Jonathan Maberry - Flesh & Bone

“Turkey vultures,” observed Chong.

“I know.”

They watched the dark, ugly birds glide without sound on the thermal currents above the endless miles of pinyon pines.

“There are a lot of them out today,” Chong said. “Seem to be everywhere.”

Benny looked at him. He could feel the blood drain from his face.

“Oh, crap…”

“Yeah. Carrion birds don’t eat zoms…”

“… so what are they circling?” Benny finished.

It was one of the great mysteries of the Ruin that vermin did not feed on the zoms, even though they smelled of decay. No one understood it, and as Mr. Lafferty at the general store once said, “Kind of a shame, too, ’cause in about a month we’d have had a zillion fat crows and no zoms at all.”

Chong said, “Something’s dead out there.”

“I’d better get Nix,” said Benny.

Lilah angrily fisted the tears from her eyes and glared around as if ready to bash anyone who happened to be a witness to those tears. She detested weakness of any kind. It was something she could barely tolerate in her friends and would not allow in herself.

Especially after what had happened a month ago. After Tom led them out of town, their group had gotten separated. Chong, torn by guilt for having inadvertently caused Nix’s face to be slashed, and generally feeling like the town boy he was, had run away, requiring that Tom go and find him. That night, while Nix, Benny, and Lilah waited for Tom’s return in a deserted monk’s way station, the place was overrun by a sea of zoms. Thousands upon thousands of them; more zoms than anyone had seen in one place since First Night. In the moments before the attack, Lilah had been arguing with Benny, and he accused her of deliberately ignoring and mocking Chong’s feelings for her. That hurt, because it was entirely true. Lilah cared for Chong, but he was the weakest and least hardy of their team. He was not suited for the Ruin; not at all. When the zoms attacked, Lilah panicked and ran. It was the first time she had ever panicked since that terrible night when she had escaped from Gameland and was forced to quiet Annie. She’d thrown down her spear and run blindly into the dark. Even now she could not remember what her thoughts had been in those moments. Or even if she’d had any thoughts. All she remembered was running through the blackness, inside and out.

Awareness came back to her much later. She found herself curled on the ground, totally vulnerable and totally lucky to be alive. The zoms had not found her; but a strange mountain loner named the Greenman had. He hadn’t attacked her — just the reverse; he showed her kindness and patience, and helped her discover where she’d left her strength. He also spoke with her about love, about responsibility, about guilt, and about the choices everyone makes.

Lilah had wept several times that day. And she wept even more bitterly that night, when the monster Preacher Jack shot Tom Imura in the back. It did not matter that Preacher Jack and Gameland both died that night. Tom Imura had died too. Lilah had clung to his hand as the last strength went out of it. Even now, a month later, thinking about it was like being punched in the heart.

She stood there in the forest and wept again. For Tom.

And for Annie.

God, how that little girl, Eve, looked like Annie. So much. Too much.

It was unfair.

It was cruel.

She sniffed and wiped her eyes and took as many deep breaths as she needed to in order to stop her chest from hitching with sobs. The forest waited for her. The day seemed to pause for her.

“Annie,” Lilah whispered to the forest. “Oh God, Annie, I miss you.”

She begged the forest to answer her. She begged for the ghost of Annie to speak inside her mind, like the ghost of Tom Imura sometimes did.

And suddenly the forest stopped being empty and silent.

She spun and faced the northern reach of the forest as noise filled the air. She frowned. This was not a forest sound. It was a sound she had only ever heard once, back in Mountainside.

It was the sound of a machine.

No… machines. At least two, coming from different directions.

The sounds rode the breeze toward her from different directions. Motor sounds, clearly mechanical, like the hand-crank generators in the town’s hospital.

Lilah ducked behind a tumble of rocks, going low and still, melting into the landscape as the motor sounds grew from a growl to a roar.

The leaves of the forest wall parted, and Lilah beheld something that shocked her. Something she’d believed belonged only to a world that no longer existed.

Two men came out of the woods, one on either side of the stream. They moved fast, but they were not running, nor were they astride horses, and suddenly she understood the nature of the cart tracks she had seen. These men sat on the backs of machines.

They were riding four-wheeled motorcycles.

Tom said, “As far as we know, zoms have no memory of their previous lives. They don’t respond to their name or anything like that. They appear to be mindless, but that can’t be true. Some zoms can turn a door handle. All of them remember how to walk, climb stairs, and get back to their feet after they’ve been knocked down. They know how to use their hands for things like grabbing, tearing, pulling, or holding something or someone. Most of them can recognize the difference between a blank wall and one with a window or door, because they try to get through those. And all of them remember how to bite, eat, and swallow.”

But… do they remember anything else? Maybe something that we don’t know they remember?

That thought sometimes keeps me up at night.

Benny woke Nix up and asked her to come to the edge of the ravine. She carried Eve, who was so thoroughly asleep that she drooped bonelessly in Nix’s arms. Nix’s intelligent green eyes studied the dance of black-winged birds in the sky. She gave a slow shake of her head.

“This is bad,” she said. “How long have they been circling?”

“I don’t know,” said Benny. “At least an hour, and there’s a lot more of them over the forest. See?” He turned and pointed to the east. There were at least twenty of the carrion birds, and more were drifting in on the thermal winds.

Chong’s mouth slowly fell open. He murmured, “Lilah…”

“If she was in trouble, we’d have heard gunshots,” said Benny. “But someone else…”

He trailed off as they all looked at Eve.

“Oh, man,” said Chong.

“Or,” said Benny, trying a different tack, “there could be something else dead out there. We’ve seen half the animals from Noah’s Ark since we left town.”

It was true enough. Ever since the fall of civilization, wild animals from zoos and circuses had escaped to breed in the Ruin. There were rumors of all kinds of exotic creatures, from rivers filled with hippos to herds of zebras. Shortly after Tom led them from Mountainside they’d gotten firsthand experience, chancing upon a cranky mother rhino that had trampled an entire field of zoms while protecting her calf. She nearly trampled Benny and his friends, too. Since then they’d seen monkeys in the trees, giraffes, birds they did not recognize, and at least three species of deerlike animals with horns that none of them could name. And they had also found bones of animals, large and small, brought down either by zoms, disease, or the new wilderness predators.

Benny nodded at the pistol Nix wore in a nylon shoulder harness. Tom’s pistol. “Do you think we should warn Lilah?”

Firing two spaced shots exactly ten seconds apart was a signal they’d agreed on. If any of them heard it, they were supposed to come back to camp as quickly — and cautiously — as possible. Gunshots carried with them the danger of attracting roaming zombies, so they were only to be used in an absolute worst-case scenario. The other consideration was that it wasted bullets. Lilah had thirty-one rounds for the Sig Sauer automatic she carried, and there were fourteen for Tom’s.38 Smith & Wesson.