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The king leaned forward, elbows on rotted thighs. “There are some towns out there. Small cities, fortified camps. Strong ones. I could take ’em down by force of numbers, but I don’t want to waste my people doing it. Saint John tells me you kids have a real talent for cracking those kinds of places open from the inside. Well, that’s what I want you to do for me.”
“Which towns?” asked Mercy. “Where?”
“There’s a bunch. Freetown, right here in Ohio, is where we’ll start. Then we’ll work our way up to the big enchilada.”
“Do you mean Asheville in North Carolina?”
“Yeah. We’ll take that, too. But I have a very personal score to settle with a couple of places in south Texas. A military base where they tried real hard to kill this ol’ boy.” He touched his patchwork skin. “We’re going to take that, and a juicy little town a few miles away called New Alamo.”
PART FOURTEEN THE ROAD TO ASHEVILLE
The question is not, Can they reason?nor, Can they talk?but, Can they suffer?
—JEREMY BENTHAM, WRITING ABOUT THE NATURE OF ANIMALS
57
THEY STOPPED FIVE MORE TIMES that day.
Morgie hated that he was slowing them, but he couldn’t help it. Whatever this was made any flu or cold he’d ever had feel like nothing by comparison. He had the shivers but no fever, and it felt like there were ants crawling around in his stomach.
Even so, they made it all the way to Beaumont, staying well away from the dangers of Houston. The town was as empty and ghostly as the others had been, but everywhere they looked it was clear people had lived here until recently.
“You think the swarms chased them off?” Morgie asked. After some bland food—a bowl of rice and chicken broth made from stores found in an abandoned house—he was feeling a little better.
“Ah,” said Riot, “the zombie speaks.”
“I’m not a zombie, thank you very much.”
“Yeah? You run into anyone who doesn’t know you and they’d quiet you quicker than a chicken on a June bug.”
“I’m fine.”
“Whatever.” They were in a big house that had clearly been occupied by a family both before and after First Night. There were pictures on the wall that showed two people smiling at their wedding; a picture of the woman holding a tiny baby as the man beamed down at her; another of them with a four-year-old girl and another baby; and so on, all the way to what looked like grandkids. The furniture was old and patched but clearly cared for, and except for recent dust, the place was clean. Riot walked slowly along the hall looking at the pictures. Morgie,
seated on the couch with a blanket around him, followed her with his eyes. She stopped and touched one photo that showed the mother of the family standing with her daughter, who held a sleeping infant.
After a moment Riot took the framed picture down from the wall and stared at it, and Morgie wondered what was going on in her head. Riot had originally been raised by her birth father, who’d gotten custody following a divorce. Riot’s mom had been a drug addict and was plagued by mental problems. Then, during First Night, her mother had been found and rescued from a gang by a man who called himself Saint John. Although Saint John had been a violent mass murderer and serial killer, he’d been kind to Riot’s mom, and to a bunch of orphaned children she had tried to protect during those first wild days after the dead rose and all sense of law and order crumbled.
Riot’s mother became “Mother Rose,” and the children became the very first reapers in what would become Saint John’s Night Church, all of them dedicated to what he believed was his holy mission to exterminate all human life. Saint John believed that the zombie plague was god’s way of cleansing the world, removing a race that had failed to live up to what their god wanted of them. As Saint John saw it, anyone left alive was doing so in direct opposition to god’s will. His reapers slaughtered tens of thousands of people, and planned—once all the killing was done—to take their own lives in an orgy of suicide. Riot’s father had died, and Riot was taken and raised by this new and even more twisted version of her mother. By Mother Rose.
It hurt Morgie to know this, because he’d come from a loving home, and Riot never had a chance to know what that was like.
“Riot… ?” he asked softly.
She stiffened, gave a last lingering look at the picture, and hung it carefully back on its hook, straightened it, and brushed dust from the glass. Then she turned, pasting on her usual sardonic expression.
“Yeah, I heard you, son. I guess the people here packed and run off.” She walked over to the living room window, which had been modified with light-blocking shutters on the inside. The doors were reinforced, too, set with panels of sheet aluminum. Loopholes had been cut through the walls, each covered with a leather flap for privacy, but easy to use for shooting without opening a window or door. “They fixed this place up smart, and looks like they had time to do it right. I ’spect the other houses round here will be the same. They lived here, maybe for years. Then they left, and in a right hurry, too.”
“How can you tell that?”
“They left behind stuff they would have taken if there’d been time. I checked around. There’s some bedding missing, and some clothes, but if they had time, they’d have taken the cots in the closet and medicines from the bathroom. And in the kitchen pantry, there are cans of stuff missing, but sacks of rice, flour, and cornmeal are still here. Nah—they left fast and just took what they could carry.”
She sat down on a threadbare overstuffed chair. Since arriving, she’d stripped off the heavy body armor and carpet coat, and was now in jeans and her leather vest, which she wore over her bare skin. Morgie, sick as he was, had trouble not staring at her. He loved the way she was made. Lean and muscular, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and long legs made for running. Or dancing. He wondered if, had the world been different, she might have been a dancer. There were a couple of people in town who’d been dancers before First Night, and they had the same athletic grace.
But the world had not been that kind to her. Riot’s tanned skin was marked with pink and white scars, and there were permanent lines etched around her mouth that should have been laugh lines.
“I don’t get it,” said Morgie. “What’s the point of all this? Of these swarms? Of these ravager monkey-bangers herding them like cattle and attacking towns? It can’t be just for food, because they left all those dead people behind.”
