Flesh & Bone

— 1-

Benny saw Tom there in the darkness.

His brother stood halfway down a long hallway that vanished into soft gray light. Tom was dressed for the Ruin, with his leather jacket and the kami katana slung over his shoulder.

“Tom?”

His brother turned slowly toward him.

He looked younger than Benny remembered. There were fewer shadows in Tom’s eyes.

“Hey, kiddo,” said Tom. “You have any idea what happened?”

“Yeah, a zombie hit me with a stick.”

“Crazy, huh? Bet you didn’t think that could happen.”

“Guess not.” Benny touched his head. It hurt, but it was all in one piece. That surprised him. In most of his dreams his head was in a thousand pieces and he was crawling around looking for the important ones.

“How come you never told me that zoms could do that?” Benny asked.

Tom shrugged. “World’s a big, strange place, Benny. What makes you think I know everything?”

“Oh.”

“Next time somebody swings something at your head, you might want to think about ducking.”

“Hilarious. Remind me to smother you in your sleep.”

“Little too late for that, kiddo.”

Even though Tom wasn’t moving, he seemed to be a little farther away. For the first time Benny realized that there were other people in the hallways. They were indistinct, more of a sense of movement in the gray light rather than specific shapes. He thought he recognized one of them, though.

“Chong?”

The figure stopped moving, but he stood with his back to Benny.

“Tom — is that Chong?”

His brother turned and looked at the figure. Then he bent and spoke quietly to him, but Benny couldn’t hear what was said.

“Is that Chong?” Benny asked again. “Is… is he going with you?”

Tom patted the other figure on the shoulder and then walked toward Benny. The other person remained back in the shadows.

Tom stopped a few feet away. He looked older now, more like he did that day they all left town.

“Can I come with you too?” asked Benny.

Sadness flickered in Tom’s eyes, but he still made a joke. “No, kiddo… you got other places to mess up, other people to annoy.”

“Tom… I really miss you, man.”

“I know. Me too.”

“Is it wrong that I want to go home?”

Tom touched Benny’s face. His palm was warm. “Where’s home now?” asked Tom.

Benny shook his head. “This isn’t what we expected.”

“What did you expect?” asked Tom.

“I don’t know. I thought we’d… I mean, I thought that it would be… ”

“Easier? Benny, I wish I could tell you that the world was a better place than it is,” Tom said quietly. “Or that it’s all going to be easier. But you know it isn’t, and I think you knew that before you walked through the fence back home. Nix is looking for something perfect.”

“I know. And we keep not finding it.”

“Perfect doesn’t exist. Not like she thinks. There’s a lot of hurt out here. A lot of pain, and a lot of people doing bad things.”

“Is that all there is? Hard times and bad people?”

Tom smiled. “I didn’t say that everyone was bad. I said that there are people doing bad things. Some of them, but not all of them. You met some good ones too. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

“This is the world, Benny. It’s seldom what we expect it to be.” He took his hand away. “But here’s the secret, here’s the thing I wanted to say.”

“What?”

Tom smiled. “You can fix the world. You, Nix… your generation. You can fix the world and make it right.”

“You mean put it back the way it was?”

“Was it right the way it was?”

“No.”

“Then there’s your answer.” He cocked his head. “You already know this, though. Don’t you?”

Benny thought about it.

“I guess so.” He looked up at Tom. “Does that mean you’re not really here and that this is some kind of coma thing? Like I’m having one of those vision thingies they talk about in books?”

Tom gave an elaborate shrug. “How would I know, little brother? You’re the hero with the magic sword. I’m just a ghost — who is considerably better-looking than you.”

“Hey!”

“I’m just saying.”

They stood there, grinning at each other.

“I love you, Tom.”

“Love you too, Benny.”

Tom turned and walked away, and Benny let him go.

— 2-

“Welcome back to the world,” said Phoenix Riley.

Benny cranked open one eyelid and saw her perched on a chair a few feet away. “Nix,” he said, his voice as weak as a whisper. He lay on a cot surrounded by a screen of sheets hung from metal poles.

