Rags ran and ran.
There were so many places to hide. Empty cars, empty stores, empty homes. All kinds of empty buildings. She knew how to check for the dead, and she could almost always hide from the living. Today had been a mistake. The dog was a distraction, and it was stupid to let anything do that. As she ran, she hated herself for being so clumsy. And by mentally yelling at herself, it was easier to keep from screaming.
The things that dog did.
Even to scavengers. Even to people who did the kinds of things they did.
Rags wanted to scream. Probably needed to.
Instead she clamped down on the screams that boiled like hot water inside her chest. She screamed at herself inside her head.
And ran.
3
Rags was too smart to hide inside a house when she knew there were scavengers in the area. Houses had food, blankets, beds, toilet paper, medicines, weapons, clothes. Everyone raided places like that. No one hid there unless they wanted to be found.
The same went for stores that sold anything people could use for survival. She passed a big mall once, a few weeks after it all started. There had to be fifty thousand of the dead crowding the parking lot and hammering on the doors.
Schools were almost as bad. They had lunchrooms. They had gym equipment. Hockey sticks and football pads were worth more than gold. Rags had watched in horror as a fat man wearing only boxers fought two middle-aged women—all of them armed with lacrosse sticks and baseball bats. Rags wondered if all three of them had been teachers at the school. They were screaming and bleeding and Rags doubted they’d make it through the night. That was in the entrance to a middle school.
Other places to avoid included hardware stores, sporting goods shops, grocery and clothing stores, pharmacies, hospitals, police stations, military bases, and department stores.
The best places to hide were stores or warehouses filled with stuff no one needed. Computer centers, toy stores, gift shops. Like that. For Rags, though, her most reliable bolt-holes were museums. One in particular. The one that had been her home for weeks now.
Nobody went to museums anymore. Not unless they had displays of military equipment, and those had already been looted.
Rags ran three blocks along the avenue, leaving the dog and the scavengers behind. Leaving the sounds of what was happening behind. Then she stopped behind a mailbox to study the Japanese American Museum on N Street at Taylor, right on the edge of Japantown.
The place was on the corner of a big intersection that was crammed with wrecked or abandoned cars. The burned shell of a big Marine Corps helicopter was smashed into the east wing of the museum, and the front doors were shut and locked. The building was made from blocks of tan stone, and there were no windows at all on the first floor; the ones on the second floor were covered with ornate brass grilles.
All of the first-floor doors were made from heavy steel. The words DEAD INSIDE had been spray-painted on the outside as a warning.
Rags had done that.
She put that mark on several of her favorite bolt-holes. She’d seen it on other buildings. Warnings left by travelers who cared. Or by the military back when they mattered.
There were no dead inside her place, though.
It had been shut up for the night when the world fell apart. No one had come to open those heavy doors in the morning. No one ever would. The helicopter that crashed on the east wing had burned, and as far as Rags could tell, none of the people onboard had survived. They hadn’t walked out, they hadn’t shambled out. They’d burned and stayed dead.
Rags envied them.
The street was clear of the dead.
She took a breath and moved away from the shelter of the mailbox, darting in a haphazard pattern from one car to another to another as she made her way around the fringes of the intersection. She stopped often, listened closely, watched everything. The only movement was what was pushed by the wind.
Crossing that intersection took five whole minutes, because Rags needed to know that no one saw her and nothing reacted to her. She got to the helicopter and paused again. The burned meat smell was long gone now.
With great care, Rags went around to the far side, climbed up onto the broken tail section, and crawled along it like a bug until she reached the place where the dying machine had punched through the outer wall. There was a small pile of pebbles there that Rags had left behind. She picked one up and then tossed it through the hole into the shadows of the museum. It clattered and bounced and then lay still. She bent forward and listened with all her might to whatever the shadows had to say.
They said nothing.
There were no moans, no soft and ungainly footfalls. There were no human cries of surprise.
Nothing.
She let out a breath and crawled inside.