Broken Lands
Page 4
“Wish you’d let me come with you,” said Spider.
She shook her head.
Spider sighed and helped her unbuckle and unbridle Gordo. They pulled the cart into the stable, allowing Gordo to follow at his own pace. The Quonset hut was vast and there were more than enough stalls for everyone. The Gomez stall was a double because they had a cart, and because the owner of the adjoining one had been killed by the dead while on a scavenging run. As he had no relatives, there was no objection when Gutsy knocked down the thin barrier wall and expanded her own. She’d built shelves and cabinets to accommodate all her gear, and cut several ventilation holes in the walls. People were so impressed by her design and skills that she earned food credits to revamp a dozen others.
Spider took a pair of brushes from the tack wall, tossed one to her, and they began to tend to the horse, each to a side, using gentle circular motions with the curry combs. Dust and grit fell away and Gordo tossed his head, enjoying the attention there in the coolness of the barn. Then Gutsy took a hard brush and ran it from nose to tail, following the grain of the thick hair, while Spider used a pick to remove a few small stones from Gordo’s hooves. Sombra sat in the cool shade and watched.
They did not speak, and Gutsy knew that Spider was allowing her some space. She appreciated it. Spider and Alethea were her best friends, and they’d both helped bury her mother the first time.
There were different rituals in town for dealing with family members who reanimated. Some used metal spikes to sever the brain stem. Others went for the more gruesome decapitation. The Catholics in town, though, restrained their dead, binding them with ropes blessed by Father Esteban, and then wrapped the thrashing bodies in white sheets on which prayers had been written. It was called “shrouding,” and the people who followed the tradition believed that it was both a mercy and a religious requirement. Father Esteban preached that this process of slow decay inside the buried shroud was a kind of penance for whatever sins that person had committed in life. It was a new interpretation of purgatory that would ultimately allow the spirit, now cleansed of all sins, to ascend to heaven.
Gutsy was not as devout a Catholic as Mama had been, but this was what her mother had wanted. The process was horrible, though.
Beyond horrible.
It was probably insane, too. Maybe even cruel. People in New Alamo had been arguing about that ever since the End. Gutsy wasn’t sure if she believed in purgatory. She believed in hell, though. Absolutely. That was where she lived. She wasn’t the only person in town who shared her belief, that the living were not the lucky ones but rather those who, for whatever reason, had been condemned to serve out their sentences in a hell here on earth. When her own time came, Gutsy wanted a spike and then cremation. Wasn’t that in the Bible too? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust?
But Mama had wanted the shroud and the grave, so that was what Gutsy did. Her friends proved how much they loved her by helping. Gutsy loved them for it, but somehow it didn’t really help. It made a bad night worse, because now other people would remember the way Mama’s body twisted and fought even when the first shovelfuls of dirt fell over her.
And it was Spider who had put it into the right words as the three of them stood panting beside the grave.
“The world is nuts,” he said. “This proves it.”
11
GUTSY FILLED GORDO’S MANGER WITH fresh hay, beet pulp, and grain, then stood for a moment gently stroking the horse’s neck as he ate.
“Tell me about the dog,” said Spider, standing with his fists on his lean hips, bony elbows stuck out at right angles. He was ten inches taller than Gutsy and looked like a stick bug than a spider.
Gutsy gave him an abbreviated version but mentioned the collar, the vultures, and how Sombra had spotted the living dead long before she or Gordo were aware of them.
“Nice,” said Spider. He knelt and held out a hand. Sombra flinched away. “I won’t hurt you. . . .”
Sombra looked at the hand, then at Spider’s face, then up to Gutsy, but he didn’t come closer. He began to tremble.
“God, he’s scared out of his mind,” said Spider.
“It’s okay,” said Gutsy.
Nothing. It seemed that now they were out of the desert and out of danger, the coydog’s natural wariness was taking hold. That, and whatever emotional damage he’d sustained from what he’d been through.
“He wants to run,” observed Spider. “Poor thing.”
