Jonathan Maberry - Flesh & Bone

Five minutes later Lilah stepped out onto the banks of a narrow, shallow stream that ran out of the northeast and jagged off due south. The water was clear and clean, with the kind of mineral taste that confirmed her suspicion that the source was an underground river. She drank handfuls of it and refilled her canteen.

Despite the potential for zoms and the mystery of the tracks, Lilah felt relaxed, content in her skills and in her solitude. She welcomed any opportunity to be alone. Being alone was when she felt most like herself. She felt powerful and normal. For months now, Lilah had felt anything but normal. Except when she went ahead to scout out a path for Nix, Benny, and Chong, she was seldom alone. That bothered her.

Benny and Nix often said things like, “It must be great not to be all alone anymore.” And, “You’ll never have to be alone again.”

On a practical level, Lilah could understand that they meant well. That they thought she had been rescued from loneliness. To a degree, she had.

Mostly, though, the ties between her and her new friends, the responsibility of protecting them, caring for them, felt like tethers holding her down. She did not want to care for anyone. The last person she’d cared for was Annie.

She knew that she was not like other people. Not like Benny, Nix, or Chong, even though they were all her friends. Their life experience was completely alien to her, as hers was no doubt bizarre to them.

Lilah had been two years old on First Night. Her mother was pregnant with Annie, and they were caught up in the mad exodus from Los Angeles as the dead rose. A handful of survivors managed to find a safe house hundreds of miles from the city, but that house was soon under siege by zombies. None of the other survivors realized that the pregnant woman had been bitten. Just as her mother gave birth to Annie, the infection took her and she died, only to reanimate moments later as a monster.

It was the first time Lilah had witnessed anyone being quieted, though there was nothing quiet about it. Her mother screamed like a feral beast as she tried to attack the men; and the survivors screamed in fear as they bludgeoned her with anything they could grab. Lilah screamed too. She screamed so long and so loud that she permanently ruined her vocal cords, leaving her with a ghostly whisper of a voice.

Over the next few days, the survivors tried, one by one, to escape and find help. None ever returned. The last survivor was a quiet little man named George. He stayed. He cared for Lilah and Annie. Raising them, teaching them, loving them as if they were his own children.

As she moved through the dry desert shrubs, Lilah thought more and more about her early life with George and Annie. They had been her whole world. However, during one of their moves to a new farmhouse, George met a group of armed men who claimed to be part of a movement to reclaim the Ruin from the dead.

That was a lie.

The men brutalized George and kidnapped the girls, taking them to the zombie pits at Gameland. There, Lilah and Annie were forced to fight for their lives against zoms while corrupt men and women wagered on who would survive. Lilah fought hardest against her captivity, and the Motor City Hammer and his thugs frequently beat her. She still had the scars from their fists, belts, and switches.

After Annie died, Lilah spent the next five years alone, living in a cave she filled with weapons and books. Until Benny, Nix, and Tom found her and brought her back to Mountainside.

Tom said that he had met George out in the wild, and had even helped him look for his two lost girls. Then rumors began circulating that George had gone crazy and committed suicide. Tom Imura thought it was a lie, believing that Charlie and the Hammer had murdered him and faked his suicide. Not that it mattered. George was dead.

All those men were now dead. Charlie. The Hammer.

And… Tom.

Just thinking his name made her eyes sting.

Tom and the others had brought Lilah back to their town. She went to live with the Chongs, who had a big house with plenty of room. Mrs. Chong took it upon herself to teach Lilah how to act “like a young woman,” with all the bizarre rituals that went with that. Lilah’s total lack of tact, deference, modesty, and hesitation was a jolt to the Chong household. After a while, some of the family manners and deportment she’d learned while living with George came back. Grudgingly.

Many times during those months, Lilah found the confinement of a house and the obligations of social interaction to be too much hard work. It became claustrophobic. It was frightening, because every day there were a hundred times when the things she said and did mattered to other people. Things she said caused as much pain as if she’d punched someone. It was confusing to her. So many times she packed her meager belongings — just clothes and weapons — and prepared to sneak away in the dark of the night.

She never did, though.

Partly because she wanted to belong to a family. The loss of George and Annie was so strong, even after all this time. It was as if the bounty hunters had literally carved away a piece of her body; she could feel the loss every day.

But there was another reason she stayed.

During her years of lonely isolation Lilah had read every novel she could find, from Sense and Sensibility to The Truth About Forever . She understood the concept of romance, of love. Of emotional and physical attraction. She was strange, she knew that, but she was still a teenager. A young woman.

Even so, she was unprepared for the moment when she discovered that Lou Chong had developed “feelings” for her. It was an absurd concept. He was a town boy. Not a hunter, not a fighter. He wouldn’t last a single night alone in the Ruin.

And yet.

Lilah did not want to have feelings for Chong.

She would rather have been with Tom Imura.

She even approached him once, on a winter night when no one else was around. She’d come right out and told him, “I love you.”

In the novels she read, that usually did it. The hero was swept off his feet by the honesty and directness of the heroine’s bold announcement.

What Tom said was, “Wow, Lilah. That’s a hell of a way to open a conversation. I thought you came over looking for Benny or Nix.”

“They are out,” she told him. “I waited until they left.”

“Ri-i-ight,” Tom said. They were standing in the kitchen. Tom had a cup of coffee in his hand. Outside it was thirty degrees and lightly snowing. “And you stood out there in the storm?”

“It is only snow.”

“Right,” he said again. “Okay, so here’s the thing, Lilah. I know that you like people to be direct with you, so that’s exactly what I’m going to be. I don’t know if this is going to hurt your feelings, but I think it’s absolutely necessary for us to put all our cards on the table. Do you understand that expression? Cards on the table?”

She nodded. “The truth, with nothing hidden.”

“Good. Then here’s the thing. I’m twice your age.”

“What does that matter—?”

“Shhh, let me talk. Let’s do this the right way, okay?”

Lilah had not replied to that. The moment had not become what she had expected. In books, the hero sweeps the heroine up into his arms and they kiss. Lilah had never kissed anyone except Annie and George, and those were cheek kisses. Not the fiery kisses she’d read about. The kinds of kisses where the world tilts on its axis and the heroine feels like she’s going to faint. Lilah did not know what that really meant, but she wanted to find out.

What Tom said was, “Lilah, you are my friend. You’re a very pretty girl, no doubt about that. You are strong, and intelligent, and lovely, and you care about people. All of those are amazing qualities. If I was Benny’s age, I have no doubt that I would be one of a hundred boys who would fall head over heels for you. But that’s not going to happen, for a couple of very good reasons. First, I’m an adult and you’re a teenager, so there are all sorts of legal and moral issues right there, and I’m not the kind of guy who’s ever been interested in crossing those lines. Not now and not ever.”