She wept for the food and supplies.
She wept for being alive.
Bones pressed himself against her and whined.
And they didn’t die.
7
That night they slept in a shoe store that had been so thoroughly looted that even the little stocking things people wore when trying stuff on had been taken. There was nothing in the store but empty boxes, a smashed cash register, old animal bones, and dirt.
Out back, in a small courtyard shared by six different stores, they found three dead men and a lot of blood. Flies were heavy and the corpses stank. Rags looked at them through the screen door while Bones stood beside her. There were weapons on the ground and scuff marks. This had been a real fight. Rags was getting so that she could read signs of violent encounters. Fights with the dead left one kind of mark. Fights between living people left another.
This fight had definitely been between living people. What convinced her of that was that each of the corpses had their heads cut off.
The dead didn’t return if their heads were cut off. Or if their brains were damaged. Someone had killed them and then made sure these three wouldn’t rise.
Rags closed the door.
The presence of the rotting corpses, though completely disgusting, was useful. Rot did not attract the dead. Only living flesh did that. So, with nothing to steal and nothing to eat, the place was as safe as safe got these days.
Rags and Bones slept in the storeroom, curled together like pups in a litter.
All through the next week Rags looked for a new place. Some of the best prospects—places she’d taken note of to come b
ack to—had been looted. A few had burned down, though whether it was arson or lightning was hard to say.
Almost every day they found more dead people. Not the walking dead. She found more people who had been killed.
And it was when she and Bones were examining the third fight scene that she noticed something. All the dead people had tattoos. Skulls, mostly. On their arms, on their necks. One had a big one on his chest. The tattoos were crude. Stuff that looked like it had been done recently and badly; not stuff from before.
Always skulls.
Every single dead person had a skull tattoo.
She began studying the bodies, trying to learn from them.
All the corpses were tough-looking. People with scars and with other, older tattoos. Although Rags had grown up in a nice neighborhood, she’d watched enough TV and rap videos to know what jailhouse tats looked like. Some of these people had those kinds of ink.
All of them were in bad shape. Like they’d been in a bad fight before they died. Almost all of them were men. She saw a couple of women, but these women looked every bit as rough and tough as the men.
At the seventh scene of slaughter, Rags began going through their pockets. She found stuff she didn’t care about—cigarettes, money—and stuff she kept, like matches, folding knives, sealed packages of beef jerky and Slim Jims. Bottles of hand sanitizer, aspirin, vitamins. Even a little plastic container of breath mints.
She found a lot of rope, twine, metal handcuffs, and plastic pipe-ties. What her uncle Mark called Flex-Cuffs. Like cops used on TV. Every single corpse had that stuff.
She left that stuff there and took the useful items with her.
The days passed.
Twice she thought she heard the sound of yelling and then a few gunshots, but it was on the other side of town, and about the last thing she wanted to do was walk into someone else’s trouble. Rags had gotten used to being alone. Just her and the dog.
Bones, though, sometimes he’d stand and listen, facing the direction of those kinds of sounds, head cocked, nose twitching. A few times he whined softly. But he never left her to investigate.
Bones never left her side.
8
They were walking under the deep shade of the trees in Backesto Park, down near the basketball courts on Empire Street. It was almost noon, and there were a million birds singing in the trees. Singing like the world was okay and things were normal.