Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  Until now.

  The two foster siblings, unable to sleep, had gotten together to talk in hushed voices about what they’d learned from Karen Peak. Now the wall did not seem to be as reliable. How could it be, when the real monsters were here in town?

  Here in the lab.

  Without knowing he was doing it, Spider reached for Alethea’s hand in the dark. They held on to each other for dear life.

  78

  SOMBRA RAN THROUGH SHADOWS AND gutsy followed.

  The moon was huge and white and colored the world in shades of icy paleness. It was so bright that it seemed to extinguish most of the stars in the sky. Sombra ran without pause, moving in a straight line except to avoid rocks or old wreckage. It wasn’t exactly like watching a dog follow a trail; she didn’t have to let him smell the collar again. It was more like Sombra understood what she wanted of him and was eerily focused on that goal.

  Strange dog, she thought as she ran. She realized that she loved the scruffy mutt. Quite a lot. That realization threw a little more gasoline on the fires of her hate.

  Gutsy was used to running, and so the miles melted away. Time held no more meaning out here than it did back in her kitchen. It was as if this was the last day of her life, maybe the last day of the world as she knew it. There was only the timelessness of night and whatever lay at the end of her chase.

  How long did it take to find the base?

  An hour and a half? Less? There was no way to tell. She knew she had found it before she actually saw it. There was no way not to know. Sombra suddenly yelped in fear and Gutsy skidded to a stop at the foot of a hill. Beyond the hill the night had suddenly turned to day.

  Gutsy paused, terrified and confused, as she saw the pale blue-white of moonlight washed over with a furious yellow-red. Then she broke into a faster run all the way to the top of the hill.

  And stopped. Stunned.

  Horrified.

  Beyond the hill and stretching as far as she could see, the desert seemed to be burning. Sombra stood with her, trembling in fear. Fires erupted from below the surface of the empty desert. Long fingers of flame reached for the night sky, as if some massive monster of pure fire was trapped underground and clawing to get out. There were explosions. Small at first, muffled, and then much louder as parts of the landscape leaped up into the air, swirling and burning, only to collapse slowly down amid whirlwinds of dust. The ground rippled as if an earthquake was grinding out its fury, but then whole sections of the desert floor folded inward and more fire belched upward.

  They had found the hidden military base.

  But someone else had found it first . . . and utterly destroyed it.

  She could see them, painted in fiery yellow, like demons from the pit. Some of them were shamblers, and some of those were burning too, victims of falling debris. Gutsy saw ravagers, too, dressed in leather and chains. Many were holding guns over their heads, shaking them in triumph.

  There were dozens and dozens of ravagers.

  There were many hundreds of los muertos.

  She scrambled forward, getting closer but staying completely out of sight. Here and there soldiers, scorched and screaming, ran in panic, firing weapons without aiming, wasting their ammunition on an enemy that required control and precision. Gutsy took her binoculars from her backpack and swept the landscape. She saw a familiar face. The soldier, Mateo, from Hope Cemetery, swinging an empty rifle like a club. She watched as a dozen shamblers fell on him. His screams rose into the air in a brief pause between explosions. He cried out for help in a plaintive shriek that rose higher than the gunfire for as long as it lasted. He prayed to God. He called for his mother. He begged for anyone to save him. The dead tore him to pieces and devoured him.

  Gutsy watched in horror. Not merely for the gruesome slaughter, but because she now knew that every single one of those shamblers held a prisoner inside—the conscious and aware person they had been. Those people were in there, feeling and tasting all of it. Hearing the screams. Connected to nerve endings and taste buds and optic nerves. Witnesses to a crime in which their bodies were the murder weapons.

  Crouching there, Gutsy murmured an old prayer Mama had taught her. It had lost meaning for her over the last few years, but now she hoped that someone was listening. And that whoever heard her prayer cared.

