Despite everything, Gutsy had to turn away to hide a smile. Alethea could make people—teens or adults—do almost anything she wanted.
“This way,” said Alethea haughtily, and waggled fingers at him as she started off toward Gutsy’s home.
Spider began to follow, but Gutsy grabbed his arm. “Listen,” she said urgently, “my mom’s in there. In my room. I closed the door.”
He gaped at her, aghast. “What? How?”
She told him the bones of what had happened and he looked sick.
“Oh my God,” cried Spider. “Come on.”
They hurried to catch up with Alethea and the man carrying the coydog.
22
THE MAN BROUGHT SOMBRA INTO the house and laid him on the couch. He looked around, seeming confused as to why he was there.
“Go away now,” said Alethea with a wave of her hand.
The man cleared his throat, mumbled something, and left without waiting for a thank-you or explanation.
Outside, the all-clear whistle was blowing. Two long notes, a space, two more. All clear my butt, thought Gutsy. She closed the door behind them, turned, and leaned against it. Spider and Alethea looked at her and then slowly turned toward the sound of muffled thumps down the hall.
“Who’s making all that racket?” asked Alethea, and then she stopped and jerked upright. “No. No. No way. Don’t tell me that’s . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“Yes,” said Gutsy. “They came here and they brought me a present.”
It was a bad attempt at ugly humor, and no one laughed. Alethea closed her eyes for a moment as if fighting back a scream. Her whole body trembled with rage.
“That is beyond sick,” murmured Spider.
The thumping was louder now, and they could hear moans. The three of them stood and listened for almost a full minute.
Then Alethea whispered, “But . . . why?”
Gutsy merely shook her head.
“The woman rider,” said Spider, “the one who stole your machete, did you recognize her at all?”
“I couldn’t see anything but her eyes,” said Gutsy. “If I’ve seen her before, she didn’t make an impression on me. But if I see her again, I’ll know her for sure.”
“If we bury Mama again,” said Spider quietly, “they’re just going to dig her up and bring her right back, aren’t they?” Gutsy said nothing. “Would they do that if she was . . . ?” He didn’t finish the sentence, because they all knew what he meant. Even the Catholics in town had a supply of spikes and a good hammer. Everyone did.
On the couch, Sombra whimpered and all three of them snapped their attention to him. The thumping was one problem. The people who’d done this was another. The dog . . . he needed their help right now.
Alethea fetched the first aid kit from the shelf in the kitchen, hurrying past the shuddering door to Gutsy’s bedroom. Spider began examining the dog’s head and neck. He knew more about animals than the other two, having done a lot of after-school work on farms.
“I need water and clean rags,” he said.
Gutsy fetched them, and she and Alethea stood by and watched as Spider cleaned the blood away with infinite gentleness and care. There was a lump on the top of Sombra’s head and some bloody welts on his neck and right shoulder.
“I think they beat him with something heavy but not sharp,” he said as he studied the wounds. “Like a whip handle, maybe, but with something heavy at the end of it. Weird. It knocked Sombra out, but I don’t think it broke his skull. A concussion, maybe.”
“Poor baby,” said Alethea, stroking the dog’s back and hips. Sombra was still unconscious, though he twitched and whined.
“Is he going to die?” asked Gutsy.
Spider shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen farm dogs who were kicked by donkeys and cows worse than this who were okay after a while.” He cleaned the wounds and applied a little of Old Mabel’s Get-You-Right Salve, which was made by one of the women in town. It was an antibacterial ointment that had some herbs in it to reduce swelling and soothe hurts. Everyone used it.
When he was done, they left Sombra to sleep and went down the hall, past the bedroom, and sat at the kitchen table. Gutsy put the kettle on. The pounding never stopped.
There was so much to talk about. The people on the horses. Who were they? Why had they brought Gutsy’s mom back from her grave? Twice? Why had they let los muertos into the town through the back gate? Why do any of that? There was the injured dog. There was the tragedy of the origin of that incessant pounding.
The night asked so much of them, demanding answers, demanding actions. They sat at the table and drank hot tea and tried to work their way through everything that happened.
After a while Sombra came limping along the hallway. Gutsy heard the soft click of his nails on the floorboards and turned as he walked slowly into the kitchen.
“Hey, boy,” began Spider, but Gutsy shook her head.
The coydog came up to Gutsy and sat beside her chair, licked her ankle once, and then lay down. He was asleep within seconds. Her dog was asleep by her side. Gutsy could feel the shift inside her as that thought became her truth.
Gutsy stood up, crossed to the cabinet over the sink, and removed a hammer and a metal spike. According to the hardware store from which Gutsy had scavenged the spike, it was officially known as a hot-dipped galvanized four-inch nail. The hammer was actually a mallet with a rubber head. Simple, efficient, and brutal.
She opened a drawer and removed a bundle of heavy-duty canvas work gloves and took two.
“No,” said Spider.
She looked at him, sighed, nodded, and took two additional pairs from the bundle and handed them to her friends. There were leather jackets in the closet. Gutsy had only two football helmets, though. Hers and her mother’s. She gave them to her friends and wrapped a bath towel around her own head and face so that only her eyes were exposed. She secured it with a colorful bandanna.
