In a weird, weird way, all this might have been easier to accept if Mama had been bitten by one of los muertos vivientes.
The living dead.
At least then Gutsy could have understood and even accepted it. Kind of. When los muertos rose and attacked the living, half the population on earth had died from bites.
Not Mama. She was part of the other half. The ones who won their fights, protected their families, survived all the countless hardships, only to be dragged down by something too small to fight, too tiny to kill with a machete or club or any weapon you could hold. A disease. A bacterium.
What was even worse was that it was a disease that had nearly been wiped out in the century before the End, before the world stopped. It had begun creeping back, Gutsy knew, because so many people used antibiotics the wrong way before the End—taking them for viruses even though they didn’t work for those kinds of sickness. And taking them only until symptoms went away, which wasn’t the same thing as being cured. The antibiotics weakened but did not kill bacteria, and then the bacteria mutated and came back stronger.
Since the End, so many old diseases had come back in new and more terrible forms of smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, measles, so many others. And the one that was killing Mama . . . tuberculosis.
Despite the presence of Dr. Morton and two other nurses—besides Mama—there wasn’t much in the way of useful medical equipment, no way to get in front of the disease. The old FEMA laboratory near Laredo was surrounded by tens of thousands of the living dead and had been overrun. The pharmacies in that town and in San Antonio had long since been stripped of drugs. The few antibiotics Dr. Morton gave Mama slowed the sickness for a while but didn’t stop it. The disease kept going, attacking with the unthinking, uncaring, brutal relentlessness of los muertos vivientes but without any of the living dead’s vulnerabilities.
Night after night after night Gutsy sat with her mother, or sat in the next room, listening to endless fits of wet coughing. Listening to labored breathing. Praying to God. Praying to every saint she thought would listen. Sometimes burying her face in her pillow so her screams wouldn’t wake poor Mama.
So often her delirious mother would come out of a coughing fit, or a fevered doze, and say the same thing. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what, Mama?” asked Gutsy, but she never got an answer. Her mother was too far gone by then and was almost never lucid. Gutsy could feel her drifting out of reach, going away.
As often as she dared, Gutsy put on her gloves and mask and went in to sit, holding that frail hand. Feeling like a little child. Feeling old and used up.
Feeling hopeless.
That was almost the worst part. Gutsy was so good at so many things. She could fix anything, build anything, solve anything. She was a thinker and a fixer.
She could not fix her mother.
She could not think of anything to say. Or do.
All that was left to her was to be there.
To be a witness.
Then there was that moment when Mama’s fingers tightened on Gutsy’s and she said, “I’m so sorry, Gabriella.” And this time, when Gutsy asked why, her mother seemed to swim back enough to answer, but the answer made no real sense. “The rat catchers are coming, mi corazón. Be careful. If they come for you . . . promise me you’ll run away and hide.”
It was so clear, so complete a thought, and yet it made no sense to Gutsy.
“What do you mean, Mama?” she begged.
Mama blinked her eyes, and for a moment they were clear but filled with bad lights, with panic. “Ten cuidado. Mucho cuidado. Los cazadores de ratas vienen.”
Take care, take great care . . . the hunters of rats are coming.
The rat catchers.
Gutsy tried to get her mother to explain what, if anything, that meant.
Then the coughing started again. Worse than ever, as if her ruined throat was punishing her for speaking. The fit racked Mama and made her body thrash and arch. Gutsy held on, though.
She held on.
Held on.
Even when Mama settled back down after the fit was over and did not cough again. Or gasp.
Or anything.
It took Gutsy a long time to understand.
Then she pressed the hand to her chest and held it tight, hoping that she was somehow strong enough to hold Mama here, to keep her from going away.
But Mama had already gone.
Gutsy held on and on until the fingers of that fragile hand curled around hers again.
“Mama . . . ?” she whispered.
The answer was a moan.
Not of pain. But of hunger. A deep and bottomless hunger.
It was only then that Gutsy Gomez screamed.
4
MEMORIES WERE NOT GUTSY’S FRIENDS.
As much as she wanted to remember all the things about her life that made her happy, the wound was too fresh, the hurt too raw. There was no real closure.
Closure. That was a funny word. One she’d used so many times, just like everyone else, when death came to someone else’s house. Church sermons, graveside services, the hugs from friends and neighbors, they were supposed to help the grieving get their feet back on solid ground. They were intended to remind people who lost someone that it wasn’t them who died; it wasn’t their life that had ended. There was more living to come, and at the end of grief there would be healing, and even joy. Happiness, like all other emotions, lived on a long street, and it only required that a person walk far enough down it to find those old emotions. There would be laughter again, and peace. None of that stuff died. Sure, it had been wounded, but it endured.
Gutsy had always understood that from a distance. She was part of the process for her friends and people on her block, and people in town.
It was different when Mama died. The hurt seemed to live on both sides of the street, and that street was a dead end.
Over the last two days her best friends, Spider and Alethea, had tried to do for her what Gutsy had done for others: be there, be examples of normal life after the grieving time.
The problem was that the memories of Mama being sick were all too new.
Mama coming back as a monster last night tore the scab off any chance of healing. The shovel marks and the knowledge that someone had done this rubbed salt in the wounds.
Now all Gutsy had were the memories of who and what she had lost.
And the mysteries.
Take great care . . . the hunters of rats are coming.
The hunters of rats. The rat catchers.
Rat catchers?
Mama had said it with such force, such certainty, that it seemed to lift the words, crazy as they were, out of the well of sickness and delirium.
The Rat Catchers. She made it definite, like it was the name of a gang or group.
“Oh, Mama,” cried Gutsy, caving forward and hammering the mound of grave dirt with her fists. “I hate you for leaving me alone.”
5
IT WAS A DOG THAT snapped her out of it.
Gutsy heard a single, short bark, and instantly she was back in the present, eyes snapping open, hand snatching up her machete as she rose, pivoting and dropping into a defensive crouch with the blade angled in front of her.
The dog stood twenty feet away. Dusty gray, skinny, its body crisscrossed with scars old and new, with a studded leather collar around its neck and a length of frayed rope trailing a dozen feet behind it. The eyes were the color of wood smoke, and Gutsy could see that it was a coydog—a half-breed of coyote and German shepherd.