Broken Lands Read online

  “Hey,” said Benny, “come on. We have enough problems without picking fights with each other.”

  Nix glared hot molten death at him. “Sure. Fine. Whatever.” She muttered something under her breath that sounded like Boys are idiots, but Benny wasn’t sure.

  Lilah said, “We have to do something. What good is it to just sit here?”

  “Sitting here is better than going out to get killed,” said Riot.

  They were, collectively, a powerful group. Skilled to varying degrees, experienced in combat, scarred inside and out by what they’d been through. They were still teenagers, though. Benny just wished that the adults in town had more of a clue what to do, but no one at the meeting had a good plan. Not even Solomon.

  They all lapsed into silence again.

  Again, Chong was the first to speak. “Tell me something, Morgie . . . if anyone decides to go, would you go too?”

  Morgie bristled. “Why, because I didn’t go last time?”

  “No,” said Chong. “Because you’re tough and we’re going to need all the muscle we can get out there.”

  Everyone looked at him. “ ‘We’?” asked Nix.

  “Sure,” said Chong, “or haven’t you guys worked it out yet? The medicine I need to keep from going full zom is made in Reclamation, but the chemicals and stuff they need to make it come from Asheville. Dr. McReady, the scientist who figured it out, is in Asheville. I have enough of the drug to last maybe ten months. After that, which one of you is going to quiet me with a sliver in the back of my skull?”

  No one spoke. The silence was crushing.

  “So . . . yeah,” said Chong, “I’m going to Asheville. I’d rather die trying than to wait here and just . . . die.”

  Lilah made a sound that might have been an agreement, or might simply have been a growl. Nix nodded, and for some reason she smiled. She was like that, Benny knew. Brave and a little crazy.

  Riot gave an elaborate shrug and said, “Well, I guess I’m in for whatever. Heck, I never expected to live all that long anyway. Might as well go out having some fun.”

  Benny saw Morgie mouth the word “fun.” It looked like the word hurt his mouth.

  “You know I’m in,” said Benny. “I kind of have to be. I mean, you’re smart and all, Chong, but let’s face it, you get lost trying to find the bathroom in your own house.”

  “This,” said Chong, “is true.”

  One by one they all turned to Morgie. He opened his mouth two or three times to say something, stopped, shut it again. He leaned over and banged the side of his head against the tree.

  Sighed.

  Said, “When do we leave?”

  Interlude One

  KICKAPOO CAVERN STATE PARK

  ONE WEEK AGO

  THE HUNTER MOVED THROUGH THE forest.

  His forest. He glided along, silent as a shadow, disturbing nothing, leaving no trace behind. Even animals rarely knew he was around. Sometimes he passed them by, leaving them to their ignorance. Sometimes they died without ever knowing that this was their last day.

  Those killings were always quick. Part of it was a reflex of mercy, a desire to inflict no pain even as he ended a life. Part of it was efficiency—frightened animals screamed. Screams drew other kinds of creatures. The hunter did not want to become food for them.

  And so he was quiet.

  Silent as death.

  He wore fatigues in a forest camouflage print, and when he stopped and became still, he vanished against the walls of the lush growth. He was very good at hiding. He was very good at not being seen. Years ago he had been the angel of death whose sniper bullets ended lives before the victims ever knew they were in his crosshairs. His rifle was seldom used now. It was noisy, and he rarely needed to kill something two or three thousand yards away. Now he had his knives and, for the direst of emergencies, a pistol with a Trinity sound suppressor, which, though not silent, was quiet.

  He’d planned on spending the day in his small cabin; meditating, reading, and perhaps finishing his latest carving. A delicate little hummingbird he was fashioning out of a piece of oak. He had carved hundreds of birds, animals, and fish. The exacting precision and attention to detail kept his mind from falling into depression and numbness. Hunting was another way of staying sharp. He had many ways to keep from cracking apart in this broken world.

