Dead & Gone
1
Sometimes survival is a feast. Sometimes it’s rainwater in a ditch and a bug.
The girl knew both kinds, and all the kinds in between.
Out here, you had to learn every kind of survival or you stopped learning. Stopped talking. Stopped breathing.
The hunger, though—that never goes away.
Not while you’re alive.
Not after you’re dead.
The girl fled across the desert.
She had bloodstains on her hands and on her clothes. She was certain that those stains were on her heart as well. On her soul.
As she ran, the girl prayed that they would not find her, that they would stop looking.
But they would never stop looking. Never.
Not as long as her mother wanted her dead.
Somewhere, out beyond the heat shimmers that hovered over the sandy horizon, killers were tracking her. Reapers of her mother’s Night Church.
They would never stop because they believed—truly believed—that tracking her down was their holy purpose. She was the sinner, the pariah. The monster that they hunted in order to rid the world of a dreadful impurity.
The reapers.
With knives and axes and bladed farm tools they hunted her.
Wanting to find her. Craving her death.
And so many of them were her friends.
From them, and from who she had once been, the girl tried to hide herself in the vastness of a cruel desert.
She was hungry.
It was that deep hunger, the kind that made her sharp and quick for hours. A belly-taut ache that can’t be outrun.
When she was that hungry, she couldn’t be lazy. She couldn’t climb a tree and lash herself to a thick limb and let the day shamble past.
No, this kind of hunger made her go hunting. It shook her loose from the crushing depression she’d felt since leaving the Night Church.
Before she left, she checked her weapons—the fighting knife she’d carried since she was seven years old, the strangle wire, the throwing spikes, the sling with its bag of sharp stones. She looped the coil of rope across her body.
Her home for the last three days had once been something called a FunMart. She had no idea what that was. It had shelves like a lot of the stores she’d seen, but there was nothing on them. The floor was littered with the torn wrappers of bread loaves and cracker boxes, but everything of value had been scavenged by refugees over the last twelve years, and any forgotten crumbs had been devoured by insects and animals. But the place was dry, and it got her out of the desert heat.
Now it was time to leave. She knew that she wouldn’t be coming back here. The reapers were still out there somewhere. Maybe weeks behind her, maybe much closer. She had only stayed this long at the FunMart because of the gripes—a terrible storm that had raged in her intestines after eating a piece of questionable food. That lizard she’d caught and cooked must have been sick, or it had carried some kind of toxin. For two whole days her stomach felt like it was filled with razor blades and acid. She threw up everything she ate, which was also a terrible waste of food. Nothing of value went into her system. No proteins or fats or useful calories. No nutrients.
When the gripes passed, the girl was left weak and trembling. If even the weakest reaper came at her, she could not have defended herself.
The desert offered no obvious comfort. Food had to be caught, and there was very little water. So survival required movement. Hunger demanded it.
Even so, she lingered at the door of the FunMart.
The girl did not have a home. Not anymore. And the home she used to have was not a place she could return to. No way. To the people she left behind she was a disgrace, a lost soul.
A monster.
Places like this empty shell of a FunMart offered no real protection; it was not a home in any genuine way. It was a place to be sick, and if she stayed longer, it would be the place where she died. The reapers were coming. She did not know when they would find her, only that they would.
Beyond the door was the road that stretched through the endless desert. Beyond the door was the truth. The loneliness. The fear.
The hunger.
The hunger called to her. It yelled. It shrieked.
So she had to leave.
Not soon.
Now.
Get your skinny butt in gear, girl,
scolded her inner voice.
No handsome prince is going to stroll out of a fairy tale and serve you a hot breakfast of eggs and grits.
“Shut up,” she told herself. Her voice sounded dusty and far older than her fifteen years.
She could see a faintness of green down the road. Sparse woods that had once been vast groves of fruit trees set, improbably, on the edge of the Nevada desert. Patches of scrub pine and weathered creosote bushes were thriving there now as the orchard died. The ghosts of the fruit trees stood like pale sticks. She reckoned that the water pumping stations were dead. All these years of blowing sand and dust had frozen the gears in the rows of tall, white wind turbines. Now they stood above the orchard, silent as clouds, offering the lie of power in a powerless world.
Beyond the forest was a town. It said so on the map she had.
A place called Red Pass, which looked to be have been built into the cleft of a long ridge of low mountains.
Red Pass. The name meant nothing to her, but the fact that it was a town meant that there might be some vittles. Old canned stuff. Maybe some gardens with enough life for wild carrots and potatoes to still be growing. She knew that birds lived in some of the old towns. Even a scrawny pigeon was roast breast for dinner and a day’s worth of soup from the rest. And where there was one pigeon, there would be two.
The town was where she had to go.
Ten miles under the August sun.
