Flesh & Bone (15 page)

He landed sloppily but got up fast, bringing his sword up.

Riot snarled at him, and there was murder in her eyes as she fished out another stone.

“Don’t,” he warned.

She drew back the sling—and froze.

Carter and Sarah and Eve froze too, all of them staring at the eastern woods, their eyes wide.

Benny heard it then.

The motor sound he’d heard earlier.

It was back. Louder.

And it was heading their way, closing fast from at least three different points in the forest.

“Reapers!” screamed Sarah.

Riot shot a brief look at Benny and Nix, and then she spun on her heels and ran full tilt into the woods, following the same direction Chong had taken.

“What’s going on?” begged Nix, her pistol still held out in a two-handed grip.

Carter began backing away from the forest, edging toward a thin stand of trees due south. Sarah rose, clutching Eve to her chest; the eyes of both were wild with fear.

“Nix!” called Eve, reaching a hand toward her.

For a split second, Carter and Sarah looked at their daughter’s face and then across the field to Nix and Benny.

Carter lowered his shotgun.

“Run,” he said.

The motor sounds were everywhere now, getting louder and louder.

“RUN!” screamed Sarah.

She and Carter whirled and ran for the trees.

Benny glanced at Nix.

The ravine was behind them and there were woods all around the clearing.

Nix pointed her pistol at the closest of the motor sounds. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” Benny said, pushing her arm down. “But let’s not find out. Let’s go.”

They backed up several steps, then together they turned and ran as hard as they could for the forest.

26

L
ILAH TRIED TO PULL HER PISTOL AS THE MONSTER RACED TOWARD HER
.

But it was too fast and too close.

She tried to get up, but her left side was a furnace of heat and blood. Her leg buckled, and she fell back.

Over the edge of the cliff.

The darkness below swallowed her—body, screams, and all.

27

L
OU
C
HONG RAN FOR HIS LIFE
.

It was, he realized with some despair, something he had to do way too often.

Chong was lean and fit, but he was not a good runner. He felt that his body was better suited to climbing a tree with a good book in his back pocket, wading out into slow streams with a fishing pole, or sitting at a picnic table eating apple pie and discussing either fishing or books. Eluding hot pursuit had never been on his list of things to enjoy before he got old. Neither, for that matter, was fighting zoms in a ravine, staring down the mouths of lions, or looking into the barrels of shotguns.

Nevertheless, he ran.

This forest was sparse compared to the denser woods back home in central California. Even so, Chong managed to use the meager vegetation for cover as he put as much distance as he could between himself and the craziness back on the field.

He paused only once, to gape in wonder at the men and women on motorized machines who came tearing out of nowhere.

Jeez
, he thought dryly,
Nix is going to love this
.

And not for the first time—or even the first time that day—Chong wished that Tom was still here.

But . . .

The motor sounds faded a bit, and Chong felt a splinter of relief that those newcomers were not chasing him. The others, though . . . Riot, Carter, and Sarah. They could be anywhere out here, and Riot had already demonstrated that she was capable of moving like a ghost through the forest and tall grass.

Moving like Lilah.

Chong wanted to find her more than anything in the world.

In the far distance he could see a ridge of rocks that were eye-hurtingly white, but he decided not to go that way. With his dark jeans and shirt, he’d be like a black fly on white linen.

Instead he headed along a ridge of red rocks that cut through the forest and seemed to curve around to the east. Lilah probably went east to find Eve’s parents, so Chong angled that way.

When he was a mile into the woods, Chong dropped into a low squat and listened. He was a very good listener, with sharp senses that he’d honed for months as a tower guard on the fence line between Mountainside and the Ruin. Tom had helped him refine his understanding of the information his senses offered to him. The difference between the rustle of branches in a variable breeze and the sounds of someone—or something—moving stealthily through the brush. The difference between the moan of wind through rusted metal on a deserted farm or abandoned car and the hungry cry of a distant zom. He made his body go absolutely still as he listened.

