“Nope.”
He took two running steps and leaped hands-first toward the closest car, then slapped his palms on the hood. In a demonstration of incredible flexibility and coordination, he shot his feet forward between his arms so that he cleared the other side feetfirst. Jolt landed on the far side, then jumped onto the bumper of a truck with his left foot, surged upward and leaped onto the hood of an adjoining car with his right foot, and flipped over out of sight. A moment later he appeared atop the roof of a Post Office truck two rows away. The girl had never seen anything like this acrobatic running. Jolt stopped, turned, and waved.
“What are you?” she said. “A monkey-boy?”
He grinned. “You coming or not?”
The ease with which he moved impressed her and annoyed her in equal measures. He made escape look easy . . . and fun. After all her weeks of struggle and hardship, clawing and scrabbling her way through every hour of every day, his obvious joy in running like an ape under the desert sun was . . .
Was what? She didn’t know what to call it.
Was she offended? Intimidated?
Dazzled?
Get hold of your wits, you silly cow, she scolded herself.
She ground her teeth together, set her jaw, and leaped for the hood of the nearest car.
And made it with more grace and balance than she expected.
She ran up the car and launched herself across a six-foot gap between that one and the next, landed with only a moment’s pinwheeling of arms, and repeated it until she nearly caught up to him. Then her foot slipped and she began to fall, but instead she pitched herself into a tight shoulder roll that whipped her across the ground so fast that she came out of it in a small leap that she used to hop up onto another car. Rolling and tumbling was something she’d always been good at, but the fall was an accident, and the save was more luck than style. Even so, she ended her jump dead center on the hood of the car.
Jolt broke into furious applause and hooted his appreciation. Clearly he thought the roll and leap were intentional. His smile was brighter than the sun.
“Wow—look at you,” he said, nodding. “You’re a real firecracker, girlie. You’re a total riot, you know that?”
“Yeah,” she said sourly—though she blushed as she said it. “I’m a riot.”
As if in answer, the masses of the dead let out a chorus of hungry moans.
“Oops, c’mon, riot-girl, let’s burn.”
With a laugh and no backward glance at all, Jolt spun and leaped for the next car, and the next, and the next.
“All boys are crazy,” she told herself. Nothing—not an inner voice or anything else in the world outside—attempted to contradict her.
13
What she really hated was that it was fun.
Running like the wind, jumping high over the reaching hands, dodging and twisting, pushing her body and reflexes to their limits while acting like no limits existed. Not for them, not here and now.
Before this, physical exertion was all built around combat training. Saint John and the others at the Night Church made all of the kids train. Fourteen hours a day. Hand to hand, with weapons, target practice, hunting and tracking, gymnastics, climbing, and all of it geared toward the single purpose of killing. Not that they called it that. “Sending people into the darkness”—that was how they phrased it in the Night Church. Back when she was Sister Margaret, the girl had been the best in every class. The fastest, the fiercest, the most lethal. Her mother demanded it, and Saint John pushed her relentlessly in order to make it happen. And she was the best. No doubt. A murder machine.
And now . . .
Now she ran free, ran laughing, just for the sheer joy of it.
It was the strangest thing she had ever done.
She was certain it was the most fun she had ever had.
The younger boy, the one with the burned face—Gummi Bear—joined them, but he wasn’t running free over the cars. He was on a bicycle. The girl had seen a lot of bicycles over the years. After the EMPs they were one of the few transportation machines that worked. This one was squat and tough-looking, not like the more slender touring bikes she’d seen. Gummi Bear pedaled his like a demon, and it tore along the edge of the road, kicking up a wall of dust and spitting chunks of gravel from under its fat tires.
“Look out!” she screamed as one of the gray people lunged at the boy from behind a toppled tour bus, but Gummi Bear laughed at her and did something that appeared to be completely mad. He slapped the bars and propelled his entire body off the bike, rising into the air as if pulled by strings. The bike rolled to one side of the zee, and the boy sailed over the creature’s reaching hands and then dropped down into a fast, controlled run directly behind the monster. Gummi Bear then cut left, caught his bike before it fell, flipped himself back onto the seat and was pedaling fast again before the zee was finished grabbing empty air.
“Wooohooo!” yelled Jolt, pumping his fist into the air. He stood on the hood of a Lexus, laughing with pure delight. “You ever see a fox-hop like that, riot-girl?”