They stood there, dressed for horror, outside the bedroom door.
“When it comes to it,” said Alethea, reaching for the hammer, “I’ll do that part.”
“No,” protested Gutsy, but Alethea overrode her.
“You’re already freaked out, girl,” said her friend. “You don’t need to make it worse.”
Spider nodded. They hugged. They opened the door.
They stepped into madness.
PART FOUR
RECLAMATION, CALIFORNIA
ONE WEEK EARLIER . . .
BOLDNESS BE MY FRIEND
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly
find out how far one can go.
—T. S. ELIOT
23
“WHAT DID THEY SAY?” ASKED Nix as Benny walked slowly up the garden path to the porch. He had gone off to plead the case for the six of them—Benny, Nix, Chong, Lilah, Morgie, and Riot—to mount an expedition to Asheville.
Benny stopped, shoved his hands into his pockets, and sighed. The words still rang in his ears from the meeting he’d had with Solomon Jones and Mayor Kirsch. They were both sympathetic, they were both good guys, but they were both acting like adults. Not in a good way.
• • •
“Benny,” said the mayor, “you got lucky last time. With Charlie Pink-eye. With Saint John and the Night Church. You took some stupid risks and got lucky. You’re still only fifteen—”
“I’m sixteen,” corrected Benny.
“Okay, whatever, sixteen. You’re a kid. I can’t let a minor go stumbling across the entire United States toward what is almost certainly his own death. You may be tough for your age, but you’re not your brother. And besides, Tom died out there.”
Solomon Jones was a little less condescending. “I called a meeting of the officers of the Freedom Riders and the mayors of the Nine Towns. We’ll work out a strategy and we will find the answers.”
“How long’s that going to take?” asked Benny, keeping his frustration off his face.
> “The meeting is set for next Tuesday.”
“That’s almost a week from now.”
“It’s the soonest we can get the right people together.”
Benny shook his head. “My friends and I could be halfway there by then. Maybe all the way, if we can find enough gas between here and there.”
“Not a chance,” snapped the mayor. “There’s no way on earth I’m going to let you and your crew take six quads and—”
There was more. There was shouting. It all amounted to the same thing.
• • •
“They said no,” Benny told his friends.
“Of course they did,” said Chong, who was sitting in the shade of the porch. He had been weaving a broad-brimmed straw hat and had a piece of the straw between his teeth. A compound bow and a full quiver of arrows was propped against the wall nearby.
“Solomon, Mayor Kirsch, all of them,” said Benny. “They said they were working on a plan. They said they’d handle it. They said we should try being kids for a while and stop messing in stuff.”
“What’d you expect?” asked Morgie, who sat cross-legged on the porch floor surrounded by a dozen knives of various lengths he’d arranged like a starburst. He ran a whetstone along the edge of an old pre–First Night army bayonet.
“Pretty much expected them to say all that,” said Benny.
Everyone nodded.
“Even after all this,” said Nix. “Even after everything we went through and all the stuff we did, they still think we’re just kids.”
Lilah sat next to Chong and was busy with strips of tough rawhide that she was using to secure a double-edged knife to the length of black pipe she used as a spear. She was smiling as she worked. She often smiled when she worked on her weapons.
Nix and Riot sat on the porch swing. Nix was cleaning and oiling a Glock nine-millimeter pistol that used to belong to Tom, while Riot was sorting small metal ball bearings into the pouches of a green military web belt.
Benny went over and sat near Morgie, shrugging off the strap of the kami katana his brother had given him the night he’d been murdered. Benny eased the gleaming sword from its scabbard and studied the blade. There was so much history in the weapon. Tom had gotten it from Joe Ledger a long time ago when the two of them were hunting for monsters—human and zom—in the Ruin; then Tom had used it as a paid bounty hunter, giving closure to the families of the living dead; and then it came to Benny, who avenged Tom and then carried that sword through the war with Saint John. So much history, so much blood. It was a warrior’s sword. It had never once been used for selfish or cruel purposes, despite the horrible work it had done. After Tom had died, the mayors of the Nine Towns had wanted to put the sword in a museum. Benny declined.
Without looking up from his work, Morgie slid a bottle of oil, a rag, and another whetstone toward Benny.
They sat there and worked as birds sang in the trees.
After a while Nix said, “Riot says she can pick the lock on the shed, so we can get to the quads. Once we’re ready we can just push them out into the field. We’ll mess with the other quads so by the time the guards fix them, we’ll be gone.”
Benny nodded.
“We can take three trailers, too,” added Riot. “We can tow enough gas to get us to Arizona. Maybe Texas.”
Benny nodded.
“Got enough dried meats, canned vegetables, and protein bars to last for a couple of weeks,” said Chong. “Carpet coats, first aid kit, and the rest are in bundles hidden where we can grab them.”
Benny nodded.
Morgie glanced at the others. “They’ll try to stop us.”
“They can try,” said Lilah.
The birds chattered between the leaves, bees and dragonflies drifted among the flowers, clouds tumbled across the sky. The six of them worked.
