Flesh & Bone (39 page)

A small burble of happy laughter.

He looked down at the child who clung to him. Her face was alight with sheer joy as the quad banged over fallen branches and leaped channels cut by rainwater.

Eve grinned up at him, and for the first time since he had first met her, Chong saw the uncomplicated purity of happiness. It was so odd, so totally out of keeping with everything that was happening, that even though he smiled back at her, Chong was deeply afraid for this child.

He did not for a moment believe that a kid who was borderline catatonic could simply “snap out of it.” No way. Chong kept his smile in place, but he felt that he was looking
at the beautiful face of a horror deeper than his own infection.

God, don’t let her be all the way over the edge
, he silently prayed.
If I have any grace coming to me, then let’s agree that I don’t really need it anymore. Give it to the kid. Give Eve a chance
.

Even his prayers were orderly, and Chong was good with it. He meant every word.

He closed his eyes for a moment as a fresh wave of motion-induced nausea wormed through his guts.

Lilah
, he thought.
Lilah..
.

Riot’s quad burst out of the forest and into the desert. “We’ll be in Sanctuary in less than—”

She screamed and slammed on the brakes.

Chong opened his eyes.

The desert was filled with reapers. More than a hundred of them.

One of them, a tall woman who—unlike the other reapers—had long flowing hair, drew a slender knife and pointed it at Riot.

Riot groaned and spoke a word that Chong knew would burn like acid on her tongue.

“Ma!”

She immediately spun the quad and plunged back into the forest.

Even over the roar of the engine, Chong could hear a hundred voices howl as the reapers gave chase.

84

“I
GOT THIS
,”
SAID
N
IX, RAISING HER BOKKEN.

“No!” warned Benny as he moved away from it, using his body to push Nix back. “It’s one of those smart fast ones from that scientist’s report.”

The zombie began stalking them, and immediately Nix and Benny knew they were in dangerously unknown territory. This wasn’t the slow, relentless shuffle of the zoms they knew. The creature in the green jumpsuit seemed to be assessing them as it stalked slowly forward. Its milky eyes flicked from Nix’s bokken to Benny’s
katana
.

The creature—and Benny could no longer think of this thing as a zombie—bent forward and bared its teeth, its face wrinkling with feral animal hate.

“Oh God,” whispered Nix.

The creature snarled in pure fury and rushed at them.

Benny was caught in a dreadful moment of indecision.

Run or fight?

He could feel Nix’s whole body trembling beside him.

The fight and the slope were behind them.

The choice was made for him, because the creature raced at them far too fast for any chance of escape.

85

B
ROTHER
A
LEXI SWUNG HIS HAMMER AND THE HEAVY WEAPON, POWERED
by the giant’s massive muscles and all his mounting terror, slammed into the first zombie to reach him.

The zom’s head exploded, and the lifeless body flopped to the ground.

Alexi used the force of the blow to turn his body in a pirouette, and as the hammer came around again he smashed it into the second zom. The blow caught the dead thing on the shoulder, but the force shattered its spine.

Alexi checked the swing and brought the hammer over and down onto a third zombie, and a fourth.

He laughed out loud, and his fear melted away to become diluted in battle joy.

“Come on, you rotting buggers!” he bellowed.

The zoms rose from the twitching bodies of the chosen ones, their empty eyes seeking out the author of that challenge, their mouths dripping red.

“Come on!”

They came.

Eighteen of them came.

His laughter died in his chest.

Some of them were in jumpsuits, some were in bloodstained black—with angel wings on their chests.

Something small and round sailed past Alexi’s face, and he flinched reflexively away from it. It looked like a metal baseball, and it hit the ground in front of the leading wave of zoms, bounced once, and exploded.

The blast was huge.

Pieces of zoms were flung in every direction. Blood splashed against the white plane.

Alexi spun around, shielding his eyes.

Then the air was fractured by gunfire and the combat howl of a huge dog.

86

B
ENNY HAD NO CHOICE.

