Instead Gutsy thought about who would have done something as intensely horrible and mean-spirited as digging up her mother. A few names occurred to her, but it seemed too weird, too extreme even for some of the jerks in town. So . . . what was the point?
That speculation gave a few violent shoves in the direction of the memories of the last two nights. Gutsy was practical and strong, but she did not want to relive those memories. Not now and maybe not ever. No way.
No way in the world.
And yet that was what she thought about all the way home.
8
THE WAGON RUMBLED THROUGH SEVERAL abandoned settlements—Desert Rose, Cactus Flats, and Shelter, which was short for Field Shelter Station Eighteen. Nothing moved there but wind and dust and the slow shadows that chased the sun.
There were forty other makeshift camps Gutsy knew about scattered around out here, and the ruins of abandoned towns and cities, too. Many of these camps had been thrown together hastily during the crisis, overpopulated and undersupplied, and eventually either overrun by the dead or consumed by disease from within. There were a few other camps along the Rio Grande that were still holding on, but none as big as New Alamo.
Lately more and more of the settlements were being overrun by bigger and bigger swarms of the dead. There were also the ravagers—gangs of infected, savage men and women who were slowly becoming living dead but who retained enough of their intelligence to use weapons and organize attacks. Some people in town believed those ravagers could control the mindless dead.
The Broken Lands were broken indeed.
Some people even claimed there was a fully operational military base hidden underground, but Gutsy wasn’t sure if she believed that. Why would they hide? Maybe there were reasons before the End, back when things like “politics,” “war,” and “national security” mattered, but why now? Why hide when people were in short supply and survival depended on working together, sharing the dwindling resources? It made no sense. Besides, Gutsy spent a lot of time out in the Broken Lands, and she’d never found a single trace of a military base. Nothing except dozens of abandoned Abrams tanks, rusting Bradley fighting vehicles, burned-out army Humvees, and a lot of skeletons. No, she concluded, the army and all the other branches of the military had died along with 99 percent of the people living in America.
That was sad for a lot of reasons. Partly because it was proof that mankind, for all its technology, had managed to lose a war against an enemy that had no weapons, no organization, no strategies. All the dead had were numbers and the fact that they terrified everyone. They weren’t aliens from another planet or even enemies from a foreign land. Los muertos were us. That was the truth everyone had to face. The monsters those soldiers had to fight were neighbors, friends, civilians, fellow soldiers. They were anyone who died, no matter how they died. Gutsy had heard so many stories about soldiers who simply stopped being able to pull their triggers because they recognized the faces of the creatures coming to kill them.
Before this week, Gutsy could sympathize. Now, after Mama, she could empathize. She could feel what those soldiers had felt. She could understand how the war was lost.
She was still four miles from New Alamo when Sombra suddenly sat up and stared into the distance to the left of the road. He gave a low growl, and the hair stood up like a brush all along his spine.
“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.