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.”