Lost Roads Read online

  “If I had to guess,” said Benny, “they were digging this out so they could invade the town from inside at the same time they hit the walls. The cave-ins must have slowed them down.”

  Nix nodded. “Lucky break for us.”

  “Doesn’t feel that lucky,” said Spider. “They killed a bunch of people today.”

  “If these tunnels had been finished in time,” said Sam, “they would have killed everyone.”

  Alethea gave a loud, derisive snort. “So… this is us being lucky?”

  “This is us still being alive, kid. Take the wins where you can.” Ledger turned to Gutsy. “You know anything about the old sewer system? How big it is? Where it goes? Anything?”

  “No. But Karen would.”

  “I’ll go ask her,” said Spider, and hurried out.

  “In the meantime,” said Gutsy, “I think we should go back and ask Captain Collins a whole lot more questions.”

  “Yes,” said Sam, his dark eyes glittering.

  Lilah retrieved her spear and ran her thumb along the wicked edge of the blade. “I volunteer to ask.”

  5

  KAREN PEAK AND SPIDER ARRIVED before they could leave the stable. Gutsy brought her up to date.

  “There’s only a couple of drainage tunnels big enough to crawl through,” said Karen after thinking about it. “One is definitely collapsed. That happened when Billy Cantu and his crew were digging up the streets to lay down new sewer pipes. They didn’t even know about the other tunnel and smashed through it. Since it was old and not in very good shape, they filled that section in after they laid their pipes. The other one that Lilah found goes way, way back to when there was an old Catholic church here in the late 1800s. Runs about four hundred feet, but it’s not tied into any of the modern plumbing. I can check the maps to see if there’s more, but I don’t think so.”

  She knelt at the edge of the hole and lowered the lantern.

  “I don’t think there’s more of these,” she continued. “But I’ll have some guys check. They can drive some rebar down to see if they hit anything. Can’t spare too many people, though. Everyone’s either helping with the wounded or working on the walls. We’re really stretched thin.”

  “Got to be done, though,” said Sam.

  They all moved out into the sunlight. There were screams from people in agony and moans from people in despair. The street was splashed with blood, red and black. Here and there bodies were covered by sheets. Karen asked, “You going back to talk to Collins?”

  “Yes,” said Gutsy.

  Karen turned and stepped close to Ledger. She looked up into the soldier’s hard, scarred face. “I don’t care what you have to do to get those answers, but get them. You hear me?”

  “Loud and clear, sister.”

  The head of town security nodded, then turned and hurried back to the hospital.

  “She must be in hell,” said Sam. “Blackmailed into helping Collins and Morton…”

  “This whole place is hell,” said Alethea, and no one even tried to contradict her.

  As they walked back to the school, Gutsy fell into step with Nix.

  “Was it worth it?” she asked.

  Nix frowned. “Was what worth it?”

  “Leaving your home in California. Was everything you went through worth finding out what was out here? Those reapers and all this mess?”

  Nix walked half a block before answering. “When you go looking for the truth, you can’t expect it to be all sunflowers and puppies. The world is the world. I, for one, do not want to live in ignorance.”

  Gutsy nodded, accepting the practicality of that.

  “Tell you what, though,” said Nix, a smile blossoming on her freckled face. “It isn’t all bad out here. It’s dangerous, sure, but we’ve seen so much that’s beautiful along the way. Not every person we meet is a psychopath or a monster. We’ve met good people out here. Friends.”

  “Like Captain Ledger and Sam Imura?”

  Nix gave Gutsy a sidelong look. “Sure. And other people, too. When the world’s this messed up, maybe you have to go a long way from home to meet your real family. Not blood kin, but what my mother used to call ‘soul family.’ ”

  “What’s that?”

  “The family you choose for yourself. The ones who’ve been through enough stuff to understand someone else who has scars.”

  She didn’t ask Gutsy if she understood what that meant, and didn’t water it down by explaining that she wasn’t talking about physical scars. Nix was making a judgment call that Gutsy got her. Which she did.

  They smiled at each other.

  Soul family.

