She said nothing.
“Z-Games?” he ventured.
She still said nothing.
He grunted. “Wow, you really aren’t from around here, are you?”
“And y’all are taking the long way round the mountain just to answer a question.”
The zees were moving toward them again, and more had joined in.
“Better to tell you at the camp—”
“Tell me now or I ain’t going nowhere.”
“Okay, fast version because, like—well, check it out.” He nodded at the approaching dead. “I’m part of a scavenger crew that’s been working the Ruin and—”
“The what?”
He frowned again and waved his hand to indicate everything. “This . . . the great Rot and Ruin. Used to be called America, now it’s pretty much a breakfast buffet for the shambling wrinklers out there.”
“Still called America, last I heard.”
“Then you heard different than me,” said Jolt. “You been as far west as California?”
“They nuked California, didn’t they?”
“Just L.A. and, I think, San Francisco. Big state, though, and there’s some towns scattered up and down the Sierra Nevadas. Some small settlements farther out. Everything else—well, we just call it the great Rot and Ruin.”
“It’s not all ruined,” said Riot, but her comment lacked conviction. She had seen her fair share of ruin. Some of it caused by the dead, some by other things. The Night Church was turning a lot of this part of the world into a silent graveyard. So . . . ruin . . . that seemed to fit better than anything else she’d heard it called. “What are Z-Games?”
“Ah . . . well, that’s the real fun,” said Jolt. “Makes the whole scavenging thing worth it, you know? We go into towns to locate food, salvageable supplies, all sorts of stuff. We tag the buildings with spray-paint, and then the trade guards go in all armored up and collect the stuff.”
“How is that a game?”
“It’s all about how we go in. You have to go in clean. No weapons, no armor, nothing but the clothes you’re standing up in and, depending on the category, your ride. Gummi Bear’s a biker, or at least he’s practicing to be one. Right now he’s a pied piper. He uses the siren to call the zees. There are a bunch of bikers, though, real pros. And we have sticks—kids on skateboards—and cutters, the cats who cruise on inline roller skates.”
“What are you?”
“I’m a bouncer. I do freerunning—it’s a kind of acrobatic sport running. Used to be called parkour before things fell down. I used to be a stick, but I got pretty good at running and I won these kicks”—he waggled one of the sneakers he wore—“so I switched.”
She goggled at him. “You do this for fun?”
“Sure, why else? Besides, it’s a total rush. The whole thing’s about wits and speed and cruising right there on the edge, where it’s just what you know and what you can do matched against a bunch of biters with dead brains.”
“One bite from those biters is enough.”
“Sure, so the rule is don’t get bit,” he said simply. “Pretty easy rule to remember.”
“Do people get bit?”
Jolt gave another shrug. “Yeah, but the incentive program is pretty strong. Mind you, the crew chiefs won’t let a player in if they think he’s off his game. They’re not actually trying to feed to the biters. The teams that go in are primed, you know? They’re ready to dance on a ray of light and hop over the sun.”
Riot shook her head. “Y’all are crazier than an outhouse full of bats, y’know that, right?”
Jolt laughed out loud.
“What’s so damn funny?”
“Wow, the actual apocalypse was twelve years ago. I mean, we are living in the epilogue to the end of the world, and you’re telling me that we’re crazy for finding ways to have some fun in the middle of it? That’s fricking hilarious.”
She grunted. “The Z-Games . . . is that how that young’un got his face all burned up?”
A shadow crossed Jolt’s face. “Nah. We don’t know how that happened. One of the trade guards, Solomon Jones, found Gummi out on the sand. He was burned and half dead. Maybe three years old. No one else around, and no way to find where he belonged. Solomon brought him to us ’cause that’s what people do with orphans. Everyone in the Games is an orphan.”
“You too?”
“Me too.”
The dead had reached them now and were straining upward to reach them.
“Oops, time to boogie,” said Jolt. “We’re about a mile from the camp. It’s Tuesday, right? That’s chicken-and-bean burrito day. You hungry?”
