“You’re . . . you’re a bunch of . . . kids . . . ?” he gasped, struggling to talk. “Who are you? Are you from town?”
“Town?” asked Nix. “What town?”
The man seemed confused by the question. “There’s only one town. The settlements, the camps . . . they’re all gone. There’s only . . . New Alamo.”
“New Alamo?” echoed Nix. “Wasn’t everyone at the old Alamo killed in a war?”
“Look, mister, we’re not from here,” Benny said gently. “We’re just traveling through.”
The confusion lingered. “Traveling from where? To where?”
Benny glanced at Nix, who shrugged and then nodded. “We live in central California,” said Benny.
The man gave a weak shake of his head. “No way. California’s gone. They nuked it and that set off earthquakes. It fell into the sea.”
“No,” said Chong, “that’s not true. They dropped bombs on some of the cities—Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, a few other places—but it didn’t cause earthquakes, as far as I know. We live in the mountains in Mariposa County, in the Sierra Nevadas.”
“There’s nowhere else,” mumbled the soldier. “We killed the world. All that’s left is New Alamo.”
“Listen to me,” said Benny, leaning close. “You’re wrong. There are nine towns in California. Thirty thousand people. And a lot more in Asheville, in North Carolina. There’s even a government. We’re coming back. The world’s coming back.”
Blood ran like tears from the man’s lacerated face. “I heard those stories,” he wheezed. “About Asheville. It’s not true. There’s nothing there but the dead.”
“We’re heading there now,” said Benny, choosing not to tell him about the fact that the capital of the American Nation might be as dead as this man thought it was. “But first, where’s this New Alamo town? We’ll take you there. Do they have doctors there?”
The man laughed. Actually laughed. “Doctors? Yeah, kid . . . they have lots of doctors.” His laugh turned into a coughing fit that left his lips flecked with fresh blood.
“Who are these men?” asked Lilah gruffly. “They’re zoms or half-zoms?”
“I . . . don’t know what that means,” gasped the man. His voice was fading and the glaze was returning to his eyes. “They’re ravagers. They’re . . . infected. These three . . . they were part of a pack of five. Scouting party. I . . . got one. Infected gorilla got another.”
“We met the gorilla,” said Chong. “It’s dead.”
The man blinked in surprise, then attempted a smile. “Tough kids.”
“Tough times,” said Benny.
“Tougher than you know,” said the man.
“Why did these men hurt you?” prompted Nix. “You said these ravagers were scouts? Scouts for who?”
“For the . . . Night Army . . .”
“What’s that?” asked Chong.
The man was weakening, fading, but he managed to tell them a horror story. At first Benny thought he was raving and delirious, but the more the man spoke, the more convinced Benny became of the reality of an army of infected killers backed by hordes of shamblers—which Benny took to mean the R1 zoms. He said that there was a man who was able to control all the dead. The soldier called him the Raggedy Man, but Benny was half-sure the guy was losing it, becoming delirious.
Then the soldier coughed again and this time the fit did not seem to want to end. He convulsed and thrashed and vomited blood onto the grass, then settled back, eyes glassy and skin gone yellow-gray. “Please,” he said in a faint whisper, “the ravager scouts wanted to know the hidden way . . . in. To the base, I mean. There are tunnels. Tunnels into town, too. If the ravagers find the tunnels and the weapons, everyone is going to die. My friends at the base . . . the doctors . . . everyone in New Alamo.”
Another coughing fit, worse than the others. Terrible to see. He was weeping when it was over.
“Please . . . you need . . . to warn them. The town. The council. They think help . . . will come.” He shook his head. “They don’t know what’s really coming. Please, don’t waste time . . . on me. I’m no good. I’m nothing. I’m a Rat Catcher. I was part . . . of it. I know I’m going . . . to hell.”
“No, don’t say that,” soothed Nix, but the man gave a single violent shake of his head.
