Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  “We have New Alamo or we have the Broken Lands. That’s not an actual choice. There are no equal benefits to weigh. So, I suppose I should say that we don’t have a choice of location. We have to stay here. The one choice we do have is whether we can risk taking action or not.”

  “Kind of already know that,” said Gutsy, sitting down at the table again.

  But Ford shook his head. “No, because even there the choices are limited. If we take no action, then—given that we are all living in the research lab—we will eventually become test subjects. Like Mama, like Diego and Maria Cantu, like Mirabelle Santiago, like all the others. Like the soldiers who ‘volunteered.’ If the scientists are willing to do that to their own soldiers, then what chance do we have of living full and rewarding lives?”

  “None,” said Gutsy.

  “None,” agreed Ford. “Which means the real choice is whether we accept the risk of rebellion.”

  “They could kill us all,” said Spider, then shook his head. “No. They will kill us all. If we fight back, then maybe there’s a chance they won’t.”

  Clearly no one thought much of their chances.

  “I agree with Spider,” said Alethea. “Look, I don’t have a lot of friends in town, but there are people I care about. People I don’t want to see turned into lab rats.” She cut a look at Gutsy. “I think we all have people we care about here.” Gutsy knew Alethea was referring to Alice. They shared a private smile, but Spider caught it and gave a small nod.

  “Look,” said Gutsy, “the choices may be bad, but as Mr. Ford said, we don’t really have any other ones to make. We die or we try.”

  Urrea nodded approval. “I’m glad you didn’t say ‘die or die trying.’ ”

  “I don’t intend to die,” said Gutsy. “The situation’s hopeless, but I’m not.”

  Everyone nodded this time.

  “And,” she said, “I think I even have a plan.”

  PART FOURTEEN

  RIO GRANDE

  UNITED STATES–MEXICAN BORDER

  TWO DAYS EARLIER . . .

  LOST ROADS

  Be sure you put your feet

  in the right place, then stand firm.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  70

  IT WAS A CREATURE OUT of nightmare.

  Huge, immensely powerful, totally unnatural, infinitely deadly.

  And dead.

  It let out a roar that shattered the world around Benny. It was impossibly loud, and he screamed in pain at the assault on his ears. The gorilla pounded the dirt with two huge fists in a challenge that shook the ground. Its face was covered with long slashes and there were black holes on its chest. Bullet holes that hadn’t found the right target. The ape’s mouth and hands were smeared with blood, but Benny didn’t think it was the monster who bled. It had just come from a fight, or a kill.

  That thought darted through his head in a microsecond, because everything was in furious motion. The gorilla flung himself at Benny.

  Benny backpedaled and swung his sword, but fear robbed him of precision and balance. The tip of the sword drew a line across the creature’s chest but did not bite deep enough to do any real harm; and Benny’s left heel caught on a tree root. Suddenly he was falling, and in a surreal moment of clarity he saw the ape go hurtling over him. The ground punched Benny in the back and the shock twitched his hand open. The katana went flying.

  He fought to turn, to get back to his knees, but his body was spasming, his lungs trying to draw breath.

  The ape struck Morgie and bore him to the ground, teeth darting forward for a deadly bite; but Lilah thrust her spear into the creature’s side at the same instant Riot fired a ball bearing from her slingshot. Both weapons struck home; neither stopped the enormous beast. The ape had to be four hundred pounds, and most of that weight was in its massive arms and shoulders. Morgie screamed in pain and tried to fight, but he was helpless.

  The ape howled again and then an arrow struck its head.

  And bounced off the dense skull.

  Even so, the gorilla wheeled around and ran at the archer. Chong scrambled to fit another arrow onto the string. There was no time at all, and he shrieked and flung himself out of the way, holding the arrow but losing the bow. The ape landed hard, rolled, and came right up again, lunging now for the nearest victim: Nix.

  She had not drawn her ancient Japanese sword, Dojigiri, but instead stood in a wide-legged stance with her automatic pistol held in a two-handed shooter’s grip. The ape howled.