The motor sounds were far away, and the woods around
him were still. The forest, though, is never silent; nature never totally holds its breath. There are always small sounds—insects and animals, the subtle noises made as the temperature changes throughout the day, causing wood to expand and contract. He listened for sounds that shouldn’t be there.

There was nothing.

Until there was something.

Chong tilted his head to try and catch the ghost of a sound. He almost dismissed it because it was in time with the breeze, but then he listened closer. No, not in time with the breeze; just behind it. He nodded to himself. What he heard was the sound a careful person made when they were trying to move with the breeze, but they were doing it slightly wrong. They were waiting for the wind to stir the branches and then moving with the swaying brush; but that wasn’t the way Tom had taught them.

“You have to be warrior smart,” Tom once told them. “And a smart warrior looks ahead. Watch for the wind as it comes toward you, look into the distance and see how the foliage moves. The wind is like a wave rolling in. If you want to hide in its sound and movement, then time your movement so that you are starting to move as the wind reaches you. Don’t chase the wind—let it push you.”

Don’t chase the wind
, thought Chong. That was exactly what he was hearing.

He held his position.

Then he caught a whiff of something. At first he recoiled, thinking that it was the rotting stench of a zom, but he shook his head and took another sniff at the odor on the breeze. It was similar to the spoiled-meat smell of cadaverine or putrescence.

The sounds were louder now. Whoever was sneaking
through the woods was coming his way. Panic jumped in Chong’s chest, but he fought it down. He looked around and studied the woods for a couple of good choices for escape routes if the stranger came directly toward him. The best route was to his right, a stony path shaded by chokeberry and bitterbrush shrubs. He edged toward it, ready to bolt.

A man suddenly emerged from the woods twenty feet in front of Chong.

But he was facing the other way. Chong froze and stared at the stranger.

And strange he was.

The man was short and broad-shouldered, with huge biceps like soccer balls, a freakishly overdeveloped chest, and almost no neck at all. He wore the same black clothes as the people on the motorbikes, with red streamers fluttering in the sluggish breeze.

The man started to turn, and Chong slipped soundlessly behind a bush, certain that he hadn’t been spotted.

A pair of angel wings had been carefully embroidered on the man’s shirt, and around his neck was a chunky steel chain from which hung a slender silver whistle. Chong recognized it at once.

A dog whistle. Benny was right.

What drew Chong’s eye, though, and sent a thrill of icy fear through him, was the thing the man carried in his massive fists. A long, twisted wooden handle from which a wicked blade curved like the fang of some great dragon.

A scythe.

Chong remembered the word Riot had used.

Reapers
.

His mouth went totally dry.

The big man stood listening to the forest, much as Chong had done. His face was harsh and grim, but then a small smile formed on his thin-lipped mouth.

“No sense hiding,” said the reaper as he brought the scythe up and made a slow, deliberate cut through the afternoon air. “Hiding will only make it hurt more.”

28

S
HE DRIFTED IN DARKNESS
.

Lost.

The Lost Girl.

That was what people called her.

Lost.

For years the travelers in the Ruin believed that she was a myth. Or a ghost.

In the towns, she was a campfire tale. Something used to frighten children.

There were a dozen versions of the Lost Girl story, and in each one of them she died. Sometimes the zoms got her. Sometimes it was crazed loners. Sometimes it was her own bleak despair.

The Lost Girl died, though, in every version of the legend.

When Benny, Nix, and Tom brought her to Mountainside and she learned about those stories, she laughed. They were stupid stories. Silly.

A teenage girl, living alone? With no one to protect her?

No, they all said. Couldn’t happen. She would die.

The Lost Girl. Dead according to everyone who spun a tale about her. It was impossible for a girl to survive out in the
Ruin alone. Everyone knew that. There were too many dangers. Zoms and wild animals and bounty hunters. There were crazed loners and cannibals and a thousand different kinds of disease.

