Above them the wheel of night turned.
18
GUTSY DREAMED OF BURYING HER mother. Not once, not twice, but every single day of her life. That was what her life had become. Finding her mother, withered and dead, wandering in the rooms of their little house; restraining her; re-shrouding her; wrestling her improbably heavy body onto the cart; driving back to the cemetery; burying her; coming home; finding her mother there again. Over and over in an endless dance of heartbreak and horror.
When she heard her bedroom door creak open, the sound folded itself into her dream. It was Sombra, come to watch as Gutsy did up the knots again around Mama’s ankles and knees, elbows and wrists. The coydog watched with eyes that burned with real fire; eyes that gave off the only heat in the whole world. Sombra was bigger in the dream, more wolflike.
The dog’s presence bothered Gutsy as she slept. It was wrong. When she’d come in from stargazing, hadn’t she left the dog in the kitchen, with the door closed? How could he be in her room?
The dreaming Gutsy paused in her work, the ends of rope in her hands, and turned to the dog.
Except it wasn’t a dog.
Somehow her mother wasn’t in the shroud Gutsy was tying.
Instead Mama stood there in the open bedroom doorway. Her clothes were torn and streaked with mud, her eyes empty of everything except a bottomless hunger, her gray hands reaching and her dry teeth snapping at the air.
“Mama . . . ?” said Gutsy in a voice that sounded like a little child’s.
She wanted to wake up out of the dream, but she could not.
Because she wasn’t dreaming.
And her mother was there, in her room, reaching for her.
19
SOMBRA HOWLED IN THE KITCHEN.
Gutsy screamed in her bedroom.
Mama moaned as she grabbed Gutsy.
The dream held Gutsy with cold, strong fingers, trapping her for a moment at the edge of waking. For a terrible fragment of a second she wasn’t sure whether this was a nightmare or if the world had cracked open and nightmares spilled out into her real life.
Then the smell of rot and grave dirt and sickness dragged her all the way into wakefulness.
Though it was still a nightmare. Of a kind.
“Mama!” shrieked Gutsy as gray fingers grabbed one shoulder and a handful of her hair, and a gaping, snarling mouth lunged forward for a bite.
To.
Bite.
Her.
“No, Mama!”
Gutsy slammed her palms against her mother’s shoulders so hard it knocked Mama’s head forward even faster. Those teeth clacked shut an inch from Gutsy’s windpipe. Cold spit flecked her cheeks. For a moment they were locked together that way, Gutsy’s hands stiff and braced; Mama pulling her by hair and shoulder, and those teeth snapping, snapping, snapping.
In another part of the house Gutsy could hear Sombra going wild, barking, howling, knocking things in the kitchen over to clatter and smash.
Here in her bedroom, Mama suddenly twisted her head to one side and tried to bite one of Gutsy’s forearms. With a yelp, Gutsy let go with that arm and flailed at her mother, knocking the biting mouth away. That shifted the weight that was pressing down on her, and Mama lost her balance. She slipped halfway off the bed, and Gutsy turned her hips and kicked her own body the other way. It broke the contact, though she felt a flash of hot pain on her head and realized she’d lost some hair. She kept kicking until she reached the far side of the narrow bed, and then suddenly she was falling. The floor hit her like a punch between the shoulder blades and the air whooshed from her lungs as pain exploded in her shoulders and spine. She lay there for a moment, lost in pain, dazed, desperately trying to gasp in a spoonful of air.
The slap of bare feet on the floorboards snapped her out of it, and Gutsy looked through the fireworks of pain to see her mother lumbering around the end of the bed. She did not move fast, but it was a small bedroom and there was nowhere left to run.
If Gutsy had thought her town and her life were hell before, now she was sure of it. Everything about this moment burned her, including the certain knowledge that some devil had dug her mother up twice, had brought her here twice. Maybe hell was all about reliving the worst possible experience over and over and over again throughout eternity.
In her mind an ugly little voice whispered, Don’t fight. Let go.
