Like why she’d let the big dog out of that car.
She shouldn’t have.
The animal was starving, maybe crazy. Scared.
Letting it out was stupid. Suicidal. Way too risky a thing to even consider.
Rags had to think about it for a while, too. At first she stood on the bloodstained curb and studied the car. The dog was barking furiously.
There were no dead around. There was nothing but a couple of bodies that been shot in the head and left to rot. The stink was terrible, but Rags was used to it. Everything stank. She stank. She’d give a lot for a hot shower and clean underwear.
A lot.
The dog barked at her.
And then it stopped barking and stared at her.
It had strange eyes. One was such a dark brown that it looked almost black. The other was mint green. It wore a collar and had a tag, but Rags couldn’t read it. Not through the cracked and dirty windows.
Rags came over and peered inside. The dog looked at her with its strange eyes. She expected it to growl. It didn’t.
After a long time, Rags climbed up on the hood and sat down, cross-legged, and laid her forehead against the windshield. The dog stared at her and did not move.
Rags had no idea how long she sat there. Shadows moved on the street around her. The air was still and there were no sounds in the distance. No moans or screams. No gunfire. Nothing.
Even the dog was silent. Watching her. Waiting.
There was so much going on in those eyes. Intelligence. And . . .
And what?
It was almost like looking into the eyes of a person rather than a dog. Even PomPom, much as she’d loved him, hadn’t had this same quality. PomPom looked at her with a dog’s eyes and a dog’s mind and a dog’s uncomplicated love.
This dog seemed different in ways she couldn’t understand.
Rags straightened and then placed her palm flat over one of the cracks in the windshield. After a moment the dog bent forward and sniffed.
Then they sat and looked at each other for a while longer. Ten minutes maybe. Enough time for the shadows to slide around a bit more.
“Your family’s gone,” she said quietly.
The dog watched her.
“Mine, too.”
The first of the evening crickets began chirping in the weeds that had grown thick in the cracks on the pavement.
“If I let you out,” she said to the dog, “will you be nice?”
The dog watched her.
“I don’t have much food, but I can give you some soup. I have a couple of cans of beef soup. It has too much salt, but it’s okay. Do you want some soup?”
The dog watched her.
“I’ll give you half of what I have if you don’t get all crazy on me.”
Those eyes—dark brown and mint green—watched her.
“Okay . . . ?”
If there was anyone else to swear it to, Rags would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that the dog nodded.
It was a stupid thought, and a crazy one. But it was what she believed she saw.
Rags smiled. She felt it on her face, and it felt weird. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled.
No, that was wrong. She actually could.
It was that night, when she heard Mom’s car pull into the driveway. Rags had gotten a new pair of tights she’d bought with money she made babysitting. She knew Mom would love them. Rags was smiling when Mom opened the door.
That was the last time she smiled.
But she smiled now, as she slid off the hood and walked around the car. The dog turned on the front seat to watch her. He was so big he filled the whole front of the car.
Rags reached out to try one of the door handles.
It was locked.
Of course it was locked.
She stood in the street and thought it through. There were shattered buildings, overturned cars. Bones. Debris. She nodded to herself and picked up a brick. Most of a brick. Enough of one for her purposes.
As she approached the car, the dog watched her. Rags showed him the brick.
“You have to get back,” she said. “I have to smash the window. Get into the backseat, okay? You need to—”
The dog climbed over the seat backs and dropped down into the rear foot well.
That made Rags stop in her tracks.
That was very, very weird.
There was no doubt in her at all that the dog understood what she was saying. But . . . ?
It was just a dog.
The brick was heavy in Rags’s hand. Doubt chewed at her. She hefted the brick and said, “Please.”
To the dog, maybe. To the day. To whatever was left of the universe who might be listening.
She smashed the windshield. Even cracked, it took a lot to do it. The safety glass was tough. It resisted her, as if the car did not want to release its prisoner. Or maybe as if the car was trying to protect her from this strange dog.
The glass finally exploded. Not just broke—it exploded, showering her with little pellets of gummy glass, spraying everything inside the car with fragments.
The sound was louder than she expected. It echoed off the buildings around her.
And then the dog came surging over the seats and out through the windshield. He landed on the hood and stood there, even bigger than she’d thought, shaking glass from his thick coat, eyes blazing with bizarre light. Rags stumbled backward and fell on her butt right in the middle of the street. The brick fell from her hand and rolled crookedly off.
The huge dog stared down at her, and then he bared his teeth.
Hair stood up along his neck and back. His ears went back and a low, dreadful growl rumbled from deep in his chest.
“N-no!” stammered Rags.
The dog snarled, and there was such deep, ferocious hatred in his eyes that Rags knew she had made a terrible mistake.
Then the dog crouched, muscles rippling, fangs gleaming, and with a bellow of pure animal rage, he sprang.
At her.
Over her.
Beyond her.
Rags fell backward and watched the monster dog sail through the air. Expecting him to land on her. Expecting to be crushed.
