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    Dead & Gone
    Dead & Gone
    Dead & Gone
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    Dead & Gone

    By Jonathan Maberry

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    About this ebook

    How did Riot escape from the Night Church? How did she survive the Rot & Ruin—and the horrors of her own past? There’s only one way to find out....

    Jonathan Maberry explores the origins of a fascinating new character in an exclusive e-short story set in the land of the Rot & Ruin.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
    Release dateAug 14, 2012
    ISBN9781442472761
    Dead & Gone
    Author

    Jonathan Maberry

    Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling and five-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author, anthology editor, comic book writer, executive producer, and writing teacher. He is the creator of V Wars (Netflix) and Rot & Ruin (Alcon Entertainment). His books have been sold to more than two dozen countries. To learn more about Jonathan, visit him online at jonathanmaberry.

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    • 5/5
      This is an exclusive e-short story set in the land of the Rot & Ruin, one of my favorite series! The world that Jonathan Maberry has created is fascinating, and I love his characters! I can't wait for the next book to come out!
    • 3/5
      These are the second and the third installment, and a novella of the Benny Imura series. 14 years have passed since Benny and his older brother Tom found refuge in Mountainside, a village which is protected by a chain link fence from the outside world. Outside of this fence awaits them nothing other than the zombs which roam the Earth since the apocalypse, driven by nothing more than their insatiable hunger for human flesh and blood. However, while his brother trains him beyond the fence, to become a zombie hunter as well, Benny learns pretty quickly that they aren’t the terrible monsters he always believed them to be. Benny didn't realize the whole truth about his brother’s work until he started to train with him. Tom gets hired by some residents of Mountainside to kill their loved ones with dignity, something Benny didn't know. Tom’s clients usually find it difficult to live with the notion that their loved ones have become vicious zombs, with no memory of their earthly life. Through his training with his brother, Tom and Benny unexpectedly welds them together even closer. Benny realizes quickly that some of the bounty hunters quite often have less humanity than the zombies themselves and could easily be the greater threat. Tom trains Benny and his friends to get “warrior smart” in order to survive this harsh world with their cruelties and difficulties. Together they encounter one adventure after the other in order to find a haven. I have only recently discovered my passion for zombie stories; although I often get extremely cross as they too often end in cliffhangers. Baaaaah! However, the reason why I quite like this series is that Jonathan Maberry managed to create an engaging and believable world which he describes and builds remarkably detailed in the first book Rot and Ruin. It’s not just about zombie hunts and killing, but about growing up in a world which is about to fall. The stories are about the right to live, the treatment of the dead and the living together in communities. What do you do if there aren’t any real laws to follow and you have to deal with people who act like they are God himself and think they can put their welfare over the welfare of all others? All in all, this is a good series which is fun to read as the focus is not just on moaning, drooling and bloodthirsty zombies but also on emotions, solidarity and on how to create a new future. Definitely a series I can recommend to any zombie fan.

    Book preview

    Dead & Gone - Jonathan Maberry

    1

    Sometimes survival is a feast. Sometimes it’s rainwater in a ditch and a bug.

    The girl knew both kinds, and all the kinds in between.

    Out here, you had to learn every kind of survival or you stopped learning. Stopped talking. Stopped breathing.

    The hunger, though—that never goes away.

    Not while you’re alive.

    Not after you’re dead.

    2

    The girl fled across the desert.

    She had bloodstains on her hands and on her clothes. She was certain that those stains were on her heart as well. On her soul.

    As she ran, the girl prayed that they would not find her, that they would stop looking.

    But they would never stop looking. Never.

    Not as long as her mother wanted her dead.

    Somewhere, out beyond the heat shimmers that hovered over the sandy horizon, killers were tracking her. Reapers of her mother’s Night Church.

    They would never stop because they believed—truly believed—that tracking her down was their holy purpose. She was the sinner, the pariah. The monster that they hunted in order to rid the world of a dreadful impurity.

    The reapers.

    With knives and axes and bladed farm tools they hunted her.

