Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  Many the recent graves in Hope Cemetery had been dug up.

  All the coffins had been pried open, and all the dead from those graves were gone.

  27

  THE THREE OF THEM WANDERED through the defiled cemetery, stopping to peer into open graves, shaking their heads. Lost.

  The graveyard was big and old, but not all of it belonged to New Alamo. There were huge sections from before the End, and a quick examination showed that none of those graves had been touched. Only the sections where people who’d died after the End were buried had been disturbed. Not all of them, though, but a lot. Too many.

  Sombra limped along with them, sometimes ranging ahead to follow some movement, but it was always a piece of torn shroud blowing in the wind, or a startled lizard, or nothing at all.

  They drifted back toward Mama Gomez’s grave and stood for a while in a clump, staring down into the shadows at the bottom of the empty hole. Sombra circled them, sniffing the ground.

  “Okay,” said Alethea after taking a few deep breaths, “you’re the one who likes puzzles, Gutsy, so what the heck is going on?”

  When Gutsy didn’t answer, Alethea snapped her fingers in front of Gutsy’s face.

  “Uh-uh, girlfriend,” said Alethea sternly, “we’re not doing the whole ‘I’m too shocked to think’ thing. I’m scared green and I don’t like puzzles. So, do whatever you need to do to go all Sherlock Holmes on this. Tell me something.”

  They had all read several Sherlock Holmes short stories last summer, and Gutsy had figured out some of the mysteries before they’d been revealed.

  Spider, who often disagreed with his foster sister, waved his arms to indicate the whole cemetery and said, “We seem to have a lot of clues.”

  “Clues,” echoed Gutsy. “Right. Clues.”

  She rubbed her hands over her face and closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them, she tried to see everything as if for the first time, tried to pull all her previous opinions and judgments out and put them to one side.

  “What’s strange,” began Gutsy slowly, “is that not all the graves are open.”

  They went through and counted them. Out of more than five hundred graves in that part of the cemetery, ninety-seven had been opened.

  “Maybe that’s all the time they had,” suggested Spider. “Maybe they’ll do more tonight.”

  Gutsy considered that but shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, look at where they dug. A few here, a couple over there. The open graves are scattered all over. If they were going to dig up everyone, why not work one section at a time?” She walked a few yards away and stopped by an overturned grave marker. The name Jorge Ramirez had been painted onto a little wooden plaque nailed to a heavy cross.

  “Skinny Jorge?” asked Spider.

  “The one with the weird teeth? He was a farmer,” said Alethea. “His family lived over on the far side of town. I only knew him because his oldest son, Diego, hits on me all the time.”

  Gutsy nodded. “How’d he die?”

  Alethea shrugged. “He got the flu, I think.”

  Spider nodded.

  They walked on and stopped to read the names on every single grave marker. Most were crosses, because there were so many Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the town. Leftovers from the relocation camp, and some people who had fled north from Mexico. Of those, about fifty were Catholics. Their crosses were each marked with the name of a saint. Other people buried there were a mix of Protestants, Jews, Muslims, one Hindu, and some people who had nonreligious markers. Gutsy spoke each name aloud, and they tried to remember something about the person whose body had been stolen from their place of rest. Of the ninety-seven missing bodies, the three of them knew seventy-one, which was a higher number than Gutsy expected.

  There were more than four thousand people in New Alamo, but there had been many more. However, the town was dwindling down. Not because of shamblers or ravagers, but constant waves of diseases—flu, mumps, tuberculosis. More than half the people in town had died over the last four years. Twelve years ago, when the town guards were organized and the defenses reinforced, there had been twenty-two thousand people. They were not all buried here, though. During the worst outbreaks of disease, the town council had used death carts to carry loads of corpses out to fire pits. That had created its own problems, of course, because in their panic to burn all the infected bodies and clothes, the townsfolk hadn’t thought about wind patterns or the effect of ash soaking into the ground during the rains. While it was true that fire purified, not all the bodies were completely consumed, and some diseases survived. The pollution and diseases that got into the water table killed more people in New Alamo than los muertos.

