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She was still four miles from New Alamo when Sombra suddenly sat up and stared into the distance to the left of the road. He gave a low growl, and the hair stood up like a brush all along his spine.
“Whoa,” said Gutsy, and Gordo slowed to a stop. To the dog she said, “What do you see, boy?”
The approach road to New Alamo was lined with thousands of dead cars, trucks, and RVs that had been pushed into place by squads of survivors. The entire town was protected by walls of cars. Two or three vehicles deep, with the vehicles pulled onto their sides and lashed together, with these metal walls braced by berms of hard-packed dirt. The work had taken two full years and had been brutal and backbreaking, but it kept a lot of roamers from wandering in. When rare los muertos somehow found their way into the corridor, those corridors funneled them toward the main gates, where armed guards were waiting.
That was the town, though, and it was miles away.
Out here in the Broken Lands, the road was wide open, with countless ruined houses and businesses in various stages of dilapidation. Most of the buildings were blackened husks, the dead leavings of fires that had swept unchecked once los muertos vivientes rose and all the infrastructure—police, fire departments, ambulances, and military—fell. Even though the biggest fires had burned out before Gutsy was even born, there always seemed to be a pall of dust and ash clinging like an army of ghosts. Visibility was bad at the best of times.
Slow seconds passed while she saw nothing but ruin. Everything outside New Alamo was what everyone called the Broken Lands, and the landscape earned its name. She knew that a few miles farther east was a kind of graveyard left behind from where a massive military battle had taken place. The skeletons of tens of thousands of people lay scattered in the withered grass. None of those bones belonged to the soldiers, Gutsy knew, because when they had lost the fight and died, there was no one to end their second lives. They’d all wandered off to continue their war, fighting on the wrong side forever.
So, she saw nothing.
Until she saw something.
It was a figure moving slowly through the ruined streets. Heaps of blackened debris hid it most of the time, but Sombra had heard it somehow. His low growl held anger and fear. Smart dog, she thought. The figure was moving in the direction of the road. From that distance it was hard to tell which kind of living dead it was. Monsters, as she and everyone else in her town knew, came in a lot of terrifying varieties. Slow ones and fast ones. Dumb ones and smart ones. Ones that spread their diseases through bites; others that made people sick just by being close. The ones that looked like corpses and the ones who were still mostly alive. And old Mr. Ford in town said that there were even worse mutations the farther east or north you went, including a terrifying version of the disease that slowly turned a living person into a living dead one with all of that person’s memories and even their ability to speak intact until the very end. That, Gutsy thought, would be the worst. To know you were becoming a monster, to feel the hunger for human flesh awaken inside you, to become gradually more dead and less alive.
No one knew how the End had started, but since there were new kinds of los muertos showing up all the time, whatever it was, was still happening.
She studied the shambling form and after a few moments murmured, “It’s a shambler, I think.”
Sombra looked at her, head cocked to one side as if asking, What?
“Slow and stupid,” she told him.
A moment later she saw another one.
Then a third. A fourth.
“Crap,” she breathed. Even if they were all shamblers, there were too many of them. If there were four that she could see, there could be a dozen she couldn’t. On foot, she could have slipped past them, staying upwind so los muertos could not smell her, making maximum use of cover. The shamblers were easy to fool, and Gutsy had a hundred ways to do it. However, with the cart, the horse, and the coydog, Gutsy’s options were limited: go back or wait. Attacking that many dead was only an option if she wanted to be lunch. Good as she was with the machete, fighting a pack of them—even shamblers—was a no-win situation because she would have to fight defensively to keep them away from the animals.
She took out her binoculars, and after making sure she was not in an angle that would let sunlight reflect off the lenses, she studied the shambling dead. There were many more of them now, though there was nothing particularly remarkable about any she saw. Their clothes made statements about who they had been when they died. A man dressed in greasy jeans, a woman wearing a waitress uniform, kids dressed for school, farmers in coveralls. Some were whole, others had clearly been gnawed on, probably while they were dying. Missing hands, missing flesh. One of them had a piece of rebar thrust through his chest. Two of them had visible bullet holes in their heads, but the shots clearly hadn’t destroyed the motor cortex or brain stem. Shooting the brain wasn’t enough, which was why there were so many wild stories about people who believed the common myth that all you needed was a head shot—as if every part of the brain was important to undead survival. It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Only the motor cortex and the brain stem mattered, and to hit those you needed to know where they were and then be a really good shot. Most people had no idea and not enough skill. Gutsy, however, made sure she did. It was who she was, and it reflected her view of the world: that every problem required its own solution. Gutsy knew that firsthand.
Then she saw something that made her heart leap into her throat.
A man walked out of the shadows. She could see him clearly with the binoculars. He wasn’t one of the living dead. His skin was tan, his long hair was tied back in a ponytail. The man’s clothes were a mismatch of denim and leather, but they were not the same kind of filthy rags the shamblers wore. Nor were they like the leather jackets worn by most of the people who went out into the Broken Lands—leather being virtually bite-proof—because the sleeves had been cut off this man’s jacket, revealing arms so muscular they looked deformed. His biceps and shoulders were covered with tattoos of laughing devils, women with absurdly large breasts, and snarling dogs. Sure, some of the dead had old tattoos, but none of them carried weapons, and this man had a rifle. He walked with the long barrel laid back on one brawny shoulder.
He looked alive. And yet he walked alongside the dead—among them—and they did not attack him. Once in a while one would make a halfhearted attempt to touch him—maybe to grab, but without intensity—and the man would simply push the hand away.
That made no sense to Gutsy, and things that didn’t make sense offended her. The world, even broken like this, had what one of her teachers called an interior logic. Everything made sense. Anything that appeared not to make sense meant that the observer lacked sufficient information to understand its nature or process.
That was how Gutsy operated. Sense and order, patterns and details, observation and analysis.
This did not fit what she knew about los muertos.
However, what she saw did fit with something else. She remembered the boot prints made by a few men walking on either side of the mass of shamblers who’d trampled the mud at the bottom of the wash. Had they been like this man? Walking with the dead, maybe guiding them? Or . . . herding them?
It was a very scary thought. Inexplicable, too, though she knew any explanation she might ever discover would be a bad one.
She wondered if this was one of the ravagers. They were capable of cruelty, unlike the walking dead, who were dangerous but incapable of malice. All los muertos wanted was to feed. They did not and could not hate. They meant no more harm than the murderous winds of a late-summer hurricane. The ravagers often traveled in what the townsfolk called wolf packs. The fact that they were monsters who could still think made them so much more dangerous.
Was that why these living dead did not attack this ravager? Were those halfhearted attempts to grab him a reflex, or a reaction to that part of him that was still human?
Gutsy didn’t know, but it did seem to make the illogical parts line up into some kind of order. Of course, that in turn opened up new questions. Why was a wolf-pack ravager traveling with a bunch of shamblers? Where were they going?
Worse still, what would happen if he saw
her?
