Flesh & Bone (2 page)

Given all that, given that everyone Benny had ever met had been touched by death in one way or another, he should have been able to accept Tom’s death.

Should have.

But . . .

Although Tom had fallen during the battle of Gameland, he had not risen as one of the living dead. That was incredibly
strange. It should have been wonderful, a blessing that Benny knew he should be grateful for . . . but he wasn’t. He was confused by it. And frightened, because he had no idea what it meant.

It made no sense. Not according to everything Benny had learned in his nearly sixteen years. Since First Night everyone who died, no matter how they died, reanimated as a zom. Everyone. No exceptions. It was the way things were.

Until it wasn’t.

Tom had not returned from death to that horrible mockery of life people called “living death.” Neither had a murdered man they’d found in the woods the day they left town. Same thing with some of the bounty hunters killed in the battle of Gameland. Benny didn’t know why. No one knew why. It was a mystery that was both frightening and hopeful. The world, already strange and terrible, had become stranger still.

Movement jolted Benny out of his musings, and he saw a figure step out of the woods at the top of the slope eighty feet away. He remained stock-still, watching to see if the zom would notice him.

Except that this was not a zom.

The figure was slender, tall, definitely female, and almost certainly still alive. She was dressed in black clothes—a loose long-sleeved shirt and pants—and there were dozens of pieces of thin red cloth tied around her. Ankles, legs, torso, arms, throat. The streamers were bright red, and they fluttered in the breeze so that for a weird moment it seemed as if she was badly cut and blood was being whipped off her in ragged lines. But as she stepped from shadow into sunlight, Benny saw that the streamers were only cloth.

She had something embroidered on the front of her shirt in white thread, but Benny could not make out the design.

He and his friends had not met a living person in weeks, and out here in the badlands they were more likely to meet a violently hostile loner than a friendly stranger. He waited to see if the woman had spotted him.

She walked a few paces into the field and stared down the slope toward a line of tall bristlecone pines. Even from this distance Benny could tell that the woman was beautiful. Regal, like pictures of queens he had seen in old books. Olive-skinned, with masses of gleaming black hair that fluttered in the same breeze that stirred the crimson streamers.

Sunlight struck silver fire from an object she raised from where it hung on a chain around her neck. Benny was too far away to tell what it was, though he thought it looked like a whistle. However, when the woman put it to her lips and blew, there was no sound at all, but suddenly the birds and monkeys in the trees began twittering with great agitation.

Then something else happened, and it sent a thrill of fear through Benny and drove all other thoughts out of his mind. Three men stepped out of the woods behind the woman. Their clothes also fluttered in the wind, but for them it was because the things they wore had been ripped to rags by violence, by weather, and by the inexorable claws of time.

Zoms.

Benny got to his feet very slowly. Quick movements attracted the dead. The zoms were a dozen feet behind the woman and lumbering toward her. She seemed totally unaware of their presence as she continued to try and make sounds from her whistle.

Several more figures stepped out of the shadows under the trees. More of the dead. They kept emerging into the light as if conjured from nightmares by his growing fear. There was no choice. He had to warn her. The dead were almost upon her.

“Lady!” he yelled. “Run!”

The woman’s head jerked up, and she stared across the swaying grass to where he stood. For a moment all the zoms froze in place as they searched for the source of the yelling voice.

“Run!” yelled Benny again.

The woman turned away from him and looked at the zoms. There were at least forty of them, and more were materializing from the darkness under the trees. The zoms moved with the jerky awkwardness that Benny always found so awful. Like badly manipulated puppets. Their hands rose as they reached out for fresh meat.

However, the woman turned slowly away from them and faced Benny once more. The zoms reached her.

“No . . . ,” Benny gasped, unable to bear the sight of another death.

And the zombies lumbered past her. She stood there as a tide of them parted to move around her. They did not grab her, did not try to bite her. They ignored her except to angle their line of approach to avoid her and continue walking down the slope.

