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“See to her?” Alethea said, glancing in the direction of the house. “You’re going to silence her in front of Alice?”
“What’s the alternative? Leave Mrs. Chung like that?”
“Alice is strung out, Guts. She’ll never forgive you. It won’t matter to her mother, but it will destroy Alice if she sees you do that.”
“She has to understand how the world works,” said Gutsy, her tone pleading.
But Alethea shook her head. “What Alice needs right now is love.” She gave Gutsy a brief, fierce hug, and then she was gone.
A scream tore the air from the other end of the block, and Gutsy started in that direction to see what was happening.
She never got there.
A sound—weird and loud—made her look up. There, far above her, was the boom of the tower crane, and from it dangled a crushed Ford pickup truck. The ponderous weight swung wildly on the end of a steel cable, but instead of angling toward the wall, the truck was only a dozen feet above Alice’s house. Gutsy saw three people working the lines and pulleys to operate the crane. They were young, not much older than her, and she recognized two of them—the boy in the cowboy hat and the girl with the red ponytail and baseball cap.
They were shouting as they fought to control the swinging boom. Shadowy figures climbed up the scaffolding, and Gutsy could see that they were ravagers.
“Hey!” she cried. “Watch out!”
The two seemed unable to hear her over the sounds of fighting, and then there was a mechanical groan of pain, and suddenly the truck was falling. The cables holding it whipped back like scalded snakes, and five thousand pounds of mangled steel smashed down onto the back of the Chung house. Smashing through the roof, exploding the cinder-block walls outward, kicking up a plume of dust and debris.
“Nooooooooooo!”
Gutsy ran into Alice’s house but skidded to a stop. The truck—a dark blue F-150—had landed squarely on the kitchen roof and smashed it down, blocking the entrance from the hall. Gutsy whirled and ran outside and around to the side yard. The back door was crushed out of shape, and both windows were smashed. A fire flickered inside, and Gutsy began screaming Alice’s name.
“Help…”
The voice came from inside the kitchen. Faint but it was there. Alive.
“Alice, are you hurt?”
“I… I can’t move…” came the weak reply. “My legs…”
It galvanized Gutsy, who grabbed a piece of broken board and used it to knock
away the jagged teeth of glass still in the left-hand window; then she grabbed the sill and, with a grunt, pulled herself up and into the destroyed kitchen. The whole front of the truck had punched down with such force that the bumper shattered the dining room table. There were deep cracks in all the walls, and a lantern had been smashed, spilling oil in fiery tendrils along the floor like the claws of some vast dragon.
“Gutsy,” cried Alice, but it took Gutsy a moment to find her in that all that dust and smoke. But there she was, pinned against the stove with a yard-high mound of debris humped across her legs. Her face was scratched and bleeding, and there was a look of wild panic in her eyes.
“I can’t feel my legs.”
74
ALETHEA RAN TOWARD THE CUDDLYS’ orphanage, zigzagging through the streets, cutting down alleys, hopping backyard fences, and trying to avoid people. There was more panic now than when the shamblers and ravagers first attacked the town. More than the tunnel fight. It was as if people had reached the limit of how much fear they could take.
Or maybe they’d seen the size of the army about to smash into New Alamo.
She wished those two old soldiers would get their butts back here.
She wished that Sergeant Holly would come back with a convoy of trucks filled with guns. Or a fleet that was somehow big enough to take everyone far away from here.
She wished that time would roll itself back just two weeks. To when the worst trouble was getting caught reading by candlelight by Mrs. Cuddly. Kitchen duty had seemed like a dire punishment then. Now she would trade all of this for thirty years of kitchen duty. Heck, she’d clean the orphanage bathrooms with a toothbrush and be happy about it.
Time, stubborn and mean-spirited, kept moving forward.
She reached home and ran inside.
But no one was there. Not the Cuddlys, not any of the kids. Not Spider.
