Flesh & Bone (6 page)

Now I understand. Sometimes I wish he’d been even harder on us.

10

N
IX SAT WITH HER BACK TO THE TWISTED TRUNK OF A BRISTLECONE TREE
that loomed over the clearing forty yards from the edge of the ravine. She hugged the little girl to her chest as the child continued to scream and cry. Benny wondered if the kid’s mind had snapped. Those screams were hammering cracks in his own sanity.

Lilah squatted in the tall grass a dozen feet away and stared at the child with hollow eyes through which sad shadows flitted. Benny had once heard Tom refer to that kind of look as a “thousand-yard stare.” When Chong made to sit down next to her, Lilah drew her knife and stabbed the point into the earth between them.

“I can see that you need some quiet time,” he said, and scuttled quickly away.

Eventually Nix’s soothing tones and comforting embrace worked their magic on the girl, and she settled down to sniffles. Nix smoothed her hair.

“Sweetie . . . can you tell me your name?” she asked.

“E-E-E . . .” The girl tried to get it out, but every time she tried, she hiccuped a sob. “Eve,” she finally managed. Tiny jewels of tears sparkled on her face.

“Okay, Eve,” said Nix in a voice that reminded Benny of Nix’s mother. Soft and soothing, and full of the certainty of whatever was going to happen next. A parent voice. “Where did you come from?”

Eve looked at her with huge eyes and then looked over her shoulder, as if she could see her own memories. Her words came out all in a rush. “I was running after Ry-Ry, and I lost my way ’cause there were angels in the woods, and then the gray people were there and I ran some more and I tripped and fell. Where’s my mommmmeeee?”

Nix pulled her close again, and the child’s face vanished into a swirl of soft red curls. “Shhh, it’s okay, Eve. Everything’s going to be okay. We’ll find your mommy.”

Benny looked down at the child clutched in Nix’s warm arms. He was far less certain about that.

He wasn’t certain about anything. He thought about the sheer number of zoms that had come out of the forest.

Don’t forget the first rule about the Ruin
, whispered Tom’s voice.
Out here everything wants to kill you
.

Benny closed his eyes, and even now, separated from the madness of the ravine, he wasn’t at all sure if the voice was a memory or a ghost.

Or something worse than both.

Please don’t let this be me
, Benny thought.
Please don’t let me be going crazy
.

The sun shone and the birds sang in the trees and Benny tried hard not to scream.

11

I
N A QUIET TONE SO THAT ONLY
B
ENNY COULD HEAR HIM,
C
HONG MURMURED
, “Some day, huh?”

Benny jumped, and Chong shot him a puzzled look.

“What are you so twitchy about?”

For a moment Benny wondered if Chong could read his thoughts.

“Sorry,” said Benny when he was sure his words wouldn’t come out choked and twisted. “Yeah. Weird day.”

Chong sneaked a glance over at Lilah and sighed softly. “You know, I think I liked being down in that hole better. All the zoms wanted to do was eat me. I think Lilah would enjoy skinning me alive.”

Benny followed his gaze and half smiled. “It’s not you, man.”

“What?”

“She’s not mad at you. I mean, she is . . . but not any more than usual.”

“I fell in, and you know how she is with the whole thing about me being a clumsy town boy and—” began Chong, but Benny cut him off.

“It’s the kid. I . . . think she looks like Annie.”

Chong winced as if Benny had punched him in the stomach. “Oh, man . . .”

“Yeah.”

Benny understood Lilah’s pain. He and Tom had quieted the zombies that had once been their parents. Tom had helped him through it, though; and later, when Tom passed, Benny had been spared the horror of quieting him. Tom never reanimated. However, Lilah had been all alone with Annie. She had no older sibling to help her through it. Benny was wise enough to understand that no matter how bad his own experiences were, there were some people who had it worse.

As if reading his thoughts, Chong said, “I’d give a lot, you know? To make it different for her.”

“Yeah, man. I know.”

It was something Benny deeply understood, and he wondered if there was anything he wouldn’t give to change some of the things that had happened. To Nix’s mom. To Nix. To Tom.

To his parents.

He and Chong each drifted down the silent corridors of their personal pain as the sun burned its way through the hard blue sky. A pair of spider monkeys chattered in the trees. Benny looked at them because it was easier than looking at Eve, who still wept in Nix’s arms. He sighed, feeling immensely useless.

