Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(56)

“It wasn’t nearly that many,” Nix said defensively, but it was a weak parry.

“Yes, it was. I heard Captain Strunk talking to Tom about it. Pastor Kellogg did a sermon about it.”

Nix holstered her pistol. “I must have missed church that day.”

“Okay, then what about the way-station monks? Some of them let themselves get bitten because they think it’s what God wants. They think the zoms are the meek that are supposed to inherit the—”

“I know,” she said bitterly.

Benny paused, studying her face. “Are you really going to sit there and tell me that you never thought about it?”

Nix’s head whipped around so fast that her flying hair brushed across Benny’s face. “I would never kill myself.”

“Whoa! Whoa, now. Who said anything about—?”

“You did. You asked me if I thought about killing myself.”

“No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “I asked if you ever thought about people in town killing themselves.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“It’s what I meant, and you know it.”

Nix narrowed her eyes at him in an expression that was half a glare and half an inspection of his eyes.

“Whatever,” she said, and turned away again. She drew her bokken, then stood there, pretending to study the landscape.

Benny stared at the back of her head and did not dare say anything else. Nix had been absolutely correct. He had asked her if she ever thought about killing herself.

The thing was . . . he did not know why he asked that.

He wondered if beating his head against the tree trunk would help the moment any. It seemed like the most reasonable option.

Nix abruptly walked into the woods, heading to an upslope that led away from this scene of carnage. “Let’s go,” she called over her shoulder.

“Where?”

She pointed toward a line of white rocks beyond the trees. “Up there. We can climb those rocks and see if we can spot Lilah and Chong.”

She moved off, not looking back to see if he followed.

After several heavy seconds of indecision, Benny rose and ran after her.

They moved carefully through the brush, and the closer they got to the line of bright white rocks, the less certain Benny became that they were rocks at all.

Maybe it was a building, he thought. There had to be a ranger station or something out here.

Nix reached the edge of the woods first and suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.

“No . . . ,” she said softly.

Her bokken dropped from her hand and clattered on the rocky ground. Benny hurried to catch up, and as he did Nix screamed out a single word.

“NO!”

She yelled it so loudly that birds erupted from the trees. The echo bounced off the surrounding rocks. It was loud enough to be heard a mile away.

Loud enough for everyone to hear them.

Chong. Lilah.

Riot.

The reapers.

The dead themselves.

Louder still than her scream was the thunder of Benny’s heart as he saw what had torn that shout of denial out of her.

There was no ring of white rocks. There was no ranger station or a forgotten farmhouse.

It was a huge machine that had been smashed against the unforgiving landscape.

And it was heartbreakingly familiar.

It was an airplane.





PART TWO

BROKEN BIRDS

Shallow men believe in luck.

Strong men believe in cause and effect.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON





41

“NO!” CRIED NIX AS SHE SHOVED PAST BENNY AND RUSHED FORWARD, but he darted out a hand and caught her arm.

“Wait,” he warned in a sharp whisper.

“Let me go,” she said viciously, and tore her arm out of Benny’s grasp, giving him a wild and murderous glare. “Don’t you see what that is?”

“It’s a jet—”

“It’s the jet.” Tears broke and fell down Nix’s freckled cheeks. “Look at it. Everything’s ruined. Oh God, Benny . . . everything’s ruined.”

Benny pushed back a low-hanging branch and stepped out of the woods so he could see the wreckage. His heart sank in his chest, and his fingertips were ice cold from shock.

Beyond the trees was a plateau. One side dropped away into a crevasse that was choked with tall pines; the other side leveled out into a section of flat forestland. A long trench was cut into the mud of the flatland, stretching back at least half a mile, and the nose of the craft was smashed into a mound of mud. Benny had slid into enough bases in rainy baseball games to understand the physics of that. The plane had not simply crashed; instead the pilot had tried to land it, coming in low and then sliding to a long, messy stop on the forest floor.

Because these woods were part of the Mojave Desert, the soil was loose and sandy, which had probably kept the plane from disintegrating on impact. The fuselage was almost intact, though there were jagged tears all along the side they could see. Both wings had been sheared clean off. One was wrapped like wet tissue around a tall finger of rock two hundred yards down the trench. The other wing had torn off closer to where the craft stopped its fatal slide, and it had twisted into an upright position, looking like the sail of an old-time vessel. The main fuselage was almost a hundred feet long and was cracked in two places, but the plane had not torn itself to pieces. Even so, bits of debris were littered behind it, some blackened from fire, others still gleaming white where they were visible against brown sand and green pinyons and junipers. Creeper vines clung to the metal skin of the plane and to each of the fractured wings. The vines were draped like spiderwebs between the blades of the four big, silent propellers.