Then her scrabbling fingers found only empty leather. The pouch was empty.
The girl flung the slingshot down, tore the knife from her sheath, and began chopping at the hands, cutting dry tendons, filling the air with fingers that twitched like white worms.
And all the time she screamed.
With a last desperate howl of mingled terror and rage, the girl swung her legs up and over her head and back-rolled to her feet with her spine hard against the rear window of the truck. The dead climbed up, scaling the truck by clambering over one another as they sought to tear her apart.
The girl crouched there, teeth bared in a feral snarl of final defiance, one hand balled into a fist, the other locked iron-tight around the knife, ready to fight all the way to her last screaming breath.
“Come on—come ON!” she bellowed.
And that was when the siren went off.
12
Every face turned, every set of eyes darted toward the sound, searching out the source of a high-pitched keening wail that rose impossibly loud above the road. The girl’s head turned too.
There, on the gravel-strewn shoulder of the road, was a boy.
Not a dead boy.
This one was very much alive.
He was no more than ten, thin and dark-haired, with skin the color of chocolate. He wore faded blue jeans, sneakers—real pre-apocalypse sneakers—and a T-shirt with a full-color illustration of a grinning cartoon rat standing on a strange wheeled board. His head was shaved into a Mohawk that was dyed as blue as the sky above. The boy held a hand-crank firehouse siren, and he was working it with every bit of his strength, grinning from ear to ear while he did it.
The dead seemed to forget all about the scrawny girl-flesh they had been seconds away from devouring, and instead began shuffling toward the boy and his siren. When they were a dozen feet from him, he began walking backward, laughing as the dead followed him.
It was so . . . weird, so strange, so outside of all sense that the girl simply stood there, knife in hand, and stared slack jawed.
Then a voice behind her said, “I got to say, sister, you are a crazy riot of a fighter. Never seen anything like you before.”
Her jaws snapped shut as she whirled, bringing up the knife in a slashing attack that would have gutted a grown buck, but the owner of the voice leaped nimbly out of the way. Another boy stood there.
“Whoa, little sister,” he said with a laugh. “That’s no way to treat friends.”
She stared at him.
He was older than the little brown-skinned boy. Maybe sixteen, and even in the heat of her fury, the girl realized that he was beautiful. That was the word her mind grabbed at. The boy was very tall and lean, with finely sculpted muscles and a deep desert tan. He had lots of curly blond hair and eyes as blue as the younger boy’s hair. White teeth flashed in an almost unbearably handsome face. He wore a pair of khaki shorts, a thin green tank top, and sneakers that looked brand new. Around his neck he wore a silver necklace from which hung an old-fashioned skeleton key.
Despite the boy’s handsome face and white smile, she narrowed her eyes and snarled at him. “Y’all ain’t my friends. Put your hands on me and I’ll cut off some parts y’all don’t want to lose.”
He looked alarmed—but it was a comical alarm, heavily exaggerated. “Yeah, let’s not go in that direction, okay?”
The boy took a small step toward her.
“I’m warning y’all. . . .”
“I know, but our door’s open,” he said, nodding past her. “I think it’s time to hightail it.”
The siren wound down, and the girl looked over her shoulder to see the laughing little boy turn and run away with more than a hundred of the gray people following. The little boy did not seem to be trying very hard to escape the dead, though, and the girl realized that he was staying close enough so they could smell him.
“That young’un’s plain crazy in the head,” she said.
“Gummi Bear?” said the older boy. “Yeah, he is that. Gummi Bear’s always been a bit twitchy.”
She turned back to him, the knife still clutched in her fist. “Gummi Bear? That’s his name?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And who are y’all?”
“Jolt,” he said.
“Jolt?” She peered at him suspiciously. “That ain’t a name; it’s a verb.”
He grinned. “And look at you with the actual school education.”
“My daddy taught me to read and write. He was a doctor.”
“Yeah, well my daddy taught me not to try and fight six hundred zees with a knife.”
