Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  “I can look for him,” said Sam. He got to his feet, offered a hand to Ledger, and pulled the older soldier carefully to his feet. “I need to get you to my cabin and take a better look at that leg.”

  Sam wrapped an arm around Ledger’s waist and they began making their way back along the game trail.

  “How are you here?” Sam asked. “I mean right here, in my woods?”

  “I was on my way from California to Asheville, North Carolina,” said Ledger. “That’s where the new government is based. We have about a hundred thousand people, give or take. An army. A new government. The whole works.”

  “In Asheville? That can’t be right.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Asheville was completely destroyed,” said Sam. “It was nuked.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says some soldiers I talked to.”

  “When was it supposed to be nuked?”

  “Oh . . . years ago.”

  Ledger shook his head. “Then they lied to you or they repeated bad information. I’ve been to Asheville as recently as six months ago. It was never nuked. It’s intact and fortified.” He narrowed his eyes. “Who are these soldiers who told you this junk?”

  “There’s a small facility down near the Mexican border, about two hundred miles south. A hardened facility, so they still have lights, generators, and a fuel store. The Laredo Chemical and Biological Weapon Defense Research Facility.”

  “I heard about that way back before it all fell apart. A black budget site?”

  “Yes,” agreed Sam. “Reduced staff before the dead rose, and then one of several sites trying to find a cure. Maybe the last one.”

  “There was one at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley,” said Joe. He told Sam about rescuing Dr. McReady and her research. Sam was impressed and felt a flush of excitement at the thought of a cure.

  “It’s more of a treatment,” corrected Ledger. “Keeps infected people alive if they take their pills. Works different on full-blown zoms, though. Accelerates the life cycle of the parasites. They get fast and then they die. But listen, if the soldiers at Laredo told you Asheville was gone, then they lied to you. Asheville survived the end of everything else, and they got their act together. A government, a president, a Congress—kind of—and a lot of scientists and engineers working their butts off to fix stuff. I was heading there when my bird went down.”

  “What happened?” asked Sam. “Engine trouble?”

  “No,” said Ledger. “Someone shot us down. We took an RPG in the tail rotor. To say we did not see that coming was an understatement. Been a lot of years since I was in an aircraft that took enemy fire.”

  “Someone shot you down?”

  “Yeah. Who knows, maybe it was one of your soldier friends. I didn’t see the shot. I was on a call with some guys in Reclamation. We’d just gotten word that something was happening in Asheville and then suddenly—boom. Odd timing, though, and you know how I hate coincidences.”

  “I don’t know the soldiers,” said Sam. “I know of them. And I don’t know why they’d fire on you.”

  “Yeah,” said Ledger slowly. “I’d kind of like to ask someone that question. Not sure I’m going to be very nice about how I ask. But . . . frankly, man, I’m kind of surprised to hear that there’s an active base here in Texas. I’d also like to know why they haven’t been in touch with Asheville. If they have power, then they had to have working satellite phones. So, something’s hinky.”

  Sam shook his head. “I really don’t know. I’ve never been to the base. The impression I got was that it was operational but not doing very well. Don’t know the details and haven’t really cared to find out. I, um . . . moved away from all that, Joe. I’ve been living alone here for years. I see a few people now and then, do a little trading for goods, but mostly I stay to myself.”

  “Like a monk,” said Ledger.

  “I guess. Doing penance for old sins.”

  Ledger shook his head. “Anything you did was for the greater good.”

  Sam shook his head again. “Don’t lie to a liar. I’ve had a lot of time to think about everything I’ve done, every trigger I’ve pulled, every life I ended. You can’t tell me that we were always the good guys in spotless white hats. You’ve never been that naive, Joe.”

  Ledger sighed but said nothing for nearly a mile.

  “Listen, Sam,” he said at last, his voice tentative, “there’s something I need to say. Your family . . . your brothers . . . do you know what happened to them? Did you ever try to find them?”

