The big man seemed to sense that too. He smiled at her. “Looks like you’ve been taking good care of him for me,” he said. “He’s put some weight on. Nice.”
The dog looked from him to Rags and back again.
“He’s my friend,” said Rags. “We’ve been helping each other.”
Ledger nodded. “That’s good. That’s the only way we’re ever going to get out of this mess.”
He walked past her and stood in front of Mama Rat. Baskerville came trotting up behind him, gave Bones a quick sniff, allowed one in return, then went over to sit beside Ledger. His armor clanked.
The seven skull-riders clustered even more tightly behind Mama Rat. They each still held their weapons, but to Rags it seemed as if the men had forgotten what those items were used for.
Ledger stood and studied Mama Rat for a long time, his blue eyes filled with mysteries. Finally, when he spoke, he recited lines from an old story Rags had read in school.
“ ‘The time has come, the Walrus said,’ ” murmured Ledger, “ ‘to talk of many things. Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—Of cabbages—and kings—And why the sea is boiling hot—And whether pigs have wings.’ ”
It was some nonsense poetry from Through the Looking-Glass, and its silly verses had no business on this troubled street in an abandoned city in a dying world.
Or, Rags wondered, did they?
In the stillness of the air there was magic hidden inside the ranger’s recitation. The swordsman, Tom, came and stood ten feet to Ledger’s left. The air around him seemed to crackle with a static charge of awful possibility. And Rags knew that whatever happened—and whatever had happened—it hurt the Japanese man every bit as much as those who felt his sword. Rags knew that with total certainty.
“What—what do you want?” asked Mama Rat, her voice soft and filled with cracks.
“That’s up to you, sweetheart,” said Ledger. “We’re standing way, way out on the ledge here. You know what’s down there if you take that step.”
Another tear fell down the woman’s cheek. “We’re all dead anyway.”
Ledger shook his head, but before he could say anything, Rags spoke. She hadn’t meant to and didn’t know she was going to.
“No,” she said.
Everyone looked at her.
“That’s not true,” said Rags. “We’re not all dead.”
“Look around you, girl, the whole world’s dead,” snapped the woman. “The whole world’s gone crazy, and anyone who says it’s not is crazier than the rest.”
“Maybe the world’s crazy,” said Rags, taking a hesitant step forward, “but that doesn’t mean we are.”
When she moved, Bones moved with her, standing right at her side, the way Baskerville stood beside the ranger. Captain Ledger seemed to take note of it, and he smiled to himself.
“What do you know about anything?” sneered Mama Rat. “You’re a kid. You don’t know anything.”
Anger flared hot in Rags’s chest. “I don’t? Really? I know that this plague came and killed my mom. And after she died, my mom got up and killed my dad, and my little brother, and my gram. She killed my dog.” For some reason those last words were the hardest, and Rags’s voice cracked on them. “My mom killed everyone in my house, and she tried to kill me. And I . . . and I . . .”
Tears fell like rain from her eyes as sobs broke over and over in her chest. They hurt so bad. Everything hurt so bad. And as she spoke, all the boards she’d hammered into place in the house of her memories began to come loose. Images thrust in through the windows like pale hands, doors burst open, and into her conscious mind came the shambling, lifeless things that had been her family. They filled her mind, coming for her, trying to crowd her into a corner so they could get at her and tear her apart.
“Do you know what I did?” yelled Rags, her voice rising to a shriek. “Do you know what I did?”
“Kid . . . ,” began Ledger, reaching out for her, but Rags slapped his hand away.
“No! I want her to ask me what I did.” She wheeled on Mama Rat and slapped her across the face so hard it sounded like a gunshot. “You’re so tough. You’re so scary. You ask me what I did! Go on—ask me!”
Mama Rat mouthed the words. She clearly could not speak them.
Her lips formed the four words.
What did you do?
Rags slapped her again. “I killed them!”
Another slap.
“I came back and killed them.”
