“Wh-what?”
“You’re wearing Kevlar, genius,” said Chong, sagging back and shaking his head. He looked up at the moon and laughed.
“What?”
“It’s called a bulletproof vest for a reason, you monkey-banger. Probably bruised your ribs, knocked the air out of you.”
“I’m not going to die?”
Nix slapped the front of his vest. “I may kill you for scaring me.”
Lilah became immediately disinterested and stood up. She crept to the top of a small hill and peered back the way they’d come. Benny sat up very slowly. Kevlar or not, he felt shot. The pain was horrible, and he still had trouble breathing.
“Look at this,” said the Lost Girl.
Chong and Nix helped Benny stand.
“We seem to be making a habit of scraping you up off the floor,” said Chong.
“You can go right ahead and bite me,” Benny told him.
“Not even if I was a full zom.”
They looked at each other for a moment and then they both cracked up.
“Boys are idiots,” said Nix to the air, the moon, or anyone who would listen. She went and stood next to Lilah. Then she snapped, “Benny, Chong, get over here.”
They hurried over.
The hill offered a magnificent panorama, and far behind them they could see the ravagers trudging back to rejoin their group, having given up trying to chase motorized vehicles.
“No,” said Lilah in her ghostly voice, “not there. Over here.”
They looked. Chong went back to the quads and fetched their binoculars, and they all stood looking to the northeast.
“Is that a . . . town?” asked Nix uncertainly.
“Yes,” said Chong, “it’s a town. Big wall made of—I think—stacked cars.”
The town was far away and the night created a lot of distortion.
“I see something rippling around it,” said Benny. “Is that water? Like a moat or something?”
Chong studied the scene for a long time, and then slowly lowered his binoculars. “God . . .”
“What’s wrong?” asked Nix.
Lilah answered for him. “It’s not water.”
“Then what is it . . . ?” Benny began, and then trailed off. A cloud had been partly obscuring the moon, and now it moved off and the full light splashed down, defining the roiling shapes that seemed to wash up against the rows of cars. Not water lapping at the walls. No. It was a river of zombies.
A lot of them.
There were flashes from the walls as the people in the town began firing down at them. But there were so many monsters climbing the walls. Shamblers did not have the intelligence or coordination to do this, but the ravagers did, and they swarmed upward.
So many.
Too many.
84
GUTSY AND HER FRIENDS STOOD on the wall and watched death come toward them.
But it was like a dream, because death did not hurtle in their direction, or even come at a fast march. It shambled. Slowly, awkwardly, but inevitably.
Hundreds upon hundreds of the living dead. Too many to count. Far more than had ever assaulted the town at one time.
“No,” said Spider, shaking his head slowly. He wore his tarantula pajamas and boots and looked six years old. But he kept his strong brown hands on his fighting staff. If those hands glistened with fear sweat or trembled while he waited, Gutsy could completely understand.
Alethea wore a bathrobe over a nightgown and fuzzy slippers. She still had her tiara, though, and somehow that anchored Gutsy to the possibility of hope. Alethea clutched Rainbow Smite as forcefully as Spider held his staff. They were both good fighters; they’d both fought los muertos before.
Never more than one at a time, though.
Gutsy wondered how many of the people in town had fought in a war. Every adult had lived through the End, and a lot of them bragged about how many of the shamblers they’d killed. Looking around at the faces of the people in the street below, it occurred to her that surviving wasn’t always the result of fighting; and stories are often just that. Could these people actually fight? They seemed to belong to another world, or maybe a fantasy world. Old-fashioned Mexican dresses, men dressed like farmers from the nineteenth century. It was part of some kind of cultural thing, reclaiming the past. Something like that. But it had never made sense to Gutsy. It was like looking in the wrong direction—backward instead of toward the future.
Now Gutsy felt more sympathy toward them, and it occurred to her that the old-fashioned clothes and some of the traditions in New Alamo were an anchor, a safety net. The people who used to wear those clothes a century or two ago didn’t have to face the living dead. Was that what it was all about? Rituals and traditions?
