Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Okay, fine,” said Gutsy. “My house. Two hours.”

  “No, I—”

  “Want me to come to your place?”

  Karen shook her head.

  “Okay, then, like I said, two hours. Come in the back way. I’ll leave the door unlocked. You’d better be there, Karen. I’m not joking.”

  With that she turned away. Sombra looked back a couple of times, but Gutsy did not. She didn’t want to see what her words and her threats were doing to Karen. She was angry, she was filled with hate, but she wasn’t that cruel.

  65

  GUTSY LOOKED UP AT THE sun and judged that she had about an hour of good daylight left before the slow summer twilight.

  She and Sombra did not head home, but instead took another circuitous route back to Misfit High. However, Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford were already gone. Gutsy took a sheet of paper and wrote a quick note, paused, considered, and wrote a second one. She folded them both and left the school.

  Spider and Alethea were out front of the Cuddlys’ place again, though now they were shaving carrots. Mrs. Cuddly was inside, but even so Gutsy didn’t slow down or do anything more than say, “Hey.”

  One of the notes fell beside the basket of unpeeled carrots. Gutsy and Sombra walked on.

  The Chess Players were on their shaded porch, deep into a game, with pieces scattered across the board and cups of tea steaming beside them. Neither of them glanced up at her as Gutsy stepped onto the porch and leaned against the rail.

  “Who’s winning?” she asked casually.

  “I am,” said Ford.

  “You wish,” said Urrea.

  When Ford flicked a glance at her, Gutsy showed him a small corner of the note she had concealed in her hand. She raised a single eyebrow. Ford moved his bishop, and when he reached for his tea, his hand brushed the spine of an old paperback, knocking it to the floor. Gutsy bent to pick it up and saw that it was a dog-eared copy of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” a frightening epic poem inspired by the legend of the quest for the Holy Grail and the story of the Fisher King, both of which had been taught in school. Gutsy covertly slipped the note between the pages and handed the book back. She lingered there and watched Ford advance toward checkmate and then left, pretending to look bored.

  She stopped at the butcher shop to buy a beef bone for Sombra, then went home.

  While the coydog attacked the bone with savage glee, Gutsy used the bathroom, washed her face and hands, went into the kitchen, made a light meal, ate almost none of it, and waited.

  The windup clock on the wall ticked through what felt like ten million seconds.

  That was fine.

  It gave Gutsy lots of time to think.

  66

  THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR was light and quick. A nervous, tentative sound. Even so, Sombra leaped to his feet and barked.

  “It’s okay,” soothed Gutsy, and the coydog immediately fell silent, though he stayed alert.

  Gutsy opened the back door. Karen Peak stood there, dressed in dark clothes with an old man’s porkpie hat pulled low. She pushed her way inside and closed the door.

  “No one saw me,” she said. “I was careful.”

  “Good,” said Gutsy. “Come on. We can talk in the kitchen.”

  She led the way, but as soon as they entered the kitchen, Karen cried out and backed up, her hand moving toward a pistol she now wore in a leather holster clipped to her belt.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  At the table, Spider, Alethea, and the Chess Players looked at her. Only Alethea was smiling, but it was a nasty smile. Rainbow Smite lay on the table, with the studded end pointing toward Karen. Gutsy, who stood very close to the officer, darted out a hand and snatched the pistol from the holster before Karen could stop her. She ejected the magazine and racked the slide to remove the chambered bullet, and then she handed the weapon to Mr. Urrea, who placed it on the table.

  “Sit down, Karen,” said Ford, waving his hand toward one of the two empty chairs.

  “This is insane,” said Karen. “I’m not going to—”

  Gutsy shoved her toward the chair, and she wasn’t very nice about it.

  “Sit down,” she said. Sombra snarled. Karen looked around, but there was not a friendly eye in the room.

  She sat, perching like a nervous bird on the edge of the chair. Gutsy sat next to her.

