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Sombra watched as Gutsy slid her mother from the cart and dragged her clumsily her across the ground to the grave, swung her wrapped legs over the edge, jumped down, and pulled the struggling, thrashing body down into the hole. The dog watched with eyes that blinked with its own pain every time it moved. The gray eyes watched as Gutsy climbed out of the grave, got a shovel from the cart, and spent two hours filling it all in and tamping it down. The coydog watched as Gutsy gathered wildflowers, tied them into a bunch with a piece of twine, and placed them on the grave. She straightened the heavy wooden cross and touched the name LUISA GOMEZ, which she had carved across it with loving care. The coydog sat in silent vigil as Gutsy sat cross-legged on the ground, dirty face in her blistered hands, and wept as if the world was cracking apart.
It was a long afternoon.
7
GUTSY WAS LESS THAN A hundred yards away from the cemetery when she had an idea.
She hopped down and went around to the side of the wagon, where she had racks for long tools and a locked chest of supplies. Gutsy had remodeled the cart herself, just as she’d done throughout the house where she and Mama lived. Tools of all kinds, ready at hand; and lots of hacks—tricks that solved everyday problems. She reached under the side of the cart, located the lever that opened a small compartment, and removed a key, used it to unlock the chest, and replaced it. It was her habit to put her tools away in their proper places so they were always where she needed to find them again.
The chest held many useful items, including several large spools of fishing line. She pocketed one spool, took a heavy-duty office stapler, and closed the chest. She emptied a pouch of some useful road trash she’d collected—plastic cups, a broken flashlight, and so on—then slung the empty pouch over her shoulder.
She paused for a while, looking around, filing details away in her mind. There were only two entrances to the place that could accommodate a cart. The main gate faced southwest toward what was left of Laredo, and beyond that to the Rio Grande and Mexico. The rear gate looked northeast, toward San Antonio. Los muertos owned both cities. The cemetery was twenty miles from the outskirts of Laredo and more than one hundred fifty from San Antonio.
Gutsy figured that whoever had dug up Mama would have used a cart or wagon to carry her back to town. The ground on the road and at the entrances was hardpan that took no impressions from hoof or wheel. If someone returned tonight, Gutsy wanted to know from which direction they came. The rear entrance was framed by sawed-off telephone poles and a high crossbar, which also had the name HOPE painted on it. Gutsy unspooled some of the fishing line and stapled the end to one side of the post at about six inches from the ground, then strung it across and fastened the other end. The line was thin and barely noticeable in daylight, so it would be invisible at night. Then she went to one of the more recent graves and filled the pouch with loose dirt from the small mound left over after the body had been interred. She spread this loosely across the road on both sides of the fishing line. Even if the wind blew some away, there would be enough left to take a print. She returned to the main gate and repeated the process.
She trudged back to the cart, put the stapler and spool into the chest and locked it, shook the last bits of dirt from the pouch, and replaced the debris she’d collected. Gordo and the dog watched her with curious, patient eyes. She climbed up onto the seat and Gordo began walking without being told. The coydog jumped up onto the wagon and stood on the seat, his face inches from hers. He did not growl or whine or make any sound at all, but he stood there as if waiting for her to say something.
“I can’t have a dog,” said Gutsy. “I’m sorry.”
Sombra wagged his tail, and then he lay down at her feet and went straight to sleep. Or at least pretended to.
“I can’t have a dog,” repeated Gutsy. Sombra began to snore.
Gutsy sighed, and the three of them left the cemetery behind. The rocking of the wagon made the coydog sway back and forth, and on each pass his fur brushed against Gutsy’s leg. Every now and then he shivered as if caught in a dream of pain. A few times he whimpered softly and Gutsy reached down to pet him, though it was hard to find places to touch Sombra where it wouldn’t hurt. His injuries were dreadful.
