Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

“Joe,” he said. “Listen . . . we’ll rest for today, and then tomorrow I think we need to go find one of those weapons caches. Maybe both of them. Clean them out before the Night Army finds them. If you need to stay here and rest your leg, I’ll understand. This isn’t your fight, so . . .”

The smile on Ledger’s face made Sam’s words trail off. He knew that smile from long ago. It was not a friendly smile, not a tolerant smile. It was the smile of a killer.

“Sam, old buddy, this has always been my fight.”

Sam Imura smiled too.

PART THIRTEEN

NEW ALAMO, TEXAS

LATE AUGUST

HUNTING THE HUNTERS

There is no hunting like the hunting of man,

and those who have hunted armed

men long enough and liked it,

never care for anything else thereafter.

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY

59

WHEN SHE TURNED AROUND—WHEN she could turn around—the Chess Players were sitting where they’d been. But they looked frozen in place. Shocked. Terrified for her, and maybe of her. Sombra stood between Gutsy and the two men, looking at her; then he turned toward them too.

Gutsy pushed off the windowsill and walked over. The room no longer spun and the floor felt steady beneath her feet.

There was a time for panic and there was a time to get back to work. There was a time to be a scared kid and there was a time to be who she was, undefined by age or gender or race or anything. The icy hatred she’d felt before was still there, just beneath the surface. It was so powerful, and it focused her like sunlight through a magnifying glass. It did not own her, and she hoped and prayed it would never define her.

When she spoke, her voice sounded calm. Way too calm. She thought she probably should have been worried about that. It wasn’t something to be calm about. Inside her head, she felt fractured. Her broken heart was like two pieces of old lava rock. Hard, sharp-edged.

“Where is this lab?” she asked, her voice harsh and cold.

“We don’t know,” said Urrea.

“What about the base?”

“We don’t know,” said Ford. “We’ve looked, we’ve asked questions—”

“That’s not good enough,” roared Gutsy. “You’ve had fifteen years to find it.”

Urrea quickly said, “Gutsy, we think that the lab is somewhere near town, maybe near what’s left of Laredo. But it’s a lot of real estate, and the two of us are not as nimble as we once were at escaping swarms of shamblers or fast-infected. We haven’t really gone out much to poke around.”

“We even had to be careful with asking questions,” said Ford. “Other people asked about the base, and some of them went missing over the years.”

“Or turned up dead,” said Urrea.

Gutsy frowned. “That doesn’t make sense unless someone in town is connected with the Rat Catchers and . . .” Her words trailed off, and both men began nodding. She straightened and said, “The guards. When the Rat Catchers brought Mama back the first time, there was no fuss. No riders in the streets. No one got hurt. That never made sense to me unless someone let them in.”

“You always were a smart girl,” said Ford.

“But there was a fight the next time.”

“Which means what?”