Slap.
“Mom.”
Slap.
“Daddy.”
Slap.
“Everyone.”
Slap. Slap. Slap.
Mama Rat staggered backward into the arms of her men. Her face was so raw that tiny dots of blood sprang from her pores.
Tom stepped suddenly forward and wrapped an arm around Rags. She spun and pounded her fists on his chest, but he allowed it. Endured it. He used his free arm to gather her in, and while she screamed and wept, he held her to his chest.
Apart from the sound of her agony, the street was silent.
Then Joe Ledger said, “You people come here, hunting for little girls. Thinking they’re nothing but little girls. You don’t know anything, do you?”
Nobody said a word.
“Christ, do you know how much courage it took for her to do that? For a kid of her age to go into that house and do that?”
Silence.
“Do you know how much love it took?”
Rags stopped fighting Tom and wrapped her arms around him. Her knife fell to the ground, and she clung to him as if he was the only thing in the world that could keep her from drowning.
Ledger spat on the ground at Mama Rat’s feet.
“You think your numbers and your knives make you strong? Sister, you don’t know what strength is.” He pointed to Rags. “That? That’s strength. That’s power.”
He took a step closer, and now he was so close to Mama Rat that they could kiss.
“That’s hope,” he said. “Do you understand me? Are you capable of understanding? This girl . . . and Tom here, and a few others . . . they are the future of this world. They have hope, they remember what love is, and they have the courage to do what’s right.”
He shook his head.
“When I met Tom, he was already hunting you people. Like me, he’d heard about a pack of human lice who were taking kids, taking lives.”
In a movement that was too fast to see, Ledger drew his knife and pressed the edge against Mama Rat’s throat. He spoke now in a deadly whisper.
“Tom Imura is a good man, and hunting scum like you is killing him. He’s doing it because there are people trying to build something, trying to survive. He has a baby brother. He’s helping to put together a town. He should be back in that town looking after his brother and planting crops. Instead people like you have turned him into a hunter and a killer. Now he’s out here taking lives when we’re so close to extinction that every life is precious.”
He pressed the knife against her, lifting her onto her toes.
“I’m out here doing my part. Hunting, too, though unlike my friend Tom, I’m not as sentimental. I’m already a killer. I’m already a monster. Even before all this started I was out hunting monsters. Killing them. Monsters like you.”
A bead of bright-red blood popped onto the edge of the knife and slid down its silvery length. Ledger raised his voice.
“Tom . . . why don’t you take our new friend out of here. Take her back to Mountainside, maybe.”
“Joe,” said Tom, “I can’t just leave you here.”
“Sure you can.”
Rags pushed herself away from Tom and pawed the tears out of her eyes. “What are you going to do?”
Ledger smiled the most frightening smile she had ever seen. “I’m going to dance with Mama Rat here. Her and her boys.”
Baskerville uttered a loud, sharp, single bark. Like a promise.
“Please . . . ,” whispered Mam
a Rat. “Please don’t.”
“You called this play, darlin’,” said Ledger. “You pushed us both right out onto this tightrope. What choice do either of us have?”
“Let her go,” said one of the men, but his voice lacked all force and conviction. Bones and Baskerville growled him to silence.
“Go on, Tom,” urged Ledger. “Get the girl out of here. She shouldn’t have to see this.”
“Let her go.”
This time it was not any of the men who spoke. Nor was it Tom.
It was Rags.
Trembling, tear-streaked, flushed with psychological pain, she stood there and shook her head. “Please,” she said, “just . . . let her go.”
Ledger looked at her with a mixture of surprise, annoyance, and pity. “Seriously? You want me to cut them loose?”
Rags sniffed and wiped at her streaming eyes. “Y-yes.”
“Why on earth would you want me to do that? I mean it,” said Ledger. “Why?”
“Because we shouldn’t kill each other.”
A slow, sad smile formed on Ledger’s mouth, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Do you have any idea what these freaks were going to do to you?”
