Dust & Decay by Jonathan Maberry Read Free Book Online

swiping apples from Snotty O’Malley’s orchard. On the other hand, he wanted to be a man. He wanted to be as strong as Tom, as powerful as Tom. He wanted people to show him the fear and respect they showed Tom.
    Benny knew that once they left Mountainside he would have to become tougher. There would be challenges that would toughen him and strengthen his “legend,” just asTom’s many adventures as the region’s most feared zombie hunter had built his legend. No doubt Nix would find him irresistibly sexy the farther from town they got and the tougher he became.
    For Nix, everything that mattered was out there.
    Benny was more than half sure that if Nix actually loved him, then it was because he had agreed to go with her into the Ruin. Maybe not completely, but in a large part. He would have bet everything he had on it.
    So he didn’t dare tell her that he wasn’t really sure he wanted to go.
    Tell her,
said the inner voice.
Don’t lie to her.
    Benny ignored the suggestion.
    The Ruin was dangerous and it was uncertain, and everyone he’d talked to in town said that no one had ever gone past Yosemite Park and come back. Nix wanted to go all the way across the country, if that was what it would take to find the jet. Tom, too; and Lilah.
    He stared into his brown eyes and studied the doubt and fear that he saw there.
    “Some hero,” he said under his breath. “Some legend.”
    Nix believed that to stay in town was to be stifled and die behind walls, and she wasn’t entirely wrong. Nearly everyone in Mountainside feared the Ruin with a dread that was so profound that they almost never mentioned anything beyond the fence line. A few went out, visiting other towns, but even then they traveled in metal-reinforced wagons with the shades pulled down to block out any sight of the Ruin. Only the drivers and their bounty-hunter guards rode outside the wagons. Benny imagined that even in the earlyspring those wagons had to be sickeningly hot, but the travelers seemed to prefer that discomfort rather than the fresh air that came with looking out the window at the real world. It drove Benny nuts. He wondered what the passengers thought when they were inside the wagon but outside the fence. Did they just shut down their higher reasoning? Did they drug themselves so they slept through the journey? Or was the denial so deep that they somehow regarded entering and exiting the shuttered wagons in the same way they would passing through a doorway? Maybe to them there simply was nothing in between.
    It was like a plague, but different from the one that had destroyed the world. This was an emotional pandemic that blinded the eye and deafened the ear and darkened the mind so that there simply was no world other than what existed inside each fenced town.
    Most people had long ago stopped talking about First Night; and although no one said it aloud, it was pretty clear that they felt that they were all just waiting for everything else to end. Society had collapsed, the military and government were gone, nearly seven billion people had died, and the zombie plague was still running at full strength. They all knew that their fellow citizens of Mountainside believed that the world had ended and what was left was just the clock winding down to a final and inevitable silence.
    It was a horrible thought, and until the big fight at Charlie’s camp last year, Benny had been as adamant as Nix in wanting to break free of the town and find someplace where people wanted to be alive. Someplace where people believed that there was a future.
    Then there had been that fight. Benny had been forced to kill people.
    To kill.
    People.
    Not just zoms.
    How was that going to open the way to a future?
    There were so few people left. Barely thirty thousand left in California, and no way to know if there were any more anywhere else. How was killing going to increase that number? It was insane.
    Only here, only when he was alone and looking into the eyes of the