In town there was always someone around to help with children. The whole town looked after everyone’s kids. It was the way it had always been, at least in Benny’s experience. No one would ever let a little kid go wandering off on their own.

Nix kept stroking the sobbing child’s hair and murmuring words that Benny could not hear.

Eve was a little girl. Five years old. Helpless.

As Annie had been helpless.

Benny felt the weight of the sword slung over his shoulder. Tom’s sword. His sword now. The sword he had very nearly lost.

He felt his face flush as he thought about how Nix had chased him out of the ravine and Lilah had recovered the sword. That was wrong. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to work.

He felt eyes on him and turned to see Chong giving him a considering appraisal.

“What?” Benny demanded.

“What’s on your mind? You look like you’re trying to squeeze out a thought.”

“Nothing,” said Benny.

Chong sighed.

“Actually, there is something,” Benny said tentatively.

“What?”

“When I was in the ravine, I thought I heard something.”

“Like the sound of you peeing your pants?”

“Hilarious. Like a motor, like the hand-crank generator at the hospital. Did—did you guys hear that?”

Chong shook his head. “I didn’t. I was asleep.” Then, without meaning to, he said something very unkind. “Maybe you imagined it. You know, stress and all.”

Benny stared ahead, and for a few moments he did not actually see a thing except shadows drifting across the front of his mind.

“Yeah,” he said very quietly, “crazy, huh?”

Nix hugged Eve and kissed her hair. Then she encouraged
her to drink from a canteen. Finally Nix caught Benny’s eye and gave him a tiny nod.

Benny and Chong came over, but they did not sit too close, warned off by a quick flare of Nix’s eyes. Benny sat cross-legged next to Chong and waited as Eve looked shyly at them from within the protection of Nix’s arms.

“Eve—?” began Nix softly.

“Mmm?” Eve answered in a tiny voice.

“Do you live around here?”

Eve sniffed and shook her head. “They chased us and . . . we had to run away.”

Ouch
, thought Benny.

“Who did you run away with?” asked Nix. No need to ask who they ran from.

“Mommy and Daddy and Ry-Ry and me, we had to run away ’cause the angels came and set fire to the trees, and then the gray people came through the fence and ate all the sheep and cows and tried to eat—” She suddenly stopped and looked around, her eyes filling with new tears. “Where’s my mommy?”

“Shhh, shhh, it’s okay, it’s all right,” soothed Nix, “we’ll find her.”

Benny marveled at Nix’s patience. As sympathetic as he was to Eve, he could not stand the tears, the crying, the panic that emanated from the girl. It made him want to scream and run and hit things. Dead things. Or . . . anything. Trees, a rock wall. His fists were balled tight, and his whole body remained rigid as he tensed against a possible new wave of weeping.

“Sweetie,” said Nix to Eve, “where was your mommy when you last saw her?”

Eve’s face went blank as she thought about it. She glanced over Nix’s shoulder to the slope that rose above the jagged mouth of the ravine, then turned and scanned the entire terrain. “I was playing in the creek,” she said. “Mommy was doing the washing. And Ry-Ry was making breakfast and—”

Benny nodded. He leaned forward and said, “Eve . . . does your mom have black hair?”

Eve blinked at him like a confused turtle. “No. Mommy has yellow hair.” She said it as if everyone knew that.

Chong bent close and whispered, “Why’d you ask that?”

Benny shrugged. “Probably nothing. I thought I saw a woman in the woods right before the zoms started chasing me.”

“Was she—?” began Chong, and left the rest unsaid.

“I thought so,” Benny said, “but the zoms didn’t go for her.”

“Cadaverine?” suggested Chong.

“Maybe. I don’t know, it was all so fast.”

Chong nodded sadly. They both remembered Tom’s admonition about strangers. “A newly reanimated zom hasn’t had time to rot, so they’ll look like a living person right up to when they take a bite out of you.”

“Where was your camp?” Nix asked the little girl.

“I don’t know. When the gray people tried to get me, I ran and ran. We have to find Mommy and Daddy and Ry-Ry.”

“Who’s Ry-Ry?”