  Those plans, however, had ended when he heard the sounds. Distant, but distinct. At first he thought it was a roar or growl of some beast, one of the exotics. A rhinoceros or elephant or musk ox. Or maybe one of the mutations. There were cattle out here that had developed a taste for meat, and a few hunting pairs of perentie—big and venomous Australian monitor lizards that had come from who knew where—and that had grown much larger even than their cousins, the Komodo dragons. They feared nothing, and in their arrogance of power tended to go crashing through the brush, stronger than anything faster, and faster than anything stronger.

  Was this them? he wondered. But he didn’t think so. There were so many mutations these days, more every season. The logic and predictability of nature was so badly warped that it was sometimes like living in a nightmare, or a hallucination. Sometimes the things he saw made him doubt his own sanity. He was a practical, skilled, efficient man, but he had been alone for a long time. Too long. He’d begun to speak to himself on the really bad, really long nights. That scared him. His survival and every one of his skills were wired into his mind. The thousand things he did every day to live out here were components of the mental machine he had built since childhood, with the exacting studies of martial arts, the precision of competitive shooting, the structure of the Scouts and then the military.

  He would find a rational explanation for the noise, and then he would deal with whatever made it. Destroy it, evade it, or anything necessary in order to impose logic on its existence.

  The sound was too big, though; too steady and too unnatural. However, it couldn’t be what it really sounded like because—well . . . that was impossible. There could not be that kind of noise. Not a machine noise. Things that made those sounds had died when the EMPs brought the great silence to the world.

  And yet that was what it had sounded like. A machine of some kind. A helicopter, but a wounded one, with an engine that screamed as it died. But by the time the hunter got to clear ground with good elevation, the sky was empty and silent. Only a smudge of smoke in the distance, but that could as easily have been from a brush fire. There had been lightning recently during a brief squall.

  Still . . .

  He went looking because he had to know.

  He followed a game trail, pausing now and then to listen to the woods, absorbing what the forest wanted to tell him. There were prints mashed onto the trampled grass and exposed dirt. Deer, mostly, though there were several exotic hooves. Animals from some zoo, probably. Then he saw a set of prints that made him pause. Shoe prints. Specifically boot prints. Not the tread of work boots or hiking boots. No . . . these had the unmistakable pattern of military boots. Size eleven or a little larger. Wide.

  Very much like the ones he wore.

  The hunter touched the prints. The dirt was soft. It had rained this morning, but the mud had dried. These impressions were pressed into semidry mud. Which meant they were very recent. An hour old? Less?

  The gait was unusual, though. Not a steady pace. Awkward, and there was a bit of a drag to the left foot. Someone with a bad leg? The dead ones, especially the slow shamblers, often walked with limps, or walked clumsily enough to leave uneven prints. Some of the smarter ones did too, if they had been injured before they died. Maybe a gunshot wound, or bites.

  And there were the packs of ravagers. Infected, dangerous, strange, and always violent. More and more of them all the time. The fact that the tread was military didn’t matter, because those killers had taken down their share of soldiers, and they always stripped the dead for whatever they needed. Clothes, weapons. Meat.

  The hunter moved along the path, careful not to obscure
the prints. Then he saw something glisten on a leaf at about thigh height. Red. He bent and touched it. Fresh blood. Less than an hour old for sure. The color had not darkened too much.

  Whoever had passed through here was injured, limping. Which meant he was alive. Or, at most, newly dead and reanimated. The hunter squatted there for almost a minute, thinking, considering. Either way whoever it was had no business being in the hunter’s forest.

  Moving silent as a ghost, the hunter melted into the woods, following the footprints and the trail of blood.

  PART THREE

  NEW ALAMO, TEXAS

  LATE AUGUST

  GHOST RIDERS

  You will never do anything

  in this world without courage.

  It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.

  —ARISTOTLE

  15

  SPIDER WALKED GUTSY HOME, AND sombra limped along behind.

