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Amanda nodded. She was generally the quietest of the group, deep and brooding, but fierce in combat. She wore a pair of matched hatchets tucked through her belt. “We saw one pack with nearly fifty of them in it.”
Michelle, the second archer of the group, shook her head. “No, that’s impossible.”
“That’s too many,” agreed Laura.
“Amanda’s right,” countered Samantha. “At least fifty. We both counted.”
The two packs out in the field followed the shadow for long minutes, but then it reached the top of the valley and vanished from sight. The packs slowed as confusion set in. They looked around, saw nothing else to chase, and one by one the dead slowed to a walk and then stopped.
And stood there.
The five girls knew that they would continue to stand there until something else drew their attention. Otherwise they had no reason to go anywhere.
Some of the dead, lacking an impetus to hunt, stood in fields with years of vines wrapped around them. Zombies like that were among the most dangerous. One of them could be lying on the ground covered by vines or fallen leaves or low-growing plants like pachysandra, and you’d never know until they smelled you. Or until you stepped on one.
The girls remembered that lesson very well, as they remembered all such lessons.
There used to be twenty-two of them. Girls, boys, and three adults.
Now there were six girls. Five in the tree and one . . . missing.
Tiffany had been on patrol in the woods surrounding the old motel where the girls lived, and sometime this morning she’d vanished. They found her weighted fighting sticks and a scuffle of footprints, but nothing else.
The other five girls had formed a p
arty to hunt for her. A cold morning had caught fire to become an inferno afternoon. Each of them was sick with dread at losing Tiffany. They couldn’t bear to lose another of their family.
Now they perched in a tree, letting the day tell them what was happening, what was there, what to expect.
They always paid attention to the lessons nature and experience provided. It was how they’d been raised. Samantha was the oldest of them by a few days. She’d been born one day before the world ended. The others had all been born in the days that followed. None of them ever knew their parents. Their mothers had been at a hospital near Sacramento. The nurses and doctors had tried to protect everyone from the dead, but they hadn’t been able to. During one terrible battle the hospital caught fire. Nine adults gathered up the babies in the nursery and fled in a convoy of cramped ambulances. The leader of that group of adults was a tough-as-nails prenatal care nurse named Ida from Haiti, a place that probably didn’t exist anymore. Because most places didn’t exist anymore. Not with names, at least. Ida brought her small group of survivors out of the teeth of the zombie uprising and away, deep into the forests of California, where people were always sparse even before the nightmare. There they settled and learned to survive. To forage, to hunt, and to kill.
Or so the story went.
That tale was passed down from the survivors of the hospital to other refugees they met along the way and finally to the children as they grew old enough to understand.
The five girls were the last of that group.
Ida’s main support and allies in the running of their group were Dolan, a man who used to be an actor, and Mirabel, who sold houses in Sacramento. Two springs ago Dolan had been attacked by a panther and dragged off. Ida said that the big cat probably escaped from a zoo during the End, or its parents did. There were all sorts of animals out here that used to be in zoos or circuses. Elephants and zebras and a huge white pregnant rhinoceros they saw heading north toward the Sierra Nevadas.
Mirabel and three boys had gone hunting one winter day, and none of them were ever seen again. The only trace of them that anyone ever found was Mirabel’s locket—a beautiful thing with a cameo front. Samantha spotted it hanging from a tree branch. But its owner and the last of the boys were gone. That was nearly three years ago.
And Ida . . . she died of the flu early last year.
Ida came back almost at once, but it wasn’t really Ida. It was a hungry thing that looked like her, but everything that had actually been her was gone.
The girls did what they had to do, what they’d been trained all their lives to do. Afterward they buried Ida in the cemetery, which used to be someone’s garden. Ida now slept in the cool, quiet ground along with the other kids and the adults who’d died at home.
Home.
They lived in what had once been known as the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court. It was a V-shaped building with forty bedroom units, an empty pool, a tennis court, and a wall that had been meticulously built of tractor-trailers by previous tenants of the place who’d later died of plague. The tires of the big trucks had been slashed, and all the spaces under and around the vehicles had been packed with heavy stones and clay. There were a dozen ways out, but you had to know where they were and you had to have a working brain to use them. Even then, there were booby traps in case bands of human raiders tried to get in. A few tried every year. None had ever managed it. Not alive.
One thing Ida and the other adults had taught the girls was that they had to do whatever they needed to do in order to survive. The girls learned those lessons well, which is why these five were still alive. Along with the missing Tiffany, they were the top hunters, the best fighters. They were the fiercest of the little tribe that had lived—and died—at the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court. They understood how to hunt, cook, do first aid, farm, observe, process, react, and fight.
They knew about their world, and they relied on what they’d been taught and what they’d learned from doing.
But now the rules were changing.
The dead were beginning to move in packs.
