Broken Lands
Page 35
Then Gutsy climbed up to the top of the wall, followed by Lilah and Benny. The white-haired girl pushed past her, grabbed Chong roughly, studied him with a harsh and critical eye, and then crushed him in a fierce embrace. Chong winced, but smiled, too. Benny went over to Nix and bent to kiss her, but she turned and pointed. He peered through the smoke and then his whole body went rigid.
“He’s alive. . . .” He gasped. Then he leaped into the air and pumped his fists and roared out a name. “Joe!” Then all Benny’s friends were shouting and waving. Gutsy went to the edge of the wall and looked down at the two scruffy old men.
“Who are they?” she asked. Spider and Alethea joined her.
Benny turned to her. “Friends,” he said. Despite the grime and sweat and blood on his face, he was smiling.
EPILOGUE
One
GUTSY STOOD WITH ALICE, SPIDER, and alethea and watched as a tall, battered old soldier hugged the four strange teens. They were all crying. Another old soldier stood apart, watching with guarded eyes, silent and strange. It felt odd to watch this because it had nothing to do with her, her life, her friends.
Except that it did.
Without the arrival of the four teens, Gutsy would have died in the hospital. Now Dr. Morton and Captain Collins were tied up and in Karen Peak’s custody. There was no more base and the Rat Catchers were gone, their power broken. There would be so many questions Collins would not want to answer.
But answer she would. Gutsy promised her that before Karen led her away to a holding cell. Dr. Morton tried to apologize, but Gutsy turned her back on him. He would have a lot to answer for as well, and word was already spreading around town about what he had done. None of the members of the town council had so far shown their faces since the fight began. They would all be found, those who were still alive. The power in New Alamo was going through a change. Everything about the town was changing. Gutsy wondered what it would be like in a week. Or a month.
The big gray-blond soldier, Captain Ledger, finally stepped back from the teenagers and wiped his eyes. He put his hand on the shoulder of the one who had introduced himself as Benny Imura.
“Benny,” he said, “before I start yelling at you juvenile delinquents for disobeying every rule of common freaking sense and coming out here looking for me, I need to tell you something.”
Benny grinned. “What’s that?”
Ledger cleared his throat. “You know that your brother Tom and I go way back, right? We met not too long after the dead rose and I helped coach him, taught him some useful dirty tricks about how to fight and how to survive.”
Benny nodded.
“You know that Tom had an older brother?”
“Sure. Sam. He was a soldier and died during First Night,” said Benny. “I . . . never got to meet him. Why?”
“Don’t ask me how,” said Ledger, “and don’t ask me why the universe is this weird, but . . .”
“What are you saying?”
Instead of answering, Ledger glanced at the other old soldier. A Japanese man in his fifties. Benny turned to look at him, nodded a hello, started to turn away, then stopped. A frown creased his face. He turned back to the Japanese man and studied him. The other three did as well. Slow realization changed the whole pattern of Benny’s face. The hardness of a young killer seemed to fall away, leaving a kid staring in shock at something he did not, or could not, believe. Benny’s eyes were huge and his mouth hung open.
The old soldier came walking over, very slowly, uncertainly. His lips trembled and tears fell down his soot-stained cheeks.
“Benny . . . ?” he said in a choked whisper.
“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”
And then Benny flew to the older man and grabbed him, hugging him, and was hugged back. They began laughing. So did Ledger, so did the other teens.
After a moment, so did everyone there.
Two
The fires raged.
The dead burned.
So, too, did nearly half the houses in New Alamo. Whole sections of the wall were scorched, and the stacked tires around the gate entrances smoldered until dawn.
In the cold light of a new day, with a bloody sunrise splashed across the horizon and smoke rising in columns, it was hard to tell if the town had survived or if winning the fight had killed it.
Three
The following afternoon they all gathered in Mr. Ford’s classroom at Misfit High.
Gutsy was there with Alice, Alethea, and Spider. They were all clean but bandaged. Karen Peak was there, along with a few of the townsfolk she said could be trusted. The Chess Players were there, heavily bandaged and looking older than their years. Benny Imura and his friends were there. Sombra and Grimm lay on the floor near each other. Sam sat with Benny. Ledger stood by a map on the wall.
“So, this is where the base was,” he said, making a mark. “This is New Alamo, and this is the forest where Sam has a cabin. Somewhere in this area over here is where Sam thinks is a big cache of weapons.”
“Do we need them anymore?” asked Spider. “The ravagers are all dead. And so is that guy, the whatchamacallit?”
“The Raggedy Man,” said Alethea. “Stupid name.”
