Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(48)

“There he is,” called the archer, Danny, as he stepped out of the woods. “It’s just a kid with a toy sword.”


Danny was a thin black man, dressed identically to Brother Andrew, shaved head and all. He had a leather quiver of arrows slung over his back, the fletched ends ready above his shoulder so all he had to do was reach up and slide an arrow out and down into his bow. Chong had seen plenty of hunters coming back from the Ruin with quivers identical to that. What struck him, though, was the bow this man carried. It was not one of the old-fashioned red-elm recurve bows made by the Gibson brothers in Haven; nor was it one of the sixty-two-inch plain longbows Chong and all his friends used in gym class. No, this was something from before First Night: a metal-and-fiberglass compound bow fitted with cables and pulleys to bend the limb, allowing the archer superior accuracy, velocity, and distance. Chong had seen only one like it before. A moody, scar-faced trade guard named Big Mike Sweeney gave a demonstration with one at the New Year Festival two years ago. He’d outshot every archer in the Nine Towns, and each of his arrows sank twice as deep as even the longbow arrows used by Cleveland Dave Wilcox. The Motor City Hammer had offered Big Mike a thousand ration dollars for the bow, but the scar-faced man had laughed and walked away.

Chong recognized and feared that weapon. His stomach clenched into a tiny knot of ice.

He ducked so low that he was almost on all fours and wormed his way into the densest tangle of brush he could find. He heard another arrow strike a tree, but the archer was aiming in the wrong direction. Chong felt a splinter of relief. If he could stay out of sight for another couple of minutes, then he could circle behind Danny and lose himself in the forest. He risked one peek and saw that the archer was now between him and Andrew. Chong smiled grimly and kept moving.

“Hey! Where’d he go?” growled Brother Andrew. “Watch out, Danny, I can’t see him—”

“Carter!” A woman’s voice suddenly cried out in total horror, and everyone—Andrew, the archer, and Chong—turned to see a woman with an ax standing wide-eyed with shock at the edge of the clearing. Sarah. Eve clung to her mother’s leg, face blank with incomprehension.

The archer smiled and drew another black-tipped arrow.

“Sarah,” said Brother Andrew, and he actually looked relieved. “Looks like we’ll get the whole family, praise be to the darkness. Carter won’t have to go into the darkness alone.”

The compassion in his voice chilled Chong. It was so weirdly inappropriate, and yet it seemed genuine.

“Carter!” Sarah’s eyes blazed with madness, and she kept screaming her husband’s name as if somehow the depth of her need could call him back from the dark place to which his soul had fled. Her body trembled as she fought between the desire to run to her husband and the need to protect her daughter.

“Sarah,” said Andrew, “Carter is in the arms of Thanatos now—all praise his darkness.”

“N-no . . .”

“He’s waiting for you, sweetheart. He wants you and Evie to join him.”

Tears streamed down Sarah’s face. Eve began whimpering.

“I want my daddy,” she wailed.

Brother Andrew smiled at the little girl. “You see? She wants to be with him. The darkness offers peace and an end to suffering for all of you.”

“You bastards killed my husband,” growled Sarah, her voice made rough by the jagged pieces of her breaking heart. “And now you want to kill my baby?”

“We want to save Eve and all the other children,” insisted Andrew. “Please, Sarah . . . don’t fight this. Embrace it.”

Chong knew that it was all hopeless. Sarah was on the edge of panic, and she could never defeat both reapers. She should never have come into the clearing, but Chong understood that she could not have done anything else. It was a terrible script written by an evil hand, and she and her daughter were going to become victims of their own drama.

The archer strung his arrow, the barbed head gleaming with black goo; Andrew hefted the scythe with its wicked three-foot-long curving blade.

Time seemed to have slowed for Chong, but this moment was stretched so taut that it was going to snap. He knew he could flee this encounter and head into the woods. Physically he could do that; but that was not possible on any other level. He also knew that he was no one’s idea of a hero. Benny was, although his friend would laugh at the suggestion; and both Nix and Lilah were heroes. Chong was a self-admitted sidekick. No one should ever depend on him for anything heroic. He didn’t have the mentality or the musculature for it. His bokken was clutched in his fists, and his teeth were clenched.

The reapers were distracted—Chong could simply run away.

“Move it, town boy,” he snarled at himself; and then he was up and running.

Toward the tableau that was suddenly coming unstuck from time. Sarah screamed and rushed at Andrew; the reaper raised his scythe. The archer shifted his stance to take aim at Eve, who stood alone and confused in the dirt.

This is insane, Chong told himself. I can’t do this.

“Danny!” yelled Brother Andrew. “Behind you!”

Chong was still too far away when the archer turned and fired.





35

A VOICE WHISPERED IN LILAH’S EAR.

Or perhaps in her mind.

If you don’t stop the bleeding, you’re going to die.