Jonathan Maberry - Flesh & Bone

“What I said,” Nix replied, parrying deftly. “Are you sorry we came?”

Benny stuffed his mouth with berries to buy another second to think, and he rather hoped another ravine full of zoms would suddenly open up in the ground directly in front of them.

When that did not happen, he swallowed and braced himself and said, “Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“We haven’t found the jet,” he said. “And until today we haven’t even seen any people. We don’t know if we’re going in the right direction. We’re low on supplies, and now we’ve run into a horde of zoms.” He paused, wondering how far off the cliff of “said too much” he’d already gone. He tried to fix it, but the wrong words came out. “I guess it isn’t what I expected.”

“I thought so,” Nix said, and Benny did not at all like the way she said it.

They walked in silence for another full minute.

“Okay,” he said when he could no longer bear it, “what’s going on?”

“With what?” she asked, not looking at him.

“With us.”

“Nothing,” she said tightly. “Everything’s fine.”

“Really?” he asked. “Is it?”

Nix stared ahead as they walked, watching the bees and the dragonflies.

“Look at me,” he said.

She did not.

“Nix… what is it?” he asked gently. “Did I do something, or—?”

“No,” she said quickly.

“Then what is it?”

“Does it have to be anything?”

“Pretty much, yeah. For the last couple of weeks you’ve been weird.”

“Weird?” She loaded that word with jagged chunks of ice.

“Not weird weird, but, you know… different. You spend all your time talking to Lilah or not talking to anyone. We hardly talk anymore.”

She stopped and wheeled on him. “And you spend all your time moping around like the world just ended.”

Benny gaped at her. “No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” she insisted.

“Well, okay, maybe I’ve been dealing with some stuff. My brother just died, you know.”

“I know.”

“He was murdered.”

“I know.”

“So maybe I need time to sort through that, ever think about that?”

Nix’s eyes blazed. “Are you going to lecture me about dealing with grief, Benjamin Imura? Your brother died fighting. My mother was beaten to death. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“It makes you feel like crap, how do you think I think it makes you feel?”

“Then what are you harping on—”

“Who’s harping?” he said defensively. “Jeez, Nix, all I did was ask what was wrong. Don’t bite my head off.”

“I’m not biting your head off.”

“Then why are you yelling?”

“I’m not yelling,” she yelled.

Benny took a steadying breath and let it out slowly.

“Nix, I do understand what you’re going through. I’m going through it too.”

“It’s not the same thing,” she said very quietly. An elk poked its head out from behind some sagebrush, studied them for a moment, then bent to eat berries from another bush.

“Then why won’t you tell me what it is?”

She glared at him. “Honestly, Benny, sometimes I think you don’t even know who I am.”

With that she turned and stalked away, her spine as stiff as a board. Benny stood openmouthed until she was almost back to the tree where Chong sat with Eve.

“What the hell was that all about?” he asked the elk.

The elk, being an elk, said nothing.

Dispirited and deeply troubled, Benny thrust his hands in his pockets and walked slowly over to the edge of the ravine to stare at the faces of the living dead. They looked at him with dead eyes, but in some eerie way Benny felt that they could see him and that they somehow understood all the mysteries that were sewn like stitches through the skin of this day.

A lot of the stuff Tom taught us has nothing to do with zoms. Once, right after we started training, Morgie asked Tom why we bothered, ’cause after all, Charlie and the Hammer were dead. This was before we left town, before we met White Bear and Preacher Jack.

Tom said that we should never assume that we know what’s out there. He said, “People in town refer to everything beyond the fence line as the great Rot and Ruin. We assume that it’s nothing but a wasteland from our fence all the way to the Atlantic Ocean three thousand miles away. But we saw that jet, so there is something out there. We don’t know what it is, or whether whoever’s out there will be friendly. Or generous. Or open to us joining them. A smart warrior prepares for all eventualities.”

Tom also said, “Even before First Night there were all kinds of people who wanted to be on their own. Isolationists, religious orders, militant groups, back-to-nature groups, communes, military bases, remote research stations, and more. Some of these people will do anything to protect their privacy or their way of life. To them… we’re outsiders and intruders.”

For Lilah, reading tracks on the ground was as easy as reading words on a page. Her sharp eyes missed nothing, and as she moved deeper into the desert forest, she began cataloging the marks she found. Eve’s were easy to spot, and they wandered out of the east along a crooked path.

As for the rest, Lilah slowed from a run to a walk as she studied them.

The forest was denser than she’d expected. She knelt and pawed at the sandy soil and quickly found darker, wetter soil beneath. She sniffed it.

There was water here. An underground stream or some other source beyond what the wind towers pulled in. Eve had mentioned a creek; and the footprints seemed to be coming from the densest part of the forest. That made sense. People tended to camp near water. Especially in a climate like this.

Lilah bent forward onto all fours and studied the ground. In some spots, like this one, there were many footprints, and they varied. Several men, a few women. From the spacing and gait, it was clear that these were humans. Most of the shoes, even the crudely made ones, were in good repair, and there was none of the aimless shambling typical of zoms.

Not that she didn’t find signs of wandering zoms. They were out here too.

Lilah straightened, eyes alert.

So far they had seen no zoms on this side of the ravine, but the footprints didn’t lie.

She turned and glanced back the way she’d come as if she could see little Eve sitting there with Nix and the others. The girl must be charmed, she thought, to have made it safely from where her parents were camped to where Benny had rescued her. She had no bites on her, no marks to indicate that zoms had tried to hurt her.

That was a great relief to Lilah, one she had not shared with Chong. If Eve had been bitten…

If she was infected and needed to be quieted…

Lilah did not know if she could do that.

Not to a little girl who looked so much like Annie.

Not again.

She adjusted her grip on the spear and moved on.

A few minutes later she stopped again and knelt down by a different set of tracks. Not human footprints, and not the scuffling marks of zoms. No, these were straight lines of serrated tracks, like wheel marks.

But… wheels belonging to what? If they were made by a cart or wagon, then there was no sign of what pulled it.

She cleared away some loose debris and studied the patterns. The impressions were cut deep into the ground. Whatever made them was heavy, and it had four wheels. She thought of the many abandoned cars and trucks she’d seen over the years, and these marks didn’t fit. For one thing, the wheels were too close together.

It was a mystery.

Lilah moved on.

The ground became increasingly moist. Soon she smelled water on the breeze, and then within a few minutes she heard the soft burble of a stream. The footprints and the wheel marks all came from that way.