Bits & Pieces (26 page)

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 bush 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.

Like why she'd let the big dog out of that car.

She shouldn't have.

The animal was starving, maybe crazy. Scared.

Letting it out was stupid. Suicidal. Way too risky a thing to even consider.

Rags had to think about it for a while, too. At first she stood on the bloodstained curb and studied the car. The dog was barking furiously.

There were no dead around. There was nothing but a couple of bodies that been shot in the head and left to rot. The stink was terrible, but Rags was used to it. Everything stank. She stank. She'd give a lot for a hot shower and clean underwear.

A lot.

The dog barked at her.

And then it stopped barking and stared at her.

It had strange eyes. One was such a dark brown that it looked almost black. The other was mint green. It wore a collar and had a tag, but Rags couldn't read it. Not through the cracked and dirty windows.

Rags came over and peered inside. The dog looked at her with its strange eyes. She expected it to growl. It didn't.

After a long time, Rags climbed up on the hood and sat
down, cross-legged, and laid her forehead against the windshield. The dog stared at her and did not move.

Rags had no idea how long she sat there. Shadows moved on the street around her. The air was still and there were no sounds in the distance. No moans or screams. No gunfire. Nothing.

Even the dog was silent. Watching her. Waiting.

There was so much going on in those eyes. Intelligence. And . . .

And what?

It was almost like looking into the eyes of a person rather than a dog. Even PomPom, much as she'd loved him, hadn't had this same quality. PomPom looked at her with a dog's eyes and a dog's mind and a dog's uncomplicated love.

This dog seemed different in ways she couldn't understand.

Rags straightened and then placed her palm flat over one of the cracks in the windshield. After a moment the dog bent forward and sniffed.

Then they sat and looked at each other for a while longer. Ten minutes maybe. Enough time for the shadows to slide around a bit more.

“Your family's gone,” she said quietly.

The dog watched her.

“Mine, too.”

The first of the evening crickets began chirping in the weeds that had grown thick in the cracks on the pavement.

“If I let you out,” she said to the dog, “will you be nice?”

The dog watched her.

“I don't have much food, but I can give you some soup. I
have a couple of cans of beef soup. It has too much salt, but it's okay. Do you want some soup?”

The dog watched her.

“I'll give you half of what I have if you don't get all crazy on me.”

Those eyes—dark brown and mint green—watched her.

“Okay . . . ?”

If there was anyone else to swear it to, Rags would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that the dog nodded.

It was a stupid thought, and a crazy one. But it was what she believed she saw.

Rags smiled. She felt it on her face, and it felt weird. She couldn't remember the last time she'd smiled.

No, that was wrong. She actually
could
.

It was that night, when she heard Mom's car pull into the driveway. Rags had gotten a new pair of tights she'd bought with money she made babysitting. She knew Mom would love them. Rags was smiling when Mom opened the door.

That was the last time she smiled.

But she smiled now, as she slid off the hood and walked around the car. The dog turned on the front seat to watch her. He was so big he filled the whole front of the car.

Rags reached out to try one of the door handles.

It was locked.

Of course it was locked.

She stood in the street and thought it through. There were shattered buildings, overturned cars. Bones. Debris. She nodded to herself and picked up a brick. Most of a brick. Enough of one for her purposes.

As she approached the car, the dog watched her. Rags showed him the brick.

“You have to get back,” she said. “I have to smash the window. Get into the backseat, okay? You need to—”

The dog climbed over the seat backs and dropped down into the rear foot well.

That made Rags stop in her tracks.

That was very, very weird.

There was no doubt in her at all that the dog understood what she was saying. But . . . ?

It was just a dog.

The brick was heavy in Rags's hand. Doubt chewed at her. She hefted the brick and said, “Please.”

To the dog, maybe. To the day. To whatever was left of the universe who might be listening.

She smashed the windshield. Even cracked, it took a lot to do it. The safety glass was tough. It resisted her, as if the car did not want to release its prisoner. Or maybe as if the car was trying to protect her from this strange dog.

The glass finally exploded. Not just broke—it exploded, showering her with little pellets of gummy glass, spraying everything inside the car with fragments.

