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“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.
