ON THE LONG RUN FROM town Gutsy had tried to pace herself, to conserve her strength for whatever lay ahead as she attempted to infiltrate the base.
Now, running back, she could feel all those miles in the heaviness of her legs, in small shots of pain that began shooting up her shins and across her lower back. After a few miles, she shrugged out of the backpack and let it fall. There were useful things in there, but she didn’t care. The only thing she really needed was time, and she could feel it burning away. The silenced clock in her head now ticked as loud as gunshots, and instead of an empty timelessness, she was acutely aware that the seconds of her life were ticking down.
She had to reach home in time.
She had to warn everyone in time.
If only there was enough time.
She ran. Sombra ran with her, but even dogs are not tireless. He was panting as he ran.
The dead were coming. The only grace was that they were slow, and the ravagers moved at the speed of the shamblers they herded. It was something, but only if she could get to the town in time to alert Karen Peak and the town council.
It stabbed her through the heart to realize that those people, the ones who knew about the base, the lab, the Rat Catchers, and all of this, were the very ones she had to rely on to save them all. She wondered if the world was always that warped, that complicated. Probably, she decided, and that twisted the knife.
The glow of the fire faded behind her, and all the sounds of destruction and death, of horror and pain, became muted by distance and the sound of her own laboring breath.
Where was the town?
How far had she actually come to find the base?
Distance became meaningless.
Her mind tried to distract her by overanalyzing the facts. She cataloged every detail, from the moment of Mama’s death to the things she and her friends had learned from Karen. It all fit a pattern, it had a history, and although the actions of the lab scientists and the Rat Catchers were based on rationalization rather than compassion, they made a kind of sense. Part of what it took to be rational and practical, Gutsy knew, was to be able to see both sides of any issue. That did not, as some people seemed to think, require an agreement with either side. Understanding mattered. In history class she’d read books on war, on politics, on social unrest, and she understood a lot of different viewpoints, even some that were truly vile. So it only required perspective to understand the way the Rat Catchers thought.
To them, the people interned at the relocation camp were not entirely real. They were less than fully human. Bigots had to think like that, because otherwise they’d have to face their own fears. Otherwise they’d risk being crippled by compassion.
She ran, and the ghosts of ten thousand years of civilization ran with her. Heroes and villains, conquerors and the conquered, the bad and the good, and all the countless variations of what it meant to be human. Like an army of ghosts, they ran with her, and behind them was an army of the living dead.
Ahead . . . seemingly a million miles away, she could see the lights from the watchtowers of home.
81
SAM WONDERED IF HE’D MADE a serious mistake.
The horse walked at a brisk pace—not running, certainly not galloping—but even at a walk, it was hard for Sam to keep up. It chewed up hours and then days. Hunting in his woods demanded care and sometimes great violent exertion, but this was different, requiring an endurance that might have taxed him as a young man. Now, in his fifties, he felt all his years, all the damage that had been inflicted on him by fists, knives, bullets, and shrapnel. He felt as if he carried a thousand pounds of extra weight—a burden composed of regret, guilt, bad memories, fractured hopes, and loss.
One thing kept him going, though.
Benny.
He had a brother. He had family.
And so, he ate his pain and he ran.
The miles fell away as day turned to night and the moon hung burning like a signal flare in the black night.
But then Ledger slowed the horse and Sam stopped, leaning against Peaches’s flanks, gulping in air. Grimm immediately flung himself onto the ground with a weary groan and a clank of armor.
“Are you seeing this?” asked Ledger.
“Seeing . . . what . . . ?” gasped Sam.
Ledger pointed. Sam wiped sweat from his eyes and followed the pointing finger. He was so exhausted that it took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. Then he saw it.
The sky in the distance was no longer the color of icy moonlight.
Now it was the fiery red of an open furnace.