  “I’m no Sherlock Holmes,” said Alethea as they stood in front of the last empty grave, “but I’m starting to see a pattern here.”

  “What pattern?” asked Spider, looking back the way they’d come.

  “The names,” Gutsy said, and Alethea nodded.

  “What about them?”

  Gutsy bent down, picked up the marker that had been kicked over by the grave robbers, and showed it to Spider. The name was Lucy Dominguez.

  “So?” he asked.

  “So, that grave over there is a Cantu and the one next to it are the Santiagos. And down there, that was old Mr. Diaz. Most are Spanish.”

  “Okay, so that’s freaky. It’s six Spanish names to every one that’s not.” He cut the girls a look. “You trying to say this was about race? I mean . . . come on, we learned about that in school, but there’s not enough people left for that kind of stuff anymore.”

  Gutsy took a moment with that. “Maybe not, but New Alamo wasn’t always a mixed-race town. Remember, my mama and a lot of the people here were prisoners. Undocumented. Nobody really cared much about them.”

  As if in answer to that, Sombra gave a single, sharp bark.

  28

  “OH, COME ON,” PROTESTED SPIDER, “there’s got to be more to it than someone being racist.”

  “Of course there is,” agreed Gutsy, “and I could be totally wrong . . . but you have to admit it’s weird.”

  “Everything’s weird,” said Spider. “Why would some bigots dig up all these bodies? Why would they bring your mom back to your place? How would they even know which body buried here was your mom? Those riders don’t even live in our town.”

  “What makes you think that?” asked Gutsy.

  “They rode away.”

  “Sure,” said Gutsy, “but while they were in town, they wore masks to hide their faces. The one who stole my machete pointed it at me. She knew who I was.”

  Spider shook his head. “I don’t know, Guts, it sounds like a stretch to me.”

  “Let’s keep looking,” interjected Alethea. “Maybe we’ll find something that makes it make sense.”

  They spread out to make their own investigations, calling information back and forth every time one of them saw something.

  “I’m seeing like . . . fifteen, twenty different sets of prints,” Gutsy observed. “Same kind of boots, though. Same tread patterns. Different marks of wear—cuts, nicks, whatever—on them, so we could maybe match the prints to the specific boots.” She stopped to consider. “Whoever these guys are, there’s a bunch of them.”

  “I don’t think they were all guys. Take a look at this.” Alethea placed her foot into one of the prints, and it was almost the same size. “Either that’s a guy with an awfully small foot, or it’s that woman you saw in town.”

  They kept looking and found single-wheel tracks inside the front cemetery gate and several sets of wagon wheel tracks out on the road; and there were none at all at the rear gate. It suggested that the people who did this had used smaller carts inside the cemetery and loaded the bodies onto big wagons outside, and then gone northeast. Surely not as far as San Antonio, though the wheels all rolled in that direction. Gutsy knew the terrain nearly all the way to that distant city. The
re wasn’t much there. Ghost towns, overgrown farms, dead factories, and a lot of los muertos.

  “Who are these freaks?” Spider wondered aloud, but no one had an answer.

  There were marks from single-wheeled carts all over the place. That told Gutsy that the grave robbers were using wheelbarrows. It made her sick with anger to think that the bodies were being torn from the ground and dumped into wheelbarrows for transport out to the wagon. The lack of respect for the dead was horrible. Inhumane.

  The wagon tracks out on the road were thicker, and it was clear they were using old car tires. A lot of people did that because there were plenty of tires around, and even though the weather had rotted a lot of them, good ones weren’t that hard to find.

  Sombra came out and sniffed the tire tracks, uttered a low growl, and promptly peed all over the marks.

  “Well,” said Spider, “I guess that says it all.”

  Alethea bent to give the coydog a gentle scratch in one of the few undamaged spots on his smoky hide.

  Gutsy walked to the cart, giving Gordo an affectionate pat on the withers, then stopped and leaned on the wooden slat rail to stare at the form lying silent and cold inside the shroud. Her friends came and stood on either side of her.

