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Besides, probably everyone who was an actual queen was dead. Ditto for kings, princes and princesses, dukes, earls, and all of those royals. The same was likely true of presidents and prime ministers. Dead. If any of them were alive, they were keeping a low freaking profile about it. The news reporters said that the President of the United States was going to give a speech one night, but that never happened. Air Force One went down somewhere. Nevada, maybe, if the reporters were right; but you couldn’t ask them, because they were dead, too. She’d actually watched MSNBC the night Rachel Maddow bit the throat out of that guy with the glasses and bowtie. The news went off the air after that, and nothing came back on. Not even the Emergency Broadcast thing, and that’s what it was supposed to be for. Times like this.
Except, there really weren’t times like this, were there? Never before, and definitely not now. Or ever.
The world was dead. Mostly.
Practically everyone she knew was dead. There were a couple of people in her Pack who’d been kids in her own school, but they weren’t friends. Not family either.
All dead. All eaten down to the bone or walking around looking for warm meals. Not her family, though. She’d seen to that. Knife to the head. Mom, aunts, all of them. Knife, knife, knife. The actual mechanics of it had been easy. After the first time it was rinse and repeat.
But the mechanics were the smallest part. It was Mom. It was her family. Dahlia had screamed and screamed and screamed. And thrown up. And gone black inside. For days. Curled up on the floor of her living room, surrounded by dead things that she used to love.
It was her own hunger that brought her back. Not hunger for flesh, but a raw hunger for anything. She woke up, covered in sweat and dried blood, smeared with her own piss and shit, trembling and alone. For a while all she could do was lie there and watch the flies as they flew in endless patterns through the broken front window, crawled over the faces of her family, and flew out through the open front door. Like a machine. Like a video on some kind of loop.
Then Dahlia heard voices and when she got up, she saw that the kids she’d saved at school—the ones who followed her here—were sitting around the table in the kitchen. They’d eaten their way through most of the food in the cabinets. They were drunk off the bottles from the upper shelves. They hadn’t gone away, but they hadn’t helped her, either. They waited like idiots for her to snap out of it and tell them what to do.
Weak, trembling, faint with hunger and dehydration, Dahlia had nevertheless beaten the shit out of all of them. Five of them. They didn’t even try to fight back. They screamed and wept and cowered, but they didn’t fight back. She kicked their asses and left them all bleeding on the floor. Then she staggered upstairs, found that the water—against all expectations—was still on. No heat, though. She took a cold shower, screaming into the stinging spray. The water washe
d away the filth and the blood and the acid stains of her own tears.
Later, dressed in clean clothes, she went downstairs to find the five of them sitting at the table. Wounds dressed, eyes crusted with dried tears, faces turned toward hers like kicked dogs hoping for a forgiving pat.
That’s when Dahlia understood that she had to be a queen. Their queen. She had to keep them alive because left to themselves they were going to die. Three girls, two boys—both of who towered over her. None of whom had ever been nice to her in school. Maybe that’s why they took their beatings. Maybe they knew it was their due.
Whatever.
That was then.
Now she had the Pack.
Sixty-seven in all. Most of them kids. A few lost adults. No one over twenty-four, though. A lot of them were tough as fuck. Trash was twice her size and could probably bench press her entire weight. But the one time he tried something, Dahlia had gotten a lucky shot in and damn near kicked his nuts off. The weird thing was that he seemed almost relieved. It meant that he didn’t have to make any real decisions. Not for himself or the few people he’d been leading when he met her. He was happy to be her muscle, her enforcer. The knight to her queen.
Yeah, the world was that broken.
Sometimes Trash shared her tent and they filled the night air with growls and cries and screams and sighs. Most times she slept alone. There was a seventeen-year old black girl, though . . . and Dahlia spent a lot of time wondering how to open the right kind of conversation with her. Not as queen, but girl to girl.
Sex was one problem. Love was another. Most of the time, though, it was all about survival. Staying away from the biters, feeding her people, finding a good place, knowing when to fight, knowing when to run.
Dahlia kept it all running right. And she still carried the knife she’d used to escape the outbreak at her high school. The same knife she’d used to hush her family. It was sheathed on her thigh, the handle angled to where her hand fell. Ready. Always ready.
Each time she picked a camp for the Pack, she walked the area to look at how it could be defended, and how they could escape if a swarm of the dead came out of nowhere. There were sentries in the trees, trip wires and weapons stashed along escape routes. Her tent was always positioned against a wall, a wrecked car, or some other structure so that threats could only come at her along her line of sight. None of the Pack asked where she’d learned all that, which is good because didn’t want to admit it was all from video games and those doomsday prepper shows on cable. Who knew those bearded fuckers would be right?
She sat on a folding chair next to an overturned equipment box, halfway through a game of solitaire when Trash brought Neeko to her to give a report on the failed scouting run. Neeko was young and skinny and scared of his own shadow. He was also scared of Trash, who liked to hit things. The dead, people—whatever.
“Go ahead, Neeks,” said Dahlia, “tell me what happened.”
Neeko licked his lips—a flicker of a tongue, fast as a lizard. He told her what he’d told Trash, though he stuttered, skipped words out of nervousness, and made a mess of it.
Dahlia listened with patience and without emotion. She was not the kind to fly off the handle. Never. Impulse control was key to survival. She didn’t jump into any fight just because she could. She didn’t run away just to be safe. For her, everything she did needed to have a reason. It had to be weighed for risks and rewards, but also for lessons. There was no Google anymore, no one she could call, no authorities to solve problems. She needed to be smart and practical, and to use those qualities to lead her people. To provide for them and keep them safe and even help them be happy. That was all part of the code she now lived by, and it informed the code that kept the Pack alive when everything else was dying.
“Get the shit out of your mouth and tell it right,” growled Trash, taking a swat at Neeko, who cringed and shied away.
“Let him talk,” she said, pulling a disgusted grunt from the enforcer. Then, to Neeko, she added, “I need to hear every last bit. We need to know every detail so we can figure out our play. You were telling me about how this old guy fought . . . ?”
Neeko licked his lips again and shifted a few inches sideways, as if trying to be out of Trash’s swatting distance.
“He was fast,” he said. “Fast as you.” He flinched, but when no one chastised him for that, he continued. “I don’t know what kind of stuff he knows. Karate or something. I can’t tell. Didn’t kick us. But he wasn’t exactly boxing.”
“Were his hands open or closed?” asked Dahlia. She’d taken some martial arts, but since the End had read up on it. There were a lot of books around that no one seemed to need, and if she picked the right one there was good advice. She’d even found some police hand-to-hand combat manuals and had pored over every page.
