Her home for the last three days had once been something called a FunMart. She had no idea what that was. It had shelves like a lot of the stores she’d seen, but there was nothing on them. The floor was littered with the torn wrappers of bread loaves and cracker boxes, but everything of value had been scavenged by refugees over the last twelve years, and any forgotten crumbs had been devoured by insects and animals. But the place was dry, and it got her out of the desert heat.
Now it was time to leave. She knew that she wouldn’t be coming back here. The reapers were still out there somewhere. Maybe weeks behind her, maybe much closer. She had only stayed this long at the FunMart because of the gripes—a terrible storm that had raged in her intestines after eating a piece of questionable food. That lizard she’d caught and cooked must have been sick, or it had carried some kind of toxin. For two whole days her stomach felt like it was filled with razor blades and acid. She threw up everything she ate, which was also a terrible waste of food. Nothing of value went into her system. No proteins or fats or useful calories. No nutrients.
When the gripes passed, the girl was left weak and trembling. If even the weakest reaper came at her, she could not have defended herself.
The desert offered no obvious comfort. Food had to be caught, and there was very little water. So survival required movement. Hunger demanded it.
Even so, she lingered at the door of the FunMart.
The girl did not have a home. Not anymore. And the home she used to have was not a place she could return to. No way. To the people she left behind she was a disgrace, a lost soul.
A monster.
Places like this empty shell of a FunMart offered no real protection; it was not a home in any genuine way. It was a place to be sick, and if she stayed longer, it would be the place where she died. The reapers were coming. She did not know when they would find her, only that they would.
Beyond the door was the road that stretched through the endless desert. Beyond the door was the truth. The loneliness. The fear.
The hunger.
The hunger called to her. It yelled. It shrieked.
So she had to leave.
Not soon.
Now.
Get your skinny butt in gear, girl, scolded her inner voice. No handsome prince is going to stroll out of a fairy tale and serve you a hot breakfast of eggs and grits.
“Shut up,” she told herself. Her voice sounded dusty and far older than her fifteen years.
She could see a faintness of green down the road. Sparse woods that had once been vast groves of fruit trees set, improbably, on the edge of the Nevada desert. Patches of scrub pine and weathered creosote bushes were thriving there now as the orchard died. The ghosts of the fruit trees stood like pale sticks. She reckoned that the water pumping stations were dead. All these years of blowing sand and dust had frozen the gears in the rows of tall, white wind turbines. Now they stood above the orchard, silent as clouds, offering the lie of power in a powerless world.
Beyond the forest was a town. It said so on the map she had.
A place called Red Pass, which looked to be have been built into the cleft of a long ridge of low mountains.
Red Pass. The name meant nothing to her, but the fact that it was a town meant that there might be some vittles. Old canned stuff. Maybe some gardens with enough life for wild carrots and potatoes to still be growing. She knew that birds lived in some of the old towns. Even a scrawny pigeon was roast breast for dinner and a day’s worth of soup from the rest. And where there was one pigeon, there would be two.
The town was where she had to go.
Ten miles under the August sun.
It had to be done during the day, though. At night she would not be able to see, or hunt, or defend. And they did not need the light to find her.
They.
The gray people. The wanderers.
The hungry ghosts.
She knew they were not really ghosts. That was just something her father used to call them. Hungry ghosts.
They were also in the towns.
They were always in the towns.
It’s where they’d lived. It’s where they’d died.
It’s where they waited.
And she, hungry and desperate, had no choice but to leave her empty little place of safety and journey into the places of the dead.
Hunger demanded it.
4
“Sister Margaret!”
The words tore her out of a daydream of food and dragged her into horror.
The girl spun around and crouched.
There were three of them. Two men and a woman. They rose from the desert, shedding the sand-colored cloaks that had allowed them to hide and wait until she stumbled right into their trap.
Now you walked into it, girl, said her inner voice. You done gone and stepped right into a snake pit and no mistake.
They were dressed all in black, with red streamers tied to their ankles and wrists. Stylized angel wings were embroidered on their chests. Their heads had been shaved and comprehensively tattooed with complex images of tangled vines and flowers.
Just like hers.
It was a requirement of everyone in the Night Church. A permanent mark that could not be removed. It was supposed to prove an unbreakable attachment to the god of that faith.
Now it was the only thing that made the girl look like she was connected to them. She did not wear the dark clothes and red streamers and angel wings. She wore ratty jeans, stolen sneakers, and a leather vest buttoned up over her bare skin. She had no other clothes, and she would rather die than wear the clothes of a reaper.
Never again.
The reapers approached, smiling the way they’re taught to do. Smiles of false welcome, of false acceptance.
There was no trace of real acceptance in the Night Church. You were collected by them, you belonged to them, but there was no approval of who you were.
“Sister Margaret,” said the taller of the two men as he walked toward her. He held a broad-blade machete in one muscular fist, carrying it casually with the tip pointed toward the ground. “Praise be to the darkness that we found you.”
