Bits & Pieces (2 page)

Tom Imura's Story

(This story takes place on First Night,

fourteen years before
Rot & Ruin
)

The kid kept crying.

Crying.

Crying.

Blood all over him. Their blood. Not his.

Not Benny's.

Theirs.

He stood on the lawn and stared at the house.

Watching as the fallen lamp inside the room threw goblin shadows on the curtains. Listening to the screams as they filled the night. Filled the room. Spilled out onto the lawn. Punched him in the face and belly and over the heart. Screams that sounded less and less like her. Like Mom.

Less like her.

More like Dad.

Like whatever he was. Whatever 
this
 was.

Tom Imura stood there, holding the kid. Benny was eighteen months. He could say a few words. “Mom.” “Dog.” “Foot.”

Now all he could do was wail. One long, inarticulate wail that tore into Tom's head. It hit him as hard as Mom's screams.

As hard. But differently.

The front door was open, standing ajar. The back door was unlocked. He'd left through the window, though. The
downstairs bedroom on the side of the house. Mom had pushed him out. She'd shoved Benny into his hands and pushed him out.

Into the night.

Into the sound of sirens, of screams, of weeping and praying people, of gunfire and helicopters.

Out here on the lawn.

While she stayed inside.

He'd tried to fight her on it.

He was bigger. Stronger. All those years of jujutsu and karate. She was a middle-aged housewife. He could have forced her out. Could have gone to face the horror that was beating on the bedroom door. The thing that wore Dad's face but had such a hungry, bloody mouth.

Tom could have pulled Mom out of there.

But Mom had one kind of strength, one bit of power that neither black belts nor biceps could hope to fight. It was there on her arm, hidden in that last moment by her white sleeve.

No.

That was a lie he wanted to tell himself.

Not white.

The sleeve was red, and getting redder with every beat of her heart.

That sleeve was her power, and he could not defeat it.

That sleeve and what it hid.

The mark. The wound.

The bite.

It amazed Tom that Dad's teeth could fit that shape. That it was so perfect a match in an otherwise imperfect tumble of events. That it was possible at all.

Benny struggled in his arms. Wailing for Mom.

Tom clutched his little brother to his chest and bathed his face with tears. They stood like that until the last of the screams from inside had faded, faded, and . . .

Even now Tom could not finish that sentence. There was no dictionary in his head that contained the words that would make sense of this.

The screams faded.

Not into silence.

Into moans.

Such hungry, hungry moans.

He had lingered there because it seemed a true sin to leave Mom to this without even a witness. Without mourners.

Mom and Dad.

Inside the house now.

Moaning. Both of them.

Tom Imura staggered to the front door and nearly committed the sin of entry. But Benny was a squirming reminder of all the ways this would kill them both. Body and soul.

Truly. Body and soul.

So Tom reached out and pulled the door closed.

He fumbled in his pocket for the key. He didn't know why. The TV and the Internet said that they couldn't think, that something as simple and ordinary as a doorknob could stop them. Locks weren't necessary.

He locked the door anyway.

And put the key safely in his pocket. It jangled against his own.

He backed away onto the lawn to watch the window again. The curtains moved. Shapes stirred on the other side,
but the movements made the wrong kind of sense.

The shapes, though.

God, the shapes.

Dad and Mom.

Tom's knees gave all at once, and he fell to the grass so hard that it shot pain into his groin and up his spine. He almost lost his grip on his brother. Almost. But didn't.

He bent his head, unable to watch those shapes. He closed his eyes and bared his teeth and uttered his own moan. A long, protracted, half-choked sound of loss. Of a hurt that no articulation could possibly express, because the descriptive terms belonged to no human dictionary. Only the lost understand it, and they don't require further explanation. They get it because there is only one language spoken in the blighted place where they live.

Tom actually understood in that moment why the poets called the feeling heart
break
. There was a fracturing, a splintering in his chest. He could feel it.

Benny kicked him with little feet and banged on Tom's face with tiny fists. It hurt, but Tom endured it. As long as it hurt, there was some proof they were both alive.

Still alive.

Still alive.

It was Benny Imura who saved his brother Tom.

Little, eighteen-month-old, screaming Benny.

First he nearly got them both killed, but then he saved
them. The universe is perverse and strange like that.

His brother, on his knees, lost in the deep well of the moment, did not hear the sounds behind him. Or if he did, his grief orchestrated them into the same discordant symphony.

So no, he did not separate out the moans behind him from those inside the house. Or the echoes of them inside his head.

That was the soundtrack of the world now.

But Benny could tell the difference.

He was a toddler. Everything was immediate; everything was new. He heard those moans, turned to look past his brother's trembling shoulder, and he saw them.

The shapes.

Detaching themselves from the night shadows.

He knew some of the faces. Recognized them as people who came and smiled at him. People who threw him up in the air or poked his tummy or tweaked his cheeks. People who made faces that made him laugh.

Now, though.

None of them were laughing.

The reaching hands did not seem to want to play or poke or tweak.

Some of the hands were broken. There was blood where fingers should be. There were holes in each of these things. In chests and stomachs and faces.

Their mouths weren't smiling. They were full of teeth, and their teeth were red.

Benny could not even form these basic thoughts, could not actually categorize the rightness and wrongness of what
was happening. All he could do was 
feel
 it. Feel the wrongness. He heard the sounds of hunger. The moans. They were not happy sounds. He had been hungry so many times, he knew. It was why he cried sometimes. For a bottle. For something to eat.

Benny knew only a dozen words.

Most of them were names for food and toys.

He stopped crying and tried to say one of those names.

“Tuh . . . Tuh . . . Tuh . . .”

