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Here, in the middle of a battle between two kinds of living dead and mutated wild men, one former ravager was—for the moment—a person again.
But then the Wodewose won the internal battle and the ravager crossed fully over. He seemed to forget about the two women, and when the next zombie fell, he turned and attacked it. Spreading the paracide.
“Let’s go,” urged Holly, pulling at Gutsy’s arm.
Gutsy allowed herself to be pulled backward, then she turned and hurried down the stairs to sublevel one, along a complex series of empty corridors and up a remote stairway far away from the fight. They emerged in a huge room filled with vehicles—dozens and dozens of them. Humvees and trucks of all kinds. Some were on jacks or lifts, or had their hoods open beneath chain hoists from which transmissions or engine blocks hung. Some sat on blocks, their wheels gone, and many were nothing more than hulks stripped down to skeletons for parts.
But in rows against the farthest wall were at least forty vehicles squatting on good tires, facing a massive roll-down door made from reinforced steel. Holly said that there was a long tunnel on the other side, and that she could open the door from any of the vehicles. The exit was four miles past the base, hidden among the abandoned houses of a dead town.
They moved through the big room among dozens of silent, rotting corpses and thousands of shell casings. There had been yet another terrible battle here. They crept between the lines of vehicles, Gutsy in front, her machete ready. Nothing moved down here. Everything truly felt dead.
“Some of the staff got out,” whispered Holly, as if reading her mind. “But I don’t know if they were already infected by Wodewose or one of the other pathogens released by the explosions.” She stopped by the first vehicle in the line—a tan Humvee—grabbed the door handle, and opened the door. Gutsy knew cars of all kinds, but most as silent metal shelters to get out of the rain or cold when out scavenging. The first working engine in her entire experience was the quad Nix and Lilah took.
The Humvee was big and looked solid. About fifteen feet long, covered in sturdy metal armor, with an ugly brute of a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the top.
“Do you know how to fire that thing?” Gutsy asked.
“Ha! Not a clue,” said Holly. “I’m a lab tech.”
“Great,” Gutsy said under her breath as she took the cooler and put it in the back seat. Holly climbed in behind the wheel, and Gutsy walked around to get into the passenger side. They closed and locked the doors. The engine started with a throaty growl, and Gutsy studied everything Holly did to adjust mirrors, put on a seat belt, fix the orientation of her seat. And Gutsy filed it all away in her library of a brain.
Holly took a breath, exhaled, and put the car in gear, then drove forward slowly. She did not have to do anything special to activate the big security door, and it began to rumble up as the Humvee approached—it obviously had its own generator. Gutsy braced herself, terrified of the possibility of a tunnel filled with some type of swarm.
All that waited for them were shadows.
Holly flicked on the headlights and drove forward with an awkward jerkiness that proved just how unskilled she was at driving. The Humvee moved, though, and after a few hundred yards the sergeant’s confidence increased, and she picked up speed. By the time they emerged into the gray light of an early dawn, the machine was ticking along at forty miles an hour. Gutsy was breathless, sitting with her feet braced and her hands clamped to a bar set inside the door. She’d never gone anywhere near this fast before, and she did not like it one little bit.
The hidden entrance was inside a big industrial warehouse, and Holly drove out into the street, turned to the north, and found a highway.
“We’ll have to go the long way,” she said. “Don’t want those things to see us.”
“Works for me,” said Gutsy, maintaining her death grip on the frame.
The Humvee settled onto the cracked and weedy blacktop, and it seemed like Holly pressed the accelerator nearly to the floor. Gutsy watched in horror as the speedometer climbed from forty to fifty and higher, all the way to sixty-five miles per hour. An insane speed.
Far over to her right she could see the faint glow of the last fires from the pit, but it was nearly obscured. By los muertos.
“Wait a sec,” said Gutsy as she fished a small but powerful pair of binoculars from her vest. “Slow down. I need to see this.”
Holly rolled to a stop, letting the Humvee idle quietly while Gutsy stood up and trained the glasses on the creatures in the distance. It was not a swarm. That was far too small a word for what she saw crowding around the pit. Stretching off toward the south and east was a sea of the living dead. Not hundreds or even thousands but tens of thousands of them. So many of the hungry dead.
An army.
This was what Captain Collins had warned them about.
The Night Army, in all its unstoppable force, was marching on New Alamo.
She thumped down into her seat and began beating on the dashboard. “Drive, drive, drive!”
Holly put the Humvee in gear, and it shot forward.
“Faster,” cried Gutsy, but Holly couldn’t hear her over the engine’s roar. Gutsy repeated it. Not meaning to scream but unable not to.
PART SIXTEEN THE ROAD HOME
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—That perches in the soul—And sings the tune without the words—And never stops—at all—
—EMILY DICKINSON, “?‘HOPE’ IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS”
