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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,” e
choed 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.
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