Rags nodded.
Ledger kept the knife against Mama Rat’s throat. “Do you think this witch or any of these scum-suckers would have carved off even a splinter of mercy for you?”
Rags shrugged.
“Think about the worst things that could happen to a person,” growled Ledger, “then triple that because you’re a girl. Now hold that in your mind and tell me again that you want me to let them go.”
“It’s you, isn’t it?” Rags asked. “You and this other guy. I keep finding people with skull tattoos. Dead people. Not walking around dead, but left to rot. That’s you two, isn’t it?”
“It’s us,” said Tom Imura.
“Sure,” agreed Ledger. “It’s us. We’re at war. The whole damn world is at war, or haven’t you noticed, kid? Oh, wait, that’s right, you’re already a veteran of this war. You did what you had to do. That took courage. It also took smarts and compassion. Bottom line is, it had to be done. So does this.”
“Why?”
“Why the hell do you think?” snapped Ledger.
Rags said nothing. She felt like she was standing on wobbly ground that was going to tilt under her. She turned to Tom, but his face was a mask, and he avoided her eyes.
Bones whuffed softly. He walked over to Rags and leaned against her. Rags knelt, wrapped her arms around his neck, and tried to lose herself in his fur.
“We have to stop killing each other,” she said. “Or death is going to win.”
The words seemed to hang in the air, and Rags heard them like an echo, as if it was someone else who spoke. Even to her own ears those words didn’t sound like they came from her. Not from the little teenager who knelt in the dust surrounded by killers and madmen.
Rags closed her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, and in that moment she wasn’t sure if the words were meant for Ledger or for the people he wanted to kill.
Then she heard Joe Ledger sigh. And curse softly.
She looked up to see him lower his knife. Behind her, Rags heard Tom sigh too.
“Okay,” said Ledger, and the frustration was there in his voice, woven into a fabric of anger and regret. “Okay. But there are conditions.”
“Anything!” blurted Mama Rat, but Ledger growled at her.
“Shut up and listen. I don’t want to hear any of you talk until I ask a question. You stand there and shut the hell up.”
No one said a word.
“Like I said, there are conditions,” repeated Ledger. He pointed to the ground. “First, drop the hardware. All of it. Poles, knives, anything you have. Do it now.”
There were about three full seconds of hesitation as the men looked at one another and at Mama Rat and then into the eyes of Captain Ledger and Tom Imura. Baskerville stood and moved into a flanking position; and immediately Bones pulled away from Rags and did the same on the far side of the group. It was still eight to four, but the defeat was clear in the eyes of everyone there.
Mama Rat began pulling weapons from her pockets. Knives, a hatchet, a surgeon’s scalpel. They clattered to the ground.
Then the others began doing the same. The catch-poles with their loops fell first, then knives and wrenches and other things. Rags saw a pair of nunchakus and a small pistol. She guessed it was out of ammunition or the man would have pulled it.
Baskerville padded over to the pile of weapons, hoisted a leg, and peed on it.
Everyone watched.
Joe Ledger was the only person who smiled.
“Tom—?” he said, and waited as the sad-faced swordsman moved among the men and patted them down, doing it exactly the way cops did on TV. Very quick, very thorough. “Be mighty sad if he finds something one of you idiots was trying to hide,” observed Ledger.
One of the men cleared his throat, held up a hand, palm outward, and with two fingers of the other hand slipped a push-dagger from a concealed pocket. Tom got up in his face and took it from him. Their eyes locked and held until the skull-rider couldn’t do it anymore and dropped his gaze.
For a moment Rags thought Tom was going to do something. His whole body trembled with potential, but instead he shook his head and finished patting down the men. When he was done he walked over to Mama Rat, who immediately laced her fingers together and placed them on the top of her head. She closed her eyes while Tom patted her down, but snapped them open again when the young man removed something from her jeans pocket.
