Flesh & Bone (7 page)

“I will be moving fast. Tracking.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

“You’re a—”

“A town boy. Yes, I know that, too.” He smiled. It was a fact she reminded him of a dozen times each day. “And this town boy would slow you down, get you eaten by zoms, and otherwise bring about the downfall of what’s left of humanity.”

“Well . . . yes.” Lilah studied him, clearly unsure of how to respond. Humor was the bluntest tool in her personal skills set.

“Then if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stay here and manfully defend this tree.”

Lilah narrowed her eyes. “That is not a funny joke.”

“No,” he admitted. “Just mildly silly.”

They sat for a moment, she looking at him and Chong pretending to look at nothing.

“I am leaving,” she said again.

“Okay,” he said.

She lingered, waiting.

“What?” he asked again.

“I am leaving,” she replied, leaning on the word.

“Okay. Good-bye. Be safe. Come back soon.”

“No,” she said.

“Good hunting?”

Lilah growled low in her throat, grabbed his shirt with both hands, and hauled him toward her. Into a kiss that was fierce and hot and instantly intense. After several scalding seconds, she shoved him roughly back.

She got to her feet and snatched up her spear, then looked pityingly down at him. “Stupid town boy,” she muttered, then turned and jogged into the forest.

Chong lay sprawled, eyes glazed and face flushed.

“Holy moley . . . ,” he gasped.

13

C
HONG LOOKED UP AS
B
ENNY
’
S SHADOW FELL ACROSS HIM.
B
ENNY WAS
grinning like a ghoul as he softly chanted, “Chong and Lilah sitting in a tree . . .”

“Although I’m a moral person,” began Chong as he climbed to his feet, “I would have no compunction about killing you in your sleep.”

“Just saying . . .”

Chong squatted down in front of Nix, who held a sleeping Eve. The little girl twitched every now and then, as if flinching away from shadows in her dreams.

Chong reached out to stroke Eve’s silky hair. “I’ll sit with her for a while if you want.”

“You sure?” asked Nix.

“Sure, you know me and kids.”

Nix nodded. Unlike Benny, who was often clumsy around kids and old people, Chong was completely comfortable with them. His inner calm seemed to work magic on the little ones, and he told the best stories. Chong knew all of Aesop’s fables, Mother Goose, Oz, and Narnia, and a huge number of silly, funny stories culled from the countless books he’d read.

With a grateful sigh, Nix handed Eve to Chong, who took
her with such care that the little girl never even stirred. Chong crossed his legs and sat back against the tree.

Benny touched Nix’s arm. “Want to take a walk?”

She nodded, and they set off at a slow stroll toward the forest and then turned just before the line of junipers and walked north in the shade.

The forest itself was a strange holdover from before First Night. It had once been an elaborate golf course that someone had plunked down in the middle of an inhospitable desert. Wind-driven turbines had been erected to pump in water from some distant place in order to keep the grass green; but after First Night, the wind turbines began to fail. Benny and his friends had passed a line of them on the way here. Of the fifty they counted, only three still turned sluggishly, and they must have been enough to allow some trees and plants to flourish. But there was clear evidence that the more water-hungry vegetation was dying and the more desert-hardy junipers and pinyons were taking over. Soon only the desert plants would be left, and another of man’s structures that had been imposed on the land would be reclaimed by nature.

They walked in silence through the green trees, leaving the stench of the crowd of zoms behind. A few small white butterflies fluttered past. A black-tailed jackrabbit sat shoulder-deep in the grass, munching on a stem, and paused to watch them with a nervous eye, but soon went back to its foraging. All around them the desert birds flitted and sang. Benny loved birds and pointed out some of his favorites to Nix.

“That one there’s a sage grouse,” he said. “And see, on that branch? That’s a horned lark. And I think I saw a meadowlark earlier and . . .”

His voice trailed off as he realized that she wasn’t listening. She wasn’t even giving him the usual courtesy nods and grunts people give when they’re pretending to listen. Nix was deep inside her own thoughts, and Benny was on the other side of that wall. He lapsed into silence, and they walked without talking for ten minutes.

