Flesh & Bone (Rot & Ruin, #3)(84)

“Oh sure, and when’s the last time something changed for the better?” she sobbed. “Everything is wrong. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This isn’t how any of this is supposed to be. It’s all wrong, Benny. God, I’m so stupid.”

“Wait—what? Nix, what are you talking about? How’s any of this your fault?”

“You don’t understand.” She was crying so hard those were the only words he could understand. “You just don’t understand.”

“Nix . . . I want to understand . . . just tell me what’s wrong.”


Benny felt his own tears running in lines down his face and falling onto her hair.

What storms raged inside Nix? Benny could make a list, but he was achingly positive that any list he could make would not be complete.

“I’m sorry,” he said, because he had nothing better to say. “It’ll be okay.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not going to be okay.”

He pushed her gently back and studied her face. “What do you mean?”

There was a strange light in her beautiful green eyes, and an even stranger half smile on her lips. The smile was crooked and filled with self-loathing and self-mockery.

“Oh, Benny,” she said in a terrible whisper, “I think I’m in trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“I think I’m going crazy.”

He smiled. “You’re not going crazy.”

“How would you know?”

“Nix, don’t you think I’d know?”

She shook her head. “No one knows. No one understands.”

“Try me, Nix. If something’s wrong, then tell me. Let me in.”

“God, if you knew what was going on in my head, you’d run so fast. . . . ”

“No.”

“Yes, you would.”

“No,” he said firmly, leaning all his weight into the word, “I wouldn’t. You can tell me anything.”

She continued to shake her head.

So Benny said, “I hear voices.”

He dropped it on her, and for a moment she stopped crying, stopped shaking her head, and stared at him. A twisted half smile kept trying to form on her lips.

“Yup,” said Benny, tapping his temple. “Sometimes I have a real party in here.”

“This isn’t a joke. . . . ”

“Do I look like I’m laughing?” He did smile, though, and he knew that smile was probably every bit as crooked as hers.

“Why haven’t you said anything?”

“Why haven’t you?” Benny sighed. “It’s not like we’ve been communicating that well lately, Nix.”

She sighed. “A lot’s happened.”

“I know, but we haven’t talked about it. I think that’s the whole problem.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Okay, so if it’s not the whole problem, then it’s the doorway to the problem. C’mon, Nix, it’s been a month since Gameland. Since then, what have we talked about? Hunting for food. Cooking. Routes on the map. Which leaves are safe to use as toilet paper. Jeez, Nix, we talk about stuff that just gets us through the day, but we don’t talk about what happened.”

Nix said nothing.

“We killed people, Nix.”

“I know. We killed people seven months ago at Charlie’s camp, too.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t really talk about it. Not in any way that made sense of it, or cleared it. Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”

She shrugged. “Everything’s weird.”

“After everything that’s happened, Nix, I really don’t think either of us has a chance of being totally sane. I guess ‘normal’ was last year.”

She thought about that and gave a grudging nod.

“Okay,” Benny continued, “but it can’t be good that we don’t talk about this stuff. We never really talked about your mom and what happened.”

Nix turned away.

“And . . . that’s exactly what I mean,” he said. “I even start to mention it and you lock up. That can’t be the best way of dealing with—”

“What kind of voices?” Nix interrupted.

“It . . . used to be what I guess you could call my ‘inner voice,’” he began slowly. “It was like me, but not me. It was smarter, you know? It knew about stuff. It’s hard to explain.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“All kinds of stuff. Even how to talk to you.”

The ghost of a smile flitted across her lips.

“But that’s not what really has me scared,” Benny continued. He took a breath and then blurted it. “I think Tom’s talking to me too.”

“Oh.”

“At first I thought I was just remembering things he said. But lately . . . I don’t know. I think he’s actually talking to me. Like, maybe it’s his ghost.”

“Ghost?”

Benny nodded. “God, this is why I don’t talk about this stuff, because you’re definitely going to think I’m totally monkey-bat crazy.”

“You always have been,” she said with another small smile.