8
They were walking under the deep shade of the trees in Backesto Park, down near the basketball courts on Empire Street. It was almost noon, and there were a million birds singing in the trees. Singing like the world was okay and things were normal.
Rags was hungry, and she knew Bones had to be too. The plan was to follow Empire all the way to the houses by Coyote Creek. Not all of them had been scavenged, and Rags was sure they’d find something to eat. Last month they’d gone into one of those places and found two canned hams. Entire hams, and the cans weren’t swollen or anything. The can said they were fully cooked, and though Rags had never much liked ham, she ate a lot of it that day and loved every bite. Bones pretty much inhaled an entire ham by himself.
Maybe one of those houses would be a place to stay for a couple of nights while they worked the houses in the neighborhood. With any luck they’d find enough food that they could fill a shopping cart. Maybe some new clothes, too.
She was thinking about that as they left the trees and began walking along Empire. The street was empty, like most of San Jose. Rags had no idea why this town should be so deserted when there used to be so many people here. Either the town had somehow been evacuated during the crisis, or the dead had nearly all walked away since. Of the nearly one million people who used to live here, Rags guessed that there were no more than a few thousand of the dead. And a few dozen scavengers.
She had Bones, and they managed to steer clear of trouble. Most of the time.
Once they were on the street, Rags winced at the stink of a dead skunk that lay near a rusting FedEx truck and an Escalade sitting on four flat tires. Bones whined a little at the smell, and they both hurried past the dead creature, but as they did so the door of the Escalade suddenly swung open and two men stepped out.
Both of them wore leather jackets, hockey leg pads, football helmets, and thick gloves. One of them held a heavy wrench; the other had a long pole with a leather loop hanging from one end. Rags knew what that was; she’d seen it used on TV for catching wild animals. They drop the loop over the head, and the solid pole keeps the animal from getting close enough to bite.
Both men had tattoos of skulls on their forearms. Both men were smiling the kind of smile no girl ever wants to see.
Bones tensed, and there was that low growl again. Rags was scared, but not terrified. Two men against Bones. It would be ugly, but it would be short.
She pulled out her knife.
“That’s cute,” said the man with the wrench. “Little girl’s got herself a knife.”
His voice was crude, rough.
“Is that what that little thing is?” mused the man with the pole. “Thought it was a toothpick.”
Rags clenched the knife and held it against her chest.
“Might have to show her how it works,” said the first man. “Maybe carve some rules and regulations on her so she knows her place.”
“I’m warning you,” began Rags, but then Bones turned to look behind them. Rags turned too, and her heart froze in her chest.
Three more men were crossing the street. Two of them had poles with leather loops. The third had a fire ax.
All of them had skull tattoos.
A sound made her turn to the left, and there were two more men. Both of them big. Both with baseball bats. And with them walked a woman.
She was tall and thin, with dirty-blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. Skinny jeans and a tank top under an unzipped Oakland Raiders hoodie. She wore cheap sunglasses with white frames and dark lenses, and dark-orange lipstick. The woman walked with an exaggerated hip sway like she was all that, but Rags thought she was kind of hideous. Trashy and dangerous.
For a split second, seeing a woman made Rags wonder if this would be okay. Sometimes women looked out for each other.
Except when they were scavengers.
This crew, though . . . they looked better fed than the cannibals who roamed the dead cities. They were smiling, too, and Rags had never seen a scavenger smile. Maybe eating what they ate drove all the smiles from their faces. Maybe it made them crazy because they knew there was no coming back from where they’d gone.
Either way, these people looked different.
Every bit as dangerous, but not crazy. Or at least, not in the same way.
“Well, well, well,” said the woman, drawing the three words out. She had a red skull tattoo on her upper chest and a silver skeleton on a chain around her neck. “What on earth do we have here?”
Bones growled at her and shifted to stand between Rags and the woman. It was clear to the dog, just as it was clear to Rags, that this woman was in charge.
