Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  Gutsy nodded. She knew a lot about this part. New Alamo had, after all, been a detention and relocation camp for illegal immigrants. Some of the people in town had been survivors from among the guards and staff of the camp, though they were now a minority. She remembered Mama once telling her that after the End, when the old camp was being turned into an actual town, many of the former undocumented people who’d been imprisoned there had wanted to force the old staff members out. But it was the Chess Players who stood up to argue against it. They made a case for mercy and forgiveness among all the survivors, citing that they were all badly outnumbered by los muertos and that there was strength in numbers. Not only physical strength, but by polling the crowd at a big town meeting they proved that each person there—American, Mexican American, or Mexican—had some skills or knowledge that made them useful to the whole. Carpenters and builders, hunters and farmers, engineers and designers, clergy and psychologists, cooks and tailors, and on and on. The more knowledge they had, the more of the best parts of the old world they could retain, and the more of the structure of society they could maintain.

  “I told Juan about how I’d collected the statistics he asked about,” continued Urrea, “but there was something about the way he looked at me that bothered me. It wasn’t that he didn’t agree with me or didn’t believe me. No, from the look on his face it was obvious he knew I was wrong. His certainty really rattled me, and after the lecture I looked for him. He was gone, though, but when I went out to walk back to my hotel, there he was. Scared the heck out of me, because I’ve had trouble before because of speaking my mind. Juan Cruz was angry because he said that I was making statements without knowing the truth, and he said that made me complicit. You know that word?”

  “I remember it from class,” said Gutsy, nodding. “It means to be involved with people who were doing something illegal.”

  “Good girl,” said Urrea, beaming. “Yes, that’s what it means, and that’s what Juan meant. However, he came to me because he believed I had been fooled, that I did not know the whole truth.” He paused and studied his pipe for a moment. “I have a lot of faults. We all do. But I have a great respect for the truth. I’ve never been comfortable with an ‘accepted truth,’ as some people call it. That’s not truth. It’s a distortion caused by opinion or misunderstanding or some other factor. The truth can’t have a ‘version.’ I know you get that, Gutsy, because you have that kind of mind. Always have. That’s why people don’t always trust you: because they can never be sure you’ll side with them or back the ‘version’ of the truth they insist is real. You’re not a follower. You’re not even a pack animal, despite your friends Spider and Alethea. You’re more like Sombra there.”

  She said nothing. Gutsy never needed her ego stroked and generally felt uncomfortable with compliments.

  “Get on with it, man,” said Ford quietly. “Tell her what Cruz told you.”

  “I’m getting there,” Urrea said.

  “Glaciers are faster.”

  “Okay, okay. So, after Juan and I went back and forth a few times, with me defending the statistics because I’d double-checked them while researching my book, and again while working with the TV people, and again while prepping for my lecture tour, he said that I was wrong. He told me that he was an illegal. He said that he and his family had been arrested in Corpus Christi and sent to a relocation camp. He said that he had spent weeks there and been tested, photographed, fingerprinted, blood-typed and everything else. The same with his family. And then he said that I could look for him in the system, that I could check every record and I wouldn’t find him. Or his family. When I asked him what he meant, he surprised me by taking a flash drive from his pocket.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a little device about the size of your thumb, but flat. It was part of the computer world and it stored data. You’ve seen computers—”

  “Only dead ones. But I know what they were.”

  Computers always amazed Gutsy, and she wished they still worked. The thought that almost all the world’s information had been available on a little metal and plastic box . . . that was incredible. She thought about how quickly and hungrily she devoured books and tried to imagine how easy it would be to lose herself completely in an endless ocean of things to know.

  “The information on the flash drive Juan Cruz gave me,” said Urrea, “included his complete medical history, and also the medical files on his family. Every test done in the US and in Mexico, every procedure, all of it. He’d been a computer expert in Mexico and was an excellent researcher, so he collected an incredible amount of information. He said that he’d hacked the information—stolen it from government computers—and he had proof that some of the undocumented people who had been detained were being used for some kind of medical research. Not legal stuff, though it was hidden behind various labels and lies. Because of the spread of viruses like Zika and other pathogens, all those people were being tested for the presence of diseases that might pose a threat to the United States population.”

  Gutsy heard how Mr. Urrea leaned on the word “tested.” “You’re saying that’s not what happened?”

  “Oh, they were being tested,” said Ford, “but not to prevent the spread of diseases. Oh, sure, some of the doctors at the camps were doing that, but not the ones Juan told Urrea about.”

  “No,” said Urrea. “There was a special group working for a department within the government that had no official name. It was one of many sections hidden behind bland titles or simply unnamed. They were known as ‘black budget’ groups; projects paid for by tax dollars but whose nature was never made public. Juan said that they were using those people to test the spread of different kinds of diseases.”

  “What’s so evil about that?” asked Gutsy. “Wouldn’t keeping tabs on people with diseases help to prevent outbreaks?”

  “Sure,” said Ford, “if you’re talking about tracking existing diseases. That’s not what this program was about. This was a covert biological weapons research program tasked with implementing field applications and tracking outbreak models through controlled release of infected vectors.”

