The girls remembered that lesson very well, as they remembered all such lessons.
There used to be twenty-two of them. Girls, boys, and three adults.
Now there were six girls. Five in the tree and one… missing.
Tiffany had been on patrol in the woods surrounding the old motel where the girls lived, and sometime this morning she’d vanished. They found her weighted fighting sticks and a scuffle of footprints, but nothing else.
The other five girls had formed a party to hunt for her. A cold morning had caught fire to become an inferno afternoon. Each of them was sick with dread at losing Tiffany. They couldn’t bear to lose another of their family.
Now they perched in a tree, letting the day tell them what was happening, what was there, what to expect.
They always paid attention to the lessons nature and experience provided. It was how they’d been raised. Samantha was the oldest of them by a few days. She’d been born one day before the world ended. The others had all been born in the days that followed. None of them ever knew their parents. Their mothers had been at a hospital near Sacramento. The nurses and doctors had tried to protect everyone from the dead, but they hadn’t been able to. During one terrible battle the hospital caught fire. Nine adults gathered up the babies in the nursery and fled in a convoy of cramped ambulances. The leader of that group of adults was a tough-as-nails prenatal care nurse named Ida from Haiti, a place that probably didn’t exist anymore. Because most places didn’t exist anymore. Not with names, at least. Ida brought her small group of survivors out of the teeth of the zombie uprising and away, deep into the forests of California, where people were always sparse even before the nightmare. There they settled and learned to survive. To forage, to hunt, and to kill.
Or so the story went.
That tale was passed down from the survivors of the hospital to other refugees they met along the way and finally to the children as they grew old enough to understand.
The five girls were the last of that group.
Ida’s main support and allies in the running of their group were Dolan, a man who used to be an actor, and Mirabel, who sold houses in Sacramento. Two springs ago Dolan had been attacked by a panther and dragged off. Ida said that the big cat probably escaped from a zoo during the End, or its parents did. There were all sorts of animals out here that used to be in zoos or circuses. Elephants and zebras and a huge white pregnant rhinoceros they saw heading north toward the Sierra Nevadas.
Mirabel and three boys had gone hunting one winter day, and none of them were ever seen again. The only trace of them that anyone ever found was Mirabel’s locket — a beautiful thing with a cameo front. Samantha spotted it hanging from a tree branch. But its owner and the last of the boys were gone. That was nearly three years ago.
And Ida… she died of the flu early last year.
Ida came back almost at once, but it wasn’t really Ida. It was a hungry thing that looked like her, but everything that had actually been her was gone.
The girls did what they had to do, what they’d been trained all their lives to do. Afterward they buried Ida in the cemetery, which used to be someone’s garden. Ida now slept in the cool, quiet ground along with the other kids and the adults who’d died at home.
Home.
They lived in what had once been known as the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court. It was a V-shaped building with forty bedroom units, an empty pool, a tennis court, and a wall that had been meticulously built of tractor-trailers by previous tenants of the place who’d later died of plague. The tires of the big trucks had been slashed, and all the spaces under and around the vehicles had been packed with heavy stones and clay. There were a dozen ways out, but you had to know where they were and you had to have a working brain to use them. Even then, there were booby traps in case bands of human raiders tried to get in. A few tried every year. None had ever managed it. Not alive.
One thing Ida and the other adults had taught the girls was that they had to do whatever they needed to do in order to survive. The girls learned those lessons well, which is why these five were still alive. Along with the missing Tiffany, they were the top hunters, the best fighters. They were the fiercest of the little tribe that had lived — and died — at the Rattlesnake Valley Motor Court. They understood how to hunt, cook, do first aid, farm, observe, process, react, and fight.
They knew about their world, and they relied on what they’d been taught and what they’d learned from doing.
But now the rules were changing.
The dead were beginning to move in packs.
And Tiffany was missing.
Heather, the fifth and youngest girl in the hunting party, was the only one with a working pair of binoculars. While the others talked, she sat in silence and studied the dead through the high-powered lenses. When she finally spoke, her voice was filled with doubt and fear. “They look the same as always.”
“What did you expect?” asked Laura sharply. “Little monkeys sitting on their backs, steering them?”
“No, stupid… but if they’re the same, then why are they moving differently?”
None of the girls had an answer to that. When it came to the dead, their security, their hunting patterns, their lives depended on a total lack of change. So many other things in their world changed all the time — friends and adults dying, exotic and dangerous animals coming through, drought ravaging the crops, bad storms. Those things pushed them to their limits. If the dead somehow changed, then that could push them over the edge.
And they all knew it.
Michelle touched Heather’s arm and in a small and fragile voice asked, “Do you see…?”
She didn’t finish the question. There was no point. They all knew what she was asking.
Did Heather see Tiffany out there?
Among the dead.
Heather was a long time answering. Not because she was afraid to answer the question, but because she was being sure, making certain. She moved the glasses from face to face, lingering long enough to study the features. Most of the dead were ravaged by old wounds — the injuries, bites, or bullets that had killed them — or pocked by the diseases that had swept through the fleeing human populations after the dead rose. The flesh of any zombie older than a week would be withered to a leathery mask of wrinkles. Once, when doing this kind of meticulous search among a cluster of zombies, Heather saw a torn and twisted figure whose body lacked arms and had much exposed bone showing through the remaining flesh. She could not be sure — and she didn’t want to make sure — but in her heart she believed that it was Dolan. Or what had been left of him after the panther had done its awful work.
She let out a slow sigh.
“No,” she said with real relief, “she’s not down there.”
As relief went, it was as thin and capricious as a brief waft of cool air. It did not mean that Tiffany was still alive. All it meant was that she was not part of this group of the dead.
Suddenly all the dead turned at the same time, twisting around to the east, raising their heads as if listening to a sound; however, none of the girls could hear or see anything. The dead seemed to tremble with indecision for a moment, their fingers twitching, mouths opening and closing, and then as one they began moving toward the tree line on the east part of the valley.
“What’s going on?” gasped Michelle.
Samantha narrowed her eyes as she watched the dead move toward some very specific part of the forest. “I don’t know. They must have heard something.”