Broken Lands Read online

“Whoa,” said Gutsy, and Gordo slowed to a stop. To the dog she said, “What do you see, boy?”

  The approach road to New Alamo was lined with thousands of dead cars, trucks, and RVs that had been pushed into place by squads of survivors. The entire town was protected by walls of cars. Two or three vehicles deep, with the vehicles pulled onto their sides and lashed together, with these metal walls braced by berms of hard-packed dirt. The work had taken two full years and had been brutal and backbreaking, but it kept a lot of roamers from wandering in. When rare los muertos somehow found their way into the corridor, those corridors funneled them toward the main gates, where armed guards were waiting.

  That was the town, though, and it was miles away.

  Out here in the Broken Lands, the road was wide open, with countless ruined houses and businesses in various stages of dilapidation. Most of the buildings were blackened husks, the dead leavings of fires that had swept unchecked once los muertos vivientes rose and all the infrastructure—police, fire departments, ambulances, and military—fell. Even though the biggest fires had burned out before Gutsy was even born, there always seemed to be a pall of dust and ash clinging like an army of ghosts. Visibility was bad at the best of times.

  Slow seconds passed while she saw nothing but ruin. Everything outside New Alamo was what everyone called the Broken Lands, and the landscape earned its name. She knew that a few miles farther east was a kind of graveyard left behind from where a massive military battle had taken place. The skeletons of tens of thousands of people lay scattered in the withered grass. None of those bones belonged to the soldiers, Gutsy knew, because when they had lost the fight and died, there was no one to end their second lives. They’d all wandered off to continue their war, fighting on the wrong side forever.

  So, she saw nothing.

  Until she saw something.

  It was a figure moving slowly through the ruined streets. Heaps of blackened debris hid it most of the time, but Sombra had heard it somehow. His low growl held anger and fear. Smart dog, she thought. The figure was moving in the direction of the road. From that distance it was hard to tell which kind of living dead it was. Monsters, as she and everyone else in her town knew, came in a lot of terrifying varieties. Slow ones and fast ones. Dumb ones and smart ones. Ones that spread their diseases through bites; others that made people sick just by being close. The ones that looked like corpses and the ones who were still mostly alive. And old Mr. Ford in town said that there were even worse mutations the farther east or north you went, including a terrifying version of the disease that slowly turned a living person into a living dead one with all of that person’s memories and even their ability to speak intact until the very end. That, Gutsy thought, would be the worst. To know you were becoming a monster, to feel the hunger for human flesh awaken inside you, to become gradually more dead and less alive.

  No one knew how the End had started, but since there were new kinds of los muertos showing up all the time, whatever it was, was still happening.

  She studied the shambling form and after a few moments murmured, “It’s a shambler, I think.”

  Sombra looked at her, head cocked to one side as if asking, What?

  “Slow and stupid,” she told him.

  A moment later she saw another one.

  Then a third. A fourth.

  “Crap,” she breathed. Even if they were all shamblers, there were too many of them. If there were four that she could see, there could be a dozen she couldn’t. On foot, she could have slipped past them, staying upwind so los muertos could not smell her, making maximum use of cover. The shamblers were easy to fool, and Gutsy had a hundred ways to do it. However, with the cart, the horse, and the coydog, Gutsy’s options were limited: go back or wait. Attacking that many dead was only an option if she wanted to be lunch. Good as she was with the machete, fighting a pack of them—even shamblers—was a no-win situation because she would have to fight defensively to keep them away from the animals.

