Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(101)

It growled and came charging again, and Benny tried the same trick, aiming lower this time, trying to catch the leg.

The creature dodged out of the way.

Dodged.

It . . .

Benny’s brain almost froze. Even with the warning on Dr. McReady’s document, it was—it seemed—impossible.

The zom grabbed Benny’s vest with its good left hand and jerked him forward, toward its mouth full of rotting gray teeth.

Benny had no angle for a cut, so he punched the zom across the mouth with the hand that held the sword. The blow was awkward but powerful, and teeth flew from the open mouth.

The zom ignored the damage and lunged forward to take a bite.

Benny threw himself backward, and the zom’s shattered teeth closed around a pocket of the vest instead. Benny heard a bottle of cadaverine crunch to stinking fragments inside the pocket.

The creature did not notice or care, and Benny was positive now that the network of wires bolted to its face somehow cut off its sense of smell. Maybe the scientists had done it as part of some experiment, or maybe smell was really a zombie’s primary hunting sense. Not that it mattered right now . . . the zom could see and it could still bite.

Benny fell backward with the creature, and as he fell he brought his knee up between its legs, hitting it square on the bottom of the pelvis. The fall and the kick gave Benny the power he needed to hurl the monster completely over him. It landed with a bone-rattling thud and immediately scrambled to its feet.

Benny brought his sword around into a two-hand grip but only got as far as his knees before he realized that he was in worse trouble than he thought.

As the zom raced toward him again, it snatched up a broken branch from the ground and swung it full force at Benny’s head.

There was a moment of red-black blankness. Benny never actually felt the blow. One second it was about to hit him, and then he was falling.

Then he saw something inexplicable.

The zom was falling too.

It crashed down a yard away face-to-face with Benny. The milky eyes stared at him, but now there was nothing there. No animal rage. Nothing.

But the strangest part of all was that there seemed to be an arrow sticking out of its temple.

Then a shadow fell over him, and Benny tried to bring up his sword in a last desperate defense against some new terror. Maybe the other green-jumpsuited zom?

“Hey, monkey-banger,” said a familiar voice. “You pick the strangest times to lie down for a nap.”

Benny blinked and stared. “Chong?”

It was Chong, but as Benny struggled to get to his feet, he saw his friend’s face. And froze.

Chong’s skin was gray, and a pale film of white covered his eyes.

Chong was a zom.





87

ALEXI TURNED TO SEE TWO STRANGERS—A MAN AND A TEENAGE GIRL— climb off a quad, guns in their hands, barrels raised. He saw a monster of a dog dressed in spiked armor race past him and heard it crunch into the oncoming zoms. Bullets burned past him on either side.

He heard the teenage girl yell, “NIX!”

And he heard the voice of the red-haired girl yell, “LILAH!”

Then zoms piled onto him and he staggered backward.

Alexi roared and shook his body like an angry bear, flinging the dead off him. He swung his hammer to crush heads and chests.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the little redhead swinging her toy sword like she actually knew something. Shattering legs, crushing skulls, dodging and twisting.

She’d make a great reaper, he thought as he fought. If she lives through this, I’m going to recruit that little witch.

Zombies were falling dead around him, from those he smashed, from the wooden blade of the redhead, from the gunshots, and from the dog.

Alexi really liked the dog.

He’d never seen anything fight like that, and he wondered why it had never occurred to him to train dogs to work with the reapers. This one was a cunning fighter, clearly trained to fight the dead. It did not bite at all, but instead used its horned helmet and spiked armor to rend and smash and dismember. The dead had no chance against it. Those who tried to bite it shattered their teeth on its chain mail. It was like a pack of lions trying to tear down an armored personnel carrier.

Suddenly Alexi realized that everyone in the clearing was engaged in fighting the dead except him. The gray people who had attacked him were all dead. He glanced at the man and girl with the guns. They were totally absorbed in their own personal wars.

He hefted his hammer.

“Screw this,” he said, and ran away as fast as his long legs could carry him.

He vanished into the woods to find Mother Rose.





88

“CHONG—?” BENNY GASPED.

The dead-pale face split in a rueful grin. “What’s left of him.”

“But—but—your face. What happened?”

Chong stood bare-chested, wrapped in bandages. He held a sophisticated bow in his hands, and there was a quiver of arrows slung low across his hips. He did not meet Benny’s eyes, though; he gaped at something above them. When Benny reached up to touch his forehead, he felt swollen flesh. Blood dripped like red rain across his eyes.

The pain caught up to him then.

Immense, crashing, like a giant bell ringing an inch from his ears.

Chong said something, but the words didn’t seem to make sense.