  Then she saw other movement and turned to see that many of the ravagers were herding swarms of the shamblers away from the destruction. Pushing, shoving, driving them. Not to save them from the flames, but to direct them elsewhere.

  Gutsy turned to stare and saw that scores of them were already moving across the desert landscape.

  Not merely away from the destroyed base.

  No.

  They were heading toward New Alamo.

  “No . . . ,” she breathed, but the night said yes.

  79

  LILAH WAS RIDING POINT ON their column and ranging far ahead, picking out the best path on the moonlit terrain. They were following the directions given to them by the dying soldier, and it occurred to Benny, who was at the rear of their line, that they’d never even asked for his name.

  How sad was that? To die without anyone knowing your name. It was like so many of the zoms out in the Ruin. They were just “zoms” to most people, but they’d been people once. They’d had lives, hopes and dreams, family and friends. They each had a history, and every one of them had expected to have a future. Each of them had been a person with a name.

  Now . . . ?

  Even to Benny and his friends, who felt for the people they’d been, they were nameless monsters. It felt like a crime, or maybe a sin, not to know the names of people who died when you were present. Even a man like the soldier, who claimed to be a bad guy, should have had mourners to say his name so that he did not pass out of life without an identity.

  Benny knew he was being superstitious, or maybe he was losing his marbles. Probably a little of both. The deeper they went into the Ruin, the less stable he felt. And the more morbid his thoughts became.

  He rumbled and bumped over the ground, grateful for once that the carpet coat and body armor were warm, because the temperature plummeted as soon as the sun went down. Ahead he could see Nix’s curly hair whipping in the wind from under the edge of her helmet. Beyond her was Chong, sitting hunched as if the weight of everything was crushing him by slow degrees. And Lilah. Still a mystery to everyone. She acted so cold and tough, but Benny knew there was a heart beneath the ice and armor. It had to be breaking after what Chong had said earlier about his life expectancy.

  Up ahead Lilah reached the top of the crest, and he saw her slow her quad into a skidding stop. She killed the engine and turned to the others, drawing a finger across her throat in a kill it gesture. They all stopped and switched off. She waved them over and then flattened herself out on the crest so she could peer over the edge. Benny caught up with the others, his heart thumping.

  “Now what?” he breathed as he closed in on the Lost Girl.

  The four of them saw “what.”

  The crest overlooked the edge of a long, flat plain of grassy ground with a few sparse trees here and there. With the engine motors stilled, they could hear the sounds from below.

  Moans.

  A thunder of them. A storm of bottomless need. An ache that spiraled up from within the living dead and gathered into a collective, unanswerable appeal for food. For meat.

  “There’s so many of them,” gasped Nix.

  “Look,” said Lilah, pointing. “More of the ravagers.”

  It was true. There were dozens of the leather-clad half-zoms spread out among the swarm, and, as before, they were herding the dead.

  “Um, guys . . . ?” said Chong. When the others turned, he pointed in a different direction, down the length of the crest to a point where it leveled out with the plain. Figures were moving, running toward them. Ravagers. Armed with knives, whips, and guns.

  “They heard the quads,” said Benny. “Run!”

  They ran f
or their machines. There were several hollow pops, and Benny saw the limb of a stunted live oak explode in a spray of jagged splinters as heavy bullets punched into it.

  “Go, go, go,” screamed Nix as she fired up her quad and spun away, kicking up clouds of dust and gravel. She did not try to return fire. The ravagers had rifles and she had a pistol. She would be lucky to even clip one of them, let alone get a head shot. The distance was too great to waste bullets.

  Chong slipped and went down to one knee, but Lilah caught him under the arm, hauled him up, and shoved him in the direction of the quad as bullets burned through the air around them. One round struck the wheel of the cart attached to the back of Benny’s quad, blowing apart the tire.