Toward Benny.

Not one of them touched the woman or even looked in her direction.

Confusion rooted Benny to the spot, and the sword hung almost forgotten in his hand.

Was he wrong about her? Was she one of the dead and not a living person at all? Was she wearing cadaverine? Or was there something else about her that made the dead forgo the feast at hand for the one that stood gaping at them down the slope?

Run!

The word exploded inside his mind, and for a crazy moment Benny thought that it was Tom’s voice shouting at him.

He staggered as if punched, and then he wheeled around and ran.

3

H
E RAN LIKE HELL
.

This was no time to contemplate mysteries. He pounded down the slope faster than a jackrabbit as the mass of the dead growled out a moan of hunger and followed.

A zom rose up out of the tall grass directly in his path. There was no way to avoid the thing, not with all the momentum of the downward run, so he tucked his head and drove his shoulder into it like he was trying to bust through a line of offensive backs on the school football field. The zom went flying backward, and Benny leaped over the thrashing creature.

More zoms came at him, rising up out of the weeds and staggering out from behind tumbled boulders. Benny still held Tom’s sword, but he hated using it on zoms. Not unless he had no choice. These creatures were not evil, they were dead. Mindless. Unless he could completely quiet one of them, chopping at them seemed . . . wrong. He knew they couldn’t feel pain and wouldn’t care, but Benny felt like some kind of malicious bully.

On the other hand, there was that whole survival thing. As three zoms closed in on him in a line he could not bull his way through, the hand holding the sword moved almost
without conscious thought. The blade swept upward through one set of reaching arms, and the hands flew high above, grasping nothing but air. With a deft twist of his shoulder, he flicked the blade sideways and a zom’s head went flying into the bushes. Another cut left the third zom toppling to one side with one leg suddenly missing from mid-thigh.

“Sorry!” Benny yelled as he burst through the now disintegrating line of three zoms.

But there were more.

So many more, coming at him from all directions. Cold fingers fumbled at his face and tried to grab his hair, but Benny jagged and dodged and dove through them toward open ground.

His foot hit a rock and he sprawled forward; the sword flew from his hand and clattered thirty feet down the slope.

“No!” he cried as the sword vanished in the tall, dry grass.

Before Benny could get up, a zom grabbed a loose pocket flap on his vest and another grabbed his cuff.

“Get away!” Benny yelled as he thrashed and kicked and fought his way free. He scrambled to his feet, but his balance was bad and the slope was steep, so he ran like a sloppy dog on hands and feet for a dozen paces until he could get fully upright again.

More and more of the living dead staggered down the hill after him. Benny had no idea where they had come from, or why there were so many here. Even before Gameland, the zoms had started moving in packs rather than alone as they’d always done before. A month ago Benny, Lilah, and Nix had been under siege by thousands of them at a monk’s way station. How and why this flocking behavior was happening was
another of the mysteries that no one had an answer for.

“Tom,” Benny said, gasping his brother’s name as he ran. He didn’t know why he spoke the name. Maybe it was a prayer for guidance from the best zombie hunter who had ever worked the Ruin. Or maybe it was a curse, because now everything Tom had taught him seemed to be in question. The world was changing beyond the lessons Tom had given.

“Tom,” Benny growled as he ran, and he tried to remember those lessons that could not change. The ways of the samurai, the ways of the warrior.

He saw sunlight glitter on metal ten paces downslope, and Benny leaped at the fallen sword, grabbing it by the handle with his left hand, switching it into a two-handed grip even while his legs continued to run at full speed. Zoms came at him, and the sword seemed to move with its own will.

Arms and legs and heads flew into the hot sunlight.

I am warrior smart
, thought Benny as he ran and fought.
I am an Imura. I have Tom’s sword
.

I am a bounty hunter
.

Right
.

You’re about to be lunch, you moron
, muttered his inner voice. For once Benny could not muster a convincing argument.