“Stop right there, Jason,” warned the girl. “Y’all turn around and be on your way.”
They continued to smile at her. The shorter man had a hunter’s hatchet tucked through his belt. Sunlight gleamed along the wicked edge as he drew it.
“We bring love and greetings from your mother, Sister Marg—”
“Don’t call me that,” snapped the girl. “That’s not my name no more.”
“What name do you want us to use, sister?” asked the woman. She was young, no more than three years older than the girl. Maybe eighteen, but already there were combat scars on her face, and her eyes were ablaze with righteous anger.
“I don’t have a name no more, Connie,” said the girl. “I left all that behind when I left the church.”
“That’s not true, little sister. Your mother sent us to bring you home, to bring you back into the peace and love of the Night Church.”
“I know you, Connie. You don’t open your mouth ’cept when a lie needs to come out.”
Sister Connie’s smile flickered, and her eyes went cold. “And you can’t help but carve more sins onto your own soul.”
Sister Connie drew her blade—a slender double-edged antique dagger that had been looted from a museum in Omaha. The girl had been there when Connie had found the weapon four years ago. Six families had been living in the museum, and they had refused to join the Night Church. The reapers had cut through them like scythes through ripe wheat.
The girl, only eleven at the time, had killed too. It had not been the first time she’d ended the day bathed in innocent blood.
The memory burned in her mind as she saw that knife in Sister Connie’s hand.
“C’mon, Sister Connie,” said the shorter man, “it’s too hot to stand here and play games with this brat.”
“Hush, Brother Griff,” said the young woman. “We
were told to give our little sister here a chance to recant her wicked ways and come back to the church.”
The girl laughed. A single, short bark of harsh derision.
“Come back? What kind of sun damage have y’all had on what little brains ye got that my ‘coming back’ was even a possibility? Mom doesn’t want me back and we all know it. She wants me dead and left to the vultures. Anything any of y’all say different would be a goll-durn lie.”
Jason, Griff, and Connie stared at her with a variety of emotions playing on their faces. Anger at her sass, shock at the bald intensity of her words, confirmation of their private thoughts, and something else. A cruel delight that the girl knew only too well. The anticipation of wetting those blades as they opened red mouths in her flesh and sent her screaming into the eternal darkness.
None of them answered her, though.
The girl said, “Y’all don’t have to do this. We can all just walk away.”
The three reapers began to spread out, forming a loose half circle around her, hands flexing to find the perfect grip on each weapon.
The girl sighed. It was so heavy a sigh that it felt like a piece of her heart was being pulled out of her chest and flung into the wind.
“I tried,” she said, though even she wasn’t sure to whom those words were directed. “Dang if I didn’t at least try.”
She drew her knife.
They moved first. They moved with lightning speed.
Perhaps in their excitement they had forgotten just who it was they’d been sent to find. There were three of them. They were all older than the girl, larger and stronger than the girl, better armed than the girl.
It should have ended there.
Brother Jason lunged first, raising his arm and chopping down with the big machete. The blade cut through the air where a girl-shape had been a millisecond before. Jason’s swing was so heavy, backed by all of his weight and muscle, that the blade chopped deeply into the highway blacktop, sending shock waves up his arm.
The girl spun away from the blow, twirling like a top but staying so close she could feel the wind as Jason’s weapon whistled past. She continued her spin and flashed her arm out, silver glinting in her hand, and then the dry air was seeded with red.
Jason made a confused gagging sound that was more surprise than pain as he dropped his knife and clutched his throat. A throat that was no longer constructed for breathing.
“Get her!” screeched Sister Connie, and thrust out with her knife. But the girl darted away, ducked under the swing of Brother Griff’s hatchet, slashed him across the top of one thigh, and then shoved him toward Connie.
Griff tried to keep his balance; Connie tried to jerk her knife back.
Griff suddenly screeched like a gaffed rabbit and dropped to his knees. The movement tore the knife from Connie’s fingers. She stared in horror as blood bubbled from between Griff’s lips.
“No . . . ,” he said, his voice thick and wet.
But the moment said yes, and he fell.
That left Connie standing there, her hands empty, her companions down, and all of it happening so fast.
They stood there, face to face no more than six feet apart. The wind blew past them, making the streamers on Connie’s clothes snap and pop.
Connie tried to say something, tried to frame a comment that would make sense of the moment. “I—” was all she managed before the girl cut her off.
“Run,” said the girl, her voice raw and ugly.
Connie stared at her. “W-what . . . ?”
“Run,” the girl repeated. “Run!”
Connie stood there, blank-faced and unsure of what was happening. An easy and certain kill had somehow become a disaster.
“Griff and Jason were good fighters. Not y’all, Connie. Y’all were never no good,” the girl said quietly. “But me? Heck, I was taught every dirty trick there is by Saint John of the Knife.”
Connie paled. She knew all about the girl’s training and her level of skill, but hearing of it again and seeing the proof of it demonstrated in the silent bodies of Griff and Jason chilled her to the bone. Her lips quivered with sudden fear.
