Now he stood above them, silhouetted against the sun.
“Speak, apparition,” said Chong in a theatrical tone.
“Dude,” said Benny, “what’s with the sash? I thought you were off today. Grab some ground and sit yourself down.”
“Guys,” said Morgie quietly, “something’s happened. You need to come with me to the mayor’s office.”
“Hey, Benny,” said Chong, “maybe they’re going to name the town after you.” He spread his hands as if describing a big banner. “Fartsville.”
They both cracked up, but their laughter died away when Morgie stepped closer and sunlight showed his expression. His face was dead white; his eyes were wild with fear. Benny and Chong sat up.
“What’s wrong?” said Benny so sharply that Nix and Lilah paused in their game to look in their direction.
Morgie looked sick. “Guys,” he said again, “I just found out . . . we’ve lost contact with Asheville.”
“So?” said Chong. “The satellite phone’s been messing up for two weeks.”
“You don’t understand,” said Morgie. “Solomon got a distress call. All we could hear was shouting, some screams and gunfire, and then it went dead. They checked the sat phone and it’s working, but Asheville’s not answering.” His eyes were glassy and wet. “They think it might be gone.”
13
“HOW CAN IT BE GONE?” demanded Nix riley.
Solomon Jones winced because she said it really loud, and she had the kind of voice that could punch its way through any conversational chatter. It silenced the entire room. Solomon, who was both the head of the Freedom Riders for the Nine Towns and the interim governor of California, sat behind his desk in the communications center at the Reclamation Capitol Building. It was really a two-story wood building sandwiched between the general store and a feed-and-grain warehouse.
The town mayor, Randy Kirsch, stood beside the desk, hands clasped behind his back, head bowed, looking grim and worried. They were both middle-aged men, both of medium height, both bald, but that was where the similarities ended. Solomon was a muscular black man with very dark skin, a precisely trimmed gray goatee, and eyes that were both fierce and shrewd. The mayor was softer, with kinder eyes and less of an air of a hunting cat and more that of a golden retriever.
Aside from the two officials and Benny and his friends, there were at least fifty people crammed into the office. More choked the hallway, and Benny figured that by now everyone in town had heard the news. They’d all come swarming in. The brief silence following Nix’s outburst crumbled away as everyone began throwing fresh questions and demands for information everywhere.
Solomon held up his hands in a calm down gesture, and Benny saw Nix tense to launch another barrage of her own, but then she gave a harsh exhale and a curt nod. The others gradually settled down too. When there was quiet, Solomon nodded to the mayor.
“Some of you are new to Reclamation,” said the mayor, “so this is where we are and what we know.” He stepped over to a wall map of the United States. Hundreds of colored pushpins littered the map. He touched a green one stuck in the mountains of Mariposa County in central California. “Green pins indicate settled towns that we know about. As you can see, we have nine here in California, five in Nevada, seven in Arizona, and then nothing until we go all the way southeast to Georgia. There may be more—and hopefully many more—but we are still looking. Red pins indicate towns destroyed by Saint John’s armies.”
There were 107 red pins in the board, Benny knew. Chong had counted them one day and spent the rest of that week in a blue funk. And there were only twenty-eight green pins. Asheville was by far the biggest human settlement, with nearly a hundred thousand people, which was more than three times the combined population of the other towns. Asheville was the capital of the American Nation, the newly formed government that was trying to reclaim and rebuild America.
Most of the rest of the map was empty of pins because no one knew what was going on there. Same with Canada and Mexico and, well, the whole rest of the world. It depressed Benny to think about it, but also kindled a little fire of hope, too. He imagined what Tom would have said about it. Probably something Zen like, Just because you don’t know what’s out there, Benny, doesn’t mean there’s nothing good.
Thinking about that made Benny’s heart hurt. He missed his brother every single day.
