Broken Lands

by Jonathan Maberry

  His only real regret was that Grimm was going to die too. Ledger liked dogs a lot more than he’d ever liked people, and Grimm had been his friend for a long time.

  They fought well together.

  Up ahead he could see the ravager who he’d marked as the leader of this little shindig. A big bruiser of a guy who very much needed his butt kicked. Two or three times the ravager had ordered his thugs to gun Ledger down, but Sam Imura punched their tickets. Bing, bang, boom.

  The leader leaped down from his hill and was working his way toward Ledger.

  Fine, thought the old soldier, if he wants to make a fight of it, then let’s tango.

  For him it would be one last brawl to close out a life lived out in the storm lands, in the place where nothing but cold winds ever blew.

  Maybe when it was over he’d find peace. Maybe that slim chance was possible, even for someone like him. He thought about his wife, Junie Flynn, who had almost certainly died on First Night. Junie with the tangled blond hair, sun freckles, and the bluest eyes Ledger had ever seen. Sweet-natured, smart, powerful.

  Lost.

  And their child. Lost. It did not matter to Ledger that their baby had been adopted. Who cared? Family was family.

  What mattered was that maybe they would be waiting for him on the other side.

  Maybe.

  Maybe.

  He swung the sword, and Grimm slashed with his spikes, and they fought on.

  98

  GUTSY STARED AT COLLINS BUT not at the gun. She didn’t really care about it. The world was ending anyway.

  Dr. Morton stood holding a duffel bag, eyes wide, mouth open, shocked to silence.

  Behind Gutsy, out in the hall, the soldier was screaming in a way that told them all that he was losing his fight with his former “pet.” Good. Sombra had a lot of his own issues to sort out with the man who had beaten him so cruelly and forced him to fight other dogs.

  “Bess,” said the doctor, finding his voice, “Darren . . .”

  “Darren’s an idiot who can’t even control his own dog,” snapped Collins. “Who cares about him?”

  “But—”

  “Finish filling the bags. Do it now, Max, or so help me God I’ll put a bullet in you.”

  The doctor flinched and began reaching for more of the records.

  “Gomez,” said Collins, eyeing Gutsy, “what did you mean when you said the base had blown up? Was that some kind of stupid joke?”

  “It’s the truth,” said Gutsy. “I was there. It’s destroyed. So . . . where are you going to go now, huh? You have another bunch of Rat Catchers somewhere else?”

  Collins smiled, but it was fragile, forced. “You’re lying to me.”

  “Why the heck would I lie?” laughed Gutsy. “What’s the point? I went out there to try and find you and beat your brains in because of what you did to my mother, but the Night Army got there first. It’s burning, and I ran back here to try and warn the town before it was too late.”

  “You should have run faster,” said Collins coldly.

  “Bess . . . ?” said Morton. “What are we going to do?”

  “We do what I said before,” she snapped. “We get these records to the other lab.”

  “How? It’s over a thousand miles from here. How will we get there without the vehicles at the base?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  The screaming in the hallway stopped, and Sombra came stalking back into the room. His muzzle was smeared with bright red blood, and there was an alien wildness in his eyes. For a moment Gutsy thought the coydog was going to attack her, but Sombra looked up at her and there was a momentary softening of his expression. It was as if he was aware of the line he’d crossed and it scared him. He whined and gave a sad little wag of his tail. Gutsy wanted to hug him, to tell him it was all going to be okay. Except, as she had done once before, she declined to lie to the animal.

  Nothing was ever going to be okay again.

  Collins was moving backward toward a big storage locker, her gun steady on Gutsy. “Come on, Max. We have to go. We’ll find a way to get to Asheville. Get the bags.”

  With her free hand, she reached back for the locker door handle, but the doors suddenly opened outward and a ravager slammed into Collins with shocking force. The gun went off and a bullet punched the wall inches from Gutsy’s head. Collins fell screaming with the ravager on top of her. Her gun flew from her hand.

  Gutsy was suddenly in motion, swinging the crowbar at the ravager, but in the instant it landed on the killer’s skull, Gutsy realized that the ravager wasn’t moving.

