Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

“Of course I’m serious,” she barked. A dozen yards away a couple of the zees turned sharply toward her. Riot lowered her voice. “I just met y’all, boy, so how am I supposed to know what kind of games y’all are fixing to play?”

“Okay, okay, don’t have a kitten. I thought you could figure it out from me and Gummi Bear. Him on his bike, me freerunning out here.”

She said nothing.

“Z-Games?” he ventured.

She still said nothing.

He grunted. “Wow, you really aren’t from around here, are you?”

“And y’all are taking the long way round the mountain just to answer a question.”

The zees were moving toward them again, and more had joined in.

“Better to tell you at the camp—”

“Tell me now or I ain’t going nowhere.”

“Okay, fast version because, like—well, check it out.” He nodded at the approaching dead. “I’m part of a scavenger crew that’s been working the Ruin and—”

“The what?”

He frowned again and waved his hand to indicate everything. “This . . . the great Rot and Ruin. Used to be called America, now it’s pretty much a breakfast buffet for the shambling wrinklers out there.”

“Still called America, last I heard.”

“Then you heard different than me,” said Jolt. “You been as far west as California?”

“They nuked California, didn’t they?”

“Just L.A. and, I think, San Francisco. Big state, though, and there’s some towns scattered up and down the Sierra Nevadas. Some small settlements farther out. Everything else—well, we just call it the great Rot and Ruin.”

“It’s not all ruined,” said Riot, but her comment lacked conviction. She had seen her fair share of ruin. Some of it caused by the dead, some by other things. The Night Church was turning a lot of this part of the world into a silent graveyard. So . . . ruin . . . that seemed to fit better than anything else she’d heard it called. “What are Z-Games?”

“Ah . . . well, that’s the real fun,” said Jolt. “Makes the whole scavenging thing worth it, you know? We go into towns to locate food, salvageable supplies, all sorts of stuff. We tag the buildings with spray-paint, and then the trade guards go in all armored up and collect the stuff.”

“How is that a game?”

“It’s all about how we go in. You have to go in clean. No weapons, no armor, nothing but the clothes you’re standing up in and, depending on the category, your ride. Gummi Bear’s a biker, or at least he’s practicing to be one. Right now he’s a pied piper. He uses the siren to call the zees. There are a bunch of bikers, though, real pros. And we have sticks—kids on skateboards—and cutters, the cats who cruise on inline roller skates.”

“What are you?”

“I’m a bouncer. I do freerunning—it’s a kind of acrobatic sport running. Used to be called parkour before things fell down. I used to be a stick, but I got pretty good at running and I won these kicks”—he waggled one of the sneakers he wore—“so I switched.”

She goggled at him. “You do this for fun?”

“Sure, why else? Besides, it’s a total rush. The whole thing’s about wits and speed and cruising right there on the edge, where it’s just what you know and what you can do matched against a bunch of biters with dead brains.”

“One bite from those biters is enough.”

“Sure, so the rule is don’t get bit,” he said simply. “Pretty easy rule to remember.”

“Do people get bit?”

Jolt gave another shrug. “Yeah, but the incentive program is pretty strong. Mind you, the crew chiefs won’t let a player in if they think he’s off his game. They’re not actually trying to feed to the biters. The teams that go in are primed, you know? They’re ready to dance on a ray of light and hop over the sun.”

Riot shook her head. “Y’all are crazier than an outhouse full of bats, y’know that, right?”