Except that it did not happen that way.
Instead he passed completely over her and struck something else.
On the ground, Rags turned and looked.
And saw.
Them.
Five of them.
Monsters.
Not the dead.
No, she would have smelled the dead.
Scavengers.
There were survivors, and everyone these days had to scavenge. But the people that the survivors called scavengers were something else. They weren’t out here looking for cans of food. They had darker, stranger, and more terrifying appetites.
And here were five of them.
Three men, two women.
All of them with knives. All of them with that look in their eyes that Rags had seen before. The look that promised awful things.
They must have heard her banging on the windshield, and on silent cat feet had come up behind her. With knives. With clubs. With ugly smiles and a hunger more frightening than what the dead had.
Rags knew that she couldn’t outrun them. A couple of them, maybe. Not all of them. She couldn’t outrun the two biggest men. And she certainly couldn’t outfight them. Even so, she pulled her knife. It had a three-inch blade, and usually that was enough. Now it felt like a toothpick.
One of the scavengers spoke a single word. Maybe the most terrifying word Rags had ever heard.
“Meat . . .”
The five of them looked so hungry. Rags heard someone’s stomach growl. One of the women licked her lips. If there was any sanity left inside the woman, it did not look out through those eyes. Those eyes—all of their eyes—were every bit as dead as the eyes of the walking corpses who filled the rest of the world.
“Please,” said Rags.
“Please,” e
choed the scavengers. It meant something totally different.
Rags heard the dog growl. She turned. They all looked.
“Meat,” said the man again. He bared his teeth in some kind of smile.
The dog bared his teeth too.
What happened next was unspeakable.
Rags screamed as she ran away. Her screams, though, were little things, small, kept locked inside her chest. The screams of a careful, frightened scavenger who needed to shriek aloud but absolutely could not.
2
Rags ran and ran.
There were so many places to hide. Empty cars, empty stores, empty homes. All kinds of empty buildings. She knew how to check for the dead, and she could almost always hide from the living. Today had been a mistake. The dog was a distraction, and it was stupid to let anything do that. As she ran, she hated herself for being so clumsy. And by mentally yelling at herself, it was easier to keep from screaming.
The things that dog did.
Even to scavengers. Even to people who did the kinds of things they did.
Rags wanted to scream. Probably needed to.
Instead she clamped down on the screams that boiled like hot water inside her chest. She screamed at herself inside her head.
And ran.
3
Rags was too smart to hide inside a house when she knew there were scavengers in the area. Houses had food, blankets, beds, toilet paper, medicines, weapons, clothes. Everyone raided places like that. No one hid there unless they wanted to be found.
The same went for stores that sold anything people could use for survival. She passed a big mall once, a few weeks after it all started. There had to be fifty thousand of the dead crowding the parking lot and hammering on the doors.
Schools were almost as bad. They had lunchrooms. They had gym equipment. Hockey sticks and football pads were worth more than gold. Rags had watched in horror as a fat man wearing only boxers fought two middle-aged women—all of them armed with lacrosse sticks and baseball bats. Rags wondered if all three of them had been teachers at the school. They were screaming and bleeding and Rags doubted they’d make it through the night. That was in the entrance to a middle school.
Other places to avoid included hardware stores, sporting goods shops, grocery and clothing stores, pharmacies, hospitals, police stations, military bases, and department stores.
The best places to hide were stores or warehouses filled with stuff no one needed. Computer centers, toy stores, gift shops. Like that. For Rags, though, her most reliable bolt-holes were museums. One in particular. The one that had been her home for weeks now.
Nobody went to museums anymore. Not unless they had displays of military equipment, and those had already been looted.
Rags ran three blocks along the avenue, leaving the dog and the scavengers behind. Leaving the sounds of what was happening behind. Then she stopped behind a mailbox to study the Japanese American Museum on N Street at Taylor, right on the edge of Japantown.
The place was on the corner of a big intersection that was crammed with wrecked or abandoned cars. The burned shell of a big Marine Corps helicopter was smashed into the east wing of the museum, and the front doors were shut and locked. The building was made from blocks of tan stone, and there were no windows at all on the first floor; the ones on the second floor were covered with ornate brass grilles.
All of the first-floor doors were made from heavy steel. The words DEAD INSIDE had been spray-painted on the outside as a warning.
Rags had done that.
She put that mark on several of her favorite bolt-holes. She’d seen it on other buildings. Warnings left by travelers who cared. Or by the military back when they mattered.
There were no dead inside her place, though.
It had been shut up for the night when the world fell apart. No one had come to open those heavy doors in the morning. No one ever would. The helicopter that crashed on the east wing had burned, and as far as Rags could tell, none of the people onboard had survived. They hadn’t walked out, they hadn’t shambled out. They’d burned and stayed dead.
Rags envied them.
The street was clear of the dead.
