Bits & Pieces

by Jonathan Maberry

  Nearby, Brother Andrew grabbed Jolt by the arms, hauled the boy upright, then flung him back against the truck.

  The third reaper, Brother Max, climbed to his feet and shifted to Brother Colin’s right. Riot knew that the moment was slipping away. They could come at her in a combined attack that would overwhelm her. She couldn’t block two expert knife fighters at once. That’s why Saint John had sent them out, and why Brother Andrew had picked them for this ambush. Their combined skill was more than a match for hers. The only chance she might have—and it would be a slim one—would be to slaughter them, to go in fast and use every bit of skill she had to cut them apart and kill them.

  But Jolt’s words kept ringing in her ears.

  We don’t kill.

  There’s been enough death in the world.

  In a flash of a moment, Riot thought of all the lives she’d taken before she realized how horrible the Night Church was. She felt like she now stood ankle-deep in a river of blood. She could feel the bloodlust, the murderlust, burning in her heart and tingling in the fingers of the hand that held the knife. She realized with total horror that she wanted to kill these men; she longed to open red mouths in their flesh. To give them the gift of darkness.

  It was everything her mother had ever taught her.

  Everything Saint John had taught her.

  It was the thing about her that allowed them to own her.

  The blood hunger, the murder hunger, the need to kill in order to make the world right.

  Riot thought she had escaped all of this when she’d run away from the Night Church.

  But it was there in her hand. In her pounding ear.

  In her need.

  “Please,” she said to the two reapers. “Please.”

  They rushed at her.

  Something inside Riot’s mind . . . twisted.

  She moved.

  So fast.

  As she had been taught.

  Their blades drove toward her flesh. She parried hard, knocking one hand aside so that the tip of the knife drove through the empty air an inch from her hip. With the other hand she snapped the tip of the blade down, finding flesh, finding bone.

  There was a scream.

  There was blood.

  Brother Colin’s knife dropped to clatter on the ground.

  Riot moved, turning lithely. She may not have been able to dance a bicycle like Gummi Bear or run like the desert wind over every obstacle like Jolt, but in this, in the dance of blades and bodies, she was perfection in form and function. Elegant, in the way that perfect control can be elegant even in the commission of a violent act. Smooth, effortless, flawless.

  Riot turned, and the blade whipped across Brother Max, cutting cloth and skin. Finding the redness beneath flesh. Drawing drops of it out in a spray of rubies. Drawing the scream out.

  She turned in, completing a dancer’s pirouette, coming to an abrupt stop as if painted on the canvas of the moment. Brother Max was on his knees, arms crossed over his chest, holding his blood inside. Brother Colin leaned against a car, one hand clamped over a ruined forearm. Both of them torn by her knife.

  Both of the them only torn.

  Both of them alive.

  “Riot,” said Jolt.

  She stood there, panting, eyes wide and unfocused, staring through the world.

  “Riot,” he said again.

  And she looked at him.

  Jolt leaned against the truck; Brother Andrew held him in place with a flat palm on his chest and a fist the size of a bucket poised to deliver a killing blow.

  Brother Andrew sneered at her, at her refusal to kill. “How far you’ve fallen, little witch.”

  He drove the punch at Jolt.

  Jolt laughed.

  He suddenly dropped into a low squat, letting his body simply go limp in a deadweight plunge. Andrew’s hand slid with him, and the incoming punch missed Jolt’s curly blond hair by ten inches.

  It did not miss the side of the truck.

  The impact was huge, a massive ka-rang that shook the whole vehicle.

  The sound was so loud it masked the sound of all the bones in Andrew’s fist breaking.

  The echo of the sound bounced off all the cars. It drew moans from the dead—the closest of which were now no more than a dozen paces away.

  Brother Andrew did not scream.

  He stared at his shattered fist, and for a moment the only sound he made, the only sound he was capable of making, was a high-pitched whistle that approached the ultra-sonic.

  Jolt rose to his feet and shoved Brother Andrew away from him. The big reaper staggered back, his face flushing scarlet as he fought to articulate his agony.

  “Finish it,” cried Riot.

  Jolt looked at her. “What?”

  “Kill him!” begged Riot. “While you still have the chance.”

