Dead & Gone

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.

Nearby, Brother Andrew grabbed Jolt by the arms, hauled the boy upright, then flung him back against the truck.

The third reaper, Brother Max, climbed to his feet and shifted to Brother Colin’s right. Riot knew that the moment was slipping away. They could come at her in a combined attack that would overwhelm her. She couldn’t block two expert knife fighters at once. That’s why Saint John had sent them out, and why Brother Andrew had picked them for this ambush. Their combined skill was more than a match for hers. The only chance she might have — and it would be a slim one — would be to slaughter them, to go in fast and use every bit of skill she had to cut them apart and kill them.

But Jolt’s words kept ringing in her ears.

We don’t kill.

There’s been enough death in the world.

In a flash of a moment, Riot thought of all the lives she’d taken before she realized how horrible the Night Church was. She felt like she now stood ankle-deep in a river of blood. She could feel the bloodlust, the murderlust, burning in her heart and tingling in the fingers of the hand that held the knife. She realized with total horror that she wanted to kill these men; she longed to open red mouths in their flesh. To give them the gift of darkness.

It was everything her mother had ever taught her.

Everything Saint John had taught her.

It was the thing about her that allowed them to own her.

The blood hunger, the murder hunger, the need to kill in order to make the world right.

Riot thought she had escaped all of this when she’d run away from the Night Church.

But it was there in her hand. In her pounding ear.

In her need.

“Please,” she said to the two reapers. “Please.”

They rushed at her.

Something inside Riot’s mind… twisted.

She moved.

So fast.

As she had been taught.

Their blades drove toward her flesh. She parried hard, knocking one hand aside so that the tip of the knife drove through the empty air an inch from her hip. With the other hand she snapped the tip of the blade down, finding flesh, finding bone.

There was a scream.

There was blood.

Brother Colin’s knife dropped to clatter on the ground.

Riot moved, turning lithely. She may not have been able to dance a bicycle like Gummi Bear or run like the desert wind over every obstacle like Jolt, but in this, in the dance of blades and bodies, she was perfection in form and function. Elegant, in the way that perfect control can be elegant even in the commission of a violent act. Smooth, effortless, flawless.

Riot turned, and the blade whipped across Brother Max, cutting cloth and skin. Finding the redness beneath flesh. Drawing drops of it out in a spray of rubies. Drawing the scream out.

She turned in, completing a dancer’s pirouette, coming to an abrupt stop as if painted on the canvas of the moment. Brother Max was on his knees, arms crossed over his chest, holding his blood inside. Brother Colin leaned against a car, one hand clamped over a ruined forearm. Both of them torn by her knife.

Both of the them only torn.

Both of them alive.

“Riot,” said Jolt.

She stood there, panting, eyes wide and unfocused, staring through the world.

“Riot,” he said again.

And she looked at him.

Jolt leaned against the truck; Brother Andrew held him in place with a flat palm on his chest and a fist the size of a bucket poised to deliver a killing blow.

Brother Andrew sneered at her, at her refusal to kill. “How far you’ve fallen, little witch.”

He drove the punch at Jolt.

Jolt laughed.

He suddenly dropped into a low squat, letting his body simply go limp in a deadweight plunge. Andrew’s hand slid with him, and the incoming punch missed Jolt’s curly blond hair by ten inches.

It did not miss the side of the truck.

The impact was huge, a massive ka-rang that shook the whole vehicle.

The sound was so loud it masked the sound of all the bones in Andrew’s fist breaking.

The echo of the sound bounced off all the cars. It drew moans from the dead — the closest of which were now no more than a dozen paces away.

Brother Andrew did not scream.

He stared at his shattered fist, and for a moment the only sound he made, the only sound he was capable of making, was a high-pitched whistle that approached the ultra-sonic.

Jolt rose to his feet and shoved Brother Andrew away from him. The big reaper staggered back, his face flushing scarlet as he fought to articulate his agony.

“Finish it,” cried Riot.

Jolt looked at her. “What?”

“Kill him!” begged Riot. “While you still have the chance.”

The young man glanced at Andrew, who reeled away from him, cradling his hand against his chest and making small keening sounds.

“No,” said Jolt. “It’s over; he’s done.”

“He’s not.”

“Yes, he is.” He looked past her at the two wounded reapers. “They all are.”

“No… you don’t understand…. There are more of them out there.”

Jolt pointed past her and she turned. Beyond the line of cars, near the town and coming hard in their direction, was a mass of people. Fifty of them. A hundred. More. Riding in front of them, his siren still wailing, was Gummi Bear.

