No one spoke.
The wind carried the hungry cries of the dead.
“I’m just a kid,” said Rags, “so you probably don’t care anything about me or what I have to say. Maybe I’m wasting my breath. Maybe I’m being stupid and naive. I don’t know. I hope not, because I really don’t want these two men and their dogs to kill you. They would, you know. If I hadn’t asked them not to. If I wasn’t here. They’d kill you.” Rags shook her head. “Maybe even now, if I asked them to do it, they’d kill all of you. You can see that they would. That they could. They’re killers.”
Tom sighed again.
“But there’s a difference,” said Rags. “They’re killers, but they’re not monsters.”
She went over and handed the locket back to Mama Rat.
“Maybe you can stop being monsters too.”
Rags had to wait a long time before Mama Rat took the locket back. The woman’s hands were shaking as she wrapped them both around the locket, but Rags didn’t immediately let go of the chain. The brief tug-of-war forced the woman to meet Rags’s eyes.
“My family used to go to church,” said Rags. “When my family was alive. When there was a world. Every Sunday we’d dress up nice and go. Since all this started, I think I stopped believing in God for a while. Not sure I believe even now. It’s hard to believe in anything when everything is dying.”
As if in agreement, the dead moaned louder.
They were in sight now. A dozen of them, shambling through the park, coming from different directions. Not dangerously close yet, but coming. Definitely coming.
“One of the stories I remember from church,” continued Rags, “is the one about Cain and Abel. You know that one? Everyone does. They were brothers, and I forget why they had a fight, but Cain killed Abel. Bashed his head in. I guess that means Cain invented murder. When I first heard that story, I thought that it was going to end with God killing Cain. Like for punishment, you know? But he didn’t. He let Cain live. Cain’s pretty much the ancestor of everyone else. That’s crazy when you think about it. Cain, the guy who committed the first murder, is the one ancestor we all share. You’re white, I’m black, Tom’s an Asian guy—but we all go back to Cain.”
The moans of the dead floated on the breeze.
“Do you know what God did?” said Rags. “He told everyone that they weren’t allowed to kill Cain. He made it a sin to do that. And he put a mark on Cain so that everyone would know who he was. They’d know, and they’d have to let him live. I never understood that story before.” Rags let go of the chain. “Now I think maybe I do.”
She reached out and touched the skull tattoo on Mama Rat’s chest.
“Anyone who looks at you can see the same mark.”
Mama Rat touched the tattoo as well, and for a brief moment their fingers touched. Something passed between them, like a static shock. Rags felt it, and she knew that Mama Rat did too.
“We’re supposed to survive this, you know,” said Rags, stepping back. “This plague, all this disease and stuff. We’re supposed to survive it.”
“How . . . how do you know that?”
Rags thought about it, then shrugged and shook her head.
“Because we’re still alive. That has to mean something.”
“What if it doesn’t mean anything?” asked Mama Rat, clutching the locket to her breast. “What if none of this means anything?”
Rags shrugged again. “No. What if it does?”
With that she turned away. The dead were coming closer.
Captain Ledger and Tom stepped back and glanced at each other. Then they turned away too. The dogs were the last to leave.
The two men, the girl, and the two big dogs walked together along the street. Away from the dead, and away from the eight monsters who stood together near their pile of discarded weapons.
10
That night they camped on the top floor of an office building. Tom stayed with Rags while Ledger and the dogs cleared the building, checking for the dead. When it was clear, they went up to the fifth floor and found an office that had two couches and big windows. They made a cooking fire in a metal trash can, and Ledger produced cans of Spam from his pack. They ate in silence. In fact, none of them had spoken a word since they’d left Mama Rat.
When they were done eating, they sat on the couches and watched the sunset. Bones laid his big head on Rags’s lap. Baskerville, free of his spiked and bladed armor, crawled under a big desk and began snoring.
It was Tom who broke the silence. “What you did back there?” he began, his voice soft. “What you said? That was very brave.”
“Brave?” said Rags, surprised.
“Oh yeah,” agreed Ledger. “You’re something else, kid.”
Rags shrugged.
“Want to tell us about your family?” asked Tom.
She shook her head.
They nodded.
The sun set and the stars came out. With no lights in the city, there were ten billion jewels in the nighttime sky. They sat and watched them and said nothing.
Finally Tom said, “Do you want to come with us? There’s a small town out near Yosemite. It’s an old reservoir, but we’re building a fence and planting some crops. We have about a thousand people now. More coming in all the time. You’d be welcome. You’d be safe.”
Instead of answering, Rags asked, “What do you think she’ll do?”
“Mama Rat?” asked Ledger. Then he shrugged. “I know you’d like to believe that she and her crew are going to have a change of heart and devote the rest of their lives to good works. But . . .”
He let the rest hang.
“If she hurts another kid,” said Rags, “is that on me? Will that be my fault?”
“Ooh,” said Ledger, wincing, “that is one tough philosophical question.”
“No,” said Tom, “it’s not. You’re asking if mercy is wrong if the person who receives it goes out and does something wrong again.”
