It wasn’t until she heard the faint click of his nails on the sidewalk that she knew. It lit a small fire in her heart. The general store was five blocks away and the air was cooling a little. There was still plenty of humidity, though, and that held the warmth.
As she crossed the street, a familiar voice called her name, and Gutsy saw two old men seated on opposite sides of an empty beer keg on the porch of the general store. A rusty Coleman lantern spilled light on them and on the chessboard that was perpetually positioned there. Gutsy walked over to where the Chess Players—Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford—sat. They each had cups of tea. The knights and royals were scattered around the board, with a few standing idly alongside, victims of another of their devious battles.
“Hey,” she said as she stepped up onto the pavement and leaned against a post. The Chess Players were both old, their faces deeply lined and jowly, but both of them had sharp eyes that sparkled with inquisitive lights. A long time ago, before the End put an end to so many things, both of them had been writers. Famous novelists. They still wrote, but their stories were handwritten into notebooks. Occasionally they would have some of them typeset and printed with a hand-crank copier, but mostly they shared their stories with Gutsy and her friends, or through readings in school.
Early on, Gutsy knew, the two writers had been heroes for a while because they’d organized several hundred survivors and led them on a daring scavenging raid to the docks in Corpus Christi. There they fought hordes of los muertos to secure a massive facility where big metal shipping containers were stored after being unloaded from ships. There were no living survivors in the city, so the stuff was there to be taken. Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford helped to rig barges and load them with all kinds of stuff. It cost the lives of seventeen of their team, but the supplies they brought back probably saved a hundred times as many lives. Tons of canned food, medical supplies, clothes, and so much more. The whole expedition took two months, but that was fifteen years ago. Disease had claimed so many people in New Alamo that the tale had become almost a folktale. Not everyone believed it ever happened, or that the heroic deeds of two now ancient men were anything but exaggerations.
It was that story, though, that inspired a much younger Gutsy Gomez to become a scavenger. The tales the Chess Players told about how problems were met and solved at every stage of the Raid—as it was called—flipped some kind of switch in her, and from then on, she loved solving problems. They knew it too, and often posed logic problems for her to solve. Never scolding or mocking when she failed, but instead guiding her through the best logical steps so she wouldn’t fail at that kind of problem again.
Mr. Urrea nodded to the coydog, who stood in the middle of the street, eyeing the two old men with uncertainty. “You picking up strays?”
“We picked up each other,” said Gutsy, and explained about their meeting.
“He’s a coydog,” said Mr. Ford. “Interesting. Been a long time since I saw a tame one.”
“Not sure he’s all that tame,” said Gutsy. “Maybe he just wanted to be around someone who wouldn’t hurt him.”
Both men nodded, accepting that.
“So, you’re going to keep him?” asked Mr. Urrea.
“If he wants to stay,” said Gutsy, “then he can stay. If he wants to go, I won’t stop him.”
The Chess Players liked that, too.
Then Mr. Urrea’s face lost its genial smile, and he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “We heard about last night. About your mama. How are you?”
“And what are you doing to take care of yourself?” added Mr. Ford.
Gutsy took a long time deciding how best to answer the questions. She liked and trusted both of the old men, but her natural tendency was to keep things to herself. Spider and Alethea were exceptions, but she didn’t share everything even with them. Just as she hadn’t shared everything with Mama. It wasn’t exactly a lack of trust, but rather a desire to reserve the right to think things all the way through, at her own pace.
“I’m figuring it out,” said Gutsy. “I don’t know what I feel about it yet, but I’m working on it.”
The answer seemed to please them.
“If you need to talk to a couple of old farts who’ve been around and seen a few things . . . ,” said Mr. Ford, leaving the rest hanging.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’d better get what I came for and get on home. My friends are coming over for dinner.”
She went in and bought some supplies, but as she headed for the street, Mr. Urrea said, “Gutsy . . . ? Wait one minute longer, please.”
