“Yes,” said the hunter.
The gun barrel moved and the hunter heard three quiet steps. The steps were uneven, confirming the hunter’s guess that the man was walking with a limp.
“Hands on your head, fingers laced. Do it now.” The hunter did as ordered. “Turn to face me. Pivot on your knees. Stay down.”
The hunter turned very slowly in the soft mud. He did not look at the gun, but instead looked past it. The man was tall, muscular, fit, and covered in dirt and blood. He wore black military fatigues, but the clothes were torn and scorched, with flaps hanging down to expose burned skin. Gray-blond hair was pasted to the man’s head by crusted blood and dirt, and one eye was bloodshot and the other puffed nearly closed. A long, shallow cut ran from mid-cheekbone through both lips and along the chin. Two pieces of metal were strapped to either side of the stranger’s left leg, held in place with what looked like pieces of a seat belt.
The hunter took in all the details about the man. That he was military was obvious. The trick he’d used—walking backward in his own prints in order to double back and lay a trap—was a classic. On reflection, the bloody handprint had probably been a trick too—something to suggest that he was either very injured or unskilled at woodcraft, or both. It worked, too, fooling even the hunter.
The man smelled of sweat and blood and dirt and smoke. All of that made sense. What he did not smell like was rot. Los muertos stank. The half-zombie ravager mutations stank. And his clothing, except for recent damage, looked new.
“Who are you?” asked the hunter. “Where are you from? What was that sound I heard this morning?”
“Hey, how ’bout I ask the questions?” said the man. “Okay with you, sparky? Good. Let’s start with the obvious one. Why are you tracking me?”
“What makes you think that’s what I was doing?”
“If I shoot you in the leg, will I get a straight answer to my question?”
The question, although said in a joking manner, was no joke, and the hunter knew it.
“You are in my woods,” he said. “I wanted to know who and what you are. I needed to decide if you were still alive.”
“Okay, fair enough,” said the soldier. “Thing is, there aren’t a lot of us humans left. You could have verified that I was alive by asking.”
“You could have lied.”
“Last I heard, zoms don’t speak, and that means they can’t lie.”
“What’s a zom?”
“Zom? Short for zombie? Dead guys that seem to think the living are part of an all-you-can-eat buffet. We had the whole zombie apocalypse thing fifteen years ago. Maybe you heard of it? It was kind of a big thing.”
“I know the dead rose,” said the hunter. “Never heard them called ‘zoms’ before. And zombies were from old black-and-white movies. Are you saying this started in Haiti, with all that voodoo stuff?”
“Not saying that at all,” said the soldier. “This isn’t some kind of black magic. Might have been better if it was. No, this whole thing was a bioweapon, and people started using the nickname ‘zoms’ for the biters.”
“We call them shamblers,” said the hunter, making conversation because he was looking for an advantage, waiting for a moment to make his move. “Or los muertos vivientes.”
“The living dead,” said the soldier, translating it. “Good a name as any. But let’s get back to the point, shall we? I don’t look or smell like one of your los muertos and yet you were hunting me. I’d like to know why.”
“There are a lot of bad things out here,” said the hunter. “And a lot of bad people. All sorts of mutations, and some of them can talk.”
The soldier stiffened. “Okay, that’s scary as all heck.”
“Are you going to kill me?” asked the hunter.
“I’m keeping my options open.” The pistol barrel was an unflinching black eye that did not waver. “Right now I’m enjoying our little chat. Mess with me, though, and I don’t like your odds, feel me?”
The hunter nodded. “I heard a sound. In the sky. And saw smoke. Now you’re here and your leg is splinted with pieces of metal. You’re dressed like a soldier.”
“Those are statements, sparky. What’s the question?”
“Were you on a . . . helicopter?”
The soldier smiled. There was something dangerous in his smile, but not threatening. It was dangerous because for a split second he looked oddly familiar to the hunter. He looked like someone he’d known a long time ago. Someone who was definitely dead. Which made the feeling of unreality swirl inside his head even more.