  Up ahead, Benny suddenly jerked to a stop. “Wait… something’s wrong,” he said sharply.

  The front door of the high school stood open, and there was blood smeared on it.

  “Chong!” screamed Lilah, and bolted forward.

  The others drew their weapons and ran after her.

  6

  THEY FOUND ONE OF THE two town guards just inside the front door. Alethea gagged and turned away, her face going gray. Spider stood with huge, unblinking eyes.

  The man had been hacked to pieces.

  Lilah merely jumped over him and tore down the hall, screaming Chong’s name.

  They found Chong on the floor, half in and half out of the open classroom doorway. He lay still and silent in a pool of blood.

  Lilah flung her spear down with a harsh metallic clang as she dropped to her knees beside Chong. Her hands were everywhere, checking for the wound that killed the boy she loved.

  “You’re not allowed,” she said in a weirdly high-pitched voice of panic. “You’re not allowed.”

  Her face was livid with stress and her eyes bright with tears. Lilah’s hands were everywhere at once. Spider and Alethea knelt by her.

  Ledger moved past them, pointing his gun down the hall. There had been a terrible fight. Broken weapons, smashed glass, and plaster from damaged walls littered the floor. Several of Chong’s arrows were buried deep in door frames or lying on the ground, the barbs coated with dark and polluted blood.

  “Sam,” he said, “on me.”

  The sniper fell in to Ledger’s rear left corner, and the two of them moved along the hall with quick, quiet steps, shifting their weapons toward open doors, covering each other as they took turns entering and clearing the classrooms.

  Gutsy, Benny, and Nix crept behind the two soldiers. Ledger sent Grimm ahead and Sombra immediately followed, but even the dogs moved cautiously. The hall had an ugly vibe to it, as if it were a battery that could store anger, pain, and violence. Gutsy felt that whatever happened here was over, but her nerves did not accept that assessment.

  When they rounded the corner at the end of the hall, they found the second guard. The man stood over a pair of dead ravagers, but he swayed as if half asleep, his eyes looking nowhere. His body was streaked with red, but the blood around the bites on his face and throat was already turning black. Gutsy could see the tiny, threadlike worms wriggling in it.

  “Oh, no…,” she said. It was Abdul, a leather worker from town who worked three nights a week for Karen Peak. At least, that’s who and what he had been. Now he was a shell, a vehicle for hunger and pain. Abdul raised his hands toward them and opened his mouth in a moan of bottomless need.

  “I’m sorry, brother,” said Ledger, lowering his pistol and drawing a heavy knife. The blade rose and fell, and Abdul collapsed into the only kind of peaceful sleep afforded to anyone in this broken world.

  Gutsy turned away, heartsick. Abdul was one of the nicest people she knew. Kind and funny. And now gone, with all of his laughter and talent and life stolen from him. Not by Ledger but by Collins and all the scientists like her who’d done this to the world. Gutsy wanted to cry. She wanted to take her crowbar and smash Collins to pieces.

  They moved on, finding more bodies of the ravagers, each with a head wound. Gutsy frowned; there was something odd about them. Some still had weapons clutched in their cold hands, and others had weapons near them, but they didn’t actually look like ravagers. Two of them were dressed in regular pants and shirts. No chains or any of that.

  “Los muertos,” murmured Gutsy. “But… how’d they get in here?”

  No one answered.

  They reached the classroom, and Ledger waved the teens back as he and Sam went in fast. There were no shots, no yells. Nix and Gutsy exchanged a look and then entered the room. It was a complete shambles. Chairs were overturned, a desk had been flipped over and used as a barricade. The ropes used to bind Captain Collins lay cut and discarded.

  And there were seven bodies on the floor. Sombra sniffed one and recoiled from the slack flesh, snarling and scared. The hair stood up all along his spine. Six of the dead had arrows stuck in eye sockets, foreheads, or temples. Chong, with his steel-tipped arrows, had fought like a demon.

  The other ravager had been killed more crudely, clearly beaten with a folding chair.

  “She’s gone,” snarled Benny, and kicked a metal trash can halfway across the room.