“It’s funny,” said the soldier bitterly, “but we believed them. The doctors. The captain. We believed every lie. They told us we were trying to save the world. They lied. We . . . lied.” His hand caught Benny’s wrist with surprising strength. “The people . . . the people in town. Please . . . tell them to run . . . while they still can. No help is coming. The only chance they have is to run. Maybe it’s no chance at all. But . . . it’s all they have. Tell them the Night Army is coming. . . .”
“We’ll tell them,” promised Benny. “Where’s the town?”
“Close,” he said, and his voice was noticeably weaker now. “Go straight northeast from here, you can’t miss it. Big walls made from stacked cars. The Night . . . Army may already . . . be there. But listen,” he wheezed, “there’s a . . . way . . . in.”
Benny bent closer still. “Tell me.”
The man spoke for as long as he could and Benny listened. Nix and Chong leaned in, but they could not hear anything. And then Benny couldn’t hear anything else. He straightened and looked down at the soldier, and saw that he was gone. Benny sighed and quieted the man.
The four of them got to their feet and told Morgie and Riot everything.
“What do we do now?” asked Nix.
“It’s not our problem,” said Morgie. “It’s not our town. If there’s an army out there, we have to get away from here right now.”
“How can we just go?” demanded Chong.
“How can we stay?” Morgie countered. “If we do this, we might never get to Asheville. Come on, Chong, you of all people have to see that. You’re going to run out of pills if we don’t keep moving.”
Lilah turned to Chong. “He’s right. We have to go.”
“Kind of agree,” said Riot. “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”
Chong walked a few feet away and stopped, his hands pressed to the sides of his head as if keeping it from cracking open.
Benny leaned close to the others and spoke in an urgent whisper. “We can’t go to Asheville. Not now. Not after what he said.”
“We have to,” snarled Lilah, her voice lowered but intense. “Chong can’t risk it.”
“Look, this isn’t only about Chong,” said Benny, and before Lilah could say anything, or possibly stab him, he continued. “It’s not about any of us, or even all of us. This is a whole town full of people. We have to at least warn them. We can’t just let them die.”
“You don’t even know if that man was telling the truth,” said Nix with quiet ferocity.
“Come on,” said Benny, “you think he was going to use his last breath to mess with us?”
“He said he was a bad guy, Benny. He admitted that he lied to people. He could have been lying to us. Or maybe he was just out of his mind.”
Benny shook his head. “I can’t take that chance.”
“Why not?” she demanded.
“Because he has a soul,” said Chong. They all looked at him. He turned slowly to face them. “You guys can’t whisper worth crap.”
“Chong, I—” began Nix, but he shook his head.
“Let me talk,” he said. “Morgie, Riot . . . you’re right. Lilah? You’re right. This isn’t our problem. This isn’t our fight. We don’t know these people and we have other responsibilities.”
“That’s what I mean,” began Morgie, but again Chong shook his head.
“I’m infected and, yeah, I really want those pills.” He smiled. “We all know that even with those pills I’m not going to live as long as you guys. Doc McReady said I could have ten or twenty good years. Okay. So, maybe I’ll make it to my fortieth birthday. Maybe I won’t. You always joke about how I’m half-dead already,
Morg. You’re not wrong. But listen to me, okay? Asheville is a long way from here. From what that man said, this New Alamo place is about an hour away by quad. If we turn and sneak off, then that defines who we are.”
“The people in Asheville need us too,” said Riot.
Chong frowned. “Do they? I mean, really—what can six of us do if Asheville is overrun? Other than sneak in, get my pills, and sneak out again, what are we really hoping to do? We never found Captain Ledger. We probably won’t. We’ve nearly died a bunch of times already. One of these times we will die. You know it as well as I do.”
No one spoke.
Chong nodded. “So, given a choice between going on a possibly suicidal and definitely selfish trip to Asheville or taking a chance of helping a whole town full of people who are still alive, then is that really a choice? That man gave us information those people need to know. I can’t speak for anyone else, and I’m not going to ask any of you to go with me, but I am taking my quad and going to find New Alamo.”
