Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(52)

The universe is throwing you a bone, he told himself. Take it.

He reached for the bow with clumsy fingers. Picked it up. Picked up an arrow. The black goo smeared on the tip smelled horrible, like cadaverine or something worse.

But even as he fumbled it onto the string, Chong felt his strength pumping away. Flowing out of him.

He looked past Brother Andrew to where Eve stood.

“Run . . . ,” he croaked.

The girl was frozen to the spot. Wide-eyed, voiceless with horrors so vast that she could do absolutely nothing but stand and stare.

And die. Chong knew that she was going to die. She’d stand there and be killed and never lift a hand because there just wasn’t enough of her left for even that.

Brother Andrew seemed to snap out of his own daze. His lip curled in anger, and he adjusted his grip on his scythe as he began stalking across the clearing toward Chong.

“Run,” begged Chong. He raised the bow and arrow, but his hands trembled with the palsy of shock and injury.

“I’ll make you pay for what you’ve done,” promised the reaper. “I’ll make this last. I’ll hear you scream and beg before I let you taste the darkness. By the god of death so I will.”

“Will you please just shut up,” Chong said between gritted teeth. Then, with the last energy he had, he pulled the string and released the arrow.

It flew straight and true and buried itself in the dirt between Andrew’s feet.

The reaper laughed and raised his scythe, and its shadow painted a promise of darkness across his face.





FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

Before we left town, I did something nobody else knows about.

I went to the cemetery and dug a little hole next to where my mom’s buried. I put two things in it.

The key to the house we used to live in and a drawing of me that Benny did. It looks just like I did before everything went bad.

I wanted to bury the me who used to live there, because that person was dead. It’s a different person who left town.





38

LILAH STEADIED HERSELF AGAINST THE TREE TRUNK AND EXAMINED HER wounds.

There were plenty of minor cuts and scrapes, but the real problem was a deep gash in her side that ran from just above the belt line on her left side to the middle of her thigh. The gash was uneven, deepest where the boar’s tusk had struck her and going quickly shallow as it ran down her leg. Her gun belt had probably kept her from being impaled. The belt was gone, lying wherever it had landed, taking her gun with it. She still wore her vest, but all the pockets on the left had been ripped open, and the contents—including her first aid kit—were gone.

She had to stop the bleeding, though.

She patted her other pockets and found that she still had her folding knife, which had a sturdy three-inch blade. That was a relief. With a flick of her wrist she snapped the blade into place and used its razor edge to cut away both her trouser legs from mid-thigh down. The left side was useless, soaked with blood and smeared with some black goo that Lilah feared might have come from the boar’s mouth. With a small grunt of disgust, she tossed it away. A moment later she heard squeals and furious grunts as the boars fought over the blood-soaked piece of cloth.

The other trouser leg was dirty but not as bad. She cut several long strips off it. She folded the remainder into a thick bandage and used the strips to lash it to her waist and thigh. Her canteen was lost, so she couldn’t clean the wound, but right now it was more important to prevent further blood loss. She’d worry about infection later. If she got down from the tree, there were plenty of things she could find in a forest that were useful in combating infection. As George and Tom had each said, “Nature provides if you know how to ask.” Lilah knew.

With the wound bandaged, Lilah felt her confidence returning.

However, along with the confidence came the full set of memories of everything that had happened before the boar attacked her.

Mother Rose and the reapers. The slaughter in the camp. The four-wheeled motorcycles.

And . . . the thing she had found by the cliff.

She had to get back to Chong and the others and tell them. They were in greater danger than she was, because as far as Lilah knew, the others had no idea what was happening in this stretch of desert forest. She needed to tell them, and then to get them all out of this place before . . .

Below her the boars grunted hungrily.

Lilah looked up, but there was no escape route there. The tree in which she stood reached all the way to the edge of the cliff, but long before it got there it narrowed to a slender wand that could never support her weight.

With the cold efficiency of a survivor, she dismissed it and looked down.

The hogs were there. If she landed among them, they’d close around her and tear her apart, of that she had no doubt.

However, if she were able to somehow avoid them and jump to the outside of their ring, then she might have a chance to use ground cover to help her effect an escape. There were boulders, thick bushes, and plenty of ravines and gullies in the landscape.

That left two questions.

If she climbed to a lower branch, could she manage to jump that far away from them? And if she did, did she simply have enough strength and stamina left to outrun and outmaneuver six tireless creatures?

The answer to both questions was almost certainly no.

But she had no other options. None. It was a bad choice or no choice.