  “Come on,” growled Ledger, and they went back to where Lilah and the others were clustered around Chong. Gutsy had been afraid of what they’d find there, but Chong’s eyes were open. They’d propped him against a wall, and he looked around with the glazed eyes of someone who’d just come out of a deep, deep sleep.

  Benny rushed to his friend’s side, but Lilah shoved him back. “He doesn’t need you pawing at him,” she barked.

  Ledger tempted fate by kneeling to examine Chong, ignoring lethal stares from Lilah. Then he sat back on his heels.

  “The kid okay?” asked Sam.

  “The kid,” said Chong in a weak voice, “is decidedly not okay.”

  “Looks like a concussion and a pretty nasty laceration,” said Ledger. “Can’t tell if your skull’s fractured, though, so you’re going to have to take it real easy for a while.”

  “Oh, bummer,” said Chong. “I was planning on doing jumping jacks and standing on my head.”

  “Don’t do that,” began Lilah, then colored as she realized he was joking.

  Chong just gave her a wan smile. Then he looked around. “What happened? I… can’t remember much.”

  They told him about the attack in town. Chong looked horrified and saddened by the carnage.

  “What happened here?” asked Ledger.

  Chong’s face clouded as he picked through tangled memories. “I heard a sound. A crash, like a broken window. Abdul went to look, and then suddenly there were a bunch of zoms running down the hall.”

  “Running?” echoed Nix. “Fast ones? Like R3’s?”

  “I… guess,” said Chong, frowning. “It’s a little blurry.”

  R3 zombies were one of several recent mutations the kids from California had fought. The R3’s had been exposed to experimental compounds that were intended to accelerate the life cycle of the parasites and essentially burn the infection out. The problem was that before that happened, those zoms became faster and, in many cases, smarter. Gutsy wondered if this was similar to what Collins and Morton had used on the soldiers who’d become ravagers.

  “Weird thing is,” said Chong, “there seemed to be two different kinds of zoms, and I don’t think they liked each other all that much.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Benny.

  “Well… there were the ravagers like the ones we fought at the wall, all leather and chains. But there were some in regular clothes. Just people, you know? Except they were totally out of their minds. Actually raving and yelling.”

  “Yelling what?” asked Gutsy.

  “Just yelling. Not any actual words, just howls. Like people who are so angry they can’t even form words. These… yelling ones… they attacked two of the ravagers, but the ravagers put them down. It’s nuts, I know, but the ravagers seemed to be scared of them.”

  “You must have seen it wrong,” said Alethea. “Ravagers aren’t afraid of anything.”

  Chong shrugged. “Maybe. I did get hit pretty hard, so honestly I don’t know what’s real or not.”

  “And maybe you saw what you thought you saw,” said Sam. “There are bodies back there dressed in street clothes. I didn’t see any obvious bites on them, now that I think about it.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Ledger, looking uneasy. “And their skin color was close to normal.”

  “Wait,” said Spider. “Do regular people turn into ravagers, though? I thought those guys were all soldiers who’d been experimented on.”

  “At this point,” said Ledger, “I don’t know. You got yourself a whole bunch of strange zombies down here in Texas. More mutations than I’ve ever seen. Tell you what, though—until now I haven’t been all that worried about the ravagers, because I figured, how many can there actually be? But if your average citizen can turn into one of them… Well, that’s a special kind of scary, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Spider, “it is.”

  7

  “HOW DID CAPTAIN COLLINS ESCAPE?” asked Benny.

  Chong’s face turned bright red, and he couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. “I… well… I guess I… um…”

  “You let her go?” roared Alethea.

  Lilah immediately got up in her face, but Alethea did not back down. Nix cut in between them and pushed them apart.

  “He had to,” she said, then cut a look at Chong. “Didn’t you?”

  Chong nodded, then hissed because nodding really hurt. “Yes. Ouch. Yes.”

  They all understood it, even if they didn’t like it. Chong had been fighting a gang of fast ravagers or mutated shamblers. In a close-quarters battle, even a good archer wasn’t likely to win. Collins, however, was a tough military officer—and, despite being a vile murderer, she was alive, and their enemies were monsters. The battle lines were clear.