  The Gomez place was a shotgun house. Narrow but long, with six rooms lined up one after the other, from living room to kitchen, with a dining room, bedrooms, and a bathroom in between, and a narrow hallway running front to back. It was sturdily built from cinder blocks, with a pitched tin roof, and it was one of nearly two hundred identical homes that had been built before the End. A big, faded sign stood at the edge of town, its words only just legible.

  IMMIGRATION DETENTION CENTER

  A lot of rude and obscene things had been painted on the sign, but that had been done long ago too, and all of it had been nearly burned away by fifteen years of harsh sun, dry wind, and blowing sand. Most of the kids in town didn’t know much about the origin of the town, why it was built, who’d built it, who’d lived there, or why. That was part of the world that had died before they were born. Gutsy knew, though, because her mother had once told her the story about being arrested in San Antonio and sent to the camp. That was where she lived for nearly two years while the authorities on both sides of the Rio Grande tried to decide who wanted her. Neither, apparently, did. Or maybe it was fair to say that neither tried very hard to make her welcome, and by the time the paperwork had come through for Mama to be sent across the river, the dead rose and consumed the bureaucrats, the police, the soldiers, the border guards, and the governments who used people in the same way the old men in town now used painted stones as poker chips.

  The thing that made Mama laugh while she told that story was the fact that all those well-built houses were intended to be mini prisons, and when the dead swarmed through the camp, the prisoners stayed safe behind their walls while the camp staff perished. Mama said that there was justice in that, but it was so far outside of Gutsy’s experience that she didn’t get the joke. She also didn’t agree. As far as she was concerned, there weren’t many people left, so any death was a bad thing.

  The world was hell and the world was crazy. That was what Gutsy believed. But there were good people, even in hell. Spider and Alethea, the two old guys everyone called the Chess Players, a few others. Good people.

  There were also innocents. Babies, little kids. The livestock.

  She glanced down at Sombra. He was scarred and scared, fierce and feral, but he was innocent too. Just because bad things had been done to him did not mean that he was bad.

  As they approached her front door, Sombra slowed and finally stopped, looking nervous and uncertain.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Spider.

  “Not sure,” said Gutsy. “Maybe he doesn’t like being inside.”

  She opened the door and tried to coax the coydog in, but he came no closer than the rosebushes in the front yard.

  Spider sat down on one of the plastic chairs positioned in the shade of a blue tarp Gutsy had long ago rigged as a canopy. “Now what?”

  “I’m thinking,” said Gutsy. “He’s scared and we don’t want to make him feel worse, right? No one’s ever scared of something without a reason, not even dogs, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So, trying to force him inside isn’t going to help. Got to come up with plan B, or maybe even have a plan C and plan D in case.”

  “Sure,” said Spider, “so what’s the plan? Maybe he’ll let you pet him and, I don’t know, cuddle him? You think he’d let you do that?”

  Gutsy shook her head. “I think that would be exactly the wrong thing to do.”

  “Why? He’s scared. I like people around me when I’m scared. And when there’s a storm, Alethea likes it when we wrap a blanket around both of us.”

  “Alethea’s a person and so are you, Spider,” said Gutsy. “You guys understand that you’re trying to be there for each other. She probably tells you she wants to hide under a blanket with you, right?”

  “Well, sure, but who doesn’t need some affection?”

  Gutsy knew there was a lot of Spider’s own life in that question. He had shadows in his past that she knew something—but not everything—about.

  She said, “Sombra’s a dog. Dogs are pack animals, right? Look at how the strays in town all bunch together. They follow a pack leader.”

  “Right . . . so?”

  Gutsy went and sat down near the coydog, but she didn’t touch him, or try to pet him, or even look at him. Sombra twitched but didn’t move away. “The way I see it,” said Gutsy, “is that dogs react to two things—getting hurt and getting treats. Mr. Rayner’s dog, Pickles, will do anything for a piece of jerky. All those tricks she does? That’s all for treats, right?”

  “I guess,” said Spider slowly, not sure where Gutsy was going with this.