Maybe. Probably. Whatever.
There were too many monsters, and the night was going to last forever.
Below where Gutsy stood with her friends, Karen Peak was yelling orders, pushing and shoving people into position, checking weapons, her voice cutting through the panic. Men and women with weapons climbed ladders to the catwalk. A dozen archers took up position along the wall.
“Not enough,” said Gutsy.
“What?” yelped Spider.
“It’s not going to be enough.”
“Don’t say that,” he cried. Alethea wrapped her arm around him and pulled Spider close while glaring at Gutsy.
“Yes,” she snapped, “don’t say that. You’re supposed to be the problem solver, girl. Well, as far as I can see it, this is a really big darn problem.”
“I offered Karen my help,” said Gutsy. “She said they had it handled.”
Before Alethea could reply, there was a thud that shook the wall, and they hurried to the edge and looked down.
The first wave of the dead had arrived. They were not ravagers, but they were faster than shamblers and had outpaced the rest. There were a dozen of them, men and women, ragged and wild. They didn’t moan but instead snarled like wildcats as they leaped at the wall, clawing at it for handholds, falling, slipping, trying again, relentless. Sombra snarled and barked.
Gutsy had come to the wall prepared for a fight. She had a dozen different clubs, including a crowbar. She understood enough about physics to know that hitting downward gave her extra force because of gravity; and the dead had to use their hands to climb. Waiting, though, was hard. Some of the tower guards were firing, but she saw half the bullets miss.
“Aim!” yelled Gutsy. “Pick your targets. Conserve your ammunition.”
If any of the adults on the wall heard her, they gave no indication and kept firing wildly. A moment later Karen’s voice rang out.
“You heard her,” she roared, and added some curses that made Spider grin despite his terror. Karen gave Gutsy a nod and turned away to organize more of the defense.
“At least she doesn’t treat you like a dumb kid,” said Spider.
“No, she doesn’t care that you’re a kid,” amended Alethea. “That’s better.”
The shamblers were almost to the town now. Gutsy looked down at the people in the streets. Most milled around as if they had no idea where they were. She saw plenty of people she knew well and some she saw only in passing. Some of her friends from school were down there.
So was Alice.
Despite every wrong thing in the world, despite her own fear, Gutsy’s heart skipped a happy beat when Alice looked up and their eyes met. Alice wore jeans and a white blouse embroidered with flowers, as if this was any other evening in town. She might have been on her way to the general store or to hang out at the library. Her long black hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she held a spade shovel in her small hands.
Alice smiled up at her and gave the shovel a strong shake, as if promising to fight like a hero. Gutsy lit up and returned the smile. Then suddenly one of the tower guards screamed and toppled backward from his post. Gutsy whirled, and only then, like an afterthought, she heard the crack of a rifle.
“Where did that come from?” she asked,
and Spider pointed with his staff. Down there on the wrong side of the wall was a knot of ravagers armed with rifles. That thought made Gutsy feel faint.
“It’s too much,” she said, but only loud enough for her own ears to hear it. “It’s too much.” As if in agreement, she heard people screaming behind her. Men and women. Children, too.
And then the dead reached the top of the wall and the Battle of the Alamo began in earnest.
85
FOUR QUADS RACED ACROSS THE plain in a straight line.
They had watched the zoms approaching the town of New Alamo and had stood helpless, their minds shocked into blank canvases.
Chong finally said, “We’re too late.”
“Yes,” said Nix. She looked stricken.
“There are too many of them,” said Lilah.
When Benny said nothing, they glanced at him. Nix frowned.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Oh God,” said Chong. “I think he has an idea.”
“Maybe,” said Benny.
“We won’t like it, will we?” Nix asked.
“Not even a little bit.”
He reminded them of the last thing the dying soldier had told him. Chong gaped at him. “Let me get this straight: You want us to find the entrance to a tunnel?”
