“You can fight. You’ve been trained. Anyone can see that. And the way you stepped in tonight? That was so cool. You’re a real hero.”
“No, I’m not. I had a good teacher, though,” said Rags. “Captain Ledger. He’s an actual hero. He was Special Ops before the Fall. I trained with him for four years.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. Somewhere.”
“Are you . . . looking for him?” asked Rachael.
“No.”
“What are you looking for?”
Rags didn’t answer. She shrugged again.
Rachael chewed her lip for a moment and made a soft, thoughtful noise as she watched the fireflies. Then she abruptly pushed off the fence and walked a few paces.
“Let me show you something, okay?” she asked.
“Show me what?”
“You’ll see. It’s . . . well, it’s what we’ve been doing since we got here.”
She led the way, and after a moment Rags followed. Ghoulie trotted along behind, huffing and clanking.
They passed through another gate—this one properly manned—and then turned and walked nearly half a mile down what had once been a broad street lined with big stores and automobile dealerships. They stopped at the top of a hill and stared at what lay beyond.
Rags gasped.
She took two clumsy steps and then sat down hard on the ground.
“How—how—how many—?”
Rachael knelt beside her, and they looked at the lights. Cooking fires and bonfires.
Hundreds of them, stretching along both sides of the road and then spreading back toward the distant gloom of nightfall. At the fringes of the fires were rows of tents, campers, RVs, trailer homes, and plywood shacks. Beyond those was farmland. Corn and wheat, pumpkins and apple groves. And more that Rags could not identify from that distance.
Her eyes, though, were drawn to the lights. To the fires.
There were hundreds of them.
Thousands.
And around each of them were people.
“At last count,” said Rachael, “we had eleven thousand civilians. And I have two hundred and fifty-six heroes in training.”
Tears burned in Rags’s eyes and fell down her cheeks as a sob burst in her chest. Ghoulie whined and licked her face.
“So many people . . .”
“We’re finding more all the time,” said Rachael. “And once we train enough people, we’ll send out more scouting parties. To find more. And to clear out the farmlands. Every year we take more of it back. Every year we get more of the world back.”
“My God . . .”
Rachael leaned close to Rags. “We need to get tougher so we can save more of them,” she said. “Tough like you. Like that man you mentioned, Captain Ledger. If we’re going to save the world, then we need to become real heroes.”
“You already are,” said Rags thickly. “God . . . you’re already heroes.”