“A girl,” Eve said, as if that was obvious to anyone. “She was taking us to a new home where we could all be safe from the gray people and the angels.”

Lilah abruptly stood. “I’ll find them,” she said, and
stalked off to begin preparing her gear for a hunt.

“Where’s the spear lady going?” asked Eve.

“She’s a very good hunter,” said Nix. “She’ll find your mommy and the others.”

“What about the gray people?” Eve asked in horror. “They’ll get her!”

Nix smiled. “No, honey. They gray people won’t get Lilah. She’s smart and really strong, and she’s quieted a lot of them.”

“Quieted?”

“Put them to sleep.”

“Pretend sleep or forever sleep?”

“Um . . . forever sleep,” Nix assured her.

Chong leaned close to Benny again. “This is fascinating,” he said quietly. “If there are other settlements out here, then they’re probably like islands or distant countries used to be in the days before the world was mapped. So isolated that their own phrasing and references—all the slang and jargon that we’ve used since First Night—is going to be different.”

“But . . . the way-station monks travel all over, don’t they?”

Chong shrugged. “Sure. Like the Irish monks did during the Middle Ages and the Jesuits did a few centuries later. The Shaolin did it in China, too. Traveling, recording, spreading information, and making connections among the learned. Kind of a theme with traveling monks.”

“The way-station monks don’t travel to spread their religion, though.”

“Not every monk or priest is an evangelist, Benny. Some were scholars and historians. Though, shocking as it is, you’re right about one thing. If we find people using the same
post–First Night slang, then it’s probably going to be because of the monks.”

“Gosh, Encyclopedia Chong. Thanks for throwing me a bone.”

“It’s a small bone. Chew it well.”

Benny elbowed him in the ribs, but he did it discreetly. He didn’t want to scare the kid.

12

E
VE EVENTUALLY FELL ASLEEP.
N
IX WAVED EVERYONE AWAY SO AS NOT TO
disturb the child. Benny drifted off to stare at the zoms in the ravine.

Chong saw Lilah sitting on a fallen log, sharpening the blade of her spear in preparation for setting off to find Eve’s parents. Not feeling in the mood for another rebuke, he sank down with his back to a slender pine, closed his eyes, and began wandering slowly through the library of his mind. That was how he viewed it. A library, with shelves of books and rows of file cabinets in which his thoughts and memories and experiences were neatly filed.

The only mental file cabinet that was not as neatly and precisely ordered was the one labeled
LILAH
.

That one leaned with an awkward tilt, its sides were dented, and none of the drawers rolled smoothly out.

Lilah was the storm that swirled around Chong’s life, and he dwelt in its calm eye, awed by the power and beauty of it, but not at all sure he understood it. Chong was relatively sure he would die of old age before he ever understood her completely.

He conjured the image of her in his mind. She was easily
the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Tall, lithe, with long, tanned limbs, eyes the color of honey, and snow-white hair. Since Tom’s death, it had fallen to Lilah to be the de facto leader of their expedition. Even though she’d never been to Nevada—or in a desert—she understood the logic and science of survival. From age eleven to sixteen she had lived alone in the Ruin, alternately running from zoms and bounty hunters and hunting them. Chong believed that Lilah could survive in any environment on earth in which she found herself. And although he could understand the skills she possessed on an intellectual level, he knew that he lacked her basic survival instincts.

His reverie ended abruptly with a sharp kick in the middle of his thigh.

“Ow!” he yelped, and loaded his tongue with the vilest insult he could construct for Benny . . . only it wasn’t Benny.

When Chong opened his eyes, it was Lilah standing over him. She had her leather hunting pouch slung slantwise across her body and the spear in her hand.

“Wake up,” she said.

“I am awake.”

Lilah dropped the spear in the grass and sat cross-legged, facing him.

“I am leaving,” she said.

“You just got here.”

“No, I am going to find Annie’s parents.”

“Eve’s,” he corrected.

Her eyes flashed with irritation. “That’s what I said.”

“Okay,” said Chong.

Lilah sat there with an expectant look on her face.

“Yes?” asked Chong.

“Well—?” she said.

“Well . . . what?”

“I said I was leaving.”

“I know. Did . . . you want me to go with you?”

She laughed. “This is a hunt.”

“I know.”