Gutsy paused, looking at them both.
“Your mother was a good person,” said Mr. Urrea. “No matter what, you need to remember that.”
Gutsy said nothing.
Mr. Ford said, “She didn’t ask for anything that happened to her.”
“I know that,” said Gutsy. “She didn’t ask for anything that was done to her either.”
There was sadness in the eyes of the two old men. Sadness and something else she could not identify and was not, at the moment, prepared to discover. They nodded to her, and after a few seconds she returned the nod, then walked home in the dark with a silent shadow trotting beside her. She could feel the eyes of the Chess Players on her the whole way, but when she stopped outside her house and looked back, the store’s porch was empty.
17
“GUTSY?” CALLED A GIRL’S VOICE from outside the house. “There’s a big, ugly, weird dog out here and he won’t let me in.”
Gutsy and Spider were seated across from each other at the small dining room table, about to eat the chicken tacos they’d prepared together.
“She wasn’t home, so I left her a note,” said Spider as he started to rise, but Gutsy waved him back.
“I’ll go.”
She walked through to the living room and opened the door. A fifteen-year-old white girl stood at the far end of the small patch of front yard. She was a little taller than Gutsy, heavier in a way that made older guys rubberneck at her and sometimes walk into walls. If the occasional jerk said she was too heavy, the girl withered them with a stare that could have stripped paint off plate steel. She wore tights that she had hand-painted so that the left leg was a sunlit desert after a rain, with all the popping colors of new flowers, while the right was that same desert under cold starlight. Over that was a T-shirt on which was written in flowing script: Curvy Is My Superpower. She had eyes that sometimes looked hazel and sometimes looked brown, and she insisted the color was “olive-brown.” Her hair was a spill of auburn curls, and she wore a little hand-glittered tiara. Alethea had at least twenty tiaras and was never seen without one, even in school.
Sombra sat in the middle of the garden path, ears standing straight up, eyes fixed on the newcomer. He wasn’t growling, but he also clearly wasn’t moving.
“It’s okay, Sombra,” said Gutsy, stopping next to the coydog. “Alethea’s a friend.”
The dog looked at Alethea but didn’t move. So Gutsy walked the rest of the way and gave her friend a hug.
“He’s yours?” asked Alethea.
“We kind of adopted each other,” said Gutsy. “Come on in. We just made dinner.”
“I think he thinks I’m dinner.”
“He’s cool. C’mon.” They walked past Sombra, who got to his feet, turned, and watched. Because the coydog neither barked nor growled, Gutsy said, “Good boy.”
She wasn’t sure if Sombra understood the words. Maybe he’d never been told he was a good boy before. But he yawned and went over and lay down between the plastic chairs. Gutsy remembered reading that dogs yawn sometimes as a way of releasing tension. He’d done it twice now at times when it was clear he was easing down from high alert. She took it as a good sign.
Once inside, Alethea kissed the top of Spider’s head, as he bent over his plate assembling another taco, then sat down. Spider pushed the fixings her way.
“So,” said Alethea, looking straight at Gutsy, “tell me about the dog.
No, wait. Tell me what happened last night and today. In fact, tell me everything.”
Gutsy took a breath and did. Alethea had finished two tacos by the time the whole story was done.
“Whoa, wait . . . someone dug her up?” demanded Alethea, appalled.
“And brought her to town,” said Spider.
“That’s sick!”
“No,” said Spider, shaking his head. “It’s evil.”
“Maybe. But whatever it is,” said Alethea, “there’s got to be a reason somebody did it.” She cocked an eyebrow. “You make anyone mad at you lately?”
“No more than usual.”