  Sam flinched as an ancient ache stabbed him. “I tried, Joe. But the nukes, the radiation, the dead . . . . I called my stepmom. She told me that Dad came home hurt. Bitten . . . you understand? She dropped the phone. There were screams. I could tell what was happening. They’re all dead, Joe. My parents. Tom, little Benny. It’s crazy, but I never even saw Benny. Just baby pictures and e-mails, you know? Facebook posts. But I never actually saw him. Poor kid never had a chance.”

  When he caught Joe’s expression, Sam stopped. “What is it? I’m talking about my family and you’re smiling. . . .”

  “Sam,” said Ledger in a voice that was fragile with emotion, “I have a lot to tell you. God . . . where do I even begin?”

  PART ELEVEN

  NEW ALAMO, TEXAS

  LATE AUGUST

  SECRETS AND LIES

  By a lie, a man . . . annihilates

  his dignity as a man.

  —IMMANUEL KANT

  52

  “I GUESS THE BEST WAY to start this,” said Mr. Urrea, “is to ask what you already know.”

  “Know about what?” demanded Gutsy.

  “About Los cazadores de ratas vienen.”

  She stiffened. “The Rat Catchers. I know some.”

  “Some, huh,” said Urrea, shooting a look at Ford.

  “Question is,” said Gutsy, “what do you know? I mean, do you know who these Rat Catchers are and why they’re acting like they’re in some kind of military when there isn’t any real military left?”

  That seemed to jolt the two old teachers. Urrea studied her with intense eyes. “Gutsy,” he said stiffly, “you really do need to tell us everything you know. Everything.”

  “You first,” she countered.

  “No,” said Ford.

  When she still hesitated, Urrea said, “Please.”

  Gutsy folded her arms. “How do I even know I can trust you two? Because right now you’re scaring me, and I’m getting tired of being scared.” As if picking up on her emotions, Sombra stood up and glared at them. He did not exactly snarl, but there was clear menace in the way he stood—straight, ready, his muscles tense.

  The dog’s high state of alertness, coupled with the marks of violence all over him, seemed to flick some kind of switch in both of the old men. Ford got up and crossed to the door, closed it, and locked it. Urrea pulled the shades down on all the windows, plunging the room into amber shadows. Then the Chess Players sat down at students’ desks and waved Gutsy to another. She pulled hers around to face them, and Sombra lay like a sphinx in the space between.

  “If you’ve ever trusted us,” said Ford, “then trust us now. Tell us what you know. Leave nothing out.”

  Gutsy took a while to think about it. Mr. Ford and Mr. Urrea had always seemed like good guys. Smart, insightful, fair-minded and . . . honest? She hoped so.

  “Okay,” she said, “but you’d better not be messing with me.”

  They gave their words, and Urrea even put his hand over his heart.

  “If you think we’re lying,” he said, “then you can sic your coydog on us. I give you full permission.”

  “I don’t,” said Ford, but Urrea ignored him.

  Gutsy considered them both, then nodded to herself. She told them all of it, and even surprised herself by keeping nothing back. Everything Mama had said on her deathbed; the two times the Rat Catchers had brought horror back from the cemetery. The desecration of all those graves. The capt
ain, lieutenant, and two soldiers. The Night Army. The lab and the base. The bizarre question about whether Mama had told Gutsy some kind of information after she’d been brought back from the grave.

  Partway through her tale, Mr. Urrea took his pipe from a pocket, cleaned it slowly, and put the stem between his teeth. As far as Gutsy knew, the old man never actually smoked the pipe. Something to fidget with, she figured. Something to keep nervous hands busy.

  Mr. Ford, on the other hand, sat still and barely even looked like he was breathing. Only his eyes were fully alive.

  By the time she was done the noonday sun was baking all of New Alamo.

  “Okay,” said Gutsy. “Your turn.”

  53

  “THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE between what we know for sure,” began Ford, “and what we’ve guessed.”