  “What . . . ?”

  Ford’s smile looked like a wince of pain. “When secret government labs created bioweapons, this group infected people with them and then tracked them in order to measure how fast these designer diseases spread. It was part of something called biological warfare.”

  “They made people sick?” Gutsy demanded, appalled at the thought.

  “Oh yes,” said Urrea. “But these weren’t doomsday diseases. Nothing that would, say, endanger the general US population. No. This was much more insidious. These were diseases that already existed—mumps, measles, pertussis, rubella, tuberculosis . . . all kinds of diseases that modern medicine had either eliminated or controlled. These were new strains. Nothing so radical that they would look like designer diseases, because the misuse of antibiotics had already created mutations. And maybe that’s where the scientists in the program got the idea in the first place. Who knows? Juan didn’t know either. However, he believed that he and his family had been part of this program. His wife died of whooping cough. His three-year-old daughter died from a new strain of the mumps. All of them had been at the relocation camp. Juan found all their records. None of the other families in the same barracks as his family got sick. So . . . how did they? Why did they?”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, then held up her hands. “What does any of this have to do with what’s happening now?”

  “Because,” said Mr. Urrea, “even though the department didn’t have a name, the research team did. Groups like this use code names. Want to take a guess what their code name was?”

  Gutsy felt her mouth turn dry as dust, and there seemed to be a distant ringing in her ears. The room felt strange, as if it—or maybe the whole world—was beginning to tilt.

  Even so, she forced herself to say the words. “The Rat Catchers.”

  It wasn’t a q
uestion. It was a statement. And both the men nodded.

  “Oh my God,” breathed Gutsy.

  “It gets worse,” said Urrea softly. “The program Juan Cruz told me about was conducted partly at the camp. This camp. And partly out of a government facility hidden in a fortified bunker somewhere near here. That bunker is still there, still in operation. And, I guess, all overseen by the lab, wherever that is.”

  “How do you know that?” demanded Gutsy.

  “We don’t know all of this,” admitted Ford. “A lot of this is a patchwork of bits of information, things we’ve picked up or overheard, and a whole lot of guesswork.”

  “We’ve had years to put this much together,” said Urrea.

  “We have to tell someone about it,” cried Gutsy.

  “There’s more,” said Ford. “You know about the ravagers, yes? You know what they are?”

  “I know what everyone else knows,” said Gutsy. “They’re infected with a different kind of disease. They’re turning into los muertos, but a lot more slowly. They’re like the living dead except they know what they’re doing.”

  “All of that is true,” said Ford, “but like most things, there’s more to the story.”

  “Like maybe they’re herding los muertos?”

  “What?” asked Urrea. “Where did you hear about that?”

  “I saw it,” she said. “I didn’t tell you that part, because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Mama or the Rat Catchers.” She told them about the footprints in the wash and the smaller group of living dead with one of the ravagers moving them along.

  Urrea turned away and walked over to the window. He stood for a moment peering out through the blinds. “So, it’s true . . .”

  “What is?”

  Ford answered. “It’s true that the ravagers are infected, but it’s not with the same plague that created los muertos. They’re not going to become shamblers. They’ve already become what they are. They are living dead, but their minds aren’t gone. They can think and talk.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Gutsy,” said Urrea, “the disease they’d been infected with was not a bioweapon, not like the one that started this whole thing. They were given something that was intended to be a cure.”

  “A cure? But they’re monsters.”

  “Oh yes,” said Ford. “They are the scariest monsters in the whole world. They are the most dangerous by far. Do you want to know why?”

  “Because they can think?” she ventured.

  “No,” said Ford, “because they can remember.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Urrea turned away from the window. “They were soldiers once. Probably good soldiers. They fought the dead in a losing battle from Western Pennsylvania all the way to San Antonio. They fought an enemy that people didn’t really understand. Not at the time. And while they fought, many of them were bitten and became infected. The scientists at the lab that’s somewhere around here were supposed to try and help those soldiers. They gave them treatment after treatment that they swore would save their lives. But the scientists lied to those poor soldiers. They had no cure. All they had were a series of radical and experimental treatments. Many of those soldiers died. Badly. Screaming in agony, turning wild, attacking their fellow soldiers. It was a bloodbath. It was horrible, because they couldn’t understand what was happening to them. All they knew was that after getting a series of shots they were different from the other infected.”

  “The later generations of the treatments upset the chemical composition of the soldiers’ bloodstreams,” said Ford. “Somehow the attempted cure merged with the original plague and totally warped their brain chemistry. They developed tumors and cysts that corrupted their minds. The soldiers became incredibly violent, uncontrollable. It turned them into homicidal maniacs with an unbearable need to kill and consume.”

  “The treatment drove them mad,” said Ford, “but it didn’t kill them. Eventually those test subjects revolted. They slaughtered most of the medical staff and broke out of the lab. The chemicals in their systems continued to warp their personalities. Now there are hundreds of them out there, and there are crazy rumors that one of them has emerged as a leader among them.”

