After the Rain | Page 8

took a painkiller, the old kind that came in pill form that were now everywhere. Take a few of them and you would forget your problems, or so hissed the boys she passed in the street, though she passed them without a glance or a sniff.
Soon Mata was asleep, back in her bed, and Valentine was back in her bed, too, but she couldn't sleep.
Under her bed she had the remains of her grip sheet parcel, one of the precise robot-knots remaining. In that parcel was her winter galosh, just one, the other had been stolen the winter before, while she'd had them both off to rub some warmth back into her toes before going back to the digging.
In the toe of the galosh, there was a pea-sized glowing light. She'd never considered selling it for bread, though it was very fine. Its light seemed too bright in the dark flat, so she took it outside into the hot night, and used it to light her way on a secret walk through the old streets of her dirty city.
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Nine months after her father died, winter had sent autumn as a threatening envoy. The bread ration was cut to 120 grams, and there were sometimes pebbles in the bread that everyone knew were there to increase the weight.
She was proud that when the bread was bad, she and the other diggers cursed the enemy and not the city. Everyone knew that no one had it any better. They fought and suffered together.
But she was so hungry all the time, and you couldn't eat pride. One day, she was in the queue for bread and reached out with her trembling hands to take her ration, and then she turned with it, and in a flash, a man old enough to be her father had snatched it out of her hands and run away with it!
She chased after him, and the shrill cries of the women followed them, but he knew the rubble-piles well, and he dodged and weaved, and she was so tired. Eventually she sat down and wept.
That was when she saw her first zombie. Zombiism had been eliminated when she was practically a baby, just after the revolution, years and years ago.
But now it was back. The zombie had been a soldier, so maybe zombiism was coming back in the gas attacks that wafted over the trenches. His uniform hung in rags from his loose limbs as he walked in that funky, disco-dancer shuffle that meant zombie as clearly as the open drooling mouth and the staring, not-seeing eyes. They were fast, zombies, though you could hardly believe it when they were doing that funky walk. Once they saw prey, they turned into race horses that tore over anything and everything in their quest to rip and bite and rend and tear, screaming incoherencies with just enough words in them to make it clear that they were angry -- so so angry.
She scrambled up from the curb she'd been weeping on and began to back away slowly, keeping perfectly silent. You needed to get away from zombies and then tell someone from the city so they could administer the cure. That's how you did it, back in the old days.
The zombie was shambling away from her anyway. It would pass by harmlessly, but she had to get away in any event, because it was a zombie and it was wrong in just the same way that a giant hairy spider was wrong (though if she found something giant and hairy today, she'd take it home for the soup-pot).
She didn't kick a tin or knock over a pile of rubble. She was perfectly stealthy. She hardly breathed.
And that zombie saw her anyway. It roared and charged. Its mouth was almost toothless, but what teeth remained there gleamed. It had been a soldier, and it had good boots, and they crunched the broken glass and the rubble as it pelted for her. She shrieked and ran, but she knew even as she did that she would never outrun it. She was starved and had already used all her energy chasing the bastard, the fucking bastard who'd taken her bread.
She ran anyway, but the sound of the zombie's good boots drew closer and closer, coming up on her, closing on her. A hand thumped her shoulder and scrabbled at it and she spied a piece of steel bar -- maybe it had been a locking post for a hover-car in the golden days -- and she snatched it up and whirled around.
The zombie grabbed for her, and she smashed its wrist like an old-timey schoolteacher with a ruler. She heard something crack, and the zombie roared again. "Bread fight asshole kill hungry!" is what it sounded like.
But one of its hands was now