Dead & Gone (2 page)

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.

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.

As she staggered through the morning, she daydreamed of cool trees and running water. Of leaping fish and bushes heavy with ripe berries.

Way off in the distance she heard a roar, and she stopped, whipping out her knife.

It was a cat, a big one.

Las Vegas was less than forty miles from where she stood. Las Vegas used to have those shows with the white tigers and golden lions. There was a zoo behind one of the casinos, with jungle predators of all kinds. When her father was still alive, back when it was just the two of them traveling through the wasteland looking for shelter, they had gone past the old gambling town. They met a half-crazed man who described the terrors of Vegas: the dead constantly at war with tigers and lions for control of the hunting grounds, and the people who tried to survive there.

The crazed man’s stories were all past tense.

Nobody lived in Las Vegas anymore, and the cats—like the dead—had gone into the desert to find fresh meat.

That roar came from way over in the tumble of red rocks to her left. The big cats made that terrible shriek when they’d killed something. It’s part triumph and part
warning—I killed this and I’ll defend my meat.

That kitty cat is too durn big and mean,
she thought.
You don’t want no truck with it, do you, girl?

She often talked to herself as if she were an adult scolding a child. Like there were two of her. It took the edge off being so completely alone.

The girl hurried along the road, wanting no part of whatever red drama was happening behind those rocks. She was hungry, but her hunger had not yet driven her crazy enough to want to fight eight hundred pounds of muscle and claws. She was fifteen, and prolonged hunger had leaned her down to ninety pounds. All that was left of her was bone, hard muscle, and pain.

The road ahead was clear ahead for half a mile before it curved around a big, white piece of junk. The girl thought it was an overturned tractor trailer—they always held the promise of some item left behind after scavengers had come through like locusts. But as she approached, she realized that it wasn’t a truck at all. It was too big.

She hurried to see what it was.

The closer she got, the more she realized that it was massive. Much bigger than she’d thought. The thing had to be well over two hundred feet long with wings nearly as wide. It had once been snow white with a broad sky-blue line that covered the cockpit and ran all the way to the towering tail. But there had been a fire, probably on impact. Much of the white and blue paint was soot-blackened, and in places it had burned completely away to reveal the silvery glint of steel. Rusted now, and pitted by endless blowing sand.

Words had been painted in black along the sides:
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
.

And on the shattered tail there was a number: 28000.

The girl knew about jets, of course. Everybody knew about them. There were airports full of them. The bones of all kinds of aircraft littered the landscape. The girl had even spent two nights camped out in the shell of a Black Hawk helicopter.

But she’d never seen one this big. Not up close.

The four big engines lay half-buried in the sand, torn away by the impact. Behind the jet was a deep trench cut like a rough scar into the landscape and all the way across the blacktop. The jet had spent a long time grinding to a halt, and now it lay still and silent, its engines cold, the windows shattered and filled with shadows.

The jet presented a tricky choice. There could be bottled water, cans of soft drinks, plastic bags of stuff like nuts and crackers. Things that had enough preservatives in them to last. Not good food, but a far mile down the road from no food.

The doors were shut, and the windows were too small to climb through, and it would take some doing to climb up onto the nose of the craft and enter that way. On the up side, it didn’t look like anyone else had been inside the jet, which was odd because it was right there, big as anything. On the downside, if the doors were all closed, then what had happened to the people on board? Had they managed to climb out? If so, how?

If not . . . were they still there?

A jet this size had to have carried a lot of people.

All of them could be dead.

And waiting.

“No,” she said. Her voice sounded as dry as the desert wind.

She stared up longingly at the plane.

If it was empty, then it was high and safe, and out of the wind. It could answer all of her needs. It could be a kind of home.

The wind whipped past her, lashing her cheeks with coarse sand. It stung her scalp. She closed her eyes for a moment, wrestling with herself about this choice.

There was the choice she wanted to believe in, and there was the sensible choice.

You’d have to be dumber than a coal bucket to go up yonder.

“No,” she said again.

With a reluctance so great that it felt like grief, the girl turned away from the jet, dragging her eyes from those smashed-out cockpit windows, turning her whole body with an effort of will. She walked slowly around the jet, studying it from every side, marveling that such a massive thing ever could have flown.

She looked into the desert that ran alongside the road. Far, far in the distance she saw some shapes moving. People. At least a dozen of them, maybe more. She faded into the shadows of the plane and watched them, squinting to try and decide what she was seeing. Were they the gray people? Sometimes they moved in bunches, a small mass of them triggered into movement by passing prey.

There was a flash of sunlight on metal.

No.

Not the dead.

Reapers.

She cupped her hands around her eyes and studied the group, counting the shapes, counting the flashes of sunlight on sharpened steel.

Twenty of them? Twenty-one.