Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

“Maybe,” said Gutsy, “or maybe not. I read a little about dogs because Mama was going to get a puppy for me. I remember reading that you can’t explain to a dog why it shouldn’t be scared. You can’t really tell it everything’s okay or that it’s safe. It doesn’t understand. No, what you need to do is be calm. You need to be the leader of the pack, and the leader should always be, like . . . well . . . calm. Strong, mentally together. Like that.”

She sat cross-legged on the ground and kept her tone normal. She didn’t look at the dog at all, but she was aware that Sombra was staring at her. Studying her.

“All he’s getting from me,” said Gutsy, looking up at Spider, “is me being me. No problems, no pressure, no nothing except me in my own space. He can probably smell my scent all over this yard and knows this is my place. If he stays here, it’s because he decides to be part of my pack.”

Spider smiled and shook his head again. “You’re deeply weird, Guts. Always were, always will be.”

Sombra gave a huge yawn and lay down with his head between his paws. After a few minutes, he closed his eyes.

“I’m okay with being weird,” said Gutsy.

Overhead the sun was rolling toward the edge of day, and the yard was painted with long purple shadows. The last of the day’s bees moved without haste from one rose to another. From the house next door, they could hear the sound of bare hands slapping tortillas into shape. Farther down the street a little girl shrieked as she dodged two other kids in a game of tag. Cooking smoke from the first of the evening fires drifted toward them on a sluggish breeze, carrying the scent of peppers and onions—the way they smelled when they were tumbled fresh onto a hot pan.

Gutsy didn’t know she was crying until the tears dropped from her cheeks onto her shirt. Spider came over, sat down, and almost put his arm around her.

Gutsy sniffed and forced a smile. “

I’m not a dog, you dummy. I understand why.”

He put his arm around her shoulder and they sat there in the yard, both of them aware that the sounds and smells of mothers making dinner would never come from inside the Gomez house ever again.

After a long, long time Sombra put his battered head on Gutsy’s thigh.

16

GUTSY ASKED SPIDER TO COME over for dinner.

“Sure,” he agreed, “but I need a bath first. I smell like overheated horse.” He sniffed his clothes. “And horse poop.”

“Go get clean. Tell Alethea, if she wants to come.”

“She will. Mrs. Cuddly is making her ‘wilderness stew’ again. Yuck.”

Mrs. Cuddly and her husband ran the Home for Foundlings, where Spider and Alethea lived. Mrs. Cuddly was, by all accounts, the worst cook in the history of dining, but her wilderness stew took that to an incredible low. No one was ever quite certain which meat served as the base for the stew. It didn’t taste like beef, mutton, pork, goat, or even horse. Alethea said it was probably made from kids who tried to run away from the Cuddlys’ orphanage. She was only half joking.

Spider left and Gutsy stood for a long time watching him walk away. All their lives Spider and Alethea had been the orphans and she’d been the one with a family, even though it was a two-person family. Her father had died when Gutsy was little, but Spider and Alethea never knew either of their parents. Now, of course, they were all orphans. Despite all the pain she felt, there was some strange comfort in it too, as if this meant Alethea and Spider were now her family.

Maybe they always had been. She’d have to think about that.

A quick check of the cabinets told her that she didn’t have enough food for three people, so she sorted through her pockets to make sure she had enough food credits and headed for the door.

“Come on,” she said to the coydog as she walked out into the twilight. Gutsy did not look to see if Sombra followed. Either he would, or he wouldn’t.

It wasn’t until she heard the faint click of his nails on the sidewalk that she knew. It lit a small fire in her heart. The general store was five blocks away and the air was cooling a little. There was still plenty of humidity, though, and that held the warmth.

As she crossed the street, a familiar voice called her name, and Gutsy saw two old men seated on opposite sides of an empty beer keg on the porch of the general store. A rusty Coleman lantern spilled light on them and on the chessboard that was perpetually positioned there. Gutsy walked over to where the Chess Players—Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford—sat. They each had cups of tea. The knights and royals were scattered around the board, with a few standing idly alongside, victims of another of their devious battles.

“Hey,” she said as she stepped up onto the pavement and leaned against a post. The Chess Players were both old, their faces deeply lined and jowly, but both of them had sharp eyes that sparkled with inquisitive lights. A long time ago, before the End put an end to so many things, both of them had been writers. Famous novelists. They still wrote, but their stories were handwritten into notebooks. Occasionally they would have some of them typeset and printed with a hand-crank copier, but mostly they shared their stories with Gutsy and her friends, or through readings in school.

Early on, Gutsy knew, the two writers had been heroes for a while because they’d organized several hundred survivors and led them on a daring scavenging raid to the docks in Corpus Christi. There they fought hordes of los muertos to secure a massive facility where big metal shipping containers were stored after being unloaded from ships. There were no living survivors in the city, so the stuff was there to be taken. Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford helped to rig barges and load them with all kinds of stuff. It cost the lives of seventeen of their team, but the supplies they brought back probably saved a hundred times as many lives. Tons of canned food, medical supplies, clothes, and so much more. The whole expedition took two months, but that was fifteen years ago. Disease had claimed so many people in New Alamo that the tale had become almost a folktale. Not everyone believed it ever happened, or that the heroic deeds of two now ancient men were anything but exaggerations.

It was that story, though, that inspired a much younger Gutsy Gomez to become a scavenger. The tales the Chess Players told about how problems were met and solved at every stage of the Raid—as it was called—flipped some kind of switch in her, and from then on, she loved solving problems. They knew it too, and often posed logic problems for her to solve. Never scolding or mocking when she failed, but instead guiding her through the best logical steps so she wouldn’t fail at that kind of problem again.

Mr. Urrea nodded to the coydog, who stood in the middle of the street, eyeing the two old men with uncertainty. “You picking up strays?”

“We picked up each other,” said Gutsy, and explained about their meeting.

“He’s a coydog,” said Mr. Ford. “Interesting. Been a long time since I saw a tame one.”