The woman eyed the dog, and if her smile flickered, it did so for only a moment. She snapped her fingers, and the men with the poles began spacing themselves out in a loose circle. None of them were close enough to do anything yet, but there was also nowhere for Rags and Bones to run.
“What do you want?” demanded Rags, and she hated that her voice sounded so thin and defensive. It sounded like a kid’s voice, and she wanted to sound strong.
“Pretty much what you think we want, little sister,” said the woman. “You get to play with the boys. And Rover there gets to come play in the pits.”
“Pits?”
“Oh heck yeah. We have a nice big pit up in Milpitas. Got us fifty dogs, ’bout a dozen good hogs, couple wild coyotes, and . . . oh, a few other surprises. Zoos are fun, let me just put it that way.” She laughed, and all the men laughed with her. “Rover there has been on my to-do list for a while now. Been finding his leavings and all those footprints. Big ol’ paws he has on ’im. What’s he, a little wolfhound? Some husky or shepherd? Yeah, he’s going to be a whole lot of fun. Maybe worth breeding if he turns out to be a good fighter. Love to have me a pack of dogs with that kind of muscle. If I had six, seven of them, I could wipe the floor with Danny-Boy and his pack of Rotties, oh hell yes.”
Rags had no idea who Danny-Boy was, but if he had a pack of Rottweilers and was involved in some kind of dogfights, then Rags hated him on principle. Just as she hated this woman and her crew of goons. Bones growled again, his anger in tune with hers.
The woman snapped her fingers. “C’mon now, let’s make this easy. We don’t need to leave hair on the walls here. That’s for later. Be smart and this won’t get any worse than it has to be. So, why don’t you take one of those collars and put it on your pup? Do that for us, and maybe I’ll give you something that’ll make everything else all dreamy so you won’t hardly be in your own head when stuff happens.”
Stuff. The woman put the word out there like it was nothing. Like it was ordinary. Like it would destroy everything that Rags was, had been, or ever might be.
Stuff.
God.
Rags laid her hand on Bones’s quivering back. The dog grew quiet, no longer growling, but he was incredibly tense. With the scavengers, maybe Bones knew he was going to win. Against these big men with the loops, there was no way. There were too many of them, and they had set a trap.
“Leave us alone,” said Rags defiantly. “We haven’t done anything to you. We don’t have anything. Just let us go.”
Everyone laughed at that. As if it was funny.
Rags felt tears in her eyes. “Please . . .”
“No, honey,” said the woman. “You can say please all day and night and it won’t matter much. School’s out and the world went all to hell.”
“Why are you doing this?” insisted Rags, gripping her knife. She was terrified, but she was also furious. To have survived so much, to have lasted this long when so many stronger, older people had died should mean something. It wasn’t right that creeps like this could come along and decide that her life was over. That made less sense to Rags than what the dead did. It made less sense than what the cannibals did. The dead and the crazoid scavengers were out of their minds. These people—this woman and these men—were not. They were in control of themselves, and yet this was what they chose to do.
r /> Rags wanted to say all this, to lay it out, to build a case for the world not going in this direction. Gangs of postapocalyptic predators? That was so cliché. It was from old movies on the Syfy channel. It was video game stuff.
It shouldn’t be allowed to be real.
“No,” she barked, “you have to tell me why. What makes you think this is okay to do? What makes you think you can just do this?”
The woman grinned. “Because we can,” she said, then shrugged. “And . . . because we want to. Because it’s fun.”
“I think,” said a voice from behind Rags, “that the young miss here deserves a better answer than that.”
Everyone whirled around. Everyone gaped. With the stink of the dead skunk polluting the air, not even Bones had smelled anyone else approach. Now the big dog suddenly let out a single, sharp bark, and his tail began whipping back and forth too fast to see. He barked again, and again. He didn’t sound scared or shocked. No. He sounded happy.
Happy?
Rags frowned, because that concept didn’t seem to fit into the day. Not in any way that made sense.
A man sat cross-legged on the top of the FedEx van, sitting as casually as if he was meditating, or sunning himself.
