Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  It struck Benny how little borders meant in the Rot and Ruin. The maps and compasses they brought with them insisted they’d left California and entered Nevada, and then passed below the border of Utah into Arizona and then into New Mexico, but it was all wasteland to Benny. They saw thousands of zombies. Young and old, torn or seemingly whole.

  They found no living people at all. Not one.

  It saddened Benny. He kept hoping to find outposts, settlements, camps of traders or scavengers, and in truth they did find many of those, but they were all empty. Some had clearly been abandoned years before. Others looked newly deserted, and of these, every one of them was marked with the clear signs of violence. Spent shell casings, dried blood, some bodies too badly mangled to reanimate.

  All dead, though.

  They came to a place where a train had derailed, spilling all kinds of chemicals from ruptured tanker cars. They stopped for a while, though, and gaped at what they saw.

  All along the train tracks, and growing wild between the tumbled cars, were trees. But they were all wrong. The chemicals had worked some kind of sorcery on the genetics of the plant life and twisted what had probably been scrub pines and piñon trees into towering monstrosities, with bark that looked more like the scaly hide of some dragon. Strange, ugly fruit hung where pinecones should have grown, and swarms of deformed wasps buzzed in clouds, warring with one another, filling the air with insect rage.

  On the ground, where those fruits had fallen and split open, thick yellow worms feasted on the body of a five-legged deer. Roaches the size of mice teemed over the side of one tanker, and Benny could see something pale and obscene moving inside the ruined metal container. It looked like a praying mantis, but it was far too large.

  “No,” said Nix, and that was all that needed to be said. They backed their quads away, careful not to make any noise that would attract those insects. Then they headed south as fast as they could.

  Their plan had been to go north of Albuquerque, but they stopped again when they encountered the first of several signs that been erected across Route 40. The signs had been hand-painted on bedsheets and hung on trees and on the sides of overturned vehicles. The signs read:

  NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN

  DON’T GO THIS WAY

  “Won’t the radiation have, I don’t know, faded by now?” asked Morgie.

  “Not for another ten thousand years,” said Chong. “Let’s get the heck out of here.”

  They got the heck out of there.

  That afternoon, when they stopped to eat, Chong said, “Chemical spills, radiation, all of that . . . I always wondered what it would do to the animals and plants. Now we know.”

  Riot shook her head. “Nah, we only seen a bit of it. I heard stories going back ten years about the things that were happening out east. Not just to the birds and the bees, but to people. And maybe to the zoms, too.”

  They all looked from her to the far eastern horizon. The direction they were heading. They ate the rest of their meal in silence.

  They kept finding more signs for the meltdown, which drove them farther south, but by the time they left the last warning sign behind them, they began seeing massive swarms of zoms. It hurt Benny to have to waste more time going even farther south, but once they were on Route 285 in New Mexico, it was clear driving. That road took them through empty towns that even the dead had abandoned. However, every attempt to shoot due east again ran them into more of the swarms.

  South and south and south they went.

  They paused at the junction of 285 and Route 10 in Texas, hid their quads behind an overturned tractor trailer that stood amid an abandoned community of campers, and watched as a river of the zoms came staggering past. They all doused themselves with cadaverine, because this was no time to conserve.

  And they watched. The swarm was massive. Chong tried counting them, but gave up after he reached seven hundred. Benny figured there had to be ten times as many as that. Nix crouched beside Benny, her body trembling with fear. This was the largest horde of the dead they’d seen since Saint John’s reapers herded thousands of them against the Nine Towns.

  “Why are they doing this?” asked Morgie, who hadn’t seen flocks of zoms except during the war with the Night Church and the groups clustered around the prison.

  “It happens out in the Ruin sometimes,” said Benny. “I thought it was only because of the reapers and their whistles.”

  The reaper army had learned that the ultra-high-pitched shrill of a dog whistle would attract the zoms. They coated their own clothing with a chemical similar in effect to cadaverine and walked among them like drovers working a herd of cattle. There were no drovers here, though.

