Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(102)

Benny asked him to repeat it, but he heard his own words.

They were meaningless gibberish.

The fading sunlight flared too white and too bright, and then the hinges fell off the world and Benny was falling.

Falling.

Falling.





89

BENNY COULD NOT MOVE. HE COULD BARELY BREATHE. HIS HEAD FELT LIKE it was actually on fire.

He heard several sounds happen all at once, colliding into one another so hard and fast that it was hard to separate them out and assign meaning.

He heard a girl scream in fear. Nix?

Did she say his name? Was she the one shouting it over and over?

He heard a dog barking.

So weird. He didn’t have a dog.

He heard the moans of the living dead.

He heard gunshots.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them the light had changed. And now there was a ring of faces around him. Benny raised a hand and touched one of them; he traced the line of a pink scar down through a field of freckles.

“I love you,” he said.

The face, grave with concern, flushed, and that made Benny smile.

“Benny,” said Nix, “you’re hurt. You hit your head.”

“A zom hit my head,” he said. “I was hit in the head by a zom.” He thought that was funny and laughed, but laughing hurt, so he stopped.

The other faces swam in and out of focus. Lilah. Chong.

“Are you dead?” he asked Chong.

Chong tried to smile, but it didn’t suit his face. “That’s open to debate,” he said.

Nix said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Chong said something, but Benny didn’t understand it. Thinking was so hard. His head felt like it was in a hollow metal box and someone kept banging on it.

He thought he heard Nix scream. Or cry. Or maybe she was laughing.

“Are you sleeping?” asked a tiny voice, and Benny realized that his eyes had closed. He open them to see a lovely little face.

“Eve?”

“You found me in a hole in the ground,” she said. At first Benny thought it didn’t make sense, but then he realized it did.

“Yeah, just like a bunny rabbit.” He touched the tip of her nose. “You’re a little bunny.”

She giggled.

That sound seemed to screw one of the world’s hinges back into place.

A strange voice said, “Kid’s a mess. Skull fracture, concussion . . . ”

Benny looked toward the sound of the voice. A big man smiled down at him. One of those tight smiles people give when they don’t want you to know how bad things look through their eyes. It was almost a wince.

“I’m Joe,” he said.

“I know you,” said Benny as he raised a bloody finger and touched Joe’s face. “You’re on a Zombie Card. Captain Ledger, Hero of First Night. You’re number two-eighty-four. I have two of you. I was going to trade one of you to Morgie for his Sheriff Rick card.”

Riot’s face swam into view. “What the heck are Zombie Cards?”

“Kid’s delirious.”

Chong said, “The reapers are coming. We saw them.”

“Where and how many?” demanded Joe.

“Reaper, reaper . . . ,” Benny began, and tried to work it into a rhyme, but he couldn’t.

“There are a couple of hundred of them out on the desert, heading toward the hills,” said Riot. “But a bunch came running after us.”

“On foot or on quad?”

“Both. I lost them, but they’ll find us.”

Benny wondered what they were talking about. It began to occur to him that his head was not working properly, that his thoughts were silly. The word “delirious” triggered a response that went deeper than his understanding. A voice spoke inside his head.

Think, Benny, it said. You saw something.

But he did not understand what the voice meant.

Joe said, “Then we have to go now. Get to Sanctuary . . . ”

“We can’t move Benny,” insisted Nix. “His head . . . ”

“What’s an MRE?” Benny asked. They ignored him. He frowned, because he was sure that was important. He’d read it somewhere.

“We can’t fight off an army of reapers. Not here.”

“We can’t let ’em get to Sanctuary,” growled Riot. “They’ll slaughter the monks and refugees and all them scientists and—”

Joe looked stricken. “I know. They have a few soldiers there, but they can’t stop an army. And my rangers are scattered all over the place. We have to warn them. That means either we go without this kid, in which case the reapers’ll carve him into lunch meat; or we put him on a quad and let the ride out there do the job for them.”

In the distance they heard the faint buzz of quads. They all looked that way and then at one another.

“Oh God,” breathed Nix.

Benny, whispered Tom, you know what you saw. Tell them. Tell them. . . .

“What I wouldn’t give for a minigun or an—”

Benny asked dazedly, “What’s a LAW rickett?”

Joe froze and stared down at him.

“What did you say?”

“That’s what it said. L-A-W-R-K-T. LAW rickett. I read it. M-R-E. R-P-G and—”