Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  He tapped Ford’s weapon with his bloody sword. “Gimli was the one with the ax.”

  “No way, José, I’m—oh crap.” Ford and Urrea set themselves as a fresh wave of shamblers lumbered toward them. They both smiled like heroes from some ancient tale. If either saw the fear in the other’s eyes, neither mentioned it. After all, heroes were allowed to be afraid.

  93

  THE TUNNEL MIGHT AS WELL have been the entrance to the underworld from an ancient myth.

  The two quads filled the corridor with thunder that drowned out the moans of the dead and the sound of slaughter.

  It was quickly apparent that there were three kinds of monsters down here. Most of them were R1 slow zoms, and half of these were recently murdered soldiers. There were a few R3’s—fast and devious, but no match for the four of them in their riot gear and weapons. But then there were the ravagers. They were the most dangerous and armed, but luckily, there weren’t many of them; and they were all the way at the far end of the throng of living dead. Their own mindless followers kept them from using their guns effectively.

  The quads were sturdy, with roll bars and crash grilles, and steel impact plates welded in place by the mechanics in town. Built for fighting the dead. Built for brutal work. Benny led the way and smashed into the shamblers, knocking them back against their fellows while Nix kept up a continuous fire. Chong was behind him, his body shifted to the right to allow Lilah to shoot past him. Even with the shotguns taken from the prison, the four of them earned every yard they gained. Nix and Lilah fired their guns dry, reloaded, kept firing.

  Together they stormed the gates of hell.

  94

  THEY WERE LOSING AND ALETHEA knew it.

  Not just them, but the whole town. There were still hundreds of los muertos out there and dozens of ravagers. There were too many. They never got tired, they never lost heart, they did not understand the concept of despair, or compromise, or surrender.

  It was like fighting a hurricane. There was simply no way to turn your back on it, no way to reason with it. It was a force of nature, and—even perverted as they were by science—so were the armies of the dead.

  Spider was lighter and very fast, but even he moved as if his thin limbs were weighted down with blocks of stone. Alethea, though very strong, carried more weight, and she felt like her lungs were going to burst.

  She used Rainbow Smite to ram the face of an infected, sending him backward off the wall, arms pinwheeling as he fell. Then another crawled over the edge near her and a shape pushed past her to smash its skull with a meat tenderizer. Alethea gaped at the blood-spattered person of Mrs. Cuddly. Her clothes were torn and her hair was wild, but there were no visible bites on her.

  Mrs. Cuddly caught her eye and gave her a stern frown. “Don’t think this gets you out of kitchen duty.” Then she turned away and laid into a ravager who tried to attack Spider with a hatchet.

  Alethea laughed out loud. The world was nuts, but that was fine with her.

  As she turned back to the wall, she saw something below that made her stare. A big man dressed like a soldier was walking directly toward a bunch of fast-infected. He wasn’t alone, though. Stalking beside him was the biggest dog Alethea had ever seen. It was massive, nearly as big as a bull calf, and it was completely covered with armor from which spikes jutted in all directions. They were down there at the main gate, and they were attacking the dead.

  The monsters howled as they rushed at him and the man reached over his broad shoulder to grasp the handle of a long, slim sword. His reach was slow, but then he whipped the blade free and stepped into the onrush. From then on the sword seemed to become invisible, just a whisper of flickering silver. The dog slammed into the dead from another angle, using its massive bulk and those spikes and blades to tear the legs from the dead. The dead swarmed toward them, and Alethea was positive she could see the man laughing as he fought.

  Fifty yards away, beyond the gate and on the other side of the wall of cars, Alethea saw a figure she hadn’t noticed before climb to the top of a hill. It was a ravager, but he seemed different somehow. Bigger than the others, and there was something oddly powerful about him. He dominated the scene. She could not hear what he was saying, but it was clear he was shouting at the ravagers and to those infected who retained enough intelligence to follow orders.

