Nothing else moved.
There was no one else there. It took a long time for Gutsy to accept and believe that, but after five long minutes she lowered her machete. The blade fell from her hand, landing with a dull thud. She squatted down beside the empty grave, wrapped her arms around her head, and began to cry.
Some of the tears were bitter.
Some were as hot as the rage that burned in her chest.
The world was full of monsters. Gutsy knew that as well as anyone left alive. Not all those monsters were the living dead.
That made it all so much worse.
3
THE MEMORIES CAME TO HER like a swarm of monsters. Grabbing at her, holding her down, biting her, making her bleed. Making her scream.
Two days ago . . .
“I’m sorry, Gabriella,” whispered her mother. “Please forgive me.”
Her voice was so thin, so faint, as if she was already gone.
Gutsy sat on the floor beside her mother’s cot. The air was thick with the smell of soaps and disinfectant and aromatic herbs, but the smell of dying was too strong to be pushed aside. Nothing could stop the infection. Nothing. Not alcohol, not what few antibiotics Gutsy and her friends could scavenge. It raged beneath her mother’s skin, set fire to her blood, and was taking her away, moment by moment.
“It’s okay, Mama,” said Gutsy, careful not to squeeze too hard. Her mother’s hand was hot, but it was frail and felt like it could break at any second.
Gutsy’s words were muffled by the mask she wore, and she hated that the doctor made her wear gloves. No skin-to-skin contact, and even with those precautions Gutsy had to take a scalding-hot shower afterward. Mama had insisted too, because she had been a nurse at the town hospital. Not before the End, but trained by Max Morton, the town doctor after the dead rose. She’d been part of a team of hastily trained nurses who tried to form a kind of wall between the people in the town and the constant wave of death that always seemed ready to crash down. Death never rested.
In a weird, weird way, all this might have been easier to accept if Mama had been bitten by one of los muertos vivientes.
The living dead.
At least then Gutsy could have understood and even accepted it. Kind of. When los muertos rose and attacked the living, half the population on earth had died from bites.
Not Mama. She was part of the other half. The ones who won their fights, protected their families, survived all the countless hardships, only to be dragged down by something too small to fight, too tiny to kill with a machete or club or any weapon you could hold. A disease. A bacterium.
What was even worse was that it was a disease that had nearly been wiped out in the century before the End, before the world stopped. It had begun creeping back, Gutsy knew, because so many people used antibiotics the wrong way before the End—taking them for viruses even though they didn’t work for those kinds of sickness. And taking them only until symptoms went away, which wasn’t the same thing as being cured. The antibiotics weakened but did not kill bacteria, and then the bacteria mutated and came back stronger.
Since the End, so many old diseases had come back in new and more terrible forms of smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, measles, so many others. And the one that was killing Mama . . . tuberculosis.
Despite the presence of Dr. Morton and two other nurses—besides Mama—there wasn’t much in the way of useful medical equipment, no way to get in front of the disease. The old FEMA laboratory near Laredo was surrounded by tens of thousands of the living dead and had been overrun. The pharmacies in that town and in San Antonio had long since been stripped of drugs. The few antibiotics Dr. Morton gave Mama slowed the sickness for a while but didn’t stop it. The disease kept going, attacking with the unthinking, uncaring, brutal relentlessness of los muertos vivientes but without any of the living dead’s vulnerabilities.
Night after night after night Gutsy sat with her mother, or sat in the next room, listening to endless fits of wet coughing. Listening to labored breathing. Praying to God. Praying to every saint she thought would listen. Sometimes burying her face in her pillow so her screams wouldn’t wake poor Mama.
So often her delirious mother would come out of a coughing fit, or a fevered doze, and say the same thing. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what, Mama?” asked Gutsy, but she never got an answer. Her mother was too far gone by then and was almost never lucid. Gutsy could feel her drifting out of reach, going away.
As often as she dared, Gutsy put on her gloves and mask and went in to sit, holding that frail hand. Feeling like a little child. Feeling old and used up.
Feeling hopeless.
That was almost the worst part. Gutsy was so good at so many things. She could fix anything, build anything, solve anything. She was a thinker and a fixer.
She could not fix her mother.
She could not think of anything to say. Or do.
All that was left to her was to be there.