There was a short silence after she said it, and the foster siblings exchanged a knowing glance. Gutsy understood why. She was not the most popular kid in school and definitely not the most well-liked in New Alamo. Gutsy was, as old Mr. Urrea once phrased it, “a difficult girl.” He’d meant it as a compliment. Urrea and Ford were also not very well liked. They were opinionated, occasionally grumpy, and—like Gutsy—difficult. What that meant was they seldom agreed with the way things were run, and rarely shared the same views as the majority of townsfolk. Gutsy considered herself a free thinker and tended to rely on her own judgment and preferred forming her own thoughts rather than being told what to do or think. That was not a pathway to popularity in a town of frightened people.
It made her like herself, though, and that was what mattered to Gutsy most. She seldom cared what others thought. If she did, she’d have been crippled by their criticisms that she didn’t dress like a girl, didn’t go to church often enough, didn’t act right.
Most of that was true. She didn’t “dress like a girl” because the old-fashioned Mexican village skirts and frilly white blouses a lot of the girls in town wore weren’t practical for scavenging for food and supplies in towns infested with los muertos. Jeans, a T-shirt, and a vest with lots of pockets made more sense to her. She did not go to the Saturday evening dances at the school, because she wasn’t a fan of being groped by boys. She wasn’t even sure she liked boys. Some of them, sure, but not most. She also liked some girls, but not most.
If she lived long enough, then maybe she’d take that stuff down off a mental shelf and see if it made sense. Not now, though. Life had enough complications. Even on a day-to-day basis. She cut school now and then because of issues she had with some of what they were teaching. There were three schools in New Alamo, and two of them were very strict religious schools. She wasn’t sure how important religion had been to people before the End, but it tended to dominate a lot of conversations since. Gutsy never slammed anyone’s beliefs, even though she had issues with her own, because she had no idea who was right or wrong about how the universe was wired. She certainly didn’t know. And she’d heard the Chess Players wrangle on for hours about religion, the practice of it, the politics of it, the different approaches to it, and the complex history of it. Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford seemed to agree that everyone was right until everyone was proved wrong, and there was no way to do that. That seemed fair to her. Her open-ended tolerance won her few friends. The teachers in the two religious schools were not particularly keen on that view either.
So Gutsy talked her mother into letting her go to the town’s third school. The official name was the drab New Alamo High, but even the staff tended to call it by its common nickname: Misfit High.
Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford both taught there.
Spider and Alethea were not in a formal school but were “homeschooled” by their foster caregivers. The couple in charge of the Home for Foundlings had the hilarious names of Adolf and Vera Cuddly. They did not refer to themselves as foster parents and instead used the more generic and antiseptic term of caregiver. The Cuddlys had twenty-six orphans in their charge, ranging from toddlers to Alethea and Spider.
Cuddly, though, the couple were not. Adolf looked like he might have been a gangster before the End; he had cold, beady eyes and a lot of crooked yellow teeth. His wife, Vera, had the personality of an irate scorpion without any of that insect’s warmth.
For Gutsy, being an outsider was a fact of her life, but rather than letting it make a victim of her, she’d embraced it. She was living life as much on her own terms as circumstance would allow. She only hoped that with Mama’s death the town council would not send her to the Cuddlys as a new foster. No. She’d run away first. Gutsy was absolutely sure she could survive indefinitely out in the Broken Lands.
So, even though she wasn’t Miss Perfect or Miss Popular, was there anyone in town who outright hated her? Gutsy shook her head. Her fists were clenched into tight balls of knuckles on the tabletop.
“I don’t know why someone would do something like this,” she said.
“How’d they even get Mama’s body in through the gate without the guards noticing?” asked Alethea. Like everyone, she referred to Gutsy’s mother as “Mama.” Then she answered her own question. “Those lamebrains wouldn’t notice if los muertos formed a mariachi band and led a parade of shamblers through the center of town.”
“Which is why I hate this town,” said Spider. Alethea sighed. Gutsy knew this was an old argument and a topic Spider came back to time and again. The only downside to reading so many books was that it made all three of them want to leave New Alamo and see the world. Not necessarily the broken world that it currently was, but the wider and infinitely complex world it had been. When he was ten, Spider made a scrapbook of places he dreamed of going, filling them with drawings or images cut from old magazines and catalogs from companies that were as dead as the rest of the world. The Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York. The snowy Alps and the lush tropical rain forests of Brazil. Easter Island to see the big stone heads and Australia to dive the coral reefs.
