“Then you can’t either. Not if you want to stay out here. Maybe if you went to Mountainside with that kid, Imura. Sure, behind fences you can take five. Or down in Asheville, in the new towns. But out here? Nope. You train, you prepare, you don’t let up and don’t lighten up and that way you . . . what?”
“You get to stay alive,” she replied.
“Yeah you do.”
It was a conversation they had so many times in a hundred different ways.
So, she was careful. Always. And in all ways.
She missed Ledger, though. Every night since he’d left to try to build a team of rangers, she wondered where he was, what he was doing, and if he was still alive.
Probably still alive, she generally concluded. Joe Ledger was a very hard man to kill.
Joe had taken Bones’s older brother, Baskerville, with him, as well as Freya, the full-blood American mastiff mother of Ghoulie. Three hunters traveling in a pack, and one perhaps more of an animal than the other two.
The last time she saw them was nine years ago. Since then the world had grown quieter, older, less civilized, and far stranger.
Since then, Rags had crossed the country in a long, unplanned zigzag pattern, with no specific destination ever in mind. Going where the wind blew her was how she thought about it. Taking the road less traveled, in all the ways that phrase could be defined.
The years were long, and although sometimes she was completely content to share her life only with dogs—first Bones, then Ghoulie—she often wondered if she should turn and go back to the west. To find Ledger and maybe that other man, Tom Imura. To find people.
The dead were the poorest of company, and as the months crawled by, Rags became more disillusioned by talking to herself or imagining conversations in her head. She craved a simple conversation. She longed to belong somewhere. That hadn’t been the case when she and Ledger parted company, but it was now. She was lonely, and the world had become so empty and so quiet. There weren’t enough things to shelter her from her increasingly depressing thoughts.
One of which was the nagging question she so often asked herself.
Why?
Why keep going? Why keep fighting?
Why stay alive?
Why, why, why?
The more she asked herself those questions, the less often she could construct an answer. And over time, even the lies she told herself wore thin.
What terrified her most was the thought that staying alive had become nothing more than a habit. That was it. A reflex action without further or deeper purpose.
At night she dreamed about her family, lost to the plague all those years ago. She dreamed that they waited for her on the other side of a thin veil. All it would take to be with them again, to be happy again, to be needed and loved again, would be to cut through the veil. Ledger had taught her how to kill in a hundred different ways, and some of those ways could be applied to her own skin, her own veins, her own heart.
There were times when the presence of Ghoulie—of another beating heart a few feet away—was all that tethered her to the world on this side of the veil. With every day, with every endless night, that tether was fraying. She knew that someday it would snap.
Or she would cut it.
That day used to be far, far off.
Now, though . . .
Now she moved through the days and along the miles, and she tried not to cry. She tried not to beg for someone or something to take her away.
Or to give her a reason to stay.
Her path led nowhere in particular. Today it brought her along a creek and down some overgrown roads and into a fence made of stout timbers that was set across the blacktop at the entrance to a town.
There was a sign.
DOYLESTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
Once upon a time a population count had been painted in the lower left, but someone had scratched it out with real passion so that the board beneath was scored and splintered.
It was a small town north of Philadelphia and south of New York. Neither of those cities was ever on her list of possible destinations. Philadelphia was a radioactive hole in the ground. It had been one of the first cities nuked in the government’s failed attempt to contain the spread of the zombies. Dumb.
New York, on the other hand, was a different case altogether. Rags had met a few travelers who had been there. Something had happened there. Or many weird things.
The stories were so strange and often contradictory, and she had never once met anyone who’d been there who was also sane enough to give a story Rags could believe. Worse things than zombies, the survivors all told. Worse things . . . but exactly what these horrors were, the survivors either could not or would not tell her.
Even though Rags told Ghoulie that they were never, ever going to go to such a place, their path seemed to be drifting in that direction.
Pure accident, of course. Nothing intended.
She told the dog that a lot.
Ghoulie did not appear to believe her, but being a dog, was unable to say so.
Her self-respect was comforted by the fact that at least they were not heading toward that city with anything approaching haste. Rags did not believe in haste. She had no use for it except in crisis moments, and she was smart enough to avoid most threats. So, without hurrying, she wandered through the years of her life.
There was a door in the fence, and it stood ajar.
Another place that had been fortified against the dead and whose defenses had either been abandoned or had failed.
Moving with great caution, Rags passed through the gate and walked along the empty road toward the town. Ghoulie trotted beside her, looking right and left to study the overgrown foliage that flanked the road.
They stopped at an intersection and spent some time on the porch of an old hotel. The front corner of the hotel had been a Starbucks once, but now it was home to rats that made their nests among piles of bones.
The streets were quiet and empty. The sun hung low in the west, casting deep shadows across the street, bathing nearly everything in purple darkness. The crickets had begun their concert early tonight, anticipating the quick twilight of late autumn. Somewhere off to her left a bullfrog croaked in a pond created by collapsed sewer pipes and seasonal flooding. Farther along the side street, a doe and two fawns foraged among wild bushes that flourished in the cracked asphalt.