“Stupid or not,” said Nix, “he’s dead, right? Captain Ledger cut his head off.”
“That usually does it,” agreed Benny.
“Actually, kids, I don’t know if that was him,” said Ledger. “I killed some weirdo out there who seemed to be running things. But if that was the Raggedy Man, then he didn’t live up to the hype.”
“It can’t be him,” said Karen.
“Why not?” asked Urrea.
“Because from what you said, he was telling the ravagers what to do, but did he actually seem to be controlling the shamblers? Or the fast-infected?”
Sam and Ledger exchanged a look. “Not really,” said Sam.
“What does it matter if it’s him or not?” asked Chong.
“Because,” said a cold voice from the other end of the room, “you have no idea who or what the Raggedy Man is.”
They all looked at Captain Bess Collins, who was tied to a chair. They had moved her from the holding cell to the school. It was quieter there, and none of them trusted anyone related to the town police or government anymore. Karen had helped them do it.
Collins’s nose was swollen and crooked and she had two black eyes and a split lip. Even so, beaten and helpless, tied and captive, she retained her sense of power.
“Oh, so now you’re finally going to say something?” said Alethea, puffing out her chest.
“Maybe,” said Collins, “if we can make a deal.”
“No way,” said Spider.
“Yeah,” agreed Alethea, “only deal you’re getting is whether I kill you or Gutsy does.”
“What kind of deal?” asked Urrea, ignoring that threat.
“You want to know about the project, yes?” No one answered. Collins nodded as if everyone had. “You want to know why we kept everything a secret from the people here? You want to know why we dug up all those bodies? You don’t have to say anything. I know you have a million questions and I have all the answers. So, sure, I have a lot to bargain with.”
“Going out on a limb here,” said Ledger, “but I’m pretty sure Dr. Morton would be happy to talk to us. He looks like he’s ready to unburden his soul.”
“Max is a weasel.”
“Maybe,” said Gutsy, “but if he knows all this, then we don’t need to make any deals with you.”
“Sure,” said Collins with a casual shrug. “Ask him. He’ll spill his guts. He’ll tell you everything he knows.”
She leaned on the word “he,” and everyone heard it. Collins watched their faces and nodded. Her expression was like that of an alligator. Cold, smiling, heartless, and confident. “He knows enough to confuse you all ten times as much. But, believe me or not, Max doesn’t have a real clue. No one else in the lab or the base had the full picture.”
“Just you?�
� asked Gutsy.
“Just me.”
“What’s your price?” asked Sam.
Collins gave another shrug. “I walk.”
“You,” said Ford, “are completely out of your mind.”
“Why on earth would we even consider that?” asked Gutsy, truly perplexed.
“Because I know what you need to know.” Again the emphasis.
“And what is that?” asked Urrea.
“I know who the Raggedy Man is,” said the captain. “I know you haven’t killed him. I know what he can do. And I know what’s coming.”
“Why are we even listening to her?” demanded Alethea.
“Shut up, fat girl,” sneered Collins. “No one cares what you have to say.”
“Hey!” growled Spider, taking a threatening step forward, but Alethea stopped him.
“She’s just trying to be mean,” she said. “I’ve been dealing with mean girls all my life. She’s nothing.”
“Keep saying that,” said Collins. “You might even believe it after a while.”
“Okay, enough,” growled Gutsy. “What are you trying to say? What is it you think is so important that we’d ever consider letting you go?”
Collins smiled. “Do you idiots think that you actually won last night?”
“Um . . . yeah,” said Chong. “Lot of toasted zoms out there.”
“Then you’re as big an idiot as the people in this town,” said Collins. “That was the Raggedy Man testing you to see how tough you were.”
“If that’s true,” said Urrea, “then he knows we can beat him.”
“Oh, is that what he knows?”
Ledger walked over to her. “Listen, sister, let’s have a perspective check here, okay? You’re tied to a chair after getting your butt handed to you by a fifteen-year-old kid. So you talking smack doesn’t carry a lot of weight. That’s point one. Point two is that if you have information that we need to have, do you want to look me in the eye and tell me I can’t make you talk?”
“And who are you?” she said with contempt.
He smiled. “Ever heard of the Department of Military Sciences? Ever heard of Rogue Team International? Yeah, I can tell you have. You’re career military, so you definitely heard of both groups. Good. Then you’ve also probably heard of the guy who ran point for those teams. Psychotic kind of guy who looks a whole bunch like someone in this room.”
The sneer faltered. “Joe Ledger . . . ?”
