Flesh & Bone

A living child.

And all around her were the ravenous living dead.

Benny stared at the child in absolute horror.

A hundred questions tried to squeeze through a crowded doorway in Benny’s dazed brain. Where had she come from? Why was she here?

The little girl could not see Benny down in the pit.

“Get away from here!” he yelled as loud as he could, and the little girl’s scream froze as she twisted to look down with wild eyes. “Get away from the edge!”

“Help!” she screeched. “Please… don’t let the gray people get me!”

She backed away from the zombies, who closed around her, and Benny screamed out a warning a half second before her retreating foot came down on empty air. With a shriek so loud that Benny was sure every zom for miles could hear it, the girl pitched into the pit. Her tiny hands darted out and caught the crooked roots under the lip of the edge and she hung there, legs kicking, her scream unrelenting. The zoms in the pit moaned and reached for her.

The zombies choked the narrow ravine, and Benny knew that if he held his ground, their sheer numbers would crowd him to the point where he could no longer swing the katana. Attack was the only option, and that meant carving a pathway through them, impossible as that seemed. It was reckless and crazy, but it was the only choice left to him.

Suddenly Benny was moving.

The katana snapped up and flashed outward, and the head of one zom fell to the dirt. Benny spun away from the corpse and cut once, twice, again and again, lopping off dry arms and heads. He ducked and chopped, taking off legs and sending zoms crashing to the ground. If his weary arms ached, he ignored them completely. Rage and urgency filled him.

The undead fell before him, but they did not fall back. Retreat was an impossible concept. They crowded forward on both sides, their attention shifting back and forth between the prey above and the prey at hand.

“Mommmeeeeeee!” shrilled the girl. “The graaayyyy peeeepuuuull!”

He slashed back and forth to clear some room and then attacked the nearest zom with a jumping front kick to the chest that sent it staggering backward into two others. The three of them went down. Benny ran straight at them, running over their bodies, his feet wobbling uncertainly as he stepped on thighs and stomachs and chests. He pivoted and slashed again as a massive zom in the burned rags of a soldier’s uniform came lumbering at him. Benny crouched and aimed a powerful cut across its legs. It was a move he had seen Tom do several times, a fierce horizontal sweep that literally cut the legs out from under an attacker. But when Benny tried it, he aimed too high, and his blade struck the heavy thighbone and stuck fast!

The jolt tore the handle out of his hands and sent darts of pain shooting up his arms.

Even with the sword blade notched into his femur, the big zom came relentlessly on.

Above Benny, the little girl screamed. Her fingers were slipping through the roots. Cold hands reached down from the edge and up from the pit.

“No!” Benny drove his shoulder into the soldier zom’s stomach and ran him backward into the mass of walking corpses. As the creature fell off balance, Benny grabbed the handle of the katana and tried to pull it free, but the blade would not move.

“Help!” The scream had an even sharper note of panic, and Benny looked up to see the little girl’s fingers slither through the last of the roots. With a piercing howl, the child fell.

“Helllllp!”

Once more Benny was moving before he realized it, slamming into the zoms with crossed forearms and then throwing himself under the tiny body, turning, reaching — praying.

She was so small, no more than forty pounds, but she had twenty feet to fall, and the impact slammed into Benny’s chest like a thunderbolt, crushing him to the ground and driving the air painfully from his lungs. He went limp with her atop him, and instantly she began kicking and punching at him to try and escape.

“Stop it… c’mon, ow! OW! Stop!” cried Benny in a hoarse bellow. “Stop it — I’m not one of them!”

Panic filled the girl’s eyes, but at the sound of his voice she froze and stared at him with the silent intensity of a terrified rabbit.

“I’m not one of them,” Benny croaked again. His chest felt smashed, and pain darted through his lungs and back.

The girl looked at him with the biggest, bluest eyes in the world, eyes that were filled with tears and a flicker of uncertain hope. She opened her mouth — and screamed again.

But not at him.

Zoms were closing in on all sides.

With a cry of horror, he rolled onto his side, huddled his body over the girl’s, and kicked out at the legs of the closest zombie. Bone cracked, but the zom did not go down, and Benny saw that it was one of the burly farmers. The thing had been rawboned and sturdy in life, and much of that strength lingered in death.

Benny kicked again, knocking the lead zom backward. He scrambled to his feet and pulled the girl up, shoving her toward a bare patch of wall, away from the grasping hands of the army of the dead. Behind them, the ravine ran on for forty yards and vanished into the shadows around a bend. In front of them were dozens of zoms; and far back in the crowd was the soldier with Tom’s katana buried in its thighbone. There was no way on earth Benny could retrieve it.

“They’re going to eat us!” wailed the girl. “The gray people are going to eat us!”

Yes, they are, Benny thought.

“No they’re not!” he growled aloud.

He backed away, using his body to push the girl deeper into the ravine. “Go,” he whispered urgently. “Run!”

She hesitated, lost and confused, the fear so overwhelming that instead of running, she closed her eyes and began to cry.

The moans of the dead filled the air.

Benny had no choice. He turned away from Tom’s sword and the lost possibilities of survival it promised, then snatched up the little girl, pressed her to his chest, and ran.

FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

The first time I was out in the Rot and Ruin, after I escaped from Charlie Pink-eye and was hiding with Benny, we saw something impossible. A jet. One of the big flying machines from the old world, from before First Night.

It was in the sky, flying west, almost in the direction of home. Then it turned and flew back toward the east.

I know that if I’d been alone when I saw it, I wouldn’t have believed it. And no one would believe me if I told them. But Benny saw it too. And Tom.

We knew we’d have to go find it. I mean, how could we not?

That’s why Tom started the Warrior Smart program. To get us ready for whatever we’d find. So far it’s saved our lives more times than I can count.

Now… finding the jet is the only thing that matters.

7

As he ran, Benny could feel the little girl’s fluttering heart beating against his chest. It called up an old