  She fired.

  Once, twice. Again. All in the time it took Benny to close his hand around his fallen sword.

  The first bullet struck the ape in the cheekbone. The second hit it in the center of its upper lip. The third punched a small black hole in the steep shelf of brow above its nose. The loads in the bullets she and Lilah used were not heavy, not intended for maximum stopping power. They were lighter loads that would prevent the bullet from exiting the skull. Any skull. Instead the round would be trapped inside the frame of the skull and bounce around until all the force was expended. The effect was to plow holes haphazardly through the soft, vulnerable brain.

  Joe Ledger had taught them that. He said it was a trick used by assassins. Low caliber, maximum internal damage.

  The ape did not stagger, did not roar.

  It simply lost all motor function and all nerve conduction. It was a slack corpse before it flopped to the ground.

  The six of them stood where they were, caught in postures of combat or flight, or lay as they had fallen. Staring at the nightmare creature they had just fought.

  71

  RIOT CAME OVER TO MORGIE and looked down at him. “You alive?”

  He said, “Ughh.”

  She pulled him roughly to his feet. Morgie stood swaying, clearly in pain. She checked him over for bites, found none, and then gave him a harsh two-handed push.

  “Hey!” yelped Morgie. “What was that for?”

  “For moving slower than cold dirt.”

  “I didn’t have a chance,” he protested. “Did you see how fast that thing was?”

  “Sure,” said Riot, “but you’re still slower than molasses in January. Could have got your dumb self chomped by a dead ape, which means you ain’t even as smart as a dead ape.” She turned away, no trace of good humor on her stern face. Morgie looked at her, and Benny could see that there was more hurt in his eyes than in his body. The cracks in the relationship between Morgie and Riot were getting deeper.

  “Was anyone bit?” Nix asked.

  “No,” said Benny, “but for the record, I will never sleep again.”

  They gathered in a circle around the dead thing.

  “Zombie silverback gorilla,” mused Chong. “Well, that’s something you just don’t see every day.”

  “Don’t want to see one again,” said Nix with a shiver. She glanced around as if expecting the trees to be full of them.

  Lilah knelt and touched it, prodding the skin, poking into the muscles. “Hasn’t been dead long,” she pronounced. “Day. Maybe two.”

  “How’d it turn?” asked Morgie. “I thought it was only wild pigs.”

  “You heard the same rumors we’ve been hearing, Morg,” said Benny.

  “Sure, but I didn’t believe any of them.”

  “Believe them now, genius?” said Riot. Morgie colored but said nothing.

  The woods were very thick, the morning mist still masking what was around them. Chong turned away and squinted through the fog. “You know, guys, we kind of should have seen this coming.”

  “How could we possibly expect a zombie gorilla?” asked Benny.

  “Not that specifically,” replied Chong, “but something weird. I mean, think about it. Tom was the first one who warned us about thinking we know what’s out here. I remember his exact words. He said, ‘People in town refer to everything beyond the fence line as the great Rot and Ruin. We assume that it’s all nothing but a wasteland from our fence all the way to the Atlantic Ocean thr
ee thousand miles away.’ He said we can’t know for sure about anything.”

  “Asheville’s in the east,” said Morgie.

  “Sure, but think about what we know of Asheville. They turned it into a kind of kingdom. They protected thousands of acres of farmland and everyone pretty much lives inside the city. You’ve met plenty of soldiers and tech staff from there, Morgie. Can you remember any of them saying what was happening in Virginia, or Pennsylvania, or Maryland? No, because they’ve been so busy trying to create a safe place in Asheville that no one’s gone looking.”

  “They would have told us if there were other zom animals. . . .”

  “Would they? I mean, sure, if they knew, but America is huge. Something like four million square miles. All of Asheville, including all the farmland, is like sixty square miles. They don’t drive out here like we’re doing. They use helicopters.”

  “They’d have seen something like this from the air.”