“Benny!” Nix flew to him, but her hands were so gentle and tentative. She covered his face with a hundred quick kisses.

He tried to raise his head, to kiss her, but that was impossible. His head hurt too much, and his muscles felt like limp spaghetti. Nix looked worn thin, her face pale, her red hair hanging limp.

“How… bad is it…?” he asked, not really wanting to know.

“You… almost slipped away from us,” she said, and her smile was a little too bright, her laugh a bit too forced. “God… this was the longest week of my life!”

“Week?”

“Benny, we’ve been here for eight days.”

He gaped at her.

“I thought I lost you, Benny,” she said, and she held his hand with all her strength. She bent and kissed his knuckles.

“Where are we?” he asked “This place… is this Sanctuary?”

She nodded, sniffed, and dabbed at her eyes, but she kept her smile bolted in place.

“It’s on an old military base,” she said as she helped him sit up. She was very careful with him, as if he were made of glass. “It’s run by the way-station monks. There are a couple hundred of them here.”

All Benny could see was the curtain. “Where is everybody?”

“They’re here,” she said, but her eyes darted away for a moment. “We’re all here.”

“I want to see Lilah and Chong.”

Nix hesitated. “Okay,” she said eventually. “Let me get your robe and mask.”

“Mask?”

“Everyone has to wear them in the houses. It’s confusing… it’s easier if you see it.”

Nix helped him stand and put on a robe made of heavy wool. Then she took a blue cotton mask and tied it around his mouth and nose. She put one on too.

“Sanctuary isn’t exactly what we thought it was,” she said, and her voice sounded ready to crack.

Nix slowly pushed back the curtains, and Benny stared wide-eyed.

They were in a vast room, hundreds of feet long, with a massive arched ceiling and huge windows at either end.

“It used to be an airplane hangar,” she explained. “There are eight like this one. And more on the other side of the compound.”

Benny hardly heard her. He stared numbly at the rows of cots that stretched from one end of the hangar to the other. Every bed was filled. Some of the beds were screened off, as his had been. Most were not, and most of the figures lay as still as death. Farther down the row, separated by a line of sawhorse barricades, was a larger screened-off area. Benny heard continuous coughs coming from there. Everywhere there were soft cries, the sound of weeping, moans of pain. Way-station monks in their simple tunics moved from bed to bed, washing the patients, hand-feeding them, talking to them. A few sat reading to people who seemed to stare up at the nothingness above their beds.

“Oh my God.”

“There are a thousand people in each hangar. All the hangars are full.”

Benny was appalled. “What is this place? Nix, this isn’t right. I thought there was a lab where they were studying the plague, trying to cure it.”

“That’s the other Sanctuary,” said Nix. “The labs are on the other side of the compound. I’ll show you.”

They walked slowly between the rows. Benny’s balance was bad and his legs weak, but Nix supported him and they walked with great care. Some of the patients looked at them, their eyes glazed with pain or bleak with despair.

“Who are these people?”

“Refugees from all over. The way-station monks bring a lot of them here. Some find their own way. Riot brings some.”

“Did the reapers do all this?”

Nix shook her head. “Benny, after First Night, there were no real hospitals left. No factories to mass-produce drugs. No local doctors to prescribe them. Everything broke down. Diseases just went wild. Everything, even simple infections, went crazy. It’s like this everywhere. People are dying everywhere faster than the zoms can kill them. The monks can’t help everyone. They aren’t real doctors… they’re just monks. They have a few places like this.”

“Hospitals?”

She gave another sad shake of her head. They paused to look at an old man who lay curled into a fetal position, his skin mottled with dark blisters.

“It’s a hospice, Benny. This hangar is a healing place, but not the others. The monks call those transition houses. They bring people here to take care of them while they’re dying.”

“Where are the doctors and nurses?”

“There are no doctors on this side of the compound. The doctors and the scientists are all in a different hangar. In what they call a clean facility. Almost no one’s allowed in except for the research field teams. And a few special patients.” She paused. “The thing is… once a patient goes into the clean facility, they’re not allowed out again.”