“No . . . ,” she said. “Don’t.”
“Run away,” said the girl who was no longer Sister Margaret. Her arms were red to the elbows with bright blood. “Run away and tell my mother not to send any more of her killers after me. Tell her to leave me alone. Tell her to forget I exist. Tell her I died out here.”
“I . . . can’t . . .”
“You better.”
“I—”
Connie’s protest was interrupted by a low groan. She looked down to see that Griff’s eyes were open. His dead eyes.
His dead mouth opened too, rubbery lips pulling back from bloody teeth as he uttered that deep, terrible moan of awakening hunger. He reached for Connie with twitching fingers.
Connie gave a shrill cry of horror and sprang back.
Right into Jason.
He wrapped his big arms around her and dragged her back.
Connie fought against him, driving her elbow into his stomach, head butting him with the back of her skull, stamping on his feet, and all the while trying to free an arm so that she could wave the red cloth ribbon under his nose. He snapped at her, trying to bite her hand, trying to bite her face.
The girl knew about those ribbons. The reapers soaked them every few days in a noxious chemical mixture that made the gray people react the same way they did around other dead. When the chemical was strong, the dead totally ignored the reapers.
“How long since you dipped your streamers, Connie?” she asked.
Connie’s face, already pale, went whiter still.
She screamed. Loud and terrible.
And then the girl was moving. She lunged in and slammed the steel pommel of her knife against the dead reaper’s temple, knocking his head sideways. That loosened his hold, and the girl grabbed the shoulder of Connie’s shirt and gave her a single violent pull. Connie staggered three awkward steps backward, then fell over Griff, who was trying to get to his feet.
The girl ducked low and slashed Jason’s ankles, cutting the tendons. Even though the man was past feeling pain, his skeleton still needed those tendons in order to stand. Jason toppled into the dust.
Connie was still screaming, but now her horror was directed at Griff, who crawled toward her, teeth bared, fingers scrabbling for purchase on her trouser cuffs. In her panic and confusion Connie had lost herself completely, forgetting everything she’d learned, everything that had helped her survive this long since the Fall.
The girl knew that Connie was going to die.
She almost let her die.
Almost.
Instead, with a sigh of disgust, the girl jumped forward and kicked Griff in the side of the head with the flat of her foot. It toppled the dead man onto his side. Connie stopped moving and stared.
The girl walked up behind Griff, used another kick to knock him flat on his stomach, crouched, and drove the point of her knife into the cleft formed by the bottom notch of the skull and the upper part of the spine. The brain stem. The knife slid in without effort, and Griff instantly went still. No death twitch, no transition. Living death, and then the forever kind of death.
Jason was eight feet away, crawling toward them.
The girl looked at him, then turned to stare down at Connie.
“I told you before and this’ll be the last time,” said the girl. “Run away. Tell my mother and Saint John and all the others to leave me alone.”
“They won’t. You’ve sinned against the church and against your mother. The reapers will never stop. You belong with us. You belong to the church, heart and soul, flesh and bone. You know that, Sister Mar—”
The girl moved like lightning and crouched over the reaper, the bloody tip of her knife pricking the softness under Connie’s chin.
“Call me that again and I’ll butcher you like a hog and leave you to bleed out here. I’ll leave you to Jason and the flies
and the scorpions. Y’all think I’m joshing you?”
Connie shook her head.
The girl leaned closer. “Tell them, Connie. Tell them to leave me be.”
A tear broke from the corner of the reaper’s eye. “They won’t. The reapers will never stop. You know that. You know that they’ll never stop looking for you. And they will find you and they will kill you. You belong to the Night Church. You belong with us.”
“I don’t belong to anybody!” snarled the girl. “Why can’t you get that through your head? I don’t belong to the church or to my mother or Saint John or anybody. Leave me alone.”
Jason was inches away now. The girl pivoted away from Connie, knocked Jason flat, and ended him the way she had ended Griff. A single thrust delivered with the cold precision of a perfect killer.
Exactly the way she had killed before. Exactly the way she had ended the lives of countless gray people. And countless living people.
The girl stood up and backed away from the living reaper and the two dead men.
“Y’all just used up whatever bit of mercy I had left,” she said. “Don’t let me see you again.”
With that she turned and walked away.
She didn’t look back. Didn’t watch to see if Connie got up and grabbed a weapon.
She offered her unguarded back to the reaper.
The girl left a trail of broken minutes behind her. She was halfway to the horizon line when the first sobs broke in her chest.
5
That night she caught a small turtle and ate it.
And threw it up.
She curled up in the backseat of a highway patrol car that was pocked with bullet holes and surrounded by bones. As night collapsed around her, she used spit and a piece of cloth to try to wipe the blood from her hands and arms. It left a brown stain.
She cried all night and finally fell into a weary slumber before dawn.
The hunger screamed at her until she woke up.
6
As she staggered through the morning, she daydreamed of cool trees and running water. Of leaping fish and bushes heavy with ripe berries.