“I guess I am,” said Rags. “I’ve been sitting here thinking about it and wondering if I did something stupid or wrong.”
The men gave it serious thought. They all did, and Ledger surprised her by being the first to answer. “No,” he said. “If mercy’s the wrong choice, then how screwed are we as a species?”
“But you’d have killed them,” said Rags.
“Yes, I would have,” he admitted. “And I still wish I had.”
“But—”
“But that doesn’t make me right. And showing mercy to a monster doesn’t make you wrong.”
She shook her head. “I don’t really understand it.”
Tom smiled for the first time. A sad and wistful smile. “Who ever does?” He leaned over and patted Rags on the knee. “But I have to tell you, the difference between what I would have done, and what Joe would have done, and what you did, is simple. And it’s important. Maybe more important than anything. Maybe more important than mercy itself.”
She studied his dark eyes, waiting.
“What you did was based on hope.”
“Hope,” she echoed.
“If we give up hope, then this world really will belong to the monsters and the dead.” He smiled again. “And I thank you for that.”
Ledger looked thoughtfully at Tom, then nodded to Rags. “Yeah. That says it. Hope.” He grinned and shook his head. “In this day and age, who’d have thought there was any of that left?”
“Hope,” Rags said again.
They watched the moon rise.
“You didn’t answer my question,” said Tom. “About coming back with us to Mountainside.”
“I . . . don’t know.”
“What’s your alternative?” asked Ledger.
She rose and walked to the window. “Does anyone know what’s happening out there? In the rest of the world, I mean?”
“The plague is everywhere,” said Ledger.
“That doesn’t mean everyone’s dead,” said Rags. “We’re not.”
“No,” a
greed Tom. “We’re not.”
“I . . . ,” she began, then faltered. She drew in a breath. “I think I want to go find out. I think I want to go and see what’s out there. There has to be something. Who knows, maybe someone’s trying to put it all back together. I need to find out. I want to find out.”
“Alone?” said Tom, alarmed. “It’s too dangerous.”
Ledger leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “She won’t be alone.”
“You’re going with her?”
“Maybe I will,” said the ranger. “Me, and a couple of flea-bitten mutts I happen to know.”
Rags turned and stared at him. “Really?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“But . . . why?”
Ledger stood up and joined her at the window. “Because until today I’d given up hope too. I thought it was a sucker’s game. Now . . . well, now I’m not so sure.”
“Because of me?”
“Sure, kid. Why not?”
“I’m just a kid.”
“So? Who ever said kids can’t change things? Change people. Change minds.” Ledger bent and kissed her on the forehead. “Who knows, you and me—? Maybe we’ll go change the whole world.” He laughed.
And Rags, despite everything, laughed too.
Bones jumped up and pushed between them, offering his head to whoever would pet it. They both did. After a moment, Baskerville joined them.
Only Tom sat apart, still on the couch, still wearing the same sad smile.
“Hope,” he said, tasting the word.
“Hope,” said Ledger, nodding.
“Hope,” agreed Rags.
Above the city, the moon burned as bright as a promise.
And the night, like all nights, passed.
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
ON DISCOVERING YOUR OWN PATH
(BEFORE FLESH & BONE)
Benny and I fight a lot.
I mean . . . a lot.
We love each other, but we don’t always love everything about each other.
We want to be together, but we don’t want the same things out of life. I know that, and he knows it . . . even if we don’t always talk about it.
If this was a fairy tale, he’d be my Prince Charming and we’d live happily ever after.
If this was one of the epic fantasy stories Benny reads, then I’d be his princess and we’d live happily ever after.
Neither of us are those things. Not to ourselves and not to each other, so . . .
I don’t know if happily ever after is a real thing.
Neither of us know if we’re going to like the people each other becomes.
If so, we’ll have to fall in love again and again as we change.
If not, I think we love each other enough as friends to stay friends.
But even that’s not written in stone, is it?
PART THREE
ADRIFT IN THE ROT AND RUIN
Stay Calm and Be Warrior Smart!
In the Land of the Dead
The Fence
(Between the events of Rot & Ruin and Dust & Decay)
The teenager sat on a folding chair and stared through the fence at the zombie.
He was there most mornings. Sometimes in the afternoons, too.
At first the fence guards tried to chase him away.
“What the heck are you doing there, kid?” growled one, a new guard who didn’t know who the boy was. The guard had come along the fence, a shotgun open at the breech crooked over one arm, a wad of pink chewing gum in his open mouth. When the kid did not move or even look at him, the guard came and stood right in front of him, blocking out the sun, blocking eye contact with the dead thing on the other side of the chain-link wall. “Hey? You deaf or dead?” the guard demanded.
Only then did the teenager raise his eyes to the big guard with the polished steel shotgun. He had dark-green eyes and brown hair, and the sunlight revealed streaks of red in his dark hair. A good-looking kid, fit and lean; the kind of kid the guard thought should be fishing for trout up at the stream or trying to lay some lumber on a breaking ball down at McGoran Field. He didn’t look like the morbid kind of teen he sometimes met here at the fence; the kind who dressed in rags and painted their faces gray and pretended to be zoms. The Gonnz, they called themselves. No, this kid looked like any other teenager from town.
