Dead & Gone

13

What she really hated was that it was fun.

Running like the wind, jumping high over the reaching hands, dodging and twisting, pushing her body and reflexes to their limits while acting like no limits existed. Not for them, not here and now.

Before this, physical exertion was all built around combat training. Saint John and the others at the Night Church made all of the kids train. Fourteen hours a day. Hand to hand, with weapons, target practice, hunting and tracking, gymnastics, climbing, and all of it geared toward the single purpose of killing. Not that they called it that. “Sending people into the darkness”—that was how they phrased it in the Night Church. Back when she was Sister Margaret, the girl had been the best in every class. The fastest, the fiercest, the most lethal. Her mother demanded it, and Saint John pushed her relentlessly in order to make it happen. And she was the best. No doubt. A murder machine.

And now…

Now she ran free, ran laughing, just for the sheer joy of it.

It was the strangest thing she had ever done.

She was certain it was the most fun she had ever had.

The younger boy, the one with the burned face — Gummi Bear — joined them, but he wasn’t running free over the cars. He was on a bicycle. The girl had seen a lot of bicycles over the years. After the EMPs they were one of the few transportation machines that worked. This one was squat and tough-looking, not like the more slender touring bikes she’d seen. Gummi Bear pedaled his like a demon, and it tore along the edge of the road, kicking up a wall of dust and spitting chunks of gravel from under its fat tires.

“Look out!” she screamed as one of the gray people lunged at the boy from behind a toppled tour bus, but Gummi Bear laughed at her and did something that appeared to be completely mad. He slapped the bars and propelled his entire body off the bike, rising into the air as if pulled by strings. The bike rolled to one side of the zee, and the boy sailed over the creature’s reaching hands and then dropped down into a fast, controlled run directly behind the monster. Gummi Bear then cut left, caught his bike before it fell, flipped himself back onto the seat and was pedaling fast again before the zee was finished grabbing empty air.

“Wooohooo!” yelled Jolt, pumping his fist into the air. He stood on the hood of a Lexus, laughing with pure delight. “You ever see a fox-hop like that, riot-girl?”

The girl said, “Umm… no?”

“You’re darn right no. And I’ll bet you a full bag of prime goods that Gummi Bear’s going to be a full-out player before he’s twelve.”

“A player? What’s that?”

Jolt didn’t answer; he was too busy yelling compliments at Gummi Bear.

The boy suddenly lunged up, pulling the front end of his bike completely off the road. He waggled the front wheel back and forth, landed with a dusty thump and was off, dodging and weaving on and off the road, slipping past zees with inches to spare.

Laughing.

All the time laughing.

It was all so crazy and so well done that, despite everything, the girl laughed too.

She turned and saw with a start that the town was much closer. Without realizing it she and Jolt had run more than half the distance to the cluster of buildings. It was incredible. The hunger, the aches, and weariness were still there — but at the moment her system was flooded with adrenaline and something else. She didn’t dare call it by its name because “happiness” was such a rare and elusive thing she was afraid of chasing it away.

“Hey, Riot!” called Jolt. “You daydreaming?”

“That’s not my name,” she yelled back, but there was a laugh in her voice.

“Okay — what is your name?”

She had to think about how to answer that. When it was just her and Dad she’d been Maggie. Then once they’d somehow been absorbed into her mother’s Night Church she’d been Sister Margaret. But neither of those names seemed to fit anymore. The first was too weighed down by loss and grief. The other was burdened by horror.

So — who was she?

Jolt squatted down, his muscular thighs bulging, his blond curls stirring as a hot breeze blew in off the sand. Even from thirty feet away, the girl could feel the impact of his stare. There was genuine interest there, and honest happiness. The one thing she could not find, no matter how hard she searched in those bottomless blue eyes, was a single flicker of judgment.

“I… guess my name’s Riot,” she said.

“Booyah!” He rose and shouted through cupped hands. “Hey, Gummi Bear! Riot thinks you have mad bike skills.”

The boy somehow lifted the back end of his bike and rolled forward on just the front tire, then popped the whole bike up, spun it in a 360-degree turn, and zoomed off.

Jolt laughed, then he turned to Riot. “You need to get back to somewhere?”

She said nothing.

“What about your people? Are you lost out here or—”

“I’m not lost and no one’s waiting up for me,” she said. “I don’t belong nowhere.”

As an after-echo she heard the deep bitterness in her voice. Vicious and hard.

Jolt’s smile flickered as he studied her eyes. She had no idea what he saw there, or what he thought any of it meant, but for just a moment he looked very sad.

“Somebody hurt you?” he asked.

She did not answer the question.

“Okay,” said Jolt, accepting her silence, or perhaps her right to silence. Then he beamed another of his bright smiles. “You can come with us, if you want. We got a camp up near the town, and we’re going to play some games tomorrow. You in?”

“Games?” she asked suspiciously. “What kind of games?”

He frowned. “You serious?”

“Of course I’m serious,” she barked. A dozen yards away a couple of the zees turned sharply toward her. Riot lowered her voice. “I just met y’all, boy, so how am I supposed to know what kind of games y’all are fixing to play?”

“Okay, okay, don’t have a kitten. I thought you could figure it out from me and Gummi Bear. Him on his bike, me freerunning out here.”

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.