  “Really? With all the helicopters and planes they have, how come they didn’t know about the Night Church and the reaper army? I mean, okay, Captain Ledger knew some, but even he had no idea how big their army was . . . and that was an army. Some zombie animals wouldn’t be even a blip to them.”

  “You have a point to all this or are you just talkin’ to hear yourself talk?” asked Riot irritably.

  “I do,” said Chong. He pointed into the mist. “We don’t know anything about what’s out there. We don’t know if there are more animals like this. We don’t know if there’s maybe a whole other place like Asheville, maybe in New England or Montana, or Canada. All that radiation we saw, and the toxic chemical spill? You saw what it was doing to the plants. Put that in the same pot with the fact that we know for sure the scientists were experimenting with mutagens, and then tell me if there isn’t a real chance that a zombie gorilla isn’t the worst thing we might see. Remember those lions in Nevada last year? Or the rhino in California? What if they turned zom? Maybe it wasn’t zoms who overran Asheville. Maybe it’s something we don’t even know about yet.”

  “Okay, so now we’re scared,” said Nix. “So what? We were scared before.”

  “Maybe,” said Chong, “we haven’t been scared enough. The world here is different than where we came from and I, for one, don’t want to make the mistake of assuming I know what’s what. There could be things out here we’re not ready to face.”

  And as if in answer to his words, a scream slashed through the mist, rising high into a shriek of unbearable agony.

  It was a human scream.

  72

  DESPITE THE NEED, THE HUMANITY, and the urgency of the scream, they did not immediately go running into the forest. The mist was like a wall, and Chong’s words of warning had not been erased by the cry. The infected gorilla was still there, a reminder even in death.

  “Where is it?” whispered Morgie, turning first one way and then another. He had his bokken in his strong hands.

  “There,” said Nix, pointing to their left.

  “No,” said Lilah, looking straight ahead. “There.”

  That direction was where the gorilla had come from. Benny glanced down at the blood on its fangs and hands. Nix and Riot did too, and their eyes met as understanding flooded in.

  “That thing attacked someone else before it came after us,” he said.

  Lilah shook her head. “Or it has a mate who is hunting someone else.”

  “Crap,” said Morgie.

  There was another scream, and this time it wasn’t a wordless howl but a definite plea in a man’s desperate voice. “Oh God . . . help me . . .”

  Benny was moving before it finished.

  “Wait!” cried Morgie, but Nix and Lilah plunged into the mist right behind Benny. Chong drew a breath, fitted an arrow, and followed. When Morgie turned to appeal to Riot, she was gone. He hadn’t seen her fade into the fog. Morgie lingered for a moment longer. “We’re all going to die out here,” he said, repeating what he’d said before they left Mountainside. This time they felt less like a complaint to his ears and far more like a prophecy.

  Even so, he gripped his wooden sword and followed.

  • • •

  Up ahead, Benny moved as quickly as he could through the mist, but it was like running through a dream. The screams rose and fell, and the fog distorted them, making some cries sound like they came from right where he was, while others seemed far away and in a totally different direction.

  Lilah caught up and passed him, and he let her lead, trusting her judgment far more than his own. Nix touched Benny’s shoulder to let him know she was beside him, and they moved together.

  “Please, God . . . help me . . . oh God . . .”

  The cries were continuous now, and Benny was certain they were getting closer to the source. The fog was thinning too, the farther they were from the stream. He could see trees taking shape as more than rumors, and their solidity steadied his feet and his mind. Some, though; not entirely.

  Chong’s words echoed in his mind. Maybe we haven’t been scared enough. There could be things out here we’re not ready to face.

  “Thanks a bunch,” Benny grumbled.

  “Here!” called Lilah, and a split second later he heard her scream too.

  • • •

  “Lilah!” bellowed Chong as he appeared out of nowhere and pushed between Benny and Nix before vanishing into the mist ahead.

  “Wait,” cried Benny, but then he broke into a run. Nix was faster in a fight but Benny could outrun her, and he did so now, leaping a fallen log and plunging into a dense stand of vine-covered pine trees. The ground sloped sharply away and he fell three feet down a decline, skidded on moss, caught his balance and outran his own momentum so that he emerged into a clearing in a fast run.

