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“After a while,” said Ford, “we stopped hearing all of that noise.”
“Really? That doesn’t seem possible. Or smart.”
“Possible, yes. Smart… well, we didn’t have zombies back then.”
“Must have been nice,” said Alethea.
Urrea sighed. “I don’t know; there’s a lot to be said for silence.”
They watched the
dust blow away. When the road was clear, there was no sign of the two fierce girls on the noisy little machine. Silence reclaimed the morning. Gutsy looked south to where sunlight gleamed on the fenders and glass of the cars that made up the walls of New Alamo. From this distance, which was close to two miles, the town looked whole, and she so wanted to accept that lie.
“Now we wait,” said Benny. “Swell.”
“No,” said Sam firmly, “now we find Site B.”
He went into the tunnel, and almost everyone followed except Ledger, who stopped Gutsy with a light touch on her arm.
“That satellite phone idea was pretty brilliant,” he said.
She shrugged. “Not really. I’m just trying to be practical, I guess.”
“Trying and succeeding, kid, which makes you pretty formidable.”
“For a kid, you mean,” she retorted. “That’s what you keep calling me.”
Ledger grinned and sat down on an ancient wooden chair that was in one corner of the room. “Oh, heck, I call everyone younger than me ‘kid.’ Don’t mean it as a slight. No… what I meant was that you’re formidable as a person. Age has nothing to do with it. Makes me wish I’d met Mama Gomez, because my guess is you got a lot from her.”
Gutsy said nothing. She shifted uncomfortably because she hated compliments and never knew how to react. Ledger gestured to another chair and she sat, perching on the edge.
“You remind me of myself when I was a kid,” he said. “You see, I had some very bad things happen to me when I was about your age. Someone I loved was hurt, and I couldn’t do anything to help. All I got to do was bury her.”
“That’s… horrible,” said Gutsy. “I’m so sorry. But why are you telling me this?”
“I saw you with Collins before she escaped. You have a lot of control, but there is a whole lot of rage, too. Bess Collins killed your mom. She killed a lot of people you knew. You want revenge, but that can’t be your main goal in life. It can’t be what drives you.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Captain,” Gutsy said tartly. “It seems to me that revenge is a pretty practical game plan.”
He gave her a cold, appraising look. “Sure, kid, and that’s how it feels sometimes. I’ve gone after revenge a bunch of times, and even got it more than my fair share. Maybe it balanced some cosmic scales, but I’m not so sure if it ever did me any real good.”
“You’re alive.”
“Sure. And almost everyone I ever really loved is dead,” he said. “My wife and kid. Gone. My whole family. Gone. Ever since the dead rose, I wake up every morning and beat the crap out of myself for not having been in the right place at the right time to stop all this from happening.”
Again, Gutsy said nothing.
“You have friends here,” said Ledger. “Alethea and Spider love you. And you have that girl, what’s her name?”
“Alice.”
“You have Alice. If you let yourself get twisted up inside because of a need to find and punish Collins, you could lose all of that.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Gutsy demanded. “Just let Collins go?”
“Let me put it this way,” said Ledger. “We’re in a war, so sure, we have to be warriors. If we, as warriors, want to not only survive the war but have a place waiting for us when the battle is done, then we have to fight for the living, not the dead. If anything, that shows how much we love those who’ve passed, because we are not throwing our lives away on a gesture that the dead can’t care about.”
He took a breath and let it out as a crooked smile formed on his lips.
