Bits & Pieces Read online

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  FIRST NIGHT

  From Nix’s Journal: On First Night

  Sunset Hollow

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  From Nix’s Journal: On Tom Imura

  Jack and Jill

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  From Nix’s Journal: On Dying

  The Valley of the Shadow

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  From Nix’s Journal: On Love

  A Christmas Feast

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  From Nix’s Journal: On Surviving

  THE DYING YEARS

  First Night Memories

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  From Nix’s Journal: On Being a Hero

  Overdue Books

  From Nix’s Journal: On Knowledge

  Dead & Gone

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  From Nix’s Journal: On Rebellion

  Rags & Bones

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  From Nix’s Journal: On Discovering Your Own Path

  ADRIFT IN THE ROT AND RUIN

  In the Land of the Dead

  The Quick and the Dead

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  From Nix’s Journal: On Being Who We Are

  Hero Town

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  From Nix’s Journal: On Natural and Supernatural

  Tooth & Nail

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  From Nix’s Journal: On Hope

  BONUS MATERIAL

  Rot & Ruin Issue #1: Warrior Smart

  Page 1

  Page 2

  Page 3

  Page 4

  Page 5

  Page 6

  Page 7

  Page 8

  Page 9

  Page 10

  Page 11

  Page 12

  Page 13

  Page 14

  Page 15

  Pages 16–17

  Page 18

  Page 19

  Page 20

  About Jonathan Maberry

  This is for all of the kids and teens who find the courage to do what is right, to accept a code of ethics, and to always be warrior smart.

  And, as always, for Sara Jo.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Lisa Mandina; librarian Erin Daly and the girls at the Chicopee Library Teen Book Club—Samantha Desrochers, Michelle Rondeau, Amanda Noonan, Laura Hebert, Tiffany Moczydlowski, and Heather Moczydlowski; to Rachael Lavin; to Rachel Tafoya and the students of my Experimental Writing for Teens programs; Michelle Lane; Walker Shefchek; Steven Ard of Kamiakin High School; and Keaton Russell.

  PART ONE

  FIRST NIGHT

  This Is How the World Ends.

  FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

  ON FIRST NIGHT

  (PRIOR TO ROT & RUIN)

  My name is Phoenix Riley. My friends call me Nix.

  I was born right around the time the world died. A plague turned everyone into zombies. Actual living dead.

  No one knows where it started. Or how. Or why.

  It spread fast, though. By the time people realized that there was a problem, the problem was biting them. Then everything went crazy. There was a day the survivors call First Night. That was the point at which no one could ignore the problem. No one could say that it wasn’t really happening, or even if it was, it wasn’t happening here. It was happening everywhere.

  The year I was born, the United States Census Bureau estimated that there were 6,922,000,000 people alive on planet Earth. My mom says that probably a billion people died on First Night. And over the next few days and weeks, nearly everybody died. They used to have something called the “Internet.” Before that went down, the estimates of the global death toll were at three billion and climbing. After that there were no more news reports. There was no one left to report it. And after the power grids failed, there was no way to report it.

  The world went dark and it went silent.

  Except for the sound the dead make. Moans. Like they’re hungry.

  And they are hungry. All the time.

  They want to eat people.

  Animals, too. They’ll eat anything alive. That’s why the world’s so empty. The dead rose and they ate everyone.

  Well, not everyone, I suppose. My teachers say that the dead killed enough people for everything to fall apart. My history teacher said the outbreak destroyed what he called “the infrastructure.” Which is police and government and hospitals and like that. My health class teacher says it was disease, malnutrition, and bad water that killed most of the others.

  Problem is, no matter how someone dies, they come back to life as a zombie.

  Everyone.

  Which meant that the survivors kept having to run to find a safe place to hide. And to find food and stuff. To find medicine.

  Mom ran. She took me with her.

  I used to have a dad, and brothers. I never knew them. I was too little, and when Mom ran . . . she was running from them. Or from what they had become.

  Mom doesn’t talk about that. I don’t think she can.

  I grew up in Mountainside. It isn’t a real town, or at least it didn’t use to be. Before First Night it was a reservoir built against a mountain wall in Mariposa County in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of central California. Not too far from Yosemite National Park. A bunch of people who were on the run found it. The reservoir had a fence, and that kept the people alive. Then more and more people found it, and when the big panic started to settle down, the people sent out teams to raid local houses and towns and stores for building materials, food, beds, clothes, and all sorts of stuff. They found a construction supply company a few miles from here, and they brought back miles of chain-link fence
. Pretty soon they had a kind of town.