Zees. It was an expression she’d heard only once or twice. Zee for zombie. Most of the people she knew called the dead “gray people.” Once or twice she had heard travelers call them “zoms.” She liked “zees,” though she didn’t care to let this crazy boy know that.
There was a sound behind him, and one of the dead appeared beside the truck and made a grab for Jolt’s ankle. But then the young man did something that appeared almost magical. He did what looked like a cartwheel, but he did it in midair, spinning his body off the truck and landing well beyond the creature. It was the smoothest acrobatic move the girl had ever seen, with the kind of apparent effortlessness that concealed highly trained muscles.
The zee swiped the empty air where he had been, and for a moment it looked totally blank. Then it sensed him and turned around to face its elusive prey.
“Yeah, I’m over here, Dusty,” said Jolt.
“Dusty? You know his name?”
Jolt darted close to the dead man and slapped his chest, kicking up a cloud of brown dust. Then he spun away out of reach.
“They’re all dusty. Dusty, Lumpy, Ugly, Slowpoke, Shambler . . . take your pick. Got to call ’em something.”
The girl climbed out of the pickup and stood on the far side, with the whole truck between her and both boy and corpse.
Jolt hopped up onto the hood of a car as if he had springs under his shoes. The zee took another swipe at him, but Jolt dove into a handstand, ran up the windshield, and, once he was on the roof, flipped back to his feet. It was the strangest thing, like watching the bizarre antics of a character in a dream.
“I—” she began, but then she heard a scuff behind her, and she spun as a fat gray woman with bullet holes in her chest reached for her. Without thinking, the girl parried the grabbing arms and ducked low to slash the tendons on the creature’s ankles. As it buckled down to its knees, the girl grabbed the zee’s filthy hair, shoved its head forward, and drew back her arm for a knife-thrust that would have severed the brain stem and sent the monster into the final darkness of absolute death.
“No!” cried Jolt with unexpected force and passion.
The girl froze, looking over her shoulder as the boy leaped like a monkey from the hood of the car to the hood of the pickup and flipped down to the ground beside her. He shoved her knife arm away and pushed the zee in the other direction.
“What are you doing?”
They both yelled it at exactly the same time.
“There’s no reason to hurt it,” said Jolt, his smile gone.
“It was trying to bite me,” she fired back.
“So what? You telling me that you can’t get away from a fat old zee like her without killing her? I had you figured for a fighter with a little bit of skill. Guess not.”
Her face felt like it was about to catch fire. “And I figured you for someone with a handful of wits under all that blond hair,” she yelled back, “but I guess a handful isn’t enough.”
“Whoa, wait—didn’t we just save your life? Or am I thinking about a totally different psycho bald chick?”
The girl slipped the knife into its sheath and then shoved the boy as hard as she could with both hands. If she expected him to fall she was disappointed. He took a single backward step but turned it into a pivot and bent his knees to slough off the force. As he straightened, he got right up into her face.
“Don’
t do that again,” he said quietly. “We’re trying to help.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.”
“But you got it, so that song’s sung.”
The crippled zee was crawling toward them. The girl and Jolt looked down at her, and she truly did seem to be helpless and pathetic. Over by the shoulder of the road, the zees called by Gummi Bear’s siren were shuffling back toward the cars.
Toward them.
“We can stay and argue,” said Jolt, “or we can get the heck out of here.”
He touched her shoulder to try to guide her away, but she shook him off. “Don’t touch me.”
“Okay,” he said, “for the record, you touched me first. You shoved me.”
“Didn’t neither. Y’all touched me first when you swatted at my arm like it was a skeeter.”
He considered. “Maybe. Doesn’t matter. We can get out of here, or we can rub steak sauce all over each other and go dancing with the lunch crowd.”
“Why in tarnation do y’all talk like that?”
He smiled. “That question may be funnier than you know.”
“I’m thinking of kicking you in a bad place.”