  The ravager wasn’t alive.

  The crowbar crunched through bone and Collins immediately shifted the body off her and snapped out with a powerful kick-sweep that sent Gutsy crashing to the floor. She fell hard and banged her head on the ground, but she kicked back and caught Collins on the hip, spilling the captain as she tried to rise. As Collins fell down, Gutsy swarmed atop her and began hitting the woman who had killed Mama and treated her like vermin.

  Every bit of fear, every moment of indignity, every life destroyed and future stolen put iron in her muscles and shoveled coal into the furnace of her hate. It was no longer the cold hatred from back in the cemetery. Now she burned with it as she punched and punched. This was for Mama. For her friends. For the town. She hit and hit until she thought her hands were going to shatter. Collins may have been military, but she wasn’t prepared for the speed and power of Gutsy’s attack. Maybe she’d underestimated the little Latina. Maybe her own rank and status made her too arrogant to think this “rat” was any kind of threat.

  She learned different.

  But then someone looped an arm around Gutsy’s waist and hauled her backward and off the captain, and it wasn’t Dr. Morton.

  “Enough!” roared a voice she had never heard before. Gutsy was dumped on the floor, and the person who grabbed her danced backward out of reach of the furious swing Gutsy launched.

  Sombra leaped at the newcomer and clamped his teeth on the person’s wrist, but those teeth did not bite through flesh.

  The moment froze.

  A boy stood there. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. Tall, strong-looking, wearing full body armor and a helmet with a plastic visor. Behind the visor were Asian-looking eyes. He had what looked like a samurai sword strapped to his back.

  “If this is your dog,” said the boy, struggling with Sombra, “better call him off. I don’t want to hurt him.”

  Suddenly there was more movement in the corner, and Gutsy turned to see something that looked impossible. Three more teenagers stepped out of the cabinet as if they were stepping out of nowhere. It was like one of those old novels. Like the kids coming out of the wardrobe from Narnia or Alice through her mirror. They were all dressed in body armor, all splashed with gore. A second boy, also with Asian eyes, and two girls: a tall, stern-faced blonde and a short redhead. The second Asian kid had a compound bow and was drawing an arrow back, the weapon pointed at Sombra, who continued to slash and chew the first boy’s wrist pads. The blond girl had a long spear and the redhead had another katana, though hers was in her hands.

  “Last warning,” said the boy with the bow. “I like dogs, but I like my friend more. Well . . . maybe only a little more.”

  Gutsy tried to make sense of it. Failed.

  But she said, “Sombra . . . no . . .”

  And with great reluctance the coydog released his bite. He stood his ground, though, growling at the newcomers. In the corner, Dr. Morton was a statue, too terrified to move. Captain Collins groaned and rocked side to side on the floor, her hands over her bloody face.

  “Who . . . who are you?” gasped Gutsy. “And where did you come from? How did you get in here?”

  “The tunnel . . . ?” squeaked Morton. “God, are they in the tunnel?”

  Everyone knew who “they” were.

  “Only what’s left of them,” said the blonde.

  The first boy held out a hand—very careful of So
mbra—toward Gutsy. “My name’s Benny Imura,” he said. “We . . . um . . . well, we’re here to help.”

  “Help what?” said Gutsy, getting up without his assistance. “We’re losing. We’re all going to die.”

  The boy grinned. “Maybe not. I kind of have a plan.”

  “You won’t like it,” said the other boy. “No one ever does.”

  As it turned out, Gutsy liked it just fine.

  99

  GRIMM SLAMMED INTO A PAIR of ravagers, the blades on his shoulders shearing through their thigh muscles. A third ravager fell as a sniper bullet took him in the eye. Ledger leaped over his body and rushed at the leader of the wolf pack.

  “Yo, Raggedy Man,” he bellowed, “let’s dance.”

  There was a flicker of confusion on the ravager’s face, but then he was backpedaling away from the slashing blade. He turned and dove into a very smooth roll and came up with a rifle, but Grimm hit him hard and drove the ravager back and down.

