Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

Gutsy held out a finger and the bee crawled onto it as if it were part of the stem. She lifted her hand very slowly and held it close to the biggest of the flowers. The bee’s wings fluttered and it immediately began feeding on nectar and pollen. It made Gutsy smile because despite mutation and everything, the bee was still essentially a bee, and it went about its work as bees had for millions of years. They adapted and survived. Gutsy appreciated that.

One of the living dead had the distinctive swollen belly of a late-term pregnancy. That was a kind of horror Gutsy had heard about but never seen before. Dead mother, dead baby, wandering hungry forever.

The world was indeed insane. The shambling dead people continued to cross the road. It took nearly an hour before she was sure they were all gone, and she was very glad she’d waited. There had been twenty-seven of them, including five children.

Gutsy watched them go, and her heart did not slow to a normal pace until they had dwindled to nothing in the distance. Sombra kept vigil too, a

nd when neither of them could see anything moving, the coydog simply lay down again. She sat for a few seconds longer, considering her new friend. He had saved her from a difficult situation.

The fact that she had found him at her mother’s grave seemed somehow significant. She reached down to pet the dog, but before she did, Gutsy crossed herself and said, “Gracias, Mama.”

Then she drove home.

10

A TALL, SKINNY BOY WITH dark brown skin, short black hair, and mint-green eyes stood in the middle of the street, watching her approach. He wore scruffy jeans, ancient sneakers, and a long-sleeved cotton shirt that had been hand-stitched by one of the ladies at the orphanage. There were flowers embroidered across the front and down the sleeves, and elaborate spiderwebs had been stitched between the blossoms. A single black spider dangled from a slender thread that slipped out from beneath the fold of the left front collar. His shirt was buttoned at the cuffs and all the way to the throat.

“Hey, Gutsy,” he called.

“Hey, Spider,” she called back.

There was a spider of one kind or another embroidered or hand-drawn on every shirt he owned. He would have gotten one tattooed on his cheek, but none of the tattoo artists in town would do it. Not until he was at least sixteen, and that was eleven months away.

Gordo angled in toward the water trough outside the big Quonset hut that had been converted to a stable and plunged his head in, gulping and splashing noisily. The sound made Sombra stand up, and Spider arched an eyebrow as he studied the scarred, battered coydog.

“Picking up roadkill now?” he drawled.

“Something like that,” said Gutsy, climbing down. She stretched so hard her joints popped. Her friend held out a canteen and she drank. As she handed it back, she caught Spider searching her eyes with his.

“Here’s the world’s stupidest question,” he said quietly, “but how are you?”

Gutsy wiped her mouth and looked over her shoulder at the dusty road behind her. “It’s been a day, y’know?”

“Wish you’d let me come with you,” said Spider.

She shook her head.

Spider sighed and helped her unbuckle and unbridle Gordo. They pulled the cart into the stable, allowing Gordo to follow at his own pace. The Quonset hut was vast and there were more than enough stalls for everyone. The Gomez stall was a double because they had a cart, and because the owner of the adjoining one had been killed by the dead while on a scavenging run. As he had no relatives, there was no objection when Gutsy knocked down the thin barrier wall and expanded her own. She’d built shelves and cabinets to accommodate all her gear, and cut several ventilation holes in the walls. People were so impressed by her design and skills that she earned food credits to revamp a dozen others.

Spider took a pair of brushes from the tack wall, tossed one to her, and they began to tend to the horse, each to a side, using gentle circular motions with the curry combs. Dust and grit fell away and Gordo tossed his head, enjoying the attention there in the coolness of the barn. Then Gutsy took a hard brush and ran it from nose to tail, following the grain of the thick hair, while Spider used a pick to remove a few small stones from Gordo’s hooves. Sombra sat in the cool shade and watched.

They did not speak, and Gutsy knew that Spider was allowing her some space. She appreciated it. Spider and Alethea were her best friends, and they’d both helped bury her mother the first time.

There were different rituals in town for dealing with family members who reanimated. Some used metal spikes to sever the brain stem. Others went for the more gruesome decapitation. The Catholics in town, though, restrained their dead, binding them with ropes blessed by Father Esteban, and then wrapped the thrashing bodies in white sheets on which prayers had been written. It was called “shrouding,” and the people who followed the tradition believed that it was both a mercy and a religious requirement. Father Esteban preached that this process of slow decay inside the buried shroud was a kind of penance for whatever sins that person had committed in life. It was a new interpretation of purgatory that would ultimately allow the spirit, now cleansed of all sins, to ascend to heaven.

Gutsy was not as devout a Catholic as Mama had been, but this was what her mother had wanted. The process was horrible, though.

Beyond horrible.

It was probably insane, too. Maybe even cruel. People in New Alamo had been arguing about that ever since the End. Gutsy wasn’t sure if she believed in purgatory. She believed in hell, though. Absolutely. That was where she lived. She wasn’t the only person in town who shared her belief, that the living were not the lucky ones but rather those who, for whatever reason, had been condemned to serve out their sentences in a hell here on earth. When her own time came, Gutsy wanted a spike and then cremation. Wasn’t that in the Bible too? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust?

But Mama had wanted the shroud and the grave, so that was what Gutsy did. Her friends proved how much they loved her by helping. Gutsy loved them for it, but somehow it didn’t really help. It made a bad night worse, because now other people would remember the way Mama’s body twisted and fought even when the first shovelfuls of dirt fell over her.

And it was Spider who had put it into the right words as the three of them stood panting beside the grave.

“The world is nuts,” he said. “This proves it.”

11