Flesh-&-Bone(58)

The compassion in his voice chilled Chong. It was so weirdly inappropriate, and yet it seemed genuine.

“Carter!” Sarah’s eyes blazed with madness, and she kept screaming her husband’s name as if somehow the depth of her need could call him back from the dark place to which his soul had fled. Her body trembled as she fought between the desire to run to her husband and the need to protect her daughter.

“Sarah,” said Andrew, “Carter is in the arms of Thanatos now—all praise his darkness.”

“N-no . . .”

“He’s waiting for you, sweetheart. He wants you and Evie to join him.”

Tears streamed down Sarah’s face. Eve began whimpering.

“I want my daddy,” she wailed.

Brother Andrew smiled at the little girl. “You see? She wants to be with him. The darkness offers peace and an end to suffering for all of you.”

“You bastards killed my husband,” growled Sarah, her voice made rough by the jagged pieces of her breaking heart. “And now you want to kill my baby?”

“We want to save Eve and all the other children,” insisted Andrew. “Please, Sarah . . . don’t fight this. Embrace it.”

Chong knew that it was all hopeless. Sarah was on the edge of panic, and she could never defeat both reapers. She should never have come into the clearing, but Chong understood that she could not have done anything else. It was a terrible script written by an evil hand, and she and her daughter were going to become victims of their own drama.

The archer strung his arrow, the barbed head gleaming with black goo; Andrew hefted the scythe with its wicked three-foot-long curving blade.

Time seemed to have slowed for Chong, but this moment was stretched so taut that it was going to snap. He knew he could flee this encounter and head into the woods. Physically he could do that; but that was not possible on any other level. He also knew that he was no one’s idea of a hero. Benny was, although his friend would laugh at the suggestion; and both Nix and Lilah were heroes. Chong was a self-admitted sidekick. No one should ever depend on him for anything heroic. He didn’t have the mentality or the musculature for it. His bokken was clutched in his fists, and his teeth were clenched.

The reapers were distracted—Chong could simply run away.

“Move it, town boy,” he snarled at himself; and then he was up and running.

Toward the tableau that was suddenly coming unstuck from time. Sarah screamed and rushed at Andrew; the reaper raised his scythe. The archer shifted his stance to take aim at Eve, who stood alone and confused in the dirt.

This is insane, Chong told himself. I can’t do this.

“Danny!” yelled Brother Andrew. “Behind you!”

Chong was still too far away when the archer turned and fired.





35

A VOICE WHISPERED IN LILAH’S EAR.

Or perhaps in her mind.

If you don’t stop the bleeding, you’re going to die.

“I know that,” she said irritably, and it was only when she heard the sound of her own voice that she realized the other voice had not spoken aloud.

Her eyes snapped open, and with a start she realized that she was awake. She remembered falling asleep, or at least she remembered the darkness folding around her. She liked the darkness; it was soft and gentle and sweet.

Waking was none of those things.

Pain seemed to be part of everything. Even opening her eyes hurt. The sun was directly overhead, and she squinted up through a gap in the trees.

You have to stop the bleeding.

The voice was a familiar one, but it was not one that had ever spoken to her before. Not when she was alone. Not out here in the Ruin.

George? Sure, she heard his voice all the time. Annie, too.

But not this. Not him.

“Tom—?” she asked.

The only answer was the soft rustle of the wind in the trees.

Her heart instantly began hammering as the full awareness of where she was flooded back into her mind with ugly clarity.

“Help me, Tom.”

There was a reply to that, but it wasn’t Tom’s voice. It was the hungry grunt of the monster. Somehow it had found its way down from the cliff and was below her now.

The boar.

The impossible boar.

She looked down and gasped in horror. She was suspended in the interlocking boughs of two pine trees, but she wasn’t sure how far off the ground she was. Below her was a wild boar that had somehow become infected with the zombie plague, but she did not know how to cope with it. She had no spear. That was lost, probably somewhere on the cliff or down there with the pig.