“I—”
“Or did you fill up on Spam and pineapple?” he asked with a wicked grin. He laughed and ran on, leaping and jumping in the sunshine.
Riot—for that was now her name, and she knew that it was going to stay with her—nearly fell over.
“Well I’ll be a . . . ,” she began softly, but let the words blow away into the wind. In all the surprise and excitement of meeting these two boys she had somehow not connected them to the food placed in her traps. She thought that had been a kind act from a loner who wanted to help but didn’t want to interact. Now she could see the prankishness of the act. The wildness of it.
“Hold on, I’m coming!” she cried, but her inner voice clucked at her. Have a little self-control, girl.
“Hush,” she told that voice.
Riot ran to catch up.
14
During the last quarter mile the demands of running and jumping finally caught up with her. Twice she slipped and had to climb back up from the roadbed. To her satisfaction she saw that Jolt had slowed too. She hoped that he was getting tired—proof that he was human enough—and not that he was slowing down out of pity for her. The other boy, Gummi Bear, had sped on ahead.
Both times she fell, Riot’s first reaction was to pull her knife and wheel to face the oncoming zee. Jolt was far ahead and wouldn’t see her. She knew that she could make the kill quickly and be on her way without alerting him. But in each case she put the knife back, used a kick to knock the zee away from her, and hastily climbed up out of danger.
It made her feel strange and conflicted.
In the Night Church her mother and the elders occasionally had to silence the dead, though they always regretted it. There were complex spiritual reasons that were part of the church’s mission to create what Mom called a “quiet world.” At the same time the members of the church—called the Reapers in the Fields of the Lord or just reapers—wore colored streamers soaked in chemicals that somehow kept the gray people from attacking. And one of the elders, a strange and dangerous man known as Saint John, was trying to devise a way of controlling the countless hordes of living dead. The official church policy was to avoid killing the dead—though killing humans was allowed and even encouraged.
The farther Riot got from that group and the more she viewed it from a distance, the less sense it made.
After she’d fled, the girl realized that she had no choice but to deal harshly with any threat. She had no supply of the chemical that kept the reapers safe, and she had no sentries to watch over her as she slept, no teams of armed reapers to come to her aid if she was attacked by a dozen of the monsters. Since leaving the camp she had killed countless zees. It had become an automatic response.
Now she wondered if doing that had been wrong. How many of those kills had been unavoidable?
It was a dreadful question, and it throbbed like a canker in her mind. In light of Jolt’s disapproval, it felt wrong. Now this kind of killing felt like killing. The word was the same, but the meaning had changed.
Now killing these monsters felt like murder.
There was something dangerous hiding in that thought, but now was not the time to sit and puzzle it out.
She ran and leaped and flew through the air. When she caught up, they grinned at each other and ran together.
Jolt ran ahead of her, looking over his sho
ulder to throw smiles behind him.
Then Brother Andrew stepped out from behind a big delivery van right in Jolt’s path.
There was no time to warn Jolt as the wicked blade of the scythe flashed in the dry desert air.
15
Jolt fell backward, leaning, arching, his muscles contorting his big frame into an impossible backbend, lying almost flat as the blade cut through the air a tenth of an inch above him. The tip of the blade caught the loop of the silver chain and tore it from Jolt’s neck. The skeleton key went spinning through the air to land at Riot’s feet.
Brother Andrew was a bear of a man with biceps like bowling balls and a back that was so crammed with muscle that he looked like a gargoyle. He had put every ounce of his strength into that swing, and had it connected, it would have cut Jolt in half. Easily.
Instead Jolt fell hard on his back on the hood of a red Chevy, and the scythe struck the curved windshield and caromed upward, gouging the glass, ripping loose a piece of silver molding, causing the reaper to spin in a full circle and then lose all balance. Brother Andrew crashed against the side of another car.
All of this . . . all of it . . . inside a fractured second.