  Or so they thought.

  Lilah suddenly tensed and pointed around the rear of the overturned semi. Here and there, scattered throughout the endless mass of zoms, were people who were still clearly alive. They were ugly and rough-looking, dressed in heavy leather jackets, jeans, and boots; and they all had chains wrapped around their arms or waists. They were filthy and unkempt, but they weren’t zoms, because they talked to one another, calling out crude jokes and sometimes cursing at zoms who strayed out of the main army.

  They were not reapers; of that Benny and his friends were certain. However, they were doing exactly the same thing—driving the dead. Not with dog whistles, but through some other means that was not evident. The men were herding the staggering, shambling, rotting army toward the south of Texas, following Route 10.

  It took a long time for the swarm to pass, and when it was gone, the six teenagers emerged from behind the semi and watched the receding dust cloud.

  “G-god,” breathed Chong as he nearly collapsed back against one of the campers. He pushed up his visor with fingers that shook so badly he fumbled the simple action twice.

  Lilah stood beside him, and even her legendary calm was shaken. She nibbled at her fingernails as she stared at the mass of zoms. “Too many,” she whispered softly.

  Riot and Morgie stood in total silence, unable to speak.

  Nix pushed up her visor and wiped at some tears. Her hands did not shake as badly as Chong’s, but there was a fever brightness in her green eyes. Benny shook his head, swallowing at the thought of how hopeless it would be to get caught by a swarm like that out in the open.

  Then Nix turned around and gave a sharp cry, and when the others turned they saw more of the dead coming along the same road. This second swarm was smaller, but the third, following half an hour behind them, was the biggest yet. If the first swarm was a river, then this was an ocean.

  “H-have to be thirty or—or—or forty th-thousand of them,” stuttered Chong once they were gone.

  “Where are they going?” demanded Morgie, who was gray with fear. “What’s down that way?”

  Benny consulted the map. “San Antonio, I think.”

  They waited another half hour, but there were no more zoms, and darkness was falling.

  “We can’t risk going back the way we came,” said Nix.

  “We take that road,” said Lilah, gesturing to Route 10.

  Chong nodded. “And we sure as heck can’t go north because of that meltdown.”

  “Way I figure it,” said Benny, poring over the map, “is we go straight all the way south to the Mexican border and follow that. That’ll take us far enough away from San Antonio to stay out of whatever those swarms are all about.”

  They moved away from the wrecked truck and that stretch of the road, found an abandoned service station, and made it their home for the night. There were two zoms in the place, but Lilah and Nix quieted them without fuss. Chong and Morgie used drop cloths from the mechanics’ bays to block the windows, and they took turns standing watch.

  Deep in the middle of the night they heard another swarm pass.

  And another.

  And another.

  “Wherever they’re going,” said Benny, “I’m glad we’re not going anywhere near them.”

  They slept badly and th
e night was long.

  56

  THEY DROVE ALL MORNING AND reached the banks of the Rio Grande by noon.

  It was a wild area and much more overgrown than Benny expected, considering the barren terrain through which they’d ridden for many miles. It was as if nature had gathered all its strength and burst forth with lush new life on both sides of the winding river.

  Down here they saw all kinds of wild animals, many clearly the descendants of creatures that had either escaped from zoos or been turned loose. A small herd of zebras grazed on dandelions. Monkeys screamed and taunted them from the branches of a thousand trees. Tapirs rooted in the grass, kangaroos stood in clusters and watched them with dark eyes. Pythons slithered away from the sound of their motors, while an old, bony, weary-looking tiger watched from within the shadows beneath a towering pine. A huge tortoise crossed the road in front of them, and they all stopped to allow it to pass. Then they drove on without comment.