“These blue pins,” continued Mayor Kirsch, bringing him back to the moment, “indicate places where it was clear people had settled but moved on, either to escape Saint John’s reaper army, or to avoid swarms of zoms. Most likely the latter, at least in recent months.”
Over the last couple of years, some of the zombies had begun hunting in packs, and in places those packs had combined into massive swarms. Genetic mutations in the parasites that created the zombie plague in the first place were believed to be the cause of that, but the American Nation scientists hadn’t yet mapped it all out. Scouts and scavengers were reporting new and bigger swarms, and they were getting closer to some of the Nine Towns. And there were other things—wild reports from travelers about different kinds of mutations coming from the east. Animals that some said had caught the zombie plague. That was scary because so far only wild hogs had been infected. Now there were stories—and no one in town had so far been able to prove if they were true—about monkeys and other animals who were said to be infected. Some stories hinted that there were even worse things out there, especially the farther east you went, but none of them had so far been proven. No one from Asheville, which was very far east, seemed to think those were anything more than tall tales. Benny wasn’t so sure. The world was broken and it kept getting stranger all the time.
“Now these pins,” said the mayor, touching some of the many black pins, “are areas where we’ve lost contact but haven’t yet verified whether it’s because the lines of communication failed—bad radios, swarms blocking the new Pony Express, or other issues—or if those towns have been overrun.”
The crowd stood in uneasy silence, watching as Solomon got up and crossed to the map, took a black pin from a tray on a side table, removed the green pin from Asheville, and replaced it with the black one.
“As of six thirty this morning,” he said slowly, “we have lost all communication with Asheville. The satellite phone is working fine, so it’s not that. We’ve placed calls to the other eight towns and confirmed that they’ve lost contact with Asheville too. We called the military station near New Haven and they haven’t heard anything either. I wish I could say this is only a technical problem, but we have to face facts.”
There was a collective gasp from the crowd. Benny saw Nix take Lilah’s hand and squeeze it. Both girls looked as scared as he felt. Chong looked positively stricken. Morgie stood by the window, arms folded, mouth turned down in a hard line. The girl standing beside him was wiry, tough, and pretty, with a cynical half smile on her thin lips and a tattoo of roses and barbed wire covering her scalp, except where a stiff crimson Mohawk rose in dagger-sharp spikes. Her name was Riot, and she’d been raised within Saint John’s army, but had rebelled and fallen in with Benny’s group to fight back. She and Morgie were always trying to be a couple, but they kept breaking up. At the moment they were kind of together, but the fact that they stood a few feet apart suggested they were drifting again.
Solomon held a hand up for silence as the gasps turned to chatter. He said, “We don’t know anything right now other than our belief that there was a crisis.”
“You’ve all heard about the last call,” said the mayor, “about the screams and gunfire. That’s troubling, but it’s not a good idea for us to speculate on the nature of the emergency or the extent of it. We are waiting for more information.”
“What about Captain Ledger?” asked Benny. “Is he back yet?”
Captain Joe Ledger was an old soldier who had led a special ops team before First Night—when the dead rose—and he had been instrumental in bringing the military resources of the new Ameri
can Nation to the Nine Towns. He’d also fought alongside Benny and his friends against Saint John, nearly dying in the process. Since then he and his group of rangers had begun searching for more towns. He was also overseeing the spreading of a mutagen that amped up the parasites semi-dormant in all zoms. That was risky and had to be managed carefully, because although the mutagen eventually caused tissue breakdown that destroyed the living dead, there was a brief period where it made the creatures move much faster and even restored higher brain functions to some of them. The captain was almost never in Reclamation, though; he was busy in the field, fighting a new kind of battle in this terrible war.
Benny caught Solomon and Mayor Kirsch exchanging a brief, worried look. Then Solomon cleared his throat.
The mayor said, “We . . . um . . . Captain Ledger was already on his way to Asheville.”
“Wait,” said Nix, “what does that mean?”