He and Nix were too close to each other to swing their swords—they were breaking one of Tom’s cardinal rules about battlefield combat.

But she seemed frozen in place.

“I’m sorry!” Benny said, and shoved her backward as he jumped forward to meet the creature.

He heard Nix’s scream as she hit the edge of the slope—and fell.

Benny had no time to process that.

The creature was on him, and Benny lunged in low and to the left, swinging the sword in as powerful a lateral cut as he could manage. The shock of impact jolted him, but the
katana
was sharper than a razor. It sliced through dead flesh and brittle bone.

The creature fell past him and Benny turned, controlling the erratic postimpact swing of his blade. As he pivoted, he saw the zom scramble to a stop at the top of the slope and wheel around. The sword had cut completely through the right side of its chest, from front to back. Muscle and bone were destroyed, and the monster’s right arm sagged down. It
did not even pause. There was no reaction to damage; there was no pain.

It growled and came charging again, and Benny tried the same trick, aiming lower this time, trying to catch the leg.

The creature dodged out of the way.

Dodged.

It . . .

Benny’s brain almost froze. Even with the warning on Dr. McReady’s document, it was—it seemed—impossible.

The zom grabbed Benny’s vest with its good left hand and jerked him forward, toward its mouth full of rotting gray teeth.

Benny had no angle for a cut, so he punched the zom across the mouth with the hand that held the sword. The blow was awkward but powerful, and teeth flew from the open mouth.

The zom ignored the damage and lunged forward to take a bite.

Benny threw himself backward, and the zom’s shattered teeth closed around a pocket of the vest instead. Benny heard a bottle of cadaverine crunch to stinking fragments inside the pocket.

The creature did not notice or care, and Benny was positive now that the network of wires bolted to its face somehow cut off its sense of smell. Maybe the scientists had done it as part of some experiment, or maybe smell was really a zombie’s primary hunting sense. Not that it mattered right now . . . the zom could see and it could still bite.

Benny fell backward with the creature, and as he fell he brought his knee up between its legs, hitting it square on the
bottom of the pelvis. The fall and the kick gave Benny the power he needed to hurl the monster completely over him. It landed with a bone-rattling thud and immediately scrambled to its feet.

Benny brought his sword around into a two-hand grip but only got as far as his knees before he realized that he was in worse trouble than he thought.

As the zom raced toward him again, it snatched up a broken branch from the ground and swung it full force at Benny’s head.

There was a moment of red-black blankness. Benny never actually felt the blow. One second it was about to hit him, and then he was falling.

Then he saw something inexplicable.

The zom was falling too.

It crashed down a yard away face-to-face with Benny. The milky eyes stared at him, but now there was nothing there. No animal rage. Nothing.

But the strangest part of all was that there seemed to be an arrow sticking out of its temple.

Then a shadow fell over him, and Benny tried to bring up his sword in a last desperate defense against some new terror. Maybe the other green-jumpsuited zom?

“Hey, monkey-banger,” said a familiar voice. “You pick the strangest times to lie down for a nap.”

Benny blinked and stared. “Chong?”

It was Chong, but as Benny struggled to get to his feet, he saw his friend’s face. And froze.

Chong’s skin was gray, and a pale film of white covered his eyes.

Chong was a zom.

87

A
LEXI TURNED TO SEE TWO STRANGERS—A MAN AND A TEENAGE GIRL—
climb off a quad, guns in their hands, barrels raised. He saw a monster of a dog dressed in spiked armor race past him and heard it crunch into the oncoming zoms. Bullets burned past him on either side.

He heard the teenage girl yell, “NIX!”

And he heard the voice of the red-haired girl yell, “LILAH!”

Then zoms piled onto him and he staggered backward.

Alexi roared and shook his body like an angry bear, flinging the dead off him. He swung his hammer to crush heads and chests.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the little redhead swinging her toy sword like she actually knew something. Shattering legs, crushing skulls, dodging and twisting.

She’d make a great reaper
, he thought as he fought.
If she lives through this, I’m going to recruit that little witch
.