  “We have theories,” agreed Urrea. “We’ve heard things, but we can’t prove much.”

  “Tell me anyway,” she insisted.

  Ford nodded to his friend. “You go first. It started with you.”

  Mr. Urrea took his pipe out of his mouth and studied the bowl with raised eyebrows, as if surprised to find that it was empty. Then he looked up at Gutsy. “I was a writer before the End. You know that, of course. Ford was too. We were at a writers’ conference in San Antonio when it all started.”

  “What’s a writers’ conference?” she asked.

  “Bunch of self-important writers trying to convince a bunch of earnest wannabes that they’re all going to make it big.” He paused. “Look, before the End people like us made a living—even a good living—writing books. That’s one of those professions that died when the world changed. Along with movie stars, web developers, nuclear engineers, airline pilots, and a whole long list of other jobs that don’t make any sense to someone like you.”

  “How does this matter?”

  “It matters, because Ford and I were more than just writers,” said Urrea. “We were working on a project together. Something kind of secret and something very dangerous. There’s a thing called ‘investigative journalism.’ That’s when a reporter or writer digs into something that other people maybe want to keep hidden. Stuff like crimes, bad politics, corruption. You understand?”

  “Sure. Like the stories Mr. Golden writes for the paper.”

  Mr. Golden printed several hundred copies of the weekly New Alamo, which mostly ran ads for trades and swaps, notices about store hours and town council meetings, and recipes, but also had a column called The Whisperer. Everyone knew Mr. Golden wrote the column—he wrote every word of the paper—but it was supposed to be written by a mysterious person called X. The column was a lot of gossip, most of it stupid, almost all of it questionable. Like when X said that Trapper Halls sewed small pieces of scrap metal into the corners of his feed sacks in order to give short weight on what he sold. People tore those bags apart and didn’t find a thing. Or that other time when X claimed that Nancy Fowler was having an affair with Hack Santiago, when everyone who had two brain cells knew that Hack was gay. Rumors and gossip that got people talking but were usually hurtful, sneaky, and mean-spirited. Nobody Gutsy knew liked Mr. Golden. However, everyone she knew—including Mama—read that column every week.

  Ford snorted again. “Gus Golden wouldn’t know the truth if it crawled up his pants leg and bit him on the—”

  “Ford . . . ,” said Urrea quietly.

  “I get the point,” said Gutsy.

  “Real investigative journalists care about the facts,” said Urrea. “They want to uncover the truth. Not lies, not hearsay. They want the cold, hard facts. The case we were investigating had to do with how undocumented immigrants were being treated.”

  Gutsy felt her attention sharpen.

  “We’d talked to a number of the undocumented who had been in this very camp. People who had been processed out of here and sent back to Mexico but who came back across the border.”

  “How?”

  “Oh . . . various ways. Tunnels, or across the Rio Grande, in glider planes, over the wall. Sometimes across the Gulf of Mexico. People always found ways in. I knew several because of my own history. I was born in Tijuana, Mexico, but went to college in the States. In San Diego.”

  She cocked her head to one side, reappraising the old man. “You don’t look Mexican.”

  “My mother was American. I have her blue eyes and I used to have sandy blond hair.”

  “You used to have hair,” said Ford.

  “In Mexico,” continued Urrea as if his friend hadn’t spoken, “as a kid, I was the outsider because I looked American. In America I was the kid with the Mexican accent. I wasn’t welcome on either side of the border. Then I began writing about immigrants—legal and illegal. And about the need to cross borders, cross lines, change the definition of who you are to fit who you want to be. When I caught wind of something very bad happening here, I told Ford about it. We got ourselves invited to the writers’ conference in San Antonio and used it as a cover to start poking our noses where they didn’t belong.”

  “We didn’t expect the world to end,” said Ford.

  Gutsy frowned. “Yeah, but what was it you guys were investigating? And how does that have anything to do with the Rat Catchers or what happened to my mom?”

