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.”