Flesh & Bone

by Jonathan Maberry

  He walked to the base of the T-bars and looked up at the zoms.

  He cleared his throat. “I think they were the pilots,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “The uniforms. There were pictures in some of the books.”

  “Should we . . . quiet them?”

  Benny looked up at the dead, who looked down at him with empty eyes and hungry mouths. Their hands pawed at the air, gray hands opening and closing on nothing.

  “No,” he said. “They’re not hurting anyone.”

  Benny felt her come to stand beside him.

  “I’m going to climb up into the plane,” she said.

  Benny cleared his throat. “It’s not safe.”

  “Safe?” Nix echoed faintly. “When are we ever going to be safe?”

  “I—”

  “I’m serious, Benny. Unless we find where this plane came from, all we’re ever going to do is keep running for our lives. Is that what you want? Is that why you came out here?”

  He looked up at the cloudless blue sky and did not look at her. “Nix, you know exactly why I came out here.”

  “Look, Benny . . . ,” she said in the softest voice he’d heard her use in weeks. “I know things have been bad.”

  He dared not turn. This was hardly the first time she’d tuned into what he was thinking, or perhaps what he was feeling. Nix was always empathic. Benny said nothing.

  “Give me time,” she said.

  She did not wait for him to answer. She turned away and walked down the slope to the piece of plastic sheeting that hung from the open hatch. Benny turned his head ever so slightly and watched as she began to climb.

  48

  LILAH DID NOT SCREAM A WAR CRY AS SHE JUMPED DOWN TO FACE THE boars. She did not need to hype herself up for the fight; every nerve in her body was already blazing with the anticipation of battle and pain.

  The pain in her side was a searing white-hot inferno, but she swallowed it, using the pain as fuel, knowing it would shotgun adrenaline into her system. It would make her faster, more aggressive, more vicious. It would keep the fear under control. And there was a lot of fear. She never pretended to be fearless, not to others and never to herself.

  She did not fear her own death. Not really.

  She feared not living, and to her that wasn’t the same thing.

  Death ended thought, ended knowing.

  Not living meant that she would never see Chong’s face again. She would never see the exasperation he tried so hard to hide whenever she did or said something that wasn’t “acceptable” to the people in town. She would never hear his soft voice as he recited poetry. Dickinson, Rossetti, Keats. She would never feel the warmth of his hand in hers. Chong’s hands were always warm, even when it was snowing outside.

  She would never kiss him again.

  She would never get to say the words that she ached to say.

  So she said them now, just in case. Just to have them out there, to put them on the wind. To make them real.

  “Chong,” she murmured quietly, “I love you.”

  It was unlikely that he would ever get to hear her say those words. The thought of these monsters taking all that away from her made Lilah mad.

  Very mad.

  Killing mad.

  With a feral snarl that would probably have scared the life out of Chong, Lilah dropped from the branch.

  She fell with all the silence and speed of gravity. Her snow-white hair whipped away from her face as she plummeted.

  She struck the closest boar feetfirst with a dead-weight impact that staggered the beast even though it was nearly five times her weight and mass. The heels of her shoes struck it on the right shoulder, and the impact sent shock waves through her shins and through the gash in her side. However, Lilah bent her knees as she struck, letting the big muscles of her thighs absorb the shock rather than her fragile knee joints.

  The impact knocked the boar sideways into a second animal, and Lilah fell backward away from the pack. Despite the pain, she hit the ground the right way, tucked, rolled, and came up onto the balls of her feet.

  All the boars squealed in a killing frenzy. Lilah wasted no time; there was none to waste. She rushed in and swung her ax in a high overhand blow that whistled through the air. The blade smashed into the first hog’s skull and punched through right into its brain. The creature cried out and then instantly collapsed, dead for gone and forever.

  Lilah went with its fall, letting the creature’s own weight tear the blade free.

  She’d timed it right. The first boar was down between her and the others. That bought her two seconds of time. She needed one.