Nix watched the clouds and didn’t even glance down as she reassembled her pistol. Her hands moved quickly, smoothly, expertly. When she slapped the magazine into the handle, it startled the birds and a few leaped into the air.
Benny glanced at Nix. She was smiling. She was almost sixteen and the scars on her face were only now beginning to fade from rose red to ice white against the tan of her skin. Nix caught his eye and they studied each other for a moment, sharing a conversation that didn’t need words. Her smile was so much older than she was.
“Dawn tomorrow,” said Benny. They all nodded.
And continued working.
24
THE QUADS WERE UGLY, CHUNKY little motorized machines with four fat rubber tires and a kind of saddle for the driver. On flat roads, they could tear along at forty miles an hour; and even over rough terrain, the quads could travel an astounding twenty-five miles per hour.
During the terrible weeks-long battles that, collectively, were known as First Night, the military had tried a lot of different extreme measures to stop the growing armies of the dead. When everything else failed, some maniacs had tried using nuclear weapons. That still astounded Benny, who’d learned about it in school. The nukes had destroyed some of the zoms, but they’d also killed hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of the living who were trapped inside the targeted cities. Those who didn’t die in the blasts were exposed to radiation. The cancer rate among survivors of First Night was ghastly.
What made it worse was that there were two effects that turned a war into a defeat. The people killed by the blasts, along with countless living dead, became radioactive, and that was as deadly a weapon against the living as their bites. Mr. West-Mensch, the history teacher at Reclamation High School, said that dropping the nukes insured that the dead won. Partly because of the devastation and radiation, but mostly because of the EMPs. Electromagnetic pulses were massive discharges of energy that burned out nearly all electrical equipment, from cell phones needed to call for help to the engines of emergency responder vehicles. The world went quiet all at once. Communication between people was gone. Planes fell from the skies. Even the tanks and weapons of the military ground to a halt.
“We were losing the war,” said Mr. West-Mensch, “but the shock was wearing off. If we’d used the time we had, then any groups that were temporarily protected by natural barriers, like rivers or mountains, might have survived. If not on their own, then long enough for authorities to reinforce them while mustering a counterattack. Smarter leaders would have risen inside the crisis to take charge. Had the EMPs not destroyed all cell phone, radio, and Internet communication, we would have been able to share information and strategies, offer and ask for help, make plans. Let’s face it, the zoms are simple. Within days we knew the rules of the fight. Don’t get bitten. Everyone who dies reanimates. Destroying the brain or brain stem kills them completely. They can’t think, they can’t organize or plan. They can’t adapt. We can. They can’t use weapons. We can. They don’t learn from what we do, so any good plan becomes endlessly repeatable. No . . . they didn’t win the war, we lost it.”
What really galled Benny was a belief spread among the survivors that somehow technology itself was partly to blame for the dead rising. Benny didn’t know who’d started that rumor, or why people accepted it as completely as they did, but for fifteen years no one even tried to repair the old machines. Except for a few hand-crank generators, there was no electricity at all in Mountainside.
Then Benny, Nix, Chong, Lilah, and Riot had come riding out of the Ruin on motorized vehicles. No one could say that those machines were anything but a blessing. They allowed Benny and his friends to outpace the reaper army and warn the towns. Even though the reapers had many quads, their army traveled only as fast as the soldiers on foot and the swarms of zoms they brought with them.
After that war, the Nine Towns had nearly two hundred working quads, and Solomon Jones had polled the citizens to find anyone with mechanical knowledge. A massive plan was underway to bring technology back. Technicians from the American Nation helped. There were protesters to this, of course, and even some bits of sabotage perpetrated by a radic
al few who still believed that technology would restart the war with the dead, but Benny knew that technology was coming back.
It pleased him that technology was also going to help his crew get out of town fast.
25
BENNY AND NIX MOVED THROUGH the predawn darkness like ghosts, keeping to the black shadows thrown by the double-wide trailer used as a guardhouse. They reached the foot of the tower without being seen because the guards, true to their duties, were looking out, not in. If these had been enemy sentries, Benny would have sent Lilah and Riot to take care of them. Both of them were stone killers. But the guards working the midnight-to-eight shift on the south tower were neighbors. Jenny Thomas and her uncle, Chas.
Since the reaper war, each of the Nine Towns had built much stronger defenses than the fragile chain-link fences they’d relied on before. The guard tower now looked past the fences to a field six times wider than the old one. Beyond that was the tree line of a thick forest.
They took off their shoes and began to climb, making no sound at all on the wooden rungs. Benny went first and Nix was a ghost behind him. The tower was tall, but the climb was easy, and they reached the lip of the platform in less than a minute. The door to the boxy guard station was closed, but that wasn’t a problem, because it was never locked.
There was a muffled sound of conversation from inside, and Benny pressed his ear to the door to listen. The two guards were talking about Asheville, and he could just make out the words.
Chas: “. . . leave them to their own problems. We got enough to deal with here.”
Jenny: “What about the cure?”
Chas: “Ah, the cure, the cure, that’s all I ever hear about. We only have their word that it even works.”
Jenny: “Of course it works. Look what it did for Lou Chong.”
Chas: “What did it do? He looks like one of them. Kid creeps me out.”
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