  “Here’s how we’re going to do this,” she said. “My friends all know what I know. I told them what little you told me. They know about Sarah.”

  “And our hearts break for you and your daughter,” said Urrea.

  “But we all need to know what you know,” continued Gutsy. “You’re going to tell us.”

  “As a measure of trust,” said Ford, “we’ll tell you what we know. All of it. Understand, Karen, if we thought you were the enemy, we wouldn’t do that. We’d hold back key facts to see if you tried to lie or twist the truth. But we’ve known you since the beginning. You were with us on the Raid. You’re brave and tough and, for the most part, honest.”

  Gutsy saw Spider mouth the words, for the most part.

  “We’re giving you the benefit of the doubt,” added Urrea. “You told Gutsy that Sarah was sick and intimated that the Rat Catchers were responsible. That’s beyond horrible, but it makes a kind of sense. It sounds like they needed a way to put a leash on you, and everyone knows how much you love Sarah.”

  “Then you know why I can’t talk about this,” insisted Karen.

  “It’s a risk,” said Gutsy. “Sure. I don’t care. Something bad is happening here and it’s getting worse. I care about Sarah too, but I nearly died the other night. The Rat Catchers know that I know something about them. They’re probably going to come after me. Maybe as soon as tonight.”

  Alethea drummed her painted fingernails on the handle of her bat. “Which means that you have to tell us everything, ’cause you don’t want to find out what’s going to happen to you if anyone puts a finger on Gutsy.”

  “Let’s not resort to threats,” said Ford, but Spider gave him a withering look.

  “Yeah, Mr. Ford, I think threats are what we need right now. I mean . . . what else do we have?”

  “We have trust,” said Urrea. He looked at Karen. Everyone did.

  She closed her eyes and sat in silence for several seconds.

  “Okay,” she said, opening her eyes and turning to Gutsy. “But you won’t like it.”

  “People tell me that,” said Gutsy, “and they’re usually right. So, no, I don’t expect to like it, but I think I need to know it.”

  Karen nodded.

  Ford and Urrea told her what they’d told Gutsy. Then Gutsy, Spider, and Alethea retold their part of it, going into great detail. Karen listened without interrupting, nodding occasionally. Sometimes dabbing at tears that tried to form in her eyes.

  67

  “YOU’RE RIGHT ABOUT A LOT of things,” said Karen, “but there’s so much more to the story. Even I don’t know all of it, but . . . well . . . I know a lot.”

  “How do you know?” asked Gutsy.

  “Some of it was stuff I knew from when the town council was formed. They know too. Half the guards know. Some of the people in town, too. Some are in on it, and I mean really in on it. They’re not really townsfolk. They’re spies, plants. Or maybe they’re watchdogs. A little of all of that.” Karen folded her hands on the tabletop. “Other stuff I pieced together from things I heard or saw. And some of it was told to me because of my job and they needed me to be able to cooperate.”

  Everyone nodded.

  “The stories about a hidden base are true,” said Karen. “It’s here. The official name is the Laredo Chemical and Biological Weapon Defense Research Facility. You won’t have heard of it. It was what they called a black budget site. Actually illegal according to a whole lot of treaties with other countries. All bioweapons testing was supposed to have been stopped by the major powers, but none of them ever really stopped. They kept going in secret on the as
sumption that other countries would still be developing their biological warfare weapons, and if we stopped doing research we wouldn’t be prepared. They fudged their way through congressional budget hearings by saying that their whole purpose was to study bioweapons in order to create vaccines and countermeasures.” She cut a look at the teenagers. “Do you understand any of that?”

  “Enough,” said Alethea. “We’ve had pretty good history and science teachers.”

  The Chess Players gave her small nods and smiles.

