Flesh-&-Bone(45)

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

SHE 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.