“Oh heck yeah. We have a nice big pit up in Milpitas. Got us fifty dogs, ’bout a dozen good hogs, couple wild coyotes, and . . . oh, a few other surprises. Zoos are fun, let me just put it that way.” She laughed, and all the men laughed with her. “Rover there has been on my to-do list for a while now. Been finding his leavings and all those footprints. Big ol’ paws he has on ’im. What’s he, a little wolfhound? Some husky or shepherd? Yeah, he’s going to be a whole lot of fun. Maybe worth breeding if he turns out to be a good fighter. Love to have me a pack of dogs with that kind of muscle. If I had six, seven of them, I could wipe the floor with Danny-Boy and his pack of Rotties, oh hell yes.”
Rags had no idea who Danny-Boy was, but if he had a pack of Rottweilers and was involved in some kind of dogfights, then Rags hated him on principle. Just as she hated this woman and her crew of goons. Bones growled again, his anger in tune with hers.
The woman snapped her fingers. “C’mon now, let’s make this easy. We don’t need to leave hair on the walls here. That’s for later. Be smart and this won’t get any worse than it has to be. So, why don’t you take one of those collars and put it on your pup? Do that for us, and maybe I’ll give you something that’ll make everything else all dreamy so you won’t hardly be in your own head when stuff happens.”
Stuff. The woman put the word out there like it was nothing. Like it was ordinary. Like it would destroy everything that Rags was, had been, or ever might be.
Stuff.
God.
Rags laid her hand on Bones’s quivering back. The dog grew quiet, no longer growling, but he was incredibly tense. With the scavengers, maybe Bones knew he was going to win. Against these big men with the loops, there was no way. There were too many of them, and they had set a trap.
“Leave us alone,” said Rags defiantly. “We haven’t done anything to you. We don’t have anything. Just let us go.”
Everyone laughed at that. As if it was funny.
Rags felt tears in her eyes. “Please . . .”
“No, honey,” said the woman. “You can say please all day and night and it won’t matter much. School’s out and the world went all to hell.”
“Why are you doing this?” insisted Rags, gripping her knife. She was terrified, but she was also furious. To have survived so much, to have lasted this long when so many stronger, older people had died should mean something. It wasn’t right that creeps like this could come along and decide that her life was over. That made less sense to Rags than what the dead did. It made less sense than what the cannibals did. The dead and the crazoid scavengers were out of their minds. These people—this woman and these men—were not. They were in control of themselves, and yet this was what they chose to do.
r /> Rags wanted to say all this, to lay it out, to build a case for the world not going in this direction. Gangs of postapocalyptic predators? That was so cliché. It was from old movies on the Syfy channel. It was video game stuff.
It shouldn’t be allowed to be real.
“No,” she barked, “you have to tell me why. What makes you think this is okay to do? What makes you think you can just do this?”
The woman grinned. “Because we can,” she said, then shrugged. “And . . . because we want to. Because it’s fun.”
“I think,” said a voice from behind Rags, “that the young miss here deserves a better answer than that.”
Everyone whirled around. Everyone gaped. With the stink of the dead skunk polluting the air, not even Bones had smelled anyone else approach. Now the big dog suddenly let out a single, sharp bark, and his tail began whipping back and forth too fast to see. He barked again, and again. He didn’t sound scared or shocked. No. He sounded happy.
Happy?
Rags frowned, because that concept didn’t seem to fit into the day. Not in any way that made sense.
A man sat cross-legged on the top of the FedEx van, sitting as casually as if he was meditating, or sunning himself.
Rags hadn’t seen him. None of the men had. And from the looks on their faces, they were as horrified to see him as Rags had been to see them.
The man was older than everyone there. Maybe forty or fifty, Rags guessed. He had blond hair streaked with gray, cold blue eyes, and a very white smile in a very tan face. There were laugh lines around his eyes and harsher, deeper lines around his mouth. He wore green fatigue pants, a well-worn pair of Timberlands, and a green muscle shirt with the words ECHO TEAM stenciled on the chest. Despite his age, the man was very muscular and looked as dangerous as a tiger. He had a wooden kitchen match between his teeth and made it wiggle up and down.
“Who the hell are you?” demanded the man with the wrench.
The blond man removed the matchstick and smiled. “On your best day, son, I’m bad news, and I’m afraid today is not going to be your best day.”
One of the men leaned close to the woman and spoke quietly, though Rags was close enough to hear.
“That’s him,” he said. “That’s the one I was telling you about.”
The woman stiffened, and her smile went away to be replaced by a look that was colder and less human than anything Rags had ever seen on a human face. Even the dead looked more human than she did at that moment.
The woman said a name. She spat it out like a bad taste.
“Ledger.”