“What if it’s overrun?” asked Riot.
“Then it’s overrun. If we can get away, we will. But what if it’s not yet overrun?”
“What if we get stuck there when this Night Army attacks?” asked Morgie.
“We have all the weapons we took from the prison,” said Benny.
“Don’t forget my li’l ol’ slingshot,” said Riot with a sour grin.
Morgie did not return her smile. “All we’d be is casualties.”
“No,” said Nix. She walked over to stand beside Chong. “When we found out the Night Church was taking an entire army to the Nine Towns, there were only five of us, and look what happened.”
Morgie’s fists were balled at his sides. “This is different.”
“I don’t know,” said Riot. “Night Church, Night Army. Kind of has a theme. Feels like old times.”
“What are you saying?” demanded Morgie. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of doing this too.”
“Morgie,” she said, “I’m getting tired of always talking you into doing the right thing. I mean, I love ya and all, but you are a lot of hard work.”
She went and stood with Nix.
Lilah bent and picked up her spear. “If my town boy wants to fight, then I’m going to fight with him.”
Morgie turned pleading eyes to Benny. “Come on, man . . . you always act like you got elected leader of our gang. Maybe you can talk some sense into them.”
Benny walked over to him and clapped Morgie on the shoulder. “I was on his side before he even said anything.” He joined the others.
Morgie stood his ground.
“Face it, sweet cheeks,” said Riot, “you know you’re going to cave. You always do. You always know we’re right.”
Morgie slid the bokken through his belt, then bent and picked up the dead killer’s timber ax and straightened, laying it over his shoulder. The others were grinning.
“No,” he said.
They stared at him, and Riot wore a half smile, waiting for him to deliver the punch line to the joke. Morgie’s face was stone.
“I love you, Riot,” he said. “I love all of you, but you’re wrong about this.”
“What are you saying?” asked Riot, her smile crumbling.
“I’m saying you guys go do what you think you have to do,” said Morgie. “I love you guys for wanting to do this, but it’s the wrong call. There’s a town here, sure, but the whole American Nation is back east. So, you do what you got to do, but I’m going to Asheville.”
With that he turned and walked away, vanishing into the mist. They stood staring in disbelief. Riot took a couple of quick steps after him, stopped, looked back, and seemed caught between two terrible choices.
“It’s okay,” said Chong. “Go with him.”
She lingered a moment longer. “I . . .”
That was all she said, and then she whirled and, light as a dancer, melted into the mist. After a long, silent minute they heard the sounds of two quads roaring to life. They turned to follow the noise as the machines moved away and slowly, slowly faded to silence.
“Oh my God,” murmured Nix.
Lilah grabbed Chong, spun him toward her, and kissed him very hard on the lips, then shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “You’re not allowed to die,” she snarled. “Now or ever. If you get killed, so help me I’ll . . . I’ll wait for you to reanimate and then I’ll beat you to death.”
She shoved him back and stalked toward the quads. Nix ran to catch up.
Chong stared after Lilah in total confusion. Benny clapped his friend hard on the shoulder.
“That was pure poetry,” he said. “Ought to make a love song out of it.”
They walked over to catch up with the girls. Two minutes later the four quads burst out of the misty forest and turned northeast, following a dead man’s directions to a doomed town.
Interlude Seven
KICKAPOO CAVERN STATE PARK
THREE DAYS AGO
THEY DID NOT LEAVE SAM’S camp the next morning. Or the morning after that, or for most of the week.
The wound to Ledger’s leg was not bad, but the infection that set in was. A fever ignited midway through the first night, and by noon of the following day Ledger was sweaty and shivering. Sam made soups and teas concocted from herbs he picked. The first concern was Joe’s fever, but he knew better than to try to reduce it. A fever is part of the body’s natural way of fighting illness or infection, so reducing the fever could make the illness last longer. It could also let the causes of the illness live longer in the body. Sam’s small store of pharmaceuticals were to be used with caution, he knew, because even something like Advil or Tylenol were foreign substances that needed to be metabolized and filtered by the body, and that took energy and resources better left to the job of fighting the sickness. On the other hand, Joe was suffering. So a choice was often a gamble. Sam got some low-dose anti-inflammatory painkillers into him, which helped with aches but did not reduce the fever too much.