  A weathered sign told them they were entering the Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area, and as they approached the edge of the forest, the last of the crumbling towns faded away completely and the huge woods loomed up like something out of one of the fantasy novels Benny loved to read. Fangorn Forest, maybe. Shadows seemed to crouch beneath the boughs of those trees. It looked like a hungry place to Benny, and even as they thundered toward it he felt as if they were making a very bad decision. He did not know why he said nothing to the others. Maybe because it had been his plan to come this way and he felt trapped by the decision. Or maybe this was where all his roads inevitably led. To this dark and unforgiving place.

  They drove into the forest and it swallowed them whole as shadows turned bright day into purple gloom. The road was long since gone, cracked apart by roots and choked with dead tree limbs and nameless debris. They saw a single zom wandering toward them, but Riot used her slingshot to fire a ball bearing at it from fifteen feet. The zombie’s head snapped back and it fell into the undergrowth, vanishing as completely as if it had never existed. The six of them moved on, slowing to little more than a fast walk.

  Inside the forest the air felt different, much more humid and alive with buzzing insects. Birds sang in the trees, though only in front and behind them, with their songs falling silent as the quads rolled along. The birds yielded grudgingly to the noisy machines and resumed their gossip as soon as the engine roars faded.

  Nix came up and rode side by side with Benny. Her face was bright with sweat, and the flush darkened her freckles and the two long scars. On another face, on someone with less personal power, those scars might have been ugly; they might have been something for her to turn away to hide. Or hide behind. Not Nix, though. She owned them as proof of what she had been through and of how she had come through it. She was, as Chong once phrased it, the best example of herself. Aware of her own strengths and weaknesses. The quiet and introverted girl she’d been once upon a time had burned off, or been shucked like a cocoon to reveal a more evolved person. Loss had stolen some of her laughter, and trauma had ignited strange lights in her eyes, but experience had taught her that she owned courage, and situations had revealed her compassion.

  Benny loved her with his whole heart. And if that heart was in danger of being broken because there was no certainty of any shared future, then he knew he was luckier than he deserved for the time they had together.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she said, shaking him from his thoughts. “Not how I imagined Texas.”

  Benny looked around, trying to see the forest through her eyes. She had never liked growing up behind the fences of Mountainside. It had been her need, her desire that had fueled the quest to leave home last year to find out if there was anything beyond the fence. She viewed the world differently than he did. Differently than Chong or Morgie or anyone did, but once in a while Benny caught a glimpse of Nix’s version of the world. Sometimes it was beautiful. Sometimes it was scary and frightening.

  They drove for half a mile in silence, each of them looking at the forest and seeing it, which was never quite the same thing. Stones in the veil of tree-thrown shadows were soft with moss. Vines hung in soft curves between neighboring tree trunks. Little puffs of mist coiled up from deep inside clefts in the ground, and a gentle breeze brushed the grass and weeds so they leaned over as if weary.

  “Yeah,” Benny finally replied, “it’s pretty.”

  She cut him a look but didn’t comment. They drove on.

  After half an hour, though, the light was beginning to fail and it became harder to determine whether objects ahead were zoms or tree stumps, so Benny began looking for a place to camp. It was Lilah who found it, zooming past them and cutting off to the right, going deeper into the woods. At first Benny couldn’t understand why, but then he saw light dancing in the shadows and realized that it was flowing water, and that she’d found a small tributary to the larger Rio Grande. He signaled to the others and they all turned that way, following the Lost Girl’s quad for several dozen yards over lumpy ground. Then one by one they pulled to a stop and cut their engines.

  The scene before them was truly beautiful, and even Benny had to admit it without reservation. A ribbon of blue meandered past them, the waters kissed by beams of sunlight that slanted between the tall pines. Blue-white wading birds of a kind Benny had never seen before stalked through the rushes on the far bank, and bullfrogs thrummed from their hiding places in the mud. There was enough moisture in the air that the sunlight looked like bars of gold leaning slantwise on the tree limbs.

  “Wow,” said Morgie. “This is incredible.”