  Lilah whipped the ax over and around her head just as a second boar scrabbled over the dead one, and the blade struck it square in the eye socket. The steel stabbed through one eye and out the other side.

  But the boar kept charging.

  The puncture had missed the brain.

  What had been perfect timing a moment ago was now fatal. The boar tossed its head and tore the ax handle from her hands as easily as she could have taken a toy away from little Eve. Lilah staggered back and nearly fell. Her ax went flying into the weeds on the far side of the clearing. It might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the good it would do her now.

  The boars that had fallen were back on their feet, and the whole pack charged at her.

  Lilah screamed and dove away, rolling again, feeling more of her wound open up as she rose once more to her feet. She ran, and the pain chased her as surely as did the pack of boars.

  The clearing was covered in short, dry grass that had withered to a lusterless brown. As Lilah ran across it, heading for the shelter of a boulder, she saw a darker brown amid the grass, and a half pace later the gleam of steel.

  Her torn gun belt and the big Sig Sauer pistol were right there!

  But the boars were too close.

  Lilah ran past her gun and reached the boulder a split second before the pigs caught up. She slapped the curve of the rock and launched her body onto it and then over it. The boars slammed into the stone, one after another, their dead brains too damaged to correct the angle of their charge. They rebounded from the impact, and as Lilah ran around the far side of the rock, she saw that one of them had shattered its big front tusks. Far from reducing it as a threat, the damage resulted in dagger-sharp jagged stumps.

  She piled on the speed, bent almost double even though her whole left side burned with fresh blood, then scooped up the holster, grabbed the butt of the pistol, racked the slide, skidded to a stop, whirled, and brought the gun up as the boars barreled straight toward her.

  And then everything went a little crazy.

  As she pulled the trigger there were two blasts.

  Not one.

  The lead boar pitched down and tumbled over and over, its head blown to fragments. The boars behind it squealed and stumbled, colliding with their fellows, crashing into and over one another in a massive pile. Only one boar remained on its feet, and it drove straight at Lilah.

  Then something huge and gray came flying out of the woods and struck the third boar like a missile, knocking it sideways and down. The new creature rattled with the sound of metal, and Lilah had a surreal glimpse of spiked steel bands, chain mail, and a great horned helmet. It was a dog, but it was like nothing Lilah had ever seen. A monstrous mastiff, armored like a tank. It dragged down the much heavier boar and began systematically slashing the undead creature to pieces. It did not bite at all but instead smashed and tore with the blades welded to its armor.

  The last three boars rose from where they had fallen over the one Lilah had shot. One took a single lurching step toward her, paused for a moment, and then fell over dead.

  As it landed, Lilah saw the black dime-size bullet hole in its temple.

  The two others glared at her. They grunted with awful hunger and charged.

  Lilah brought her gun up, but a voice yelled, “No!”

  And a second figure came rushin
g from the woods. Not a dog this time, but a man.

  He leaped over the dead hogs and landed right in the path of the charging boars. The pale sunlight that slanted down through the trees glittered on the edge of a long sword the man raised above his head.

  Not just any kind of sword.

  A katana.

  The man stepped into the charge of the hogs and slashed low, left and right, and suddenly the animals were falling forward, one leg on each sheared clean away. The man spun and slashed, the blade moving with incredible speed and precision so that it appeared as if the boars merely disintegrated. Then he pivoted and made two massive downward stabs, ramming the point of his sword through the weakest parts of the creatures’ skulls and destroying the spark of unnatural life that burned in their zombie brains.

  Behind him, the dog rose from the destroyed hulk of the other boar.

  Lilah froze, her pistol clamped in hands that now trembled. The pain in her side was screaming through her nerve endings, and shadows were piling up inside her mind.

  But for all that, she could not help staring at the man who stood ten feet away, his face and body hidden by deep shadows, the katana held in his powerful hands.

  She stared in uncomprehending shock.