“Why not?”

“Because most of them die, and the ones that don’t are being studied. They’re trying to cure the Reaper Plague… what we’ve always called the zombie plague. Not just that, though… they’re trying to cure all these diseases. They’ve even come up with some treatments, and when they do, they give them to the monks. Not everyone who comes here dies.”

“But most do?”

She nodded sadly. “By the time most people come here, they’re already so sick. All the monks can do is make them comfortable.”

“It’s — it’s—” Benny had no word bad enough to hang on it.

“They’re doing what they can.”

They walked toward the exit doors. One or two of the patients nodded to him and he nodded back, though he wasn’t sure what that silent communication signified. Maybe, We’re not dead yet.

It was horrible.

“I’m remembering things in bits and pieces. I remember a big dog and some strange guy. Joe, maybe? I have this weird memory about a Zombie Card…. ”

“That’s him.” Nix told him about Lilah finding Joe, and about Joe being the head of a team of wilderness scouts called the rangers. “He used to be a bounty hunter up around our way, which is how he knew Tom and why he’s on a Zombie Card, but he left a long time ago and went south. Benny… there’s a kind of government. It’s small, but it’s there. They call it—”

“—the American Nation. We saw it on the plane.”

“It’s real,” she said. “They only have about a hundred thousand people so far, mostly in North Carolina, and they’ve been looking for more. People are trying to put it back together.”

Benny thought about his dream, about what Tom had said.

“I hope not,” he said. “They need to make something else, something new. Something better.”

Nix’s green eyes glittered as she studied him; then she nodded.

They walked on until they reached the end of the big hangar. The sadness of it all was a crushing weight on Benny. His heart hurt worse than his head, and he wanted to go back to his cot, pull the blankets over his head, and let all this go away. That was impossible, though, and he knew it.

Nix opened the door, and they stepped out into the sunlight.

Benny blinked and held a hand up to shade his eyes. As he adjusted to the glare, he saw that they stood outside the first in a row of massive hangars. Monks walked slowly in and out of the buildings. The grounds outside were planted with herbs, and there were rock gardens with benches for meditation. It looked peaceful out here, but the hangars held horrors inside.

Nix pointed at the other buildings, each of which had a large number painted above the door. “Building One is for patients they think will recover. Mostly injuries, animal bites, or people wounded by reaper attacks.”

“What about the other buildings?”

Nix pulled off her mask. “We’re not allowed to go in there. That’s where they keep the people with communicable diseases. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, cholera, bubonic plague. The monks who work in there never come outside.”

“What happens to them?”

Nix did not answer. She didn’t have to. Instead she said, “There are always new monks going in.”

“That’s horrible!”

She sniffed back tears. “But the monks keep volunteering. I spoke to one, a woman about my mom’s age. She said that it didn’t matter if she got sick. When it was her time to go into one of the other buildings, then at least in her last days, caring for people, she would know that her life mattered.”

Benny stared at her. “That’s what it’s come to? Is that all there is out here? Just this?”

“No,” she said, and he saw a steadiness in her eyes that he had not seen for a long time. More like the old Nix. More like the one he fell in love with. And yet there was sadness, too. Something deep and terrible. She took his hand and led him around the corner of the hangar.

Nix pointed to a spot beyond the herb garden. There was a small playground with a swing set, some monkey bars, a slide, and a big sandbox. A dozen children laughed and played and ran, their faces as bright as the sun, their laughter cleaner than anything in the world.

A little blond girl was with them, playing a game of tag in and around the legs of the monkey bars as three female monks watched with patient smiles. She wore a white tunic, and there were flowers in her hair.

“Eve,” said Benny.

He made to call out to her, but Nix shook her head. “Not yet. This is only the second day that she’s been playing.”

“She looks happy,” he said.

“More each day.”

Benny nodded. Even though he knew that there would be a long uphill road for Eve, seeing her smile put a smile on his lips. He saw another figure sitting cross-legged on the ground in the shade of a palm tree that overhung the playground.

