Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(4)

I am a bounty hunter.

Right.

You’re about to be lunch, you moron, muttered his inner voice. For once Benny could not muster a convincing argument.

Everywhere he looked he saw another withered figure lurching toward him from beneath the shade of the big trees or from between tall shrubs. He knew—he knew—that this was not a coordinated trap. Zoms couldn’t think. It wasn’t that. . . . He must have simply had the bad luck to run into a swarm of them that was spread out across the whole width of the slope.

Run! yelled his inner voice. Faster!

He wanted to tell his inner voice to stop offering stupid advice and maybe instead come up with some sort of plan. Something that didn’t involve ending up in the digestive tracts of a hundred zoms.

Run.

Yeah, he thought. Good plan.

Then he saw that the tall grass twenty yards down the slope hid the dark cleft of a small ravine. It ran the entire width of the slope, which was bad news, but it was less than ten feet across, which was good.

Could he jump it? Could he build up the momentum to leap across the opening?

His inner voice yelled, Go . . . GO!

Benny set his teeth, called on every possible ounce of speed, and threw himself into the air, his feet still running through nothingness as he hurtled over the deep ravine. He landed hard on the far slope, bending his knees just as Tom had taught him, letting his leg muscles absorb the shock of impact.

He was safe!

Benny laughed out loud and spun toward the wave of zoms that still staggered toward him. They were so completely focused on him that they did not notice—or understand—the danger of the ravine.

“Yo! Deadheads,” he yelled, waving his sword to taunt them. “Nice try, but you’re messing with Benny-freaking-Imura, zombie killer. Booyah!”

And then the lip of the ravine buckled and collapsed under his weight, and Benny-freaking-Imura instantly plummeted into the darkness below.





FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

It is one month and one day since Tom died.

Night before last, while we were all sitting around the campfire, Chong told a joke that made Benny laugh. I think it was the first time Benny laughed since Gameland.

It was so good to hear him laugh. His eyes are still sad, though. I guess mine probably are too.

I never thought any of us would ever want to laugh again.





4

BENNY FELL FROM SUNLIGHT INTO DARKNESS AND HIT THE BOTTOM OF THE ravine so hard that his legs buckled and he pitched forward onto his face. Loose soil, tree roots, and small stones rained down on him. Fireworks detonated inside his head, and every single molecule of his body hurt.

He groaned, rolled onto his side, spat dirt out of his mouth, and clawed spiderwebs out of his eyes.

“Yeah, warrior smart,” he muttered.

The bottom of the ravine was much wider than the top and thick with mud, and Benny quickly understood that it was not a true ravine but a gorge cut by water runoff from the mountains. During the times of heaviest runoff, the flowing water had undercut edges of the slope above, creating the illusion of solid ground.

If he had kept running after he had leaped the gorge he would be safe. Instead he’d turned to gloat. Not exactly warrior smart.

Warrior dumb-ass, he thought darkly.

As he lay there, his mind began to play tricks on him. Or at least he thought it was doing something twisted and weird. He heard sounds. First it was his own labored breathing and the moans of the dead above him, but, no . . . there was something else.

It was a distant roar that sounded—impossible as that was—like the hand-crank generator that ran the power in the hospital back home. Still half-buried in the dirt, he cocked his head to listen. The sound was definitely there, but it wasn’t exactly like the hospital generator. This whined at a higher pitch, and it surged and fell away, surged and fell away.

Then it was gone.

He strained to hear it, trying to decide if it was really a motor sound or something else. There were all kinds of birds and animals out there, weird stuff that had escaped zoos and circuses, and Benny had read about exotic animal sounds. Was that what he’d heard?

No, said his inner voice, it was a motor.

Suddenly there was a soft sound from above, and a huge pile of loose dirt cascaded down on Benny, burying him almost to the neck. He began fighting his way out, but then he heard another sound and he looked, expecting to see more of the wall collapsing on him, but what he saw was far, far worse. The leading wave of pursuing zoms had reached the edge of the ravine, and the land had crumbled under their combined weight. Four zombies pitched over the edge and fell into the darkness with jarring crunches, the nearest one landing only six feet away.

Then another zombie—a teenage girl dressed in the rags of a cheerleader outfit—dropped right in front of Benny, striking the ground with a thud that was filled with the brittle crunch of breaking bones. The cheerleader’s gray and dusty eyes were open, and her mouth bit the air.

Broken bones wouldn’t kill a zom. Benny knew that all too well, and he dug through the loose dirt to find the hilt of his sword.

The zombie lifted a pale hand toward him. Cold fingertips brushed his face, but suddenly a second body—a huge man in coveralls—slammed down on top of her. The impact was massive, and it shattered even more bones.

Benny cried out in horror and disgust and began digging his way out like a mad gopher, clawing at the dirt, kicking his feet free.