Alethea looked wistfully into the middle distance. “Maybe there’s another town out there somewhere,” she said.
Gutsy made no comment. So many of the other towns were dying out from disease, being overrun by shamblers, or torn apart by wolf packs. Much as she didn’t like New Alamo either, it was the safest place in the world, as far as anyone knew.
Spider leaned over and kissed her on the shoulder.
“We’ll get out of here,” he said quietly. “Somehow, someday. But first we have to deal with this freakazoid stuff.” The foster siblings turned to study Gutsy.
“Well . . . ?” prompted Alethea. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m trying to figure out why someone would hate me enough to want to do this,” said Gutsy.
“Maybe it wasn’t something about you,” suggested Spider. “Maybe it was someone who was mad at your mom.”
“Why would anyone be mad at her?” demanded Gutsy. “Mama was a nurse. She helped people.”
“Everyone has enemies,” said Alethea.
“Mama didn’t.”
“Look,” Spider said patiently, “just because your mom was nice doesn’t mean everyone automatically liked her.”
“Being a wonderful person doesn’t mean everyone likes you,” said Alethea. “Or has to like you. I’m nice, but some girls make fun of me ’cause I’m not rail thin.”
Spider looked thoughtful. “You’re ‘nice’? Is that really the right word?”
Alethea gave him the raised eyebrow of doom. “Would you like to limp for a month? No? Then hush, because grown folks are talking.”
Spider mimed zipping his mouth shut.
“Mama, though,” persisted Gutsy. “I’ve never heard anyone say a word against her.”
“They wouldn’t,” agreed Alethea. “Not to your face. Maybe not to her face.”
The conversation stalled there for a while.
After a short time, Alethea sat back and dabbed at hot sauce at the corner of her mouth. “Are you going back to the cemetery tomorrow to see if someone messed with the grave again?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m going too.”
“We’re all going,” said Spider. Gutsy did not argue. She was happy that they would b
e coming with her.
“There has to be an answer,” said Alethea. “We’ll figure it out.”
But they didn’t figure it out that night.
When everyone started yawning, Alethea asked, “Do you want us to stay?”
“No,” said Gutsy. “Besides, if you’re not back for head count, you’ll get in trouble with the Cuddlys.”
“Who cares?”
“I do.” She hugged Alethea, then Spider, and walked them to the door. “Thanks, though.”
Alethea nodded at Sombra. “You keeping him?”
“If he wants to stay, then sure,” said Gutsy.
“He probably has fleas.”
“Fleas can be handled.”
Alethea smiled and shook her head. “You think everything can be handled, don’t you?”
Gutsy shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“You’re weird,” said Alethea, “but I love you.” She kissed Gutsy on the right cheek; Spider kissed the other side.
Gutsy went outside to watch them walk away. They seemed to take all the light and warmth of the day with them. That was okay, Gutsy told herself. Everything would be okay.
It was a moonless night and there were ten billion stars up there, so she dragged one of the plastic chairs around to the side of the house where there was no light. Sombra followed, silent as a ghost, and lay down beside her chair.
Gutsy leaned back, propping her bare feet against the wall, and looked upward at infinity. Her heart hurt but her eyes were dry. She’d cried enough tears and now she wanted to let all that go, at least for a while.
Gutsy liked the silence. And the dark. She understood it. It appeared to be simple, but never was; it appeared to be empty, but wasn’t.
Without knowing she was going to do it, her left hand drifted down and began scratching the back of Sombra’s neck. The coydog allowed it. When Gutsy became conscious that she was doing it, she almost stopped. Almost.
She almost said, It’s all right, too.
Almost.
But she didn’t want to lie to the dog, or to herself.
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