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“Get inside!” roared Ledger. “Try to get one of the doors closed!” When Gutsy didn’t move, he shifted his sword to one hand and pushed her through the open doorway with the other. She stumbled and fell a few feet down the slope, caught the bannister, and ran back up to grab the edge of one heavy door. Ledger backed into the entrance, then stepped aside like a matador to allow Grimm to pass by. There wasn’t enough room, however, and one of the dog’s spikes slashed a vicious red line across Ledger’s thigh. He cried out as blood poured down his leg, but he kept fighting the relentless monsters pressing forward.
“Sombra!” wailed Gutsy, but she could not see the dog. The cries of the infected seemed to blow past her like the wind and filled the stone corridor with horror.
It was all Ledger could do to stay on his feet and fight, but he wasn’t able to close the door because too many of the infected crowded around him. Gutsy ran back up the slope, chopping with the heavy machete, hitting faces and chests and hips, knocking several of them away from the soldier. It gave her the chance to grab the handle of one of the two big doors and push it shut. It clicked into place, but the other was open, the way blocked by a huge soldier who kept trying to grab Ledger’s clothes and hair and wrists.
Then, abruptly, Ledger staggered backward and down as a smoky four-legged body hurled itself over him and through the doorway. Sombra struck Gutsy, and the two of them fell backward down the slope, being brutalized by every inch of the concrete ramp. Gutsy wrapped her arms around Sombra as they rolled. The collision tore yelps from her and the coydog, and then the corridor floor punched the air out of her lungs. Grimm jumped over them, skidding on the concrete floor. He scrambled around and started back toward the ramp to help his master, but t
here was a loud whooom as Ledger slammed the other door shut.
There was a moment of stillness and silence.
“Will it hold?” whispered Gutsy.
As if in cruel answer, the mass of the howling killers slammed into the doors. They bowed inward against the locks. The doors held, but dust puffed out from around the hinges.
Ledger didn’t need to answer her question. He threw his weight against the door just as the second impact hit. The whole tunnel seemed to tremble. Cracks splintered outward from the hinges.
“Run,” he gasped, pushing back against the press of all those bodies.
“Let’s go,” she said, but then the horror of what he meant hit her. He wanted her to run.
“Come on,” she pleaded. “We can both make it.”
“Not with this leg, kid,” he said. “They’d bust through and catch me before I got a quarter of the way up the tunnel.”
“Lean on me,” she begged. “I can help you.”
“Sure, and maybe we’d get halfway there before they swarmed us.” Ledger wiped sweat from his eyes. There was a bleak acceptance in his face, and it broke her heart to think that someone who’d fought so long, won so many battles, would simply die down here in the dark like this. He caught her studying him and gave her a fierce grin. “Everybody dies sometime. At least I can buy you enough time to get all the way to the other end. Block it solid. The door there should hold. Forget this tunnel. If things go bad, find some other way to get everyone out of town. Now come on—go!”
Gutsy felt the horror of it rise up inside of her. A dozen bad reasons to stay with him filled her mind. Grimm growled softly, and Sombra whimpered.
“I’m sorry,” cried Gutsy.
Then she turned and ran.
36
SPIDER SAT IN A CHAIR in the empty storage room. His bo was on the floor and his chin propped on his fists as he stared a hole into the middle of his thoughts.
When they’d come back from seeing the two California girls off, he lingered to wait for Gutsy. He didn’t mind that they seemed to be taking their sweet time. Being alone was okay with him. Especially now.
He felt strange. Stranger than usual, and Spider generally felt strange. Most of the time it was a matter of feeling like he did not belong in New Alamo. Not in the Cuddlys’ orphanage, not in school, not in town. The more people thought he was an oddball, the odder he wanted to become. He was aware that he was unlike anyone he’d ever met—partly because of how he looked. When the town was formed, built on the bones of a detention facility for what were called undocumented workers, the population had been mostly made up of white people, Latinos, and a few Native Americans. Very, very few African Americans, and no one at all in the community with skin as dark as his.
As he sat, he brooded on how everything was changing. And how those events were changing him. For years he’d trained with the bo until he could make the stave spin like a whirlwind. He’d sparred with Alethea and Gutsy, went out into the Broken Lands and fought a hundred mock battles with dead trees, withered cacti, and even old bones set like targets on rusted car hoods. He’d imagined a thousand battles.
Now he’d fought in two actual battles. Actual life and death. The fact that the victims were the living dead didn’t matter.
He had killed. He was a killer. A shiver rippled through his thin body.
How did people deal with having committed violence? It was a question he couldn’t answer. He knew that fighting had done him some harm. Maybe lasting harm. And Spider was afraid that the person he’d been, the person he liked being, might have been beaten to death by his own weapon.
He tried not to look at the bo on the floor. He did not blame it, of course. The staff was only a tool. But looking at it seemed to trigger the most vivid memories and all the feelings associated with those fights. It was like looking at his own guilt.
He wondered if anything could ever make him want to touch that stick again. Maybe he’d break it up and use the splinters for something good. Stakes for new tomato plants. Tools to dig in the dirt, looking for spiders. Kindling to light a happy fire on a cold desert night. Or—
“Help!”
The scream came from far away, bouncing through the open doors of the fake cabinet, twisted from the concrete corridor that led to the Broken Lands.