  She took out her binoculars, and after making sure she was not in an angle that would let sunlight reflect off the lenses, she studied the shambling dead. There were many more of them now, though there was nothing particularly remarkable about any she saw. Their clothes made statements about who they had been when they died. A man dressed in greasy jeans, a woman wearing a waitress uniform, kids dressed for school, farmers in coveralls. Some were whole, others had clearly been gnawed on, probably while they were dying. Missing hands, missing flesh. One of them had a piece of rebar thrust through his chest. Two of them had visible bullet holes in their heads, but the shots clearly hadn’t destroyed the motor cortex or brain stem. Shooting the brain wasn’t enough, which was why there were so many wild stories about people who believed the common myth that all you needed was a head shot—as if every part of the brain was important to undead survival. It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Only the motor cortex and the brain stem mattered, and to hit those you needed to know where they were and then be a really good shot. Most people had no idea and not enough skill. Gutsy, however, made sure she did. It was who she was, and it reflected her view of the world: that every problem required its own solution. Gutsy knew that firsthand.

  Then she saw something that made her heart leap into her throat.

  A man walked out of the shadows. She could see him clearly with the binoculars. He wasn’t one of the living dead. His skin was tan, his long hair was tied back in a ponytail. The man’s clothes were a mismatch of denim and leather, but they were not the same kind of filthy rags the shamblers wore. Nor were they like the leather jackets worn by most of the people who went out into the Broken Lands—leather being virtually bite-proof—because the sleeves had been cut off this man’s jacket, revealing arms so muscular they looked deformed. His biceps and shoulders were covered with tattoos of laughing devils, women with absurdly large breasts, and snarling dogs. Sure, some of the dead had old tattoos, but none of them carried weapons, and this man had a rifle. He walked with the long barrel laid back on one brawny shoulder.

  He looked alive. And yet he walked alongside the dead—among them—and they did not attack him. Once in a while one would make a halfhearted attempt to touch him—maybe to grab, but without intensity—and the man would simply push the hand away.

  That made no sense to Gutsy, and things that didn’t make sense offended her. The world, even broken like this, had what one of her teachers called an interior logic. Everything made sense. Anything that appeared not to make sense meant that the observer lacked sufficient information to understand its nature or process.

  That was how Gutsy operated. Sense and order, patterns and details, observation and analysis.

  This did not fit what she knew about los muertos.

  However, what she saw did fit with something else. She remembered the boot prints made by a few men walking on either side of the mass of shamblers who’d trampled the mud at the bottom of the wash. Had they been like this man? Walking with the dead, maybe guiding them? Or . . . herding them?

  It was a very scary thought. Inexplicable, too, though she knew any explanation she might ever discover would be a bad one.

  She wondered if this was one of the ravagers. They were capable of cruelty, unlike the walking dead, who were dangerous but incapable of malice. All los muertos wanted was to feed. They did not and could not hate. They meant no more harm than the murderous winds of a late-summer hurricane. The ravagers often traveled in what the townsfolk called wolf packs. The fact that they were monsters who could still think made them so much more dangerous.

  Was that why these living dead did not attack this ravager? Were those halfhearted attempts to grab him a reflex, or a reaction to that part of him that was still human?

  Gutsy didn’t know, but it did seem to make the illogical parts line up into some kind of order. Of course, that in turn opened up new questions. Why was a wolf-pack ravager traveling with a bunch of shamblers? Where were they going?

  Worse still, what would happen if he saw
her?

  Gutsy knew the answer to that last question, but she did not dare look too closely at it.

  9

  FEAR WAS LIKE A SCORPION crawling up her back.

  Gutsy wanted to turn the wagon around, to get out of there, but she was afraid to move. Going back to the cemetery would be not only noisy, but also a waste of time. The sun would start going down in a few hours, and by then the longer shadows of twilight would hide any wandering dead.

  So she waited. Nervous, bathed in cold sweat that seemed to boil off beneath the scorching sun.

  Watching.

  Gutsy’s hiding place was behind an old billboard advertising coast-to-coast cell phone coverage. She had only a vague idea of what that meant. One of the things that belonged to the world that existed before the one in which she lived.

  There was some cool, dark grass and Gordo, nervous as he was, never passed up an opportunity to eat. Gutsy hoped he was the only creature around who was going to be fed right then.

