It did not mean that Chong was less terrified, but the girl’s terror and trauma were worse than his own. Even if he died, what she was going through was worse. She’d seen her parents murdered right in front of her. When Chong died, his fear would end; Eve would have to live with those memories.
Everything’s relative.
Eve sat close to him, sucking her thumb, occasionally humming disjointed pieces of lullabies.
Riot went outside to make sure they were still safe, then came back and sat down. Chong studied Riot’s face. She was a puzzle to him. She reminded him of Tom’s bounty hunter friend, Sally Two-Knives. Tough, fiercely individual, violent, and clearly with a heart.
“Talk to me,” said Chong.
“About what?” she asked. “I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with some smart way out of this bear trap, but every which way I look there’s just more traps.”
“Yeah, let’s not talk about that,” said Chong. “Why don’t you tell me your story? I mean . . . are you a reaper?”
She looked away for a moment. “Not as such,” she said.
“Okay, that was evasive.”
She shrugged. “I was a reaper once upon a time. Ain’t now. End of story.”
“No,” said Chong. “I’m dying, I get to be nosy. You’re a walking contradiction. You have the same skin art as the reapers, but you went after Brother Andrew like you owed him for a lot of hurt.”
Riot ran a hand thoughtfully over her scalp, then sighed. “I was no more’n two years old when the plague hit,” she said slowly. “My dad was raising me. He was a country doctor down in North Carolina. He’d divorced my ma ’cause she was a drunk and a bum and no damn good.”
“I’m sorry,” Chong began, but she waved it away.
“That’s the nice part of the story. Y’all want to hear it or not?”
He nodded. His skin was cold and clammy, and he had an incredibly bad headache. He sat cross-legged with his back to the wall.
“I could use the distraction,” he admitted.
“Well, when the whole world turned into an all-you-can-eat buffet, Pa packed me in his car and drove northwest. Got as far as Jefferson City, Missouri, before the EMPs killed the car. After that we joined up with a buncha folks who was running from the dead. I don’t remember nothin’ about that. All kind of a blur. We was always running, always hiding, and always hungry. People came and went. Then we met up with a bigger bunch of folks, and when they found out Pa was a doc, they made sure that he was always safe. Me too.
“My pa was always trying to steer over toward Topeka, which was the last place he knew my mom to be living. And sure enough, she was there and she was alive. My pa said it was like a miracle. Only thing was, Ma was hooked up with a group that was calling itself the Night Church, and she was keeping company with its leader, a man named Saint John.”
Eve wormed closer to Chong, her thumb still socketed in her mouth. It frightened Chong that the child was barely talking. She’d said a few words after she woke up, but then she seemed to shut down. It was so sad.
“Saint John said that it really was a miracle that my ma found me,” continued Riot, “and he said that it made me special. Like I was some kind of holy person.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Me. Holy. Right.”
“This Night Church,” asked Chong, “they’re the reapers?”
She nodded. “They didn’t start calling themselves that until much later. By then I was being trained to be a fighter. Saint John knows every kind of evil move there is. Karate and all that. Dirty fighting. Hands, feet, knives, strangle wires. He taught me all that stuff, and I was the head of my class. Hooray for me.” She touched her scalp. “This stuff was actually a health thing first. We all came down with the worst case of lice in the history of bugs. Couldn’t shake ’em, couldn’t wash ’em out, so Pa suggested everybody shave all their hair off. Worked, too. But while we was all bald, somebody took it in their head to go and get tattooed. Not sure who started it, but everyone in the Night Church did it. Saint John, too, and he called it the mark in flesh of our devotion. Some crap like that.”
“Why don’t you grow your hair back?”
She ran her fingers lightly over her scalp. “I tried, but it don’t grow in right. Comes in all patchy and nasty. Better to keep it like this. Besides, the reapers can’t stand that I have the mark and I ain’t one of ’em. Drives Ma nuts too.”
“Your mother is still with them?”
“My dear old ma,” said Riot acidly, “is the high holy muck-a-muck of the Night Church. Calls herself Mother Rose. An’ she’s the only one who didn’t get her head tattooed. Grew her hair back, and Saint John somehow spun that as it was a special mark that only she could have. No, don’t look too close at it, ’cause you’ll hurt yourself. It don’t make a lick of sense.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I wised up,” she said. “I guess I kind of had what you might call a ‘moment.’ I was fourteen by then and leadin’ my own team of reapers. All girls, daughters of the inner circle of the church. We were getting ready to hit this little walled-in town in Idaho—and the thing is, I never even found out its name—and the night before the raid, I was on recon with a couple of the other girls when I heard something from over the walls.”
“What?” asked Chong.
“Weren’t much, just a lady singing a lullaby to her baby.” She paused as if looking into that memory with perfect clarity. “I was up in a tree where I could see over the wall. The guards don’t watch trees because the gray people can’t climb.”
Chong nodded.
“I could see into a lighted window, and there’s this gal, maybe twenty years old, holding a little baby in her arms as she rocked in a chair. Just a single candle lit on a table. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. The woman was so . . . happy. She had her baby, and she was in a safe town, and there was music and laughter in the streets. The world outside might be full of monsters and the whole world might have gone to hell, but here she was, rocking her baby and singing a song.”
“What happened?”
Riot sniffed and shook her head. “When I came back to give my report . . . I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. So I lied. I spun a yarn about the whole town being filled with armed men and lots of guns and suchlike. I said that we’d get ourselves killed sure as God made little green apples.”
“Did they believe you?”