“I asked Eve about where she came from,” Nix said eventually.

“Oh?”

“A lot of it is confusing. She’s little, and she doesn’t understand most of what’s happened, and I think she’s a bit out of it, you know? Like, in shock? Some of the things she says don’t make much sense. I think she’s confusing stuff from dreams, or maybe nightmares, with things that are actually happening.”

Benny nodded toward the zoms on the other side of the long ravine. “That’s not too hard to understand. Sometimes I can’t believe it myself. Sometimes I think I’m going to wake up and smell Tom’s cooking, and then I’ll go down to breakfast. Scrambled eggs with peppers and mushrooms. Your mom’s corn muffins. Fresh-pressed apple juice and a big glass of milk.” He sighed.

Nix nodded but didn’t comment on that. “Eve said she used to live in a house up in a town called Treetops. I don’t know if that’s real or something she made up.”

“That’s actually not a bad idea. Zoms can’t climb.”

“She said that one night the trees all caught fire and everyone ran. And here’s the really strange part: She said that it was angels who came and set fire to the trees.”

“She mentioned angels before. Is that another name for zoms?”

“I don’t think so. She said the angels came riding in on what she called ‘growly horses.’ Isn’t that strange?”

“Yeah.”

“According to her, the angels had wings on their chests.”

“On their chests?” Benny grinned at the thought. “Wouldn’t that make them fly upside down?”

“It’s not funny,” said Nix. “Eve was really scared of them.”

They stopped and picked some tart early-season elderberries.

As Benny ate, he thought about the idea of wings on the chests of angels, and it made him think about the woman he’d seen in the field right before the horde of zoms attacked him. What was it embroidered on the front of her shirt? Could that have been angel wings?

He told Nix about her.

“You sure she wasn’t a zom?”

“Yeah. Weird, huh? Oh, and I heard a strange sound while I was down in the ravine.” He described the motor noise. “Did you hear anything like that?”

“A motor?” Nix brightened. “I didn’t hear anything, but . . . could it have been a jet?”

Benny thought about it and reluctantly shook his head. “No. It didn’t sound anywhere near big enough.”

Nix looked crestfallen, and Benny felt bad. Although he was out here in the Ruin to look for the jet too, it was clear to everyone that the search for the jet was Nix’s mission. Her quest. Benny wanted to find it, as did Lilah and Chong; but Nix needed to find it. Benny thought he knew why she was so obsessed by it, but he didn’t dare say it to her. Not now, anyway.

He let her sort through her own emotions for a moment. She chewed her lip thoughtfully, then grunted. “Hmm. Motors . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but it makes me wonder what sound those ‘growly horses’ made.”

He paused with a handful of berries halfway to his mouth. “Wow,” he said quietly.

“Wow,” she agreed. “Mr. Lafferty said once that just because the EMPs blew out all the motors, there was no reason why someone couldn’t repair some of them. I mean . . . we did see that jet.”

“Yes, we did.”

“So . . . maybe the growly horses are some kind of . . . I don’t know . . . car or truck or something.”

Benny nodded. “Not sure I want to find out.”

Nix looked away and didn’t answer. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she asked, “Do you regret it?”

“Regret . . . what?”

“This,” she said, gesturing to the forest. “Leaving town, coming out here. Are you sorry we came?”

Benny tensed. He loved Nix, but he knew that she was not above setting verbal traps for him to put his foot into. She’d done it enough times, and he’d stumbled numbly into them more times than he could count. It wasn’t a very likable quality, but it wasn’t any kind of deal breaker for them. He was pretty sure there were things he did that annoyed her, too.

So he relied on one of his favorite stalling tactics. “What do you mean?”

“What I said,” Nix replied, parrying deftly. “Are you sorry we came?”

Benny stuffed his mouth with berries to buy another second to think, and he rather hoped another ravine full of zoms would suddenly open up in the ground directly in front of them.

When that did not happen, he swallowed and braced himself and said, “Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“We haven’t found the jet,” he said. “And until today we haven’t even seen any people. We don’t know if we’re going in the right direction. We’re low on supplies, and now we’ve run into a horde of zoms.” He paused, wondering how far off the cliff of “said too much” he’d already gone. He tried to fix it, but the wrong words came out. “I guess it isn’t what I expected.”

