Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

“That runs a mile underground.”

“Closer to two miles,” corrected Benny. “The soldier said it was three klicks long. Captain Ledger used that expression a lot. A klick is a kilometer, which is—”

“Point six-two miles,” supplied Chong. “The actual distance isn’t the issue. First we’d have to find it.”

“He said the entrance was in a Texas Rose Car Wash.”

“Uh-huh. Okay,” said Chong patiently, “but even if we find it, you’re talking about going underground, maybe through the dark, to come up inside a town that’s about to be overrun by—oh, what’s the exact number?—oh yeah, a zillion freaking zoms.”

“Pretty much,” said Benny.

“In order to accomplish what? Look,” said Chong, “I’m not trying to go all Morgie here, and I know coming here was my idea in the first place, but this is kind of nuts. We came here to warn the people of New Alamo about the swarms. I think they pretty much know at this point.”

“No,” said Nix. “They don’t. They only think they do, but they don’t know what we know.”

Benny nodded. “Besides,” he said, “maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“When have we ever been lucky?” complained Chong. “No, don’t answer that. We’re alive. We stopped Saint John, blah blah blah. We are the souls of good luck and happy times.” He sighed. “Okay. What’s your plan, Benny-Wan Kenobi?”

Benny grinned. He and Chong had read a slew of old Star Wars novels over the summer. The Jedi knights in those books were clearly inspired by samurai.

So Benny took a breath, grinned like a wolf, and told them his plan.

True to form, none of them liked it. But they, too, wore smiles. Hyenas must have smiled like that, Benny thought. He’d read about them, too. Then he remembered that people always had the wrong idea about hyenas. They weren’t stupid, cowardly scavengers. They were predators and they were very, very smart. They didn’t poach leftovers from lions; it was the other way around, with lazy lions stealing from hyenas. Hyenas were supposed to be smarter than chimpanzees.

Why am I thinking about hyenas? he wondered, but the answer was already there. No one expected them to be as tough or as smart as they were.

No one.

They ran for their quads.

86

THEY CAME CLOSE TO THE fire and saw that, no, it wasn’t New Alamo.

“What was this?” asked Ledger. “And don’t tell me it’s the weapons cache.”

“No,” said Sam. “I’m pretty sure this is—was—the Laredo chemical weapons base.”

A massive section of the ground had collapsed inward, leaving a smoking pit a quarter mile wide from which tongues of flame licked out to taste the night.

The two old soldiers approached cautiously, staying downwind of the dead who lingered there. Most of the major swarms had moved off. A scream made them turn, and they saw a pack of three living dead chasing a man who was scrambling along on all fours, his body flash-burned and one foot mangled into red ugliness.

Ledger slid from the saddle and drew the sword.

“Why bother?” asked Sam, moving to block him.

“Because we can’t ask questions of the dead.”

Sam stepped aside.

Two of the shamblers were dressed in civilian clothes, and the third was in a desert-pattern battle-dress uniform, clearly a new recruit to the army of the unliving. There were no other zoms within sight, so Ledger limped over and gave a quick whistle. “You, deadheads, over here.”

The zoms all turned toward the big man who came striding toward them. With hisses of urgent hunger, they rushed at him. The ancient katana drew silver lines on the canvas of the darkness, and the dead men flew apart. It took less than a second.

Ledger snapped the sword to one side in a chiburi motion that whipped the black blood from the oiled steel. Sam walked up behind him, a Glock in his hands with a sound suppressor screwed into the barrel.

The wounded soldier collapsed weeping on the ground, and they knelt on either side of him. Sam rolled the man onto his back. Beneath the burns and soot, the victim was a large, muscular black man with cracked wire-frame glasses and a small mouth pinched with pain. He wore lieutenant’s bars and a name tag: HOWELL. Shock glazed his eyes.