Flesh and Bone (Benny Imura 3)

Reapers.

His mouth went totally dry.

The big man stood listening to the forest, much as Chong had done. His face was harsh and grim, but then a small smile formed on his thin-lipped mouth.

“No sense hiding,” said the reaper as he brought the scythe up and made a slow, deliberate cut through the afternoon air. “Hiding will only make it hurt more.”

28

SHE DRIFTED IN DARKNESS.

Lost.

The Lost Girl.

That was what people called her.

Lost.

For years the travelers in the Ruin believed that she was a myth. Or a ghost.

In the towns, she was a campfire tale. Something used to frighten children.

There were a dozen versions of the Lost Girl story, and in each one of them she died. Sometimes the zoms got her. Sometimes it was crazed loners. Sometimes it was her own bleak despair.

The Lost Girl died, though, in every version of the legend.

When Benny, Nix, and Tom brought her to Mountainside and she learned about those stories, she laughed. They were stupid stories. Silly.

A teenage girl, living alone? With no one to protect her?

No, they all said. Couldn’t happen. She would die.

The Lost Girl. Dead according to everyone who spun a tale about her. It was impossible for a girl to survive out in the Ruin alone. Everyone knew that. There were too many dangers. Zoms and wild animals and bounty hunters. There were crazed loners and cannibals and a thousand different kinds of disease.

Stupid stories, she told herself. Except at night, when she thought about them in the private darkness of her bedroom, in the one place where she was safe enough to be weak. That was when she cried. That was when she believed that she was living on borrowed time—alive only because death had considered her too insignificant to pause long enough to collect.

Except that death collected everyone. Death is like that. Relentlessly efficient.

Borrowed time is no place to live.

Lilah had often feared that they were right.

Now she was sure they were.

That was the only thought that would fit into her head as she lay suspended in darkness.

She remembered the boar. Feral, massive. Four hundred pounds at least.

Both dead and deadly.

But animals can’t become zoms. It doesn’t work like that.

Unless, somehow, it does.

The Lost Girl should not be alive.

Unless, somehow, she was.