Gutsy thought about it, went to her cart and got more strips of jerky, came back, crossed her legs, and sat down on the stable floor, indicating for her friend to do the same. Sombra watched all this with frightened eyes, clearly caught between his instinct to flee and his need to stay near people.
“Whoever hurt him like that . . . ,” began Spider, but left the rest unsaid. His hands were balled into fists.
“I know,” agreed Gutsy. “Double that.”
“What do you think happened to him?”
“Dogfights,” said Gutsy.
Spider made a rude noise. Dogfights were illegal in town, but there was a traveling dogfight show that set up beyond the town limits every spring. Some of the people in town went to it. Gutsy knew which ones did and she hated them all. She and her friends had no mercy or compassion when it came to people like that. This was summer, though, so it wasn’t likely to be the Cerberus Circus, as the show was called, named for the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to hell in Greek mythology.
She tore off a piece of jerky and tossed it to Sombra, who jerked backward from it. He stood with all his muscles locked, eyes wild.
“Wow,” said Spider.
They sat still for nearly four minutes before Sombra relaxed enough to take a single hesitant step forward, bushy tail tucked between his legs. He lowered his head and almost took a sniff at the jerky. Stopped, withdrew. Waited. Tried again. On the fourth try he gave the jerky a lightning-fast lick. Then he studied it. Maybe it was then that the memories of eating it in the cemetery came back and overrode his fear. When he leaned out again, he snapped the jerky up, retreated again, and chewed it.
When Gutsy threw the next piece, there was only a small flinch before Sombra ate it.
After that he waited for each new piece. She never threw hard, of course. Then she handed the jerky to Spider. His first piece lay untouched on the stable floor for two whole minutes, during which Sombra eyed him with equal parts naked hostility and interest.
Sombra ate the jerky.
They fed him like that for almost ten minutes. Tossing small pieces, because Gutsy wanted to overcome the coydog’s fear and build trust as much as she wanted to feed him.
Gutsy and Spider sat on overturned wooden buckets, not saying much, watching the dog. People walked past the open door of the barn. A few stopped to offer belated sympathies to Gutsy; others merely nodded. When a slender girl with long, gleaming black hair and cutoff jeans walked past, Gutsy tried not to look. Or be seen to look; but the girl gave her a brief glance as she passed. Was there a smile? Or a hint of a smile? Or was that wishful thinking?
Once the girl had walked on out of sight, Gutsy relaxed, but then heard a soft chuckle and turned to glare at Spider. “What’s so funny?”
Spider nodded, showed a lot of teeth. “So . . . Alice Chung, huh?”
“Shut up.”
“Does she know?”
“I said shut up.”
“You ever tell her how you feel?”
“Do I have to punch you?”
Spider kept grinning. “Last week it was Corey Hale. I think he does know. Not so sure Alice does. Not so sure she’d be into it.”
“Into what? I haven’t said anything about anything to anyone.”
“Yeah, yeah, Gutsy the Pure. I get it. But you’re going to have to pick a side. Guys or girls.”
Gutsy shrugged. “Why do I have to pick one or the other?”
Spider thought about that, picked up a couple of the tiny pebbles he’d pried from Gordo’s hooves,
and tossed them out into the street. He made no further comment.
That was fine with Gutsy. She was fifteen, and while she understood the whole puberty process and the biochemical imperative to procreate, blah blah blah, she preferred to put thoughts of romance and sex aside for now. And that worked most of the time. There were dreams, of course; just as there were some of her classmates—Alice Chung, for example, and Corey Hale—who were sometimes incredible distractions. Not that either of them knew it, of course. Not that Gutsy herself obsessed on them. Much. There were more important things to focus on.
After a few minutes of silent stillness inside the barn, Sombra got up, went outside to the trough, drank, and came back inside. He lay down with his head between his paws and watched them with his smoky eyes.
“About last night,” Spider began. “It was really close. If the town guards found out that your mom came back, they’d have—”
“I know,” she said tightly. “It’s the law. If someone comes back like that, they have to use a sp-spike.” She tripped over the word.
