Lost Roads (Benny Imura 7)

The man had been hacked to pieces.

Lilah merely jumped over him and tore down the hall, screaming Chong’s name.

They found Chong on the floor, half in and half out of the open classroom doorway. He lay still and silent in a pool of blood.

Lilah flung her spear down with a harsh metallic clang as she dropped to her knees beside Chong. Her hands were everywhere, checking for the wound that killed the boy she loved.

“You’re not allowed,” she said in a weirdly high-pitched voice of panic. “You’re not allowed.”

Her face was livid with stress and her eyes bright with tears. Lilah’s hands were everywhere at once. Spider and Alethea knelt by her.

Ledger moved past them, pointing his gun down the hall. There had been a terrible fight. Broken weapons, smashed glass, and plaster from damaged walls littered the floor. Several of Chong’s arrows were buried deep in door frames or lying on the ground, the barbs coated with dark and polluted blood.

“Sam,” he said, “on me.”

The sniper fell in to Ledger’s rear left corner, and the two of them moved along the hall with quick, quiet steps, shifting their weapons toward open doors, covering each other as they took turns entering and clearing the classrooms.

Gutsy, Benny, and Nix crept behind the two soldiers. Ledger sent Grimm ahead and Sombra immediately followed, but even the dogs moved cautiously. The hall had an ugly vibe to it, as if it were a battery that could store anger, pain, and violence. Gutsy felt that whatever happened here was over, but her nerves did not accept that assessment.

When they rounded the corner at the end of the hall, they found the second guard. The man stood over a pair of dead ravagers, but he swayed as if half asleep, his eyes looking nowhere. His body was streaked with red, but the blood around the bites on his face and throat was already turning black. Gutsy could see the tiny, threadlike worms wriggling in it.

“Oh, no…,” she said. It was Abdul, a leather worker from town who worked three nights a week for Karen Peak. At least, that’s who and what he had been. Now he was a shell, a vehicle for hunger and pain. Abdul raised his hands toward them and opened his mouth in a moan of bottomless need.

“I’m sorry, brother,” said Ledger, lowering his pistol and drawing a heavy knife. The blade rose and fell, and Abdul collapsed into the only kind of peaceful sleep afforded to anyone in this broken world.

Gutsy turned away, heartsick. Abdul was one of the nicest people she knew. Kind and funny. And now gone, with all of his laughter and talent and life stolen from him. Not by Ledger but by Collins and all the scientists like her who’d done this to the world. Gutsy wanted to cry. She wanted to take her crowbar and smash Collins to pieces.

They moved on, finding more bodies of the ravagers, each with a head wound. Gutsy frowned; there was something odd about them. Some still had weapons clutched in

their cold hands, and others had weapons near them, but they didn’t actually look like ravagers. Two of them were dressed in regular pants and shirts. No chains or any of that.

“Los muertos,” murmured Gutsy. “But… how’d they get in here?”

No one answered.

They reached the classroom, and Ledger waved the teens back as he and Sam went in fast. There were no shots, no yells. Nix and Gutsy exchanged a look and then entered the room. It was a complete shambles. Chairs were overturned, a desk had been flipped over and used as a barricade. The ropes used to bind Captain Collins lay cut and discarded.

And there were seven bodies on the floor. Sombra sniffed one and recoiled from the slack flesh, snarling and scared. The hair stood up all along his spine. Six of the dead had arrows stuck in eye sockets, foreheads, or temples. Chong, with his steel-tipped arrows, had fought like a demon.

The other ravager had been killed more crudely, clearly beaten with a folding chair.

“She’s gone,” snarled Benny, and kicked a metal trash can halfway across the room.

“Come on,” growled Ledger, and they went back to where Lilah and the others were clustered around Chong. Gutsy had been afraid of what they’d find there, but Chong’s eyes were open. They’d propped him against a wall, and he looked around with the glazed eyes of someone who’d just come out of a deep, deep sleep.

Benny rushed to his friend’s side, but Lilah shoved him back. “He doesn’t need you pawing at him,” she barked.

Ledger tempted fate by kneeling to examine Chong, ignoring lethal stares from Lilah. Then he sat back on his heels.

“The kid okay?” asked Sam.

“The kid,” said Chong in a weak voice, “is decidedly not okay.”

“Looks like a concussion and a pretty nasty laceration,” said Ledger. “Can’t tell if your skull’s fractured, though, so you’re going to have to take it real easy for a while.”

“Oh, bummer,” said Chong. “I was planning on doing jumping jacks and standing on my head.”

“Don’t do that,” began Lilah, then colored as she realized he was joking.