His main approach to helping Joe was to keep feeding him fluids, whether the cranky old soldier wanted them or not. Dehydration was dangerous; and besides, the fluids helped the body flush the illness: water, herbal teas like chamomile, peppermint, or catnip. They helped considerably.
Sam fished among his precious fruits and vegetables, found the last of his elderberries, and made them into a syrup to boost the immune system. The recipe was simple, but he had to go out several times to search for the right herbs, leaves, and tree bark. Sam knew his forest, so the process was time-consuming but not actually difficult. Grimm sat silent vigil over Ledger throughout, but now even his muscular body was crisscrossed with bandages.
In the evening Sam used coconut and fruit to make a kind of rough smoothie. It was ugly to look at and tasted horrible, but it had excellent antibacterial and antiviral properties. In the morning of the fourth day, as Ledger was coming out of it, Sam plied him with peppermint tea to soothe his aching and atrophied muscles.
Every night, when both were feeling well enough, they talked. Ledger talked about Asheville, about a town in Nevada called Sanctuary—long since lost to the dead—that had been a kind of hospice run by monks and nuns, and about the Nine Towns of central California. He told Sam everything about Tom, and about Benny, and the new samurai. He told him about the new version of the ancient samurai code of Bushido, the ethics of those ancient warriors. Tom’s modern version was the Warrior Smart program, and like Bushido, the warrior’s code never actually mentioned warfare. Warrior Smart was about kindness and cooperation, honesty and loyalty, optimism and judgment.
Sam liked to hear about these things, and he felt his own fears melt away only to be replaced by a new dread. The Night Army was still out there. New Alamo was still under threat. And Joe’s mission to Asheville was still in force, even though all communications were gone.
One evening Sam said, “I think I’ve worked out where the bigger weapons cache might be.”
“How?”
asked Ledger.
“I have some old maps from before,” said Sam. “I marked them up over the years, putting in any military bases or installations that I knew about, or found, or heard about. And . . . well . . . I’ve talked to a few people here and there. People who came onto my land. Some of them were soldiers.”
“You ‘talked’ to them?” said Ledger. “Meaning what, exactly?”
Sam’s face was as expressionless as a mask. “Meaning they were on my land and some of them tried to take food and supplies from me. I didn’t let them. Some of them were very willing to talk.”
Ledger stared at him. There were so many ugly things unsaid but implied. After a moment Sam looked down at his hands. “It’s been hard out here, Joe. Old rules don’t apply.”
Ledger said nothing.
Sam said, “If the cache is where I think it is, then we need to go past New Alamo. I can leave you there, if you want, and—”
“No,” insisted Ledger, “if we’re hunting for the weapons cache, then we do it together.”
“Okay,” said Sam dubiously. “But it’s two hundred miles and you’re hurt. Besides, that’s a strange area. You have New Alamo, the biological warfare base, and the weapons cache all within a few miles of each other. From the people I’ve talked to, though, the soldiers keep a low profile. I don’t think the people in town even know they’re there.”
Ledger frowned. “That’s weird. Why would the soldiers not be right there to help the people?”
“I don’t know.”
“Doesn’t sound right to me.”
“No,” agreed Sam. “And I know how you like to poke your nose into things.”
Ledger spread his hands. “Born with a curious mind. Sue me. But seriously, what’s the play? If we find the weapons, do we warn the base first or warn the town?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Sam. “I think we’ll have to get closer and make the call then. But . . . it’s a long way from here.”
Ledger slowly flexed his leg. “I think I can walk on it.”
Broken Lands Page 28