  “Okay,” said Karen, “so the base was already here. Secret, hidden. Then the End happened. It wasn’t an attack by another country, but the plague that was used had been developed in Russia back in the 1980s, during the Cold War. It wasn’t a virus or a bacterium. It was a parasite like the green jewel wasp and some others. They wanted a bioweapon that would not only infect the host, but drive the host to aggressively spread the parasite larvae through bites. They also engineered it so the infected would feed on animal proteins in order to keep going, even while shutting down a lot of the body’s unnecessary functions—higher reasoning, natural human reproduction, and like that. They wanted a host that was all about protecting and perpetuating the bioweapon, and that’s what they got. The inventor, Dr. Herman Volker, made it worse, though, because he genetically reengineered the parasites so that they no longer had a normal life cycle. Like some jellyfish and these tiny freshwater animals called hydra, the parasites were designed to endlessly regenerate. All they need is protein, and not much of that. When they don’t get protein, they go into a kind of hibernation, which is why you sometimes see los muertos just standing there, year after year. Never quite rotting all the way to nothing. Everything the living dead do, everything they are, was designed into them.”

  “What is the basis for the plague, then?” asked Urrea. “What are the parasites?”

  “They used different kinds of parasites found in nature,” explained Karen. “The bioweapon was called Lucifer, and there are a lot of different versions of it. The one that started the plague was Lucifer 113, the one Dr. Volker redesigned after he defected to the States.”

  She explained about Dr. Volker’s warped idea of punishment for a serial killer at a prison in Western Pennsylvania. She explained how the unfortunate arrival of a major storm slowed down the police and military attempts to control the spread of the outbreak, and how it then went on to spread around the world as people fled the area. Movement of populations via cars, trains, and planes helped it spread.

  Gutsy felt like she’d been punched in the face. She glanced around at the looks of horror on the faces of everyone at the table. Even Karen. Or maybe especially Karen, since this was knowledge she had been carrying around with her.

  “After the End,” continued Karen, “the base here kept working, and they established a field lab too. Both of them are still here. All this time they’ve been trying to come up with a cure, with treatments for those who are infected but not yet turned. They’re also trying to modify the behavior of the fully infected.”

  “Modify?” asked Spider.

  “I’m getting to that. Originally they scrambled to come up with a mutating agent to disrupt the parasite life cycle in the hopes that Lucifer 113 would become inert. They tried different versions on animals, trying to find a species that could be infected, but they didn’t have much luck. That was part of the design of the bioweapon, because the last thing they wanted was infected flies, mosquitoes, rats . . . or any of that.”

  “People have been talking about los muertos wild pigs,” said Alethea.

  Karen nodded. “Sure. Pigs are biologically close to humans. So are monkeys, and there were a lot of test animals at the base. Didn’t work, though. The wild boars escaped from the lab somehow and since then have attacked everything, including other pigs and even other animals. I heard something about them hoping that if the infected mated with or infected wild boars it might result in the wild boars developing some kind of immunity. But no. It was all a mess. What did happen out there was that some other kinds of animals survived the bites. All kinds of species, and the mutated strain in the hogs somehow broke through the resistance and caused interspecies infection. And some of them had babies. The babies were different. They carried the disease in radical new forms, and none of them were benign. It seemed that every generation, every new strain, was either just as dangerous as the original, or more so.”

  “All kinds of animals?” asked Spider.

  “I doubt anyone knows the answer to that. The base had small testing stations all over, mostly disguised as small settlements of refugees, but most of them have been wiped out.”

  “By the wolf packs?” suggested Ford, and Karen nodded.

  “And that’s where this gets even worse.”

  Alethea gave her a sour look. “Speaking for everyone here, I don’t particularly like ‘worse’ when we’re talking about the apocalypse. We already have los muertos, half infected, mutant animals, wolf packs, and the Rat Catchers. Is there a ‘worse’?”

  “Before I answer that,” said Karen, “let me say this. I’m not defending what those people are doing, but I understand why they’re doing it. And maybe I even understand why they’re being so cold and brutal about it.”

  “Oh, I need to hear this,” said Alethea.

