He cocked his head at her and licked his lips. “Why are you helping me? Back there at the field, you and your friends seemed pretty determined to . . . you know.”

“Yeah, I do know, and we’d have done it too.”

“I believe you. So . . . why the change of heart? Not that I’m looking to make you question your decisions.”

Riot glanced at Eve for a moment. “Evie told me that you and your friends—the cute boy with the sword and that red-headed witch—saved her from the gray people. That earned you some real points.”

“It didn’t look that way back on the field. I remember you trying to take our weapons and supplies.”

Riot shrugged. “Times is tough, ain’t you heard? Apocalypse an’ all.” She rubbed her face. “You also tried to save Sarah and Eve from Brother Andrew. Almost died doing it. Cartin’ you here and plucking out an arrow seems the least I can do.”

“Brother Andrew,” Chong repeated with a confused shake of the head. “Who the heck are these reapers and why are they doing all this?” he asked. “I mean, I heard Andrew and Carter talking, so I think I understand some of it. Is it some kind of cult thing? Some religious cult?”

Riot considered the questions. “It’s religious,” she admitted. “Don’t know much about ‘cults.’ But this is something real, and it’s big.”

She explained about Saint John and his belief that the Gray Plague had been a kind of “rapture,” and that anyone left behind was a sinner. Saint John formed the reapers to usher those left behind into the darkness.

“Darkness? What’s that? Heaven?”

“Don’t rightly know. Saint John says that it’s the place where pain and sufferin’ don’t exist no more. He never said anything about pearly gates or none of that stuff.”

“And people join him?”

A strange light kindled in her eyes. “Oh, yes they do. By the hundreds and by the thousands.”

Chong thought about it. “Brother Andrew said a lot of things about how hard it is to survive out here. All the disease and hunger, not to mention the zoms.”

“Zoms? Oh, you mean the zees. Nobody much calls ’em zoms, ’cept the odd trader or ranger. Mostly it’s ‘gray people,’ ‘gray wanderers.’ All the same.”

“So . . . let me see if I understand this,” said Chong. “People are eager to join the reapers and embrace the ‘darkness’ because this world is too hard to live in? Is that about it?”

She nodded. “It ain’t as simple as that, but you got the bones of it. If all you know is suffering and fear, and next year looks to be just as bad, and the year after that and the year after that . . . who wouldn’t take a hard look at an offer of no pain, no suffering?”