Dead & Gone

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.

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.