“Not yet,” said Rachael. She touched the fighting sticks that were thrust through Rags’s belt. “I’m not sure what you’re out here looking for . . . but maybe it’s this.”
Rags put her face in her hands and wept.
Ghoulie howled.
Rachael placed her hand on Rags’s shoulder.
Down the hill there was bright firelight and the sound of laughter. Of people.
Of life.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
ON NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL
(BEFORE FIRE & ASH)
My mom believed in a lot of stuff. Ghosts and spirits. God, too. And angels.
I’m not sure what I believe in. I used to go along with her, with what she believed in. That’s changed now. She’s dead and I’m alive, and now I have to believe what I believe in.
But I don’t know what that is.
Out here in the Ruin, especially late at night, when it’s dark but the world isn’t quiet because the night’s never really quiet, sometimes I think I believe.
I keep thinking I see Mom’s ghost. Standing just outside the light from our campfire. Not trying to scare us or anything. Just there.
There have been so many times when I know I should have been killed. In the pits at Gameland. Fighting zoms. Fighting Preacher Jack and his sons.
I didn’t die, though.
Is Mom’s ghost protecting me?
Or am I imagining it?
How will I ever know?
Tooth & Nail
(Between the events of Flesh & Bone and Fire & Ash)
1
Sanctuary
Area 51
Benny Imura stood at the edge of a concrete trench that was all that separated him from the reaching hands and hungry mouths of half a million zoms.
Half a million.
The dead stood there, pale and silent, most of them as unmoving as statues. They looked like tombstones to Benny, their moldering flesh marking the only grave the wandering dead would ever know.
None of the creatures could reach him; the trench was too wide. Those that tried fell down to the concrete floor and could never hope to climb up the sheer sides. Benny was safe.
Safe.
Such a weak and stupid word.