Lost Roads (Benny Imura 7)

Urrea knelt beside her and took her in his arms. Ford placed his hand on her back.

“All stories end, Alethea,” Urrea said gently. “Even for old fools like us.”

“You have to go,” said Ford.

The two old men took Alethea’s arms and raised her to her feet. Ford handed her the bat. The world was breaking around her, and death was coming. She did not want to run anymore. Did not want to fight.

“We love you, princess,” he said. “You and your friends. But you need to leave.”

Urrea stroked Alethea’s cheek and kissed her forehead. “Let us do this for you. Let all we’ve been through mean something.”

She looked at him. At Ford. And saw their resolve. Their acceptance.

She kissed and hugged them both, and then she staggered back. Caught her balance. Tears blurred the world, but she found the best path.

She and the survivors ran away.

The first time Alethea looked back, she saw the Chess Players watching her.

The next time she looked back, the old writers were hurrying away to the northwest. They were making noise, clanging their weapons. Being heard by the killers who chased them. Leading death in the wrong direction.

The last time she looked back, Ford and Urrea were out of sight.

She and her people ran. Quickly and quietly. Into the night. She never saw them again.

96

THEY PUSHED THE CART FOR miles in the dark-ness, lit by moonlight and guided by stars. Gutsy led the way, because she knew the Broken Lands better than any of them. Sombra was with her, sniffing the ground, darting out into the shadows to investigate noises and returning quickly. Grimm stayed with Benny, guarding him and the Dòmi.

There was a cluster of small buildings on a high hill, above which rose the rusted skeleton of an old cell phone tower.

“Wait here,” said Gutsy. “Rest while I go up and take a look.”

Chong and Benny collapsed on the ground beside the cart, which they had muscled over the rough terrain. They didn’t dare use the main road, because it was evident from thousands of scuffed footprints that it was how a big part of the Raggedy Man’s army had come to New Alamo. It was too big a risk if they used that route, in case more were coming, or the clever reapers might follow to try and chase down refugees.

Gutsy stood at the base of the tower and took a deep breath. The adrenaline rush was fading and she had never in her life felt this exhausted, but resting was not a possibility. Not now, and probably not for hours. Site B was still many miles away, and they had to move fast. So, she took another breath, set her jaw, and climbed.

The tower was very tall and the wind was whipping out of the west, making the structure creak threateningly, and the whole thing swayed like a willow. She had to force herself to continue to climb, praying to Mama, the Virgin Mary, and every saint whose name she could remember not to let the tower fall.

There were a lot of different kinds of dishes up there, which she knew from people in town were for different kinds of service for handheld phones—similar, she assumed, to the satellite phone Nix and Lilah had. Most were weather-battered and covered in bird droppings. A few had become nests for insects.

She had to climb above the cluster of dishes to see, and was immediately sorry she did. It wasn’t just that the elevation offered a more comprehensive view of the utter destruction of her home. No. What jolted her, what nearly knocked her from that precarious perch, was what she saw moving through the darkness.

From that bird’s-eye view, she saw two masses of figures on the march. Far to the west, coming from the direction of the destroyed base, were more of the wild men, hidden by the ancient ruins of small towns. Not as many as before—Gutsy wondered how many had been destroyed in the fires—but enough. Sixty or seventy of them. Running erratically toward the northeast, loping sometimes on two legs and occasionally on hands and feet, like misshapen dogs. It was an ugly sight. Terrifying.

But much worse was what she saw to the east. She thought she’d understood how massive the Raggedy Man’s army was when viewed from the crane platform. But she was wrong. Very, very wrong. She’d half-joking referred to it as an army of a million, but now she was sure that’s what she was seeing. There were so many of them that it was as if the entire surface of the desert moved. Too many of the walking dead to count. They moved like a tide, a mass at least two miles wide and many miles long, shambling with inexorable slowness in the same direction the refugees had gone.

Here and there she saw ravagers and reapers—and she could identify them by the way the moonlight glittered on their weapons. She figured the teen Benny had fought was down there. He didn’t seem the type to have been caught helpless when the town burned.

Gutsy forced herself to look toward the northeast. Off in the distance, spread out in the night, she saw dozens of small refugee groups picking their way through lands most had not walked since the dead rose. Her heart sank, because none of them were very far ahead of her own group. They should have been. They should all be halfway there by now, but they were not. Fatigue, fear, confusion, and perhaps infighting had slowed them. The night fought them by making each footfall treacherous and uncertain. The people of New Alamo were struggling against their own survival.

The night breeze brought both distant howling and the soft pleading of hungry moans. They were all following the refugees. All of them heading on what was clearly a collision course to Site B. Or, worse, to a point before anyone could reach the hidden place. If the doors were still locked, then the land in front of that last bastion of hope would be a killing ground. Gutsy and everyone she knew would die there.

And no one would ever know.

97

A SUDDEN GUST OF WIND nearly flung Gutsy from the tower and she clung to it, crying out in sudden fear as it leaned so far over she thought it would fall. From below she heard Spider and Benny cry out too.