The voice tried so hard to make sense. And Gutsy’s mind tried to fool her into thinking that there was a light flickering in the eyes of this monster, and that it was the spark of Mama’s soul. Her need not to be abandoned, her buffer against grief, fueled her need to believe that somehow, impossible as it was, Mama was still there. Still here with her. Not gone.
Not forever gone.
Let it happen. It’ll be okay afterward. You’ll be with Mama. Don’t fight.
For a burning moment she almost stopped fighting. For one razor-sharp edge of a moment, Gutsy simply wanted to give in. To accept a bite if it was what paid her way to where Mama was.
That flicker of light was there. It really was. Wasn’t it?
Before Gutsy even knew she was doing it, she reached up and over and grabbed the handle of the night-table drawer, yanked it hard enough to pull the drawer all the way out, and flung it at the monster pretending to be her mother. Pens and notebooks and jewelry and a book of poems went flying as the drawer struck Mama’s reaching arms. Then Gutsy scrambled to her feet, snatched the pillow off the bed, and thrust it forward, pressing it into the gray hands, smashing it against the biting mouth, blocking those teeth, using it as a cushion as she drove her weight forward. Mama snarled and tried to spit the pillow out, but Gutsy shoved and ran forward until the thrashing body struck the thin wall between her bedroom and the narrow hallway that ran from living room to kitchen. The impact shook the house and pictures fell from the wall, their pine frames splitting apart as they landed.
There were other thuds as Sombra threw himself against the far wall, his bark rising into panic.
“Please,” Gutsy begged as those cold fingers tried to grab her again. “Mama, please don’t.”
The body was her mother’s, and even though Father Esteban said that the souls of the dead were still in the body, and would be until judgment day when they all rose to heaven, there was no response other than a monster’s need. This was not Mama. This was one of los muertos vivientes. Beyond thought, empty of life, filled only with hunger, offering nothing but heartbreak and death.
Gutsy struggled with the living corpse, twisting her body so that her back was to the door. Then, with a huge cry of fear and effort, she thrust her mother back, whirled, and ran for the door. Her foot caught on a tendril of blanket that had fallen to the floor during the struggle. She went flying and landed badly halfway into the hall. She turned to see Mama coming for her, mouth snapping, eyes dead, hands clawing at the air.
“No!”
Gutsy kicked free of the blanket, scuttled backward, got to her feet, and made a fast grab for the doorknob. She gave it a desperate pull and the door slammed shut as Mama lunged forward. The loose-jointed sound of hands and knees and maybe a head striking the door from the other side was horrible. She looked down at the doorknob and saw it rattle. It took a few long, long moments to realize that it was moving with the vibrations of Mama pounding on the door, but not because it was being turned.
Some of the dead were smarter. Some remembered how to do things like turn a door handle.
Not Mama, though.
Gutsy tried to feel some comfort in that. There was none. There was nothing but pain and loss on both sides of the door.
20
GUTSY STAGGERED DOWN THE HALLWAY, falling against the walls, gasping, crying. She jerked open the kitchen door and Sombra bounded out, snarling, eyes wild, teeth bared.
Not at her, though.
The coydog raced past her, but he didn’t stop to bark at the trembling door. Instead the animal ran into the living room and out into the night through the open front door.
“Wait . . . no, don’t go out there,” cried Gutsy, realizing that whoever had brought Mama here might still be there. But the dog vanished. She could hear his furious barks and then the angry whinny of a horse.
Gutsy, shaking with fear and pain, staggered after. She couldn’t see her machete anywhere. She’d leaned it against the arm of the couch, but it was gone. However, there was an umbrella stand beside the door, filled with baseball bats, a field hockey stick, a crowbar, and a heavy metal golf putter. She snatched up the hockey stick and dashed outside just in time to hear Sombra let out a high-pitched yelp of pain.
The sound came from up the street, in the direction of the back road out of town. If it had been only herself to think about, Gutsy would have gone back inside and pushed furniture in front of the doors. She would have gone back to deal with the thing in her bedroom. She would have fallen apart.
The dog, though . . .
She clutched the stick in her hand, ground her teeth together in a feral snarl, and ran.