“It means,” said Solomon Jones, “that he’d received a distress call from the military commander in Asheville and flew out in a helicopter. He did not share the details with us. All we know is that he and four of his rangers took a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that was fitted out. He planned to refuel twice at small American Nation remote outposts in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, and Searcy, Arkansas, before flying on to Asheville.”
“And . . . ?” urged Benny.
“We were speaking with Captain Ledger on the sat phone when the line went dead. The call ended before he could tell us his location. We don’t know if he reached Asheville or not. He may only have gotten as far as New Mexico, Texas, or Oklahoma. But whatever’s happening, he may already be caught up in it. And I’m afraid there has been no further communication with him, or with anyone in North Carolina, since this morning.”
14
BENNY AND HIS FRIENDS WANDERED back to his house. They sat on the chairs, the rail, and the top steps. Benny was the only one who stood, leaning a shoulder against the post of the railing, arms folded, feeling about as empty as a Halloween pumpkin on November 1. He felt deflated, sick, and scared. The others looked at their hands, up at the trees, out at the birds pecking for insects on the lawn. Anywhere but at one another.
And yet the sky above insisted on being a bright blue, and cheerful puffy clouds sailed overhead as if the world was fine.
Except the world wasn’t fine at all.
Maybe it never had been, thought Benny. Maybe the peace and contentment they’d all felt these last months was only a dream. Or worse, a setup to make them lower their guard. That was how it felt to him. During the fight with Saint John, Benny and his friends had become tough, hardened. They had been warriors. Young as they were, they had become the new samurai Tom had wanted them to be.
Now Benny felt like he was five years old. He felt small. Weak.
And so scared.
It was Chong who finally spoke. “What do we do?”
Nix and Morgie shook their heads. No one else said anything.
“No, seriously,” said Chong, “what are we going to do about this?”
“What can we do?” asked Morgie, not looking at him. “Asheville is, like, forever away from here.”
“So?” asked Chong. “We walked all the way to Nevada. That was over a thousand miles.”
“Yeah, you guys did that,” agreed Morgie, glancing at him. “And how many times did you guys almost get killed? All kinds of weird zoms—fast ones, smarter ones, packs of them. Not to mention a mother rhino that got out of a zoo somewhere who wanted to stomp you flat, a bear that tried to eat you, and, oh yeah, zombie wild boars. That’s not even counting an army of psychopaths who wanted to wipe out all human life.”
Benny sighed but said nothing.
“We’re not dead,” said Nix.
Morgie looked at her. “Nix, you’ve got two huge scars on your face.”
“So what? They’re just scars. I didn’t die.”
“He did,” cried Morgie, pointing at Chong. “He’s infected with the zombie virus.”
Lilah stiffened and pointed a finger at him. “Be careful,” she warned. The Lost Girl’s throat had been torn raw from screaming when she was little, and the scar tissue on her larynx had changed her voice permanently to a ghostly whisper. When she spoke, though, people tended to stop and listen.
“I’m not cutting up on him,” said Morgie quickly, “but face facts—what happens if we go looking for Captain Ledger and it takes so long Chong runs out of pills?”
“I’ll take plenty of them with me,” said Chong.
“What happens if he loses them? Or someone takes them away?”
“If someone tries to do that,” said Lilah, “I’ll kill them and take the pills back.”
Benny had to turn away to hide a smile. Lilah wasn’t joking. She barely knew how to joke. She also had about the same protective instincts as a mother cougar. If anyone so much as looked at Chong funny, she’d do very, very bad things to them. Benny knew because he’d seen it.
Morgie tried it from another direction. “Chong could fall into a river. Whatever.” He shook his head and pointed in the direction of the fence. “Hey, man, I love you and all, but you shouldn’t be allowed out there.”
Chong turned away and stared at the birds in the yard. Lilah reached over and squeezed his knee, but Chong did not react.
