Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(16)

“I asked Eve about where she came from,” Nix said eventually.

“Oh?”

“A lot of it is confusing. She’s little, and she doesn’t understand most of what’s happened, and I think she’s a bit out of it, you know? Like, in shock? Some of the things she says don’t make much sense. I think she’s confusing stuff from dreams, or maybe nightmares, with things that are actually happening.”

Benny nodded toward the zoms on the other side of the long ravine. “That’s not too hard to understand. Sometimes I can’t believe it myself. Sometimes I think I’m going to wake up and smell Tom’s cooking, and then I’ll go down to breakfast. Scrambled eggs with peppers and mushrooms. Your mom’s corn muffins. Fresh-pressed apple juice and a big glass of milk.” He sighed.

Nix nodded but didn’t comment on that. “Eve said she used to live in a house up in a town called Treetops. I don’t know if that’s real or something she made up.”

“That’s actually not a bad idea. Zoms can’t climb.”

“She said that one night the trees all caught fire and everyone ran. And here’s the really strange part: She said that it was angels who came and set fire to the trees.”

“She mentioned angels before. Is that another name for zoms?”

“I don’t think so. She said the angels came riding in on what she called ‘growly horses.’ Isn’t that strange?”

“Yeah.”

“According to her, the angels had wings on their chests.”

“On their chests?” Benny grinned at the thought. “Wouldn’t that make them fly upside down?”

“It’s not funny,” said Nix. “Eve was really scared of them.”

They stopped and picked some tart early-season elderberries.

As Benny ate, he thought about the idea of wings on the chests of angels, and it made him think about the woman he’d seen in the field right before the horde of zoms attacked him. What was it embroidered on the front of her shirt? Could that have been angel wings?

He told Nix about her.

“You sure she wasn’t a zom?”

“Yeah. Weird, huh? Oh, and I heard a strange sound while I was down in the ravine.” He described the motor noise. “Did you hear anything like that?”

“A motor?” Nix brightened. “I didn’t hear anything, but . . . could it have been a jet?”

Benny thought about it and reluctantly shook his head. “No. It didn’t sound anywhere near big enough.”

Nix looked crestfallen, and Benny felt bad. Although he was out here in the Ruin to look for the jet too, it was clear to everyone that the search for the jet was Nix’s mission. Her quest. Benny wanted to find it, as did Lilah and Chong; but Nix needed to find it. Benny thought he knew why she was so obsessed by it, but he didn’t dare say it to her. Not now, anyway.

He let her sort through her own emotions for a moment. She chewed her lip thoughtfully, then grunted. “Hmm. Motors . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but it makes me wonder what sound those ‘growly horses’ made.”

He paused with a handful of berries halfway to his mouth. “Wow,” he said quietly.

“Wow,” she agreed. “Mr. Lafferty said once that just because the EMPs blew out all the motors, there was no reason why someone couldn’t repair some of them. I mean . . . we did see that jet.”

“Yes, we did.”

“So . . . maybe the growly horses are some kind of . . . I don’t know . . . car or truck or something.”

Benny nodded. “Not sure I want to find out.”

Nix looked away and didn’t answer. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she asked, “Do you regret it?”

“Regret . . . what?”

“This,” she said, gesturing to the forest. “Leaving town, coming out here. Are you sorry we came?”

Benny tensed. He loved Nix, but he knew that she was not above setting verbal traps for him to put his foot into. She’d done it enough times, and he’d stumbled numbly into them more times than he could count. It wasn’t a very likable quality, but it wasn’t any kind of deal breaker for them. He was pretty sure there were things he did that annoyed her, too.

So he relied on one of his favorite stalling tactics. “What do you mean?”

“What I said,” Nix replied, parrying deftly. “Are you sorry we came?”

Benny stuffed his mouth with berries to buy another second to think, and he rather hoped another ravine full of zoms would suddenly open up in the ground directly in front of them.

When that did not happen, he swallowed and braced himself and said, “Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“We haven’t found the jet,” he said. “And until today we haven’t even seen any people. We don’t know if we’re going in the right direction. We’re low on supplies, and now we’ve run into a horde of zoms.” He paused, wondering how far off the cliff of “said too much” he’d already gone. He tried to fix it, but the wrong words came out. “I guess it isn’t what I expected.”

“I thought so,” Nix said, and Benny did not at all like the way she said it.

They walked in silence for another full minute.