Lost Roads

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  This is for Viet Mai, Tammy Greenwood, and Aleta Barthell, the 2017, 2018, and 2019 recipients of the Jonathan Maberry Inspiring Teens Award, presented in my name by the Canyon Crest Academy’s Creative Writing Club. It’s a tad surreal to have an award named after me, but it’s a great pleasure to give it to teachers and educators who are out there truly making the creative experience for teens a more effective and magical one. I celebrate you all!

  And—as always—for Sara Jo!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to some real-world people who were willing to enter the world of the living dead with me. Thanks to my agent, Sara Crowe of Pippin Properties. Thanks to my brilliant and talented assistant, Dana Fredsti.

  PART ONE NEW ALAMO

  If we don’t end war, war will end us.

  —H. G. WELLS

  1

  GABRIELLA “GUTSY” GOMEZ WAS SURE every single thing—living or dead—was trying to kill her.

  This was the world and that’s how it was.

  2

  IT STARTED LIKE THIS.

  A bunch of them in a classroom at Misfit High. Gutsy and her best friends, Spider and Alethea. Gutsy’s adopted coydog, Sombra. Karen Peak, head of town security. The two old teachers, Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford, known to everyone as the Chess Players. The California Kids—Benny Imura, Nix Riley, Lou Chong, and Lilah—who’d arrived in town just as an army of ravagers and shamblers was attacking. Two grizzled and scarred old soldiers had shown up as well—Benny’s older half brother, Sam Imura, and special ops agent Joe Ledger. Grimm, Ledger’s massive and heavily armored mastiff, lurked nearby.

  All of them there in that room. With a monster.

  Captain Bess Collins.

  She was the one who’d run a hidden military base near New Alamo. She’d overseen the lab that used the citizens as lab rats for bizarre medical experiments. She had allowed Dr. Max Morton and his team to systematically inject various unsuspecting townsfolk, including Gutsy’s own mother, with deadly diseases so they could study the reanimation process. They said it was to try and save the world, to find a way to control or destroy the parasites that created los muertos. To restore some intelligence to the newly risen dead. To remove the aggression that made the shamblers want to kill and devour.

  Monsters doing monstrous things to fight other monsters.

  That was how it started.

  Captain Collins admitted all of this now. She admitted that her team had made terrible mistakes. They had experimented on wounded or dying soldiers and accidentally turned many of them into murderous thinking zombies—ravagers.

  She admitted that everyone in New Alamo was expendable if the end result was a cure.

  And she told them about their worst failure: Years ago the team at the lab had found the original infected person, a brutal mass murderer named Homer Gibbon. He had not become a shambler and could somehow control the other undead. Gibbon had been terribly mangled in a car accident during the initial outbreak. Soldiers had collected what was left of him and brought him to Collins’s lab, where she and Dr. Morton had stitched Gibbon back together like a pair of Frankensteins. They’d experimented on him, but had badly underestimated how dangerous and powerful he was.

  Homer Gibbon—the Raggedy Man—had escaped.

  It was he who’d sent an army against New Alamo.

  It was he who’d sent an even larger force toward Asheville, where the fledgling American Nation was trying to rise from the ashes of the old United States.

  It was he who was going to sweep across the face of the world and devour all living things.

  Captain Collins told them all of this.

  And then, as if fate wanted to cruelly punctuate her words, screams tore the air.

  The dead had come back to New Alamo.

  Gutsy and her friends had only won a single battle. The war for the right to survive—to live—was just beginning. They knew this now.

  3

  FORD RUSHED TO THE WINDOW and stuck his head out, ear cocked toward the east gate, but then he frowned and turned back. “God… it’s coming from the center of town.”

  Urrea crowded in next to him. “By the hospital, I think. Please, no…”

  Gutsy snatched her crowbar from a desktop and dashed for the door, Sombra at her heels. Everyone followed. Gutsy yelled over her shoulder as she ran.

