Bits & Pieces (32 page)

“Hope,” Rags said again.

They watched the moon rise.

“You didn't answer my question,” said Tom. “About coming back with us to Mountainside.”

“I . . . don't know.”

“What's your alternative?” asked Ledger.

She rose and walked to the window. “Does anyone know what's happening out there? In the rest of the world, I mean?”

“The plague is everywhere,” said Ledger.

“That doesn't mean everyone's dead,” said Rags. “We're not.”

“No,” agreed Tom. “We're not.”

“I . . . ,” she began, then faltered. She drew in a breath. “I think I want to go find out. I think I want to go and see what's out there. There has to be something. Who knows, maybe someone's trying to put it all back together. I need to find out. I want to find out.”

“Alone?” said Tom, alarmed. “It's too dangerous.”

Ledger leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “She won't be alone.”

“You're going with her?”

“Maybe I will,” said the ranger. “Me, and a couple of flea-bitten mutts I happen to know.”

Rags turned and stared at him. “Really?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“But . . . why?”

Ledger stood up and joined her at the window. “Because until today I'd given up hope too. I thought it was a sucker's game. Now . . . well, now I'm not so sure.”

“Because of me?”

“Sure, kid. Why not?”

“I'm just a kid.”

“So? Who ever said kids can't change things? Change people. Change minds.” Ledger bent and kissed her on the forehead. “Who knows, you and me—? Maybe we'll go change the whole world.” He laughed.

And Rags, despite everything, laughed too.

Bones jumped up and pushed between them, offering his head to whoever would pet it. They both did. After a moment, Baskerville joined them.

Only Tom sat apart, still on the couch, still wearing the same sad smile.

“Hope,” he said, tasting the word.

“Hope,” said Ledger, nodding.

“Hope,” agreed Rags.

Above the city, the moon burned as bright as a promise.

And the night, like all nights, passed.

Benny and I fight a lot.

I mean . . . a lot.

We love each other, but we don't always love everything about each other.

We want to be together, but we don't want the same things out of life. I know that, and he knows it . . . even if we don't always talk about it.

If this was a fairy tale, he'd be my Prince Charming and we'd live happily ever after.

If this was one of the epic fantasy stories Benny reads, then I'd be his princess and we'd live happily ever after.

Neither of us are those things. Not to ourselves and not to each other, so . . .

I don't know if happily ever after is a real thing.

Neither of us know if we're going to like the people each other becomes.

If so, we'll have to fall in love again and again as we change.

If not, I think we love each other enough as friends to stay friends.

But even that's not written in stone, is it?

The Fence

(Between the events of
Rot & Ruin
and
Dust & Decay
)

The teenager sat on a folding chair and stared through the fence at the zombie.

He was there most mornings. Sometimes in the afternoons, too.

At first the fence guards tried to chase him away.

“What the heck are you doing there, kid?” growled one, a new guard who didn't know who the boy was. The guard had come along the fence, a shotgun open at the breech crooked over one arm, a wad of pink chewing gum in his open mouth. When the kid did not move or even look at him, the guard came and stood right in front of him, blocking out the sun, blocking eye contact with the dead thing on the other side of the chain-link wall. “Hey? You deaf or dead?” the guard demanded.

Only then did the teenager raise his eyes to the big guard with the polished steel shotgun. He had dark-green eyes and brown hair, and the sunlight revealed streaks of red in his dark hair. A good-looking kid, fit and lean; the kind of kid the guard thought should be fishing for trout up at the stream or trying to lay some lumber on a breaking ball down at McGoran Field. He didn't look like the morbid kind of teen he sometimes met here at the fence; the kind who dressed in rags and painted their faces gray and pretended to be zoms.
The Gonnz, they called themselves. No, this kid looked like any other teenager from town.

“You okay?” the guard asked, his tone still sharp.

The teen did not say a word. He simply stared into the guard's eyes.

“You got to be careful around zoms, kid. They bite.”

Something flicked through the kid's eyes; an emotion or reaction that the guard could not identify.

The guard was tough, big-chested and unshaven, a former trade route rider who had recently moved to Mountainside from Haven. The guard was used to staring down other people. He was that kind of man. He'd been out in the Ruin, he'd fought zoms, killed more than a few. No boy had ever stared him down, not even when the guard had
been
a boy. He met the boy's stare and stood his ground.

But it was the guard whose eyes broke contact first and slid away.

Before he did, the man's stern face changed, the harsh lines of his scowl softening into an uncertain frown. As he broke eye contact, he tried to hide it by pretending to turn and look at the zombie the kid had been staring at.

“What's so special about this one?” demanded the guard. “You know her?”

The zombie was dressed in the tattered rags of a party dress. Most people who worked the fence or ran the trade routes were pretty good at guessing how old a person had been before they'd zommed out, and this one looked to have been forty or fifty. A middle-aged woman dressed for some event. Maybe a graduation, maybe a wedding. The relentless California suns
and fourteen brutal winters had bleached her rags to a paleness in which only the ghosts of wildflowers could still be seen. The dress must have been vibrant and pretty once. Expensive, too.

The guard turned back to the kid on the chair.

“Who was she?” he asked, and much of the gruffness was gone from his voice. He suddenly thought he knew, and he didn't want to know. “She your mom, kid?”