“Is that Riot?” he asked.

“Yes. She won’t let Eve out of her sight.”

“You still think she’s a freak?”

Nix shook her head. “She’s been through a lot.” She told Benny about Riot’s past, about her being a reaper and about how she’d rebelled against that lifestyle and spent the years since helping people.

“Her mom is Mother Rose?” gasped Benny.

“Was,” corrected Nix. “Mother Rose died that day we found the wrecked plane. Riot’s been dealing with that, and I think it hit her harder than she expected.”

“How could it not?” asked Benny. “She was still her mother.”

Nix nodded. “I guess… she’s one of us. And she did everything she could to help Eve’s family. She knows now that we were only trying to help Eve too.”

“Well,” Benny said, “Eve’s still here. We accomplished something. We saved a kid. That’s got to count for something, even in this world.”

Shadows moved in Nix’s eyes. Not the dangerous ones that had been there so often since her mother was killed; but shadows nonetheless. Was it because their trip had failed so badly in almost every way, or because this harsh world out here in no way matched Nix’s expectations? Benny was afraid to ask for fear of breaking what resolve she had managed to put in place.

Nix sniffed back some more tears and said, “Listen, Benny, there are some things I have to tell you. Good and bad things, okay?”

“I don’t know how much more I want to hear,” he said, pitching it as a joke and watching it fall flat.

Nix said, “Do you remember seeing the jet?”

Benny brightened. “I — think so. Was it real?”

“It’s real, and it’s here. It’s in one of the hangars on the other side of the compound. But before I show you, I have to warn you about something. I need you to understand how this place works.”

“You’re scaring me here, Nix.”

“I don’t mean to.” She took a ragged breath. “Benny, people have been coming here for years. A lot of them. Long before the American Nation set up the lab. Before they had any kind of treatments for anything. People came here to die in peace, Benny. They came here because this place is run by way-station monks. Do you understand what that means?”

“Yes,” Benny said, though his voice was a hoarse croak. “Way-station monks think the zoms are the meek who are supposed to inherit the earth.”

“Have inherited the earth, Benny. Have.”

He studied her, but her eyes were hard. She seemed to be waiting for him to ask, so he asked. A terrible thought crept into his mind.

“Nix,” he asked, “what happened to all those people?”

Nix nodded and took him gently by the hand and guided him around the corner of the hangar.

Benny stopped dead in his tracks. Just beyond the hangar was a trench that was twenty feet wide and twenty feet deep. Beyond that was a set of runways for a military airport. Benny had seen pictures of places like this. The flat ground stretched all the way to the range of red rocks in one direction and into a heat haze on the far horizon. A second set of hangars — four in all — stood a thousand yards beyond the trench, and in front of those was a six-story concrete building. Surrounding these buildings was a ten-foot-high cinder-block wall. On the far side of the landing field, well beyond the runways, there was a line of slender towers, like lampposts but with bell-shaped devices mounted atop each one.

Outside the cinder-block wall, filling the desert and stretching off into the shimmering horizon, were zoms. Thousands upon thousands of them. There were more lining the edge of the trench, and when Benny looked toward the back of the building, he saw many more.

Nix said, “Joe says that there are probably two or three hundred thousand of them now. When people die, they are taken across the trench and allowed to roam free. The monks pray for them several times a day.”

“But the jet? The lab?”

Nix reached into the V of her blouse and pulled out a silver whistle on a chain. “Recognize this? It’s a reaper’s dog whistle. It’s ultrasonic. The zoms follow it every time.” She pointed. “See those towers? When the jet is ready to take off or land, they blast an ultrasonic call through those. The zoms follow the call to the towers, and it clears the runway. I’ve seen it work twice now. It’s amazing.”

“Dog whistles,” said Benny. “It’s warrior smart. Tom would approve.”

Nix nodded.

“What goes on over there?” asked Benny, pointing to the concrete buildings.

Nix started to answer, but the brave front she had been putting up collapsed, and she crumpled into grief. She put her face in her hands, and her body shook with sobs.