  “Someone watch her.”

  “I got it,” said Chong, and he wheeled around back to the classroom.

  The rest ran.

  As they exited the school, the sounds of the screams were horrific, and gunfire cracked through the hot afternoon air. Small arms, rifles and shotguns.

  “I don’t understand,” gasped Spider. “How can there be this big a fight in town?”

  No one had an answer, and they all ran harder.

  As they rounded a corner, they saw a terrible fight in progress—not at the hospital but across the square by the livery stables, which had been used to store the many enemy dead until they could be taken out by the cartload and burned.

  Just ahead, a gang of ravagers poured out of the stable, each of them armed with axes, pitchforks, and sledgehammers that they swung with terrible efficiency. People were down, clutching broken arms or shattered faces. Blood from open wounds splashed ten feet high on the walls. A couple of residents were firing handguns as they backed away, but they were almost immediately overrun. There were more attackers than there were bullets.

  “Ravagers!” Gutsy cried.

  “I thought they’d checked them all from the attack,” gasped Nix. “All the dead ones were silenced, weren’t they?”

  Lilah reached the melee first and leaped into the air, swinging her spear in a glittering arc that cleaved through a ravager’s wrist. He shrieked and dropped his ax, then Lilah crashed into him, knocking him backward. She reversed the spear and swung a short, devastating blow to the killer’s temple that dropped him like an ox in a slaughterhouse.

  Gutsy and Benny split right and left and Nix came up the middle, her gun in both hands as she fired careful, spaced shots. The ravagers were not quite los muertos but they were no longer human, and it was very difficult to kill them. Head shots, however, took everything down, human, inhuman, or in-between.

  Sam Imura moved past Gutsy with his sniper rifle in his hands. The weapon was a precision instrument designed to kill from great distances, but Sam proved that it worked close-up. He shot, pivoted, shot, pivoted, shot. Each time a ravager went down with a black dot on forehead or temple.

  Then Captain Ledger reached the fight and he drew his katana so fast that the weapon was nothing more than a whisper of silver. He and Sam peeled off and ran toward the hospital on the far side of the square, carving a path of destruction. Gutsy stared at them. Ledger, Sam, and the California kids were all warriors. She and her friends were not. There were no samurai or special ops soldiers or trained fighters in New Alamo. Just ordinary people.

  Watching them did not make her feel diminished or foolish or helpless, though. For Gutsy, it had the opposite effect. She saw how experienced fighters worked. There was a clear science to it, a practicality, and she was all about that.

  Gutsy hefted her crowbar and felt coldness run through her veins. Some of it was fear. Some of it was a kind of rage. She and her friends had learned the terrib
le art of killing on the wall, and that meant they were not helpless.

  A ravager rushed out of the stable and swung an ax at her, but Gutsy ducked low and smashed her crowbar into his kneecap. His leg buckled, dropping him onto the injured knee—and Gutsy hit him in the head, making him fall back and drag a second ravager down. A third attacker swung a shovel at her, but Gutsy twisted away, and the blade missed her face by inches. She recovered and smashed the ravager in the throat, but the blow was badly aimed and did little damage. The man simply staggered away without falling.

  “Move!” yelled a voice, and Gutsy evaded again as Alethea’s baseball bat—Rainbow Smite—whistled past and took the same ravager on the point of the chin. The man spun like a top and fell bonelessly to the ground.

  Then Gutsy pushed Alethea out of the way of a ravager with a pitchfork, parried the weapon with her crowbar, kicked him in the knee, and then smashed the killer’s skull. He fell, broken and still.

  Spider used his bo to drop another ravager, and for a few minutes there was furious fighting as more of the monsters came out of nowhere. The whole world seemed to be defined by pain and blood and violence. The defenders, shocked and terrified though they were, fought like wildcats.

  There was a brief moment’s respite as the last of the ravagers on that side of the street went down, though pockets of battle raged all around them.

