Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(38)

Stupid stories, she told herself. Except at night, when she thought about them in the private darkness of her bedroom, in the one place where she was safe enough to be weak. That was when she cried. That was when she believed that she was living on borrowed time—alive only because death had considered her too insignificant to pause long enough to collect.

Except that death collected everyone. Death is like that. Relentlessly efficient.

Borrowed time is no place to live.

Lilah had often feared that they were right.

Now she was sure they were.

That was the only thought that would fit into her head as she lay suspended in darkness.

She remembered the boar. Feral, massive. Four hundred pounds at least.

Both dead and deadly.

But animals can’t become zoms. It doesn’t work like that.

Unless, somehow, it does.

The Lost Girl should not be alive.

Unless, somehow, she was.

For now.

It felt like she was falling and yet not falling. Pinpricks of pain held her aloft, and for a long time she could not understand that.

Little points of pain all along her body. Except for her hands, which hung down into the black well of nothingness.

Above her, she heard the grunt of the boar and the scuff of its hoof on the edge of the rocky shelf. Then dirt and loose stones tumbled down, striking her face and chest and stomach and thighs. She heard a rustling sound as the debris fell past her. It sounded like foliage, like pine boughs and vine leaves being pelted by rain.

She forced one eye to open. It was smeared with blood, and what little she saw was filtered through red. She blinked and blinked until tears ran pink from the corners of her eyes. Above her—thirty feet at least—the snout of the dead boar protruded over the edge of the stone shelf. That meant that . . .

Panic flared in her heart, and it brought with it a fresh burst of adrenaline, and with adrenaline came clarity.

She knew where she was.

She was suspended in a tangle of dense trees and tall shrubs, caught in the midst of her fall. Temporarily held, as if fate was waiting for her to wake up and pay attention as death made his call to collect her.

Lilah tried to move, to lift her arms, and suddenly the whole assembly of branches shifted with her. Pinecones rained down on her. Angry birds fled the trees.

How far down was the ground? The cleft was so choked with foliage that she had not been able to see the bottom. It could be six feet below her. It could be sixty. She wished she knew how badly she was hurt. Or where.

In all the tales, in every variation, the Lost Girl died.

Lilah closed her eyes.

“Chong,” she said hoarsely.

Or, she meant to say “Chong.”

What she said was, “Tom.”





29

BENNY AND NIX MADE IT TO THE WOODS WITH NO TIME TO SPARE. THE motor noise roared as loud as thunder as they dove beneath the canopy of leaves and pine needles.

Nix led the way, and Benny was a half step behind her. He cut a quick look over his shoulder and saw something that made him grab Nix’s arm and jerk her to a stop.

“Look!” he said in an urgent whisper.

They crouched down behind a thick bush and stared with slack-jawed amazement at something neither of them had ever seen.

Ten people came tearing into the clearing, all of them dressed in black clothes tied with red streamers, all of them heavily armed . . . and each of them on four-wheeled motorized vehicles.

“Oh my God,” breathed Nix, gripping Benny’s arm. “What—what—?”

The machines were not cars or trucks, and not quite motorcycles, either. Benny fished for the name and scraped up the initials ATV. He thought they stood for “all-terrain vehicle,” and that was probably right, because these machines roared easily over the uneven surface of the field. They each had four fat rubber tires and a kind of saddle for the driver. The machines were spattered with mud, but some colored metal shone through. Different colors for each—blue and green and other shades. A basket or duffel bag was lashed to the back of each, and the handles of swords and axes sprouted from many. The roar of the machines was unnaturally loud—and even in that moment of tension, it struck Benny how quiet his world was and how loud the old world of machines must have been.

The presence of these machines was like a punch to the head.

“Are we seeing this?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said in a fierce tone. She turned to him, her eyes alight. “First the jet and now this. Benny—the old world isn’t dead. Everything wasn’t destroyed.”

Benny nodded, but he studied the figures on the machines and didn’t like what he was seeing. He remembered the word Riot had used. Quads. This had to be what she was referring to.

The quads zoomed across the field and circled the big bristlecone tree. One rider stopped and dismounted, studying the ground. Looking for footprints, Benny realized.

“Nix,” he said, indicating the man who had dismounted, “look at them, look at his chest.”

She looked where he was pointing, and her mouth turned down into a frown of doubt. On the center of the man’s black shirt were angel wings, neatly embroidered in white thread.

“Angels with wings on their chests,” Nix murmured as she dumped the spent shells from her pistol.

“Angels came and set fire to the trees,” Benny added.