  It was clear that the man with the sword was fighting his way toward the tall ravager, who roared at his army to defend him. A mass of the dead that had been heading down the corridor to the attack the gate suddenly turned like a tide and washed toward the man and the dog.

  95

  GUTSY WANTED TO HUG ALICE. She wanted to kiss her. Both things were so wildly inappropriate in a moment like this that it made Gutsy doubt her own sanity. How could she think of romance when people were dying around her?

  On the other hand, seeing Alice, and knowing that she was alive, made a lot of weariness fall away. Even in the heat of the moment, Gutsy was analytical enough to understand what she was feeling. Alice was something to fight for. She was someone to survive for. Maybe that’s what all warriors needed to come home from the battlefield. And this, after all, was a war.

  Thinking that nearly stopped her again. This was war. And war was something from the past, from history books and the stories the survivors of the End told. It wasn’t really part of her experience. Like Spider and Alethea, Gutsy had grown up after the war. After what everyone assumed was the last war. Now, here it was. She was at war with the soldiers and scientists—if any survived the attack at their base. She was at war with the Raggedy Man and his army of the dead.

  She was at war. She was in a war. Did that make her an actual warrior? Or a soldier? And what was the difference? All Gutsy knew for sure was that she could not be on the sidelines. She could not run and hide. She had to fight because she could fight, and because she had things—people, her home, her friends, Alice—to fight for. Gutsy almost smiled at that thought.

  Then she saw two people go running across the street, heading in the direction of the town hospital. The first was Dr. Max Morton. That was normal. That made sense. But the person with him twisted the world into a grotesque shape.

  Captain Bess Collins. Not dressed in her Rat Catcher clothes but in jeans and a leather jacket. She had a pistol holstered on her right hip and a familiar broad-bladed machete hanging from her left. Both of them carried big, empty canvas duffel bags and were running as fast as they could.

  The words that rose to Gutsy’s mouth were not ones she ever used. They were foul, vicious, hateful. Alice stared at her in shock.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Who is that woman?”

  “She’s dead is who she is,” growled Gutsy. “Alice—get to the general store. The Chess Players will keep you safe.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To catch a rat.”

  The doctor and the captain pushed through the crowds of injured at the hospital, and Gutsy raced to catch up. She bullied and pushed her way through the people, trying not to do more damage to the injured, but absolutely determined to catch up with Captain Collins. People pulled back from her dog as much as from her, and Sombra played his part by showing his teeth to anyone in his way.

  The hospital was packed with people, and some of them were unconscious, maybe on the edge of death. One had just reanimated, and an orderly with a hammer and spike was wrestling with him.

  Gutsy hurried past in time to see Collins and Dr. Morton enter his office at the end of the hall. She ran faster but skidded to a stop when she heard them speaking in urgent voices just inside.

  “—all of it, Max,” Collins was saying. “Everything. The files, the clinical trial data, the autopsy reports on the bodies we brought back.”

  There was the sound of duffel bags being unzipped and file drawers being yanked open.

  “We only had time for four autopsies, Bess,” said Dr. Morton.

  “I don’t care. Take whatever you have. But take all of it.”<
br />
  “This is insane, Bess. The town’s falling apart. These people need me.”

  Gutsy heard Collins give a harsh laugh. “Since when do you care about these rats?”

  “Not all of them are test subjects. I have friends in this town.”

  “Oh, well, feel free to stay and die with them, Max,” sneered Collins. “Personally, I’m going to get this data to the base and then head east to the other lab.”

  Other lab? It was the first Gutsy had heard of that. Karen Peak hadn’t mentioned it, which suggested that it was something kept secret from everyone but a select few. Gutsy wondered how the captain was planning on getting through the dead attacking the town.

  “What happens if the Night Army wipes out the whole town, Bess? What then?”

  Collins’s voice was ice cold. “Then we’ll get the big guns from the weapons cache, come back here, and wipe them out, and after that we’ll have a whole town full of stage two test subjects. Imagine all you’d learn from that, Max.”