  Even so, the ravager twisted as he fell and drove a stunningly powerful punch into the side of Grimm’s head, leaving a dent and tearing a cry of pain from the dog. Grimm staggered and fell, and the ravager scooped up the gun and swung the barrel toward Ledger.

  Ledger was already there and he brought his blade down on the weapon, striking sparks from the barrel. The gun fell, but the ravager immediately kicked Ledger in the stomach. The old soldier went down hard, his sword spinning away. Then the leader and two other ravagers charged at Ledger, going for the kill.

  • • •

  Sam Imura had no more rounds for his rifle, so he abandoned it and took a Colt CM901 rifle from a duffel bag they’d brought with them. The burned-out old car he had been using as a shooting blind was now too far from the action. It was time to follow Ledger into the thick of it, as he had done so many times all those years ago. He slung a smaller bag, filled with as many additional magazines as he could carry, slantwise across his body, and stuffed his pockets with magazines for his Sig Sauer P226 handgun.

  Then he was running.

  He’d lost sight of Ledger when the big idiot tried to take down the ravager they thought was the Raggedy Man. There were infected everywhere, and they turned to face the running man.

  Sam preferred the distance and solitude of a sniper’s elevated firing position, but he was, first and foremost, a world-class special operator. That meant there was no kind of weapon he couldn’t pick up and use. There were few weapons he had never fired. The Colt and the Sig Sauer were old friends. He knew how to make them sing dark songs.

  They filled the night with the music of Armageddon.

  • • •

  On the wall, Alethea and Spider were running out of catwalk. Mrs. Cuddly crawled along with them as they retreated, leaving a slug’s trail of glistening red.

  “Behind you,” she screamed, and Alethea turned as one of the fast-infected flung himself at her, fingernails curled into claws, mouth wide for a bite. Alethea turned too late.

  Then the leaping monster seemed to freeze in midair as if it had hit an invisible wall.

  Alethea saw the shiny tip of a knife protruding from between its broken teeth. There was a grunt of effort and a figure they had not seen before tore a long spear from the back of the infected’s head, letting the body fall.

  Alethea, Spider, and Mrs. Cuddly all gaped at the figure holding the spear. Tall, powerful, armored, deadly. And totally unknown to them.

  “Stop staring and fight,” said the figure in a ghostly whisper of a voice.

  More of the dead rushed at them, and the tall girl turned to fight the ones behind her. Alethea and Spider exchanged a look, eyebrows raised.

  “Works for me,” said Alethea, and whirled to swing Rainbow Smite into the face of another monster. Spider laughed and joined his foster sister. They formed a protective triangle around Mrs. Cuddly, and whenever one of their enemies fell to the catwalk, injured but not dead, the meat tenderizer and the cleaver were ready.

  • • •

  “Get inside,” gasped Ford, pushing Urrea toward the open door of the general store. They were both hurt, though neither had been bitten. Their pads had saved them so far, but now there were simply too many los muertos to fight. Alice caught Urrea as he stumbled and half carried the old writer inside. Ford kept swinging his ax to try to buy them enough time, but gray hands were plucking at his clothes, hooking around the edges of his hockey pads.

  Alice pushed Urrea into the hands of the people huddling inside, snatched up Urrea’s fallen sword, and tried to swing it, but it was too heavy and awkward and she fell hard onto her knees. A ravager rushed at her, his face split by a hungry grin of dark triumph.

  A second later a ball of fire exploded in the center of the town square. The ragged clothes and withered flesh of the shamblers ignited and they staggered in all directions, their senses immediately useless inside envelopes of flame. A second explosion set more of them alight. A third burst among the fast-infected who tried to escape.

  Ford and Alice clung to each other, reeling backward from the heat, but the fire was not aimed at them. They saw a figure standing on the roof of the hospital. A small woman or teenage girl—it was hard to tell with the armor she wore—was hurling plastic water bottles with burning pieces of cloth stuck in them. No, not water, Alice realized as she caught a whiff of gasoline.

  The ravagers tried to make a break for it, some cutting left and others right to escape the conflagration in the center of the square.