“I thought so,” Nix said, and Benny did not at all like the way she said it.

They walked in silence for another full minute.

“Okay,” he said when he could no longer bear it, “what’s going on?”

“With what?” she asked, not looking at him.

“With us.”

“Nothing,” she said tightly. “Everything’s fine.”

“Really?” he asked. “Is it?”

Nix stared ahead as they walked, watching the bees and the dragonflies.

“Look at me,” he said.

She did not.

“Nix . . . what is it?” he asked gently. “Did I do something, or—?”

“No,” she said quickly.

“Then what is it?”

“Does it have to be anything?”

“Pretty much, yeah. For the last couple of weeks you’ve been weird.”

“Weird?” She loaded that word with jagged chunks of ice.

“Not
weird
weird, but, you know . . . different. You spend all your time talking to Lilah or not talking to anyone. We hardly talk anymore.”

She stopped and wheeled on him. “And you spend all your time moping around like the world just ended.”

Benny gaped at her. “No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” she insisted.

“Well, okay, maybe I’ve been dealing with some stuff. My brother just died, you know.”

“I know.”

“He was murdered.”

“I know.”

“So maybe I need time to sort through that, ever think about that?”

Nix’s eyes blazed. “Are you going to lecture me about dealing with grief, Benjamin Imura? Your brother died fighting. My mother was beaten to death. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“It makes you feel like crap, how do you think I think it makes you feel?”

“Then what are you harping on—”

“Who’s harping?” he said defensively. “Jeez, Nix, all I did was ask what was wrong. Don’t bite my head off.”

“I’m not biting your head off.”

“Then why are you yelling?”

“I’m not yelling,” she yelled.

Benny took a steadying breath and let it out slowly.

“Nix, I do understand what you’re going through. I’m going through it too.”

“It’s not the same thing,” she said very quietly. An elk poked its head out from behind some sagebrush, studied them for a moment, then bent to eat berries from another bush.

“Then why won’t you tell me what it is?”

She glared at him. “Honestly, Benny, sometimes I think you don’t even know who I am.”

With that she turned and stalked away, her spine as stiff as a board. Benny stood openmouthed until she was almost back to the tree where Chong sat with Eve.

“What the hell was that all about?” he asked the elk.

The elk, being an elk, said nothing.

Dispirited and deeply troubled, Benny thrust his hands in his pockets and walked slowly over to the edge of the ravine to stare at the faces of the living dead. They looked at him with dead eyes, but in some eerie way Benny felt that they could see him and that they somehow understood all the mysteries that were sewn like stitches through the skin of this day.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

A lot of the stuff Tom taught us has nothing to do with zoms. Once, right after we started training, Morgie asked Tom why we bothered, ’cause after all, Charlie and the Hammer were dead. This was before we left town, before we met White Bear and Preacher Jack.

Tom said that we should never assume that we know what’s out there. He said, “People in town refer to everything beyond the fence line as the great Rot and Ruin. We assume that it’s nothing but a wasteland from our fence all the way to the Atlantic Ocean three thousand miles away. But we saw that jet, so there is something out there. We don’t know what it is, or whether whoever’s out there will be friendly. Or generous. Or open to us joining them. A smart warrior prepares for all eventualities.”

Tom also said, “Even before First Night there were all kinds of people who wanted to be on their own. Isolationists, religious orders, militant groups, back-to-nature groups, communes, military bases, remote research stations, and more. Some of these people will do anything to protect their privacy or their way of life. To them . . . we’re outsiders and intruders.”

14

F
OR
L
ILAH, READING TRACKS ON THE GROUND WAS AS EASY AS READING
words on a page. Her sharp eyes missed nothing, and as she moved deeper into the desert forest, she began cataloging the marks she found. Eve’s were easy to spot, and they wandered out of the east along a crooked path.

As for the rest, Lilah slowed from a run to a walk as she studied them.

The forest was denser than she’d expected. She knelt and pawed at the sandy soil and quickly found darker, wetter soil beneath. She sniffed it.