“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.”
“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.