Flesh-&-Bone(71)

“No,” she agreed.

“I hope that’s good news.”

She nodded but said nothing; clearly she was more interested in the plane than in the welfare of Lilah and Chong. Benny found that profoundly disturbing.

“We need to look inside,” said Nix.

“Yeah,” Benny said, and headed to the front of the plane. The mound of dirt was so steep that he had to climb it on all fours. But as he reached the top, he saw that there was an easier path that emptied out from the woods. That wasn’t what made him freeze in place, however. “Oh my God!”

“What?” demanded Nix, who was just behind him.

“Don’t come up here,” Benny warned, but it was already too late. Nix reached the top and cried out exactly as he had.

“Who . . . ?” she began, but shook her head and didn’t finish.

The clearing in front of the plane was not at all clear.

There were several things placed just in front of the crumpled nose of the plane. They had been out of sight behind a row of twisted trees.

The first object was a small altar made from red stones scavenged from the arid ground. The altar was covered with bundles of dead flowers and small fire-blackened incense bowls. Set atop the altar was a row of human heads.

Not skulls. Heads.

Five of them. The oldest was withered and nearly picked clean by insects; the freshest could not have been more than a day old.

Nix gagged.

But the spectacle was worse than this pagan display.

Beyond the altar, standing in the shadow of the big plane, were three posts, more like T-bars than crosses, and lashed to each one was a body.

The bodies wore the faded and wind-torn rags of military uniforms.

The three bodies were withered, but they were not lifeless.

They were zoms.





FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

I remember one day when Tom got pretty cheesed at Benny. Benny was trying to impress Morgie, and he said something about having killed so many zoms that he could do it in his sleep.

Tom blew his stack.

He gave us all a big lecture about how we can never let down our guard, never rest on our laurels, never forget that every single zom is as much a danger now as they were the first time we faced them. He went on and on like that.

Benny apologized and all and said it was just a joke. But I don’t think Tom really believes him.





45

LILAH WAS NOT AFRAID TO DIE.

Death was something she knew too well, too intimately, to fear. Annie and George were on the other side of death. So was Tom.

Only Chong was here, and in her heart Lilah believed that if she died today, then Chong would not survive very long. Not even with Benny and Nix. The Ruin was too hard for them. Too dangerous. They were all town kids.

Below her the boars grunted and milled around, agitated by the nearness of living flesh.

Lilah examined the thing she held in her tanned hands. It was not as powerful as the spear she’d lost; or as quick as the gun that lay somewhere in the gloom below, but she liked the heft of it.

Using her knife, she’d cut three of the straightest branches she could reach, then shaved off the twigs and smaller branches and trimmed the branches into four-foot-long poles. Then she removed her canvas vest, stowed the last useful items in her pants pockets, and cut the vest into many long strips. Once all the cutting and trimming was done, Lilah placed the crossbar of the knife between the poles and lashed it all together with turn after turn of canvas. Lilah knew a great deal about knots and binding. She preferred soft leather—deer hide was best—but a smart warrior used the resources at hand rather than wasting time longing for what she did not have.

It was a painstaking process, but Lilah did not hurry. A mistake in preparation would guarantee failure. The result of her work was a kind of long-handled ax. The blade of the knife protruded at a right angle from the tip of the ax, and a piece of hard, knotty wood was lashed to the back end to create a club. As long as the poles and bindings held, she could chop and smash.

The hogs crashed into the tree again.

Lilah climbed carefully down, limb by limb, until she stood on a stout branch seven feet above the circle of dead boars. They stopped ramming the tree and glared up at her, and Lilah’s smile flickered. There was intelligence in those eyes. Not human intelligence, but the cold and calculating intelligence of a predator. Animal cunning. Animal hate.

Why? And . . . how? The zombie plague, whatever it was, erased all intelligence when it reanimated the dead body. Right?