Dead & Gone

14

During the last quarter mile the demands of running and jumping finally caught up with her. Twice she slipped and had to climb back up from the roadbed. To her satisfaction she saw that Jolt had slowed too. She hoped that he was getting tired — proof that he was human enough — and not that he was slowing down out of pity for her. The other boy, Gummi Bear, had sped on ahead.

Both times she fell, Riot’s first reaction was to pull her knife and wheel to face the oncoming zee. Jolt was far ahead and wouldn’t see her. She knew that she could make the kill quickly and be on her way without alerting him. But in each case she put the knife back, used a kick to knock the zee away from her, and hastily climbed up out of danger.

It made her feel strange and conflicted.

In the Night Church her mother and the elders occasionally had to silence the dead, though they always regretted it. There were complex spiritual reasons that were part of the church’s mission to create what Mom called a “quiet world.” At the same time the members of the church — called the Reapers in the Fields of the Lord or just reapers — wore colored streamers soaked in chemicals that somehow kept the gray people from attacking. And one of the elders, a strange and dangerous man known as Saint John, was trying to devise a way of controlling the countless hordes of living dead. The official church policy was to avoid killing the dead — though killing humans was allowed and even encouraged.

The farther Riot got from that group and the more she viewed it from a distance, the less sense it made.

After she’d fled, the girl realized that she had no choice but to deal harshly with any threat. She had no supply of the chemical that kept the reapers safe, and she had no sentries to watch over her as she slept, no teams of armed reapers to come to her aid if she was attacked by a dozen of the monsters. Since leaving the camp she had killed countless zees. It had become an automatic response.

Now she wondered if doing that had been wrong. How many of those kills had been unavoidable?

It was a dreadful question, and it throbbed like a canker in her mind. In light of Jolt’s disapproval, it felt wrong. Now this kind of killing felt like killing. The word was the same, but the meaning had changed.

Now killing these monsters felt like murder.

There was something dangerous hiding in that thought, but now was not the time to sit and puzzle it out.

She ran and leaped and flew through the air. When she caught up, they grinned at each other and ran together.

Jolt ran ahead of her, looking over his shoulder to throw smiles behind him.

Then Brother Andrew stepped out from behind a big delivery van right in Jolt’s path.

There was no time to warn Jolt as the wicked blade of the scythe flashed in the dry desert air.