  “The Raggedy Man,” supplied Urrea. “Not sure who or what he is, but the ravagers are reported to worship him like a god. And that, young lady, is a truly terrifying thought. A god of the living dead.”

  “Raggedy Man . . . I heard that name,” said Gutsy. “The Rat Catchers seem to be scared of him. Is he a ravager too? And how is he a ‘god’ to them?”

  “Urrea’s being dramatic,” said Ford. “From what I’ve heard, he’s more like a king or a general.”

  “Equally terrifying,” said Urrea, and Ford didn’t dispute his statement.

  “We don’t know anything reliable about him,” continued Ford. “As for the ravagers, though, either they learned how to manage their madness, or the disease mutated further still. In either case, there have been reports that they can communicate with the shamblers and other mutations. They attack settlements and camps, but they also attack the soldiers from the base. All they want to do is kill anything that is not like them.”

  Urrea sighed and shook his head as if unbearably weary from all of this. Gutsy couldn’t blame him.

  “The soldiers at Mama’s grave,” she said slowly, “they were afraid of the Night Army.”

  “Yes. The Night Army is real, and they’re the ones following this Raggedy Man. It’s his army. We have our walls here in town to protect us, and the base is hidden, but the Night Army is looking for a way in to both places. They won’t give up because they can’t. We’ve left them nothing else worth having. All we’ve done is give them a reason to want to wipe us all out.” He paused and closed his eyes. “We damaged this lovely green-and-blue wonder of a world, we squandered this beautiful gift. But our extermination is not because of nature rebelling, it isn’t Mother Nature’s revenge. No. We’ve done this to ourselves. We created our own boogeymen, and now they’re hunting us.”

  “Was it the Rat Catchers who made Mama sick?” asked Gutsy. “Could they have done that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ford, “but we have to accept the possibility.”

  “And their lab is around here somewhere?”

  “Yes. Urrea and I know people who swear it’s still in operation. The Rat Catchers never stopped their work, even after what they did to their own soldiers. They are still trying to find a cure, but now they’re using the people in New Alamo as their lab rats.”

  She stared at them and the tilting room began to spin.

  “My mama died from tuberculosis,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Ford.

  “I didn’t catch it.”

  “No,” said Urrea.

  “They killed her, didn’t they?” she said in a voice that was no more than a hoarse croak. “They killed her because they knew she’d come back as one of the living dead. They killed her so they could try a cure on her.” She looked at them. “Didn’t they?”

  Neither man answered. Which was answer enough.

  Gutsy looked at them, and away, and around, as if she could see the whole town and the endless miles of the Broken Lands. Nothing looked right. None of the parts that made up the places she knew seemed to fit anymore. The day was the same, but the world had changed.

  She walked over to the window. Stumbled, fell against the sill. There was not enough air in the room. Not enough in the whole world. Then she bent and laid her face atop her balled fists. She did not cry. The horror was too great to allow that. The rage was too cold to allow it.

  Sombra stood up behind her. She heard his nails on the floor.

  He did not whine or bark.

  He howled.

  After a moment, Gutsy threw back her head and she, too, howled.

  PART TWELVE

  CENTRAL CALIFORNIA AND POINTS EAST

  TWO DAYS EARLIER . . .

  STRANGE HIGHWAYS

&n
bsp; I had crossed the line. I was free;

  but there was no one to welcome

  me to the land of freedom.

  I was a stranger in a strange land.

  —HARRIET TUBMAN

  55

  THE SIX QUADS DROVE ALONG slowly, each of the riders more watchful now than they had been before the prison fiasco. Experience was a harsh and unrelenting teacher. Even though their attempt at mass quieting was behind them, it felt fresh and raw to Benny. Everyone else was processing it at their own speed. No one was happy. No jokes, no smiles. But also—no tears. He wondered what the processing was doing to them; what it was turning them all into.

  Although the engine roars drew wandering zoms to the sides of the road, the six of them could see the creatures coming in plenty of time to go off-road when necessary to evade encounters. By midafternoon, even at a reduced rate of speed, the prison was many miles behind. They followed Route 426, skirted Bass, and headed south, past a spot where a military jet lay crumpled amid a sea of bones. All the trees around the crash site were younger than fifteen years, and Benny figured that the jet’s fuel tanks had probably exploded, burning down the older growth.

  They stopped at the deserted Bass Fork Mini Mart, where people had clearly lived for a while, but there was no one alive to greet them. Just bones. Meals were mostly conducted in silence. Their route took them along North Fork Road to where a campground was littered with tents and RVs that were completely covered with creeper vines and kudzu. They saw many zoms, but those dead were trapped by the endless coils of vines, unable to give chase. It was a sad, strange place and Benny was happy when they found open road again.

  They rode and rode and the hours melted away, and then days.

  The six of them avoided any area where they thought zoms might naturally have gathered. Towns, food warehouses, hospitals, malls, military bases. Places where people would have gone seeking food, shelter, and protection during First Night. Those places became feeding grounds for the dead.