“Yes,” said the soldier, and his smile faded. “A Black Hawk. Well . . . not anymore. Now it’s a pile of junk. I got out. Maybe my combat dog too. Not sure. My friends weren’t so lucky.”
“How?” begged the hunter. “There hasn’t been anything flying since the EMPs.”
The soldier gave him a quizzical look. “Boy, are you out of touch. The EMPs knocked everything out, but it’s been a lot of scared people keeping them grounded. Some folks seem to believe that it was the machines that made the dead rise. Or make the dead come after us. Or something. Lots of crazy theories, and you can really hurt yourself trying to make sense of ’em. Truth is, pretty much anything that’s busted can be fixed. Where I come from we have planes, choppers, all sorts of stuff. Nothing new, of course. It’s all rebuilt or repaired. But we’re fixing more of the stuff all the time.”
The hunter licked his lips. It was so dangerous to simply accept this as real. Machines had been dead for so long they’d become like extinct animals to everyone. Like dinosaurs. Real once upon a time, but not part of this world. To accept their present reality required a leap of faith, and the hunter had so little to spare. He studied the big soldier.
“You set a trap for me,” he said. “You doubled back on your trail and came up behind me. No one’s been able to do that to me in a long, long time. Since before the End. You’re no ordinary scavenger. You’re a soldier. Or were.”
“You’re quick, sport. Did the uniform give me away?”
“I was a soldier too.”
“Yeah, from the way you moved I figured you had training. What kind of soldier?”
“Special forces,” said the hunter. “I was a sniper.”
The soldier studied the hunter’s face for a long time. Really studied it, and the hunter knew the man was trying to see past the grizzled gray-black beard and long hair. The soldier narrowed his eyes as if trying to carve years off the hunter’s face. Deep vertical lines appeared slowly between his brows, and there was doubt and confusion in his blue eyes. “Do I . . . do I know you . . . ?”
“No,” said the hunter bluntly.
The soldier kept staring at him, and then he jerked as if he’d been slapped hard across the face. He blinked several times, and the barrel of the gun, which had been rock steady, began to waver.
“Wait . . . ,” said the soldier. “No . . . that’s impossible. I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”
The soldier suddenly lowered the gun and sat down hard on the ground. He looked like he had just been punched in the face. The pistol tumbled from his hand and landed in the dirt.
“I’m losing it,” the soldier said, and he grabbed his head with both hands. “I’m totally losing it. I . . . I . . . I . . .”
He never finished the sentence, because the hunter launched himself through the air and tackled the soldier.
PART SEVEN
NEW ALAMO, TEXAS
LATE AUGUST
THE GRAVE ROBBERS
The secret to happiness is freedom,
And the secret to freedom is courage.
—THUCYDIDES
37
GUTSY WATCHED THE RAT CATCHERS dig. As they worked, she felt something happening to her.
At first it was only a physical thing. Her fists closed into knots, her stomach clenched, her jaws locked as she ground her teeth. It felt like fear, at first. It felt the way it did sometimes when she was running from the smarter, fast
er kinds of living dead. Or how she felt when a party of rough-looking Broken Lands travelers nearly trapped her out on the desert. Fear of what could happen to her; of what would happen if she wasn’t fast enough or smart enough.
As Gutsy always did, she looked inward to try to understand what she was feeling. The Chess Players sometimes talked about the difference between a “knee-jerk” reaction and a “considered” one. Knee-jerk reactions were instant. Sometimes they were a reflex inspired by nothing more than a simple emotion—fear, anger, need, hunger, insecurity. Other times they were copied reactions, like one dog starting to bark after another one started. Considered reactions were different—they were how people responded once they’d had time to think things through. It was how smarter or more experienced people reacted, basing what they did on what they’d learned, what they knew, what they thought about things.
