Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

“I think he thinks I’m dinner.”

“He’s cool. C’mon.” They walked past Sombra, who got to his feet, turned, and watched. Because the coydog neither barked nor growled, Gutsy said, “Good boy.”

She wasn’t sure if Sombra understood the words. Maybe he’d never been told he was a good boy before. But he yawned and went over and lay down between the plastic chairs. Gutsy remembered reading that dogs yawn sometimes as a way of releasing tension. He’d done it twice now at times when it was clear he was easing down from high alert. She took it as a good sign.

Once inside, Alethea kissed the top of Spider’s head, as he bent over his plate assembling another taco, then sat down. Spider pushed the fixings her way.

“So,” said Alethea, looking straight at Gutsy, “tell me about the dog.

No, wait. Tell me what happened last night and today. In fact, tell me everything.”

Gutsy took a breath and did. Alethea had finished two tacos by the time the whole story was done.

“Whoa, wait . . . someone dug her up?” demanded Alethea, appalled.

“And brought her to town,” said Spider.

“That’s sick!”

“No,” said Spider, shaking his head. “It’s evil.”

“Maybe. But whatever it is,” said Alethea, “there’s got to be a reason somebody did it.” She cocked an eyebrow. “You make anyone mad at you lately?”

“No more than usual.”

There was a short silence after she said it, and the foster siblings exchanged a knowing glance. Gutsy understood why. She was not the most popular kid in school and definitely not the most well-liked in New Alamo. Gutsy was, as old Mr. Urrea once phrased it, “a difficult girl.” He’d meant it as a compliment. Urrea and Ford were also not very well liked. They were opinionated, occasionally grumpy, and—like Gutsy—difficult. What that meant was they seldom agreed with the way things were run, and rarely shared the same views as the majority of townsfolk. Gutsy considered herself a free thinker and tended to rely on her own judgment and preferred forming her own thoughts rather than being told what to do or think. That was not a pathway to popularity in a town of frightened people.

It made her like herself, though, and that was what mattered to Gutsy most. She seldom cared what others thought. If she did, she’d have been crippled by their criticisms that she didn’t dress like a girl, didn’t go to church often enough, didn’t act right.

Most of that was true. She didn’t “dress like a girl” because the old-fashioned Mexican village skirts and frilly white blouses a lot of the girls in town wore weren’t practical for scavenging for food and supplies in towns infested with los muertos. Jeans, a T-shirt, and a vest with lots of pockets made more sense to her. She did not go to the Saturday evening dances at the school, because she wasn’t a fan of being groped by boys. She wasn’t even sure she liked boys. Some of them, sure, but not most. She also liked some girls, but not most.

If she lived long enough, then maybe she’d take that stuff down off a mental shelf and see if it made sense. Not now, though. Life had enough complications. Even on a day-to-day basis. She cut school now and then because of issues she had with some of what they were teaching. There were three schools in New Alamo, and two of them were very strict religious schools. She wasn’t sure how important religion had been to people before the End, but it tended to dominate a lot of conversations since. Gutsy never slammed anyone’s beliefs, even though she had issues with her own, because she had no idea who was right or wrong about how the universe was wired. She certainly didn’t know. And she’d heard the Chess Players wrangle on for hours about religion, the practice of it, the politics of it, the different approaches to it, and the complex history of it. Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford seemed to agree that everyone was right until everyone was proved wrong, and there was no way to do that. That seemed fair to her. Her open-ended tolerance won her few friends. The teachers in the two religious schools were not particularly keen on that view either.

So Gutsy talked her mother into letting her go to the town’s third school. The official name was the drab New Alamo High, but even the staff tended to call it by its common nickname: Misfit High.

Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford both taught there.

Spider and Alethea were not in a formal school but were “homeschooled” by their foster caregivers. The couple in charge of the Home for Foundlings had the hilarious names of Adolf and Vera Cuddly. They did not refer to themselves as foster parents and instead used the more generic and antiseptic term of caregiver. The Cuddlys had twenty-six orphans in their charge, ranging from toddlers to Alethea and Spider.

Cuddly, though, the couple were not. Adolf looked like he might have been a gangster before the End; he had cold, beady eyes and a lot of crooked yellow teeth. His wife, Vera, had the personality of an irate scorpion without any of that insect’s warmth.

For Gutsy, being an outsider was a fact of her life, but rather than letting it make a victim of her, she’d embraced it. She was living life as much on her own terms as circumstance would allow. She only hoped that with Mama’s death the town council would not send her to the Cuddlys as a new foster. No. She’d run away first. Gutsy was absolutely sure she could survive indefinitely out in the Broken Lands.

So, even though she wasn’t Miss Perfect or Miss Popular, was there anyone in town who outright hated her? Gutsy shook her head. Her fists were clenched into tight balls of knuckles on the tabletop.

“I don’t know why someone would do something like this,” she said.

“How’d they even get Mama’s body in through the gate without the guards noticing?” asked Alethea. Like everyone, she referred to Gutsy’s mother as “Mama.” Then she answered her own question. “Those lamebrains wouldn’t notice if los muertos formed a mariachi band and led a parade of shamblers through the center of town.”

“Which is why I hate this town,” said Spider. Alethea sighed. Gutsy knew this was an old argument and a topic Spider came back to time and again. The only downside to reading so many books was that it made all three of them want to leave New Alamo and see the world. Not necessarily the broken world that it currently was, but the wider and infinitely complex world it had been. When he was ten, Spider made a scrapbook of places he dreamed of going, filling them with drawings or images cut from old magazines and catalogs from companies that were as dead as the rest of the world. The Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York. The snowy Alps and the lush tropical rain forests of Brazil. Easter Island to see the big stone heads and Australia to dive the coral reefs.

Alethea looked wistfully into the middle distance. “Maybe there’s another town out there somewhere,” she said.

Gutsy made no comment. So many of the other towns were dying out from disease, being overrun by shamblers, or torn apart by wolf packs. Much as she didn’t like New Alamo either, it was the safest place in the world, as far as anyone knew.

Spider leaned over and kissed her on the shoulder.

“We’ll get out of here,” he said quietly. “Somehow, someday. But first we have to deal with this freakazoid stuff.” The foster siblings turned to study Gutsy.