  “This is impossible,” yelled Mr. Ford as he and Urrea came limping up. “The crews couldn’t have missed this many of them…”

  It was Nix who answered; she’d fought her way to the open doors of the stable and had a good angle to see inside as she jettisoned her empty magazine and slapped in a new one. “Look!” she cried. “They’re coming up out of the ground!”

  It was true. Inside the barn there were at least a dozen ravagers, and more were climbing out of a ragged hole in the dirt. Horses in their stalls screamed and kicked, and halfway down the line Gutsy’s own horse, Gordo, was rearing and slamming his massive hooves against the bolted door.

  Gutsy turned to look across the street, where more of the ravagers were in a fierce battle with people outside the hospital. Could all those killers have come from this one tunnel? It chilled her to think the whole town might be riddled with hidden entrances.

  The ravagers in the stable saw the cluster of teenagers and grinned like ravenous wolves. One of them bared yellow teeth that had been filed to wicked points. “Fresh meat!”

  It jolted her to hear one of them speak. Had they always been able to do that? The thought made them somehow more terrifying. More like evil people than victims of a disease.

  “Pair up—watch each other’s backs,” Benny yelled as he waded in, his sword moving too fast to follow. Nix moved with him, her small freckled hands rock-steady on the handle of her pistol.

  Gutsy estimated that at least thirty ravagers were in the streets among the crumpled and bloody bodies of the men and women who’d first been attacked. Mr. Cantu, one of New Alamo’s tomato farmers, lay staring at the sky with sightless eyes. Sofia Vargas was slumped against a wall with most of her throat gone. Others, too—some so badly mangled that they couldn’t be easily identified. As she watched, Mr. Cantu suddenly twitched, his slack hands spasming into fists and then opening wide. He sat up, eyes still staring and totally blank, but his mouth snapping at the air as if trying to bite the smell of blood.

  Movement out of the corner of her eye made Gutsy whirl around as a ravager rushed at her with a big farming sickle in each dirty hand. But Alethea moved to meet the attack, bashing one sickle away with such a powerful blow that it shattered the ravager’s arm. Then she hit the killer with three very fast blows to the face and head. He fell at her feet. Alethea’s tiara was slightly crooked in the nest of her hair, but she raised Rainbow Smite and gave a wicked grin.

  4

  THE FIGHT WAS DREADFUL.

  In one of those odd moments where things seemed to swirl around them as if they were the calm eye of a storm, Gutsy and Alethea locked eyes. No matter what else happened now or in whatever lives they would have, both knew that they’d crossed into a bigger version of the world. Or maybe it was in that moment the two fifteen-year-olds realized with bittersweet clarity that they weren’t the little girls they’d once been. They weren’t grown women, either, but they were closer than ever to the people they would become.

  They fought and fought…

  And then there were no more ravagers inside the stable—only broken bodies lying in rag-doll heaps. Dead for real now. Dead forever.

  Gasping, her heart aching in her chest, Gutsy staggered to the stable door and looked outside.

  Captain Ledger and Sam were finishing off the last of the ravagers. Dr. Morton was overseeing the triage of the wounded, tailed by an armed guard. Morton was as much a monster as Collins, but he was the only doctor left alive in New Alamo, and they needed his medical knowledge and his understanding of the zombie plague. The guard was there to keep him from running, but also keep him alive. A lot of people in town would love to kill the man for his crimes, but they, too, needed him. When this was all over, Gutsy wondered how long the doctor would last. She certainly had no sympathy. Not a trace of it.

  The doctor met Gutsy’s gaze for a moment. She saw fear there, and some anger. And a mix of other emotions she couldn’t easily define. But he turned away and busied himself with work.

  Spider spat on the ground as he passed him. Alethea did too. Gutsy did not, but in her thoughts she was doing awful things to the man. Truly awful things.