Stupid stories, she told herself. Except at night, when she thought about them in the private darkness of her bedroom, in the one place where she was safe enough to be weak. That was when she cried. That was when she believed that she was living on borrowed time—alive only because death had considered her too insignificant to pause long enough to collect.

Except that death collected everyone. Death is like that. Relentlessly efficient.

Borrowed time is no place to live.

Lilah had often feared that they were right.

Now she was sure they were.

That was the only thought that would fit into her head as she lay suspended in darkness.

She remembered the boar. Feral, massive. Four hundred pounds at least.

Both dead and deadly.

But animals can’t become zoms. It doesn’t work like that.

Unless, somehow, it does.

The Lost Girl should not be alive.

Unless, somehow, she was.

For now.

It felt like she was falling and yet not falling. Pinpricks of pain held her aloft, and for a long time she could not understand that.

Little points of pain all along her body. Except for her hands, which hung down into the black well of nothingness.

Above her, she heard the grunt of the boar and the scuff
of its hoof on the edge of the rocky shelf. Then dirt and loose stones tumbled down, striking her face and chest and stomach and thighs. She heard a rustling sound as the debris fell past her. It sounded like foliage, like pine boughs and vine leaves being pelted by rain.

She forced one eye to open. It was smeared with blood, and what little she saw was filtered through red. She blinked and blinked until tears ran pink from the corners of her eyes. Above her—thirty feet at least—the snout of the dead boar protruded over the edge of the stone shelf. That meant that . . .

Panic flared in her heart, and it brought with it a fresh burst of adrenaline, and with adrenaline came clarity.

She knew where she was.

She was suspended in a tangle of dense trees and tall shrubs, caught in the midst of her fall. Temporarily held, as if fate was waiting for her to wake up and pay attention as death made his call to collect her.

Lilah tried to move, to lift her arms, and suddenly the whole assembly of branches shifted with her. Pinecones rained down on her. Angry birds fled the trees.

How far down was the ground? The cleft was so choked with foliage that she had not been able to see the bottom. It could be six feet below her. It could be sixty. She wished she knew how badly she was hurt. Or where.

In all the tales, in every variation, the Lost Girl died.

Lilah closed her eyes.

“Chong,” she said hoarsely.

Or, she meant to say “Chong.”

What she said was, “Tom.”

29

B
ENNY AND
N
IX MADE IT TO THE WOODS WITH NO TIME TO SPARE.
T
HE
motor noise roared as loud as thunder as they dove beneath the canopy of leaves and pine needles.

Nix led the way, and Benny was a half step behind her. He cut a quick look over his shoulder and saw something that made him grab Nix’s arm and jerk her to a stop.

“Look!” he said in an urgent whisper.

They crouched down behind a thick bush and stared with slack-jawed amazement at something neither of them had ever seen.

Ten people came tearing into the clearing, all of them dressed in black clothes tied with red streamers, all of them heavily armed . . . and each of them on four-wheeled motorized vehicles.

“Oh my God,” breathed Nix, gripping Benny’s arm. “What—what—?”

The machines were not cars or trucks, and not quite motorcycles, either. Benny fished for the name and scraped up the initials ATV. He thought they stood for “all-terrain vehicle,” and that was probably right, because these machines roared easily over the uneven surface of the field. They each had
four fat rubber tires and a kind of saddle for the driver. The machines were spattered with mud, but some colored metal shone through. Different colors for each—blue and green and other shades. A basket or duffel bag was lashed to the back of each, and the handles of swords and axes sprouted from many. The roar of the machines was unnaturally loud—and even in that moment of tension, it struck Benny how quiet his world was and how loud the old world of machines must have been.

The presence of these machines was like a punch to the head.

“Are we seeing this?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said in a fierce tone. She turned to him, her eyes alight. “First the jet and now this. Benny—the old world isn’t dead. Everything wasn’t destroyed.”