The teenager stood up and moved his chair a few feet to the left so that he had a clear view of the dead woman in the party dress.

“Hey,” said the guard. “Did you hear me? I asked—”

“No,” said the kid. “She's not my mother.”

The guard's frown deepened. “Aunt?”

“No.”

“Someone from your family—?”

“I don't know her,” said the teen.

The guard looked from the boy to the zom and back again.

“Then what's she to you?”

The teen didn't answer. He sat down on his chair and rested his elbows on his thighs and looked through the fence. The zombie in the faded party dress shuffled clumsily through the tall grass, ignoring the guard and turning her dusty eyes on the boy. She stopped a foot from the fence; her arms hung limply at her sides, fingers twitching every once in a while. Her mouth opened and closed as if trying to speak. Or chewing on some imagined meal.

“Jeez, kid . . . haven't you ever seen a zom before?” asked the guard.

The teenager nodded. “One or two.”

“So, what's the fascination?”

The boy almost smiled. “You wouldn't understand.”

Minutes passed slowly. Flies crawled over the zombie's face. Sun-drowsy bees droned by, looking for flowers in the shade of the guard tower a hundred yards along the fence line. Five crows settled on the top bar of the fence and cawed to one another in their own ancient language.

The boy and the zombie stared at each other as if the guard, the fence, and the rest of the world did not exist.

“You shouldn't be out here,” the guard said. “Ain't safe.”

After a long, thoughtful moment, the teen said, “I know.”

“There's been a lot of trouble lately, and not just with the zoms.”

The teen nodded.

“Bunch of bounty hunters got themselves killed up in the hills last month.”

Another nod.

“Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer. Their whole crew. Got ambushed. Someone killed the whole bunch of them.”

“Yes,” said the boy. “I heard.”

“If you heard, then you know it ain't safe out there. Weird stuff happening out in the Ruin, too. Zoms are all stirred up. People been seeing stuff. Wild animals and such, stuff nobody's seen for years, and I'm not talking about wolves and bears. There's talk about animals out of old zoos and circuses from before First Night. Tigers and lions and—”

The boy took a breath and exhaled it slowly and audibly.
He turned to look at the guard. “Is there a town law about sitting here?”

“Probably,” the guard said bluntly. “Especially for underage—”

“I'm not underage,” said the boy. “I'm fifteen.”

“Fifteen? Then how come you're here all the time? Shouldn't you be working, earning your ration dollars?”

Another ghost of a smile flitted over the teen's mouth. “I
am
working.”

“Gimme a break. You're just loafing out here.”

The teen shrugged.

“Okay,” said the guard in a challenging tone, “what kind of job are you
working
at, sitting out here looking at zoms all day?”

The boy's eyes burned with green fire. Cold and distant. “I'm a zombie hunter,” he said.

That made the guard laugh. “Oh really?”

“Really. An apprentice, but, yeah . . . that's what I do.”

“
You're
a bounty hunter? That's what you're trying to tell me? That's what I'm supposed to believe?”

The teen shrugged. “Believe what you want.”

The guard gave a big braying laugh. “And who are you supposed to be apprenticing to?”

The cold green eyes were steady and unblinking. “My brother,” he said.

“Yeah? And who's your brother?”

“Tom Imura,” said the boy.

The mocking grin froze on the guard's face, and then slowly, slowly, it drained away. The guard's eyes flicked from the teen to the red zone that separated the fence line and the
broad green fields that flanked them from the town.

“Tom Imura?” echoed the guard in a small voice. “You're Tom Imura's kid brother . . . ?”

“Yes,” said Benny Imura. “My brother told me to come down here. He told me to do what I'm doing. Do you want me to go tell him that you said I couldn't?”

It wasn't said as a threat. Benny never raised his voice, never changed his expression. The guard stood near him, looking down at him, his mouth now working silently in an unconscious parody of the zombie.

“I'd like to be left alone,” said Benny. “If that's not breaking any rules.”

“Um . . . no. No, that's fine,” said the guard. He unconsciously backed away from Benny, and his beefy shoulders bumped lightly against the chain-link wall.

Instantly the zombie lunged at him, thrusting her withered fingers through the links, clawing at the guard's shirt, biting at the chain-links with rotted gray teeth.

The guard cried out in alarm and tried to simultaneously pull himself away and close the shotgun breech; but before he could do either, Benny was out of his chair. Benny grabbed the guard's shirt with both hands and yanked him forward, away from the fence, away from the twisting pale fingers. As the guard staggered forward, his weight crashed toward Benny, but the teenager pivoted his hips and shoved the guard away from him so that the man staggered several yards toward the red zone. The shotgun fell to the grass with a muffled thud.

The moment seemed to freeze in place. The guard lay shocked and wide-eyed on the ground near the shotgun; the zom stood erect and motionless, her hunting frenzy stilled
with no prey to attack. Benny Imura stood between them, legs planted wide, arms wide, palms pointing calmingly out toward guard and zom.

The guard looked up at the teenager as Benny slowly lowered his arms.

“You have to be careful around them,” said the boy. “They bite.”

Then Benny offered his hand to the guard and helped him up. He didn't touch the fallen shotgun, leaving it to the guard. Once he was up and dusted off, the guard checked the shotgun barrels and gave Benny a long, considering glare.

“I ought to chase you the heck out of here,” he said.