Rags hadn’t seen him. None of the men had. And from the looks on their faces, they were as horrified to see him as Rags had been to see them.
The man was older than everyone there. Maybe forty or fifty, Rags guessed. He had blond hair streaked with gray, cold blue eyes, and a very white smile in a very tan face. There were laugh lines around his eyes and harsher, deeper lines around his mouth. He wore green fatigue pants, a well-worn pair of Timberlands, and a green muscle shirt with the words ECHO TEAM stenciled on the chest. Despite his age, the man was very muscular and looked as dangerous as a tiger. He had a wooden kitchen match between his teeth and made it wiggle up and down.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded the man with the wrench.
The blond man removed the matchstick and smiled. “On your best day, son, I’m bad news, and I’m afraid today is not going to be your best day.”
One of the men leaned close to the woman and spoke quietly, though Rags was close enough to hear.
“That’s him,” he said. “That’s the one I was telling you about.”
The woman stiffened, and her smile went away to be replaced by a look that was colder and less human than anything Rags had ever seen on a human face. Even the dead looked more human than she did at that moment.
The woman said a name. She spat it out like a bad taste.
“Ledger.”
Rags stiffened. That had been the name on Bones’s tag. Captain J. Ledger.
“Yeah,” said Ledger. He pointed to the woman with the matchstick. “I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that you’re Mama Rat, am I right?”
The woman merely grunted.
“Mama Rat,” repeated Ledger, nodding to himself. “And these seven geniuses are what’s left of the skull-riders. Geez. Skull-riders. I have to believe alcohol was involved in the process of coming up with that name.” He shook his head. “So sad, really. You hear the rumors and you want to believe the hype. People in the refugee camps talk about the skull-riders like they’re the biggest, baddest bunch of butt-kickers since the Visigoths. People tell stories about you ass-clowns, you know that?”
He sighed and shook his head.
Rags had no idea what was going on. There were seven armed men, all of them younger than this old guy. And yet he was making fun of them. Was he nuts? Was that it?
“You’re that old ranger,” said Mama Rat. “Joe Ledger.”
“Guilty as charged,” Ledger admitted as he rose slowly to his feet. He was very tall and had an empty holster on his right hip and a sheathed knife on his left. “And if you know my name, honey, then you know why I’m here. And you know that I don’t take kindly to anyone messing with one of my dogs.”
The woman cleared her throat. “Your . . . dogs . . . ?”
“Uh-huh. Dogs. Plural. Oops!” Ledger snapped his fingers, and with a clatter of nails and a deep-chested whuff, a second dog stepped out from between two cars.
It was massive, and its coat was the color of dirty snow.
It had one brown eye and one mint-colored eye.
It looked exactly like Bones.
Except that it was a lot bigger.
“Now ain’t this a pickle?” said Ledger with a contented little chuckle.
9
Mama Rat and her seven brutish skull-riders gaped at this new dog. So did Rags. It was the biggest dog she had ever seen. Easily two hundred pounds, and probably closer to two-fifty. It wore a coat of leather studded with steel bolts whose shafts had been sharpened to deadly points. A metal cap was strapped to its head, and from its dome sprouted a dozen wickedly sharp blades. Another line of blades stood up along its spine like the plates of a stegosaurus.
“Let me make introductions,” said Ledger. “Baskerville, meet the clown college. Clown college, meet my friend Baskerville. I’m sure you’ll all get along swimmingly.”
Baskerville bared his teeth. There were a lot of them, and his eyes blazed with such heat that Rags thought she could feel it. Beside her, Bones barked once, twice, again. Deep-chested and challenging. Baskerville responded with a booming bark that seemed to shake the street.
All seven men stepped back, fear blooming like weeds in their eyes.
Only Mama Rat held her ground, and despite everything, she smiled up at the big man with the big dog.
“Yeah,” she said, “you’re pretty darned impressive. You fit the stories people tell about you. The showmanship, the smart mouth.”