  Closer to the hospital entrance, the Chess Players were silencing both injured ravagers and reanimated citizens. It was brutal, soul-crushing work. A single ravager was still on his feet, but he was running away. Sam Imura raised his rifle and, with an almost casual nonchalance, put a bullet in the back of the killer’s head.

  And then it was over.

  The fighting, at least. Not the pain, the loss. The horror.

  Everything became unnaturally quiet. Gutsy wasn’t even sure she was breathing. It was like a painting of carnage in a book; everything seemed flat and two-dimensional. There was death everywhere. Gutsy later learned that some of the killers were not ravagers but what Benny called R3’s. Fast living dead. There were none of the slow shamblers around. They hadn’t been part of this attack.

  More than two dozen citizens of New Alamo lay dead or so badly wounded that they would die soon. There were nearly twenty others with lesser injuries, but of those, five had bites, which meant that within a day or two they would die too.

  All around the square people were weeping, children screaming. Adults screamed too, as they came out of hiding to discover the fate of their loved ones.

  Gutsy heard someone gag and turned to see Alethea bend over and vomit into the street. Gutsy, not knowing what else she could do, pulled the sweaty strands of Alethea’s hair out of the way. Then she patted her friend’s back and handed her a crumpled handkerchief. Alethea dabbed at her mouth, nodding thanks. She was pale and haggard, and her eyes were jumpy.

  “Hey…,” soothed Gutsy. “Hey, now. You okay?”

  Alethea pasted on a totally false smile that faltered and fell away. “I… I don’t know how much more of this I can take, Guts,” she said.

  “I know,” Gutsy agreed.

  She and all her friends seemed to teeter on the edge of a black and bottomless pit filled with terrors. A hole where there was no light or hope. No trust, either. That had been smashed to splinters by the betrayal of Dr. Morton and the evil of Captain Collins.

  She bent and kissed Alethea’s cheek. “It’ll be okay,” she said.

  Her friend shook her head. “Don’t lie to me.”

  Gutsy had no response to that. She offered a meaningless smile and rose, waving for Captain Ledger and Sam Imura to come over to the barn so she could show them the tunnel.

  “Someone get me a lantern,” said Ledger. Gutsy took one from the wall and handed it to him. Sam covered Ledger with the rifle as he leaned down into t
he tunnel mouth. Everyone crowded around to see.

  “Look,” said Spider, pointing, “they got it all shored up with boards.”

  “No way they dug that since the attack on the wall,” said Gutsy.

  “Nope,” agreed Ledger. “Makes me wonder if this is the only tunnel, too.” He glanced at Benny. “Go tell Karen about this, okay? Have her start a search.”

  “On it,” said Benny, and he ran outside.

  “What if there are, like, fifty of these things?” asked Spider. “What if they’re all over town?”

  Ledger shook his head. “If there were a lot of them, we’d all be dead right now. No, I think this might be another of the Raggedy Man’s experiments. First he hits the wall with a big force, then he tries this ninja stealth stuff.”

  “Yes,” said Sam. “He’s learning a lot about the town, too.”

  Ledger nodded. “We’re going to have get the walls repaired. Right now a couple of nearsighted gophers could invade this place. In the meantime, I want to see where this goes.”

  “You’re too big,” said Lilah. “I’ll go.” She handed her spear to Nix, drew her automatic, checked the magazine, then dropped into the hole.

  Ledger handed his lantern to her. “No heroics, kid. You look and you come right back. If you run into anything nasty down there, give a yell.”

  Lilah’s reply was a sour little laugh, and then she was gone.

  There was a scuffling sound, and then Lilah came scrambling out of the hole. Ledger helped her out and she sat, panting, on the edge of the opening, brushing dirt out of her hair.

  “It’s about sixty yards long,” she said in her ghostly whisper of a voice, “but it connects with a bigger tunnel that I think was some kind of old drainage system. The bigger part is brick-lined. Old. And there were some places where it looked like the drainage tunnel is caved in. Seems like they had to clear it out to finish this one.”