Riot lowered her knife.

The dead were getting closer now, climbing over the locked bumpers of crashed cars.

Jolt walked over to Brother Andrew’s scythe, hooked his foot under the handle, kicked it into the air, caught it, and then spun his whole body and hurled the weapon as far away as he could. It arced over the cars and over the heads of the oncoming mass of zees. It fell out of sight, its clatter of impact lost beneath the moans of the dead.

Brother Andrew looked in the direction of his lost weapon and then turned slowly back to Jolt. His eyes were wet with unshed tears of pain, but his face was a mask of murderous fury.

“Jolt…,” pleaded Riot, “please… you have to….”

But Jolt shook his head. “I told you already, Riot. There’s been enough killing.”

Brother Andrew managed a small, tight smile. “She’s right, boy,” he wheezed. “This is your only chance.”

Jolt caught Andrew by the throat and stood him up, leaning in close to stare the man in the face. “Get your sick friends and get the hell out of here. You don’t belong around decent folks.”

He shoved the big reaper away from him and pointed to the only path through the cars that was not blocked by any of the living dead.

Andrew growled at the others to go, but he lingered at the mouth of the narrow path.

“You think you did something smart and noble here,” he said. “But all you did was cry out for the wrath of god. The darkness will come for you. It will come for you and everyone you love… and I’ll be there to see it happen.”

Jolt just shook his head. “Go.”

Brother Andrew looked past him at Riot.

“This is on you, girl. You know that we’ll be back. You know what we’ll do.”

Riot pointed her knife at him. “If I ever see you again, Andrew, I’m going to kill you.”

The reaper smiled. “Ah… now that’s my girl.”

He turned and lumbered away, trailed by his bleeding companions.

Riot hurried over to Jolt and got right up in his face. “He’s not joking, Jolt; they will be back.”

“I guess they will.”

She studied him. “Y’all are barn-owl crazy.”

Jolt grinned. “Been told that.”

“Why are you doing this?” she demanded, her voice a fierce whisper. “Y’all are stepping into harm’s way here, and you don’t even know me.”

“Does that matter? How long does a person have to know someone before they do what’s right? You’re a girl out here, starving and fighting for her life. Am I supposed to just ignore all that? What kind of person would that make me? What kind of world would that make? Look, Riot, I wasn’t joking about what I said. How much killing is enough? How much pain is enough? When do we stop and say ‘that’s it, no more’?”

Riot opened her mouth to respond, but she didn’t know how to answer those questions.

“The world that died couldn’t answer those questions either,” he said, and gave a small shrug. “The people Gummi and I travel with — we don’t pretend to know all the answers, but we’re working on them.” His grin returned, brighter than ever. “And we’re having some fun while we work it out.”

“Y’all are definitely crazy,” said Riot, and she too grinned.

The dead, smelling blood on the air, moaned in hunger. They crawled over the cars toward the living meat.

“Time to go,” said Jolt, and he started to turn away. Then he paused and reached out a hand to her. “Want to come…?”

She gave it a lot of thought. Maybe a full second.

Then she took his hand, and together they climbed onto the nearest car.

“Let’s go!” bellowed Jolt. He let out a huge whoop of sheer joy, took two running steps across the hood, and then jumped high and wide, sailing over the heads and mouths and reaching arms of the biters.

Riot watched him — his strong back, his lithe body.

What in tarnation have you got yourself into, girl? she wondered.

Behind her the dead were massing, scrambling over the cars now like a swarm of wriggling worms. Off the road, hundreds of people were rushing toward her, coming to help her and Jolt. People she did not know. Orphans and refugees. Scavengers.

Friends?

Maybe. As strange as that concept was.

But what kind of friend could she be to them? Brother Andrew was right. He would be back. The reapers were out there, and there were so many of them. If they came in force, what could a couple of hundred people do?

“Please,” she said to the hot air. But she did not know exactly what she was asking for. She watched Jolt run and leap and twist and land and run. “Please.”

Riot cast one last look behind her, to where Brother Andrew had gone.

“Please,” she begged.

The reapers would come for her.

No, that wasn’t quite right. They would come for Sister Margaret. They would come for the girl who once belonged to them, to the Night Church.

Maybe they would not find her. Maybe by the time they came back the scavengers would have moved on to another town. And another. Maybe if it took too long to find her, the reapers would give up.

She hoped so.

She desperately wanted them to understand that the girl they were looking for did not exist anymore. Not a trace of her.

The girl she had been, Sister Margaret, was dead and gone.

She turned and ran and leaped and followed, hoping that she was free.