Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

“So, that grave over there is a Cantu and the one next to it are the Santiagos. And down there, that was old Mr. Diaz. Most are Spanish.”

“Okay, so that’s freaky. It’s six Spanish names to every one that’s not.” He cut the girls a look. “You trying to say this was about race? I mean . . . come on, we learned about that in school, but there’s not enough people left for that kind of stuff anymore.”

Gutsy took a moment with that. “Maybe not, but New Alamo wasn’t always a mixed-race town. Remember, my mama and a lot of the people here were prisoners. Undocumented. Nobody really cared much about them.”

As if in answer to that, Sombra gave a single, sharp bark.

28

“OH, COME ON,” PROTESTED SPIDER, “there’s got to be more to it than someone being racist.”

“Of course there is,” agreed Gutsy, “and I could be totally wrong . . . but you have to admit it’s weird.”

“Everything’s weird,” said Spider. “Why would some bigots dig up all these bodies? Why would they bring your mom back to your place? How would they even know which body buried here was your mom? Those riders don’t even live in our town.”

“What makes you think that?” asked Gutsy.

“They rode away.”

“Sure,” said Gutsy, “but while they were in town, they wore masks to hide their faces. The one who stole my machete pointed it at me. She knew who I was.”

Spider shook his head. “I don’t know, Guts, it sounds like a stretch to me.”

“Let’s keep looking,” interjected Alethea. “Maybe we’ll find something that makes it make sense.”

They spread out to make their own investigations, calling information back and forth every time one of them saw something.

“I’m seeing like . . . fifteen, twenty different sets of prints,” Gutsy observed. “Same kind of boots, though. Same tread patterns. Different marks of wear—cuts, nicks, whatever—on them, so we could maybe match the prints to the specific boots.” She stopped to consider. “Whoever these guys are, there’s a bunch of them.”

“I don’t think they were all guys. Take a look at this.” Alethea placed her foot into one of the prints, and it was almost the same size. “Either that’s a guy with an awfully small foot, or it’s that woman you saw in town.”

They kept looking and found single-wheel tracks inside the front cemetery gate and several sets of wagon wheel tracks out on the road; and there were none at all at the rear gate. It suggested that the people who did this had used smaller carts inside the cemetery and loaded the bodies onto big wagons outside, and then gone northeast. Surely not as far as San Antonio, though the wheels all rolled in that direction. Gutsy knew the terrain nearly all the way to that distant city. The

re wasn’t much there. Ghost towns, overgrown farms, dead factories, and a lot of los muertos.

“Who are these freaks?” Spider wondered aloud, but no one had an answer.

There were marks from single-wheeled carts all over the place. That told Gutsy that the grave robbers were using wheelbarrows. It made her sick with anger to think that the bodies were being torn from the ground and dumped into wheelbarrows for transport out to the wagon. The lack of respect for the dead was horrible. Inhumane.

The wagon tracks out on the road were thicker, and it was clear they were using old car tires. A lot of people did that because there were plenty of tires around, and even though the weather had rotted a lot of them, good ones weren’t that hard to find.

Sombra came out and sniffed the tire tracks, uttered a low growl, and promptly peed all over the marks.

“Well,” said Spider, “I guess that says it all.”

Alethea bent to give the coydog a gentle scratch in one of the few undamaged spots on his smoky hide.

Gutsy walked to the cart, giving Gordo an affectionate pat on the withers, then stopped and leaned on the wooden slat rail to stare at the form lying silent and cold inside the shroud. Her friends came and stood on either side of her.

“We can’t bury her here,” said Alethea as she came to stand beside Gutsy. “Not after this. Which sucks so bad.”

Gutsy nodded.

It took her a while before she answered. “You know, I’m getting a little tired of being pushed around by all this.”

“So we turn it over to Karen Peak or the town council and let them handle it,” said Alethea. Then she shook her head. “Ah . . . I know that look, Guts. That’s not what you’re going to do, is it?”

“No.”