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She used that skill now, becoming, in a sense, one of the dead. It felt strange, like some of the schoolyard games she’d played with Alice and the other kids when they were little. Stop, Go, and Grab. Haunted House.
It was so odd that something like this would recall happier days. When Mama was alive. When New Alamo was the whole world.
When things made sense.
She moved closer and closer to the edge of the pit. Fires still burned here and there, and there was a pall of black oil smoke hanging like a shroud over the whole area. Parked near the edge was a burned-out Humvee. A sturdy metal tow cable ran from the front end of it over the lip and down into the smoky darkness. The ground at the edge was littered with dozens of sets of footprints as well as hand marks, showing where people had climbed out. Gutsy pivoted on the balls of her feet, studying the ground. From what she could tell, the people seemed to stagger around in aimless circles for a while before abruptly turning and moving off in specific directions.
Gutsy tried to make sense of that. She reckoned that the soldiers were either killed by the blast and reanimated, or killed by all those pathogens released when the hot room ruptured. In either case, they became infected by Wodewose. It was sad. Frightened soldiers climbing out, each of them already infected by the pathogens swirling in the air; then becoming dizzy and disoriented as the bioweapon rewrote the rules of their consciousness and central nervous system. Once transformed, they began to move fast in the direction of the first prey they spotted, living person or undead shambler. She was not as experienced a tracker as either Sam Imura or Joe Ledger, but she was sure this was the story told by the marks on the scorched earth.
Right now, though, the creatures she could see appeared to be shamblers. Had the wild men all run off? Was the toxic cloud not filled with the paracide? Two important questions that she did not have answers for.
The cable was tempting and felt like a stroke of luck for her, but Gutsy was too cynical to believe that things were going to be that easy. So, instead of immediately climbing down, she ghosted silently around the edge of the pit, looking down to try and get a sense of the place and matching it with the map Morton drew.
According to the doctor, the base covered a sprawling sixty-three acres underground, with wings jutting out in several directions. A massive section of the roof had been blown up by some catastrophe created by the ravagers, and hundreds of tons of debris then collapsed back into the pit. It lay in uneven piles, the biggest of which rose to within thirty feet of the edge. Desultory fires burned here and there, but they were fading. She had no idea what fuel had kept them burning this long. Possibly stores of natural gas or some kind of geothermal venting, but those were guesses and there was no way or time to check.
The blast seemed to have blown upward from the second of the upper sublevels, tearing a massive hole in the topmost level and the ground. By kneeling and peering through the gloom, though, Gutsy could see under the undamaged portion of the roof, and there were faint glows that were too steady to be fire. Could it be electric lights? If so, then that meant there was still power down there, and that in turn meant a good deal of the underground structure was still intact. As bad as the explosion had been, it could not have destroyed a complex as massive as what Morton described. Her heart jumped at that thought, because it meant that this crazy mission could work.
She completed her circle of the pit and stopped again by the burned Humvee, wondering briefly what happened to whomever had brought it here to try and get survivors out. Had the wild men killed him? Had fumes from the pit overwhelmed him with their mingled diseases and bioweapons? Or had he simply been consumed?
There was no one else around. Not here at the edge, and she reckoned that the newly transformed wild men were the reason for that. They would have attacked any los muertos, but where had they gone since then? Some had certainly been among the group that she and Ledger had fought at the car wash. Were there more, or had that been all of them?
“Worry about that later,” she told herself. Then she took hold of the steel tow-cable and climbed
down into the home of the Rat Catchers.
The place where monsters were made.
52
THE CABLE REACHED MIDWAY DOWN the biggest pile of debris, and Gutsy held on fast while she tested the slope to see if it would hold her weight. It did, mostly comprised of broken stone, shattered timbers, and twisted steel beams. She released her grip very carefully and then made her way down—slowly and precariously—to the floor. The hazmat suit was bulky and clumsy, but she managed, and then stood panting on the ground. The glow revealed itself to be emergency lights attached to big battery boxes bolted to the walls. The illumination allowed her to see the openings of several of the facility’s wings. Morton’s notes told her to follow yellow lines painted on the walls, indicating directions. There was a rainbow of colored lines running everywhere, but she located the yellow ones easily enough. Yellow would take her to the correct rooms, and orange would bring her back. Easy and efficient; just how Gutsy liked it. She did a tap-check of her equipment and hazmat suit, then moved off into the building. The yellow lines took her to a set of elevators—which stood open, empty, and uninviting—and a set of stairs winding downward. She drew her machete and took the stairs.
Gutsy was a scavenger, among many other things, and had broken into more than one building looking for items to take back to town. She knew how to move silent as a shadow, and how to take stairs at angles to check the corners of each new level. There was a flash in her head as she wondered if Captain Ledger would be proud of how she was handling this—providing he wasn’t out of his mind with rage over her being here at all. She also wondered if Alice would be proud of her bravery. Or would she be repulsed by the risks Gutsy was taking?
“Focus,” she growled at herself, and even with the muffling effect of the hazmat suit, her voice seemed unnaturally loud in the darkness. It scared her to silence.
She reached sublevel two and peered through the sooty glass window in the steel door of a lab. What she saw sickened her. There had been a slaughter here. The walls, floor, and even the ceiling were spattered with blood that had dried to a chocolaty brown. Pieces of bodies lay everywhere, and several corpses lay in a sprawl—obvious victims of gunfire. One of the shamblers was still alive. Kind of. It was a person who’d obviously died there and reanimated, but was pinned beneath a pair of heavy steel cabinets. That probably was how she died, but the ponderous weight kept her hungry corpse pinned down. The thing’s hands clawed with futile persistence at the floor in a vain hope to pull itself free. Gutsy gagged when she saw that the fingernails and much of the skin of each fingertip had been ripped away by days of clawing, clawing, clawing.
The sight of the helpless los muertos hurt Gutsy. She knew that this dead woman had been part of something vast and horrible, and that she had to know what was going on. That made her a monster long before she died. And yet there was the other part. The knowledge that the personality of this woman was still in there, even at a greatly reduced level, was horrifying. Able to feel pain and hunger. Able to see and hear. And yet helpless.
Had the woman believed that the work being done at this facility was cruel but necessary? Was this punishment just? Gutsy had no answers.
On impulse, Gutsy opened the door and went inside the room. There was no biohazard symbol on the outside, and the door opened with a simple turn of the handle. The dead thing turned its head and growled at her, and those torn fingers stretched up to grab what was beyond their reach. A few scattered papers rifled, but nothing else moved.
Gutsy drew a push-spike as she walked over to the undead creature. She moved around to an angle where it couldn’t grab her, knelt on the creature’s upper back, pressed the bloody head facedown, and placed the tip of the spike at the curved depression at the base of the skull. Skin and muscle and tendon resisted, but the sharpened tip punched through and severed the spinal cord. All movement instantly stopped, and the thrashing monster became a truly dead person.
“Sorry,” murmured Gutsy, though she wasn’t really sure that was the right word. She’d given the woman rest. Peace. Though that word seemed wrong, too. Everything here was a mockery of peace.
Gutsy stood slowly, pulling out the spike. She wiped it on the woman’s smock. Someone might still be alive who loved her. Or remembered her. Or she could have been here since the base was destroyed, the consciousness of the person she’d once been aching for death and thinking about the people she loved.
The same hell Mama had been in.
“Mama…,” she cried. “Ay, dios mio, Mama… I’m so sorry.”
Gutsy moved on through this giant tomb of a place.
PART THIRTEEN THE LAREDO CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPON DEFENSE RESEARCH FACILITY
The secret to happiness is freedom…And the secret to freedom is courage.