  He ran straight into the center of a bloody battle. Not with another gorilla, nor with any other infected animal. She was fighting three big men . . . and with a shock Benny realized that these were the same kind of men he’d seen herding the swarms of zoms. All leather, spiked gloves, and chains. One held a big logging ax, another had a pitchfork, but the third clamped the stump of his right wrist as blood shot from it with fire-hose force. His hand, finger still hooked through the trigger guard of an automatic pistol, lay on the ground at Lilah’s feet, and there was fresh blood on her spear. Behind her, sprawled on the ground, was a fourth man who was covered in terrible bleeding wounds. He was different from the brutal attackers; dressed like a soldier, in forest-pattern camouflage and a military equipment belt.

  The closest of the three attackers spun toward Chong and swung his ax, but Chong went into a sliding skid beneath the swing and fired his arrow while still in motion. The arrow struck the man in the shoulder, but the brute plucked it out of the thick leather without even a wince. He raised his ax for a downward killing blow.

  Benny leaped into the air and slashed at him with a blow so furious and powerful that it cut the attacker nearly in half. Blood splashed the trees.

  That left the wounded man and the one with the pitchfork. Nix shot the second man in the chest twice. A double-tap that knocked him back against a tree. He winced in pain, but then laughed and rushed at her.

  It was so weird, so unexpected, so impossible that Nix froze for a second.

  “He’s . . . he’s a zom!” cried Chong.

  Benny pivoted and back-kicked the man in the ribs, knocking him sideways against another tree, and Lilah spun and stabbed him in the stomach.

  The killer froze, his pitchfork falling with a thud, impaled on the heavy blade. But not dead. He grinned with bloody teeth and with a savage growl tore the spear from Lilah’s hands. He tore the blade from his stomach, spun the spear in his hands as if he was familiar with such weapons, and rushed at Nix.

  She shot him three more times. Twice in the chest, which did no good at all. Her third bullet, however, punched through the bridge of his nose, and he went down all at once into a sloppy, boneless sprawl.

  That left the third attacker. He bled
from the stump, but with his remaining hand he pulled a knife from a thigh sheath and tried to stab Lilah in the back. Then Morgie and Riot were there, closing in on him from two sides. Riot hit him in the throat with a ball bearing from her slingshot, and Morgie smashed him across the temple with the bokken. The man staggered, fought to remain on his feet, kept trying to stab.

  Morgie hit him again. And again.

  And again.

  What was left of the man fell.

  Benny started to rush over to the injured man these three killers had been attacking when something clamped around his ankle. He looked down in abject horror to see that the man he’d cut in two had an iron grip on Benny’s ankle. Blood swirled around the man, and Benny could see that it was both red and black, but the two colors were not mixing, as if the human blood would not tolerate joining with the oily black blood.

  It sent icy needles through Benny, because he had seen this before.

  This was how the R3 zombies bled. The ones who were smarter, faster, more dangerous.

  But these men had used weapons. They were dressed like fighters, like members of a gang. Even the R3’s were not that sophisticated. What, then, was this?

  Benny raised his sword and swept the blade down. The neck and the brain stem parted and the man’s hand twitched once and then relaxed.

  Morgie stared at the fallen man. “Is he . . . I mean . . . what . . . ?”

  “He’s an R3,” said Nix, her voice hushed.

  “No,” said Benny, “he’s something worse than that.”

  73

  A GROAN MADE THEM ALL turn, and they hurried over to the injured soldier. It was easy to see that he was horribly injured. Dying.

  “Morgie, Riot, stand watch,” said Benny as he knelt beside the man.

  He, Lilah, Nix, and Chong did their best with strips of cloth to stanch the bleeding wounds, but they all knew it was hopeless. There were knife wounds all over the man’s body, but there were also bite marks. Human teeth. The man’s eyes were filled with pain, but he blinked them as clear as he could and looked up at the faces around him.