  “It’s defensible,” said Lilah bluntly. She dismounted, plucked her spear from the makeshift rack on the back of the quad, and began stalking along the bank. Riot, without saying a word, headed in the other direction. Both of them had spent a lot of the last few years living in the wild. Benny had no illusions about the gulf between what he knew—and what he’d learned from his short trips with Tom—and what they knew. He stayed where he was until they came back and said that it was safe.

  Then they got to work.

  Each of them had brought long spools of plastic-coated wire scavenged from an old store that sold radio and computer equipment. They created a network of trip wires around the camp, so that it formed a half circle, with the stream at their backs. Chong collected the empty tin cans everyone had in their saddlebags, filled them with pebbles, and hung them on the wire, using small black metal binder clips to secure them. One set of wires was strung at waist level, the other at knee height. A small animal could pass without creating a racket, but a zom of any size would be heard even in the dead of the darkest night.

  Morgie and Riot were the best cooks, and they began preparing a simple meal of beans and beef. Lilah slung a game pouch over her shoulder and vanished into the forest, returning forty minutes later with the pouch filled with summer berries, edible roots, and some nuts. They sat to eat.

  Benny noticed that Chong turned half away when he took his pills. It hurt Benny that Chong was embarrassed by what he called his “condition.” He caught Benny looking and gave him a weak smile. Benny shook his head to tell him that it was all good, no judgment. Chong looked down at the campfire and did not meet his eyes again.

  Since leaving the prison, there had been very little conversation among them. However, as the sky turned black and the stars came out, they began to talk.

  It was Lilah, usually the least talkative of them, who broke the silence.

  “Captain Ledger is alive,” she said in her spooky whisper of a voice. She said it with such certainty that for a moment no one seemed willing to offer a contrary opinion.

  Until Riot did. “Look, I like the old geezer as much as y’all do, but I don’t know that I’d bet a broke-leg hunting dog on that, Lilah. Maybe Captain Ledger got to Asheville and it was all so bad he couldn’t get out. I mean, c’mon, if someone like him was okay, then wouldn’t he have found some way of reaching out?”

  “He’s alive,” grumbled Nix. B
enny started to say something, thought better of it, and gave her an encouraging nod.

  “Something could have happened to the, um, wires,” said Morgie, who Benny knew did not really understand how satellite phones worked.

  “They had satellite phones and they had radios,” countered Riot. “We ain’t heard nothing.”

  “Maybe we have,” said Nix. “We’ve been gone almost a week now—for all we know there’s been a hundred calls from Asheville.”

  “Really?” said Riot. She nodded to Benny. “Why don’t you ask your boyfriend if there’s been a call?”

  Everyone turned to Benny.

  “What is she talking about?” demanded Lilah.

  “Yes,” said Nix coldly, “what is she talking about?”

  Benny glared at Riot, then got up, threaded his way through the wires to his quad, opened the saddlebag, removed a black object, and brought it back. He showed them what it was. A satellite phone, and the small green power light was lit.

  “I saw it when I was looking for the fuel line to get his bike going,” said Riot.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Chong.

  Benny sat down with a heavy sigh. “I wanted to. I snuck into the mayor’s office while you guys were sleeping and stole it. I . . . I guess I was hoping to be able to spring some good news on everyone. At first I didn’t say anything because we were stuck in the prison. Then, after we left, I rode point so I could use the earpiece to check it when you guys couldn’t see.”

  “Why?” asked Nix. She did not look happy. “Why hide it?”

  “Because the other night, when I was standing guard, I heard some chatter from home. Solomon Jones made a general call. One of those conference-call things where a lot of people listen in at once?” The others nodded. “He was talking about maybe sending an expedition east because there hasn’t been any word at all from Asheville. Nothing.”

  For a long time, the only sound in the world seemed to be crickets and cicadas and the lonely call of some night bird. Then Chong bent forward, put his face in his hands, and began to weep.