Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(80)

I get that.





61

FOR A LONG TIME CHONG FLOATED IN AN INFINITE OCEAN OF PAIN.

For hours, days, weeks . . . maybe years.

Time was meaningless.

Then he heard a voice.

“You in there, boy?”

“Don’t . . . call me ‘boy,’” Chong said thickly.

“I need y’all to wake up,” said Riot. “We need to have us a talk.”

Chong slowly opened his eyes. He was lying on his uninjured side and had to look over his shoulder to see Riot, who knelt behind him. She appeared to be studying the exit wound. When Chong looked down at the entry wound, all he saw was a red-black burn.

He expected it to hurt, and it did. The area around the burn was puffy and red. Chong felt hot, as if the heat of the cauterizing blade had infused his entire body. Sweat ran down his torso and pooled under him.

“I don’t feel too great,” he said.

Riot breathed in and out through her nose for a moment. “Yeah, well, that’s the thing,” she said. “We maybe got us a problem.”

“Really? A problem?” He arched an eyebrow. “Beyond arrows, burned flesh, an army of killers, and the end of the world?”

She did not smile.

“Riot—?”

Instead of answering, she picked up the arrowhead she’d unscrewed. She sniffed it, and her frown deepened. Then she picked up the quiver of arrows and studied the blackened tips of each.

“Oh, man . . . ,” she breathed.

“What is it?” asked Chong. “What’s wrong? Is it poison?”

Riot got up and walked around so she faced him. There was a haunted look in her eyes, and her mouth was drawn and tight.

“Is it poison?” Chong repeated.

“No,” she said faintly. “No, I don’t think we’re going to catch that kind of a break.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? It doesn’t look that bad.”


“You ain’t seein’ it from t’other side. Skin around the wound looks funny. It’s turning black, and there are some crooked dark lines creeping out from it.”

“God,” said Chong, feeling panic leap up in his chest. “That’s blood poisoning! You’re telling me I have blood poisoning?”

After a long pause, Riot said, “I don’t think that’s what we got here. The lines are black, not red.”

“But—”

“You’re running a fever . . . but the skin back here’s cool to the touch.”

“Then we need to treat me for shock. Do you have anything we can use as a blanket or—”

“No,” she said. “Ain’t shock, neither. I think we got ourselves somethin’ else. Something we maybe can’t fix.”

“What’s that mean?”

“That black goo on the tips?” Riot held one of the arrows under his nose. “Tell me what it smells like to you.”

Chong studied her eyes for a long moment. There was a bleak, defeated look in them that made him hesitate before he took an arrow from her. Even then he didn’t immediately raise the arrow to his nose.

“You already know what it is,” he asked quietly, “don’t you?”

Riot nodded.

Chong closed his eyes for a moment. Instead of it being dark behind his eyelids, he saw twisted threads of bright red forking like lightning inside his personal darkness.

Then he opened his eyes and took a tentative sniff. He smelled what she had smelled.

“No,” he said, and his denial matched frequency with hers. This wasn’t something you just could refuse to accept.

Riot said nothing.

“Why . . . why would anyone do something like that?” demanded Chong.

“Why do you think?”

The answer was obvious, but it took all his courage to say it. “So . . . even if he just wounded someone . . . they’d . . . they’d . . .”

Words failed him.

Riot sighed and sat down on the floor, placing the arrows well away from Eve.

However, the smell lingered in Chong’s nose. He knew exactly what it was, and why it smelled like cadaverine.

The archer had dipped his arrows in the infected flesh of the living dead.

And now that infection was burning its way through Chong’s flesh.





62

“HONORED ONE!” CRIED SISTER AMY AS SHE DASHED OUT OF THE WOODS.

The saint and Brother Peter turned and waited for her to catch up with them. Amy was badly winded, and she dropped to her knees before them, bending to kiss the red tassels on their legs.

When she could speak without panting, Sister Amy told them about finding the ranger named Joe, and watching as he rescued a white-haired girl, tended to her wounds, and spoke with her. She told the saint everything and saved the choicest bit for last.

Saint John listened, and when she was finished, his eyes blazed with inner light.

“Nine towns,” he murmured. “In central California?”

“No militia,” mused Brother Peter. “Living up there in the mountains, they probably think they have nothing to fear except wandering gray people.”

“From what the girl said,” added Sister Amy, “they seem to believe that everything beyond their fence lines is wasteland.”