  “It has everything to do with it, I’m afraid,” said Urrea, and Gutsy could hear pain and maybe fear in his voice. “You see, the rumors we followed weren’t just about the way undocumented persons were being treated here. Not only about that. No, the story we were investigating had to do with things that were happening to some of those people in the lab down here.”

  “Lab?” gasped Gutsy. “What lab? You mean the FEMA place near Laredo?”

  “No,” said Ford. “That was set up during the crisis. Everyone knew about it because they wanted people to be able to find it. Unfortunately, some of the people who went there for shelter had been bitten. And . . . well . . . you know how that turned out. We came looking for a secret laboratory that was supposed to be around here.”

  She folded her arms. “I’ve been all over the Broken Lands. If there was a base, I’m pretty sure I would have found it.”

  “Wouldn’t that depend on how well it’s hidden?” asked Mr. Urrea. “I mean, the Rat Catchers said they had a base, right? That’s what you overheard. Then the base exists. Trust me, kiddo, the military were always very good at hiding things. Before the End, there were all kinds of rumors and urban legends about hidden bases. A lot of people believed there were even bases where they hid wreckage from crashed UFOs.”

  “Ri-i-i-i-ight,” said Gutsy. “Mr. Golden writes about that, too. He thinks that the whole reason los muertos rose is because of aliens. Or . . . radiation from some kind of space probe. Or something like that. Crazy stuff. Are you going to tell me that this secret base was hiding little green men from outer space?”

  “No,” said Urrea. “Be almost nice if that was the case.”

  “Be better than the truth,” said Ford.

  “Why better?” asked Gutsy.

  “Because the truth is so much more frightening than that,” said Urrea. “And it’s so much uglier than space aliens or cosmic radiation. If it was something wild like that, then it would have all been totally beyond our control. It would have been something done to us.”

  “You’re saying it’s not?” she asked.

  “No. This plague . . . the whole end of the world was something done by us.”

  When she said nothing, Mr. Ford quietly said, “And it’s not over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He means,” said Urrea, “that the people who started this whole thing are still out there. And they’re still playing God with what’s left of the human race.”

  54

  “IT REALLY STARTED WHEN I met a man named Juan Cruz,” began Mr. Urrea. “I was giving a talk at a library as part of a book tour. The book was about a family of immigrants who are trying to reconnect north of the border and build a life for themselves as part of the Ame
rican Dream. Do you understand any of that?”

  “I’m good,” said Gutsy. “Keep going.”

  Urrea nodded. “My book was being adapted into a TV series. Juan heard about me and looked me up on the Net, found my list of appearances, and was in the audience for that talk. I focused partly on the plight of people who risked everything to come to America because their country—Mexico—had always suffered through poverty, a shortage of decent-paying jobs, and none of the advantages that would allow a working man or woman to provide comfort for their families.”

  “He also talked about politics,” said Ford, “and went on a rant about how unfair the immigration system was, and how immigrants in this country were used for cheap labor and then disposed of when some politician wanted to be elected on an ‘America first’ platform.”

  “You weren’t even there, Ford. You didn’t hear my lecture.”

  “No, but every time you talked about immigration, that’s where you always went.”

  Urrea looked like he was going to argue, then smiled faintly. “Fair enough. Anyway, after I gave my lecture, I took questions from the audience. Juan Cruz stood up and said, ‘You give a lot of statistics about how many people sneak over the border, how many manage to eventually become US citizens, and how many are captured and sent back. Where do you get those numbers?’ It was a fair question, and I cited a number of sources that included government agencies and public watchdog agencies.”

  “What are those?” asked Gutsy.

  “Groups that tried to make sure the government was doing the right thing and telling the truth,” supplied Ford. “Some of them in defense of immigrants, and some dead set against them. People didn’t always agree about how many people should be let into this country, how many should be allowed to become citizens, how many should be sent back to wherever they came from. There were plenty of fights about it. Not just in state and national Congress, but actual fights in the streets.”