Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

Really?

Chong says that people are “stubbornly entrenched in convenient worldviews.” Which is his way of saying that people don’t want to think about anything but what they think about every day. Ever since they moved to Mountainside, people stopped thinking about the rest of the world. Tom says they can’t afford that, because thinking about what’s out there makes them have to remember what they’ve lost. I’m not sure that’s it. I think they’ve given up, and they’re okay with just waiting out the rest of their lives in what they think is comfort. They don’t care about the future. They’ve given up on it.

So if they think about us, about why we’re training, about that jet we saw, then they have to accept that there’s something out there. That means they have to find the courage to become involved in the world again. They have to be alive again.

If having hope for the future and needing to go find what’s out there makes us rebels, then . . . okay. I guess we’re rebels.

Rags & Bones

(Thirteen years before the events of Rot & Ruin)

1

They called her Ragdoll.

Or sometimes just Rags.

She was small for her age. On the skinny side of thin. On the plain side of pretty. On the starving side of being alive. She was thirteen the last time her age mattered to anyone, even herself.

Once upon a time she’d had a name, but she never told anyone what it was. That name belonged to someone else. It belonged to a little brown teen who lived in a small town on the outskirts of San Jose. A girl who went to school. A girl who had friends. A girl who had her own room, the promise of a car when she was old enough, a great computer, a top-of-the-line tablet, nice clothes, great shoes, and a three-year-old brother.

It belonged to a girl who belonged. To friends, to places, to a family.

That girl had been happy. She’d been loved. She’d been protected.

That girl was dead as far as Rags was concerned.

Rags was alone and she was a loner.

Except for the dog. She hadn’t named the dog yet. It wasn’t any dog she’d known before. Her own—the one she’d had since she was seven—was gone, and Rags didn’t like to think about how she’d gone. PomPom had been small and cute and was scared of everyone, even the cat. It wasn’t fair what had happened to her. And to the cat.

And to the world.

Rags tried never to think about any of that, because to think about PomPom meant thinking about what had happened.

What had happened when Mom came home.

Because Mom came home all wrong. All broken.

Red and strange and . . .

. . . and . . .

. . .

Rags sometimes had to scream to make her brain stop thinking about that.

Sometimes she ran down a road until she was pouring sweat and panting and the crazy lights started burning in the corners of her eyes.

Anything to keep her mind from replaying all of that.

It was like a streaming video that would show everything in high-def and then automatically begin again as soon as it was over.

If she exhausted herself, it helped.

When she was busy trying to find food, that helped too.

When she was running from the dead, that didn’t help. That was part of the memory, even if these dead weren’t the people she’d once been related to. Even if they didn’t look like Mom or Dad, or Tyler or Gram or . . . or . . .