The ones closest to her moaned with their pitiful dry voices.
One, a tall man in the rags of a set of blue coveralls, lunged at her, but she crouched and spun, drawing the slingshot tight and loosing a stone. It struck him in the forehead hard enough to snap his head backward and send him sprawling into the arms of the other dead. He struggled to grab her even as he fell beneath their relentless feet.
“Move!” she yelled, and the sound of her own voice was the whip that made her run to the end of the car and leap across the distance to the next one. She landed with a hard thump, her slight weight denting the hood, her thighs flexing to take the impact, arms pumping for balance. She ran and jumped, ran and jumped, as wax-white hands reached for her. Dry fingertips scraped along her calves as she leaped over their heads.
She fired stone after stone, knocking some of them back, knocking a few down, clearing a path. It was hard work, though, and with every step, every pull on the slingshot, every leap, her energy was flagging. And there were two miles of cars in front of her.
As she ran, she heard a strange mewling cry and realized with horror that she was making the sound. A whimper, like a whipped dog might make.
Shut your gob and run!
The next vehicle was a pickup truck, and she leaped high and hard to clear the outer edge of the bed. Her left foot made it with half an inch to spare, but her right was half an inch too low, and the girl suddenly pitched forward and down into the truck bed. It had a black rubber liner, but it felt like iron as she struck. She tried to tuck and roll, but she banged her shoulder against the far side.
Immediately gray arms reached over the metal bay toward her.
“No!” she shrieked, trying to shrink back from the withered flesh and clawing fingers. But they crowded around the truck, reaching, reaching.
Fireflies of pain danced in her eyes. Lying there on her back, she dug out stone after stone and fired her slingshot. One dead face rocked back, and then another spun away with a shattered jaw, and a third toppled backward with one eye suddenly blown dark by a stony missile. She fired eight stones, ten, fourteen…
She had to keep firing.
She didn’t even have the chance to get up.
She dug into her pouch for another stone. And another…
Then her scrabbling fingers found only empty leather. The pouch was empty.
The girl flung the slingshot down, tore the knife from her sheath, and began chopping at the hands, cutting dry tendons, filling the air with fingers that twitched like white worms.
And all the time she screamed.
With a last desperate howl of mingled terror and rage, the girl swung her legs up and over her head and back-rolled to her feet with her spine hard against the rear window of the truck. The dead climbed up, scaling the truck by clambering over one another as they sought to tear her apart.
The girl crouched there, teeth bared in a feral snarl of final defiance, one hand balled into a fist, the other locked iron-tight around the knife, ready to fight all the way to her last screaming breath.
“Come on—come ON!” she bellowed.
And that was when the siren went off.
12
Every face turned, every set of eyes darted toward the sound, searching out the source of a high-pitched keening wail that rose impossibly loud above the road. The girl’s head turned too.
There, on the gravel-strewn shoulder of the road, was a boy.
Not a dead boy.
This one was very much alive.
He was no more than ten, thin and dark-haired, with skin the color of chocolate. He wore faded blue jeans, sneakers — real pre-apocalypse sneakers — and a T-shirt with a full-color illustration of a grinning cartoon rat standing on a strange wheeled board. His head was shaved into a Mohawk that was dyed as blue as the sky above. The boy held a hand-crank firehouse siren, and he was working it with every bit of his strength, grinning from ear to ear while he did it.
The dead seemed to forget all about the scrawny girl-flesh they had been seconds away from devouring, and instead began shuffling toward the boy and his siren. When they were a dozen feet from him, he began walking backward, laughing as the dead followed him.
It was so… weird, so strange, so outside of all sense that the girl simply stood there, knife in hand, and stared slack jawed.
Then a voice behind her said, “I got to say, sister, you are a crazy riot of a fighter. Never seen anything like you before.”
Her jaws snapped shut as she whirled, bringing up the knife in a slashing attack that would have gutted a grown buck, but the owner of the voice leaped nimbly out of the way. Another boy stood there.
“Whoa, little sister,” he said with a laugh. “That’s no way to treat friends.”
She stared at him.
He was older than the little brown-skinned boy. Maybe sixteen, and even in the heat of her fury, the girl realized that he was beautiful. That was the word her mind grabbed at. The boy was very tall and lean, with finely sculpted muscles and a deep desert tan. He had lots of curly blond hair and eyes as blue as the younger boy’s hair. White teeth flashed in an almost unbearably handsome face. He wore a pair of khaki shorts, a thin green tank top, and sneakers that looked brand new. Around his neck he wore a silver necklace from which hung an old-fashioned skeleton key.
Despite the boy’s handsome face and white smile, she narrowed her eyes and snarled at him. “Y’all ain’t my friends. Put your hands on me and I’ll cut off some parts y’all don’t want to lose.”
He looked alarmed — but it was a comical alarm, heavily exaggerated. “Yeah, let’s not go in that direction, okay?”
The boy took a small step toward her.
“I’m warning y’all…”
“I know, but our door’s open,” he said, nodding past her. “I think it’s time to hightail it.”
The siren wound down, and the girl looked over her shoulder to see the laughing little boy turn and run away with more than a hundred of the gray people following. The little boy did not seem to be trying very hard to escape the dead, though, and the girl realized that he was staying close enough so they could smell him.
“That young’un’s plain crazy in the head,” she said.
“Gummi Bear?” said the older boy. “Yeah, he is that. Gummi Bear’s always been a bit twitchy.”
She turned back to him, the knife still clutched in her fist. “Gummi Bear? That’s his name?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And who are y’all?”
“Jolt,” he said.
“Jolt?” She peered at him suspiciously. “That ain’t a name; it’s a verb.”
He grinned. “And look at you with the actual school education.”
“My daddy taught me to read and write. He was a doctor.”
“Yeah, well my daddy taught me not to try and fight six hundred zees with a knife.”
Zees. It was an expression she’d heard only once or twice. Zee for zombie. Most of the people she knew called the dead “gray people.” Once or twice she had heard travelers call them “zoms.” She liked “zees,” though she didn’t care to let this crazy boy know that.
There was a sound behind him, and one of the dead appeared beside the truck and made a grab for Jolt’s ankle. But then the young man did something that appeared almost magical. He did what looked like a cartwheel, but he did it in midair, spinning his body off the truck and landing well beyond the creature. It was the smoothest acrobatic move the girl had ever seen, with the kind of apparent effortlessness that concealed highly trained muscles.