“You okay?” the guard asked, his tone still sharp.
The teen did not say a word. He simply stared into the guard’s eyes.
“You got to be careful around zoms, kid. They bite.”
Something flicked through the kid’s eyes; an emotion or reaction that the guard could not identify.
The guard was tough, big-chested and unshaven, a former trade route rider who had recently moved to Mountainside from Haven. The guard was used to staring down other people. He was that kind of man. He’d been out in the Ruin, he’d fought zoms, killed more than a few. No boy had ever stared him down, not even when the guard had been a boy. He met the boy’s stare and stood his ground.
But it was the guard whose eyes broke contact first and slid away.
Before he did, the man’s stern face changed, the harsh lines of his scowl softening into an uncertain frown. As he broke eye contact, he tried to hide it by pretending to turn and look at the zombie the kid had been staring at.
“What’s so special about this one?” demanded the guard. “You know her?”
The zombie was dressed in the tattered rags of a party dress. Most people who worked the fence or ran the trade routes were pretty good at guessing how old a person had been before they’d zommed out, and this one looked to have been forty or fifty. A middle-aged woman dressed for some event. Maybe a graduation, maybe a wedding. The relentless California suns and fourteen brutal winters had bleached her rags to a paleness in which only the ghosts of wildflowers could still be seen. The dress must have been vibrant and pretty once. Expensive, too.
The guard turned back to the kid on the chair.
“Who was she?” he asked, and much of the gruffness was gone from his voice. He suddenly thought he knew, and he didn’t want to know. “She your mom, kid?”
The teenager stood up and moved his chair a few feet to the left so that he had a clear view of the dead woman in the party dress.
“Hey,” said the guard. “Did you hear me? I asked—”
“No,” said the kid. “She’s not my mother.”
The guard’s frown deepened. “Aunt?”
“No.”
“Someone from your family—?”
“I don’t know her,” said the teen.
The guard looked from the boy to the zom and back again.
“Then what’s she to you?”
The teen didn’t answer. He sat down on his chair and rested his elbows on his thighs and looked through the fence. The zombie in the faded party dress shuffled clumsily through the tall grass, ignoring the guard and turning her dusty eyes on the boy. She stopped a foot from the fence; her arms hung limply at her sides, fingers twitching every once in a while. Her mouth opened and closed as if trying to speak. Or chewing on some imagined meal.
“Jeez, kid . . . haven’t you ever seen a zom before?” asked the guard.
The teenager nodded. “One or two.”
“So, what’s the fascination?”
The boy almost smiled. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Minutes passed slowly. Flies crawled over the zombie’s face. Sun-drowsy bees droned by, looking for flowers in the shade of the guard tower a hundred yards along the fence line. Five crows settled on the top bar of the fence and cawed to one another in their own ancient language.
The boy and the zombie stared at each other as if the guard, the fence, and the rest of the world did not exist.
“You shouldn’t be out here,” the guard said. “Ain’t safe.”
After a long, thoughtful moment, the teen said, “I know.”
“There’s been a lot of trouble lately, and not just with the zoms.”
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The teen nodded.
“Bunch of bounty hunters got themselves killed up in the hills last month.”
Another nod.
“Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. Their whole crew. Got ambushed. Someone killed the whole bunch of them.”
“Yes,” said the boy. “I heard.”
“If you heard, then you know it ain’t safe out there. Weird stuff happening out in the Ruin, too. Zoms are all stirred up. People been seeing stuff. Wild animals and such, stuff nobody’s seen for years, and I’m not talking about wolves and bears. There’s talk about animals out of old zoos and circuses from before First Night. Tigers and lions and—”
The boy took a breath and exhaled it slowly and audibly. He turned to look at the guard. “Is there a town law about sitting here?”
“Probably,” the guard said bluntly. “Especially for underage—”
“I’m not underage,” said the boy. “I’m fifteen.”
“Fifteen? Then how come you’re here all the time? Shouldn’t you be working, earning your ration dollars?”
Another ghost of a smile flitted over the teen’s mouth. “I am working.”
“Gimme a break. You’re just loafing out here.”
The teen shrugged.
“Okay,” said the guard in a challenging tone, “what kind of job are you working at, sitting out here looking at zoms all day?”
The boy’s eyes burned with green fire. Cold and distant. “I’m a zombie hunter,” he said.
That made the guard laugh. “Oh really?”
“Really. An apprentice, but, yeah . . . that’s what I do.”
“You’re a bounty hunter? That’s what you’re trying to tell me? That’s what I’m supposed to believe?”
The teen shrugged. “Believe what you want.”
The guard gave a big braying laugh. “And who are you supposed to be apprenticing to?”
The cold green eyes were steady and unblinking. “My brother,” he said.
“Yeah? And who’s your brother?”
“Tom Imura,” said the boy.