Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

Gutsy knew the answer to that last question, but she did not dare look too closely at it.

9

FEAR WAS LIKE A SCORPION crawling up her back.

Gutsy wanted to turn the wagon around, to get out of there, but she was afraid to move. Going back to the cemetery would be not only noisy, but also a waste of time. The sun would start going down in a few hours, and by then the longer shadows of twilight would hide any wandering dead.

So she waited. Nervous, bathed in cold sweat that seemed to boil off beneath the scorching sun.

Watching.

Gutsy’s hiding place was behind an old billboard advertising coast-to-coast cell phone coverage. She had only a vague idea of what that meant. One of the things that belonged to the world that existed before the one in which she lived.

There was some cool, dark grass and Gordo, nervous as he was, never passed up an opportunity to eat. Gutsy hoped he was the only creature around who was going to be fed right then.

She got down, machete in hand, and crept to a corner of the big sign. It stood on a lattice of metal poles and there had once been an open space below, but it was choked with wild growth and provided excellent cover. Some of the flowers and plants growing wild out here were unknown and unnamed. Mutations, even among plants and animals.

The rise of the dead did more than pervert the nature of human life. There was more to it. For most of the people she knew, the collapse of society meant the end of police and military, emergency services, fire departments, and hospitals. But Mr. Ford and Mr. Urrea said that the End also meant the end of what they called “administrative oversight,” which meant that no one was tending to nuclear power plants, factories that made chemicals, oil wells, and things like that.

“The nuclear plants didn’t melt down,” explained Mr. Urrea one day in school. He and Mr. Ford were teachers, and the best ones in town. They talked to the students, not down at them. That mattered to Gutsy as much as what they had to say. “However, the sites where they stored spent nuclear fuel rods and radioactive heavy water were no longer being tended to. And there was fallout from every nation on earth trying to stop the living dead with nuclear bombs. Power plants were blown apart, dams destroyed, factories ripped open, and fallout . . . all that fallout . . . drifting on the winds.”

“Chemical storage tanks, tanker trucks, and trains transporting dangerous chemicals were left to rust,” said Mr. Ford. “Which meant that they were vulnerable to metal fatigue, rust damage, and—as we’ve all found out—damage from hurricanes that slammed into the coast from the Gulf of Mexico. Those chemicals have to go somewhere. They don’t just wash away. They soak into the ground and pollute the groundwater.”

The storms were one of the worst parts of living down here in south Texas. In the years before the End, Gutsy had learned, storms had gotten worse and worse, the result of so many factories and automobiles pumping exhaust into the atmosphere. Even when the infrastructure was intact, the storms often battered everywhere they touched, causing flooding, destroying homes, taking lives.

“After the End,” said Mr. Ford, “the weather didn’t just reverse itself and calm down. The water temperature and salinity changed, and the storms continued. Storm surges brought seawater inland to kill farmable land, and it dragged polluted water from cisterns and sewers, mixing it into a toxic soup.”

Gutsy knew the rest of the story. All that contamination, radiation, and pollution mingled together and drove Mother Nature to madness. That was how Mama had once described it, and the image stuck in Gutsy’s mind. Mother Nature gone mad.

Mutations were everywhere. There was a new species of malformed cactus in the desert from which sprouted perfect yellow roses. There was grass that turned bright orange on rainy days. Strawberry plants that had mutated into towering trees, and a kind of milkweed whose sap was the color of fresh blood. Gutsy had once come upon a creeper vine that could detach itself and move like an octopus across the ground. And the scavengers who went deeper into the Broken Lands than she did said there were brand-new species of plants and flowers no one had put a name to yet.

Some of the birds had gone strange too, especially the crows, each generation of which had nearly doubled in size so that some were as big as eagles. When they cried, it sounded like someone screaming in pain. Flocks of those crows attacked cattle and could bring down a good-size calf and strip it to bones in half an hour. And yet there was a speckled mutant species of mountain lion that ate only flowers and made sounds like a mourning dove.

Strange. Dreamlike in its way; often nightmarish, sometimes quite beautiful. Always unsettling.

The location for New Alamo was picked because Mr. Urrea and Mr. Ford—who had emerged as leaders in the early days following the End—liked the isolated location, the fact that it already had a sturdy fence around it and plenty of housing. It was also far away from the worst disaster areas and had the least amount of visible pollution.

“Least amount,” though, wasn’t the same as “none.”

The diseases in town proved that. The rates of cancer among refugees proved it. The fact that some crops grew into strangeness, yielding plants that caused new kinds of sickness.

And the living dead, in all their terrifying variety.

The breeze blew toward her, carrying the scent of bad meat from the shamblers. Had it been blowing the other way, los muertos would have smelled her.

Sombra followed Gutsy and crouched beside her, teeth bared in a silent growl.

“It’s okay,” she said quietly. “They can’t see us.”

Surprisingly, the coydog stopped snarling and looked up at her, searching her face. She smiled and touched his shoulder. Not a pat, exactly. A communication of some kind. Her instincts told her that small actions were how to deal with this battered, frightened, confused animal.

Time moved even slower than the shamblers. The ravager—if that’s what he was—stood for a while watching the dead file past, and every now and then one would start heading in the wrong direction and the man would shove it back into line with the others. The shamblers did not seem to mind the roughness and occasional kicks the man used. They did not care about anything, Gutsy knew, except feeding.

Of all the species of living dead, the shamblers were by far the most common. Ninety-nine out of every hundred were that kind. In towns like San Antonio to the northeast, it was said to be a different mix, more of the wilder mutations and smarter dead. However, this close to Laredo, right on the border, nearly all los muertos were shamblers.

They scared her enough, though.

An insect buzzed past her, circled and flew back, landing on the stem of a six-headed mutant daisy. It was a bee. Kind of. Instead of two bulbous eyes, its head was covered with dozens of smaller eyes. Most of those eyes were milky and sightless, and it groped its way toward the flowers with stunted forelegs. If it was aware of Gutsy and Sombra, it gave no notice. It moved with trembling slowness as if uncertain where to go despite the flowers above it.