The dog woke once when the wagon wheels rumbled through a runoff wash. Recent rain had smeared the wash with mud, which had then dried hard beneath the Texas sun. When she’d come out this way from town, Gutsy had not paid much attention to the ground, but now she slowed to look at it. There were footprints in the damp earth. Human prints: all sizes, male and female, in shoes and bare feet. Not a few random prints like she often saw to mark where one of los muertos had passed. No, there were hundreds of sets of prints, overlapping one another in a chaotic pattern. Clearly a large number of people had passed this way, but the markings were confusing. First, why on earth would so many people go walking through muck like this? The rain had stopped in the middle of the night two days ago, which meant these marks were made right after that. Why would a crowd of people be walking through the desert at night or in the early morning?
If, she thought, they were people. Gutsy got down and looked at the marks more closely, and found something else. On the fringes of the mass of prints were others. Boot prints. The spacing and angles told her that the people who’d left those were not staggering or shambling, but walking with a deliberate, controlled pace. Always to the outside of the main body. Strange.
The footprints faded out completely as they left the muddy bottom of the wash and went up onto higher, firmer ground.
Very strange. Something about it niggled at her, making her feel uneasy, though she couldn’t quite understand why. She climbed back onto the wagon and they moved on. Other thoughts pulled her attention away, and after a few miles she forgot about the prints.
Instead Gutsy thought about who would have done something as intensely horrible and mean-spirited as digging up her mother. A few names occurred to her, but it seemed too weird, too extreme even for some of the jerks in town. So . . . what was the point?
That speculation gave a few violent shoves in the direction of the memories of the last two nights. Gutsy was practical and strong, but she did not want to relive those memories. Not now and maybe not ever. No way.
No way in the world.
And yet that was what she thought about all the way home.
8
THE WAGON RUMBLED THROUGH SEVERAL abandoned settlements—Desert Rose, Cactus Flats, and Shelter, which was short for Field Shelter Station Eighteen. Nothing moved there but wind and dust and the slow shadows that chased the sun.
There were forty other makeshift camps Gutsy knew about scattered around out here, and the ruins of abandoned towns and cities, too. Many of these camps had been thrown together hastily during the crisis, overpopulated and undersupplied, and eventually either overrun by the dead or consumed by disease from within. There were a few other camps along the Rio Grande that were still holding on, but none as big as New Alamo.
Lately more and more of the settlements were being overrun by bigger and bigger swarms of the dead. There were also the ravagers—gangs of infected, savage men and women who were slowly becoming living dead but who retained enough of their intelligence to use weapons and organize attacks. Some people in town believed those ravagers could control the mindless dead.
The Broken Lands were broken indeed.
Some people even claimed there was a fully operational military base hidden underground, but Gutsy wasn’t sure if she believed that. Why would they hide? Maybe there were reasons before the End, back when
things like “politics,” “war,” and “national security” mattered, but why now? Why hide when people were in short supply and survival depended on working together, sharing the dwindling resources? It made no sense. Besides, Gutsy spent a lot of time out in the Broken Lands, and she’d never found a single trace of a military base. Nothing except dozens of abandoned Abrams tanks, rusting Bradley fighting vehicles, burned-out army Humvees, and a lot of skeletons. No, she concluded, the army and all the other branches of the military had died along with 99 percent of the people living in America.
That was sad for a lot of reasons. Partly because it was proof that mankind, for all its technology, had managed to lose a war against an enemy that had no weapons, no organization, no strategies. All the dead had were numbers and the fact that they terrified everyone. They weren’t aliens from another planet or even enemies from a foreign land. Los muertos were us. That was the truth everyone had to face. The monsters those soldiers had to fight were neighbors, friends, civilians, fellow soldiers. They were anyone who died, no matter how they died. Gutsy had heard so many stories about soldiers who simply stopped being able to pull their triggers because they recognized the faces of the creatures coming to kill them.
Before this week, Gutsy could sympathize. Now, after Mama, she could empathize. She could feel what those soldiers had felt. She could understand how the war was lost.