Zombies were falling dead around him, from those he smashed, from the wooden blade of the redhead, from the gunshots, and from the dog.

Alexi really liked the dog.

He’d never seen anything fight like that, and he wondered
why it had never occurred to him to train dogs to work with the reapers. This one was a cunning fighter, clearly trained to fight the dead. It did not bite at all, but instead used its horned helmet and spiked armor to rend and smash and dismember. The dead had no chance against it. Those who tried to bite it shattered their teeth on its chain mail. It was like a pack of lions trying to tear down an armored personnel carrier.

Suddenly Alexi realized that everyone in the clearing was engaged in fighting the dead except him. The gray people who had attacked him were all dead. He glanced at the man and girl with the guns. They were totally absorbed in their own personal wars.

He hefted his hammer.

“Screw this,” he said, and ran away as fast as his long legs could carry him.

He vanished into the woods to find Mother Rose.

88

“C
HONG
—?” B
ENNY GASPED
.

The dead-pale face split in a rueful grin. “What’s left of him.”

“But—but—your face. What happened?”

Chong stood bare-chested, wrapped in bandages. He held a sophisticated bow in his hands, and there was a quiver of arrows slung low across his hips. He did not meet Benny’s eyes, though; he gaped at something above them. When Benny reached up to touch his forehead, he felt swollen flesh. Blood dripped like red rain across his eyes.

The pain caught up to him then.

Immense, crashing, like a giant bell ringing an inch from his ears.

Chong said something, but the words didn’t seem to make sense.

Benny asked him to repeat it, but he heard his own words.

They were meaningless gibberish.

The fading sunlight flared too white and too bright, and then the hinges fell off the world and Benny was falling.

Falling.

Falling.

89

B
ENNY COULD NOT MOVE
. H
E COULD BARELY BREATHE
. H
IS HEAD FELT LIKE
it was actually on fire.

He heard several sounds happen all at once, colliding into one another so hard and fast that it was hard to separate them out and assign meaning.

He heard a girl scream in fear. Nix?

Did she say his name? Was she the one shouting it over and over?

He heard a dog barking.

So weird. He didn’t have a dog.

He heard the moans of the living dead.

He heard gunshots.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them the light had changed. And now there was a ring of faces around him. Benny raised a hand and touched one of them; he traced the line of a pink scar down through a field of freckles.

“I love you,” he said.

The face, grave with concern, flushed, and that made Benny smile.

“Benny,” said Nix, “you’re hurt. You hit your head.”

“A zom hit my head,” he said. “I was hit in the head by a zom.” He thought that was funny and laughed, but laughing hurt, so he stopped.

The other faces swam in and out of focus. Lilah. Chong.

“Are you dead?” he asked Chong.

Chong tried to smile, but it didn’t suit his face. “That’s open to debate,” he said.

Nix said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Chong said something, but Benny didn’t understand it. Thinking was so hard. His head felt like it was in a hollow metal box and someone kept banging on it.

He thought he heard Nix scream. Or cry. Or maybe she was laughing.

“Are you sleeping?” asked a tiny voice, and Benny realized that his eyes had closed. He open them to see a lovely little face.

“Eve?”

“You found me in a hole in the ground,” she said. At first Benny thought it didn’t make sense, but then he realized it did.

“Yeah, just like a bunny rabbit.” He touched the tip of her nose. “You’re a little bunny.”

She giggled.

That sound seemed to screw one of the world’s hinges back into place.

A strange voice said, “Kid’s a mess. Skull fracture, concussion . . . ”

Benny looked toward the sound of the voice. A big man smiled down at him. One of those tight smiles people give when they don’t want you to know how bad things look through their eyes. It was almost a wince.

“I’m Joe,” he said.

“I know you,” said Benny as he raised a bloody finger and touched Joe’s face. “You’re on a Zombie Card. Captain Ledger, Hero of First Night. You’re number two-eighty-four. I have two of you. I was going to trade one of you to Morgie for his Sheriff Rick card.”