The swordsman rushed toward the closest zombie—a teenage boy who looked like he’d been about Benny’s age when he died. The blade swept upward in a glittering line that sheared through the zombie’s right arm at the shoulder, and then he checked his swing and sliced down to take the other arm. Instantly he pivoted and swung the sword laterally and chopped through both legs, an inch below the groin. The zombie toppled to the ground, and one leg, against all odds, remained upright.
The three men burst out laughing.
“Time!” yelled Eye-patch, and read the stopwatch. “Holy crap, Stosh. That’s two point nine-nine seconds!”
“And three cuts!” shouted Stosh. “I did it in three cuts!”
They howled with laughter, and the third man, Denny, squatted down, wrapped his burly arms around the limbless zombie’s torso, picked it up with a grunt, and carried it over to the wagon. Eye-patch tossed him the limbs—one-two-three-four—and Denny added them to the pile.
The kicking game started up again. Stosh drew a pistol and shot one of the remaining zombies in the chest. The bullet did no harm, but the creature turned toward the impact and began lumbering in that direction. Denny yelled, “Jump-spinning back kick!”
And Eye-patch leaped into the air, twisted, and drove a savage kick into the zombie’s stomach, knocking it backward into the others. They all fell, and the men laughed and handed around a bottle while the zombies clambered awkwardly to their feet.
Tom leaned close to Benny and whispered, “Time to go. ”
He moved away, but Benny caught up to him and grabbed his sleeve. “What the hell are you doing? Where are you going?”
“Away from these clowns,” said Tom.
“You have to do something!”
Tom turned to face him. “What is it you expect me to do?”
“Stop them!” Benny said in an urgent whisper.
“Why?”
“Because they’re … because …,” Benny sputtered.
“You want me to save the zombies, Benny? Is that it?”
Benny, caught in the fires of his own frustration, glared at him.
“They’re bounty hunters, Benny,” said Tom. “They get a bounty on every zombie they kill. Want to know why they don’t just cut the heads off? Because they have to prove that it was they who killed the zombies and that they didn’t just collect heads from someone else’s kill. So they bring the torsos back to town and do the killing in front o
f a bounty judge, who then pays them a half day’s rations for every kill. Looks like they have enough there for each of them to get almost five full days’ rations. ”
“I don’t believe you. ”
“Keep your voice down,” Tom hissed. “And, yes, you do believe me. I can see it in your eyes. The game these guys are playing—that’s ugly, right? It got you so upset that you wanted me to step in and do something. Am I right?”
Benny said nothing. His fists were balled into knuckly knots at his sides.
“Well, as bad as that is … I’ve seen worse. A whole lot worse. I’m talking pit fights where they put some dumb-ass kid—maybe someone your age—in a hole dug in the ground and then push in a zom. If the kid’s lucky, maybe they’ll give him a knife or a sharpened stick or a baseball bat. Sometimes the kid wins, sometimes he doesn’t, but the oddsmakers haul in a fortune either way. And where do the kids come from? They volunteer for it. ”
“That’s bull. …”
“No, it’s not. If I wasn’t around, and you lived with Aunt Cathy when she was sick with the cancer, what would you have done? How much would you have risked to make sure she got enough food and medicine?”
Benny shook his head, but Tom’s face was stone.
“Are you going to tell me that you wouldn’t take a shot at winning maybe a month’s worth of rations—or a whole box of meds—for ninety seconds in a zom pit?”
“That doesn’t happen. ”
“No?”
“I’ve never heard about anything like that. ”