Dead & Gone by Jonathan Maberry Page A

stuff. Maybe some gardens with enough life for wild carrots and potatoes to still be growing. She knew that birds lived in some of the old towns. Even a scrawny pigeon was roast breast for dinner and a day’s worth of soup from the rest. And where there was one pigeon, there would be two.
    The town was where she had to go.
    Ten miles under the August sun.
    It had to be done during the day, though. At night she would not be able to see, or hunt, or defend. And they did not need the light to find her.
    They.
    The gray people. The wanderers.
    The hungry ghosts.
    She knew they were not really ghosts. That was just something her father used to call them. Hungry ghosts.
    They were also in the towns.
    They were always in the towns.
    It’s where they’d lived. It’s where they’d died.
    It’s where they waited.
    And she, hungry and desperate, had no choice but to leave her empty little place of safety and journey into the places of the dead.
    Hunger demanded it.

4
    “Sister Margaret!”
    The words tore her out of a daydream of food and dragged her into horror.
    The girl spun around and crouched.
    There were three of them. Two men and a woman. They rose from the desert, shedding the sand-colored cloaks that had allowed them to hide and wait until she stumbled right into their trap.
    Now you walked into it, girl, said her inner voice. You done gone and stepped right into a snake pit and no mistake.
    They were dressed all in black, with red streamers tied to their ankles and wrists. Stylized angel wings were embroidered on their chests. Their heads had been shaved and comprehensively tattooed with complex images of tangled vines and flowers.
    Just like hers.
    It was a requirement of everyone in the Night Church. A permanent mark that could not be removed. It was supposed to prove an unbreakable attachment to the god of that faith.
    Now it was the only thing that made the girl look like she was connected to them. She did not wear the darkclothes and red streamers and angel wings. She wore ratty jeans, stolen sneakers, and a leather vest buttoned up over her bare skin. She had no other clothes, and she would rather die than wear the clothes of a reaper.
    Never again.
    The reapers approached, smiling the way they’re taught to do. Smiles of false welcome, of false acceptance.
    There was no trace of real acceptance in the Night Church. You were collected by them, you belonged to them, but there was no approval of who you were.
    “Sister Margaret,” said the taller of the two men as he walked toward her. He held a broad-blade machete in one muscular fist, carrying it casually with the tip pointed toward the ground. “Praise be to the darkness that we found you.”
    “Stop right there, Jason,” warned the girl. “Y’all turn around and be on your way.”
    They continued to smile at her. The shorter man had a hunter’s hatchet tucked through his belt. Sunlight gleamed along the wicked edge as he drew it.
    “We bring love and greetings from your mother, Sister Marg—”
    “Don’t call me that,” snapped the girl. “That’s not my name no more.”
    “What name do you want us to use, sister?” asked the woman. She was young, no more than three years older than the girl. Maybe eighteen, but already there were combat scars on her face, and her eyes were ablaze with righteous anger.
    “I don’t have a name no more, Connie,” said the girl. “I left all that behind when I left the church.”
    “That’s not true, little sister. Your mother sent us tobring you home, to bring you back into the peace and love of the Night Church.”
    “I know you, Connie. You don’t open your mouth ’cept when a lie needs to come out.”
    Sister Connie’s smile flickered, and her eyes went cold. “And you can’t help but carve more sins onto your own soul.”
    Sister Connie drew her blade—a slender double-edged antique dagger that had been looted from a museum in Omaha. The girl had been there when Connie had found the weapon four