Sounded great, sounded very heroic, but Benny knew the irrefutable truth that swinging a sword required effort, and each time he delivered a killing blow he would spend some of the limited resources he had.

Zoms never tired.

Even if he killed thirty of them, the thirty-first or thirty-second would get him. They had the patience of eternity, and he was living flesh. Fatigue and muscle strain were as deadly to him as the teeth of the dead.

The knowledge of that, the shocking awareness of it, did not spark him into action. It did exactly the opposite. It took the heart from him, and with that went all the power in his muscles. He sagged back against the mud wall. His knees wanted to buckle.

Benny looked into the faces of the zoms as they shuffled closer to him. In those last moments he saw past the sun-bleached skin and desiccated flesh; past the rotting death and milky eyes. For just a moment he saw the people they had been. Not monsters. Real people. Lost people. People who had gotten sick, or who had been bitten, and who had died only to be reborn into a kind of hell beyond anything anyone should suffer.

But they eat people! Benny had once said to his brother, yelling the words during an argument on their first trip to the Ruin.

Tom had replied with five of the most damaging words Benny had ever heard.

They used to be people.

God.

“Nix,” he said, feeling a wave of wretched guilt because he knew how much his death would hurt her. And how much it would disappoint her; but there did not seem to be anything he could do about that.

All of the zoms were close now. A knot of dead-pale faces fifteen feet away. Monsters coming for him in the dark, and yet the faces were not evil. Merely hungry. The mouths worked, but the eyes were as empty as windows that looked into abandoned houses.

“Nix,” he said again as the dead came closer and closer.

Each face that Benny saw looked . . . lost. Blank and without direction or hope. Farmers and soldiers, ordinary citizens, and one man dressed in a tuxedo. Beyond him was a girl in the rags of a dress that must once have been pretty. Peach silk with lace trim. She and the zom in the tuxedo looked like they had been about Benny’s age. Maybe a year or two older. Kids going to a prom when the world ended.