  “We can’t bury her here,” said Alethea as she came to stand beside Gutsy. “Not after this. Which sucks so bad.”

  Gutsy nodded.

  It took her a while before she answered. “You know, I’m getting a little tired of being pushed around by all this.”

  “So we turn it over to Karen Peak or the town council and let them handle it,” said Alethea. Then she shook her head. “Ah . . . I know that look, Guts. That’s not what you’re going to do, is it?”

  “No.”

  Spider looked confused. “What else is there to do?”

  Gutsy smiled. From the way her friends recoiled, she knew that it wasn’t a nice smile, or a pretty one. It made Sombra sit up straight and show his teeth. “I’ve got a plan.”

  “A plan?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “and you’re not going to like it.”

  29

  THEY FINISHED FILLING IN MAMA’S grave in under an hour.

  It was sad work, but the anger kept them all at it. The sun fried them and the wind scoured them, but it got done. Gutsy used the flat of her shovel to hammer the cross into place.

  “Now what?” asked Alethea, dripping with sweat and leaning heavily on the upright handle of her shovel. She took a yellow bandanna from her shirt pocket and mopped her brow, then offered it to Spider.

  “Eww, gross,” he said, pushing it away. He used a sleeve to wipe sweat from his eyes.

  Gutsy used her shovel to smooth the dirt, then laid the handle over her shoulder and marched back to the wagon. Spider and Alethea exchanged a look, shrugged, and followed. They caught up to her as Gutsy was stowing the tools, and she took theirs and secured them all, then fetched two bowls, filled them with water, put one down for Sombra, and held the other so Gordo could drink.

  “Well . . . say something,” said Alethea, giving Gutsy a small shove. “I left my psychic powers in my other tiara.”

  Gutsy leaned forward to touch her forehead to Gordo’s, and they stood like that for a moment. She wished all of life was as simple and pure as this. Horses were smart and they had their own quirks, but unless they were deliberately mistreated, they weren’t mean. Dangerous, sure, but any animal can be dangerous. That was nature. But not mean. She kissed the old horse and hunkered down next to Sombra, who was lapping up the last of the water in his bowl. The coydog flinched when she tried to touch him, then seemed to think better of it and allowed her fingers to stroke his head. She was careful not to touch the big bruise, which looked better but still not good. Sombra was not mean either. He probably had a right to be. His true nature showed through and there was a gentleness, a sweetness beneath the fear and distrust. Whoever had hurt him tried to turn him into a brute, a monster, and maybe they had, but not completely; and perhaps that damage could be undone over time. Gutsy hoped so.

  She knew her friends were getting impatient, but that was okay. They would wait for her, despite what Alethea said.

  Finally Gutsy straightened and wiped her hands on her jeans. In a voice pitched so that only they could hear her, she said, “There’s a chance they have someone watching the cemetery. You know, to see if anyone shows up. No, don’t look around. Act natural.”

  “The riders?” Spider stiffened. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not for sure. They’ve been here a couple of nights in a row—first to dig up Mama and then to do all this.”

  “Then why do you think they’re watching us?”

  “ ’Cause it’s what I would do,” said Gutsy. She glanced at Sombra, who had moved to sit in the shade beside the wagon. “They’re not close, though, or he’d be barking. So, maybe a scout with binoculars. Plenty of cover in the hills. Plenty of places they could stand downwind so Sombra can’t smell them.”

  “So . . . what do we do?” asked Spider.

  “Sun’ll be down by the time we get back to town,” she said. “We’re going to head that way. You guys can take the wagon all the way in, but I’m going to bail near that old Abrams tank.” The vehicle in question was a relic of the last battle with los muertos. It was a monstrous metal machine, twenty-six feet long, not counting the cannon barrel; twelve feet wide and eight feet high. All the smaller weapons—the machine gun and other gear—had long since been stripped off it, but Gutsy had stored emergency supplies inside, including water, dried meats wrapped in plastic and aluminum foil, and weapons. Sadly, no extra machete. “I’ll hide out there,” she continued, “then come back here when it’s dark.”

