BONE CRUSH

Part 2

"Rise and shine, Leigh."

A light snapped on ruthlessly and she jerked awake, suddenly conscious and painfully aware of it. "You knocked me out," Leigh said on reflex, fingers coming up to prod the back of her head where she felt the lingering pain.

Merle kicked a wooden chair closer to the bed and stradled it, resting his one arm aganst it. "Part of the rules, kid. Can't make an exception for anybody out here."

Darkness loomed on the otherside of the window. Leigh caught a glimspe of a few street lights magically turned on and frowned, confused in the sensation of ordinary living. "Blind folding people just doesn't work?"

"Some of 'em get squirmy."

Leigh sat upright and saw her bag neatly sitting on the table beside the door. Her knife was pointedly beside it like nothing had been forced away from her, like they hadn't hauled her against her will from wherever they found her. "Where are they? Those men?"

"Don't worry about them. They ain't gonna bother you. They're just road runners, people who get sent out to check for the good stuff."

"They chased me down."

"Good thing they did. Wouldn't have known you were even in this state if they hadn't spotted you. Hell. Can't believe you're alive and breathing," Merle said easily. "It's a damned miracle, ain't it? You wanna spill the beans and tell me how exactly you're here in the flesh and blood?"

Leigh fidgeted. The room was tiny. Someone was walking the corridor outside, heavy boots stomping along the wooden floor, obviously keeping patrol. "Mom got me out of school before it went really bad. She found some people and we stayed with them. Missed out on the stuff happening in the cities because of it, and we just stuck it out with the group."

Merle tilted his head a fraction. "And?"

"I left."

"Now why the hell would you go and do a thing like that?"

The blanket was scratchy. She twisted it around her fingers tight. "She got a new boyfriend. You always— you're the one who always said I needed to walk the other way if one of them was coming around."

He smiled but the expression looked sad despite the effort. "So you figured you'd take a cold hard road all by yourself? Sharley didn't try and come after you?"

"What happened to your hand?" Leigh decided to ask, blunt as a baseball bat coming down, switching the conversation around. "Last I saw you, you had two of 'em."

Merle wiggled his remaining fingers against his knee. "Had to part ways with it back in Atlanta. Made out with some decent hardware." The knife looked particularly sharp.

Leigh could easily imagine her uncle assembling the pieces to make a weapon in place of where his hand used to be. He was always decent at parts, fiddling with their toaster until it worked again, sticking his head under the hood of a car just to take a look at whatever was causing grief. "Oh."

"It ain't bad."

"Right."

"We gonna sit and ignore the elephant in the room some more or you ready to talk about it?"

She cringed. "Is he... around?"

"No." His blue eyes were sharp, reading her the way she was trying to read the empty room. "We went hunting before the world took a nose dive into the gutter. Came back and saw some of what was goin' on. All that shit, you know? Kept the truck packed up with our gear, split with the intention of getting to Virginia. But... Atlanta. Whole shit stain of a city was locked up and jammed with them military blockades. Couldn't go through so we tried going around, got stalled on the highway right when they opened fire on the city. Didn't have the gas to push, couldn't get much further from where we hit the brakes."