  She heard the doctor gasp. “You’re actually insane.”

  “Oh, grow up,” said the captain. “Don’t pretend you really care about anyone here. Friends or not. Not after all you’ve done for the project.”

  “What I’ve done has been for the good of—”

  There was a sharp sound of a hard slap and then Collins spoke in a tight voice. “Don’t you dare preach to me, Doctor Morton. You’re a monster and so am I. Monsters are exactly what we need to be. It’s what we’ve had to be since the End. It’s monsters like us who will save whatever’s worth saving in this messed-up world. If that means killing every single person left in this state, then that’s what I’ll do, because right now hard choices and big-picture thinking are the only way we have even a chance of winning. Now stop whining, help me collect all the research, and let’s get out to the base while we still have time.”

  Gutsy pulled the door open and stepped inside. The doctor and the captain froze. She looked at the half-filled duffel bags and then up at them. She knew they could see the truth in her eyes. They knew that she’d heard them.

  “Gutsy,” said the doctor quickly, “it’s not what you think. . . .”

  “Shut up,” said Gutsy. “You’re a doctor. You’re supposed to help people. You disgust me.”

  She turned to face the captain, who did not look particularly worried about the presence of a girl with a bloody crowbar and a big coydog. Collins laid her hand on her holstered pistol.

  “And you, Captain Collins,” said Gutsy, enjoying the way the Rat Catcher’s eyes suddenly flared, “if you think that you’re going to be safe at your secret base . . . well . . . I have some bad news for you.”

  The captain narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “I just came from there,” said Gutsy. “It’s gone.”

  “What do you mean ‘gone’?”

  “I mean gone. I watched it blow up. I watched the Night Army eat all your men. You have nowhere to run to.”

  Sombra growled.

  The captain glanced at the dog, and again her eyes widened. “Killer . . . ?”

  Sombra barked once. It was not a happy bark.

  “Is this your dog?” asked Gutsy.

  “It belongs to one of my men. Did you steal it, you little rat?”

  “No,” said Gutsy. “You’re wrong. His name is Sombra and he’s my dog. He’s my friend.”

  Sombra bared his teeth and hot spit glistened on his fangs.

  “Cap, it’s getting bad out there, we really need to go,” said a voice, and Gutsy turned as a soldier entered the room. “What’s going on? Whoa, hey . . . Killer? You found my dog? Holy—”

  With a snarl that sounded like a werewolf more than a dog, Sombra leaped at the soldier. They crashed backward through the door. The soldier’s scream was piercing and filled with terror, confusion, and pain.

  Then Gutsy heard a metallic click behind her and spun around to see Collins pointing the gun at her face.

  96

  THEY FOUGHT THEIR WAY ALONG two miles of tunnel. The hall became so choked with the dead that they had to abandon their quads and fight on foot.

  Benny’s ears rang with the noise of gunfire and screams. His sword dripped with gore. Nix and Lilah had long since run out of pistol ammunition and switched to the clumsier but more effective shotguns. Chong eventually switched from bow to long gun too. The dead could not use their weight of numbers to advantage because the whole corridor was one long choke point. The four of them fought with brutal efficiency.

  It was a rhythm of mayhem, a ritual of destruction.

  Never before had the training they’d gotten—first from Tom and later from Captain Ledger—mattered as much. Never before had it sunk in that the four of them were this dangerous.

  Never before had Benny felt more like a killer. He was no fan of guns, but after a while it became clear that the only way to reach the end of the tunnel was with the shotguns. He went half-deaf from the roar and hated having to use them. Somehow, to him, they were cruder and less civilized than his sword. He was aware that this was fractured logic, but it was how he felt. He used the shotgun with as much precision as he could, and as it became easier to use and as the efficiency of it became evident, he felt himself moving forward in a machinelike way. It did the job, but it did not feel right. He understood that he needed these skills and this weapon, but it also hurt him. Maybe because it detached him from the act of quieting far more so than the sword. Each of the infected still mattered to him on a deep level, on a human level. In other battles, Benny had felt himself losing pieces of his soul with every undead life he took. There was even one time when he simply wanted to stop doing harm, even harm to these unfeeling monsters, and just let them take him. That had been a black moment in his life, and he carried the memory of it with perfect clarity.

