Broken Lands (Benny Imura 6)

“Why?” demanded Spider, Ford, and Gutsy all at the same time.

“Because they needed to control us,” said Karen. “With me, they needed to put me on a leash, but at the same time they wanted me healthy enough to do my job.”

“And Mama . . . ?” asked Gutsy quietly.

“She was a threat to them. Most of the hospital staff aren’t part of this. Your mama wasn’t a part of any of it. But she was smart and she was putting some pieces together. Making you sick wouldn’t have been enough, so they made her sick instead. They did it with a disease she was exposed to anyway at the hospital. It took her fast, though. Way too fast for ordinary tuberculosis. We were told it was a naturally mutated strain, but she didn’t believe that. Though before she could do much about it, she was too sick to even move.”

Gutsy sat in a well of silence, unable to move or speak. Alethea and Spider got up and came around and hugged her. The Chess Players sat immobile. Karen looked down at her hands.

“There’s more to it,” said Karen slowly. “Some of it I know, and some I don’t know.”

“Tell me,” whispered Gutsy. “Tell us all of it.”

68

“I OVERHEARD SOME THINGS I wasn’t supposed to hear,” said Karen. “I was in the hospital one night to get medicine for Sarah and I heard two people talking behind a screen. One of them was the woman soldier you saw. Captain Bess Collins. She runs the base and oversees security at the field lab. I report to her, so I recognized her voice.”

“What was the substance of the conversation?” asked Urrea.

“I only caught parts of it because they were talking in hushed

voices, but from what I was able to piece together, they’ve been working on a new generation of the mutagen. It seemed pretty clear to me that they’ve just about given up on actually stopping the plague. Every attempt to do that just has resulted in a worse mutation, and I’ll tell you more about that in a second. The conversation I heard was about the new thing they’ve been trying for the last two years. It was starting to show results that made them think they were getting somewhere. Something that, if it works, would change the nature of all los muertos. Lucifer 113 changed the brain chemistry so that all higher reasoning was detached from motor function. I’m not a scientist, so I can’t explain the actual biochemical process, but this new plan was supposed to somehow repair that damage, restore the connection. At least in a percentage of the dead.”

“For what reason?” asked Spider.

“To give them back their ability to control their bodies,” said Karen. “To make them stop wanting to feed, stop wanting to bite.”

They sat with that for a moment.

“That’s actually kind of horrible,” said Spider. “To suddenly wake up and know you’ve been a flesh-eating monster. That’s their great master plan?”

“I’m explaining it wrong,” said Karen. She asked for a glass of water and Gutsy gave her one. Karen took several sips, then set her cup down. “The scientists seem to think that the living dead aren’t actually brain-dead. They think that the consciousness of the host is still there, and still aware, but the parasites prevent it from taking control of any actions. Think about that. The living dead do some things already—walk, some even run, a few can climb, some pick up rocks, some can turn doorknobs. There’s some memory of things they used to do lingering inside. Lucifer 113 had not been designed to destroy higher function, not really, but to disconnect it from motor functions. That’s what it does in nearly all of them. The ones who can still do a few things are exceptions.”

“Okay,” said Ford, “that is profoundly worse.”

Urrea nodded. “I can’t think of anything more horrible. You’re actually saying every single shambler, is aware of what it is?”

“Much worse than that,” said Karen, looking sick. “They are still connected to all five senses. They hear, smell, taste, feel, and see everything, but they are unable to exert any control over the physical body. That’s what Dr. Volker built into the plague. He wanted the person, that serial killer, to be able to experience everything after he woke up in the coffin.”

Mr. Urrea got up so suddenly that his chair fell over backward with a crash. He staggered into the bathroom and they could hear him vomiting. Gutsy sat gripping the edge of the table with all her strength for fear that she would simply fly away into darkness.

“Mama . . . ?” she whispered. “Ay Dios mío . . . Mama?”

Urrea appeared in the kitchen doorway, his eyes glassy with unspilled tears. “Do you know how many los muertos we killed during the Raid? Do you know how many we’ve killed since?”

Karen nodded. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to tell you any of this.”

Gutsy slammed her palms down hard on the table with a sound like a double-barreled shotgun firing. Sombra leaped to his feet and began barking.

“No,” yelled Gutsy, and the dog instantly fell silent. He crept over to her, tail tucked between his legs, whimpering. Gutsy turned in her chair and took the dog’s head with both hands and leaned against him, forehead to forehead, the way she did with Gordo. She stayed like that for a long time and no one spoke. Then Gutsy straightened. “Is that what you heard in the hospital?”

“Some of it,” said Karen weakly. “The rest . . . well . . . I heard enough to know that they were testing this new mutagen on the people in New Alamo.”

“Why here?” asked Alethea. “And why us?”

Karen licked her lips. “Because they ran out of lab animals two years ago.”

And there it was.