  The last thing she said before blood loss and damage dragged her down into the darkness was, “Tom . . . ?”

  49

  “Y’ALL READY?” ASKED RIOT. SHE WAS CROUCHED BEHIND CHONG, HER fingers lightly touching the barbed head of the arrow.

  “No,” he said through clenched teeth. Then a moment later he croaked, “Go ahead.”

  “Take hold of that other end, and don’t you let it turn. Otherwise we’ll be doing nothing but reaming the hole.”

  “Well,” he said as conversationally as he could, “we wouldn’t want that now, would we?”

  “Here,” she said, handing him a thick piece of leather strapping she’d cut from her belt, “take this. Put it between your teeth.”

  “I don’t need that.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “you do.”

  Chong took it with great trepidation and placed it between his strong white teeth. Then he reached down and wrapped his fingers around the shaft just below the dark feathers. “O-okay.”

  Riot took a deep breath; so did Chong.

  “Here goes.”

  She gripped the end that protruded from his back, closing her left fist around it; then pinched the flat of the barb between thumb and fingers and . . . turned.

  The whole arrow turned. Blood suddenly welled from both sides of the wound, darkening the strips of Chong’s shirt that Riot had used to pack the wound.

  The pain was . . . exquisite. It was pain on a level Chong had never imagined before, and in the last month he had been beaten, kicked, stomped, and punched by full-grown bounty hunters. Memories of that other pain lined the shelves in his mind. This pain was on a much higher shelf. It was worse than when he’d gotten shot by the arrow in the first place. When the arrow hit him, the shock of it blunted his nerve endings and slammed his mind and body into a weird kind of traumatic numbness.

  That was then, this was now.

  He could feel every single nerve ending as the arrow turned despite their grips.

  As it turned out, he did indeed need that leather strap. Instead of throwing his mouth wide to scream, he bit down on the pain, and the scream echoed around within his body. He could feel his scream burning through him.

  Riot straightened and craned her neck to see how he was holding the arrow.

  “Dang it, son, don’t grab the shaft, grab the feathers. You need friction to hold it steady. Hold it tight.” She chuckled and added, “Pretend you’re holding the Lost Girl’s hand.”

  Several biting remarks occurred to Chong, but he did not have the breath to speak them. Instead he shifted his hand position, clamped down harder on the leather strap, and waited for her to try again.

  She gritted her teeth and channeled her strength into her fingers.

  The arrowhead did not turn. The whole shaft shifted inside the tunnel of flesh. The pain was every bit as bad. Chong screamed a muffled scream of torment, sucking in the sound, feeling tears and sweat burst from him. Feeling the heat of fresh blood on his stomach and back.

  “It’s stuck like a boot in mud,” growled Riot needlessly. She tried again. And again.

  Chong could feel nausea washing around in his stomach, but he did not dare give in to it. If he started vomiting now, it would make everything worse.

  “Y’all want me to stop?” asked Riot.

  Chong did. He really did. He wanted to tell her that. Maybe beg for her to stop. Stopping was the only sane choice.

  “N-no . . . ,” he wheezed, forcing the word past the leather strap.

  Riot leaned over and looked at him for a moment, studying his eyes. There was a strange expression on her face that Chong could not interpret. She gave him the smallest of smiles and a tiny nod, then bent back to her work.

  Riot tried again. And again. Over and over, and each time it was worse than the time before. Chong wept unashamedly.

  Then . . .

  “It’s turning!”

  Suddenly the pain and the awkward, terrible shifting of the arrow in his body changed. The arrow became almost still except for a faint tremor as the arrowhead turned and turned on its threads.

  “Got ’er done!” cried Riot.

  Chong closed his eyes and collapsed back, soaked with sweat and exhausted. The arrowhead was one step.

  It was the easy step.

  There were two more.

  Riot got up and ran to the fire. She wrapped a piece of cloth around the knife and removed it from the fire. Three inches of the blade glowed yellow-white. She hurried back to Chong and knelt in front of him.

