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Leper, either.

6

    “R econ” wasn’t in fact what Danny had in mind. She simply didn’t want to discuss the real nature of the mission: It was time to take the Leper on a feeding trip.
    For twenty minutes Danny drove through open country, then the fringes of a settlement, slowing down when they entered a light industrial area not far from the husk of a medium-sized town. A dead end by road, but with railway lines running through it.
    “What are you in the mood for? Rats?” Danny said, as they rolled past shuttered repair shops, auto parts distributors, and warehouses.
    “It’s not funny,” the Leper said, drawing breath for the purpose.
    “You never did have a sense of humor, Kelley.”
    “Or maybe you were never funny. Do you know what rats taste like?”
    They pulled up in front of a ransacked food distribution center beside the railway tracks. The place had been thoroughly trashed by survivors looking for sustenance. As much had been trampled underfoot as carried away. There was a lot of rotten garbage strewn around in front of the yawning warehouse doors.
    And there were plenty of rats.
    The vermin population had exploded since the outbreak. Most species except man were making a comeback, especially those that thrived on human detritus. There were millions of tons of hermetically sealed food out there, even after the better part of two years. Cheetos would be available for decades, entombed in airtight plastic. Most of all, two hundred millionhuman corpses made a ready supply of protein. Rats and cockroaches and flies had inherited the Earth.
    “I hate it,” Kelley said.
    “I ate a two-year-old candy bar the other day,” Danny said. “It had turned white.”
    “No, I mean not just the rats. All of it. I’m coming apart, Danny. I’m peeling and rotting. Imagine you can’t heal. Every little scrape.” She filled her lungs again. “The skin on my fingers is worn almost completely off, and there’s stuff showing through underneath. My gums are just rags. I can feel parts of the bone in back—I can feel where my teeth go into the bone.”
    “Wish it wasn’t like this,” Danny said, knowing it was a feeble response.
    “I’m the picture of Dorian Gray.”
    “I don’t know what that is,” Danny admitted.
    She waited while Kelley stepped carefully out of the interceptor. She had to move cautiously—her flesh was vulnerable.
    “Go somewhere else,” Kelley said. “The rats are afraid of the car.”
    “Good hunting.”
    She was already crossing the littered street.
    “I’ll see you in an hour and a half or so,” Danny replied. “Be here, okay? Sundown is coming.”
    Danny watched as the bandaged woman lay down in the midst of the garbage in front of the food warehouse. The rats would smell death. They would come swarming. And Kelley would feast on them once they got too close. Danny had learned a great deal about the undead through her sister; she was one of them, a thinker, the intelligent variety.
    Kelley had died in Danny’s arms and come back different from the rest of the undead. She remained the person she had been, mostly. Danny had almost blown her sister’s brains all over the farmhouse they had taken shelter in. If she had, she might have blown her own brains out, too. But Kelley had spoken. I’m still me, she’d said. And a pick of ice had been thrust down the center of Danny’s brain that was as cold and sharp today as in that moment. She would never forget the horror of that. It had been seasoned by hope, somehow. Some crazy idea that the dead might not always be lost.
    But Kelley was lost. She had returned with her memories, the record of her life, intact inside her mind. Just as her body was decaying, those things that had been hers were fading by degrees. Sometimes Danny thought she should have pulled the trigger. But she hadn’t, and Kelley was now her constant responsibility. It was the price she paid for being a crappy sister,and for putting the Tribe at risk to go