She took a breath and moved away from the shelter of the mailbox, darting in a haphazard pattern from one car to another to another as she made her way around the fringes of the intersection. She stopped often, listened closely, watched everything. The only movement was what was pushed by the wind.
Crossing that intersection took five whole minutes, because Rags needed to know that no one saw her and nothing reacted to her. She got to the helicopter and paused again. The burned meat smell was long gone now.
With great care, Rags went around to the far side, climbed up onto the broken tail section, and crawled along it like a bug until she reached the place where the dying machine had punched through the outer wall. There was a small pile of pebbles there that Rags had left behind. She picked one up and then tossed it through the hole into the shadows of the museum. It clattered and bounced and then lay still. She bent forward and listened with all her might to whatever the shadows had to say.
They said nothing.
There were no moans, no soft and ungainly footfalls. There were no human cries of surprise.
Nothing.
She let out a breath and crawled inside.
Rags flicked on her solar-powered flashlight—an insanely valuable item she’d taken from the backpack of a dead hiker. Someone had shot the hiker in the head but left his gear intact. Half the good supplies Rags had in her own backpack had come from that person, and when she prayed at night, Rags always included a special thanks to Stanley Nogatowski. She’d learned his name from stuff she’d found in his wallet. Mr. Nogatowski was thirty-four, was a house painter, had a library card, had a debit card and two credit cards, belonged to Sam’s Club, and had a picture of him and another man holding hands as they cut a wedding cake.
The things she had found in his pack—PowerBars, a canteen, water purification tablets, a compass, a first aid kit, and a knife, not to mention the solar flashlight—had saved her life that day and a dozen times since. Maybe more. She sometimes prayed to Stanley as if he were her personal guardian angel. Maybe he was.
Holding Stanley’s flashlight in one hand and his Buck lock-knife in the other, Rags descended a slope of rubble from the hole in the wall to the floor of the museum.
The east wing had a lot of displays about the architecture of ancient Japan. Rain and fire had ruined almost all of it.
The rest of the building was in good shape, though Rags hadn’t yet fully explored it. She’d been to the art displays, the literature display, and one room on the second floor that was filled with all kinds of clothing. Kimonos in glass cases or hung on strings from the ceiling. They looked like giant butterflies. Rags had taken a dozen of them down and made a nest for herself in a niche behind two massive display cases filled with thousands of ivory combs and jeweled hairpins. No one would want to loot that stuff, so that was where she went. She was safe there.
She settled down and tried not to think about what had just happened outside. The room was dark and quiet and safe. There were a dozen ways out and she knew every one. She had weapons positioned around—sharp sticks, pipes, a few knives she’d taken from display cases of samurai stuff over in the west wing.
The last of the day’s light fell in dusty, slanting lines through the high windows, and the grilles split the light into patterns of lotus flowers and cherry blossoms. She watched the way the patterns moved as the sun slowly set.
Rags thought about eating some of her soup, but her stomach rebelled. No. Not after what had happened.
So she pulled the ancient silk around her and tried to sleep.
The shakes began then, and they stayed with her. The shivers followed her all the way down into her dreams, and her dreams were no escape at all.
4
The dog found her.
In the deep of night, hours and hours after the thing with the
scavengers, she woke from a troubled dream of broken teeth and grabbing hands. She woke to the certain knowledge that she was no longer alone.
Rags was too practiced a survivor to cry out even in terror. Instead she snatched up her knife and put her back to the wall, ready to run left or right, planning her route through the midnight darkness of the museum, certain she could navigate it better than any intruder.
Except she heard it coming.
It, not them. Not the living, not the dead. Not people on either side of that dividing line.
She heard it even though it moved very quietly. The dead are clumsy, and they don’t understand stealth. Scavengers do, but Rags was alert. She was paying attention and analyzing the sounds she heard for reliable meaning.
She heard the dog coming. The faint click of nails on the marble floor. Clickety-clickety-click.
Panic flared in Rags.
That big dog was coming.
For her.
It had followed her here.
That monster of a dog.
Clickety-clickety-click.
The knife in her hand felt so small. She felt small.
That dog had killed five people. Five armed adults.
Clickety-clickety-click.
So close now. Right on the other side of the case behind which she crouched.
Then . . .
Silence.
Rags did not dare breathe.
A single ray of cold moonlight slanted down through one of the high windows. She rose slowly. So slowly, gripping the knife, holding the flashlight in her left hand, thumb on the button. Ready to flick on the light and stab in that moment of blinding surprise.
She tried to remember if dogs could see in the dark. If so, did that make them more vulnerable to sudden bursts of light?
Rags had no idea.
She moved very slowly down the edge of the case and peered around.
What she saw made her freeze into a pillar of ice.
The big dog sat there. Right in the middle of the patch of light thrown down from the window. It was a huge male. Young and strong, but looking starved and a little wild. He sat upright and looked directly at her.
As if anticipating that she would come that way. Hearing, smelling, sensing. Whatever. Knowing.