  She got down, machete in hand, and crept to a corner of the big sign. It stood on a lattice of metal poles and there had once been an open space below, but it was choked with wild growth and provided excellent cover. Some of the flowers and plants growing wild out here were unknown and unnamed. Mutations, even among plants and animals.

  The rise of the dead did more than pervert the nature of human life. There was more to it. For most of the people she knew, the collapse of society meant the end of police and military, emergency services, fire departments, and hospitals. But Mr. Ford and Mr. Urrea said that the End also meant the end of what they called “administrative oversight,” which meant that no one was tending to nuclear power plants, factories that made chemicals, oil wells, and things like that.

  “The nuclear plants didn’t melt down,” explained Mr. Urrea one day in school. He and Mr. Ford were teachers, and the best ones in town. They talked to the students, not down at them. That mattered to Gutsy as much as what they had to say. “However, the sites where they stored spent nuclear fuel rods and radioactive heavy water were no longer being tended to. And there was fallout from every nation on earth trying to stop the living dead with nuclear bombs. Power plants were blown apart, dams destroyed, factories ripped open, and fallout . . . all that fallout . . . drifting on the winds.”

  “Chemical storage tanks, tanker trucks, and trains transporting dangerous chemicals were left to rust,” said Mr. Ford. “Which meant that they were vulnerable to metal fatigue, rust damage, and—as we’ve all found out—damage from hurricanes that slammed into the coast from the Gulf of Mexico. Those chemicals have to go somewhere. They don’t just wash away. They soak into the ground and pollute the groundwater.”

  The storms were one of the worst parts of living down here in south Texas. In the years before the End, Gutsy had learned, storms had gotten worse and worse, the result of so many factories and automobiles pumping exhaust into the atmosphere. Even when the infrastructure was intact, the storms often battered everywhere they touched, causing flooding, destroying homes, taking lives.

  “After the End,” said Mr. Ford, “the weather didn’t just reverse itself and calm down. The water temperature and salinity changed, and the storms continued. Storm surges brought seawater inland to kill farmable land, and it dragged polluted water from cisterns and sewers, mixing it into a toxic soup.”

  Gutsy knew the rest of the story. All that contamination, radiation, and pollution mingled together and drove Mother Nature to madness. That was how Mama had once described it, and the image stuck in Gutsy’s mind. Mother Nature gone mad.

  Mutations were everywhere. There was a new species of malformed cactus in the desert from which sprouted perfect yellow roses. There was grass that turned bright orange on rainy days. Strawberry plants that had mutated into towering trees, and a kind of milkweed whose sap was the color of fresh blood. Gutsy had once come upon a creeper vine that could detach itself and move like an octopus across the ground. And the scavengers who went deeper into the Broken Lands than she did said there were brand-new species of plants and flowers no one had put a name to yet.

  Some of the birds had gone strange too, especially the crows, each generation of which had nearly doubled in size so that some were as big as eagles. When they cried, it sounded like someone screaming in pain. Flocks of those crows attacked cattle and could bring down a good-size calf and strip it to bones in half an hour. And yet there was a speckled mutant species of mountain lion that ate only flowers and made sounds like a mourning dove.

  Strange. Dreamlike in its way; often nightmarish, sometimes quite beautiful. Always unsettling.

  The location for New Alamo was picked because Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford—who had emerged as leaders in the early days following the End—liked the isolated location, the fact that it already had a sturdy fence around it and plenty of housing. It was also far away from the worst disaster areas and had the least amount of visible pollution.

  “Least amount,” though, wasn’t the same as “none.”

  The diseases in town proved that. The rates of cancer among refugees proved it. The fact that some crops grew into strangeness, yielding plants that caused new kinds of sickness.

  And the living dead, in all their terrifying variety.

  The breeze blew toward her, carrying the scent of bad meat from the shamblers. Had it been blowing the other way, los muertos would have smelled her.

  Sombra followed Gutsy and crouched beside her, teeth bared in a silent growl.

  “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “They can’t see us.”