    Wanting to find her. Craving her death.

    And so many of them were her friends.

    From them, and from who she had once been, the girl tried to hide herself in the vastness of a cruel desert.

    3

    She was hungry.

    It was that deep hunger, the kind that made her sharp and quick for hours. A belly-taut ache that can’t be outrun.

    When she was that hungry, she couldn’t be lazy. She couldn’t climb a tree and lash herself to a thick limb and let the day shamble past.

    No, this kind of hunger made her go hunting. It shook her loose from the crushing depression she’d felt since leaving the Night Church.

    Before she left, she checked her weapons—the fighting knife she’d carried since she was seven years old, the strangle wire, the throwing spikes, the sling with its bag of sharp stones. She looped the coil of rope across her body.

    Her home for the last three days had once been something called a FunMart. She had no idea what that was. It had shelves like a lot of the stores she’d seen, but there was nothing on them. The floor was littered with the torn wrappers of bread loaves and cracker boxes, but everything of value had been scavenged by refugees over the last twelve years, and any forgotten crumbs had been devoured by insects and animals. But the place was dry, and it got her out of the desert heat.

    Now it was time to leave. She knew that she wouldn’t be coming back here. The reapers were still out there somewhere. Maybe weeks behind her, maybe much closer. She had only stayed this long at the FunMart because of the gripes—a terrible storm that had raged in her intestines after eating a piece of questionable food. That lizard she’d caught and cooked must have been sick, or it had carried some kind of toxin. For two whole days her stomach felt like it was filled with razor blades and acid. She threw up everything she ate, which was also a terrible waste of food. Nothing of value went into her system. No proteins or fats or useful calories. No nutrients.

    When the gripes passed, the girl was left weak and trembling. If even the weakest reaper came at her, she could not have defended herself.

    The desert offered no obvious comfort. Food had to be caught, and there was very little water. So survival required movement. Hunger demanded it.

    Even so, she lingered at the door of the FunMart.

    The girl did not have a home. Not anymore. And the home she used to have was not a place she could return to. No way. To the people she left behind she was a disgrace, a lost soul.

    A monster.

    Places like this empty shell of a FunMart offered no real protection; it was not a home in any genuine way. It was a place to be sick, and if she stayed longer, it would be the place where she died. The reapers were coming. She did not know when they would find her, only that they would.

    Beyond the door was the road that stretched through the endless desert. Beyond the door was the truth. The loneliness. The fear.

    The hunger.

    The hunger called to her. It yelled. It shrieked.

    So she had to leave.

    Not soon.

    Now.

    Get your skinny butt in gear, girl, scolded her inner voice. No handsome prince is going to stroll out of a fairy tale and serve you a hot breakfast of eggs and grits.

    Shut up, she told herself. Her voice sounded dusty and far older than her fifteen years.

    She could see a faintness of green down the road. Sparse woods that had once been vast groves of fruit trees set, improbably, on the edge of the Nevada desert. Patches of scrub pine and weathered creosote bushes were thriving there now as the orchard died. The ghosts of the fruit trees stood like pale sticks. She reckoned that the water pumping stations were dead. All these years of blowing sand and dust had frozen the gears in the rows of tall, white wind turbines. Now they stood above the orchard, silent as clouds, offering the lie of power in a powerless world.

    Beyond the forest was a town. It said so on the map she had.

    A place called Red Pass, which looked to be have been built into the cleft of a long ridge of low mountains.

    Red Pass. The name meant nothing to her, but the fact that it was a town meant that there might be some vittles. Old canned stuff. Maybe some gardens with enough life for wild carrots and potatoes to still be growing. She knew that birds lived in some of the old towns. Even a scrawny pigeon was roast breast for dinner and a day’s worth of soup from the rest. And where there was one pigeon, there would be two.

    The town was where she had to go.

    Ten miles under the August sun.

    It had to be done during the day, though. At night she would not be able to see, or hunt, or defend. And they did not need the light to find her.

    They.

    The gray people. The wanderers.

    The hungry ghosts.

    She knew they were

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