  The young man glanced at Andrew, who reeled away from him, cradling his hand against his chest and making small keening sounds.

  “No,” said Jolt. “It’s over; he’s done.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Yes, he is.” He looked past her at the two wounded reapers. “They all are.”

  “No . . . you don’t understand. . . . There are more of them out there.”

  Jolt pointed past her and she turned. Beyond the line of cars, near the town and coming hard in their direction, was a mass of people. Fifty of them. A hundred. More. Riding in front of them, his siren still wailing, was Gummi Bear.

  Riot lowered her knife.

  The dead were getting closer now, climbing over the locked bumpers of crashed cars.

  Jolt walked over to Brother Andrew’s scythe, hooked his foot under the handle, kicked it into the air, caught it, and then spun his whole body and hurled the weapon as far away as he could. It arced over the cars and over the heads of the oncoming mass of zees. It fell out of sight, its clatter of impact lost beneath the moans of the dead.

  Brother Andrew looked in the direction of his lost weapon and then turned slowly back to Jolt. His eyes were wet with unshed tears of pain, but his face was a mask of murderous fury.

  “Jolt . . . ,” pleaded Riot, “please . . . you have to. . . .”

  But Jolt shook his head. “I told you already, Riot. There’s been enough killing.”

  Brother Andrew managed a small, tight smile. “She’s right, boy,” he wheezed. “This is your only chance.”

  Jolt caught Andrew by the throat and stood him up, leaning in close to stare the man in the face. “Get your sick friends and get the hell out of here. You don’t belong around decent folks.”

  He shoved the big reaper away from him and pointed to the only path through the cars that was not blocked by any of the living dead.

  Andrew growled at the others to go, but he lingered at the mouth of the narrow path.

  “You think you did something smart and noble here,” he said. “But all you did was cry out for the wrath of god. The darkness will come for you. It will come for you and everyone you love . . . and I’ll be there to see it happen.”

  Jolt just shook his head. “Go.”

  Brother Andrew looked past him at Riot.

  “This is on you, girl. You know that we’ll be back. You know what we’ll do.”

  Riot pointed her knife at him. “If I ever see you again, Andrew, I’m going to kill you.”

  The reaper smiled. “Ah . . . now that’s my girl.”

  He turned and lumbered away, trailed by his bleeding companions.

  Riot hurried over to Jolt and got right up in his face. “He’s not joking, Jolt; they will be back.”

  “I guess they will.”

  She studied him. “Y’all are barn-owl crazy.”

  Jolt grinned. “Been told that.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she demanded, her voice a fierce whisper. “Y’all are stepping into harm’s way here, and you don’t even know me.”

  “Does that matter? How long does a person have to know someone before they do what’s right? You’re a gi
rl out here, starving and fighting for her life. Am I supposed to just ignore all that? What kind of person would that make me? What kind of world would that make? Look, Riot, I wasn’t joking about what I said. How much killing is enough? How much pain is enough? When do we stop and say ‘that’s it, no more’?”

  Riot opened her mouth to respond, but she didn’t know how to answer those questions.

  “The world that died couldn’t answer those questions either,” he said, and gave a small shrug. “The people Gummi and I travel with—we don’t pretend to know all the answers, but we’re working on them.” His grin returned, brighter than ever. “And we’re having some fun while we work it out.”

  “Y’all are definitely crazy,” said Riot, and she too grinned.

  The dead, smelling blood on the air, moaned in hunger. They crawled over the cars toward the living meat.

  “Time to go,” said Jolt, and he started to turn away. Then he paused and reached out a hand to her. “Want to come . . . ?”

  She gave it a lot of thought. Maybe a full second.

  Then she took his hand, and together they climbed onto the nearest car.

  “Let’s go!” bellowed Jolt. He let out a huge whoop of sheer joy, took two running steps across the hood, and then jumped high and wide, sailing over the heads and mouths and reaching arms of the biters.

  Riot watched him—his strong back, his lithe body.

  What in tarnation have you got yourself into, girl? she wondered.

  Behind her the dead were massing, scrambling over the cars now like a swarm of wriggling worms. Off the road, hundreds of people were rushing toward her, coming to help her and Jolt. People she did not know. Orphans and refugees. Scavengers.

