The zee swiped the empty air where he had been, and for a moment it looked totally blank. Then it sensed him and turned around to face its elusive prey.
“Yeah, I’m over here, Dusty,” said Jolt.
“Dusty? You know his name?”
Jolt darted close to the dead man and slapped his chest, kicking up a cloud of brown dust. Then he spun away out of reach.
“They’re all dusty. Dusty, Lumpy, Ugly, Slowpoke, Shambler… take your pick. Got to call ’em something.”
The girl climbed out of the pickup and stood on the far side, with the whole truck between her and both boy and corpse.
Jolt hopped up onto the hood of a car as if he had springs under his shoes. The zee took another swipe at him, but Jolt dove into a handstand, ran up the windshield, and, once he was on the roof, flipped back to his feet. It was the strangest thing, like watching the bizarre antics of a character in a dream.
“I—” she began, but then she heard a scuff behind her, and she spun as a fat gray woman with bullet holes in her chest reached for her. Without thinking, the girl parried the grabbing arms and ducked low to slash the tendons on the creature’s ankles. As it buckled down to its knees, the girl grabbed the zee’s filthy hair, shoved its head forward, and drew back her arm for a knife-thrust that would have severed the brain stem and sent the monster into the final darkness of absolute death.
“No!” cried Jolt with unexpected force and passion.
The girl froze, looking over her shoulder as the boy leaped like a monkey from the hood of the car to the hood of the pickup and flipped down to the ground beside her. He shoved her knife arm away and pushed the zee in the other direction.
“What are you doing?”
They both yelled it at exactly the same time.
“There’s no reason to hurt it,” said Jolt, his smile gone.
“It was trying to bite me,” she fired back.
“So what? You telling me that you can’t get away from a fat old zee like her without killing her? I had you figured for a fighter with a little bit of skill. Guess not.”
Her face felt like it was about to catch fire. “And I figured you for someone with a handful of wits under all that blond hair,” she yelled back, “but I guess a handful isn’t enough.”
“Whoa, wait — didn’t we just save your life? Or am I thinking about a totally different psycho bald chick?”
The girl slipped the knife into its sheath and then shoved the boy as hard as she could with both hands. If she expected him to fall she was disappointed. He took a single backward step but turned it into a pivot and bent his knees to slough off the force. As he straightened, he got right up into her face.
“Don’t do that again,” he said quietly. “We’re trying to help.”
“I didn’t ask for your help.”
“But you got it, so that song’s sung.”
The crippled zee was crawling toward them. The girl and Jolt looked down at her, and she truly did seem to be helpless and pathetic. Over by the shoulder of the road, the zees called by Gummi Bear’s siren were shuffling back toward the cars.
Toward them.
“We can stay and argue,” said Jolt, “or we can get the heck out of here.”
He touched her shoulder to try and guide her away, but she shook him off. “Don’t touch me.”
“Okay,” he said, “for the record, you touched me first. You shoved me.”
“Didn’t neither. Y’all touched me first when you swatted at my arm like it was a skeeter.”
He considered. “Maybe. Doesn’t matter. We can get out of here, or we can rub steak sauce all over each other and go dancing with the lunch crowd.”
“Why in tarnation do y’all talk like that?”
He smiled. “That question may be funnier than you know.”
“I’m thinking of kicking you in a bad place.”
Jolt held up his hands, palms outward in a “no trouble” gesture. “Okay, come on, let’s not do this. Besides, it’s going to get crowded again. We should go.”
She looked at the approaching dead and then around at the densely packed cars. “Which way? Out into the desert?”
“Nope.”
He took two running steps and leaped hands-first toward the closest car, then slapped his palms on the hood. In a demonstration of incredible flexibility and coordination, he shot his feet forward between his arms so that he cleared the other side feetfirst. Jolt landed on the far side, then jumped onto the bumper of a truck with his left foot, surged upward and leaped onto the hood of an adjoining car with his right foot, and flipped over out of sight. A moment later he appeared atop the roof of a Post Office truck two rows away. The girl had never seen anything like this acrobatic running. Jolt stopped, turned, and waved.
“What are you?” she said. “A monkey-boy?”
He grinned. “You coming or not?”
The ease with which he moved impressed her and annoyed her in equal measures. He made escape look easy… and fun. After all her weeks of struggle and hardship, clawing and scrabbling her way through every hour of every day, his obvious joy in running like an ape under the desert sun was…
Was what? She didn’t know what to call it.
Was she offended? Intimidated?
Dazzled?
Get hold of your wits, you silly cow, she scolded herself.
She ground her teeth together, set her jaw, and leaped for the hood of the nearest car.
And made it with more grace and balance than she expected.
She ran up the car and launched herself across a six-foot gap between that one and the next, landed with only a moment’s pinwheeling of arms, and repeated it until she nearly caught up to him. Then her foot slipped and she began to fall, but instead she pitched herself into a tight shoulder roll that whipped her across the ground so fast that she came out of it in a small leap that she used to hop up onto another car. Rolling and tumbling was something she’d always been good at, but the fall was an accident, and the save was more luck than style. Even so, she ended her jump dead center on the hood of the car.
Jolt broke into furious applause and hooted his appreciation. Clearly he thought the roll and leap were intentional. His smile was brighter than the sun.
“Wow — look at you,” he said, nodding. “You’re a real firecracker, girlie. You’re a total riot, you know that?”
“Yeah,” she said sourly — though she blushed as she said it. “I’m a riot.”
As if in answer, the masses of the dead let out a chorus of hungry moans.
“Oops, c’mon, riot-girl, let’s burn.”
With a laugh and no backward glance at all, Jolt spun and leaped for the next car, and the next, and the next.
“All boys are crazy,” she told herself. Nothing — not an inner voice or anything else in the world outside — attempted to contradict her.
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.