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Rags recognized the character. She’d spent endless hours over the long years reading what books she could find. Sometimes they were novels, sometimes they were old comics. Whatever survived and could be read. So, yes, she knew who Captain America was.
Except that in the comics Captain America was male, and this person was not.
This was a woman. Tall and slender, but definitely female.
And . . . this person was nobody’s idea of a hero. Not anymore.
She was a zom.
The dead woman in the hero’s costume staggered into the street, feet moving without grace, shuffling and tripping over the smallest thing and yet not falling. The shield was strapped to her arm and seemed to be fixed there so that it did not slip off. There was a huge rip in the blue material on her thigh, exposing a leg that was missing important muscle and flesh. The flesh around the wound was gray and veined with black lines. Blood was caked around her mouth and splashed in dark splotches on the tunic.
This made no sense at all to Rags.
She had been thirteen when the world fell, and she remembered Halloween. This dead woman was far too old to have been a trick-or-treater, and it was unlikely she had been at a costume party when it all went down. She hadn’t been dead that long.
Not nearly that long.
Rags had seen every kind of walking corpse over the last fourteen years. The dead began to rot and then stopped. The oldest zombies looked like they were made from old leather—wrinkled and moistureless. Only the most recent of the dead had flesh that seemed to remember that it had once been soft and pliant and filled with blood.
This woman was somewhere in between.
Dead, but not withered enough to have been killed when the world ended.
So why was she in costume?
All these thoughts flashed through her head in a microsecond as she prepared herself for flight or combat. Beside her, Ghoulie stood as still and silent as a statue, waiting for her command.
This was a drama they had played out many times, just as she had done with Bones before that. One of the dead entered their world, and they got ready and waited to see what kind of reaction the moment would require.
Most of the time, Rags did nothing, allowing the dead the chance to follow whatever attracted it—some other prey, the wind, or something less understandable—and she would watch it go. Other times she might leave, outpacing the dead, or putting useful barriers between her and trouble. Sometimes, though, neither of those options were available to her. On those days, when the Fates were being playful in the ugly way they had, Rags would have to fight.
She was very good at it. She hated it, but experience had made her both cunning and strong. The slow and clumsy didn’t survive out in the world. They became the shambling threats someone else would have to deal with; and in that transition from inept human to walking dead, they gained a greater measure of threat. A zombie child could bite. An old, crippled corpse crawling along the ground could bite. A bite was all it took.
The creature in the street took a few tentative steps toward the old hotel, then paused as a sound drew its focus. Rags turned too, but she did it slowly, without jerking her head around. Sudden movements drew the eye. Ledger had taught her that. One of ten thousand things he’d taught her.
Ghoulie made a small, soft sound. Not a growl, but enough of a noise to make sure she saw what he saw.
She did.
Across the intersection, moving along the side street, there were people.
Dead people.
Walking singly or in clusters.
Five of them.
Ten.
More.
Moving as fast as the dead ever moved, which was faster than many people knew. They were slow most of the time, but when there was an immediate promise of fresh meat, they could move almost as fast as the living. Some were even faster, moving with real speed. It was something Rags had encountered several times in her travels. Usually with zombies who came from the fringes of areas whe
re nukes had fallen, or where reactors had melted down. The radiation was changing some of them. Not many. Some.
Enough.
Seeded among the zombies in this procession there were some of the faster ones. They loped along. Clumsy, but not as clumsy as the others. One of them scuttled forward on all fours because it had no feet.
