Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

Mr. Golden printed several hundred copies of the weekly New Alamo, which mostly ran ads for trades and swaps, notices about store hours and town council meetings, and recipes, but also had a column called The Whisperer. Everyone knew Mr. Golden wrote the column—he wrote every word of the paper—but it was supposed to be written by a mysterious person called X. The column was a lot of gossip, most of it stupid, almost all of it questionable. Like when X said that Trapper Halls sewed small pieces of scrap metal into the corners of his feed sacks in order to give short weight on what he sold. People tore those bags apart and didn’t find a thing. Or that other time when X claimed that Nancy Fowler was having an affair with Hack Santiago, when everyone who had two brain cells knew that Hack was gay. Rumors and gossip that got people talking but were usually hurtful, sneaky, and mean-spirited. Nobody Gutsy knew liked Mr. Golden. However, everyone she knew—including Mama—read that column every week.

Ford snorted again. “Gus Golden wouldn’t know the truth if it crawled up his pants leg and bit him on the—”

“Ford . . . ,” said Urrea quietly.

“I get the point,” said Gutsy.

“Real investigative journalists care about the facts,” said Urrea. “They want to uncover the truth. Not lies, not hearsay. They want the cold, hard facts. The case we were investigating had to do with how undocumented immigrants were being treated.”

Gutsy felt her attention sharpen.

“We’d talked to a number of the undocumented who had been in this very camp. People who had been processed out of here and sent back to Mexico but who came back across the border.”

“How?”

“Oh . . . various ways. Tunnels, or across the Rio Grande, in glider planes, over the wall. Sometimes across the Gulf of Mexico. People always found ways in. I knew several because of my own history. I was born in Tijuana, Mexico, but went to college in the States. In San Diego.”

She cocked her head to one side, reappraising the old man. “You don’t look Mexican.”

“My mother was American. I have her blue eyes and I used to have sandy blond hair.”

“You used to have hair,” said Ford.

“In Mexico,” continued Urrea as if his friend hadn’t spoken, “as a kid, I was the outsider because I looked American. In America I was the kid with the Mexican accent. I wasn’t welcome on either side of the border. Then I began writing about immigrants—legal and illegal. And about the need to cross borders, cross lines, change the definition of who you are to fit who you want to be. When I caught wind of something very bad happening here, I told Ford about it. We got ourselves invited to the writers’ conference in San Antonio and used it as a cover to start poking our noses where they didn’t belong.”

“We didn’t expect the world to end,” said Ford.

Gutsy frowned. “Yeah, but what was it you guys were investigating? And how does that have anything to do with the Rat Catchers or what happened to my mom?”

“It has everything to do with it, I’m afraid,” said Urrea, and Gutsy could hear pain and maybe fear in his voice. “You see, the rumors we followed weren’t just about the way undocumented persons were being treated here. Not only about that. No, the story we were investigating had to do with things that were happening to some of those people in the lab down here.”

“Lab?” gasped Gutsy. “What lab? You mean the FEMA place near Laredo?”

“No,” said Ford. “That was set up during the crisis. Everyone knew about it because they wanted people to be able to find it. Unfortunately, some of the people who went there for shelter had been bitten. And . . . well . . . you know how that turned out. We came looking for a secret laboratory that was supposed to be around here.”

She folded her arms. “I’ve been all over the Broken Lands. If there was a base, I’m pretty sure I would have found it.”

“Wouldn’t that depend on how well it’s hidden?” asked Mr. Urrea. “I mean, the Rat Catchers said they had a base, right? That’s what you overheard. Then the base exists. Trust me, kiddo, the military were always very good at hiding things. Before the End, there were all kinds of rumors and urban legends about hidden bases. A lot of people believed there were even bases where they hid wreckage from crashed UFOs.”

“Ri-i-i-i-ight,” said Gutsy. “Mr. Golden writes about that, too. He thinks that the whole reason los muertos rose is because of aliens. Or . . . radiation from some kind of space probe. Or something like that. Crazy stuff. Are you going to tell me that this secret base was hiding little green men from outer space?”

“No,” said Urrea. “Be almost nice if that was the case.”

“Be better than the truth,” said Ford.

“Why better?” asked Gutsy.

“Because the truth is so much more frightening than that,” said Urrea. “And it’s so much uglier than space aliens or cosmic radiation. If it was something wild like that, then it would have all been totally beyond our control. It would have been something done to us.”

“You’re saying it’s not?” she asked.

“No. This plague . . . the whole end of the world was something done by us.”

When she said nothing, Mr. Ford quietly said, “And it’s not over.”

“What do you mean?”

“He means,” said Urrea, “that the people who started this whole thing are still out there. And they’re still playing God with what’s left of the human race.”