While the thing that had been Dad pushed its way through the bedroom door that Mom had tried to block with a chair and lamps and anything else she could find.
Benny remembered Mom screaming words, but the memory was so old and he had been so young that he didn’t remember what any of them were. Maybe there were no words. Maybe it was just her screaming.
Benny remembered the wet heat on his face as Tom’s tears fell on him as they climbed out of the bedroom window. They had lived in a ranch-style house. One story. The window emptied out into a yard that was pulsing with red and blue police lights. There were more shouts and screams. The neighbors. The cops. Maybe the army. Thinking back, Benny figured it was probably the army. And the constant popping of gunfire, near and far away.
But of all of it, Benny remembered a single last image. As Tom clutched him to his chest, Benny looked over his brother’s shoulder at the bedroom window. Mom leaned out of the window, screaming at them as Dad’s pale hands reached out of the shadows of the room and dragged her back out of sight.
That was Benny’s oldest memory. If there had been older memories, then that image had burned them away. Because he had been so young the whole thing was little more than a collage of pictures and noises, but over the years Benny had burned his brain to reclaim each fragment, to assign meaning and sense to every scrap of what he could recall. Benny remembered the hammering sound vibrating against his chest that was Tom’s panicked heartbeat, and the long wail that was his own inarticulate cry for his mom and his dad.
He hated Tom for running away. He hated that Tom hadn’t stayed and helped Mom. He hated what their dad had become on that First Night all those years ago. Just as he hated what Dad had turned Mom into.
In his mind they were no longer Mom and Dad. They were the things that had killed them. Zoms. And he hated them with an intensity that made the sun feel cold and small.
“Dude, what is it with you and zoms?” Chong once asked him. “You act like the zoms have a personal grudge against you. ”
“What, I’m supposed to have fuzzy bunny feelings for them?” Benny had snapped back.
“No,” Chong had conceded, “but a little perspective would be nice. I mean … everybody hates zoms. ”
“You don’t. ”
Chong had shrugged his bony shoulders and his dark eyes had darted away. “Everybody hates zoms. ”
The way Benny saw it, when your first memory was of zombies killing your parents, then you had a license to hate them as much as you wanted. He tried to explain that to Chong, but his friend wouldn’t be drawn back into the conversation.
A few years ago, when Benny found out that Tom was a zombie hunter, he hadn’t been proud of his brother. As far as he was concerned, if Tom really had what it took to be a zombie hunter, he’d have had the guts to help Mom. Instead, Tom had run away and left Mom to die. To become one of them.
Tom came back into the living room, looked at the remains of the dessert on the table, then looked at Benny on the couch.
“The offer still stands,” he said. “If you want to do what I do, then I’ll take you on as an apprentice. I’ll sign the papers so you can still get fu
ll rations. ”
Benny gave him a long, withering stare.
“I’d rather be eaten by zoms than have you as my boss,” Benny said.
Tom sighed, turned, and trudged upstairs. After that they didn’t talk to each other for days.
2
THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND BENNY AND CHONG HAD PICKED UP THE Saturday edition of the Town Pump, because it had the biggest help wanted section. All of the easy jobs, like working in stores, had been long-since snapped up. They didn’t want to work on the farms, because that meant getting up every morning at the crack of “no way, José. ” Besides, it meant dropping out of school completely. They didn’t love school, but it wasn’t too bad, and school had softball, free lunches, and girls. The ideal fix was a part-time job that paid pretty good and got the ration board off their backs, so over the next several weeks, they applied for anything that sounded easy.
Benny and Chong clipped out a bunch of want ads and tackled them one at a time, having first categorized them by “most possible money,” “coolness,” and “I don’t know what it is, but it sounds okay. ” They passed on anything that sounded bad right from the get-go.
The first on their list was for a locksmith apprentice.
That sounded okay, but it turned out to be humping a couple of heavy toolboxes from house to house at the crack of frigging dawn while an old German guy who could barely speak English repaired fence locks and installed dial combinations on both sides of bedroom doors, as well as installing bars and wire grilles.
It was kind of funny watching the old guy explain to his customers how to use the combination locks. Benny and Chong began making bets on how many times per conversation a customer would say “what,” “could you repeat that,” or “beg pardon. ”
The work was important, though. Everyone had to lock themselves in their rooms at night and then use a combination to get out. Or a key; some people still locked with keys. That way, if they died in their sleep and reanimated as a zom, they wouldn’t be able to get out of the room and attack the rest of the family. There had been whole settlements wiped out because someone’s grandfather popped off in the middle of the night and then started chowing down on the kids and grandkids.
“I don’t get this,” Benny confided to Chong when they were alone for a minute. “Zoms can’t work a combination lock any more than they can turn a doorknob. They can’t work keys, either. Why do people even buy this stuff?”
Chong shrugged. “My dad says that locks are traditional. People understand that locked doors keep bad things out, so people want locks for their doors. ”
“That’s stupid. Closed doors will keep zoms out. Zoms are brain-dead. Hamsters are smarter. ”