High-pitched squeals of pain told her the way. Along the street a few windows popped with yellow as some of the neighbors lit lanterns. One or two curtains parted, but no one came out to see what was happening. That was so typical, she thought. People hid rather than get involved. They were braver during the day, braver in numbers, but at night they trusted closed doors, locks, and the night guards to deal with problems. No one wanted to be seen wandering in the streets for fear of being mistaken for one of the dead.
Gutsy reached the end of her street and skidded to a stop, because now there was no sound at all. Sombra had fallen silent. Was he dead? That thought stabbed her, making her realize how much she already cared about the strange coydog.
She edged toward the corner of the last house on the left, one of the empty ones used for bulk storage. There were more houses than people in New Alamo. Adjusting her grip on her weapon, she leaned out for a fast look and ducked back, letting her brain process what the brief glimpse had captured.
Then she leaned out again and stared. Sombra lay in the middle of the street.
Beyond him, moving away from the spot where he’d fallen, were two riders on horseback. For a wild moment, Gutsy was terrified that the cannibal ravagers had somehow breached the walls. That was always the worst fear in town. When they raided a town, they left nothing and no one alive. Not a person, not even the smallest house cat.
“Please, God,” she begged, gripping her weapon, aware of how flimsy it was against killers like that.
Then the riders moved into a patch of light thrown by a streetlamp. They wore long canvas coats whose split tails flapped as they galloped. Each had an old-style cowboy hat with the brim pulled low, and they both wore scarves wrapped around the lower half of their faces. Gutsy moved into the center of the street and stood by Sombra, who was still breathing and whimpering softly. There was fresh blood on his muzzle, but his eyes were closed.
Gutsy gripped her hockey stick in both hands.
“Come back and fight, you freaking cowards,” she yelled.
One of them, the shorter of the two, cut a look over his shoulder and reined his horse to a stop. The rider looked too young to be doing what he was doing. A teenage boy or . . .
No. Was it a woman?
That thought somehow jolted Gutsy, because she hadn’t expected that. But even in the bad light, she was sure she was right. It was a woman. Slim but strong-looking, with broad shoulders. She raised a weapon and pointed it at Gutsy. It wasn’t a gun, though. It was Gutsy’s own machete. It wasn’t a challenge—it was a message letting Gutsy know that it was she who had brought Mama back, and she who had taken the big knife.
Gutsy raised her hockey stick and pointed back at her. After a moment, the woman gave a single, short nod. Then shouts filled the air, along with the sound of people running. Townsfolk and the night guards. The rider turned away, kicked her horse, and was gone. Gutsy dropped slowly to her knees beside the dog. Sombra was alive, but unconscious and bleeding.
The thought she’d had earlier, that New Alamo was the safest place anyone knew, now seemed to come back to mock her. This town wasn’t safe at all.
Nowhere was safe.
Nowhere.
21
BAD NIGHTS CAN ALWAYS GET worse.
Night guards tore past to try to catch the riders. People crowded the streets now, everyone chattering but no one saying anything she needed to hear. Then all conversation died as a series of gunshots filled the night air from the direction of the rear gate. Then the town’s alarm whistles were shrieking, giving the signal that everyone in town knew and dreaded—three shorts bursts followed by three longer ones, and three more short ones. An old code, from before the End.
SOS.
A lot of people thought that it meant “Save Our Ship” or “Save Our Souls.” Gutsy knew it didn’t, or at least it wasn’t meant to mean that when German sailors invented the signal a long time ago. The nine sounds were picked because it was an easy code, and it was the only nine-sound message used in Morse code. Something she had learned in a book.
It was used now for one purpose, and it might as well have meant Save Our Souls.
It meant that the dead were inside the town walls.
The people scattered like sheep. Some screamed as they ran for home. Maybe on another night Gutsy would have run away too.
She did not.
The dog—her dog—was hurt and she wasn’t going to leave him to be devoured by los muertos. No way. She’d already lost too much. And besides, she was mad. Really mad. It burned in the skin of her face and in the muscles of her hands. She wanted to hurt someone. The female rider, for sure, and anyone else who was with her. A shambler would do very nicely. Or a ravager.