  That was fourteen years ago.

  Since then people have built eight other towns along the Sierra Nevadas. At the New Year’s census, the total population of the nine towns here in central California is 28,261. Mom’s friend Tom Imura says that there are maybe five hundred to a thousand people living outside the towns. Out in the Rot and Ruin. Out where the zoms are. Loners, scavengers who raid towns for supplies, bounty hunters, and a bunch of crazy monks who live in old gas stations and who think the zoms are the meek who were supposed to inherit the earth. Add them to the people in the towns, and there are still fewer than thirty thousand people left.

  Thirty thousand of us and nearly seven billion zoms.

  I’ve never been outside the fence line. Neither have most of the people in town. People here hardly even talk about what’s out there. They talk about the other towns as if they’re in different countries. We get news from them, and once in a rare while a traveler goes from one town to another. But everything else is the Rot and Ruin.

  My mom wants me to live here. To “be content” because I’m safe and alive.

  Behind the fences.

  In a cage.

  Sometimes I think the fence isn’t just for keeping the zoms out. I think it’s to keep us in. We built it and we locked ourselves in.

  I hate it.

  I can’t live in a cage.

  I won’t.

  But . . . I don’t know how to escape the cage when everything outside is the Ruin. Out there, everything wants to kill you. Everyone says that.

  Still . . . if I have to live my whole life in a cage, then I know I’ll go crazy.

  There has to be a way out.

  There has to be.

  Sunset Hollow

  Tom Imura’s Story

  (This story takes place on First Night,

  fourteen years before Rot & Ruin)

  1

  The kid kept crying.

  Crying.

  Crying.

  Blood all over him. Their blood. Not his.

  Not Benny’s.

  Theirs.

  He stood on the lawn and stared at the house.

  Watching as the fallen lamp inside the room threw goblin shadows on the curtains. Listening to the screams as they filled the night. Filled the room. Spilled out onto the lawn. Punched him in the face and belly and over the heart. Screams that sounded less and less like her. Like Mom.

  Less like her.

  More like Dad.

  Like whatever he was. Whatever this was.

  Tom Imura stood there, holding the kid. Benny was eighteen months. He could say a few words. “Mom.” “Dog.” “Foot.”

  Now all he could do was wail. One long, inarticulate wail that tore into Tom’s head. It hit him as hard as Mom’s screams.

  As hard. But differently.

  The front door was open, standing ajar. The back door was unlocked. He’d left through the window, though. The downstairs bedroom on the side of the house. Mom had pushed him out. She’d shoved Benny into his hands and pushed him out.

  Into the night.

  Into the sound of sirens, of screams, of weeping and praying people, of gunfire and helicopters.

  Out here on the lawn.

  While she stayed inside.

  He’d tried to fight her on it.

  He was bigger. Stronger. All those years of jujutsu and karate. She was a middle-aged housewife. He could have forced her out. Could have gone to face the horror that was beating on the bedroom door. The thing that wore Dad’s face but had such a hungry, bloody mouth.

  Tom could have pulled Mom out of there.

  But Mom had one kind of strength, one bit of power that neither black belts nor biceps could hope to fight. It was there on her arm, hidden in that last moment by her white sleeve.

  No.

  That was a lie he wanted to tell himself.

  Not white.

  The sleeve was red, and getting redder with every beat of her heart.

  That sleeve was her power, and he could not defeat it.

  That sleeve and what it hid.

  The mark. The wound.

  The bite.

  It amazed Tom that Dad’s teeth could fit that shape. That it was so perfect a match in an otherwise imperfect tumble of events. That it was possible at all.

  Benny struggled in his arms. Wailing for Mom.

  Tom clutched his little brother to his chest and bathed his face with tears. They stood like that until the last of the screams from inside had faded, faded, and . . .

  Even now Tom could not finish that sentence. There was no dictionary in his head that contained the words that would make sense of this.

  The screams faded.

  Not into silence.

  Into moans.

  Such hungry, hungry moans.

  He had lingered there because it seemed a true sin to leave Mom to this without even a witness. Without mourners.

  Mom and Dad.

  Inside the house now.

  Moaning. Both of them.

  Tom Imura staggered to the front door and nearly committed the sin of entry. But Benny was a squirming reminder of all the ways this would kill them both. Body and soul.

