“Tell me something, O mighty sage,” Benny said at length. “Do you ever have too many thoughts in your head?”

Chong started to say something funny and biting, but stopped himself and studied Benny for a slow three-count. He turned back to study the faces of the dead.

After a long time he said, “All the time, man. All the darn time.”

They were silent for many long minutes before either of them spoke again.

“Earlier . . . you said you saw a woman?” asked Chong. “What was that about?”

Benny told him. And about how she appeared to blow on a silent whistle, and how the zoms did not attack her. By the time he was finished, Chong had a half smile on his face.

Benny sighed. “Go on, say it.”

“You are monkey-bat crazy.”

“Thanks.”

“A whistle?”

“Yeah.”

“Like . . . what? A dog whistle?”

Benny grunted. He hadn’t considered that possibility. Mr. Lafferty, who owned the general store, had a dog whistle. You couldn’t hear that sound either.

“Maybe,” said Benny. “That’s what it kind of looked like.”

“For calling zoms?”

“I never said she called the zoms. I’m telling you what I saw.”

“Okay,” said Chong.

“Okay,” said Benny.

They watched the zoms.

“Real question,” said Chong, “so don’t hit me.”

“Okay.”

“How was it down there? Was it bad?”

“It was bad.”

“Are . . . you okay?”

Benny shrugged.

“Did you see any fast ones?” asked Chong.

“A couple.”

“Jeez.”

“Yeah.”

All their lives there had been only one kind of living dead. Slow, mindless, shuffling zoms. It was the way it was—a zom was a zom was a zom. Then last month, while Benny and Nix were on the way to Gameland, they had encountered zombies who moved faster. Not really as fast as a healthy human, but at least twice as fast as any zom Benny had ever heard about.

That ugly fact was just one of several things about the zoms that was changing the world as Benny knew it. The people back in town had only survived this long because they began to understand what zoms could and could not do. Knowledge of them did not make the dead less of a threat, but it increased the chances of survival in a world where zoms were everywhere.

Now that was changing. Now nothing that had previously been known about them could be relied on. Some zombies were faster. The few advantages people had over zoms seemed to be crumbling.

What if the dead started thinking? There were seven billion of them, and barely enough humans to fill a small city.