Luckily—if luck was even a word that applied—no one but Gutsy and her friends knew that Mama had returned. Spider and Alethea had been over, sitting with her through the hours of emptiness in the Gomez house. When the two of them kissed her good night, and went outside, they’d all seen the nightmare figure in the front yard. It took all three of them to wrestle Mama to the ground, gag her, drag her inside, and tie her up again. And put a new shroud around her.
It was awful. As a thing to have to do, and as a memory that persisted with brutal clarity.
Gutsy knew Spider was reliving it too. He didn’t have any blood relations, and Mama had loved Gutsy’s friends, as they loved her.
Silence owned them both for a while. It was broken only by the slow, rhythmic crunching of horse teeth on hay.
“It’s my fault,” said Spider.
Gutsy glanced at him. “What? What’s your fault?”
“Your mom,” he said in a small voice. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I think it’s my fault. When we were getting her ready, you know? Doing her shroud and all. I was never good at knots. I—”
“No,” said Gutsy firmly.
“Really, I think—”
“Listen, it’s not your fault and it’s not my fault. Someone dug her up,” she said, and it stopped Spider’s words as surely as if she’d slapped him. His mouth worked but no words came out. Gutsy nodded. “I saw the shovel marks.” She described what she’d found at the cemetery. Spider gaped at her.
“That’s insane. Who would do that? I mean . . . why?”
The heat of rage that had burned in Gutsy all day had changed. It did not go out but was instead replaced by a coldness that ran so deep it vanished into blackness.
“That,” she said, “is what I’m going to find out.”
As she said that, her fingers gripped the handle of her machete. Spider swallowed hard, but Sombra gave a single, sharp whuff. In that moment, he looked less like either a coyote or dog and more like a wolf.
PART TWO
RECLAMATION, CALIFORNIA
ONE WEEK EARLIER . . .
THE VIEW FROM THE MOUNTAINS
Sweet is the memory of distant friends!
Like the mellow rays of the departing sun,
it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.
—WASHINGTON IRVING
12
THE ONLY THING ABOUT BEING sixteen that felt different to Benny Imura was that fewer people—living or dead—tried to kill him. He put that in the win category.
He sat in the shadow of a massive black oak with his best friend, Lou Chong. They both had bottles of root beer, and the remains of a big lunch were scattered around them like the leavings of hungry wolves. Chong held up a finger and Benny, attentive, listened to a very long, complicated, and deeply noxious belch. Benny nodded approval. They said nothing for a long time.
The tree stood in a corner of one of the newer fields in the town of Reclamation. The tree was nice, the town itself was nice, the name of the town was stupid. Benny and Chong agreed on that, as did pretty much everyone they knew. Sure, sure, it had all sorts of meaning because the people who lived here, in fact, had reclaimed all this land from what had once been called the Rot and Ruin. Now, instead of the cramped old town of Mountainside—which had been burned down after a war with the Reaper army—with its population of eight thousand people, the new town was home to twice that many, and more came in all the time. There was room for all the newcomers, too, and that had been part of the plan, to not only reclaim the land, but reclaim the concept of civilization.
Benny was cool with the concept. He’d fought very hard to make that a possibility. He’d sacrificed a lot, and Chong had sacrificed more. All his friends had.
But the name was still stupid.
“How about Kingstown?” suggested Chong, coming back to the topic they had been discussing off and on since breakfast.
“Why?” asked Benny. There were a few crumbs of hamburger meat on the plate and he was on a search-and-destroy mission, leaving no bite behind.
“ ’Cause we saved the town and maybe the whole freaking world, man. We’re kings. There wouldn’t even be a town if it wasn’t for us.”
“Yeah,” said Benny, “no. I pretty much don’t see anyone going for that.”
Chong gave a philosophical sigh. “Small minds.”