  Friends?

  Maybe. As strange as that concept was.

  But what kind of friend could she be to them? Brother Andrew was right. He would be back. The reapers were out there, and there were so many of them. If they came in force, what could a couple of hundred people do?

  “Please,” she said to the hot air. But she did not know exactly what she was asking for. She watched Jolt run and leap and twist and land and run. “Please.”

  Riot cast one last look behind her, to where Brother Andrew had gone.

  “Please,” she begged.

  The reapers would come for her.

  No, that wasn’t quite right. They would come for Sister Margaret. They would come for the girl who once belonged to them, to the Night Church.

  Maybe they would not find her. Maybe by the time they came back the scavengers would have moved on to another town. And another. Maybe if it took too long to find her, the reapers would give up.

  She hoped so.

  She desperately wanted them to understand that the girl they were looking for did not exist anymore. Not a trace of her.

  The girl she had been, Sister Margaret, was dead and gone.

  She turned and ran and leaped and followed, hoping that she was free.

  FROM NIX’S JOURNAL

  ON REBELLION

  (BEFORE DUST & DECAY)

  Some of the people in town think that we’re acting out. Because of training with Tom. Because we stood up to Charlie (and a lot of freaks in this town still think Charlie was a good guy!!!!). Because we go outside the gates and into the Ruin.

  They say that Benny, Chong, Lilah, Morgie, and I are rebels.

  Rebels.

  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 . . .

  Taking care of the dog helped.

  Trying to come up with a name for him was good. Especially when she kept trying different names on him to see if he’d respond to one.

  The dog was big. Really big.

  More than twice as big as her. The last time Rags had stood on her bathroom scale, she was eighty-six pounds. She’d lost weight since. Too much, really.

  The dog had to be at least twice as heavy as she’d been on that day.

  He was pretty. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. Rags loved dogs, and she could usually spot what breeds made up a mix. The Langstons next door had owned a cockapoo and a Labradoodle.

  PomPom had been a . . .

  No.

  No. Don’t go there.

  She told herself that fifty times a day. Most days she listened. Some days, no matter how much she did to her body or how much she crammed into her head, she couldn’t help but go down that road.

  It was on those days that she really learned how to scream.

  It was on those days that she learned how to scream quietly. Into her backpack, into her hands. Sometimes into the crook of her arm when she huddled under a b
ush and smothered every single sound so the dead wouldn’t find her.

  It was a survival skill. One of the things she had to learn.

  The dog, though.

  The new dog. The dog she’d saved and who’d saved her. He was something else. Not a combination of a couple of miniature breeds. He was a brute. Rags thought that he was at least half white shepherd and half Irish wolfhound. Fur the color of dirty snow. Lots of teeth, lots of muscle.

  The dog had been trapped in a wrecked car. There was no driver, no passengers. No one alive or dead. Just the dog.

  Big. Wild-eyed. More than half-starved. Looking like a monster, like a werewolf from a horror movie.

  When Rags first saw him, she almost broke and ran. She was instantly afraid of him, like she was taught to be afraid of things. Mom and Dad had been really good at teaching her to be afraid of stuff. People she didn’t know. Animals. Bugs. The outdoors.

  Stuff.

  Since everything went crazy, Rags had become afraid of a lot more. The dead, of course. She always had to be afraid of them. They were never afraid of her.

  Other things. Scavengers. Especially the male scavengers. Rags was young, but she wasn’t naive.

  Wild animals, too. When the end came, someone must have let the animals out of their cages at the zoos. Maybe in circuses, too. There were all kinds of things out there. She saw a tiger chasing a deer once. And a pair of zebras running along the side of a highway. There were monkeys in the trees, and last week she saw a pack of the dead hunkered down around a dead giraffe. Eating it.

  The dead would eat anything.

  Rags had met survivors who thought that the dead only went after people, but that was not true. They’d eat anything.

  Being on the road, being out in the world, taught Rags the truth. The dead would eat anything as long as it was alive, or if it had just died. She didn’t understand that. No one she knew did. Just like she didn’t know why the dead would stop eating a person while they were mostly still whole, but they’d eat an animal all the way down to the bones.

  It made no sense to her.

  A lot of things made no sense.