He was no more than ten, thin and dark-haired, with skin the color of chocolate. He wore faded blue jeans, sneakers—real pre-apocalypse sneakers—and a T-shirt with a full-color illustration of a grinning cartoon rat standing on a strange wheeled board. His head was shaved into a Mohawk that was dyed as blue as the sky above. The boy held a hand-crank firehouse siren, and he was working it with every bit of his strength, grinning from ear to ear while he did it.
The dead seemed to forget all about the scrawny girl-flesh they had been seconds away from devouring, and instead began shuffling toward the boy and his siren. When they were a dozen feet from him, he began walking backward, laughing as the dead followed him.
It was so . . . weird, so strange, so outside of all sense that the girl simply stood there, knife in hand, and stared slack jawed.
Then a voice behind her said, “I got to say, sister, you are a crazy riot of a fighter. Never seen anything like you before.”
Her jaws snapped shut as she whirled, bringing up the knife in a slashing attack that would have gutted a grown buck, but the owner of the voice leaped nimbly out of the way. Another boy stood there.
“Whoa, little sister,” he said with a laugh. “That’s no way to treat friends.”
She stared at him.
He was older than the little brown-skinned boy. Maybe sixteen, and even in the heat of her fury, the girl realized that he was beautiful. That was the word her mind grabbed at. The boy was very tall and lean, with finely sculpted muscles and a deep desert tan. He had lots of curly blond hair and eyes as blue as the younger boy’s hair. White teeth flashed in an almost unbearably handsome face. He wore a pair of khaki shorts, a thin green tank top, and sneakers that looked brand new. Around his neck he wore a silver necklace from which hung an old-fashioned skeleton key.
Despite the boy’s handsome face and white smile, she narrowed her eyes and snarled at him. “Y’all ain’t my friends. Put your hands on me and I’ll cut off some parts y’all don’t want to lose.”
He looked alarmed—but it was a comical alarm, heavily exaggerated. “Yeah, let’s not go in that direction, okay?”
The boy took a small step toward her.
“I’m warning y’all. . . .”
“I know, but our door’s open,” he said, nodding past her. “I think it’s time to hightail it.”
The siren wound down, and the girl looked over her shoulder to see the laughing little boy turn and run away with more than a hundred of the gray people following. The little boy did not seem to be trying very hard to escape the dead, though, and the girl realized that he was staying close enough so they could smell him.
“That young’un’s plain crazy in the head,” she said.
“Gummi Bear?” said the older boy. “Yeah, he is that. Gummi Bear’s always been a bit twitchy.”
She turned back to him, the knife still clutched in her fist. “Gummi Bear? That’s his name?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And who are y’all?”
“Jolt,” he said.
“Jolt?” She peered at him suspiciously. “That ain’t a name; it’s a verb.”
He grinned. “And look at you with the actual school education.”
“My daddy taught me to read and write. He was a doctor.”
“Yeah, well my daddy taught me not to try and fight six hundred zees with a knife.”
Zees. It was an expression she’d heard only once or twice. Zee for zombie. Most of the people she knew called the dead “gray people.” Once or twice she had heard travelers call them “zoms.” She liked “zees,” though she didn’t care to let this crazy boy know that.
There was a sound behind him, and one of the dead appeared beside the truck and made a grab for Jolt’s ankle. But then the young man did something that appeared almost magical. He did what looked like a cartwheel, but he did it in midair, spinning his body off the truck and landing well beyond the creature. It was the smoothest acrobatic move the girl had ever seen, with the kind of apparent effortlessness that concealed highly trained muscles.
The zee swiped the empty air where he had been, and for a moment it looked totally blank. Then it sensed him and turned around to face its elusive prey.
“Yeah, I’m over here, Dusty,” said Jolt.
“Dusty? You know his name?”
Jolt darted close to the dead man and slapped his chest, kicking up a cloud of brown dust. Then he spun away out of reach.