The sound was louder than she expected. It echoed off the buildings around her.

And then the dog came surging over the seats and out through the windshield. He landed on the hood and stood there, even bigger than she'd thought, shaking glass from his thick coat, eyes blazing with bizarre light. Rags stumbled backward and fell on her butt right in the middle of the street.
The brick fell from her hand and rolled crookedly off.

The huge dog stared down at her, and then he bared his teeth.

Hair stood up along his neck and back. His ears went back and a low, dreadful growl rumbled from deep in his chest.

“N-no!” stammered Rags.

The dog snarled, and there was such deep, ferocious hatred in his eyes that Rags knew she had made a terrible mistake.

Then the dog crouched, muscles rippling, fangs gleaming, and with a bellow of pure animal rage, he sprang.

At her.

Over her.

Beyond her.

Rags fell backward and watched the monster dog sail through the air. Expecting him to land on her. Expecting to be crushed.

Except that it did not happen that way.

Instead he passed completely over her and struck something else.

On the ground, Rags turned and looked.

And saw.

Them.

Five of them.

Monsters.

Not the dead.

No, she would have smelled the dead.

Scavengers.

There were survivors, and everyone these days had to
scavenge. But the people that the survivors
called
scavengers were something else. They weren't out here looking for cans of food. They had darker, stranger, and more terrifying appetites.

And here were five of them.

Three men, two women.

All of them with knives. All of them with that
look
in their eyes that Rags had seen before. The look that promised awful things.

They must have heard her banging on the windshield, and on silent cat feet had come up behind her. With knives. With clubs. With ugly smiles and a hunger more frightening than what the dead had.

Rags knew that she couldn't outrun them. A couple of them, maybe. Not all of them. She couldn't outrun the two biggest men. And she certainly couldn't outfight them. Even so, she pulled her knife. It had a three-inch blade, and usually that was enough. Now it felt like a toothpick.

One of the scavengers spoke a single word. Maybe the most terrifying word Rags had ever heard.

“Meat . . .”

The five of them looked so hungry. Rags heard someone's stomach growl. One of the women licked her lips. If there was any sanity left inside the woman, it did not look out through those eyes. Those eyes—all of their eyes—were every bit as dead as the eyes of the walking corpses who filled the rest of the world.

“Please,” said Rags.

“Please,” echoed the scavengers. It meant something totally different.

Rags heard the dog growl. She turned. They all looked.

“Meat,” said the man again. He bared his teeth in some kind of smile.

The dog bared his teeth too.

What happened next was unspeakable.

Rags screamed as she ran away. Her screams, though, were little things, small, kept locked inside her chest. The screams of a careful, frightened scavenger who needed to shriek aloud but absolutely could not.

Rags ran and ran.

There were so many places to hide. Empty cars, empty stores, empty homes. All kinds of empty buildings. She knew how to check for the dead, and she could almost always hide from the living. Today had been a mistake. The dog was a distraction, and it was stupid to let anything do that. As she ran, she hated herself for being so clumsy. And by mentally yelling at herself, it was easier to keep from screaming.

The things that dog did.

Even to scavengers. Even to people who did the kinds of things they did.

Rags wanted to scream. Probably needed to.

Instead she clamped down on the screams that boiled like hot water inside her chest. She screamed at herself inside her head.

And ran.

Rags was too smart to hide inside a house when she knew there were scavengers in the area. Houses had food, blankets, beds, toilet paper, medicines, weapons, clothes. Everyone raided places like that. No one hid there unless they wanted to be found.

The same went for stores that sold anything people could use for survival. She passed a big mall once, a few weeks after it all started. There had to be fifty thousand of the dead crowding the parking lot and hammering on the doors.

Schools were almost as bad. They had lunchrooms. They had gym equipment. Hockey sticks and football pads were worth more than gold. Rags had watched in horror as a fat man wearing only boxers fought two middle-aged women—all of them armed with lacrosse sticks and baseball bats. Rags wondered if all three of them had been teachers at the school. They were screaming and bleeding and Rags doubted they'd make it through the night. That was in the entrance to a middle school.