  “Pickles doesn’t know she’s supposed to be an entertainer. It just seems to me that Pickles knows that if she does this thing or that thing, she gets a reward. So she’s always ready to do a trick because that means food.”

  “So?”

  “Sombra’s scared right now. That’s what he’s feeling or thinking. He’s hurt. If I get all goofy with him and pet him and tell him he’s a good dog and all the stuff Mr. Rayner does, won’t I just be training Sombra to think that being scared means getting a reward?”

  Spider shook his head. “You might be overthinking this.”

  “Maybe,” said Gutsy, “or maybe not. I read a little about dogs because Mama was going to get a puppy for me. I remember reading that you can’t explain to a dog why it shouldn’t be scared. You can’t really tell it everything’s okay or that it’s safe. It doesn’t understand. No, what you need to do is be calm. You need to be the leader of the pack, and the leader should always be, like . . . well . . . calm. Strong, mentally together. Like that.”

  She sat cross-legged on the ground and kept her tone normal. She didn’t look at the dog at all, but she was aware that Sombra was staring at her. Studying her.

  “All he’s getting from me,” said Gutsy, looking up at Spider, “is me being me. No problems, no pressure, no nothing except me in my own space. He can probably smell my scent all over this yard and knows this is my place. If he stays here, it’s because he decides to be part of my pack.”

  Spider smiled and shook his head again. “You’re deeply weird, Guts. Always were, always will be.”

  Sombra gave a huge yawn and lay down with his head between his paws. After a few minutes, he closed his eyes.

  “I’m okay with being weird,” said Gutsy.

  Overhead the sun was rolling toward the edge of day, and the yard was painted with long purple shadows. The last of the day’s bees moved without haste from one rose to another. From the house next door, they could hear the sound of bare hands slapping tortillas into shape. Farther down the street a little girl shrieked as she dodged two other kids in a game of tag. Cooking smoke from the first of the evening fires drifted toward them on a sluggish breeze, carrying the scent of peppers and onions—the way they smelled when they were tumbled fresh onto a hot pan.

  Gutsy didn’t know she was crying until the tears dropped from her cheeks onto her shirt. Spider came over, sat down, and almost put his arm around her.

  Gutsy sniffed and forced a smile. “
I’m not a dog, you dummy. I understand why.”

  He put his arm around her shoulder and they sat there in the yard, both of them aware that the sounds and smells of mothers making dinner would never come from inside the Gomez house ever again.

  After a long, long time Sombra put his battered head on Gutsy’s thigh.

  16

  GUTSY ASKED SPIDER TO COME over for dinner.

  “Sure,” he agreed, “but I need a bath first. I smell like overheated horse.” He sniffed his clothes. “And horse poop.”

  “Go get clean. Tell Alethea, if she wants to come.”

  “She will. Mrs. Cuddly is making her ‘wilderness stew’ again. Yuck.”

  Mrs. Cuddly and her husband ran the Home for Foundlings, where Spider and Alethea lived. Mrs. Cuddly was, by all accounts, the worst cook in the history of dining, but her wilderness stew took that to an incredible low. No one was ever quite certain which meat served as the base for the stew. It didn’t taste like beef, mutton, pork, goat, or even horse. Alethea said it was probably made from kids who tried to run away from the Cuddlys’ orphanage. She was only half joking.

  Spider left and Gutsy stood for a long time watching him walk away. All their lives Spider and Alethea had been the orphans and she’d been the one with a family, even though it was a two-person family. Her father had died when Gutsy was little, but Spider and Alethea never knew either of their parents. Now, of course, they were all orphans. Despite all the pain she felt, there was some strange comfort in it too, as if this meant Alethea and Spider were now her family.

  Maybe they always had been. She’d have to think about that.

  A quick check of the cabinets told her that she didn’t have enough food for three people, so she sorted through her pockets to make sure she had enough food credits and headed for the door.

  “Come on,” she said to the coydog as she walked out into the twilight. Gutsy did not look to see if Sombra followed. Either he would, or he wouldn’t.