  Truly. Body and soul.

  So Tom reached out and pulled the door closed.

  He fumbled in his pocket for the key. He didn’t know why. The TV and the Internet said that they couldn’t think, that something as simple and ordinary as a doorknob could stop them. Locks weren’t necessary.

  He locked the door anyway.

  And put the key safely in his pocket. It jangled against his own.

  He backed away onto the lawn to watch the window again. The curtains moved. Shapes stirred on the other side, but the movements made the wrong kind of sense.

  The shapes, though.

  God, the shapes.

  Dad and Mom.

  Tom’s knees gave all at once, and he fell to the grass so hard that it shot pain into his groin and up his spine. He almost lost his grip on his brother. Almost. But didn’t.

  He bent his head, unable to watch those shapes. He closed his eyes and bared his teeth and uttered his own moan. A long, protracted, half-choked sound of loss. Of a hurt that no articulation could possibly express, because the descriptive terms belonged to no human dictionary. Only the lost understand it, and they don’t require further explanation. They get it because there is only one language spoken in the blighted place where they live.

  Tom actually understood in that moment why the poets called the feeling heartbreak. There was a fracturing, a splintering in his chest. He could feel it.

  Benny kicked him with little feet and banged on Tom’s face with tiny fists. It hurt, but Tom endured it. As long as it hurt, there was some proof they were both alive.

  Still alive.

  Still alive.

  2

  It was Benny Imura who saved his brother Tom.

  Little, eighteen-month-old, screaming Benny.

  First he nearly got them both killed, but then he saved them. The universe is perverse and strange like that.

  His brother, on his knees, lost in the deep well of the moment, did not hear the sounds behind him. Or if he did, his grief orchestrated them into the same discordant symphony.

  So no, he did not separate out the moans behind him from those inside the house. Or the echoes of them inside his head.

  That was the soundtrack of the world now.

  But Benny could tell the difference.

  He was a toddler. Everything was immediate; everything was new. He heard those moans, turned to look past his brother’s trembling shoulder, and he saw them.

  The shapes.

  Detaching themselves from the night shadows.

  He knew some of the faces. Recognized them as people who came and smiled at him. People who threw him up in the air or poked his tummy or tweaked his cheeks. People who made faces that made him laugh.

  Now, though.

  None of them were lau
ghing.

  The reaching hands did not seem to want to play or poke or tweak.

  Some of the hands were broken. There was blood where fingers should be. There were holes in each of these things. In chests and stomachs and faces.

  Their mouths weren’t smiling. They were full of teeth, and their teeth were red.

  Benny could not even form these basic thoughts, could not actually categorize the rightness and wrongness of what was happening. All he could do was feel it. Feel the wrongness. He heard the sounds of hunger. The moans. They were not happy sounds. He had been hungry so many times, he knew. It was why he cried sometimes. For a bottle. For something to eat.

  Benny knew only a dozen words.

  Most of them were names for food and toys.

  He stopped crying and tried to say one of those names.

  “Tuh . . . Tuh . . . Tuh . . .”

  That was all he could get. “Tom” was too difficult. Not always, just sometimes. It wouldn’t fit into his mouth now.

  “Tuh . . . Tuh . . . Tuh . . .”

  3

  It was a strange moment when Tom Imura realized that his baby brother was actually trying to say his name.

  Because saying it was also a warning.

  A warning was a thought that Tom wouldn’t have credited to a kid that young.

  Could toddlers even think like that?

  A part of Tom’s mind stepped out of the moment and looked at the phenomenon as if it were hanging on a wall in a museum. He studied it. Considered it. Posed in thoughtful art-house stances in front of it. All in a fragment of a second so small it could have been hammered in between two of the Tuh sounds.

  Tom.

  That’s what Benny was saying.

  No. That’s what Benny was screaming.

  Tom jerked upright.

  He turned.

  He saw what Benny had seen.

  Them.

  So many of them.

  Them.

  Coming out of the shadows. Reaching.

  Moaning.

  Hungry. So hungry.

  There was Mrs. Addison from across the street. She was nice but could be mean sometimes. Liked to tell the other ladies on the block how to grow roses, even though hers were only so-so.

  Mrs. Addison had no lower lip.

  Someone had torn it away. Or . . .

  Bitten it?

  Right behind her was John Chalker. Industrial chemist. He made solvents for a company that sold drain cleaner. He always brought the smell of his job home on his clothes.