  Surprisingly, the coydog stopped snarling and looked up at her, searching her face. She smiled and touched his shoulder. Not a pat, exactly. A communication of some kind. Her instincts told her that small actions were how to deal with this battered, frightened, confused animal.

  Time moved even slower than the shamblers. The ravager—if that’s what he was—stood for a while watching the dead file past, and every now and then one would start heading in the wrong direction and the man would shove it back into line with the others. The shamblers did not seem to mind the roughness and occasional kicks the man used. They did not care about anything, Gutsy knew, except feeding.

  Of all the species of living dead, the shamblers were by far the most common. Ninety-nine out of every hundred were that kind. In towns like San Antonio to the northeast, it was said to be a different mix, more of the wilder mutations and smarter dead. However, this close to Laredo, right on the border, nearly all los muertos were shamblers.

  They scared her enough, though.

  An insect buzzed past her, circled and flew back, landing on the stem of a six-headed mutant daisy. It was a bee. Kind of. Instead of two bulbous eyes, its head was covered with dozens of smaller eyes. Most of those eyes were milky and sightless, and it groped its way toward the flowers with stunted forelegs. If it was aware of Gutsy and Sombra, it gave no notice. It moved with trembling slowness as if uncertain where to go despite the flowers above it.

  Gutsy held out a finger and the bee crawled onto it as if it were part of the stem. She lifted her hand very slowly and held it close to the biggest of the flowers. The bee’s wings fluttered and it immediately began feeding on nectar and pollen. It made Gutsy smile because despite mutation and everything, the bee was still essentially a bee, and it went about its work as bees had for millions of years. They adapted and survived. Gutsy appreciated that.

  One of the living dead had the distinctive swollen belly of a late-term pregnancy. That was a kind of horror Gutsy had heard about but never seen before. Dead mother, dead baby, wandering hungry forever.

  The world was indeed insane. The shambling dead people continued to cross the road. It took nearly an hour before she was sure they were all gone, and she was very glad she’d waited. There had been twenty-seven of them, including five children.

  Gutsy watched them go, and her heart did not slow to a normal pace until they had dwindled to nothing in the distance. Sombra kept vigil too, a
nd when neither of them could see anything moving, the coydog simply lay down again. She sat for a few seconds longer, considering her new friend. He had saved her from a difficult situation.

  The fact that she had found him at her mother’s grave seemed somehow significant. She reached down to pet the dog, but before she did, Gutsy crossed herself and said, “Gracias, Mama.”

  Then she drove home.

  10

  A TALL, SKINNY BOY WITH dark brown skin, short black hair, and mint-green eyes stood in the middle of the street, watching her approach. He wore scruffy jeans, ancient sneakers, and a long-sleeved cotton shirt that had been hand-stitched by one of the ladies at the orphanage. There were flowers embroidered across the front and down the sleeves, and elaborate spiderwebs had been stitched between the blossoms. A single black spider dangled from a slender thread that slipped out from beneath the fold of the left front collar. His shirt was buttoned at the cuffs and all the way to the throat.

  “Hey, Gutsy,” he called.

  “Hey, Spider,” she called back.

  There was a spider of one kind or another embroidered or hand-drawn on every shirt he owned. He would have gotten one tattooed on his cheek, but none of the tattoo artists in town would do it. Not until he was at least sixteen, and that was eleven months away.

  Gordo angled in toward the water trough outside the big Quonset hut that had been converted to a stable and plunged his head in, gulping and splashing noisily. The sound made Sombra stand up, and Spider arched an eyebrow as he studied the scarred, battered coydog.

  “Picking up roadkill now?” he drawled.

  “Something like that,” said Gutsy, climbing down. She stretched so hard her joints popped. Her friend held out a canteen and she drank. As she handed it back, she caught Spider searching her eyes with his.

  “Here’s the world’s stupidest question,” he said quietly, “but how are you?”

  Gutsy wiped her mouth and looked over her shoulder at the dusty road behind her. “It’s been a day, y’know?”