“Hey!” she said, making a grab for it. “That’s not a—”
Tom slapped her hand away and backed up. He showed the item to Ledger, but Rags could see it too. It was a silver locket with a broken chain. Tom opened it and stared at the picture, then held it out.
Rags saw the picture inside. It was a girl of about seven. Very pretty, with a pair of braided brown pigtails.
“That’s mine,” insisted Mama Rat. “Please—”
“Who’s she?” asked Rags. “Is that your daughter?”
Mama Rat could not meet her eyes. She turned her head and looked at the nothingness down the empty street.
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Did . . . did the dead people get her?”
Mama Rat shook her head.
“Where is she?” asked Tom.
It clearly cost Mama Rat to answer that. “Back . . . back at our camp.”
Tom made a sick sound.
Ledger asked, “She’s safe there, isn’t she?”
Mama Rat nodded.
“Are there other kids there too?” Ledger demanded.
A nod.
“Kids who you people keep safe?” the big man growled.
Nod.
“And you bring kids like me back there?” asked Rags. “Not to keep us safe?”
No nod this time, but Rags could read the truth in the woman’s eyes.
“Why?” asked Rags. “I mean . . . how can you be someone’s mom and do that stuff to other kids? How can you be someone’s mom and a monster at the same time?”
Mama Rat’s knees buckled, and she sank slowly to the ground.
In that moment, Rags wanted to kill this woman herself. She could feel the need to destroy bursting like fireworks in her chest, behind her eyes. Her fists contracted into tight balls of bone and gristle and she wanted, needed, ached to kill. To slaughter. To destroy. Mama Rat and anyone like her. She could understand what made a person into a cold killer like Captain Ledger. She could understand what turned a gentle man like Tom Imura into the kind of person who could do the things he’d clearly done. She told herself that it wouldn’t be murder. It would be no different from killing a scorpion that got into the house. Or a rattlesnake.
Bones and Baskerville seemed to feel her rage, and they both threw back their heads and let loose with howls as grim and loud as any wolf had ever thrown at a hunter’s moon.
; Rags held out her hand to Tom, and he gave her the locket. This tore a small cry from Mama Rat, and the woman made a half movement forward as if she wanted to grab it and take it back. But Rags stared her down, and the woman seemed to collapse back into herself.
The little girl in the picture was smiling.
No one else was.
“What’s her name?” asked Rags.
“Caitlyn.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
Mama Rat nodded.
“Did you have any other kids?”
“No.”
“Where’s Caitlyn’s dad?”
“He left,” said Mama Rat. “Long ago. Before.”
“So it’s you and her?”
A nod.
Rags showed her the picture, holding it up as if the little girl could see her mother through it. “Does she know what you do to people?”
No answer.
“Does she?”
“No.”
“No,” agreed Rags. “What do you think she’d say if she knew?”
No answer. Rags caught the glance Tom and Ledger shared between them. Ledger was about to say something, but Tom shook his head. They waited, letting Rags own this moment.
“I know what she’d say.”
“You don’t even know her.”
Rags shrugged. “How’s that matter?”
No answer.
“What would she say?” asked Tom.
Rags still held the locket out. “She’d hate you,” she said to Mama Rat. “She’d hate you and she’d run away.”
A breath of wind swept down the street, and it made the locket sway on its broken chain. It blew some of the stink of the dead skunk away. And it carried a distant sound, something that made everyone look. Both dogs growled softly. The sound was a moan.
Not one voice. Many.
Although she couldn’t see them yet, Rags knew that the dead were coming.
The dead always came.
“We’re drawing a crowd,” said Ledger. “Put a button on this, kid, and let’s get out of here.”
Rags nodded. “I can’t make you promise that you’ll stop doing this stuff. I don’t think I’d believe you even if you did promise. You’re a monster. So are your friends. Monsters. Maybe you like being monsters. You seem to, and that’s sick. It’s sad and it’s sick.”