Gutsy looked for those two kinds of reactions in people and found that it was useful to understand the forces at work in a person. It told her a lot. It gave her compassion, when that was needed, usually after someone said something or did something that they would later regret. But it also taught her a lot about how someone really was. If someone was kind as a reflex, that was great, like someone stepping aside to hold the door when they saw an old person going into the general store at the same time. A “reflex of courtesy,” Mr. Ford called it. Or the way Mama used to snap at her when Gutsy did something dangerous, jumping to anger to hide the fear.
Then there were the times she was so mad that her face flushed and her throat burned and she felt like just rushing at someone and beating their brains out. Like the time Nicky Cantu pantsed Spider in front of everyone at the spring fair. Or when Mrs. Osborne across the street kicked the neighbor’s twelve-year-old half-blind yellow Lab for pooping on her lawn. Those times were raw, unthinking anger. The kind that Gutsy always had to fight back, to stuff into their closets and lock the doors. They were knee-jerk reactions.
This, though . . . this was different.
What she felt as she watched them throw shovelfuls of dirt out of the hole was different from all those feelings.
This wasn’t a reflex, and it wasn’t the heat of anger. This wasn’t even rage. It went beyond that. It went the whole way past that into a place Gutsy had never been before. A place she thought she’d been, but now that she was there, she knew that these were her first footsteps into that strange and ugly landscape.
This, she knew, was hate.
38
THE RAT CATCHERS LABORED OVER their ugly work. The white woman and the tall black man stood watching as the other two dug. An owl hooted from a nearby tree. It was like a scene from Frankenstein, a book Gutsy had read last autumn.
“Make it quick,” said the lieutenant to the two men with shovels. Then, in a quieter voice, he addressed his captain. “Have to admit, Bess, I’ll be glad when this phase is done.”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “Losing your nerve?”
“Being realistic. We’re taking a big risk here.”
“We’re doing our job, Simon.”
Gutsy took note of the names. Bess and Simon.
“Sure,” said the lieutenant, “we are, and we’re nearly done. That’s great. But you’ve seen the reports, you’ve heard what the scouts have been saying. What if they’re right? What if all of them are getting smarter? What if they’re really getting organized?”
“They’re not. The scout teams haven’t found a thing.”
“C’mon, Bess,” said the big man, “you can’t say that with a straight face. Not one of the scout teams we sent out in the last three weeks has come back. The writing’s on the wall. We need to shut down the lab, clear out the base, and get out of here and head east while we still can.”
“You’re overreacting,” said the captain.
“Am I? You’ve known me for a long time. When have I ever overreacted? I just know when retreat is the smarter choice.”
“The research has to be completed before we even think about leaving.”
“That’s what you said last year, and the year before that. Are we really any closer to cracking this? I don’t think so. I think we’re fooling ourselves. All the science team gives us is mumbo jumbo and empty promises. Can you really stand there and tell me they’ve made progress? No, better yet, can you look me in the eye and tell me they haven’t made it worse? And I mean a lot worse. Those things are organized out there.”
“According to rumor.”
Simon made a disgusted sound. “Yeah, well, what’s your plan? Wait until those ‘rumors’ come waltzing up and bite us all on the butt?”
“Keep your voice down,” snapped Bess.
“Okay, okay,” said Simon more quietly, “but be reasonable. You have to know that this is going to fall apart. Don’t forget, there’s a heck of a lot more of them than there are of us. All that talk about the Raggedy Man—”
“Don’t say that name,” she hissed, cutting a worried look at the soldiers digging the grave and then out at the night. She stood chewing her lip for a moment. Then she took Simon by the arm and led him farther out of earshot of the diggers, but closer to where Gutsy lay. “Listen, officially we’ve got this under control. But . . . personally, I think you’re right. A few of us agree. And I have something worked out if the worst happens.”
“What do you mean ‘worked out’?”
