Lost Roads (Benny Imura 7)

In the other room, her mother moaned too. Very softly.

* * *

Miles and miles away, far from New Alamo, the Raggedy Man slept.

He did not sleep the way the living did. Nor did he stay perpetually awake like his billions of shambling children. But every now and then he fell slowly into a stupor, his ugly head sagging down onto his patchwork chest, his hands going slack in his lap, as still as dead tarantulas. His breath—such as it was—faded to the faintest of whispers.

His eyelids did not close, though. They stayed open, and the eyeballs, milky and dusty, stared at nothing. Rubbery lips, caked with dried blood and utterly slack, hung open. A fly landed on his chin and walked over the torn skin and onto those lips, nibbling at tiny flecks of uneaten meat.

Homer Gibbon’s tongue, gray as a worm, flicked out and caught the fly, pulling it in, pushing it toward teeth that ground it to paste. At no time during this did the Raggedy Man wake. He slept, and dreamed dreams that were painted in shades of black and red.

60

WHEN THEY REACHED THE LOWER of the two main floors, Gutsy and Holly stopped in the stairwell doorway, keeping back to remain in shadow. The mound of debris that reached up to the dangling steel cable was right there, less than two dozen paces away.

But it might as well have been on the far side of the moon.

The whole mound and much of the ruined top floor swarmed with figures that moaned and howled and tore and bit. Wild men. She had no idea where they’d come from. Other rooms, other floors, maybe drawn by the sounds she’d made, even though Gutsy had tried to be quiet. Or had something else triggered them? There was no way to know, and no time to figure it out.

And then she understood.

The wild men were not looking for her. All their rage was directed upward, and by leaning out, Gutsy could see that the upper edge of the big pit was thronged with hundreds of shapes. Los muertos. A swarm of them must have come upon the base, drawn by the smell of living flesh. The wild men, after all, were not dead. Not the ones here in the base, at least. They had been transformed by the paracide spread by the clouds of toxic smoke.

The living dead packed the rim of the pit, moaning with impossible hunger, and there were so many of them that the mass behind pushed those in front over the edge. They fell by the dozen, raining down onto the slope or smashing themselves on the concrete floor. Gutsy flinched as she heard bones shatter and meat burst apart. Some hit the sides of the heaped debris and bounced or rolled and then struggled to their feet, unconcerned with any injuries. Soon so many were falling that they landed not on broken concrete or twisted metal but on the bodies of other living dead.

The wild men, true to their name, went into a frenzy as the dead fell among them.

They surged forward, leaping on each zombie, biting and tearing at them with savage ferocity, sparing only those who transitioned quickly to wild men. The ones who, for whatever unknown quirk of biology, turned more slowly were simply torn to pieces.

At first Gutsy thought that it was just being close to their victims that turned the living dead into wild men, but then she saw that the paracide was also active in the bites. She was terrified, but at the same time found a splinter of twisted admiration for the science behind Wodewose. There were so many ways the howling carriers could infect los muertos—saliva, their own blood, skin-to-skin contact, breath. They had clearly been engineered to be perfect delivery systems for this counterplague. It also made Gutsy understand why Wodewose had been shelved. It was too dangerous. Too overwhelming.

The fight she watched proved that. It should have been unequal, because there were only about twenty of these frenzied mutants and dozens of los muertos. But the wild men were so much faster. They were much more coordinated in their attacks, too, bashing aside reaching arms and tripping the living dead before falling on them.

Some of the wild men were dragged down, though, buried under piles of the zombies, but even as they were torn apart they bit their attackers and howled and spat their infection at the reanimates. A few of the dead fell back, and Gutsy could see their bodies begin to twitch. The Wodewose paracide worked with unbelievable speed. Within a minute of the first wild men exposure, zombies began rising and turning on their own kind. Others, turned by spit from the howls, turned even faster. Seconds.

The fight was getting worse as more and more of the shamblers fell over the edge, and Gutsy realized that this must be a swarm. One of the big ones Benny and his friends had seen. She saw a few ravagers fighting their way along the rim, trying in vain to push their mindless charges back. She saw one fall, pushed over the edge by the weight of bodies. He pinwheeled his arms as he dropped, trying to avoid a jagged spike of broken steel and failing in a gruesome way. He landed on a seething mass of shamblers, bounced, rolled, and then sprawled at the feet of two of the wild men, who fell upon him instantly.

This fight was different, though. Even with the hard fall and sudden attack, the ravager rolled away and got to his knees as he drew a pistol. He fired six shots, hitting the two wild men in the chest

and face. They fell, but the gunshots drew the attention of the others, and a pack of them ran howling toward the ravager. He emptied his pistol into them, dropping another three, but then the rest swept over him like a tidal surge. He went down with a roar of anger and fear. Then he shrieked like a wounded fox as they bit him on the hands and neck and face.

The wild men cast him aside and ran howling in search of fresh prey. After a few seconds, the ravager began to twitch. As the spasms racked him, he struggled to his feet and tried to stop the wild jerks of his limbs, tried to stand or walk normally. The ravager fought back, even to the point of punching his own face and chest and legs as if he could force them to obey. Then a series of terrible cramps hit him in the stomach and he caved over, vomiting explosively. As he dropped to his knees, his face, by pure chance, pointed toward the open stairwell. He stared into the shadows as if he could see the two young women crouched there.

Gutsy had looked into the eyes of the ravagers before, and all she’d seen was a lingering intelligence but no trace at all of humanity.

Not now, though.

The ravager blinked over and over again as if trying to clear his eyes, and—impossibly—the rage was gone, replaced by pain and…

Awareness.

Yes, that was it. In that moment, the ravager seemed somehow aware of what it was. Completely aware. Terribly aware. He looked at his filthy hands, stained with old and new blood. He plucked at his clothes—leather and chains—and touched his torn face. All the time his eyes stared into the shadows.

He spoke a single word.

“Please…”

Close as she was to him, there was too much noise to hear the word, but she saw the shape of his mouth. She knew what he meant.