Jolt held up his hands, palms outward in a “no trouble” gesture. “Okay, come on, let’s not do this. Besides, it’s going to get crowded again. We should go.”
She looked at the approaching dead and then around at the densely packed cars. “Which way? Out into the desert?”
“Nope.”
He took two running steps and leaped hands-first toward the closest car, then slapped his palms on the hood. In a demonstration of incredible flexibility and coordination, he shot his feet forward between his arms so that he cleared the other side feetfirst. Jolt landed on the far side, then jumped onto the bumper of a truck with his left foot, surged upward and leaped onto the hood of an adjoining car with his right foot, and flipped over out of sight. A moment later he appeared atop the roof of a Post Office truck two rows away. The girl had never seen anything like this acrobatic running. Jolt stopped, turned, and waved.
“What are you?” she said. “A monkey-boy?”
He grinned. “You coming or not?”
The ease with which he moved impressed her and annoyed her in equal measures. He made escape look easy . . . and fun. After all her weeks of struggle and hardship, clawing and scrabbling her way through every hour of every day, his obvious joy in running like an ape under the desert sun was . . .
Was what? She didn’t know what to call it.
Was she offended? Intimidated?
Dazzled?
Get hold of your wits, you silly cow, she scolded herself.
She ground her teeth together, set her jaw, and leaped for the hood of the nearest car.
And made it with more grace and balance than she expected.
She ran up the car and launched herself across a six-foot gap between that one and the next, landed with only a moment’s pinwheeling of arms, and repeated it until she nearly caught up to him. Then her foot slipped and she began to fall, but instead she pitched herself into a tight shoulder roll that whipped her across the ground so fast that she came out of it in a small leap that she used to hop up onto another car. Rolling and tumbling was something she’d always been good at, but the fall was an accident, and the save was more luck than style. Even so, she ended her jump dead center on the hood of the car.
Jolt broke into furious applause and hooted his appreciation. Clearly he thought the roll and leap were intentional. His smile was brighter than the sun.
“Wow—look at you,” he said, nodding. “You’re a real firecracker, girlie. You’re a total riot, you know that?”
“Yeah,” she said sourly—though she blushed as she said it. “I’m a riot.”
As if in answer, the masses of the dead let out a chorus of hungry moans.
“Oops, c’mon, riot-girl, let’s burn.”
With a laugh and no backward glance at all, Jolt spun and leaped for the next car, and the next, and the next.
“All boys are crazy,” she told herself. Nothing—not an inner voice or anything else in the world outside—attempted to contradict her.
13
What she really hated was that it was fun.
Running like the wind, jumping high over the reaching hands, dodging and twisting, pushing her body and reflexes to their limits while acting like no limits existed. Not for them, not here and now.
Before this, physical exertion was all built around combat training. Saint John and the others at the Night Church made all of the kids train. Fourteen hours a day. Hand to hand, with weapons, target practice, hunting and tracking, gymnastics, climbing, and all of it geared toward the single purpose of killing. Not that they called it that. “Sending people into the darkness”—that was how they phrased it in the Night Church. Back when she was Sister Margaret, the girl had been the best in every class. The fastest, the fiercest, the most lethal. Her mother demanded it, and Saint John pushed her relentlessly in order to make it happen. And she was the best. No doubt. A murder machine.
And now . . .
Now she ran free, ran laughing, just for the sheer joy of it.
It was the strangest thing she had ever done.
She was certain it was the most fun she had ever had.
The younger boy, the one with the burned face—Gummi Bear—joined them, but he wasn’t running free over the cars. He was on a bicycle. The girl had seen a lot of bicycles over the years. After the EMPs they were one of the few transportation machines that worked. This one was squat and tough-looking, not like the more slender touring bikes she’d seen. Gummi Bear pedaled his like a demon, and it tore along the edge of the road, kicking up a wall of dust and spitting chunks of gravel from under its fat tires.