“The second it looks like things are falling apart, we’re gone. Me and a few others.” She rattled off some names that were meaningless to Gutsy. “We have transport, weapons, and supplies. We just need to grab the research from the lab and let everything else go. I’m inviting you in, Simon, but you can’t tell anyone, you understand? We could use some extra muscle, and I’d rather that be you than those two.” She nodded in the direction of the digging soldiers. “Stay close to me and if this blows open, then we head east to Ashe—”
“Hey, Cap,” called the white soldier from the bottom of the grave. “Think we got it.”
The officers abandoned their covert conversation and stepped closer. Gutsy ached to know what they’d been talking about and to hear the rest of what the captain was going to say, but now everyone was focused on Mama’s grave again.
“Biohazard gear on,” ordered the captain, and they all removed white surgical masks from their pockets and pulled on thin rubber gloves. “Okay, Duke, dig it out.”
Duke, the white soldier, began digging with renewed vigor. “Give me a second to . . . Hey, wait . . .”
“What’s wrong, Duke?” asked the Latino soldier.
“What the heck is this?” growled Duke. “Mateo, hand me the lantern, there’s something hinky down here.”
The Latino soldier took a lantern and jumped down next to Duke. The two officers crouched down to peer into the open grave. Gutsy held her breath.
“What in the . . . ?” began the big lieutenant, but his words petered out too. Gutsy smiled thinly.
She watched as they hauled out the shroud, now filthy and streaked with dirt. Duke and Mateo struggled to lift it, and then the lieutenant reached down and together they heaved it onto the side of the grave. The soldiers scrambled out and crouched on either side of the shroud. There was the slithery sound of a knife being drawn, and then the captain knelt down and cut a long slit in the shroud. She reached her other hand inside and drew something out.
It was a rock. The lieutenant lifted a corner of the shroud and more rocks fell out onto the ground; some thudding to a stop in the soft mound of dirt, others bouncing off the edge and dropping out of sight. The captain pulled her mask off and dropped it.
“What’s going on?” asked Duke.
Instead of answering, the captain rose quickly to her feet. She still held the knife in her left hand, but now there was an automatic pistol in her right. The draw had been so fast and smooth that Gutsy never saw it. The lieutenant drew his weapon too.
“We’re compromised,” said Simon. The two gravediggers immediately grabbed automatic rifles from their duff
el bag.
Sombra was trembling again. At first Gutsy thought he wanted to run away, but then she saw a trace of lantern light on his bared teeth. Dogs, it seemed, could hate too.
“We’re being played,” said the lieutenant.
The soldiers looked scared. Terrified. Even the captain seemed shaken. They stood in a circle, weapons pointing outward.
Mateo crossed himself the way some of the more devoted Catholics in town sometimes did. “Ay, Dios mío!” he cried in a terrified whisper. “It’s the Ejército de la Noche.”
The Night Army? wondered Gutsy. Who or what was that?
“Maybe it’s only the townies,” said Duke. “Maybe they figured it out.”
“Both of you shut up,” ordered the captain. She stepped away from the others and turned in a slow circle, studying the area. Then she slid her knife into its sheath and bent to study the ground around the grave. The others stood with their guns pointing out into the night.
“There,” said Bess, and they all looked down at a set of footprints exposed by the yellow glow. The prints began at the far side of the grave and moved off toward the cemetery entrance. “Stand down. It’s not the Night Army . . . and whoever did this, they’re not here.”
Simon knelt by his captain and looked at the footprints. “One set. Small. A woman?”
“No,” said the captain, “this was a girl. Fifteen years old. Mexican.”
“How could you know that?” asked the big lieutenant.
“Because,” said the woman with a sneer, “I know who it was. Damn. She always said her daughter was smart.”
“Wait,” said the lieutenant, frowning, “are you talking about Luisa Gomez’s kid? You think she figured out it was us who brought her mother back?”
“That’s exactly what I think,” said Bess. “And she buried these rocks for us to find in case we came back.”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” said Mateo. “Why would the Gomez girl do this?”
The captain holstered her gun. “Because even rats can be smart. This one thinks she’s really smart. She’s trying to play some kind of trick on us.”
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