That was all he could get. “Tom” was too difficult. Not always, just sometimes. It wouldn't fit into his mouth now.

“Tuh . . . Tuh . . . Tuh . . .”

It was a strange moment when Tom Imura realized that his baby brother was actually trying to say his name.

Because saying it was also a warning.

A warning was a thought that Tom wouldn't have credited to a kid that young.

Could toddlers even think like that?

A part of Tom's mind stepped out of the moment and looked at the phenomenon as if it were hanging on a wall in a museum. He studied it. Considered it. Posed in thoughtful art-house stances in front of it. All in a fragment of a second so small it could have been hammered in between two of the 
Tuh
 sounds.

Tom.

That's what Benny was saying.

No. That's what Benny was 
screaming
.

Tom jerked upright.

He turned.

He saw what Benny had seen.

Them.

So many of them.

Them.

Coming out of the shadows. Reaching.

Moaning.

Hungry. So hungry.

There was Mrs. Addison from across the street. She was nice but could be mean sometimes. Liked to tell the other ladies on the block how to grow roses, even though hers were only so-so.

Mrs. Addison had no lower lip.

Someone had torn it away. Or . . .

Bitten it?

Right behind her was John Chalker. Industrial chemist. He made solvents for a company that sold drain cleaner. He always brought the smell of his job home on his clothes.

Now he had no clothes. He was naked. Except for his hat.

Why did he still have his hat on and no clothes?

There were bites everywhere. Most of his right forearm was gone. The meat of his hand hung on the bones like a loose glove.

And the little Han girl. Lucy? Lacey? Something like that.

Ten, maybe eleven.

She had no eyes.

They were coming toward Tom and his brother. Reaching with hands. Some of those hands were slashed
and bitten. Or gone completely. None of the wounds bled.

Why didn't the wounds bleed?

Why didn't the damn wounds bleed?

“No,” said Tom.

Even to his own ears his voice sounded wrong. Way too calm. Way too normal.

Calm and normal were dead concepts. There was no normal.

Or maybe 
this
 was normal.

Now.

But calm? No, that was gone. That was trashed. That was . . .

Consumed.

The word came into his head, unwanted and unwelcome. Shining with truth. Ugly in its accuracy.

“Tuh . . . Tuh . . . Tuh . . .”

Benny's voice was not calm.

It broke Tom.

It broke the spell of stillness.

It broke something in his chest.

Tom's next word was not calm. Might not actually have been a word. It started out as “No,” but it changed, warped, splintered, and tore his throat ragged on the way out. A long wail, as unending as the moans of his neighbors. Higher, though, not a monotone. Not a simple statement of need. This was pure denial, and he screamed it at them as they came toward him, pawing the air. For him. For Benny. For anything warm, anything alive.

For meat.

Tom felt himself turn but didn't know how he managed
it. His mind was frozen. His scream kept rising and rising. But his body turned.

And ran.

And ran.

God, he ran.

They, however, were everywhere.

The darkness pulsed with the red and blue of police lights; the banshee wail of sirens tore apart the shadows of the California night, but no police came for him. No help came for them.

The little boy in his arms screamed and screamed and screamed.

Pale shapes lurched toward him from the shadows. Some of them were victims—their wounds still bleeding—still 
able
 to bleed; their eyes wide with shock and incomprehension. Others were more of 
them
.

The things.

The monsters.

Whatever they were.

Tom's car was parked under a streetlamp, washed by the orange glow of the sodium vapor light. He'd come home from the academy, and all his gear was in the trunk. His pistol—which cadets weren't even allowed to carry until after tomorrow's graduation—and his stuff from the dojo. His sword, some fighting sticks.

He slowed, casting around to see if that was the best way to go.

Should he risk it? 
Could
 he risk it?

The car was at the end of the block. He had the keys, but the streets were clogged with empty emergency vehicles. Even
if he got his gear, could he find a way to drive out?

Yes.

No.

Maybe.

Houses were on fire one block over. Fire trucks and crashed cars were like a wall.

But the weapons.

His weapons.

They were right there in the trunk.

Benny screamed. The monsters shambled after him.

“Go!” Mom had said. “Take Benny . . . keep him safe. Go!”

Just . . . go.

He ran to the parked car. Benny was struggling in his arms, hitting him, fighting to try to get free.

Tom held him with one arm—an arm that already ached from carrying his brother—and fished in his pocket for the keys. Found them. Found the lock. Opened the door, popped the trunk.

Gun in the glove compartment. Ammunition in the trunk. Sword, too.

Shapes moved toward him. He could hear their moans. So close. So close.

Tom turned a wild eye toward one as it reached for the child he carried.

He lashed out with a savage kick, driving the thing back. It fell, but it was not hurt. Not in any real sense of being hurt. As soon as it crashed down, it began to crawl toward him.

And in his mind Tom realized that he had thought of it as an
it
. Not a
him
. Not a
person
.

He was already that far gone into this. That's what this had come to.

He and Benny and 
them
.

Each of them was an 
it
 now.

The world was that broken.

It was unreal. Tom understood that this thing was dead. He knew him, too. It was Mr. Harrison from three doors down, and it was also a dead thing.

A monster.

An actual monster.

This was the real world, and there were monsters in it.

Benny kept screaming.

Tom lifted the trunk hood and shoved Benny inside. Then he grabbed his sword. There was no time to remove the trigger lock on the gun. They were coming.

They were here.

Tom slammed the hood, trapping the screaming Benny inside the trunk even as he ripped the sword from its sheath.

All those hands reached for him.

And for the second time, a part of Tom's mind stepped out of the moment and struck a contemplative pose, studying himself, walking around him, observing and forming opinions.