“Hey… hey… Nix — what’s wrong?”

Nix turned and wrapped her arms around him, sobbing as hard now as she had back on the crashed plane. But through her sobs she forced herself to speak.

“They’re working on the cure over there, Benny. They really are. With the stuff we found, the stuff on the plane, they think that maybe they really will cure it. They think that they’ll be able to stop the plague… to stop the infection… ”

“That’s great, Nix,” Benny said, stroking her back.

But she shook her head and kept shaking it.

“Nix? What is it… what’s wrong?”

And then he understood.

Then he remembered.

The memory was a knife in his heart.

“Nix,” he whispered, and his voice broke on that single word. “Nix… where’s Chong?”

She clung to him. “They’re trying, Benny. They’re trying everything. But… he’s so sick. He’s already so… ”

Nix couldn’t say another word.

Benny wouldn’t have been able to hear her anyway.

They clung to each other, and together they dropped brokenly to their knees.

— 3-

It would be hell.

Lilah knew that.

Hell was something the Lost Girl knew. She had lived it all her life.

She was a toddler on First Night, but she remembered the panic and flight. The endless screams. The blood and the dying.

She saw her pregnant mother die as Lilah’s sister, Annie, came screaming into the world. She remembered the other refugees, filled with terror and confusion, at first recoil from her mother as she came back from that place where all souls go and only the soulless return from. She remembered what they did — what they had to do. Lilah had screamed herself raw. Those screams had smashed down the doorway into hell.

She remembered Charlie Pink-eye and the Hammer brutalizing George and then laying rough hands on her and Annie. Dragging them to Gameland.

To the zombie pits.

She remembered coming back to Gameland to rescue Annie, but Annie was not there. A thing was, wearing the disguise of beautiful little Annie.

Lilah remembered what she had been forced to do.

And she remembered every moment of every day of every month of the lonely years that followed.

Hell?

Lilah knew hell.

It had nothing to teach her, no new tricks it could play on her.

She sat on the edge of Chong’s bed and watched the strange machines beep and ping. But each beep was farther apart, each ping closer to a whisper.

Lilah held Chong’s icy hand in hers. His eyes stared up at the ceiling, but they were milky, the irises transformed into a polluted mix of brown and green and black. The pupils were pinpricks, the whites veined with black lines as thin as sewing thread.

Bags of chemicals and medicines hung pendulously from the metal bed frame, dripping their mysteries into Chong’s veins. His arm was covered with the black marks from needles. So many needles.

Lilah had refused to wear a hazmat suit. The doctors had warned her that if she didn’t put one on, she could never leave this building. Even they couldn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t carry a disease out with her that would do what the Reaper Plague and all the other plagues had failed to do. Wipe everyone and everything out. The people inside the labs lived in isolation, never touching flesh to flesh, not even a handshake. They wore their hazmat suits all day until they sealed themselves into their private bedroom cells.

Lilah didn’t care about any of that.

If she got sick and died, so what?

She would not be alone in death’s kingdom. She knew that.

She listened to the beeps and willed Chong to fight.

To fight.

Fight.

“You damn well fight, you stupid town boy,” she growled.

But with every minute those beeps, those electronic signs of life, grew fainter and fainter.

Until all she could hear was a long, continuous scream from the heart monitor.

It was almost the loudest sound in the world.

Only her own, endless keening cry of grief was louder.

Hell, it seemed, had one last trick to play.

— 4-

Benny and Nix stood by the edge of the trench as the sun fell behind the world and the stars ignited overhead. The trench was twenty feet across. It might as well have been ten miles. Ten thousand miles.

They stared at the tall building with its electric lights glowing against the shadows on the walls.

Stared at one window, high and to the left.

An hour ago they had seen Lilah’s silhouette there.

There had been no sign of her since.

They didn’t even turn when Joe’s quad rumbled to a stop. They heard him switch it off, heard Grimm’s soft whuff and the crunch of Joe’s shoes on the gravel, but they never took their eyes from that lighted window.