  Even with that, he fought.

  The dead fell and he moved on.

  There were far fewer of them now, and beyond the last dozen or so, Benny could see a heavy metal door. The last ravagers were trying to force it open, but so far had not managed it.

  They passed stacks of supplies. Cases of bottled water, tanks of propane and other fuels. Pallets of canned goods. Enough to feed thousands of people for years. Hidden away down here. Some of the ravagers tried to hide behind those supplies, but Lilah and Nix, Benny and Chong found them.

  Hunted them.

  And they killed them all.

  97

  ALETHEA HAD TO TURN AWAY from the spectacle of the man with the sword and the armored dog doing insane amounts of damage down there, because things were not going as well up on the catwalk.

  Mrs. Cuddly went down with a knife stuck in her thigh and lay there, gasping, trying to use her cleaver and meat tenderizer even while she was down. The guards on the wall were mostly dead, and some civilians had climbed up to help. Alethea saw many of them go down, some dragged to pain and horror by reanimating guards. Every now and then, though, one of the fast-infected or an armed ravager would spin away as another mystery bullet ended their lives. If it wasn’t for the shooter—whoever and wherever he was—the wall would have been lost.

  Alethea pulled Spider back and they stood above Mrs. Cuddly, defending her as the dead closed in.

  • • •

  In the street below, Alice Chung stood behind the Chess Players, holding her piece of pipe. She had no body armor, and the old men had tried to tell her to hide. She did not. Alice’s mind was filled with the image of Gutsy Gomez and her dog attacking and killing five los muertos. Five, and Gutsy was two inches shorter than Alice.

  She gripped her pipe, determined to fight. Determined to make Gutsy proud of her.

  • • •

  Karen Peak led a team of guards and townsfolk in a rally to try to reclaim the town square. Adolf Cuddly was with her, his guns belching fire and his face remaining completely impassive, no matter what happened around him.

  Karen held a Beretta M9 and her hands ached from all th
e recoil. She’d lost count of how many rounds she’d fired. When all her magazines had been spent, she’d taken more from dead guards, and even from dead ravagers. Her hands were powder burned and her eyes stung from smoke and tears.

  “Here they come,” she yelled as a new wave of fast-infected rushed toward them.

  She raised her gun and fired.

  • • •

  The Chess Players were slowing down. They both knew it.

  The street was heaped with the dead, but their weapons weighed ten thousand tons. Ford was wheezing and there were red blotches on his cheeks. His eyes looked fevered. Urrea had pains in his chest and down his left arm.

  They tried to hold the line, but they were forced to give ground. Inch by bloody inch.

  • • •

  Captain Ledger loved a good fight.

  This wasn’t a good fight.

  It was an epic fight.

  His personal philosophy had always been that a fight was won by whoever wanted it more, and he always wanted it more than anyone he faced. A lot of them probably thought they had the skills and drive and determination to win, but Ledger was still alive, and all his old enemies were dead.

  He wondered, in his darker moments, whether when he died and went to where killers like him deserved to go, all the people he’d killed would be waiting for him. At other times he wondered if he’d go somewhere like the Valhalla of the Norsemen, where he would fight all day and feast all night, and that was how it would be forever. He thought that likely, or at least fitting, since he had never really known anything but war. A tragedy when he was a teenager had twisted him into a certain shape, forged him into a weapon, and that weapon had been called to use over and over and over again.

  No rest for the wicked. That was how he saw it.

  Now, he thought that this might be his last great fight.

  An army of monsters all around him and no real plan for anything but inflicting as much collateral damage as possible. If he had to fall, then what of it?