It hurt Benny to know that Morgie was right. There was no way on earth to justify Chong leaving the town. He had been frail before being infected, and he was a scarecrow now. He also screamed at night sometimes. They all knew it, but nobody ever mentioned it. That was heartbreaking, but it was also something you wouldn’t want a traveling companion to do if you were camping out in the Rot and Ruin.
Even though the townsfolk had renamed the zom-infested wilderness “Tomsland,” it would always be the Rot and Ruin to Benny. To all his friends.
“We have to do something,” said Nix after a long silence.
“Asheville’s all the way across the Ruin,” insisted Morgie. “And you know what people are saying about new mutations and infected animals.”
“People say all kinds of things,” countered Nix. “Doesn’t make it true.”
“Doesn’t make it a lie, either,” said Riot. She spoke with a slow Cajun accent, which was deceptive because of how quick she was in wits and reflexes. Like Lilah, Riot had spent a lot of her life fighting and was nearly as vicious as the feral Lost Girl. “I seen some weird stuff and I’ve been farther east than any of y’all. Saw a bear once that I was pretty sure was turned. Had half a dozen arrows in him and one eye missing and he kept moving like that was nothing to him. Tell me that’s natural. Y’all want to run smack into a zombie bear?”
“There’s no zombie bears,” said Lilah.
“How would you know?”
“I lived in the forest. The only zom animals we saw were boars, and that was in Nevada.”
“Okay, sure,” said Riot, “but I saw the bear in New Mexico. You ever go that far?”
“No.”
“Then I guess you don’t know for sure, do you?”
Lilah merely snorted. She and Riot had a lot of similarities in that they had lived rough, but they had never bonded.
Morgie said, “None of that really matters, because we don’t even know how to get to Asheville. We don’t know what route Captain Ledger took and he was flying, so he didn’t need to worry about mountains, rivers, or overrun cities. We’d need to stick to roads, which means we won’t be going in as straight a line. You’re pretty good at math, Nix. Want to tell me what the odds are of us finding a safe route? And what if we get there and Captain Ledger’s dead? Or turned into a zom?”
“It’s not just about finding Joe Ledger,” said Benny, though it caused a twinge of pain to say it. “We can use maps to plan a route to Asheville. If he took a helicopter, then we can follow as straight a line as we can, but either way, we’ll make for North Carolina. We can take the quads and drive most of the way.”
Quads were small four-wheeled vehicles that wer
e, currently, the only working motorized transportation anywhere. While all the other machines had been rendered useless by EMPs, a clever mechanic in Nevada had figured out a way to repair the sporty two-stroke engines of recreational quads. Saint John’s reapers had used them to create a kind of mobile cavalry, and Benny and his friends had stolen several and driven all the way back to Mountainside to warn of the impending invasion. Now the Nine Towns had a small fleet of them and would soon have gas-powered cars and trucks.
“What if we can’t find gas for them?” asked Morgie.
“Then we walk the rest of the way. Or we find horses or bicycles. Look, Morgie, it’s not about how tough it’ll be. We know it won’t be easy. No, this is all about getting to Asheville.”
“Yeah? What if it’s been overrun?”
“Then it’s been overrun,” said Nix. “Benny’s right, we have to know. As far as we know, Asheville is where the world is starting back up again. People, government, industry, the military.” She shook her head. “We have to find out.”
“Do we?” asked Morgie. “The Nine Towns got along pretty good since First Night. We survived, we got to grow up. We were safe.”
“Really?” said Nix, her voice suddenly going cold. “What about Charlie Pink-eye and the Motor City Hammer? What about Gameland? What about Preacher Jack? You call that safe? What about what they did to my mother? What about what they tried to do to all of us? They nearly killed you, Morgie. They did kill my mom. They put Benny and me in the zombie pits. Maybe I’m stupid or something, but how is that ‘safe’?”
“That’s not what I meant,” mumbled Morgie.
“I know what you meant,” said Nix, not letting up. “Why can’t you admit that you’re wrong?”
Broken Lands Page 5