Someone shouted for medics, and a moment later a group of men came up the street, half carrying, half dragging the two sentries who had been assigned to the rear gate. The guards were alive, but dazed and bloody from having been badly beaten when the riders entered the town. Gutsy saw Dr. Morton come running up the street, looking disheveled and out of breath.
“What happened?” he yelled. “Someone tell me what happened.” Morton spotted Gutsy and paused. “You—you’re Luisa Gomez’s daughter, right? Gracie or something?”
“Gabriella, but people call me Gutsy.”
Morton nodded. “Right, ’cause you’re a scavenger. Always taking risks, always going outside the walls.”
Gutsy said nothing.
“Do you know what’s going on around here tonight?” asked the doctor.
Before she could answer, one of the night guards came and grabbed the doctor’s sleeve. “We need you, Doc. Couple of our boys got hurt. Jimmy Quiñones is pretty bad.”
The doctor gave Gutsy a smile that was more like a wince. “Sorry!” he said, then ran off with the guard.
One of her neighbors, Mrs. Gonzalez, came hurrying over. She had a ball-peen hammer in her hand. “Gabriella, sweetheart,” she gasped, “hurry. Come with me. You’ll be safe at our house.”
Gutsy shook her head. “My dog’s hurt.”
“Dog?” said the woman. “That’s a . . . is that a coyote, or . . . ?”
“He’s my dog,” insisted Gutsy.
“Well,” said Mrs. Gonzalez dubiously, “whatever he is, he looks pretty bad. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you need to leave him and come with us.” The woman tried to take her arm, but Gutsy shook her off.
“He’s my dog and I’ll take care of him,” she snarled. “Go home and hide and leave me alone.”
Mrs. Gonzalez flinched and stepped back. “You’re being stupid,” she said. “They’re inside.”
There were more gunshots and yelling, and some screams. The fight was invisible, though, too far down the exit road to be seen. Someone kept blowing the stupid whistle, as if it was even necessary to let anyone know there was trouble. People were running everywhere. A hand-cranked siren began wailing like an angry ghost, the cry rising and filling the air with earsplitting insistence.
Suddenly Spider and Alethea were there, appearing as if out of nowhere. The sight of her friends almost made Gutsy lose it. It was such a relief to see the faces of the two people on earth who got her, who understood what was going on with her. Their faces were clouded with concern as they knelt down on either side of Gutsy.
“What happened?” asked Alethea. She wore a bathrobe over pajamas and carried a baseball bat. The words You Only Hurt the Ones You Love were painted in rainbow script along its length. The handle was bound in leather and the heavy end had dozens of roundheaded screws drilled into it. She called the bat Rainbow Smite. Alethea joked about being “a lover, not a fighter,” but she was fierce with the bat. Very fierce.
She had her tiara, though, and despite how insane everything was, it made Gutsy feel like the world still made sense if—in the middle of a crisis—Alethea had paused long enough to put on her tiara. It was as if it was a statement that said, Don’t worry, there’s still time. Take a breath.
Gutsy took a breath.
Spider wore only Halloween-pattern pajama bottoms with tarantulas and bats on them, and, for no reason Gutsy ever discovered, big floppy rubber rain boots. His weapon of choice was a bo, a sturdy wooden staff. Despite his skinny arms, Spider could spin that staff into a blinding whirlwind of destructive force.
He studied Gutsy for a moment, frowning as he looked into her eyes. “What’s going on?”
“Not now,” she said urgently. “We have to get Sombra home. He’s hurt and I can’t leave him out here.”
“I got this,” said Alethea, straightening. She turned toward a burly adult man who was standing in the street, clutching a sledgehammer as if ready to take on the world. “You!” she cried, pointing at him with Rainbow Smite. The man almost snapped to attention as if the command had been given by an actual princess and not a teenage girl. He even looked surprised by his own response. “This is my friend’s dog. Pick him up.”
“I—”
“Now.”
He did. The burly man handed his sledgehammer to Spider, squatted down, and lifted Sombra as easily as if the coydog was a puppy.
Broken Lands Page 8