PART ONE NEW ALAMO
If we don’t end war, war will end us.
—H. G. WELLS
1
GABRIELLA “GUTSY” GOMEZ WAS SURE every single thing—living or dead—was trying to kill her.
This was the world and that’s how it was.
2
IT STARTED LIKE THIS.
A bunch of them in a classroom at Misfit High. Gutsy and her best friends, Spider and Alethea. Gutsy’s adopted coydog, Sombra. Karen Peak, head of town security. The two old teachers, Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford, known to everyone as the Chess Players. The California Kids—Benny Imura, Nix Riley, Lou Chong, and Lilah—who’d arrived in town just as an army of ravagers and shamblers was attacking. Two grizzled and scarred old soldiers had shown up as well—Benny’s older half brother, Sam Imura, and special ops agent Joe Ledger. Grimm, Ledger’s massive and heavily armored mastiff, lurked nearby.
All of them there in that room. With a monster.
Captain Bess Collins.
She was the one who’d run a hidden military base near New Alamo. She’d overseen the lab that used the citizens as lab rats for bizarre medical experiments. She had allowed Dr. Max Morton and his team to systematically inject various unsuspecting townsfolk, including Gutsy’s own mother, with deadly diseases so they could study the reanimation process. They said it was to try and save the world, to find a way to control or destroy the parasites that created los muertos. To restore some intelligence to the newly risen dead. To remove the aggression that made the shamblers want to kill and devour.
Monsters doing monstrous things to fight other monsters.
That was how it started.
Captain Collins admitted all of this now. She admitted that her team had made terrible mistakes. They had experimented on wounded or dying soldiers and accidentally turned many of them into murderous thinking zombies—ravagers.
She admitted that everyone in New Alamo was expendable if the end result was a cure.
And she told them about their worst failure: Years ago the team at the lab had found the original infected person, a brutal mass murderer named Homer Gibbon. He had not become a shambler and could somehow control the other undead. Gibbon had been terribly mangled in a car accident during the initial outbreak. Soldiers had collected what was left of him and brought him to Collins’s lab, where she and Dr. Morton had stitched Gibbon back together like a pair of Frankensteins. They’d experimented on him, but had badly underestimated how dangerous and powerful he was.
Homer Gibbon—the Raggedy Man—had escaped.
It was he who’d sent an army against New Alamo.
It was he who’d sent an even larger force toward Asheville, where the fledgling American Nation was trying to rise from the ashes of the old United States.
It was he who was going to sweep across the face of the world and devour all living things.
Captain Collins told them all of this.
And then, as if fate wanted to cruelly punctuate her words, screams tore the air.
The dead had come back to New Alamo.
Gutsy and her friends had only won a single battle. The war for the right to survive—to live—was just beginning. They knew this now.
3
FORD RUSHED TO THE WINDOW and stuck his head out, ear cocked toward the east gate, but then he frowned and turned back. “God… it’s coming from the center of town.”
Urrea crowded in next to him. “By the hospital, I think. Please, no…”
Gutsy snatched her crowbar from a desktop and dashed for the door, Sombra at her heels. Everyone followed. Gutsy yelled over her shoulder as she ran.
“Someone watch her.”
“I got it,” said Chong, and he wheeled around back to the classroom.
The rest ran.
As they exited the school, the sounds of the screams were horrific, and gunfire cracked through the hot afternoon air. Small arms, rifles and shotguns.
“I don’t understand,” gasped Spider. “How can there be this big a fight in town?”
No one had an answer, and they all ran harder.
As they rounded a corner, they saw a terrible fight in progress—not at the hospital but across the square by the livery stables, which had been used to store the many enemy dead until they could be taken out by the cartload and burned.
Just ahead, a gang of ravagers poured out of the stable, each of them armed with axes, pitchforks, and sledgehammers that they swung with terrible efficiency. People were down, clutching broken arms or shattered faces. Blood from open wounds splashed ten feet high on the walls. A couple of residents were firing handguns as they backed away, but they were almost immediately overrun. There were more attackers than there were bullets.
“Ravagers!” Gutsy cried.
“I thought they’d checked them all from the attack,” gasped Nix. “All the dead ones were silenced, weren’t they?”
Lilah reached the melee first and leaped into the air, swinging her spear in a glittering arc that cleaved through a ravager’s wrist. He shrieked and dropped his ax, then Lilah crashed into him, knocking him backward. She reversed the spear and swung a short, devastating blow to the killer’s temple that dropped him like an ox in a slaughterhouse.
Gutsy and Benny split right and left and Nix came up the middle, her gun in both hands as she fired careful, spaced shots. The ravagers were not quite los muertos but they were no longer human, and it was very difficult to kill them. Head shots, however, took everything down, human, inhuman, or in-between.
Sam Imura moved past Gutsy with his sniper rifle in his hands. The weapon was a precision instrument designed to kill from great distances, but Sam proved that it worked close-up. He shot, pivoted, shot, pivoted, shot. Each time a ravager went down with a black dot on forehead or temple.
Then Captain Ledger reached the fight and he drew his katana so fast that the weapon was nothing more than a whisper of silver. He and Sam peeled off and ran toward the hospital on the far side of the square, carving a path of destruction. Gutsy stared at them. Ledger, Sam, and the California kids were all warriors. She and her friends were not. There were no samurai or special ops soldiers or trained fighters in New Alamo. Just ordinary people.
Watching them did not make her feel diminished or foolish or helpless, though. For Gutsy, it had the opposite effect. She saw how experienced fighters worked. There was a clear science to it, a practicality, and she was all about that.
Gutsy hefted her crowbar and felt coldness run through her veins. Some of it was fear. Some of it was a kind of rage. She and her friends had learned the terrib
le art of killing on the wall, and that meant they were not helpless.
A ravager rushed out of the stable and swung an ax at her, but Gutsy ducked low and smashed her crowbar into his kneecap. His leg buckled, dropping him onto the injured knee—and Gutsy hit him in the head, making him fall back and drag a second ravager down. A third attacker swung a shovel at her, but Gutsy twisted away, and the blade missed her face by inches. She recovered and smashed the ravager in the throat, but the blow was badly aimed and did little damage. The man simply staggered away without falling.
“Move!” yelled a voice, and Gutsy evaded again as Alethea’s baseball bat—Rainbow Smite—whistled past and took the same ravager on the point of the chin. The man spun like a top and fell bonelessly to the ground.
Then Gutsy pushed Alethea out of the way of a ravager with a pitchfork, parried the weapon with her crowbar, kicked him in the knee, and then smashed the killer’s skull. He fell, broken and still.
Spider used his bo to drop another ravager, and for a few minutes there was furious fighting as more of the monsters came out of nowhere. The whole world seemed to be defined by pain and blood and violence. The defenders, shocked and terrified though they were, fought like wildcats.
There was a brief moment’s respite as the last of the ravagers on that side of the street went down, though pockets of battle raged all around them.
“This is impossible,” yelled Mr. Ford as he and Urrea came limping up. “The crews couldn’t have missed this many of them…”