The age thing was the only real question. She would be seventeen in four weeks. Brett, like most of the guys in school, tended to focus on “older” women. Older as in college freshmen. As if two years made that much of a difference. Please.
Of course it didn’t help at all when Gayla came to one of these conventions. Gayla was nineteen, and she always wore costumes that were more shock than style. Daenerys from Game of Thrones—one of her skimpier costumes. Or Power Girl, with the skintight white onesie with the huge cutout for cleavage. Or slave-girl Princess Leia. It was repulsive. Gayla was half-naked most of the time, and sure, she had a very nice figure, but everyone knew she wasn’t born with those boobs. She went from a small B cup to whatever the heck you’d call those science-fiction plastic bowling balls she had now. That happened last summer, right after she graduated. She went away with a normal chest and came back looking like a Barbie doll. Brett and most of the other guys lost their damn minds.
They were plastic! They weren’t real. What did it matter?
Rachael was real, head to toe. In this costume, Brett would absolutely be able to see that. And she was no stick figure herself. If Brett was able to grasp real from fake, then the choice would be obvious.
Rachael nodded to herself and unzipped her jacket a bit to show some cleavage.
Then she growled out loud and zipped it up most of the way, immediately disgusted with herself. She had never really been the kind to flaunt her curves to attract a boy, and hated that she was starting to head in that direction now.
“What are you doing?” she demanded of her reflection.
The image of Gayla seemed to wander through her imagination, barely dressed, with a love-struck Brett staggering along behind. Rachael’s fingers lingered on the zipper pull. Maybe just a little . . .
“You are such a pig,” she told herself. Or maybe she was talking to Brett.
Or Gayla.
She turned away, shaking her head, and went back to sit on the edge of the bed to continue working on the belt.
Across the room, on the big-screen TV, the reporter on CNN was telling some crazy story about a riot in Pittsburgh. People acting all weird, attacking one another. Biting one another.
“Everyone’s insane,” she told the screen.
The aerial video footage of a riot played out, but Rachael bent to her work and was soon lost in the detail-oriented task of working with grommets and leather and all the costumer’s tools.
Like most people around the world, she did not pay much attention to these first reports.
Like most people, she should have.
2
Now
Doylestown, Pennsylvania
(This story takes place at the same time as Rot & Ruin)
Rags kept to the shadows as she moved along the road.
In the fifteen years since the dead rose, Mother Nature had been ferocious in her determination to reclaim the world. Most of the streets had been torn apart by the slow fingers of roots. Young trees rose above seas of pernicious weeds. Heavy, hairy vines clung to the sides of the trees like lampreys on the skin of sharks. Kudzu, once alien to America, now dominated the landscape, obscuring the facades of most stores and homes and covering many of the cars in green
blankets. By day these streets ran with wild deer, foxes, horses, and packs of feral dogs. By night bears and wolves prowled the alleys and backyards, watched by owls and feared by everything.
Beside her, Ghoulie trotted along, sniffing everything, eyes alert, ears up. Like his father—Rags’s old and much-missed friend, Bones—Ghoulie was a brute. He had the mixed shepherd–Irish wolfhound bulk and general shape of Bones; but he also had the heavier shoulders and broader snout of his mastiff mother. Rags estimated that Ghoulie was about two hundred pounds, slightly less than twice her weight. He wore a leather harness studded with rows of sixteen-penny nails that stood up like porcupine quills. Ghoulie had a bite-proof leather-and-plastic helmet that Rags had made from a jockey’s helmet she’d taken from an abandoned racetrack in Kentucky.
The leather armor creaked a little as Ghoulie went sniffing along, but the sound was nearly lost beneath the continuous pulse of crickets and cicadas.
For her part, Rags wore jeans and a leather jacket, hiking boots and fingerless kickboxing gloves she’d taken from a sporting goods store in South Carolina and reinforced with small pieces of very hard plastic. Lightweight and strong. Her football helmet hung from her belt, ready to grab and put on if she encountered any of the dead. She made no sound at all as she walked. She’d learned that skill long ago. Captain Ledger was occasionally a jerk when it came to reinforcing his rules of safety, but Rags knew that she was alive because of him. She knew that she had survived a thousand instances when she would otherwise have died had it not been for the training he’d given her. Four years of it. Every single day that they’d traveled together. No days off.
“Will the dead take a day off?” he asked every time she complained.
“No,” was her grudging, inevitable answer.
“Then you can’t either. Not if you want to stay out here. Maybe if you went to Mountainside with that kid, Imura. Sure, behind fences you can take five. Or down in Asheville, in the new towns. But out here? Nope. You train, you prepare, you don’t let up and don’t lighten up and that way you . . . what?”
“You get to stay alive,” she replied.