  Benny jumped into the saddle, started the engine, and was off, dragging the damaged cart behind him as more bullets chased him. He was hyperaware that the cart carried their dwindling supply of fuel. Even if he’d had time to detach it, they needed that fuel. On the other hand, could a hot lead bullet ignite the fuel if it struck the tank? Benny didn’t know, so he opened the throttle and roared into the moonlit landscape.

  He heard the other two quads coming up hard behind him; and Nix was far ahead, picking out the route. The ravagers fired and fired, and suddenly Benny felt something punch him in the back. He pitched forward over the handlebars as pain exploded all through his chest cavity.

  I’ve been shot, he thought wildly. Oh God, I’m shot.

  His mind wanted to go dark, to escape the pain and all that would follow. Torture. Teeth. Reanimation as a zombie.

  I’m dying.

  With what strength he had, Benny kept the throttle open and followed Nix for as long as he could. For as long as he was able.

  80

  ON THE LONG RUN FROM town Gutsy had tried to pace herself, to conserve her strength for whatever lay ahead as she attempted to infiltrate the base.

  Now, running back, she could feel all those miles in the heaviness of her legs, in small shots of pain that began shooting up her shins and across her lower back. After a few miles, she shrugged out of the backpack and let it fall. There were useful things in there, but she didn’t care. The only thing she really needed was time, and she could feel it burning away. The silenced clock in her head now ticked as loud as gunshots, and instead of an empty timelessness, she was acutely aware that the seconds of her life were ticking down.

  She had to reach home in time.

  She had to warn everyone in time.

  If only there was enough time.

  She ran. Sombra ran with her, but even dogs are not tireless. He was panting as he ran.

  The dead were coming. The only grace was that they were slow, and the ravagers moved at the speed of the shamblers they herded. It was something, but only if she could get to the town in time to alert Karen Peak and the town council.

  It stabbed her through the heart to realize that those people, the ones who knew about the base, the lab, the Rat Catchers, and all of this, were the very ones she had to rely on to save them all. She wondered if the world was always that warped, that complicated. Probably, she decided, and that twisted the knife.

  The glow of the fire faded behind her, and all the sounds of destruction and death, of horror and pain, became muted by distance and the sound of her own laboring breath.

  Where was the town?

  How far had she actually come to find the base?

  Distance became meaningless.

  Her mind tried to distract her by overanalyzing the facts. She cataloged every detail, from the moment of Mama’s death to the things she and her friends had learned from Karen. It all fit a pattern, it had a history, and although the actions of the lab scientists and the Rat Catchers were based on rationalization rather than compassion, they made a kind of sense. Part of what it took to be rational and practical, Gutsy knew, was to be able to see both sides of any issue. That did not, as some people seemed to think, require an agreement with either side. Understanding mattered. In history class she’d read books on war, on politics, on social unrest, and she understood a lot of different viewpoints, even some that were truly vile. So it only required perspective to understand the way the Rat Catchers thought.

  To them, the people interned at the relocation camp were not entirely real. They were less than fully human. Bigots had to think like that, because otherwise they’d have to face their own fears. Otherwise they’d risk being crippled by compassion.

  She ran, and the ghosts of ten thousand years of civilization ran with her. Heroes and villains, conquerors and the conquered, the bad and the good, and all the countless variations of what it meant to be human. Like an army of ghosts, they ran with her, and behind them was an army of the living dead.

  Ahead . . . seemingly a million miles away, she could see the lights from the watchtowers of home.

  81

  SAM WONDERED IF HE’D MADE a serious mistake.

  The horse walked at a brisk pace—not running, certainly not galloping—but even at a walk, it was hard for Sam to keep up. It chewed up hours and then days. Hunting in his woods demanded care and sometimes great violent exertion, but this was different, requiring an endurance that might have taxed him as a young man. Now, in his fifties, he felt all his years, all the damage that had been inflicted on him by fists, knives, bullets, and shrapnel. He felt as if he carried a thousand pounds of extra weight—a burden composed of regret, guilt, bad memories, fractured hopes, and loss.

  One thing kept him going, though.

