Bits & Pieces (18 page)

We trained with Tom every single day.

Most of the people in town made jokes about us being samurai, and they thought that all that meant was we trained with swords.

If they only knew.

Tom never bothered to correct people about it. I guess we didn't either.

But the truth was that we learned a lot more than how to use wooden swords. More than how to do kicks and punches and combat stuff.

A lot more.

Tom told us one afternoon that “knowledge is power.”
I know that everyone says that, that it's an old saying. The reason I'm writing it down now, though, is because I think I finally understand it.

See, Tom taught us all sorts of stuff. He taught us how to hunt and stalk; how to track and how to confuse someone if they're tracking us. He taught us about plants we might find out in the Ruin—the ones you can eat, the poisonous ones, the ones that can be used for first aid. He taught us about how to read the landscape like a book. He said that nature was always trying to tell us something, and all we had to do was slow down, stop for a moment, and pay attention. He taught us how to listen to the wind and the things it says when it moves through different kinds of trees and through the summer grass and over rocks.

He made us read books on anatomy. Factoid: It takes eight and a half pounds of pressure per square inch to break the adult male elbow. Kind of cool, kind of disgusting.

We learned a lot of stuff like that.

We also learned how to use spiderwebs to fight infection, how to make shoes out of tree bark and leaves, how to walk so quietly that we could come right up to a deer and pet it without spooking it.

He taught us to always leave the forest the way we found it.

He gave us reading lists of stuff that had no connection to fighting. Poems and plays and essays about what it means to be a human being. We spent one afternoon just mixing colors from pigments we collected in the forest.

It was Morgie who finally asked him why we were learning all that crap (his word choice!) instead of just training to fight. Benny got all tense, because I guess he thought Tom was going to get mad, but Tom didn't.

Tom asked a question that really surprised us. The answer made me cry, though not right then. Later, when I was alone.

Tom asked Morgie, “Why are you training to be a samurai? What's the point?”

Morgie got all defensive, the way he does, and said that we were training to fight zoms and to stop people like Charlie and the Hammer.

Tom kept pushing him. He said that wasn't enough of an answer. He asked us all what we were fighting
for
. “What,” he asked, “is the purpose of a samurai?”

That seemed like an easy answer. Benny said, “ ‘Samurai' means ‘to serve.' ”

Tom nodded and said that was a definition, but not an answer. Who did we serve, and
what
did we serve?

It kind of caught us all off guard. We didn't know how to answer.

After we all kept saying the wrong things, it was Chong who figured it out.

He said, “People think that learning to be a samurai means learning to fight and kill.”

Tom smiled and said, “But . . . ?”

“But we're not learning how to kill,”
Chong continued. “We're learning how to be alive.”

Benny was nodding as he said it, and I think even Morgie got it.

(Five years before
Flesh & Bone
)

Sometimes survival is a feast. Sometimes it's rainwater in a ditch and a bug.

The girl knew both kinds, and all the kinds in between.

Out here, you had to learn every kind of survival or you stopped learning. Stopped talking. Stopped breathing.

The hunger, though—that never goes away.

Not while you're alive.

Not after you're dead.

The girl fled across the desert.

She had bloodstains on her hands and on her clothes. She was certain that those stains were on her heart as well. On her soul.

As she ran, the girl prayed that they would not find her, that they would stop looking.

But they would never stop looking. Never.

Not as long as her mother wanted her dead.

Somewhere, out beyond the heat shimmers that hovered over the sandy horizon, killers were tracking her. Reapers of her mother's Night Church.

They would never stop because they believed—truly
believed—that tracking her down was their holy purpose. She was the sinner, the pariah. The monster that they hunted in order to rid the world of a dreadful impurity.

The reapers.

With knives and axes and bladed farm tools they hunted her.

Wanting to find her. Craving her death.

And so many of them were her friends.

From them, and from who she had once been, the girl tried to hide herself in the vastness of a cruel desert.

She was hungry.

It was that deep hunger, the kind that made her sharp and quick for hours. A belly-taut ache that can't be outrun.

When she was that hungry, she couldn't be lazy. She couldn't climb a tree and lash herself to a thick limb and let the day shamble past.

No, this kind of hunger made her go hunting. It shook her loose from the crushing depression she'd felt since leaving the Night Church.

Before she left, she checked her weapons—the fighting knife she'd carried since she was seven years old, the strangle wire, the throwing spikes, the sling with its bag of sharp stones. She looped the coil of rope across her body.

Her home for the last three days had once been something called a FunMart. She had no idea what that was. It had shelves like a lot of the stores she'd seen, but there was nothing on them. The floor was littered with the torn wrappers of
bread loaves and cracker boxes, but everything of value had been scavenged by refugees over the last twelve years, and any forgotten crumbs had been devoured by insects and animals. But the place was dry, and it got her out of the desert heat.

Now it was time to leave. She knew that she wouldn't be coming back here. The reapers were still out there somewhere. Maybe weeks behind her, maybe much closer. She had only stayed this long at the FunMart because of the gripes—a terrible storm that had raged in her intestines after eating a piece of questionable food. That lizard she'd caught and cooked must have been sick, or it had carried some kind of toxin. For two whole days her stomach felt like it was filled with razor blades and acid. She threw up everything she ate, which was also a terrible waste of food. Nothing of value went into her system. No proteins or fats or useful calories. No nutrients.