“Look out!” she screamed as one of the gray people lunged at the boy from behind a toppled tour bus, but Gummi Bear laughed at her and did something that appeared to be completely mad. He slapped the bars and propelled his entire body off the bike, rising into the air as if pulled by strings. The bike rolled to one side of the zee, and the boy sailed over the creature’s reaching hands and then dropped down into a fast, controlled run directly behind the monster. Gummi Bear then cut left, caught his bike before it fell, flipped himself back onto the seat and was pedaling fast again before the zee was finished grabbing empty air.
“Wooohooo!” yelled Jolt, pumping his fist into the air. He stood on the hood of a Lexus, laughing with pure delight. “You ever see a fox-hop like that, riot-girl?”
The girl said, “Umm . . . no?”
“You’re darn right no. And I’ll bet you a full bag of prime goods that Gummi Bear’s going to be a full-out player before he’s twelve.”
“A player? What’s that?”
Jolt didn’t answer; he was too busy yelling compliments at Gummi Bear.
The boy suddenly lunged up, pulling the front end of his bike completely off the road. He waggled the front wheel back and forth, landed with a dusty thump and was off, dodging and weaving on and off the road, slipping past zees with inches to spare.
Laughing.
All the time laughing.
It was all so crazy and so well done that, despite everything, the girl laughed too.
She turned and saw with a start that the town was much closer. Without realizing it she and Jolt had run more than half the distance to the cluster of buildings. It was incredible. The hunger, the aches, and weariness were still there—but at the moment her system was flooded with adrenaline and something else. She didn’t dare call it by its name because “happiness” was such a rare and elusive thing she was afraid of chasing it away.
“Hey, Riot!” called Jolt. “You daydreaming?”
“That’s not my name,” she yelled back, but there was a laugh in her voice.
“Okay—what is your name?”
She had to think about how to answer that. When it was just her and Dad she’d been Maggie. Then once they’d somehow been absorbed into her mother’s Night
Church she’d been Sister Margaret. But neither of those names seemed to fit anymore. The first was too weighed down by loss and grief. The other was burdened by horror.
So—who was she?
Jolt squatted down, his muscular thighs bulging, his blond curls stirring as a hot breeze blew in off the sand. Even from thirty feet away, the girl could feel the impact of his stare. There was genuine interest there, and honest happiness. The one thing she could not find, no matter how hard she searched in those bottomless blue eyes, was a single flicker of judgment.
“I . . . guess my name’s Riot,” she said.
“Booyah!” He rose and shouted through cupped hands. “Hey, Gummi Bear! Riot thinks you have mad bike skills.”
The boy somehow lifted the back end of his bike and rolled forward on just the front tire, then popped the whole bike up, spun it in a 360-degree turn, and zoomed off.
Jolt laughed, then he turned to Riot. “You need to get back to somewhere?”
She said nothing.
“What about your people? Are you lost out here or—”
“I’m not lost and no one’s waiting up for me,” she said. “I don’t belong nowhere.”
As an after-echo she heard the deep bitterness in her voice. Vicious and hard.
Jolt’s smile flickered as he studied her eyes. She had no idea what he saw there, or what he thought any of it meant, but for just a moment he looked very sad.
“Somebody hurt you?” he asked.
She did not answer the question.
“Okay,” said Jolt, accepting her silence, or perhaps her right to silence. Then he beamed another of his bright smiles. “You can come with us, if you want. We got a camp up near the town, and we’re going to play some games tomorrow. You in?”
“Games?” she asked suspiciously. “What kind of games?”
He frowned. “You serious?”
“Of course I’m serious,” she barked. A dozen yards away a couple of the zees turned sharply toward her. Riot lowered her voice. “I just met y’all, boy, so how am I supposed to know what kind of games y’all are fixing to play?”
“Okay, okay, don’t have a kitten. I thought you could figure it out from me and Gummi Bear. Him on his bike, me freerunning out here.”