  “She was incredible,” said Chong, his voice almost colored with admiration. “She grabbed a folding chair and just went ape on them. I went out in the hall to use my bow, and just as I got the last of them… bang. Next thing I know I’m waking up with you guys.”

  “You’re lucky she knocked you out instead of taking a second to cut your throat,” said Sam, which earned him a glare from Lilah.

  Then she shifted her anger to Chong. “She could have killed you, you stupid town boy.”

  “Pretty sure she tried,” observed Chong.

  Alethea raised her hand. “Permission to, like, totally kill her the next time we see her.”

  “Granted,” said Chong. He rubbed his head.

  “Do we have any idea where this… this…,” Nix began, fishing for an appropriately vile word and instead giving her word choice enough venom to kill a scorpion, “… woman… might have gone?”

  “Not anyplace around here,” said Spider. “No one in New Alamo is going to help her.”

  “And the base is destroyed; there’s nowhere to go,” said Gutsy.

  “We can use the dogs to track her,” said Ledger. “My guess is she went to ground somewhere in town. There are a lot of empty buildings. She’s going to need rest, food, and supplies. Then she’s going to have to sneak out of here as soon as it’s dark. There may be other bases around, and she’ll—”

  Gutsy suddenly shot to her feet. “Oh no!”

  “What’s wrong?” Ledger demanded.

  “God, I think I know where she’s going,” Gutsy cried, and then she was running. Sombra uttered a sharp bark of alarm and leaped to follow her. Ledger gave Sam a look, and then ran to catch up.

  8

  THERE WAS A STEADY FLOW of refugees coming in from the Broken Lands. Some were alone and half-crazed from seeing everyone they knew and loved slaughtered; others were family groups. One group of a dozen older teens and young twentysomethings had come in just after the big fight at the gate. Their camp had been down by the Rio Grande and had been overrun. Only they had survived.

  Karen Peak welcomed them and, like the others before them, sent the young survivors to see Mr. Martinez, who was in charge of housing.

  “I’m no Realtor, but I guess you kids can take your pick,” he said, gesturing to a row of homes inside the east wall.

  “No one lives here?” asked the tall young man who acted as the spokesman for the group. He was nineteen, but his face was weathered and his eyes looked ancient. He wore a cowboy hat over long blond hair.

  “No,” said Martinez. “Any house you see with a red ribbon on the door is free for the taking. Sad truth, kids, is we lost a lot of good folks in this part of town. You’ll have to deal with anything they left behind. Clothes, pictures, and all that. We don’t have enough people to clean all these houses out.”

  “That’s no problem,” said the young man.

  Martinez managed a smile. “It’ll be a comfort to us all to have some new faces around here. Some new life, if you take my meaning. Lot of older folks in this part of town, so having you kids here is great. Say, I never did catch your name, son.…”

  “Trócaire,” said the teen with a genial smile.

  “Wow, that’s a mouthful.”

  “It’s Irish,” he said. “My parents moved here when I was four. Just before the plague. And this is Ténèbres.” He indicated a thin girl, a year or so younger than he was, whose long black ponytail stuck out through the opening of a red baseball cap.

  “Happy to meet you, Teeny-breeze,” said Martinez, mangling it.

  “This is great,” Ténèbres said. “Thanks. I hope we’re not inconveniencing you.”

  “No, no, just the opposite. Great to have you.” Martìnez smiled and held his arms wide to indicate all of New Alamo. “This is your town now.”

  He left them there and walked back to the town hall to fetch the next group.

  “Our town,” said Ténèbres.

  “Yes,” said Trócaire, smiling. “Nice to know.”

  9

  MR. URREA TAPPED MR. FORD ON THE shoulder. “I don’t like the look of this.”

  They stood together near the entrance to the hospital, taking a short break from helping tend the wounded. The two old teachers were bent from exhaustion but straightened as they saw Gutsy and the California kids race past, with the soldiers out in front and the dogs racing alongside. The whole bunch of them vanished into the building.