“Yes.”
“That runs a mile underground.”
“Closer to two miles,” corrected Benny. “The soldier said it was three klicks long. Captain Ledger used that expression a lot. A klick is a kilometer, which is—”
“Point six-two miles,” supplied Chong. “The actual distance isn’t the issue. First we’d have to find it.”
“He said the entrance was in a Texas Rose Car Wash.”
“Uh-huh. Okay,” said Chong patiently, “but even if we find it, you’re talking about going underground, maybe through the dark, to come up inside a town that’s about to be overrun by—oh, what’s the exact number?—oh yeah, a zillion freaking zoms.”
“Pretty much,” said Benny.
“In order to accomplish what? Look,” said Chong, “I’m not trying to go all Morgie here, and I know coming here was my idea in the first place, but this is kind of nuts. We came here to warn the people of New Alamo about the swarms. I think they pretty much know at this point.”
“No,” said Nix. “They don’t. They only think they do, but they don’t know what we know.”
Benny nodded. “Besides,” he said, “maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“When have we ever been lucky?” complained Chong. “No, don’t answer that. We’re alive. We stopped Saint John, blah blah blah. We are the souls of good luck and happy times.” He sighed. “Okay. What’s your plan, Benny-Wan Kenobi?”
Benny grinned. He and Chong had read a slew of old Star Wars novels over the summer. The Jedi knights in those books were clearly inspired by samurai.
So Benny took a breath, grinned like a wolf, and told them his plan.
True to form, none of them liked it. But they, too, wore smiles. Hyenas must have smiled like that, Benny thought. He’d read about them, too. Then he remembered that people always had the wrong idea about hyenas. They weren’t stupid, cowardly scavengers. They were predators and they were very, very smart. They didn’t poach leftovers from lions; it was the other way around, with lazy lions stealing from hyenas. Hyenas were supposed to be smarter than chimpanzees.
Why am I thinking about hyenas? he wondered, but the answer was already there. No one expected them to be as tough or as smart as they were.
No one.
They ran for their quads.
86
THEY CAME CLOSE TO THE fire and saw that, no, it wasn’t New Alamo.
“What was this?” asked Ledger. “And don’t tell me it’s the weapons cache.”
“No,” said Sam. “I’m pretty sure this is—was—the Laredo chemical weapons base.”
A massive section of the ground had collapsed inward, leaving a smoking pit a quarter mile wide from which tongues of flame licked out to taste the night.
The two old soldiers approached cautiously, staying downwind of the dead who lingered there. Most of the major swarms had moved off. A scream made them turn, and they saw a pack of three living dead chasing a man who was scrambling along on all fours, his body flash-burned and one foot mangled into red ugliness.
Ledger slid from the saddle and drew the sword.
“Why bother?” asked Sam, moving to block him.
“Because we can’t ask questions of the dead.”
Sam stepped aside.
Two of the shamblers were dressed in civilian clothes, and the third was in a desert-pattern battle-dress uniform, clearly a new recruit to the army of the unliving. There were no other zoms within sight, so Ledger limped over and gave a quick whistle. “You, deadheads, over here.”
The zoms all turned toward the big man who came striding toward them. With hisses of urgent hunger, they rushed at him. The ancient katana drew silver lines on the canvas of the darkness, and the dead men flew apart. It took less than a second.
Ledger snapped the sword to one side in a chiburi motion that whipped the black blood from the oiled steel. Sam walked up behind him, a Glock in his hands with a sound suppressor screwed into the barrel.
The wounded soldier collapsed weeping on the ground, and they knelt on either side of him. Sam rolled the man onto his back. Beneath the burns and soot, the victim was a large, muscular black man with cracked wire-frame glasses and a small mouth pinched with pain. He wore lieutenant’s bars and a name tag: HOWELL. Shock glazed his eyes.
Sam touched Ledger’s arm and nodded to Howell’s mangled leg. It was covered with bites.