  Benny.

  He had a brother. He had family.

  And so, he ate his pain and he ran.

  The miles fell away as day turned to night and the moon hung burning like a signal flare in the black night.

  But then Ledger slowed the horse and Sam stopped, leaning against Peaches’s flanks, gulping in air. Grimm immediately flung himself onto the ground with a weary groan and a clank of armor.

  “Are you seeing this?” asked Ledger.

  “Seeing . . . what . . . ?” gasped Sam.

  Ledger pointed. Sam wiped sweat from his eyes and followed the pointing finger. He was so exhausted that it took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. Then he saw it.

  The sky in the distance was no longer the color of icy moonlight.

  Now it was the fiery red of an open furnace.

  “Tell me that’s not New Alamo,” said Ledger.

  82

  GUTSY DID NOT BOTHER WITH the secret entrance. There was no time left for stealth.

  Instead she ran into the corridor of cars that led to the front gate. She began screaming for help before she reached them.

  After that it was a blur.

  Guards yelling. The gate swinging open. People running. Sombra barking. Whistles blowing. Questions, questions, questions.

  She sagged down and collapsed back against the fender of one of the crushed cars just inside the wall. Sombra stood shivering next to her, his eyes wild and mouth flecked with foam. Gutsy begged for the guards to fetch Karen, and suddenly the security officer was there.

  “Gutsy,” she barked, “what is it, what’s wrong? Why were you outside the gates this late?”

  Gutsy grabbed her wrists and pulled her close to speak in a fierce whisper. “The base . . . I found it.”

  Karen’s eyes flew wide and she tried to pull away. “You don’t know what you’re—”

  “It’s gone!” cried Gutsy.

  “What?”

  “They blew it up. I saw it. The whole thing is burning. All the people there . . . they’re all dead.”

  The other guards exchanged confused looks.

  “What’s she talking about?” demanded Buffy, and Gutsy remembered that she had been one of the two guards on duty the night the Rat Catchers brought Mama home the first time. Which meant that she had let them into town. It meant that she was one of them.

  Even with everything that was going on, Gutsy wanted to punch her.

  She didn’t, and instead told Karen everything about what she�
��d seen out in the desert. The huge swarms of shamblers and the packs of murderous ravagers.

  “They’re coming here,” said Gutsy.

  “Here . . . ?” murmured Karen, her face going dead pale. “How much time do we have?”

  “Not enough,” said Gutsy.

  Above her, in the guard towers, the sentries began screaming their warnings.

  PART SIXTEEN

  NEW ALAMO, TEXAS

  LATE AUGUST

  REMEMBER THE ALAMO

  We must not permit our respect for

  the dead or our sympathy for the living

  to lead us into an act of injustice

  to the balance of the living.

  —DAVID “DAVY” CROCKETT, “KING OF THE WILD FRONTIER” FRONTIERSMAN, SOLDIER, AND POLITICIAN BORN IN LIMESTONE, NORTH CAROLINA (NOW PART OF TENNESSEE), AUGUST 17, 1786 DIED IN SOUTH TEXAS, THE BATTLE OF THE ALAMO, MARCH 6, 1836

  83

  “I’M SHOT,” CRIED BENNY, AND he toppled off his quad into the reaching hands of Lilah and Chong. They lowered him to the grass, and Nix immediately began tearing at his clothes, checking him over, looking for the wound that was going to break her heart.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Nix said.

  Chong’s worried face filled Benny’s. “I don’t see anything.”

  “B-back . . . ,” gasped Benny.

  “Turn him over,” ordered Nix. “Careful—careful!”

  “I see it,” said Lilah.

  “No exit wound,” whispered Chong. “Oh no.”

  “How . . . bad . . . ?” begged Benny.

  Nix pushed him roughly onto his back. Her face seemed to swell with emotion. Not concern, but . . . anger? For a weird moment, he thought she was going to punch him.

  “You big dummy,” she growled.