Ledger gave her a small, comical bow.
“But there’s still more of us than there are of you,” said Mama Rat.
“You like those numbers? Seven idiots who couldn’t find their own butts without a road map and a compass against me, Baskerville, and Boggart?”
Boggart? thought Rags. Beside her, Bones barked when he heard that name.
His real name.
In a strange way it made her sad to know that he wasn’t really Bones. Not her Bones. The big dog belonged to this strange man. Bones—Boggart—was family to the other dog. Brother, maybe. Or son.
Either way, he didn’t belong to her, and despite everything it made Rags want to cry.
Mam Rat said, “Eight to three is good enough odds most days. I’m sorry to spoil your bit of drama here, though.” She reached into her hoodie pocket and produced a whistle, the kind coaches use. Mama Rat put it to her lips and blew a shrill, piercing note that rose high above the scene and floated away on the wind.
Both dogs barked at her, but Ledger snapped his fingers and they held their ground.
The moment stretched but nothing happened. Mama Rat looked at the surrounding buildings. Rags could see doubt flicker over her face.
“Go ahead,” said Ledger quietly. “Try again.”
Mama Rat blew the whistle again. And again. Her men looked nervously one to the other. They all turned to look down side streets and at the houses lining the street.
She blew once more, a long, protracted note that rose and rose, and then fell away as she lowered the whistle.
“Oops,” said Ledger again. “Looks like your backup isn’t coming.”
“I—I don’t—” began Mama Rat, and abruptly stopped as a figure stepped out of the shadows between two houses. He was average height, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt with the word CADET stenciled in fading black letters above the outline of a police department shield. The man was young, in his early twenties, and had a flat Japanese face with straight black hair. In his right hand he held the silk-wrapped handle of a sword. Rags recognized it from a thousand anime movies. A katana. The blade was covered in bright-red blood, and there were blood splashes all over the newcomer’s clothes. Even a few drops on his face.
He walked into the street without haste. Then he paused, raised his sword, and with a sharp downward snap of
his wrist whipped all the blood from the oiled steel. It left a pattern of red drops along the sidewalk.
Captain Ledger nodded to the man, and he nodded back.
“You okay, Tom?”
Tom, the swordsman, nodded again.
“How many?” asked Ledger.
“Six,” said Tom. “I told them . . . not to . . .” He stopped and shook his head, and Rags realized that the man was very upset.
About what he had done.
Maybe about what he’d had to do.
Ledger sighed and turned to Mama Rat.
“Six men,” he said, but Tom interrupted to correct him.
“Five men and a woman.”
The captain sighed again. He did not look as upset as Tom was, but he clearly wasn’t happy. He walked to the edge of the FedEx truck, bent to brace his hand on the edge, and jumped down, landing with a grunt and a flicker of pain.
“Knees are getting old,” he said, more to himself than anyone else. He clicked his tongue and Baskerville vanished, but Rags heard a clatter from the rear of the truck, and a moment later the brute came trotting out to stand beside his master. Bones wagged his tail and whined softly, and Baskerville gave a single acknowledging whuff.
The seven skull-riders and their leader had drawn together now and stood in a defensive knot. Mama Rat stood closest to Rags, her face filled with doubt and anger.
And horror, too.
“You killed all six of them?” she asked in a small, hollow voice. Tears glittered in the corners of her eyes.
Tom met her eyes and Rags could see such a deep pain in him that it made her heart hurt. “I gave them a choice,” he said. “They gave me none.”
“All . . . six?” gasped Mama Rat. “How? How?”
Ledger answered that. “Tom has some real talent.”
If it was meant as praise, it didn’t come out that way. Ledger sounded sad, and Tom took a long, slow, deep breath and let it out.
“They gave me no choice at all,” he repeated.
Two tears fell down Mama Rat’s cheeks. “No . . . ,” she whispered.
Joe Ledger walked up to Bones and held out his hand. The big dog licked him and danced around like a happy puppy. It twisted the knife in Rags’s heart.