Bits & Pieces (35 page)

(On First Night, fourteen years before
Rot & Ruin
)

Rachael Elle was a superhero.

Except when she was an elf queen.

Or when she was a sociopathic assassin clone.

Rachael was a lot of people.

Sixty-two people so far, with more planned.

Her friends included Star Wars stormtroopers, the many incarnations of Doctor Who and all his companions, tragic princesses from politically unstable fantasy lands, Jedi and Sith warriors, various members of the Avengers, the Justice League, the X-Men, the Guardians of the Galaxy, the crew of
Serenity
, the bridge crew of the
Enterprise
, hobbits, wizards, and at least one member each from Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw.

She had interesting friends.

Currently Rachael was dressed in skintight dark-blue trousers, a snug jacket, gun belt, and fingerless gloves. Her dark hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail, and there was a wicked cut on her cheek and another above her eye. Leftovers from when a mind-controlled Hawkeye invaded the SHIELD Helicarrier to free Loki.

Today Rachael was not Rachael. She was Maria Hill, a SHIELD agent and staunch supporter of freedom despite the constant and insidious threat of HYDRA.

Or she would be Maria Hill if she could get the grommet tool to work right so she could attach the holster to the leather gun belt. The holster, the belt, and the rest of the outfit had been made by her over many nights of painstaking research, design, materials shopping, measuring, cutting, and sewing. It was the eleventh of twelve outfits she had brought with her to New York for the big Comic Con at the Javits Center. The costumes hung on reinforced hangers that filled the closet in the small hotel room. Accessories were piled on both of the room's twin beds or arranged in careful groupings on the floor. Rachael stood in front of the mirror and studied her costume. The fit, the colors, the match between her version and the one worn by the actress in the Avengers movies and the SHIELD TV show. She rather thought hers was better. Cobie Smulders, though very pretty, was rail-thin. Rachael had a better figure and more muscle. She knew she rocked the costume. Brett, the nineteen-year-old who was going to be Thor for most of the weekend—styles from two different movie costumes, and four variations from the comics—would appreciate it, she was certain.

She certainly liked the way he fit his Asgardian clothes. He was tall, tan, and had a face a true Norse god would kill for, blue eyes that could stop the sun in the sky, and shoulder-length hair that wasn't a wig. He was Thor.

So, yes, Rachael wanted Brett to appreciate more than
her costume-making skills. She'd caught him looking, especially when she wore something tight or low-cut. When they went as Peeta and Katniss, he really paid attention to her. Working his role as her “boyfriend,” at least in cosplay terms. Though frankly Rachael wasn't sure that it was just acting, that maybe Brett wasn't just role-playing his interest.

She certainly wasn't.

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.

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.

“Yeah you do.”

It was a conversation they had so many times in a hundred different ways.

So, she was careful. Always. And in all ways.

She missed Ledger, though. Every night since he'd left to try to build a team of rangers, she wondered where he was, what he was doing, and if he was still alive.

Probably still alive, she generally concluded. Joe Ledger was a very hard man to kill.

Joe had taken Bones's older brother, Baskerville, with him, as well as Freya, the full-blood American mastiff mother of Ghoulie. Three hunters traveling in a pack, and one perhaps more of an animal than the other two.

The last time she saw them was nine years ago. Since then the world had grown quieter, older, less civilized, and far stranger.

Since then, Rags had crossed the country in a long, unplanned zigzag pattern, with no specific destination ever in mind. Going where the wind blew her was how she thought about it. Taking the road less traveled, in all the ways that phrase could be defined.

The years were long, and although sometimes she was completely content to share her life only with dogs—first Bones, then Ghoulie—she often wondered if she should turn and go back to the west. To find Ledger and maybe that other man, Tom Imura. To find people.

The dead were the poorest of company, and as the months crawled by, Rags became more disillusioned by talking to herself or imagining conversations in her head. She craved a simple conversation. She longed to belong somewhere. That hadn't been the case when she and Ledger parted company, but it was now. She was lonely, and the world had become so empty and so quiet. There weren't enough things to shelter her from her increasingly depressing thoughts.

One of which was the nagging question she so often asked herself.

Why?

Why keep going? Why keep fighting?

Why stay alive?

Why, why, why?

The more she asked herself those questions, the less often she could construct an answer. And over time, even the lies she told herself wore thin.

What terrified her most was the thought that staying alive had become nothing more than a habit. That was it. A reflex action without further or deeper purpose.

At night she dreamed about her family, lost to the plague all those years ago. She dreamed that they waited for her on the other side of a thin veil. All it would take to be with them again, to be happy again, to be needed and loved again, would be to cut through the veil. Ledger had taught her how to kill in a hundred different ways, and some of those ways could be applied to her own skin, her own veins, her own heart.

There were times when the presence of Ghoulie—of another beating heart a few feet away—was all that tethered her to the world on this side of the veil. With every day, with every endless night, that tether was fraying. She knew that someday it would snap.

Or she would cut it.

That day used to be far, far off.

Now, though . . .

Now she moved through the days and along the miles,
and she tried not to cry. She tried not to beg for someone or something to take her away.

Or to give her a reason to stay.

Her path led nowhere in particular. Today it brought her along a creek and down some overgrown roads and into a fence made of stout timbers that was set across the blacktop at the entrance to a town.

There was a sign.

DOYLESTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA

Once upon a time a population count had been painted in the lower left, but someone had scratched it out with real passion so that the board beneath was scored and splintered.

It was a small town north of Philadelphia and south of New York. Neither of those cities was ever on her list of possible destinations. Philadelphia was a radioactive hole in the ground. It had been one of the first cities nuked in the government's failed attempt to contain the spread of the zombies. Dumb.

New York, on the other hand, was a different case altogether. Rags had met a few travelers who had been there. Something had happened there. Or many weird things.

The stories were so strange and often contradictory, and she had never once met anyone who'd been there who was also sane enough to give a story Rags could believe. Worse things than zombies, the survivors all told. Worse things . . . but exactly what these horrors were, the survivors either could not or would not tell her.

Even though Rags told Ghoulie that they were never, ever going to go to such a place, their path seemed to be drifting in that direction.

Pure accident, of course. Nothing intended.

She told the dog that a lot.

Ghoulie did not appear to believe her, but being a dog, was unable to say so.

Her self-respect was comforted by the fact that at least they were not heading toward that city with anything approaching haste. Rags did not believe in haste. She had no use for it except in crisis moments, and she was smart enough to avoid most threats. So, without hurrying, she wandered through the years of her life.

There was a door in the fence, and it stood ajar.

Another place that had been fortified against the dead and whose defenses had either been abandoned or had failed.

Moving with great caution, Rags passed through the gate and walked along the empty road toward the town. Ghoulie trotted beside her, looking right and left to study the overgrown foliage that flanked the road.

They stopped at an intersection and spent some time on the porch of an old hotel. The front corner of the hotel had been a Starbucks once, but now it was home to rats that made their nests among piles of bones.