She looked at Eve and smiled sadly. “No. Saint John had other people scoutin’ too, and they saw the truth, that the town was wide open, that the defenses were only good against gray people.”
“What happened?”
“They came in and killed ’em all. Every last man, woman . . . and child . . . in that town. Saint John sent his pet goon, Brother Peter, to drag me in for a talk, but I read the writing on the wall and cut bait. I was gone before sunup. Just up and went.”
“They let you just leave?”
“‘Let’? No. I had to muss a few of them ’up some, but I got away.” She sniffed again. “After that I fell in with a gang of scavengers. That’s where I got the nickname. Riot. Did a bunch of bad stuff and raised a lot of Cain. Then . . . I got real sick, and a way-station monk took me to a place called Sanctuary. They fixed me up right and proper. They wanted me to stay there, but I snuck out of that place like I did from my mom’s camp. Didn’t hurt nobody, though. After that I knocked around a bit, got into some more trouble. But . . . a year ago I found a bunch of refugees on the run from some reapers. I helped ’em slip away, but there were a lot of sick and injured, including a bunch of kids, so I took ’em to Sanctuary. Kind of dropped ’em at the door and ran. Done that a few times now. The folks at Sanctuary don’t mind people coming in for help, but they really don’t like people leaving. I think they’d as soon put a leash on me if they had the chance. I don’t give them no chance. I drop and run, drop and run. That’s what I was trying to do with Carter and his crew. Guess I kind of made it my calling.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s penance.”
“But . . . the stuff you did while you were with the reapers, that wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know any better, and when you did, you left.”
“Maybe. That don’t make me sleep any better at night.”
She reached over and stroked Eve’s hair.
“I got wind of the reapers planning on making a move on her town. Treetops it was called. I’d been there a few times with the scavengers. Nice folks, so I tried to get there in time to warn people, but I was about four hours too late. All I could do was offer to lead the survivors to Sanctuary.”
“You left out one part,” said Chong. “What happened to your dad?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Saint John and Mama said he up and left one night. Just took off . . . but I don’t believe that. I think they killed him.”
“Why?”
Riot gave him a hard look. “If you’re running a church based on killing everyone who’s still sucking air, do you really want a doctor around? Pa was all about some oath when he was in medical school. He was all about saving lives . . . so I guess he had to go.”
“I’m sorry,” said Chong, and he meant it. “It . . . it must be lonely for you.”
“Well, it’s the end of the world, you know? Kinda sucks for everyone.”
Chong smiled a bitter little smile. “Yeah, I really get that.”
Riot studied his face for several thoughtful seconds. “I don’t know much about medicine,” she admitted, “’cept how to patch a busted leg or stitch a knife cut, take out the occasional arrow. Point is, I know where we might be able to get some help.”
“Help? Come on, Riot, we both know how this ends. I get sicker and sicker and then I die. And then you . . . well, then you take care of me. There’s no variation on that story. Everyone who gets infected dies.”
At that last word, Eve gave a soft whimper of protest and buried her head against his chest. Chong stroked her hair. He wanted to do the same thing she was doing—curl up in a fetal position and hope the world would just go away.
“Chong, listen to me,” insisted Riot. “I think I should take you to Sanctuary.”
“And what exactly is Sanctuary? Is it just a bunch of way-station monks or . . . ?”
Riot looked away for a moment, debating with herself about something. When she turned back, her face was even more tense. “Sanctuary is a lot of different things to different people,” she said. “For some—people like . . . ” Instead of naming Carter, she nodded to Eve, and Chong understood. “For folks runnin’ from the reapers, Sanctuary’s just that. A safe place. It’s squirreled away pretty good, and it’s got some natural defenses. Mountains and suchlike. Hard as all get-out to find.”
“It’s a settlement?”
“To some,” she said. “Mostly it’s a kind of hospital, and I want to take little Evie there. I’m not going to be any good taking care of her, and she’s going to be hurtin’ for a long spell. There’s a bunch of monks who look after people.”
“Way-station monks? I’ve met some. The call themselves the Children of God, and they refer to the gray people as the Children of Lazarus.”
“Right, right. Well, they made Sanctuary their own place, and they take in the sick and injured and tend to them.”
“Are they actual doctors?”
“They’re not,” she said, but Chong caught the slight emphasis on “they’re.”
“Are . . . there other doctors there?”
“Kind of.”
“And you think they could help me?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But if anyone can, they’s the ones.”
“Okay, then let’s go.”
“Well, there’s a bit of a hitch,” she said slowly, looking almost pained.
“What hitch?”
“If they let you into that other place . . . not the part with the monks, but the part where they can maybe help you . . . ”
“Yes?”
“You won’t be allowed to leave.”
“Until—?”
“Ever,” she said. “They don’t like strangers wandering around who know where Sanctuary is. They won’t kill you or nothing, but you won’t ever leave.”
Chong closed his eyes and looked into his own future. All he could see was a blank wall.
“What choice do I have?”
FROM NIX’S JOURNAL
Last night I dreamed that the zombie plague never started. But the dream was weird; there were no details. I suppose it’s because I never knew the world before First Night.
All I know is town and the Ruin.
68
“I . . . I’M SORRY, NIX,” SAID BENNY.
She glared at him through her tears. “Yeah, well, sorry doesn’t do much. I lost my mom. I lost everything, and it’s all that damn town’s fault.”
“What?”
“God, I couldn’t stand to be there another minute. It was like living in a graveyard. No one ever talked about what happened to the world. No one ever talked about the future. You know why? Because no one believed there was a future. Everyone in Mountainside was just sitting around, waiting to die. They act like they’re dead already.”