“What happened here?” asked Ledger, and the obvious air of command elicited an immediate response from the lieutenant.
“We were overrun, sir,” the man said, adding the “sir” automatically. As best he could, the injured man explained how ravagers who had once been soldiers at the base led a marauding party in through a back way. The rear door used a high-tech hand-geometry scanner that read palm prints. One of those ravagers had been a security specialist at the site, and his palm print had never been removed from the security database, an oversight that proved fatal. Once the security doors were open, the ravagers led hundreds of shamblers inside. The dead soldier also disabled the alarm systems and other critical systems, including the lights. The dead can hunt by sound and smell, and in the utter blackness, the slaughter was comprehensive. The ravagers took weapons and set off a series of explosive charges that brought the whole structure down.
When Ledger asked him why they did it, Howell seemed confused by the question. “They hate us for what we did to them.” Then he blinked and stopped talking, as if suddenly realizing that he knew neither of these men. He was sweating badly, and when Sam checked his pulse he felt a thin but rapid heartbeat. The infection was already raging through him. His glance to Ledger shared that info.
“Listen to me, Lieutenant,” said Ledger, “you know how this works. You’re bitten. You understand what I’m saying?”
“God . . .”
“Do you understand?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“We’re heading to New Alamo, but I have the feeling that they’re about to be the second course on tonight’s all-you-can-eat menu. We’d like to cancel that party, so we’re out here looking for a weapons cache. What can you do to help us?”
Howell licked his lips and looked at the two old soldiers. “Captain Collins took a squad to town, to the lab. We lost all the research here, but she went after the duplicate records.” He hissed as pain lanced through him; when it passed, he said in a much weaker voice, “You have to believe me . . . we were trying to save the world.”
“I don’t care,” said Ledger. “Help us save the town.”
A hopeless expression filled Howell’s face. “The Raggedy Man is coming for them. He’s going to kill them all.”
“Yeah, about that,” said Ledger. “Who exactly is this Ragg
edy Man?”
“He’s like a . . . like a god to them,” the lieutenant said hoarsely. “He can control them. All of them. The shamblers, the fast-infected, all the mutations. Even the ravagers. I don’t know how. But the Raggedy Man is coming for New Alamo. You have to . . . warn them.”
Ledger had to lean close to hear because the man’s voice had become the faintest of whispers. “Look, man, if you want us to help the town,” said Ledger, “then tell us where the weapons cache is.”
The man tried, but his voice was gone. He lapsed into a silent, twitching coma, then settled back, exhaling a final breath like a sigh of defeat.
Sam straightened, reaching for his gun, but Ledger shook his head.
“Nah,” he said, “save your bullet.” He drew his sword and stabbed downward. The twitching stopped.
The two of them stood for a moment, digesting what they’d learned.
“The Raggedy Man,” mused Ledger. “Bad enough you telling me he’s the local boogeyman. Worse when I hear it from a military officer. What do you think he meant when he said this Raggedy Man is their god? You think he has some way of controlling the zoms?”
Sam shook his head. “Let’s hope not.”
“Yeah,” said Ledger, looking worried, “but it gives me a bad itch in a place I can’t scratch.”
“I know the feeling,” said Sam.
They returned to where they’d left Grimm and the horse. From that vantage point they watched the last of the shamblers and their ravager herdsmen move off into the northeast. “They’re heading straight to the town,” said Sam.
Ledger shook his head. “They really named that place New Alamo?”
“Yeah.”
“Any of them ever read a history book? Everyone at the old Alamo died.”
Sam snorted. “When have people ever learned from their mistakes? I mean, look around, Joe, we’re standing in the middle of the actual apocalypse. What’s it going to take for people to learn?”
“A second chance,” said Ledger.
“Really?” said Sam disgustedly. “And how many ‘second chances’ do we human beings deserve?”
Ledger shrugged. “Considering how many mistakes we make, Sam . . . I guess we need as many chances as we can get.”
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