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“In the meantime, I’m trying to get all of the facts straight in my head about what’s been going on in this crazy town of yours. I know most of it, but there are some gaps, and I have some questions.”
“Like… ?”
“Like, you went out to the base the night of the big attack, right? You saw it burn. But do you know if anyone from the base escaped?” asked the old ranger. “Any soldiers? Any lab staff, maybe carrying equipment cases?”
“If they did,” said Gutsy, “I didn’t see them. Why?”
“Just trying to figure out how those nonmilitary folks we saw at the school got turned into ravagers,” said Ledger. “If that’s what they were. I checked them again, and neither had bite marks of any kind.”
“They could have died some other way,” said Gutsy. “Everyone who dies—”
“—comes back as a zombie, yes. We all know that. But whoever they are, they must have died very recently. There was absolutely no sign of decay.”
Gutsy thought about it. “Maybe they were from one of the little camps out in the Broken Lands. Before the ravagers began attacking everyone in the area, there were a whole bunch of settlements. Some big, with fifty or more people, but most pretty small. Families, groups of loners.”
Ledger nodded.
“Or,” Gutsy continued, “they could have been from the base. Not soldiers but something else—scientists or lab techs. Like that.”
“That feels more likely to me,” said Ledger. “Even so… something about them gives me a bad feeling. Can’t quite put my finger on it.”
“I know,” said Gutsy. “Chong said they were fighting the ravagers. What does that mean? If they’re not shamblers and not ravagers… what does that leave?”
“Beats the heck out of me, kid. We have a lot more questions than we have answers.”
“Well, if anyone who wasn’t a ravager got out of the base, I didn’t see them. It was pretty crazy, though. Mostly I saw ravagers heading toward town. I ran back right away to warn people.”
Ledger nodded. “And by doing that, you probably saved everyone.”
“Not everyone,” said Gutsy bitterly. “A lot of people died.”
He stopped and turned, fixing Gutsy with a hard, blue-eyed stare. “But all of them would have died if you hadn’t. Focus on that, kid. That’s the patch of sunlight in all this.”
“Kind of hard to see anything sunny right now.”
“You will.” Ledger sighed. “Well… I hope so, anyway.”
They exited through the east gate and walked onto the battlefield. Parts of the big walls of stacked cars had fallen, and most had burned to blackened shells. The heat from those fires weakened the metal of the cars, and the walls now swayed and creaked ominously. Teams worked with pulleys and levers to reinforce the barriers with fresh cars dragged in by mules. It was grueling, backbreaking labor.
And it was slow.
Gutsy looked along the sections that had been repaired and then at the much longer sections that were still undone. The hot morning suddenly felt very cold. Sombra raised up on his hind legs, paws against one of the cars, and whined, as if even an animal could see the danger here.
“God…,” she breathed.
“I know,” said Ledger.
“It’s taking too long.”
“I know.” He tapped her arm. “Come on.”
They walked out into the fields on the other side of the rows of cars, picking their way through one of the many new gaps. Out there she saw so many dead los muertos that in places it was hard to know where to step. Thousands of them.
“The ravagers used to be soldiers, right?” Gutsy asked. “So, this whole thing was what? Them just following the Raggedy Man’s orders?”
Ledger nodded. “That’s what Collins said.”
“This may sound weird, but even though I had to fight them and, you know… kill them… I don’t actually hate the ravagers. And definitely not the shamblers.”
