Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(49)

“I know that,” she said irritably, and it was only when she heard the sound of her own voice that she realized the other voice had not spoken aloud.

Her eyes snapped open, and with a start she realized that she was awake. She remembered falling asleep, or at least she remembered the darkness folding around her. She liked the darkness; it was soft and gentle and sweet.

Waking was none of those things.

Pain seemed to be part of everything. Even opening her eyes hurt. The sun was directly overhead, and she squinted up through a gap in the trees.

You have to stop the bleeding.

The voice was a familiar one, but it was not one that had ever spoken to her before. Not when she was alone. Not out here in the Ruin.

George? Sure, she heard his voice all the time. Annie, too.

But not this. Not him.

“Tom—?” she asked.

The only answer was the soft rustle of the wind in the trees.

Her heart instantly began hammering as the full awareness of where she was flooded back into her mind with ugly clarity.

“Help me, Tom.”

There was a reply to that, but it wasn’t Tom’s voice. It was the hungry grunt of the monster. Somehow it had found its way down from the cliff and was below her now.

The boar.

The impossible boar.

She looked down and gasped in horror. She was suspended in the interlocking boughs of two pine trees, but she wasn’t sure how far off the ground she was. Below her was a wild boar that had somehow become infected with the zombie plague, but she did not know how to cope with it. She had no spear. That was lost, probably somewhere on the cliff or down there with the pig.

She heard a second grunt, and for a moment she strained to tell whether it was the same boar making shorter grunts or— No, there it was again. Two grunts overlapping. Then a third. A fourth.

Then two more.

Six of them.

Somewhere below her was an entire pack of the dead boars.

She closed her eyes for a moment and listened inside her body. She could not feel any cuts, but she could feel the warmth of blood inside her clothes.

She gingerly wiggled her fingers. They worked fine. She tried her toes. Also fine. There was pain in the backs of her legs, but she was comforted by the fact that she could feel her legs. After the first boar had hit her and she landed on the rock, Lilah was sure she’d broken her back. Not so.

It was a comfort, but it was not the end of her troubles.

She lifted one leg. Only an inch, but it did move. Pain shot up the back of her thigh and into her hip joint. Had the boar torn her side open? If that was the case, then she knew that she was probably going to die.

Lilah took a breath and successfully moved hands and feet, and determined that her spine was not too badly damaged. That was something. A cut, even a bad one, was something she could deal with.

She opened her eyes and looked up at the branches above her. Several of them were cracked and broken from her fall. Directly above her was one that had snapped off, leaving a spike of wood nearly eight inches long. She reached for it, moving slowly and with great care. Her fingers wriggled for the branch, her fingertips brushing the bottom of it. Almost . . . almost.

But it was too far.

There was no way she could grab it without sitting up, and that meant that her angle to the boughs would radically change. By bending at the waist she would be placing a great deal of her upper body mass at an angle toward her middle. That V position of her body would concentrate her weight into a single point instead of spreading it out over the surface of the branches. She would slide right through and probably fall.

She looked up at the branch.

She had to make that bend, but she had to do it faster than gravity could pull her. Bend, reach, lunge, grab. Without knowing how badly she was hurt, it was a terrible risk.

The alternative was to lie there and bleed to death.

Lilah closed her eyes for a moment, conjuring the faces of the people she loved. Annie, George. Tom.

And Chong.

He was a town boy and not a good match for her in any way.

But she did love him, and she knew that Chong loved her . . . even though neither of them had ever spoken that word. Love. She smiled. Chong was probably too afraid to say it. But then again, so was she.

Afraid of all that the word meant.

As a result, they’d had so little between them. A few kisses, a few tender words. Nothing else. And if she did not move, that was all she would ever have.

That wasn’t fair. She hadn’t survived all those years in the wild only to be teased by the promise of love. In the thousands of books she’d read, love was the most important thing. It could move worlds.

Could it move her fast enough to grab that branch?

“Chong,” she said, and this time it was his name she spoke. Not Tom’s. Chong.

She opened her eyes and glared at the branch.

Then all at once she threw her weight upward, tightened her stomach muscles, stretched with her shoulder and back, and braced for the screaming pain. The branches under her creaked and cracked as she lunged.

The pain was . . . immense.

But her hand closed on the branch.

She took everything the pain could throw at her. She bit down on it, snarled at it, opened her mouth and howled it out of her as she pulled on that branch. Broken twigs slashed at her side and legs and arms, but she took that pain too.

Pain had never owned Lilah, and it did not own her now.