When the gripes passed, the girl was left weak and trembling. If even the weakest reaper came at her, she could not have defended herself.

The desert offered no obvious comfort. Food had to be caught, and there was very little water. So survival required movement. Hunger demanded it.

Even so, she lingered at the door of the FunMart.

The girl did not have a home. Not anymore. And the home she used to have was not a place she could return to. No way. To the people she left behind she was a disgrace, a lost soul.

A monster.

Places like this empty shell of a FunMart offered no real protection; it was not a home in any genuine way. It was a place to be sick, and if she stayed longer, it would be the place
where she died. The reapers were coming. She did not know when they would find her, only that they would.

Beyond the door was the road that stretched through the endless desert. Beyond the door was the truth. The loneliness. The fear.

The hunger.

The hunger called to her. It yelled. It shrieked.

So she had to leave.

Not soon.

Now.

Get your skinny butt in gear, girl,
scolded her inner voice.
No handsome prince is going to stroll out of a fairy tale and serve you a hot breakfast of eggs and grits.

“Shut up,” she told herself. Her voice sounded dusty and far older than her fifteen years.

She could see a faintness of green down the road. Sparse woods that had once been vast groves of fruit trees set, improbably, on the edge of the Nevada desert. Patches of scrub pine and weathered creosote bushes were thriving there now as the orchard died. The ghosts of the fruit trees stood like pale sticks. She reckoned that the water pumping stations were dead. All these years of blowing sand and dust had frozen the gears in the rows of tall, white wind turbines. Now they stood above the orchard, silent as clouds, offering the lie of power in a powerless world.

Beyond the forest was a town. It said so on the map she had.

A place called Red Pass, which looked to be have been built into the cleft of a long ridge of low mountains.

Red Pass. The name meant nothing to her, but the fact that it was a town meant that there might be some vittles.
Old canned stuff. Maybe some gardens with enough life for wild carrots and potatoes to still be growing. She knew that birds lived in some of the old towns. Even a scrawny pigeon was roast breast for dinner and a day's worth of soup from the rest. And where there was one pigeon, there would be two.

The town was where she had to go.

Ten miles under the August sun.

It had to be done during the day, though. At night she would not be able to see, or hunt, or defend. And they did not need the light to find her.

They.

The gray people. The wanderers.

The hungry ghosts.

She knew they were not really ghosts. That was just something her father used to call them. Hungry ghosts.

They were also in the towns.

They were always in the towns.

It's where they'd lived. It's where they'd died.

It's where they waited.

And she, hungry and desperate, had no choice but to leave her empty little place of safety and journey into the places of the dead.

Hunger demanded it.

“Sister Margaret!”

The words tore her out of a daydream of food and dragged her into horror.

The girl spun around and crouched.

There were three of them. Two men and a woman. They rose from the desert, shedding the sand-colored cloaks that had allowed them to hide and wait until she stumbled right into their trap.

Now you walked into it, girl,
said her inner voice.
You done gone and stepped right into a snake pit and no mistake.

They were dressed all in black, with red streamers tied to their ankles and wrists. Stylized angel wings were embroidered on their chests. Their heads had been shaved and comprehensively tattooed with complex images of tangled vines and flowers.

Just like hers.

It was a requirement of everyone in the Night Church. A permanent mark that could not be removed. It was supposed to prove an unbreakable attachment to the god of that faith.

Now it was the only thing that made the girl look like she was connected to them. She did not wear the dark clothes and red streamers and angel wings. She wore ratty jeans, stolen sneakers, and a leather vest buttoned up over her bare skin. She had no other clothes, and she would rather die than wear the clothes of a reaper.

Never again.

The reapers approached, smiling the way they're taught to do. Smiles of false welcome, of false acceptance.

There was no trace of real acceptance in the Night Church. You were collected by them, you belonged to them, but there was no approval of who you were.

“Sister Margaret,” said the taller of the two men as he walked toward her. He held a broad-blade machete in one
muscular fist, carrying it casually with the tip pointed toward the ground. “Praise be to the darkness that we found you.”

“Stop right there, Jason,” warned the girl. “Y'all turn around and be on your way.”

They continued to smile at her. The shorter man had a hunter's hatchet tucked through his belt. Sunlight gleamed along the wicked edge as he drew it.

“We bring love and greetings from your mother, Sister Marg—”

“Don't call me that,” snapped the girl. “That's not my name no more.”

“What name do you want us to use, sister?” asked the woman. She was young, no more than three years older than the girl. Maybe eighteen, but already there were combat scars on her face, and her eyes were ablaze with righteous anger.

“I don't have a name no more, Connie,” said the girl. “I left all that behind when I left the church.”

“That's not true, little sister. Your mother sent us to bring you home, to bring you back into the peace and love of the Night Church.”

“I know you, Connie. You don't open your mouth 'cept when a lie needs to come out.”

Sister Connie's smile flickered, and her eyes went cold. “And you can't help but carve more sins onto your own soul.”

Sister Connie drew her blade—a slender double-edged antique dagger that had been looted from a museum in Omaha. The girl had been there when Connie had found the weapon four years ago. Six families had been living in the museum, and they had refused to join the Night Church. The reapers had cut through them like scythes through ripe wheat.