Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

“God in heaven,” said Ford.

“God may be in heaven,” said Karen, “but the devil is here in our town.”

“So the diseases,” said Spider, “weren’t really natural, right?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“And making Mama sick wasn’t just to shut her up?”

“No.”

“They brought Mama back to Gutsy twice,” said Alethea. “What did they think was going to happen? That seeing Gutsy would somehow wake her mind up?”

Karen didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. They all knew it was the truth.

Gutsy cleared her throat and forced herself to ask the next question. “What’s the Night Army? Are they the wolf packs?”

“They are,” said Karen, and now she looked even more scared. “But they’re not what you think.”

“What do I think?”

“That they’re just another mutation. I mean they are, but they’re not just that.” She cupped her palms around her glass and looked down into its contents. “During the End, when our army was still fighting the dead, do you know why we lost?”

“I think I do,” said Urrea. “We lost because they were us.”

“Huh?” said Alethea.

“I get it,” said Spider, but Karen explained.

“Soldiers were always trained to fight the enemy, and the enemy was always someone else. Another race, people from another country. It was ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ and the soldiers, the men and women who signed up or who were drafted, joined because they were fighting for something. Not anyone’s politics, not really. They were fighting for their families, their homes, their friends. And once they were in the field, once they were in actual combat, they were fighting for the soldiers next to them. That’s how it’s always been. I know because I was in the Texas National Guard. I was a soldier, which is how I got the job as security officer for this town. When the End happened, we weren’t fighting the Russians or North Koreans or militant religious terrorists. We were told to stop the infected—and those infected were our own people. Family members, friends, neighbors who had turned. That’s who came at us. Sure, we fought, but we only fought for as long as we could. We fought until our hearts broke. I saw soldiers—tough, experienced soldiers—drop their guns and walk into the infected, arms open, trying to hug someone they knew. Accepting the consequences, because they’d rather be dead among the people they loved than alive with only their grief, or the knowledge of who took the bullets they fired.”

She paused, drank, and set the cup down so hard water splashed on her hands. She made no move to clean it up.

“The people in the base never stopped their war. They had a medical triage center on the front lines, and they took as many soldiers as they could to try and help them. Or so we thought. The wounded were sent back to aid stations, except that was a lie. A lot of them were sent to the base. The scientists figured that they were dying anyway, so they used them. Experimented on them. Generation after generation of the mutagen. Hundreds of soldiers as test subjects. Some died, and I mean really died. A lot of the others turned. Some . . . changed. They didn’t die and didn’t completely transform. The scientists thought this was a sign of victory, a sign that they were making real progress, so they asked for more wounded. They called them ‘volunteers,’ but let’s face it, no one was volunteering.” She paused, thought about it, and shook her head. “Or maybe they did, who knows? Maybe they told the soldiers that volunteering for experimental treatments would lead to a cure that would save their family members—living and living dead. Now that I think about it, I bet that was what they did.”

“That would be my guess too,” said Urrea. “Otherwise the soldiers would eventually have mutinied.”

“They did,” said Karen. “Later. Way later.”

Ford leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

“It did work in a way, in that the mutagen they were given allowed them to keep their consciousness. They can talk and think. But the mutagen did not stop the aggression or the need to spread the disease. It actually made it worse, because the presence of the parasite in the brain drove them all mad. They are thinking parasites. They are filled with nothing but rage and a desire to kill, but they have their intelligence. They can plan how to kill. They carry out those plans too. Which is why all those camps and settlements have been destroyed.”

“That’s the Night Army?” asked Gutsy.

“That became the Night Army,” said Karen. “For a while they were leaderless, just a bunch of wolf packs, roving the Broken Lands. Then they started merging, forming larger packs. They started targeting the small testing stations and wiping those out.”

“Why? What changed?”

“They have a leader,” said Karen. “The soldiers call him the Raggedy Man, but that’s either a nickname or a code name. I don’t think they know his real name.”

“The Rat Catchers mentioned him,” said Gutsy, and told her about what they’d said at the graveside. Urrea and Ford explained about the rumors of the Raggedy Man being a god, a general, or king to los muertos.

“I don’t know that much about him,” Karen conceded. “Bits and pieces, and none of it good. All I know is that whoever he is, he’d been someone important during the outbreak, and the military went to great lengths to find his body and transport it to the base.”

“His body?” asked Spider. “You mean he was dead?”

Karen cocked her head to one side and considered Gutsy. “What’s ‘dead’ really mean these days? Whether he was a living dead or some mutant version, I don’t know. All I do know is that everyone was afraid of him, but they needed him. They needed something from him, and don’t ask me what it is, because I don’t know. They experimented on him, and I think something they got from him helped them with the latest generation of the mutagen. That’s where it all went wrong, though. Something happened and there was a mutiny at the base and all the infected soldiers got out. From what I could piece together, the Raggedy Man was either in the base and he led the revolt to break out, or he sent word for them