Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

THE THREE OF THEM WANDERED through the defiled cemetery, stopping to peer into open graves, shaking their heads. Lost.

The graveyard was big and old, but not all of it belonged to New Alamo. There were huge sections from before the End, and a quick examination showed that none of those graves had been touched. Only the sections where people who’d died after the End were buried had been disturbed. Not all of them, though, but a lot. Too many.

Sombra limped along with them, sometimes ranging ahead to follow some movement, but it was always a piece of torn shroud blowing in the wind, or a startled lizard, or nothing at all.

They drifted back toward Mama Gomez’s grave and stood for a while in a clump, staring down into the shadows at the bottom of the empty hole. Sombra circled them, sniffing the ground.

“Okay,” said Alethea after taking a few deep breaths, “you’re the one who likes puzzles, Gutsy, so what the heck is going on?”

When Gutsy didn’t answer, Alethea snapped her fingers in front of Gutsy’s face.

“Uh-uh, girlfriend,” said Alethea sternly, “we’re not doing the whole ‘I’m too shocked to think’ thing. I’m scared green and I don’t like puzzles. So, do whatever you need to do to go all Sherlock Holmes on this. Tell me something.”

They had all read several Sherlock Holmes short stories last summer, and Gutsy had figured out some of the mysteries before they’d been revealed.

Spider, who often disagreed with his foster sister, waved his arms to indicate the whole cemetery and said, “We seem to have a lot of clues.”

“Clues,” echoed Gutsy. “Right. Clues.”

She rubbed her hands over her face and closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them, she tried to see everything as if for the first time, tried to pull all her previous opinions and judgments out and put them to one side.

“What’s strange,” began Gutsy slowly, “is that not all the graves are open.”

They went through and counted them. Out of more than five hundred graves in that part of the cemetery, ninety-seven had been opened.

“Maybe that’s all the time they had,” suggested Spider. “Maybe they’ll do more tonight.”

Gutsy considered that but shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Well, look at where they dug. A few here, a couple over there. The open graves are scattered all over. If they were going to dig up everyone, why not work one section at a time?” She walked a few yards away and stopped by an overturned grave marker. The name Jorge Ramirez had been painted onto a little wooden plaque nailed to a heavy cross.

“Skinny Jorge?” asked Spider.

“The one with the weird teeth? He was a farmer,” said Alethea. “His family lived over on the far side of town. I only knew him because his oldest son, Diego, hits on me all the time.”

Gutsy nodded. “How’d he die?”

Alethea shrugged. “He got the flu, I think.”

Spider nodded.

They walked on and stopped to read the names on every single grave marker. Most were crosses, because there were so many Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the town. Leftovers from the relocation camp, and some people who had fled north from Mexico. Of those, about fifty were Catholics. Their crosses were each marked with the name of a saint. Other people buried there were a mix of Protestants, Jews, Muslims, one Hindu, and some people who had nonreligious markers. Gutsy spoke each name aloud, and they tried to remember something about the person whose body had been stolen from their place of rest. Of the ninety-seven missing bodies, the three of them knew seventy-one, which was a higher number than Gutsy expected.

There were more than four thousand people in New Alamo, but there had been many more. However, the town was dwindling down. Not because of shamblers or ravagers, but constant waves of diseases—flu, mumps, tuberculosis. More than half the people in town had died over the last four years. Twelve years ago, when the town guards were organized and the defenses reinforced, there had been twenty-two thousand people. They were not all buried here, though. During the worst outbreaks of disease, the town council had used death carts to carry loads of corpses out to fire pits. That had created its own problems, of course, because in their panic to burn all the infected bodies and clothes, the townsfolk hadn’t thought about wind patterns or the effect of ash soaking into the ground during the rains. While it was true that fire purified, not all the bodies were completely consumed, and some diseases survived. The pollution and diseases that got into the water table killed more people in New Alamo than los muertos.

“I’m no Sherlock Holmes,” said Alethea as they stood in front of the last empty grave, “but I’m starting to see a pattern here.”

“What pattern?” asked Spider, looking back the way they’d come.

“The names,” Gutsy said, and Alethea nodded.

“What about them?”

Gutsy bent down, picked up the marker that had been kicked over by the grave robbers, and showed it to Spider. The name was Lucy Dominguez.

“So?” he asked.