That was good. Deer were as good a warning system as birds and crickets for signaling the presence of danger. The deer fled and the natural noisemakers fell silent in the presence of the dead. Deer also hightailed it away from dog packs, wolf packs, and hunting packs of the big cats.
So far, there were no obvious threats.
Ghoulie nuzzled her hand, letting her know that he thought it was safe for them to eat. Or rather, for her to feed him. He was less involved in how and when she fed herself.
“Okay, okay, don’t nag,” she told him as she unslung her pack and fished in it for the rest of a rabbit she’d trapped and cooked that morning. She tore off a leg for herself and then cocked an eyebrow at Ghoulie, who immediately sat down and looked well behaved and attentive.
“Here you go,” said Rags, placing the rabbit onto the floor.
Ghoulie destroyed the rabbit, eating the meat and even crunching most of the bones. He kept his head down while he ate, reducing the noise.
They both had some water from a jug hung from Ghoulie’s saddlebags, and they settled down to watch the fall of night. Everything was calm, even peaceful.
Until it wasn’t.
Until a superhero walked out of the building across the street.
3
Then
New York City
“You decent?” yelled a voice. Male, deep, familiar.
Rachael felt her face go hot even though she was fully dressed and not—thanks to winning her inwardly directed battle of wills—flaunting anything. The zipper of her tunic was up to a level perhaps one inch above modesty. A bit of overcompensation. Even so, s
he felt suddenly naked as she opened the door to let Brett in.
If he noticed her burning face, he didn’t comment.
“Oh, good, you’re ready,” he said as he crossed the room and went into the bathroom.
“Um . . . hello?” she said to the door as it closed.
“Got to pee,” he called from inside.
So I hear, she thought sourly. He seemed to be making a career of it in there, so she killed a few moments checking her gear in the mirror. The gun belt had come out perfectly, and the pistol replica she carried looked like standard-issue SHIELD, but it was plastic and sealed with the orange peace bond required by the convention for all weapons. She had little pouches on the belt; they looked very official, but she’d filled them with lipstick, a compact, gum, cash, a debit card, her cell phone charger, a printed schedule that was folded neatly into a block, and a small stage makeup kit to keep her face freshly bruised. The version of Maria Hill she was playing today was specific to the Helicarrier attack scene from the first Avengers film and not the internal revolt by sleeper HYDRA agents from the second Captain America movie. There were differences, and those differences mattered. It was all about attention to detail.
Rachael intended to leverage her costume making and pop culture purity of knowledge into a job in the film industry, or maybe at a Disney attraction. There were a lot of Hollywood people at the Comic Con. You never knew who might see her and ask. She wouldn’t be the first cosplayer to get a nod from the gods of moviemaking.
There was another knock on the door, and Rachael gave her hair a final pat and went over to let her in. Gayla the Plastic Fantastic. Rachael took a breath and fixed an utterly false but hopefully believable friendly smile on her face, and then she opened the door.
Gayla stood there, dressed as Angela, the female version of Thor from the comics, with miles and miles of cleavage that had no origin in human biology.
Rachael stared at her.
And screamed.
Gayla’s costume was perfect.
Her flesh was not.
There was a huge, gaping, bleeding wound on her upper arm, from which bright-red blood pumped.
Rachael screamed very loudly.
And . . . then she suddenly laughed.
“You creep!” she yelled. “You scared the crap out of me.”
It was such an intensely realistic wound that Rachael was disgusted, impressed, and jealous all at the same time. She could do costumes, but makeup effects were a different skill set.
She gave Gayla a playful shove.
Gayla staggered backward and nearly fell.
“Oh, sorry,” said Rachael quickly, snaking a hand out to catch her arm. “What’s the theme? Is this a cross-theme thing? Like Thor after she gets mauled by dark elves, or . . .”
Gayla opened her mouth.
Not to answer.
Not to scream.
Instead of sound, she vomited a pint of blood that was so dark it was nearly black. It struck Rachael’s chest.
And then Gayla was falling.
Falling.
And the world was falling too.
Completely and irrevocably off its hinges.
4
Now
Doylestown
Ghoulie shot to his feet, scattering bones and dried leaves.
Rags rose with him, her calm dissolving into immediate combat awareness. She did not carry a gun, favoring weapons that made little or no sound. So she whipped out the matched pair of fighting sticks Captain Ledger had taught her to use so many years ago. They were thirty-inch lengths of half-inch pipe fitted with lethal knobs with narrow tungsten-alloy blades on one side and slender spikes on the other.
The person across the street was dressed in a blue costume with red-and-white stripes around the torso and a white star on the chest. Red boots and gloves, a mask that covered the upper part of the head and had a white A on the forehead. The figure carried a round shield painted with concentric red-and-white circles around another white star.