Immediately Jolt twisted sideways and rolled off the front of the Chevy. He landed on the balls of his feet and leaped backward as two other reapers rose up from hiding and slashed at him with knives.
The blades glittered with reflected sunlight, and they cut absolutely nothing.
Jolt twisted out of reach, stepped on the bumper, and jumped over their heads. Before he landed, he shot one foot backward in a vicious kick that crashed one reaper into the other. The two of them slammed into Brother Andrew, and the three of them collapsed onto the blacktop. The scythe clattered to the ground nearby.
Jolt landed in a defensive crouch, hands open and ready, knees bent, face displaying equal parts confusion and rage.
“Hey! What the hell are you freaks doing?” he bellowed. “You could have fricking killed me. What, you think I’m a biter? Are you stupid or nuts or blind?”
Brother Andrew pushed himself out from under the two other reapers and climbed to his feet. As he rose, Jolt got his first clear look at the man and his eyes widened.
“Jolt—be careful!” warned Riot, climbing up onto a nearby car.
Brother Andrew bent to retrieve his weapon. He held it in one massive fist and pointed it at Jolt.
“You got one chance, pretty boy,” he said in a voice that was low and gravelly. “Walk away. Leave the little witch with us. She belongs with us. She belongs to us. Walk off now while you can.”
Jolt looked uncertain. “Who the hell are you?”
Brother Andrew cut a look at Riot. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
The big reaper narrowed his eyes. “Who do you think she is?”
“Just a girl,” said Jolt. “A friend. Why?”
Andrew laughed. The other reapers laughed too.
“Look, kid, you don’t know what you stepped into. I don’t know what kind of story Sister Margaret told you or how she convinced you to help her, but she is one of us.” Andrew touched his tattooed scalp. “She bears the mark of the Night Church. She belongs to us.”
Jolt turned his head slightly toward Riot. “What’s he talking about?”
“Don’t listen to him,” she said quickly. “He’s crazy. They all are. And they’re dangerous.”
“More dangerous than you know,” said Brother Andrew. “Saint John and your mother charged me to bring you back. You think we’re here to send you into the darkness, but you’re wrong. That would be easy, and after what you’ve done you don’t get ‘easy.’ You’re going to come back with us, and then you’re going to be on your knees before your mother. You’re going to have to account for everything you’ve done. For all of your crimes. For all of your sins. For—”
“Shut up!” screamed Riot, clapping her hands to her ears. “Just shut up.”
Brother Andrew stopped his tirade, but he laughed quietly, shaking his head with amusement.
“Listen, mister,” said Jolt, “I think you’d better haul your fat butt out of here.”
Brother Andrew took his scythe in both hands. “Boy, you don’t know what kind of trouble you’re asking for. I’m going to tell you one last time—walk away before something that isn’t your business becomes your business. And believe me, you do not want that.”
“What’s going on?” asked a small voice, and they all turned as Gummi Bear appeared between two wrecked cars. He sat on his bike, leaning on one car for support. The crank siren hung around his neck, and his face was flushed with fear.
“Jolt—get him out of here,” said Riot quickly. “They’ll hurt him.”
Brother Andrew clicked his tongue, and the two reapers with him began to move toward the boy.
“Whoa!” barked Jolt. “What are you cats doing?”
The closest one showed his knife to Jolt. “The greatest mercy of god is the release from pain. We will bless this boy. We will open red mouths in his flesh and give him the gift of darkness. Children should not have to suffer in this land of misery and woe.”
“Gift of darkness? What are you talking about?”
“Jolt—they want to kill him,” said Riot, and she moved across the car tops toward Gummi Bear. “That’s what they do—they kill. They think it’s god’s will, that it’s a way to end suffering.”
“It is,” said Brother Andrew. He pointed at Gummi Bear. “Look at this child. Ugly and deformed. He’s suffered terribly. Why perpetuate that suffering when we can bring him peace?”