“Listen,” said Joe softly, “I just brought back the last of the stuff from the plane. The scientists are going over it now. It was exactly what they needed. It… ” His voice trailed off.

“Go away,” said Benny. His voice was crushed flat and empty.

Joe walked around and stood in front of them, forcing them to see him, to react to him. He squatted down, resting his elbows on his knees. Grimm stood beside him, his eyes dark and liquid.

“I want you two to listen to me,” Joe said. “Straight talk here, okay? I know you’re hurting. I know why you left Mountainside. I understand why you’ve been searching for the jet. I know what it means to you. A better place than your little town. A chance at a real future. I get that. I’d have done the same. Tom must have thought so too, or he’d have never left and never taken you with him.”

“You don’t know anything,” said Nix.

“No? Well, I know this much,” said Joe. “You left a place that was dying on its feet. Mountainside and the rest of the Nine Towns are just going through the motions of being alive. Everybody knows that. You knew it and you got the hell out. You wanted to find a place to start something new and fresh.”

Benny glanced at him. It was almost the same thing Tom had said.

“You have,” said Joe.

“No,” said Nix.

Somewhere far away a coyote whined at the rising moon.

“You found the stuff in the jet,” said Joe. “You kids might have actually helped saved the world.”

“It’s not worth it,” Benny said. “It cost too much.”

Joe sighed and stood up. He looked up at the endless stars.

“It’s been a long night,” he said softly, “and there are still a lot of hours of darkness left. But… ”

He started to turn away, and Benny said, “But what?”

Joe gave him a small, sad smile. “No matter how long the night is, the sun always comes up.”

He nodded to them, clicked his tongue for Grimm, and walked slowly away. He climbed onto his quad and started the engine.

They watched him drive away.

After a while Nix turned to Benny. “Is he right?” she asked.

Benny shook his head. “I don’t know.”

He wrapped his arm around her, and they looked up at the lighted window.

The stars burned their way across the sackcloth that covered the sky.

— 5-

Saint John stood on a cliff that looked down on a black road. Brother Peter stood beside him, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed in thought. It was a beautiful night, with a billion stars and a fingernail moon. Crickets chirped in the grass, and owls hunted in the air.

The saint enjoyed being out here in the wild. The desert had reclaimed much of the road over the years, but it was there, and it ran straight and true to the line of mountains that formed the border of Nevada and California.

“Nine towns,” murmured Saint John. “And a place called Mountainside.”

“Praise be to the darkness,” said Brother Peter.

Saint John raised his hand, held it high in the moonlight for a long moment, and pointed a slender finger toward the road. Toward the northwest.

The desert behind him was like a sea of roiling black. The reapers came first, flowing out of the dark, and as they reached Brother Peter they formed into orderly lines, seven across. Then they followed Brother Peter down the road. Some of them prayed, some of them sang. It took twenty minutes for all the reapers to file past where the saint stood.

Thousands upon thousands of reapers.

Those who had thought themselves lost when the world ended, who now knew that all roads led through pain and into the healing darkness. Those who had lost faith in this world of disease and death and endless struggle, who now thrived with a purpose — God’s purpose. Many of them had once fought against the reapers and then, in their defeat, beheld the truth and took up their weapons again in the service of Thanatos, all praise his darkness.

The lost who had been found.

The blind who now saw.

The last army of the world, marching to fight the last war. The only war that ever mattered. The war to save mankind from its own sinful ways.

Saint John lingered a moment after the last of them was on the road. He closed his eyes and lifted a silver dog whistle to his lips, kissed it, and then blew into it, long and hard.

Behind him a second wave — ten times larger than the mass of reapers — moved forward. If the reapers were a sea, then this was an ocean, moving in a tidal surge under the watching moon. All the crickets were shocked to silence by the moan that rose from tens of thousands of dead throats.

Saint John smiled.

Nine towns waiting.

All those godless souls waiting, aching to be shown the way.

His reapers would open red mouths in the flesh of every man, woman, and child.

And then the gray people would consume them all, flesh and bone.