  “Okay,” she said, and Chong could see that she, too, was sweating heavily, “here’s the fun part. I got to pull this puppy out and then cauterize the wounds. Both sides. You’re bleeding, so we got to do it right quick. You ready?”

  “Stop asking me that,” he mumbled around the leather strap. “Just do it!”

  Riot did something else first.

  She quickly bent forward and kissed Chong on the tip of his nose.

  “For luck,” she said.

  Then she took the arrow in her left hand, took a breath, and pulled.

  It came out with a dreadful sucking sound that Chong knew he would never forget. Blood welled hot and red from the wound.

  “Bite down,” she ordered, and then she moved in with the white-hot blade.

  The pain went off the scale, but still Chong held on. He screamed into the strap and bit the leather so hard he tasted blood in his mouth, but he held on.

  And then he caught the smell of his own burning flesh.

  That was when he passed out.

  50

  BENNY CAME DOWN THE HILL AND WATCHED NIX CLIMB. THEN, WITH A sigh and a certain knowledge that this was a bad idea, he took hold of one of the rents in the plastic and began climbing too.

  The plastic was strong, and though it swayed with their weight, the climb was easy, and there were enough holes to provide easy purchase for hands and feet. Nix scrambled up ahead of him, nimble as a monkey.

  “Slow down,” Benny warned.

  “Catch up,” she fired back, and gave him a second’s worth of a smile.

  Almost like the old Nix.

  Benny scrambled up after her, and they reached the open hatch shoulder-to-shoulder. Very carefully, as if they were peering in through the window of an old abandoned house from which ghosts might peer back, they raised their heads above the deck and looked inside.

  There was a lot of debris. Broken fittings and equipment from the plane that must have torn loose during the crash, pieces of shattered pine branches, and last fall’s dried leaves. And bones. Lots of bones. Leg and arm bones, the slender curves of ribs, and part of a skull.

  Benny heard Nix’s sharp intake of breath.

  “No,” he said in a hushed voice, “I
think it’s a monkey.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Benny climbed the rest of the way up and crouched inside the hatch. He lifted the skull fragment and examined it. “Monkey,” he said with relief, as much to himself as to her.

  “Any, um, people bones?”

  “No.”

  But as Nix climbed in she froze. Benny followed the line of her gaze and saw that there were more bundles of dried flowers and incense bowls. And another sign, the writing small and feminine, painted in red on white wood.

  THIS SHRINE SPEAKS TO THE FOLLY OF THE WORLD THAT WAS.

  EVEN THEIR STEEL ANGELS FELL FROM GRACE.

  TO DISTURB THIS PLACE IS TO INVITE DAMNATION.

  They were both quiet for a moment.

  Finally Benny said, “Well, that’s comforting.”

  Nix said nothing.

  They looked around. The hatch opened into a narrow compartment that seemed to divide the airplane into two parts: the cockpit to their left and a huge cargo bay to their right.

  Both doors were closed, and there were painted warnings on each, and white wax had been poured over the door handles. Red ribbon had been pressed into the wax.

  Nix used her palm to wipe away a film of grime that obscured the message on the cockpit door. It was a single word:

  LIES

  “That’s interesting,” she said. “Let’s see what’s on the other door.”

  She crossed to the cargo bay door and tore away some creeper vines. Again the message was a single word.

  DEATH

  “Charming,” observed Benny. “Take your pick.”

  Nix crossed back to the cockpit door. “This one first.”

  “Sure.” Benny bent and examined the seal and found it untouched. “Looks like nobody has been here. Open these doors and that wax will crack right off.”

  Nix touched the door to the cockpit. “Open it.”

  “You sure this is such a smart idea?”

  She made a disgusted sound. “Don’t be such a girl.”

  Benny bit back four or five vile and wildly inappropriate comments and reached for the door. The wax seal was thick, and he had to use both hands to turn the metal handle; then with a crack the wax broke apart and the lock clicked open.