It had to be done during the day, though. At night she would not be able to see, or hunt, or defend. And they did not need the light to find her.
They.
The gray people. The wanderers.
The hungry ghosts.
She knew they were not really ghosts. That was just something her father used to call them. Hungry ghosts.
They were also in the towns.
They were always in the towns.
It’s where they’d lived. It’s where they’d died.
It’s where they waited.
And she, hungry and desperate, had no choice but to leave her empty little place of safety and journey into the places of the dead.
Hunger demanded it.
“Sister Margaret!”
The words tore her out of a daydream of food and dragged her into horror.
The girl spun around and crouched.
There were three of them. Two men and a woman. They rose from the desert, shedding the sand-colored cloaks that had allowed them to hide and wait until she stumbled right into their trap.
Now you walked into it, girl,
said her inner voice.
You done gone and stepped right into a snake pit and no mistake.
They were dressed all in black, with red streamers tied to their ankles and wrists. Stylized angel wings were embroidered on their chests. Their heads had been shaved and comprehensively tattooed with complex images of tangled vines and flowers.
Just like hers.
It was a requirement of everyone in the Night Church. A permanent mark that could not be removed. It was supposed to prove an unbreakable attachment to the god of that faith.
Now it was the only thing that made the girl look like she was connected to them. She did not wear the dark
clothes and red streamers and angel wings. She wore ratty jeans, stolen sneakers, and a leather vest buttoned up over her bare skin. She had no other clothes, and she would rather die than wear the clothes of a reaper.
Never again.
The reapers approached, smiling the way they’re taught to do. Smiles of false welcome, of false acceptance.
There was no trace of real acceptance in the Night Church. You were collected by them, you belonged to them, but there was no approval of who you were.
“Sister Margaret,” said the taller of the two men as he walked toward her. He held a broad-blade machete in one muscular fist, carrying it casually with the tip pointed toward the ground. “Praise be to the darkness that we found you.”
“Stop right there, Jason,” warned the girl. “Y’all turn around and be on your way.”
They continued to smile at her. The shorter man had a hunter’s hatchet tucked through his belt. Sunlight gleamed along the wicked edge as he drew it.
“We bring love and greetings from your mother, Sister Marg—”
“Don’t call me that,” snapped the girl. “That’s not my name no more.”
“What name do you want us to use, sister?” asked the woman. She was young, no more than three years older than the girl. Maybe eighteen, but already there were combat scars on her face, and her eyes were ablaze with righteous anger.
“I don’t have a name no more, Connie,” said the girl. “I left all that behind when I left the church.”
“That’s not true, little sister. Your mother sent us to
bring you home, to bring you back into the peace and love of the Night Church.”
“I know you, Connie. You don’t open your mouth ’cept when a lie needs to come out.”
Sister Connie’s smile flickered, and her eyes went cold. “And you can’t help but carve more sins onto your own soul.”
Sister Connie drew her blade—a slender double-edged antique dagger that had been looted from a museum in Omaha. The girl had been there when Connie had found the weapon four years ago. Six families had been living in the museum, and they had refused to join the Night Church. The reapers had cut through them like scythes through ripe wheat.
The girl, only eleven at the time, had killed too. It had not been the first time she’d ended the day bathed in innocent blood.
The memory burned in her mind as she saw that knife in Sister Connie’s hand.
“C’mon, Sister Connie,” said the shorter man, “it’s too hot to stand here and play games with this brat.”
“Hush, Brother Griff,” said the young woman. “We were told to give our little sister here a chance to recant her wicked ways and come back to the church.”
The girl laughed. A single, short bark of harsh derision.
“Come back? What kind of sun damage have y’all had on what little brains ye got that my ‘coming back’ was even a possibility? Mom doesn’t want me back and we all know it. She wants me dead and left to the vultures. Anything any of y’all say different would be a goll-durn lie.”
Jason, Griff, and Connie stared at her with a variety of emotions playing on their faces. Anger at her sass, shock at
the bald intensity of her words, confirmation of their private thoughts, and something else. A cruel delight that the girl knew only too well. The anticipation of wetting those blades as they opened red mouths in her flesh and sent her screaming into the eternal darkness.
None of them answered her, though.
The girl said, “Y’all don’t have to do this. We can all just walk away.”
The three reapers began to spread out, forming a loose half circle around her, hands flexing to find the perfect grip on each weapon.
The girl sighed. It was so heavy a sigh that it felt like a piece of her heart was being pulled out of her chest and flung into the wind.
“I tried,” she said, though even she wasn’t sure to whom those words were directed. “Dang if I didn’t at least try.”
She drew her knife.
They moved first. They moved with lightning speed.
Perhaps in their excitement they had forgotten just who it was they’d been sent to find. There were three of them. They were all older than the girl, larger and stronger than the girl, better armed than the girl.