  “You,” said Alethea, “are completely out of your mind. You know that, right?”

  “Get back to town before you get into trouble,” said Gutsy. “The Cuddlys will freak if you don’t show up, and you know it. Besides, no offense, but I can move faster and quieter alone.”

  “Yeah?” said Spider. “What about los muertos? They’re pretty quiet too, until they take a juicy bite out of you.”

  “I’ve been out here at night before. I can handle the dead.”

  It was clear Alethea and Spider wanted to talk her out of her plan, but it was a lost cause and they both knew it. So they loaded up and set off toward home. Twilight and a drifting cloud cover were already darkening the day by the time they reached the rusted old tank.

  As they approached, Gutsy said, “Don’t slow down.”

  “What happens if they see you?” asked Alethea. “Not here, I mean, but back at the cemetery. You can’t expect to fight them.”

  “Jeez, I’m not that crazy. I’ll hide, watch, see what I can see, and then get out of there,” said Gutsy. “They’ll never know I was there, and I can get back into town through one of my special routes.”

  Gutsy had long ago worked out crawl spaces between the crushed and stacked cars that formed the town wall. She’d reinforced each of them with rebar and other sturdy pieces of metal so that even if the wall shifted while settling, her hidden passages were safe. Spider had been through a few of those with her; Alethea had not, claiming it was beneath her dignity.

  “I’ll be totally safe, don’t worry,” Gutsy told them, and even managed to keep a straight face when she told that lie. “I’ll see you at my place for breakfast.”

  Gutsy fished a rough horse blanket from under the bench seat and wrapped it around her and Alethea. It was getting chilly, as deserts do very quickly in the evening, and this action would seem normal. As agreed, Alethea kept her right arm straight out to the side to make it look like there were two people huddled together for warmth. Gutsy bent low and tumbled off the wagon, rolled quickly and was deep in the shadows beside the tank in under two seconds.

  Sombra leaped after her. Gutsy tried to warn him back, but the dog wriggled in tightly beside her as if he understood the need for concealment. The wagon rolled on and Aleth
ea kept her arm out, selling the fiction until they were far away.

  Gutsy let out a sigh of relief, then turned and scowled through shadows at the coydog. “You’re a dummy. You could have been safe and warm at home.”

  She couldn’t see him very well, but she heard his wagging tail thump against the steel tread of the army tank.

  They lay there and waited for night to own the world.

  30

  THEY CAME BY MOONLIGHT.

  Four of them, dressed in long yellow canvas coats—dusters, Gutsy thought they were called—with hats pulled low. The hats weren’t like the cowboy style the riders in town had worn; these were like ball caps with curved bills and old American flag patches sewn on the crowns. One wagon carried them all, two up front and two in the back. They entered through the main gate and went straight to Mama’s grave. It confirmed what Gutsy suspected about the cemetery being watched.

  Gutsy and Sombra hid between two mounds of dirt heaped next to a pair of open graves, a thin blanket of dark wool pulled over them. She’d smeared her face and hands with dirt. Sombra was invisible beside her. His body rippled with nervous anxiety and a mix of other emotions she could not begin to define. Gutsy leaned close and whispered, “Shhh,” to him.

  The wagon stopped beside the grave and the four got down. It was soon apparent that there were three men and one woman. The gibbous moon was bright and she could see their faces clearly. The woman was maybe fifty years old, very fit, with black hair cut into a short, almost masculine style. She had dark eyes and an air of cold command. From the way she spoke to the others, it was clear she was in charge.

  Without doubt this was the woman rider from the previous night. Same eyes. Same coldness.

  There was a very large black man standing with her. He had wide-set eyes and a handsome face except for a small, pinched mouth. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and seemed to be second in command to the woman.

  The other two were very similar except for race—one white, one Latino. Both were average weight, average build, very fit, and in their late twenties or early thirties. They did whatever the woman or the black man told them to do.