if he’s there.”
“But the warrants for our arrest… people wanting to kill us…
doesn’t that change everythingT’ “Not much.” He discarded the shredded
plastic and looked the gun over. It came fully assembled, a nice piece
of work, and it felt good and reliable in his hands.
“Originally we wanted to get to Eric and finish him before he healed
entirely and came looking to finish you. Now maybe what we’ll have to
do is capture him instead of kill him-” “Take him alive?” Rachael said,
alarmed by that suggestion.
“Well, he’s not exactly alive, is he? But I think we’re going to have
to take him in whatever condition he’s in, tie him up, drive him
someplace like. .. well, someplace like the offices of the Los Angeles
Times. Then we can hold a real shocker of a press conference.”
“Oh, Benny, no, no, we can’t.” She shook her head adamantly. “That’s
crazy. He’s going to be violent, extremely violent. I tojd you about
the mice. You saw the blood in the trunk of the car, for God’s sake.
The destruction everywhere he’s been, the knives in the wall of the Palm
Springs house, the beating he gave Sarah.
We can’t risk getting close to him. He won’t respect the gun, if that’s
what you’re thinking. He won’t have any fear of it at all. You get
close enough to try to capture him, and he’ll take your head off in
spite of the gun.
He might even have a gun of his own. No, no, if we see him, we’ve got
to finish him right away, shoot him without any hesitation, shoot him
again and again, do so much ,l,amage to him that he won’t be able to
come back again.
A panicky note had entered her voice, and she had spoken faster and
faster as she strove to convince Ben.
Her skin was powder-white, and her lips had acquired a bluish tint.
She was shivering.
Even considering their precarious situation and the admittedly hideous
nature of their quarry, her fear seemed too great to Ben, and he
wondered how much her reaction to Eric’s resurrection was heightened by
the ultrareligious childhood that had formed her. Without fully
understanding her own feelings, perhaps she was afraid of Eric not
merely because she knew his potential for violence, and not merely
because he was a walking dead man, but because he had dared to seize the
power of God by defeating death and thereby had become not simply a
zombie but some hellborn creature returned from the realm of the damned.
Forgetting the shotgun for a moment, taking both her hands in his, he
said, “Rachael, honey, I can handle him, I’ve handled worse than him,
much worse-” “Don’t be so confident! That’s what’ll get you killed.”
“I’m trained for war, well trained to take care of myself-” “Please!”
“And I’ve kept in top shape all these years because Nam taught me that
the world can turn dark and mean overnight and that you can’t count on
anything but yourself and your closest friends. That was a nasty lesson
about the modern world that I didn’t want to admit I’d learned, which is
why I’ve spent so much time immersed in the past. But the very fact
that I’ve kept in shape and kept practicing my fighting skills is proof
of the lesson. Tip-top shape, Rachael. And I’m well armed.” He hushed
her when she tried to object. “We have no choice, Rachael. That’s what
it comes down to. No other choice. If we just kill him, blast the
sucker with twenty or thirty rounds from the shotgun, kill him so bad he
stays dead for good this time-then we have no proof of what he did to
himself.
We just have a corpse. Who could prove he’d been reanimated? It’d look
as if we stole his body from the morgue, pumped it full of buckshot, and
concocted this crazy story, maybe concocted it to cover the very crimes
the government is accusing us of.”
“Lab tests of his cell structure would prove something,” Rachael said.
“Examination of his genetic material-” “That would take weeks. Before
then, the government would’ve found a way to claim the body, eliminate