  Karen Peak and Mr. Cuddly were there on the left with the last of their defenders. Their guns cracked and the ravagers fell.

  On the right, Alice saw another teenager dressed in armor. A stranger, and he had a sword in his hands that he swung with deadly precision. Ravagers fell screaming around him.

  And fighting beside him, swinging a machete, was Gutsy!

  Her ugly dog was with her, lunging at ravagers and knocking them down within reach of Gutsy’s blade.

  Behind Alice the children were crying, babies screamed, but Mr. Urrea cheered. Ford got to his feet and hefted his ax. Alice rose too.

  The battle wasn’t over yet.

  • • •

  Sam Imura killed his way to where Ledger had fallen. He had no illusions about some miracle save that would allow Ledger to have survived. The world was not that kind, as had been proven too many times.

  Then he heard a horrific roar and spun to see Grimm come charging past him. Half of his armor torn away, his helmet dented, blood streaked along the mastiff’s sides, but the monstrous dog kept going as if no force on earth could stop him. The fast-infected and the shamblers did not even try to run; the ravagers who tried, failed.

  “Welcome to the party,” yelled a familiar voice, and Sam stared in true amazement to see Joe Ledger, as battered and bloody as his dog, standing with a sword in one hand and holding the hair of a severed head in the other. Ledger tossed the head at the closest infected. “Here, catch,” he said with a maniacal laugh, and then stabbed the infected through the eye.

  Sam could not help but smile. If this was all proof that his own sanity had finally cracked all the way through, then so be it. There were worse ways to go down than in the company of an old friend.

  He shifted to stand with his back to Ledger and fired, fired, fired.

  The dead kept coming. Maybe not as many as before, but enough. More than enough.

  Sam caught sight of something flying through the air, and for a weird moment he thought he was back on some previous battlefield and the object was a fragmentation grenade thrown by an enemy combatant.

  It wasn’t. It was a bottle of gasoline with a burning rag. It struck the back of a shambler and exploded, dousing all the other dead around it in flames. Grimm began barking furiously and backing away in fear. Ledger whirled.

  “What the—?”

  Another firebomb splatted against the crest of the hill on which the head ravager had been standing, and burst. Two ravagers reeled back, clawing at fire on their ha
ir and skin.

  Then a third ravager—who had escaped the flame and was raising a heavy maul in preparation for striking Grimm—juddered to a sudden stop, dropping the tool. An arrow stood out from his left temple, the shaft still quivering.

  Sam and Ledger both looked up at the wall. At the bunch of figures who stood there. A curvy girl with a baseball bat, a skinny boy with a staff. And two figures in full SWAT armor. A short girl with a whole basket of bottles at her feet, and a slim boy who was busy fitting another arrow to the string of his compound bow.

  “No,” said Ledger, his face nearly blank with shock. Then a huge grin spread from ear to ear. “Nix!” he bellowed. “Chong!”

  On the wall, they jerked erect at the sound of his voice. It was immediately clear that they hadn’t known who it was they were saving. They were just people helping people in the middle of a battle. Now they both began jumping in the air, punching the night sky with their fists.

  For about one whole second.

  Then the dead rushed past their burning comrades and attacked. Sam began firing again. Ledger swung his sword and Grimm attacked with his spikes. More fire rained down. There were many more arrows.

  The fight raged on and on and . . .

  100

  SILENCE SWEPT ACROSS THE FLAT plain that surrounded New Alamo.

  Smoke curled upward from hundreds of smoldering corpses. Fire chewed at old flesh and leather and the handles of axes. Two figures stood in a field of death, dressed in tatters. One held a rifle by its stock because in the end that was all he had left for the fight. The other held a sword. Between them, lying on his side and panting with exhaustion and pain, was a huge dog. All three of them were covered in soot.

  On the wall stood four teenagers, their shoulders sagging with exhaustion. There were no more bottles of gasoline in the basket by the short girl. There were no more arrows in the tall boy’s quiver. The boy with the staff leaned on it as if it was the only reason he had not yet fallen down. The other girl bent and placed her bat on the catwalk, then stood and straightened her tiara.