“By killing him?” demanded Jolt. “I mean, that’s what you’re saying? Am I hearing this right? You want to help Gummi by cutting his throat.”
“Um,” said Gummi Bear as he walked his bike backward, “pass, thanks.”
The two reapers moved to intercept him. Riot instantly moved across the car tops, ready to jump down between them and the boy. She drew her knife and pointed the tip at them.
“Y’all take another step toward that boy and I’ll end you both, right here and now. Tell me if I’m lying.”
“Go ahead,” said Brother Andrew. “We are reapers—to die in the service of our god is but a pathway to paradise.”
“Riot,” said Jolt, “don’t.”
She looked at him. “What?”
“Don’t kill them.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because,” explained Jolt, “there’s been enough death in the world. We don’t kill. The players, the people in our camp—we don’t kill.”
She stared at him. “Jolt—don’t you get it? These are reapers. That name wasn’t picked ’cause it sounds cool. They want everyone and everything to die. It’s who they are and what they are. . . .”
“But it’s not who we are. We’re scavengers—we find the things that help people stay alive. Seven billion people have died already. . . . How many more will it take before the message gets through that killing isn’t an answer to anything?”
Brother Andrew shook his head. “You’re as much of a heretic as she is, and you’re twice as much of a fool.”
Jolt shrugged. “I don’t really know exactly who you are, mister, but I’m beginning to get the idea. Reapers—yeah, I grok that. You think God wants you to kill everyone. Okay, fair enough, that’s what you believe, and who am I to tell you you’re wrong.”
“Smart boy . . .”
“But,” said Jolt, “here’s the thing. That’s your gig, man. That’s what you believe. It sure as heck is a popular belief around here. We got this whole ‘hey, we’re alive and ain’t it cool?’ thing going on. I can respect you for your beliefs, man, but you’re going to have to take them somewhere else. You can’t come into my zone and force your ideas down my throat.”
“This is the will of god.”
“Dude, not really all that interested in a religious debate,” said Jolt. “I’m telling you to leave us alone. You say ‘walk away’ to me
? I’m giving you that same message. Beat it. Go.”
“Or—?”
“Or I’ll make you,” said Jolt.
“I thought you said you were a pacifist.”
Jolt suddenly jumped up and kicked Brother Andrew in the face with a lightning-fast snap kick. The big reaper went flying backward and crashed into the side of a car, then slid down to land on the ground, legs sprawled.
“I said that we don’t believe in killing,” said Jolt, smiling down at the fallen reaper. “And you ain’t dead.”
Before Andrew could shake off the shock and pain, Jolt whirled. “Gummi! Get out—go loud and long. Sound it!”
The boy picked his bike up, turned it around, and stood on the pedals to get into motion. The two reapers lunged for him, but then Riot leaped off the top of the car and was among them.
“No killing!” yelled Jolt.
Riot pretended not to hear him.
She crashed into one of the reapers and sent him sprawling, then she wheeled on the other. She and the reaper had knives of almost equal length. Riot knew this man—Brother Colin—and he was a superb knife fighter. He was in an entirely different league from Connie, Griff, and Jason. They began circling each other warily, feinting with their knives but not committing to any attacks yet, looking for an opening.
“Riot . . . please,” implored Jolt.
Suddenly Brother Andrew surged off the ground, wrapped his arms around Jolt, drove him across ten feet of open space, and slammed into the side of a UPS truck. The impact drove the air from Jolt’s lungs, and for a moment his eyes went blank, then he sagged to his knees.
“No!” cried Riot, and in that moment of distraction Brother Colin lunged, jabbing and slashing at her. Blood erupted from Riot’s upper arm as the reaper’s knife opened up a long gash.
Riot danced backward, hissing in pain, narrowly avoiding a second cut that would have torn open her throat.
In the distance she heard the rising scream of Gummi Bear’s siren.
Was that what Jolt meant? To “sound it”? But why? Calling the living dead now would only take a terrible situation and collapse it into absolute defeat.