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Benny looked right into the creature’s eyes, but all he saere dust and eer or hate orA doll’s eyes hadtwist inside of him The dead mail carrier was not as scary as he had expected He was just there Benny tried to get a read on him, to connect hatever it was that drove thelooked back

Then the zoh the chain links The movement was so sudden that it felt much faster than it actually was There was no tension, no twitch of facial ht to look for in opponents in basketball or wrestling The zo

Benny yelped and backpedaled away fro pile of horse crap and fell hard on his butt

All of the guards burst out laughing

Benny and Chong quit at lunch

The nextwent to the far side of town and applied as fence technicians

The fence ran for hundreds of miles and encircled the town and its harvested fields, so this uy’s toolbox In the first three hours they got chased by a zoh a break in the fence

"Why don’t they just shoot all the zoms who come up to the fence?" Benny asked their supervisor

"’Cause folks would get upset," said the uy with bushy eyebrows and a tic at the corner of his mouth "Some of them zohts regarding their kin Been all sorts of trouble about it, so we keep the fence in good shape, and every once in a while one of the townsfolk will suck up enough intestinal fortitude to grant peruards to do what’s necessary"

"That’s stupid," said Benny

"That’s people," said the supervisor

That afternoon Benny and Chong walked what they were sure were a million miles, had been peed on by a horse, stalked by a horde of zo at all in their dusty eyes--and yelled at by nearly everyone

At the end of the day, as they sha said, "That was about as ht about it for abeaten up is ue

There was only one opening for the next job--"carpet coat sales wanted to stay ho So Benny showed up, neatly dressed in his best jeans and a clean T-shirt, and with his hair as colue

There wasn’tcarpet coats, but Benny wasn’t slick enough to get the patter down Benny was surprised they’d be hard to sell, because everybody had a carpet coat or two Best thing in the world to have on if so bitey What he discovered, though, was that everyone who could thread a needle was selling them, so the competition was fierce, and sales were few and far between The door-to-door guys worked on straight coreasy joker na-sleeved carpet coat--low knap for su for winter--and then use a device on hith bite of an adult h the coat--and here Chick rolled into his spiel about hu around terth--but it pinched really hard, and the coat was so hot, the sweat ran down under Benny’s clothes When he went hohed himself to see how many pounds he’d sweated off Just one, but Benny didn’t have a lot of pounds to spare

"This one looks good," said Chong over breakfast the next

Benny read out loud from the paper "‘Pit Thrower’ What’s that?"

"I don’t know," Chong said with ato do with barbecuing"

It didn’t Pit throorked in tea them into the constant blaze at the bottom of Brinkers Quarry Most of the zoms on the carts were in pieces The wo about "parts," and went on and on about the risk of secondary infection; then she pasted on the fakest smile Benny had ever seen and tried to sell the applicants on the physical fitness benefits that ca She even pulled up her sleeve and flexed her biceps She had pale skin with freckles as dark as liver spots, and the sudden pop of her biceps looked like a swollen tu

The other jobs offered by the quarry included ash soaker--"because we don’t want zo over the town, now, do we?" asked the freckly muscle freak And pit raker, which was exactly what it sounded like

Benny and Chong didn’tthe slide show of sray li nor physically dehts went out in the weeks following First Night, the only source of electrical poas hand-cranked portable generators There weresaid that they were left over fro days of the early twentieth century Town ordinance forbade the building of any other kind of generator Electronics and coer allowed in town, because of a strong religious movement that associated that kind of poith the "Godless behavior" that had brought about "the end" Benny heard about it all the time, and even some of his friends’ parents talked that way

It hts and computers and automobiles that had made the dead rise Or, if it was, then Benny had never heard anyone ical or sane connection between the two When he asked Tom about it, his brother looked pained and frustrated "People need so rational to bla irrational Back when people didn’t know about viruses and bacteria, they blaues on witches and vampires But don’t ask me how exactly the people in town cay with the living dead"

"That doesn’t make even a little bit of sense"

"I know But what I think is the real reason is that if we start using electricity again, and building back up again, then things will kind of go back the way they were And that this whole cycle will start over again I guess to their way of thinking--if they even consciously thought about it--it would be like a person with a badly broken heart deciding to risk falling in love again All they can rerief felt, and they can’t ih," Benny insisted "It’s cowardly"

"Welcome to the real world, kiddo"