  Karen gave her a hard look. “Think about the problem, then. The plague killed most of humanity and turned them into flesh-eating monsters. There were billions of living dead and only thousands of us left. Every single person who dies, no matter how they die, comes back as one of them. There’s no government left, not much in the way of resources, and the clock is ticking. If you were one of the scientists in the lab, and you believed—actually believed—that it was on you to find a way to save humanity from becoming completely extinct, tell me, Alethea, how far would you be willing to go?”

  “I wouldn’t make healthy people sick,” said Alethea firmly. “I wouldn’t spread other kinds of diseases, like the one that killed Gutsy’s mama. I wouldn’t let anyone else die, because that would just make the problem worse.”

  Karen shook her head. “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “Then uncomplicate it,” said Gutsy. “Why did they give Mama tuberculosis?”

  Karen’s hands balled into fists. “For the same reason they gave the plague to my daughter, Sarah.”

  “Why?” demanded Spider, Ford, and Gutsy all at the same time.

  “Because they needed to control us,” said Karen. “With me, they needed to put me on a leash, but at the same time they wanted me healthy enough to do my job.”

  “And Mama . . . ?” asked Gutsy quietly.

  “She was a threat to them. Most of the hospital staff aren’t part of this. Your mama wasn’t a part of any of it. But she was smart and she was putting some pieces together. Making you sick wouldn’t have been enough, so they made her sick instead. They did it with a disease she was exposed to anyway at the hospital. It took her fast, though. Way too fast for ordinary tuberculosis. We were told it was a naturally mutated strain, but she didn’t believe that. Though before she could do much about it, she was too sick to even move.”

  Gutsy sat in a well of silence, unable to move or speak. Alethea and Spider got up and came around and hugged her. The Chess Players sat immobile. Karen looked down at her hands.

  “There’s more to it,” said Karen slowly. “Some of it I know, and some I don’t know.”

  “Tell me,” whispered Gutsy. “Tell us all of it.”

  68

  “I OVERHEARD SOME THINGS I wasn’t supposed to hear,” said Karen. “I was in the hospital one night to get medicine for Sarah and I heard two people talking behind a screen. One of them was the woman soldier you saw. Captain Bess Collins. She runs the base and oversees security at the field lab. I report to her, so I recognized her voice.”

  “What was the substance of the conversation?” asked Urrea.

  “I only caught parts of it because they were talking in hushed
voices, but from what I was able to piece together, they’ve been working on a new generation of the mutagen. It seemed pretty clear to me that they’ve just about given up on actually stopping the plague. Every attempt to do that just has resulted in a worse mutation, and I’ll tell you more about that in a second. The conversation I heard was about the new thing they’ve been trying for the last two years. It was starting to show results that made them think they were getting somewhere. Something that, if it works, would change the nature of all los muertos. Lucifer 113 changed the brain chemistry so that all higher reasoning was detached from motor function. I’m not a scientist, so I can’t explain the actual biochemical process, but this new plan was supposed to somehow repair that damage, restore the connection. At least in a percentage of the dead.”

  “For what reason?” asked Spider.

  “To give them back their ability to control their bodies,” said Karen. “To make them stop wanting to feed, stop wanting to bite.”

  They sat with that for a moment.

  “That’s actually kind of horrible,” said Spider. “To suddenly wake up and know you’ve been a flesh-eating monster. That’s their great master plan?”

  “I’m explaining it wrong,” said Karen. She asked for a glass of water and Gutsy gave her one. Karen took several sips, then set her cup down. “The scientists seem to think that the living dead aren’t actually brain-dead. They think that the consciousness of the host is still there, and still aware, but the parasites prevent it from taking control of any actions. Think about that. The living dead do some things already—walk, some even run, a few can climb, some pick up rocks, some can turn doorknobs. There’s some memory of things they used to do lingering inside. Lucifer 113 had not been designed to destroy higher function, not really, but to disconnect it from motor functions. That’s what it does in nearly all of them. The ones who can still do a few things are exceptions.”

  “Okay,” said Ford, “that is profoundly worse.”