They watched their girlfriends, Nix Riley—she of the countless freckles, devious green eyes, and fiery red hair—and Lilah—the snowy-haired killer with a to-die-for smile. When she smiled, at least, which was rare, but always like a burst of sunlight on a cloudy day. They were throwing a Frisbee back and forth. Benny and Chong had bailed out of the game to eat, but the girls never seemed to tire. They whipped the flying disk at each other with incredible force, and it always looked like they were trying to commit murder. Benny’s hand still stung like crazy from catching—or trying to catch—the throws.
The game was typical of the way those two always were, whether it was Frisbee, softball, touch football, or recreational sparring with bamboo swords. They were friends, but there was some kind of weird tension always bubbling below the surface that neither Benny nor Chong could figure out. Maybe it was competitiveness, or maybe they were both a little crazy. Chong said a case could be made either way. No one who watched the intensity of the game ever asked to join. The fun was likely outweighed by potential crippling injuries.
Benny looked for more scraps of food, found none, made a disgusted noise, and sipped his pop. “Boringsville,” he said. “Tell me that isn’t the best name for this place.”
Chong thought about it, lips pursed judiciously, then nodded. “I like it.”
“Or, how ’bout Mindnumbinglydullistan?”
“That could work,” agreed Chong.
A few sun-drowsy bees flew past, buzzing close to the pop bottles, then flew off in disappointment.
“What I don’t get,” said Benny, “is why, or even how, we’re bored. I mean . . . wasn’t peace and tranquility and all that stuff why we went out into the Ruin in the first place?”
“ ‘All that stuff,’ ” echoed Chong, a half smile on his lips.
“You know what I mean. We fought Saint John and Preacher Jack and Charlie Pink-eye and all those guys to get this, to get what we have now. No hordes of zoms trying to break in. No armies of religious nutbags who think the best way to serve God is to kill everyone. No maniacs forcing kids to fight in the zombie pits. I mean, we stopped that. Us. A bunch of teenagers. We stopped it and now aren’t we supposed to just kick back and enjoy the peace and quiet?”
“That,” said Chong, “was the actual plan.”
Benny sighed. “Peace is boring.”
Chong shrugged. “Peace is safe, man.”
“Safe is boring too.”
The boys drank. Chong belched again.
“Okay, you’re not even trying now,” said Benny.
“Fair enough.”
“That’s not boring, though,” said Benny. “Not even a little bit.”
He glanced at Chong and saw him watching the Frisbee slash through the air like a weapon hurled at an enemy. Chong frowned and nodded to himself.
“What . . . ?” asked Benny.
Before Chong could answer, a shadow fell across both of them and they turned to look up. Morgie Mitchell stood there, his gold Freedom Riders sash hung slantwise across his muscular chest. He had not gone with Benny, Chong, Nix, and Lilah on their expedition beyond the questionable safety of Mountainside’s fences. In fact, the last thing that had passed between Morgie and Benny were hard words and what seemed like a permanent breaking of their lifelong friendship. Benny and the others had gone looking for a jet they’d seen in the empty skies, searching for proof that Mountainside and the eight other small towns in central California were not all that remained of humanity. On that trip, Benny’s older brother, Tom, had died saving their lives; and the wasteland had proven to be filled with people, many of whom were vicious, violent, or insane. The fight for survival had changed the world as they all knew it, and now they knew that there were people out there, and even a government trying to build a new America down in Asheville, North Carolina. Not many people, but some. Maybe even enough to reclaim the world.
Morgie had stayed behind, at first bitter and then torn by grief and self-loathing at the words that he’d said to Benny that day. He threw himself into the samurai training Tom had given them all, becoming leaner and much tougher than ever before. He volunteered for dangerous jobs in town, including apprentice tower guard, and Morgie’s quick thinking and heroism had saved many lives. Now he rode with the legendary bounty hunter Solomon Jones and the Freedom Riders, the group that maintained order and kept the Nine Towns safe. Morgie was proud of the gold sash he wore that marked him as a “fighter” rather than an apprentice among the Riders. When Benny and his friends had returned to Mountainside hours ahead of an army of doomsday cultists led by the dangerous fanatic Saint John, Morgie stood beside his friends and there, in the fire and ash, in that furnace, a new and stronger friendship was forged.