Lost Roads (Benny Imura 7)

There was no time left for debate. Gutsy took a firm grip on the bags of Dòmi-infused dried manure and began climbing. It wasn’t easy; she had to hold the bags with one hand and climb with the other. The rungs were old and rusted, and they creaked under her feet. Benny was right behind her, and she could hear him grunting with effort.

Up and up they went. Gutsy thought about Spider and Alethea, about the Chess Players and Karen, and about Alice. She would never see any of them again; of that she was certain. This was a true suicide mission.

But if it worked…

Up and up. A stray shot burned through the air, sounding like a furious bee, five inches from her face.

Just climb, she ordered herself. No matter what happens, just climb.

The wind was getting worse and worse, as if it was turning into some kind of summer hurricane. Pieces of debris whipped past. The breeze was so weirdly strong it nearly plucked her from the ladder. She dropped one of the bags, and it clipped Benny’s shoulder, almost knocking him down.

“Sorry!”

“Climb,” he bellowed back.

A roar made them both whip around to see a group of reapers—at least a dozen of them—zooming at them on quads, blades out. Gutsy hurried and reached the top rung.

“Gutsy,” Benny yelled, “take this.”

Gutsy turned and saw him holding up one of his bags. She leaned down and took the bag, hoisting it and her remaining bag onto a narrow catwalk at the top of the ladder. Then she took Benny’s other bag and gasped as he immediately began climbing back down.

“What are you doing?”

“Stick to the plan,” he yelled. “You’re not the only one with really bad ideas.”

Benny let go and jumped the last few yards, landed in a crouch, pitched forward, and rolled back to his feet to slough off the force of the impact. As he straightened, he whipped his sword free and took a stance at the base of the ladder while reapers on quads raced toward him.

The wind suddenly howled louder than ever, sounding almost like a teakettle.

And then the entire group of reapers, quads and all, exploded.

It happened at once. Something seemed t

o streak through the whistling wind and strike the second quad in the pack, and then a massive fireball snatched them all off the ground and hurled them into the night. The sound of it was titanic, and a shock wave punched into Benny and Gutsy and knocked them flat.

They lay there, dazed, completely stunned by what had just happened. Gutsy’s logical mind was already trying to make sense of it, conjuring a dozen different possible explanations, but all of them were wrong.

A second shriek split the air, and something smoky and gray blew past them and slammed into the front rank of ravagers just as the killers opened up a fresh barrage of automatic gunfire. The explosion seemed even bigger and louder than the first.

The shock wave loosened Gutsy’s grip on the catwalk and she began to fall, but her hands darted out just in time to grab the uprights of the ladder. Her momentum was plummeting, though, and she slid down toward the ground at an insane speed. She braced the inside arches of her shoes against the pole and they acted like brakes, so hitting the ground was merely painful instead of crippling. Gutsy flopped over onto one side and looked at the trails of gray smoke lingering in the sky being pulled apart by the wind. She had no idea what was happening. The world refused to make sense. But then she followed the smoke trails back to their source. What she saw froze the whole night into something impossible.

She saw two figures standing on the crest of the next hill. Two men, each with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher in their hands.

Two bruised, battered, and bloody old soldiers.

102

THE RAGGEDY MAN RULED THE night. That’s how he saw it, even though things were not going according to his well-laid plans.

To one side of his flatbed, the wild men were destroying a huge chunk of his army. In front of him, someone was using rocket-propelled grenades to kill his ravagers and reapers. Somehow the people of this bloody town had outfoxed him, made a fool of him. Lured him into a trap.

He snarled and spat into the teeth of the wind.

“You may be smarter,” he said very softly, “but I’m stronger. You watch.”

He raised his hands, and the entire mass of the army, nearly eight hundred thousand of the living dead, surged forward. The reapers and ravagers still held the line between him and the wild men. The Raggedy Man was wise. He understood something of this new threat from things he’d learned and overheard while a prisoner of the research base. He knew about Wodewose, and seeing it here, as a terrible reality, sweeping through his beloved dead, was horrifying.

Would it do the same to him? If all it did was to wake up the brain of the undead, how would it work on someone whose brain was already fully alive?