Jonathan Maberry - Flesh & Bone

Special thanks to some real-world people who allowed me to tap them for advice and information, lean on them for support, and in some cases shove them into the middle of the action. My agents, Sara Crowe and Harvey Klinger; my editor, David Gale, and all the good people at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers; Ashley Davis, Nancy Kiem-Comley, Tiffany Fowler-Schmidt, Rachel Tafoya, Greg Schauer, Rigel Ailur, Bubba Falcon, Jaime Noyola, Bob Clark, Jim McCain, Colin Madrid, and Dustin Lee Frye for technical advice; Michael Homler of St. Martin’s Griffin; Dr. John Cmar of Johns Hopkins University Department of Infectious Diseases; Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex (Simon & Schuster); Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books); Chris Graham, David Nicholson, and John Palakas of the History Channel documentary Zombies: A Living History ; and the King of the Zombies George A. Romero.

This novel deals in part with the phenomenon of grief. Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Chong each have a reason to grieve; each has lost something they could not bear to lose. The people they left behind in Mountainside were all traumatized by loss, as are the people they meet out in the Ruin. Grief, in its many forms, is one of the themes that tie all four books of this quadrology together.

While I was writing this book, a great and dear friend of mine died. Leslie Esdaile Banks (aka L. A. Banks), a prolific author of romance, crime fiction, thrillers, and paranormal novels, lost her battle with a rare form of cancer. I’ve known Leslie since middle school, and we were colleagues in the Liars Club, a group of writers dedicated to promoting literacy and the love of reading. Leslie was a humanitarian, a fierce intellect, and one of the most joyful people I have ever had the great good fortune to have known.

Around the same time my brother-in-law, Logan Howe, also died. He was a good and decent man.

After they died, I found it painful and difficult to accept that the sun shone, the birds sang in the trees, and the world turned without them. Grief is like that. To resist or deny grief does no good. It hurts us to pretend that we are not hurt. Sounds strange, but it’s true.

I know that many of the readers of this book have experienced grief, or will. It’s human to hurt, but all hurts eventually heal. The best path through grief is to celebrate all those things that made the departed person alive. That’s the light to follow. That’s what my friends and I did after Leslie died. We cried, but we also threw a party and told tall tales and we laughed. I know — I absolutely know — that Leslie was laughing right along with us.

And… talk about it. As Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Chong talk about grief in these pages. Find someone who will listen. There are always people willing to listen. Always.

If you are having trouble dealing with personal loss, please reach out. To parents, relatives, friends, teachers, coaches, or someone at your place of worship. People will listen, and grief is something that we all share. Don’t let yourself be alone with it.

Benny Imura thought, i’m going to die.

The hundred zombies chasing him all seemed to agree.

Fifteen minutes ago nothing and nobody was trying to kill Benny Imura.

Benny had been sitting on a flat rock, sharpening a sword and brooding. He was aware that he was brooding. He even had a brooding face for when other people were around. Now, though, he was alone, and he let the mask fall away. When he was alone, the melancholy musings were deeper, more useful, but also less fun. When you’re alone, you can’t crack a joke to make the moment feel better.

There were very few moments that felt good to Benny. Not anymore. Not since leaving home.

He was a mile from where he and his friends had camped in a forest of desert trees deep in southern Nevada. Every time Benny took another step on the road to finding the airplane he and Nix had seen, every single inch forward, he was farther from home than he had ever been.

He used to hate the idea of leaving home. Home was Mountainside, high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of central California. Home was bed and running water and hot apple pie on the porch. But that had been home with his brother, Tom. It had been a whole hometown, with Nix and her mother.

Now Nix’s mom was dead, and Tom was dead.

Home wasn’t home anymore.

As the road had unrolled itself in front of Benny, Nix, Chong, and Lilah, and melted into memory behind, the vast world out here had stopped being something ugly, something to fear. Now this was becoming home.

Benny wasn’t sure he liked it, but he felt in some strange way that it was what he needed, and maybe even what he deserved. No comforts. No safe haven. The world was a hard place, and this desert was brutal, and Benny knew that if he was going to survive in the world, then he would have to become much tougher than he was.

Tougher even than Tom, because Tom had fallen.

He brooded on this as he sat on his rock and carefully sharpened the long sword, the kami katana that had once belonged to Tom.

Sharpening a sword was an appropriate task while brooding. The blade had to be cared for and that required focus, and a focused mind was more agile when climbing through the obstacle course of thoughts and memories. Even though Benny was sad — deep into the core of who he was — he found some measure of satisfaction in the hardships of the road and the skill required to hone this deadly blade.

As he worked, he occasionally glanced around. Benny had never seen a desert before, and he appreciated its simplicity. It was vast and empty and incredibly beautiful. So many trees and birds that he had only read about in books. And… no people.

That was good and bad. The bad part was that there was no one they could ask about the plane. The good was that no one had tried to shoot them, torture them, kidnap them, or eat them in almost a month. Benny put that solidly in the “win” category.

This morning he’d left the camp to go alone into the woods, partly to practice the many skills Tom had taught him. Tracking, stealth, observation. And partly to be alone with his thoughts.

Benny was not happy with what was going on inside his head. Accepting Tom’s death should have been easy. Well, if not easy, then natural. After all, in Benny’s lifetime the whole world had died. More than seven billion people had fallen since First Night. Some to the zombies, the dead who rose to attack and feed on the living. Some to the mad panic and wild savagery into which mankind had descended during the collapse of governments and the military and society. Some were killed in the battles, blown to radioactive dust as nuclear bombs were dropped in a desperate attempt to stop the legions of walking dead. And many more died in the days after, succumbing to ordinary infections, injuries, starvation, and the wildfire spread of diseases that sprang from the death and rot that was everywhere. Cholera, staph and influenza, tuberculosis, HIV, and so many others — and all of them running unchecked, with no infrastructure, no hospitals, no way to stop them.