“Joe Ledger. Nice to be recognized, Captain. Now think back on every story you ever heard about me. There were some real doozies floating around back in the day. Yeah, I can see you remember some of them. Good. Think about what you heard me do when I went up against the bad guys. Now . . . go another step down that road and think about what I would be willing to do to protect the people I care about. Go on, let your imagination run wild.”
Gutsy glanced at the four teen strangers. She could see from the looks in their eyes that they knew some—but probably nowhere near all—about what this man was saying. They knew enough that it turned their faces to stone. Sam Imura, the other soldier, met her eyes and gave her a single, small nod.
Captain Collins licked her lips. It was the first genuine sign of nervousness.
“I still want a deal,” she said quickly.
“We’ll see,” said Ledger. “First you’re going to tell me something that lets everyone here understand the value of what you have to trade. Tell us about the Raggedy Man.”
She took a long time coming to a decision, and they all waited her out.
“Do you know the story of how the plague got started? Do you know about the pathogen?”
“Lucifer 113,” said Gutsy. “We know.”
“You know about Dr. Volker and what he did with that pathogen?”
“Yes,” said Gutsy. “He gave it to a death-row inmate to make him suffer. But he wasn’t buried and he woke up and started attacking people. That’s how the plague started.”
“Then here’s something you may not know,” said Collins, and there was no sneer in her voice now. She looked terrified. Maybe of Ledger, maybe about what she was saying. “The first infected, the patient zero of that plague, Homer Gibbon, wasn’t a shambler. He wasn’t like the fast-infected or even like the ravagers. He was unique. Supremely dangerous. And he could control the other infected.”
“I never heard that part,” said Sam, “and I was on the ground in Stebbins County.”
“It’s true.”
“How do you know this stuff?” asked Spider.
“Because the Raggedy Man told me.”
There was silence in the room.
“He was in our facility for years,” said Collins. “We studied him, hoping to use his unique biology as patient zero. He was the purest strain. We hoped to learn so many things. To awaken the minds of the shamblers so they wouldn’t hunt us. And other things. We wanted our own shock troops for use against the shamblers if that failed. But it didn’t work.”
“The ravagers?” asked Gutsy.
“The ravagers,” agreed Collins. “You see, we were never able to control them, right from the start, because someone else already was controlling them.” She looked around. “The Raggedy Man was like a god to them.” She paused and corrected what she’d said. “He is their god.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Gutsy. “We destroyed his army.”
“No,” said Collins, and for a moment Gutsy saw the captain’s professional calm slip, revealing the real person behind the soldier’s face. Collins was terrified. Genuinely and deeply terrified. “What you fought was nothing. An expeditionary force. How can you not grasp that fact? He has billions of the dead. He has an army bigger than this world has ever seen, and he is their god, their king, and their general. He’s going to come here and wipe New Alamo off the map.” She looked at Benny and his friends. “He’s going to find wherever you came from and devour them all.” She leaned back and looked up at Ledger, trying to reclaim her facade of calm, but it didn’t work. Not anymore. “He’s already sent an army to Asheville. Maybe the city is still standing, or maybe everyone there is dead. Either way, time is running out. The research we were conducting here was getting us close to a real cure, close to a way to stop the Raggedy Man forever. Now . . .” She shook her head. “God, you idiots may have killed us all.”
“Who is the Raggedy Man?” asked Chong.
Collins stared at him. “Haven’t you been listening? The Raggedy Man is Homer Gibbon, and he is coming for us.”
“How do we know you’re not lying to us?” asked Gutsy.
Suddenly the air was torn by sirens from the guard towers. SOS.
Save Our Souls.
Gutsy ran to the window and opened it.
They could hear the screaming start.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 by Sara Jo West
JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times bestselling author, fivetime Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes in multiple genres, including suspense, thriller, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and action; and he writes for adults, teens, and middle grade. His works include the Joe Ledger thrillers, Glimpse, the Rot & Ruin series, the Dead of Night series, The Wolfman, X-Files Origins: Devil's Advocate, Mars One, and many others. Several of his works are in development for film and TV. He is the editor of high-profile anthologies, including The X-Files, V-Wars, Aliens: Bug Hunt, Out of Tune, Kingdoms Fall, Baker Street Irregulars, Nights of the Living Dead, and others. He lives in Del Mar, California. Find him online at jonathanmaberry.com.
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Also by Jonathan Maberry
THE ROT & RUIN SERIES
Rot & Ruin
Dust & Decay
Flesh & Bone
Fire & Ash
Bits & Pieces
THE NIGHTSIDE
RS SERIES
The Orphan Army
Vault of Shadows
Scary Out There
Mars One
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