Everywhere he looked he saw another withered figure lurching toward him from beneath the shade of the big trees or from between tall shrubs. He knew—he knew—that this was not a coordinated trap. Zoms couldn’t think. It wasn’t that. . . . He must have simply had the bad luck to run into a swarm of them that was spread out across the whole width of the slope.

Run!
yelled his inner voice.
Faster!

He wanted to tell his inner voice to stop offering stupid advice and maybe instead come up with some sort of plan. Something that didn’t involve ending up in the digestive tracts of a hundred zoms.

Run.

Yeah
, he thought.
Good plan
.

Then he saw that the tall grass twenty yards down the slope hid the dark cleft of a small ravine. It ran the entire width of the slope, which was bad news, but it was less than ten feet across, which was good.

Could he jump it? Could he build up the momentum to leap across the opening?

His inner voice yelled,
Go . . . GO!

Benny set his teeth, called on every possible ounce of speed, and threw himself into the air, his feet still running through nothingness as he hurtled over the deep ravine. He landed hard on the far slope, bending his knees just as Tom had taught him, letting his leg muscles absorb the shock of impact.

He was safe!

Benny laughed out loud and spun toward the wave of zoms that still staggered toward him. They were so completely focused on him that they did not notice—or understand—the danger of the ravine.

“Yo! Deadheads,” he yelled, waving his sword to taunt them. “Nice try, but you’re messing with Benny-freaking-Imura, zombie killer. Booyah!”

And then the lip of the ravine buckled and collapsed under his weight, and Benny-freaking-Imura instantly plummeted into the darkness below.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

It is one month and one day since Tom died.

Night before last, while we were all sitting around the campfire, Chong told a joke that made Benny laugh. I think it was the first time Benny laughed since Gameland.

It was so good to hear him laugh. His eyes are still sad, though. I guess mine probably are too.

I never thought any of us would ever want to laugh again.

4

B
ENNY FELL FROM SUNLIGHT INTO DARKNESS AND HIT THE BOTTOM OF THE
ravine so hard that his legs buckled and he pitched forward onto his face. Loose soil, tree roots, and small stones rained down on him. Fireworks detonated inside his head, and every single molecule of his body hurt.

He groaned, rolled onto his side, spat dirt out of his mouth, and clawed spiderwebs out of his eyes.

“Yeah, warrior smart,” he muttered.

The bottom of the ravine was much wider than the top and thick with mud, and Benny quickly understood that it was not a true ravine but a gorge cut by water runoff from the mountains. During the times of heaviest runoff, the flowing water had undercut edges of the slope above, creating the illusion of solid ground.

If he had kept running after he had leaped the gorge he would be safe. Instead he’d turned to gloat. Not exactly warrior smart.

Warrior dumb-ass
, he thought darkly.

As he lay there, his mind began to play tricks on him. Or at least he thought it was doing something twisted and weird. He heard sounds. First it was his own labored breathing and
the moans of the dead above him, but, no . . . there was something else.

It was a distant roar that sounded—impossible as that was—like the hand-crank generator that ran the power in the hospital back home. Still half-buried in the dirt, he cocked his head to listen. The sound was definitely there, but it wasn’t exactly like the hospital generator. This whined at a higher pitch, and it surged and fell away, surged and fell away.

Then it was gone.

He strained to hear it, trying to decide if it was really a motor sound or something else. There were all kinds of birds and animals out there, weird stuff that had escaped zoos and circuses, and Benny had read about exotic animal sounds. Was that what he’d heard?

No
, said his inner voice,
it was a motor
.

Suddenly there was a soft sound from above, and a huge pile of loose dirt cascaded down on Benny, burying him almost to the neck. He began fighting his way out, but then he heard another sound and he looked, expecting to see more of the wall collapsing on him, but what he saw was far, far worse. The leading wave of pursuing zoms had reached the edge of the ravine, and the land had crumbled under their combined weight. Four zombies pitched over the edge and fell into the darkness with jarring crunches, the nearest one landing only six feet away.