproof troughs of crushed stone. Walker crouched behind an old dry-erase board mounted on a hinged frame and tilted the board upward so that the row upon row of old cell phones were angled just so. Sunlight flashed from the metallic mirrorlike material that had once been hidden behind each tiny screen.

The lines of fire and the reflective screens each spelled out words.

ALIVE INSIDE
was written in fiery letters.

UNINFECTED
shone with mirror brightness.

Keaton grabbed a pair of bright-orange signal flags and tossed them to Walker. Then he jogged over to the corner of the wall, where they'd mounted a heavy hand-crank alarm they'd scavenged from a fire station. Keaton began cranking the handle, and a wail burst from the bell-shaped mouth of the siren, louder than any sound in their quiet world.

Walker began flapping the signal flags. Spelling out words.

Dewey barked and barked.

The noise in the air changed.

Instead of a drone that crossed their horizon line, it suddenly changed. Became louder.

Came closer.

Below, the dead moaned louder, agitated by the siren and the thrum of the thing in the air. They reached for it.

They tried in vain to grab for the big helicopter.

Keaton cranked the siren; Walker signaled and signaled.

The helicopter came closer and closer until the rotor wash whipped away the smoke from their fire and blew out the flames.

Keaton stopped cranking.

Walker lowered his flags.

Dewey's tail whipped back and forth.

The helicopter hung there in the air. Something they'd only ever seen on the edges of their world. Something that belonged to the old world. Something they'd read about in books. Now, here.

Drawn to them by their signals.

Pulled by their wills and through the things they'd read about.

Survival skills included how to signal for help.

The boys stood there, waving with their hands now.

Grinning.

Laughing.

Tears rolling down their cheeks.

The side door of the helicopter opened, and a man dressed in military camouflage fatigues stared out at them. Even from fifty yards away they could see the surprise on his face as he looked at them, and at the apparatus they'd constructed on the roof.

Then a slow smile formed on the soldier's face.

He gave them a thumbs-up.

Then held up his hands, fingers splayed, pulsing them three times.

Wait. Thirty minutes.

The helicopter rose, climbing and turning. Looking for someplace to land.

Keaton and Walker watched it go.

Then they turned and glanced at the open roof door.

Keaton grinned. “How many books do you think they'll let us take?”

Walker gave him a devious smile. “Let's find out.”

They rushed inside to make their selections.

Below them, all around them, the mindless dead moaned for something they could never have.