Rags recognized the character. She’d spent endless hours over the long years reading what books she could find. Sometimes they were novels, sometimes they were old comics. Whatever survived and could be read. So, yes, she knew who Captain America was.
Except that in the comics Captain America was male, and this person was not.
This was a woman. Tall and slender, but definitely female.
And . . . this person was nobody’s idea of a hero. Not anymore.
She was a zom.
The dead woman in the hero’s costume staggered into the street, feet moving without grace, shuffling and tripping over the smallest thing and yet not falling. The shield was strapped to her arm and seemed to be fixed there so that it did not slip off. There was a huge rip in the blue material on her thigh, exposing a leg that was missing important muscle and flesh. The flesh around the wound was gray and veined with black lines. Blood was caked around her mouth and splashed in dark splotches on the tunic.
This made no sense at all to Rags.
She had been thirteen when the world fell, and she remembered Halloween. This dead woman was far too old to have been a trick-or-treater, and it was unlikely she had been at a costume party when it all went down. She hadn’t been dead that long.
Not nearly that long.
Rags had seen every kind of walking corpse over the last fourteen years. The dead began to rot and then stopped. The oldest zombies looked like they were made from old leather—wrinkled and moistureless. Only the most recent of the dead had flesh that seemed to remember that it had once been soft and pliant and filled with blood.
This woman was somewhere in between.
Dead, but not withered enough to have been killed when the world ended.
So why was she in costume?
All these thoughts flashed through her head in a microsecond as she prepared herself for flight or combat. Beside her, Ghoulie stood as still and silent as a statue, waiting for her command.
This was a drama they had played out many times, just as she had done with Bones before that. One of the dead entered their world, and they got ready and waited to see what kind of reaction the moment would require.
Most of the time, Rags did nothing, allowing the dead the chance to follow whatever attracted it—some other prey, the wind, or something less understandable—and she would watch it go. Other times she might leave, outpacing the dead, or putting useful barriers between her and trouble. Sometimes, though, neither of those options were available to her. On those days, when the Fates were being playful in the ugly way they had, Rags would have to fight.
She was very good at it. She hated it, but experience had made her both cunning and strong. The slow and clumsy didn’t survive out in the world. They became the shambling threats someone else would have to deal with; and in that transition from inept human to walking dead, they gained a greater measure of threat. A zombie child could bite. An old, crippled corpse crawling along the ground could bite. A bite was all it took.
The creature in the street took a few tentative steps toward the old hotel, then paused as a sound drew its focus. Rags turned too, but she did it slowly, without jerking her head around. Sudden movements drew the eye. Ledger had taught her that. One of ten thousand things he’d taught her.
Ghoulie made a small, soft sound. Not a growl, but enough of a noise to make sure she saw what he saw.
She did.
Across the intersection, moving along the side street, there were people.
Dead people.
Walking singly or in clusters.
Five of them.
Ten.
More.
Moving as fast as the dead ever moved, which was faster than many people knew. They were slow most of the time, but when there was an immediate promise of fresh meat, they could move almost as fast as the living. Some were even faster, moving with real speed. It was something Rags had encountered several times in her travels. Usually with zombies who came from the fringes of areas whe
re nukes had fallen, or where reactors had melted down. The radiation was changing some of them. Not many. Some.
Enough.
Seeded among the zombies in this procession there were some of the faster ones. They loped along. Clumsy, but not as clumsy as the others. One of them scuttled forward on all fours because it had no feet.
They were heading directly toward the center of town, toward the intersection where the old hotel stood.
Directly toward Rags.
Yet with all this, there was something stranger, something that pulled a gasp from Rags’s chest and made Ghoulie begin growling.
There was a person leading the procession, running in front of the pack, sometimes turning to run backward. Waving at them. Taunting them. Calling them.
It was a little girl.
5
Then
New York City
Rachael tore the cape from Gayla’s costume, wadded it up, and pressed it to that terrible wound. She screamed at the top of her lungs.
“BRETT!”
“What?” came his muffled reply. “I’m still in here.”
“Oh my God, Brett, it’s Gayla!”
He whipped the door open and stared, half smiling, because he expected this to be a joke. That was their world. Little dramas, little bits of cosplay fun.
The smile and the color drained from his face.
“What happened? Is that blood?” he demanded. “Jesus—”
“Call 911,” screeched Rachael. “She’s really hurt. Oh my God, she’s really bad.”
He snatched up his cell and was hitting buttons as he dropped to his knees beside her. Rachael heard him shouting into the phone, giving name and room number, the hotel’s location, and a shocked and almost incoherent description of what had happened. Gayla moaned softly and tried to raise her arms, but her movements were feeble and sloppy.
“What happened?” repeated Brett, trying to pull the cloth aside so he could examine the wound. “Did you two get into a fight or—?”
“No,” snapped Rachael. “God, are you stupid? I didn’t do this. Gayla just showed up like this. Someone must have attacked her.”