Flesh and Bone (Benny Imura 3)

“No,” he said. “They’re not hurting anyone.”

Benny felt her come to stand beside him.

“I’m going to climb up into the plane,” she said.

Benny cleared his throat. “It’s not safe.”

“Safe?” Nix echoed faintly. “When are we ever going to be safe?”

“I—”

“I’m serious, Benny. Unless we find where this plane came from, all we’re ever going to do is keep running for our lives. Is that what you want? Is that why you came out here?”

He looked up at the cloudless blue sky and did not look at her. “Nix, you know exactly why I came out here.”

“Look, Benny . . . ,” she said in the softest voice he’d heard her use in weeks. “I know things have been bad.”

He dared not turn. This was hardly the first time she’d tuned into what he was thinking, or perhaps what he was feeling. Nix was always empathic. Benny said nothing.

“Give me time,” she said.

She did not wait for him to answer. She turned away and walked down the slope to the piece of plastic sheeting that hung from the open hatch. Benny turned his head ever so slightly and watched as she began to climb.

48

LILAH DID NOT SCREAM A WAR CRY AS SHE JUMPED DOWN TO FACE THE boars. She did not need to hype herself up for the fight; every nerve in her body was already blazing with the anticipation of battle and pain.

The pain in her side was a searing white-hot inferno, but she swallowed it, using the pain as fuel, knowing it would shotgun adrenaline into her system. It would make her faster, more aggressive, more vicious. It would keep the fear under control. And there was a lot of fear. She never pretended to be fearless, not to others and never to herself.

She did not fear her own death. Not really.

She feared not living, and to her that wasn’t the same thing.

Death ended thought, ended knowing.

Not living meant that she would never see Chong’s face again. She would never see the exasperation he tried so hard to hide whenever she did or said something that wasn’t “acceptable” to the people in town. She would never hear his soft voice as he recited poetry. Dickinson, Rossetti, Keats. She would never feel the warmth of his hand in hers. Chong’s hands were always warm, even when it was snowing outside.

She would never kiss him again.

She would never get to say the words that she ached to say.

So she said them now, just in case. Just to have them out there, to put them on the wind. To make them real.

“Chong,” she murmured quietly, “I love you.”

It was unlikely that he would ever get to hear her say those words. The thought of these monsters taking all that away from her made Lilah mad.

Very mad.

Killing mad.

With a feral snarl that would probably have scared the life out of Chong, Lilah dropped from the branch.

She fell with all the silence and speed of gravity. Her snow-white hair whipped away from her face as she plummeted.

She struck the closest boar feetfirst with a dead-weight impact that staggered the beast even though it was nearly five times her weight and mass. The heels of her shoes struck it on the right shoulder, and the impact sent shock waves through her shins and through the gash in her side. However, Lilah bent her knees as she struck, letting the big muscles of her thighs absorb the shock rather than her fragile knee joints.

The impact knocked the boar sideways into a second animal, and Lilah fell backward away from the pack. Despite the pain, she hit the ground the right way, tucked, rolled, and came up onto the balls of her feet.