Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

That afternoon, when they stopped to eat, Chong said, “Chemical spills, radiation, all of that . . . I always wondered what it would do to the animals and plants. Now we know.”

Riot shook her head. “Nah, we only seen a bit of it. I heard stories going back ten years about the things that were happening out east. Not just to the birds and the bees, but to people. And maybe to the zoms, too.”

They all looked from her to the far eastern horizon. The direction they were heading. They ate the rest of their meal in silence.

They kept finding more signs for the meltdown, which drove them farther south, but by the time they left the last warning sign behind them, they began seeing massive swarms of zoms. It hurt Benny to have to waste more time going even farther south, but once they were on Route 285 in New Mexico, it was clear driving. That road took them through empty towns that even the dead had abandoned. However, every attempt to shoot due east again ran them into more of the swarms.

South and south and south they went.

They paused at the junction of 285 and Route 10 in Texas, hid their quads behind an overturned tractor trailer that stood amid an abandoned community of campers, and watched as a river of the zoms came staggering past. They all doused themselves with cadaverine, because this was no time to conserve.

And they watched. The swarm was massive. Chong tried counting them, but gave up after he reached seven hundred. Benny figured there had to be ten times as many as that. Nix crouched beside Benny, her body trembling with fear. This was the largest horde of the dead they’d seen since Saint John’s reapers herded thousands of them against the Nine Towns.

“Why are they doing this?” asked Morgie, who hadn’t seen flocks of zoms except during the war with the Night Church and the groups clustered around the prison.

“It happens out in the Ruin sometimes,” said Benny. “I thought it was only because of the reapers and their whistles.”

The reaper army had learned that the ultra-high-pitched shrill of a dog whistle would attract the zoms. They coated their own clothing with a chemical similar in effect to cadaverine and walked among them like drovers working a herd of cattle. There were no drovers here, though.

Or so they thought.

Lilah suddenly tensed and pointed around the rear of the overturned semi. Here and there, scattered throughout the endless mass of zoms, were people who were still clearly alive. They were ugly and rough-looking, dressed in heavy leather jackets, jeans, and boots; and they all had chains wrapped around their arms or waists. They were filthy and unkempt, but they weren’t zoms, because they talked to one another, calling out crude jokes and sometimes cursing at zoms who strayed out of the main army.

They were not reapers; of that Benny and his friends were certain. However, they were doing exactly the same thing—driving the dead. Not with dog whistles, but through some other means that was not evident. The men were herding the staggering, shambling, rotting army toward the south of Texas, following Route 10.

It took a long time for the swarm to pass, and when it was gone, the six teenagers emerged from behind the semi and watched the receding dust cloud.

“G-god,” breathed Chong as he nearly collapsed back against one of the campers. He pushed up his visor with fingers that shook so badly he fumbled the simple action twice.

Lilah stood beside him, and even her legendary calm was shaken. She nibbled at her fingernails as she stared at the mass of zoms. “Too many,” she whispered softly.

Riot and Morgie stood in total silence, unable to speak.

Nix pushed up her visor and wiped at some tears. Her hands did not shake as badly as Chong’s, but there was a fever brightness in her green eyes. Benny shook his head, swallowing at the thought of how hopeless it would be to get caught by a swarm like that out in the open.

Then Nix turned around and gave a sharp cry, and when the others turned they saw more of the dead coming along the same road. This second swarm was smaller, but the third, following half an hour behind them, was the biggest yet. If the first swarm was a river, then this was an ocean.

“H-have to be thirty or—or—or forty th-thousand of them,” stuttered Chong once they were gone.

“Where are they going?” demanded Morgie, who was gray with fear. “What’s down that way?”

Benny consulted the map. “San Antonio, I think.”

They waited another half hour, but there were no more zoms, and darkness was falling.

“We can’t risk going back the way we came,” said Nix.

“We take that road,” said Lilah, gesturing to Route 10.

Chong nodded. “And we sure as heck can’t go north because of that meltdown.”

“Way I figure it,” said Benny, poring over the map, “is we go straight all the way south to the Mexican border and follow that. That’ll take us far enough away from San Antonio to stay out of whatever those swarms are all about.”

They moved away from the wrecked truck and that stretch of the road, found an abandoned service station, and made it their home for the night. There were two zoms in the place, but Lilah and Nix quieted them without fuss. Chong and Morgie used drop cloths from the mechanics’ bays to block the windows, and they took turns standing watch.

Deep in the middle of the night they heard another swarm pass.

And another.