“Yes—‘The Man Who Killed the World.’ Very lurid. All the news services picked it up.”

  “For once they got the story right.”

  They beamed at each other.

  The Raggedy Man looked at the two reapers. “These are the two hotshots you’ve been bragging about?”

  Saint John introduced them, and again the reapers bowed low.

  “They got manners,” said the monster on the throne. His diction was rough and his voice coarse, but he had an undeniable air of complete command.

  “They have much more than that, Homer,” said Saint John. “Between them, they have sent more sinners into the darkness than anyone else except Brother Peter. They are sharp as knives and dedicated to our holy purpose, and I bring them to you.”

  Homer Gibbon, the Raggedy Man, the man who killed the world, sat back in his throne and smiled a broad, feral, happy smile. “And it’s not even my birthday.”

  Brother Mercy could see tiny worms wriggling between the man’s yellow teeth.

  PART TWELVE NEW ALAMO

  Faith begins where it ends. And hope is the first breath taken after everything chokes you. None of this is supposed to be easy, broken feathers just make a different flight path.

  —ANNE WALSH, “FLIGHT PATH”

  48

  “WELL,” SIGHED CHONG, “JUST WHEN I thought I couldn’t get more depressed…”

  They were all sitting around Gutsy’s dining room table, Gutsy and her friends and the California kids. The remains of an early dinner lay like debris. Sombra was on a rug by the back door, quietly chewing on a beef bone. Gutsy had liberated him from quarantine, promising to keep him inside her house for at least the next day.

  “I learned a while back,” Benny mused, poking at his potatoes with a fork, “never to say something as stupid as ‘Well, things can’t get worse.’ ”

  “No joke,” agreed Spider. He had a cup of tea cradled between his palms and stared down into it as if expecting answers to appear there.

  Gutsy thought about Alice. On the way back from Misfit High, she’d stopped to knock on Alice’s door, but there was no answer.

  “Hey, Earth calling Gutsy Gomez,” said Alethea, snapping her fingers, and Gutsy jerked, realizing that someone had asked her a question.

  “What… ?”

  “I asked,” said Alethea with false patience, “what you thought about this whole Dòmi thing. And these wild men freaks.”

  Gutsy set down her bowl. “You won’t like what I think.”

  “What exactly is it you think we won’t like?” Alethea asked.

  “Well,” said Gutsy slowly, “I think we need to go out to the base and try to find that stuff. We need to get all of the Dòmi so we can handle any new wild man attacks, and we need to look for some of the stuff Morton needs to make drugs for Chong, Sarah, and the other infected people.”

  “Sam and Joe are looking for Site B,” said Chong.

  “Looking for, sure. Doesn’t mean they’ll find it. Doesn’t mean they’ll get back here in time. Same goes for Nix and Lilah.”

  “Sure,” Benny said, “but that’s two tries at the same time.”

  “And going to the base would be three. That increases our odds by a third.”

  “It also increases the chances of getting killed,” said Alethea. “It’s a stupid plan.”

  Gutsy shrugged. “Give me a better one that doesn’t involve just sitting around waiting.”

  “At the risk of insulting you,” said Chong, “I kinda agree with the whole ‘you’re crazy’ thing.”

  Spider reached over and clasped Gutsy’s wrist. “Please… don’t even think about it.”

  Gutsy managed a smile. It was totally fake, but Spider seemed reassured by it. “Whatever, guys,” she said to the group.

  Benny relaxed a bit. “Though, to be fair,” he said, “it is kind of a crazy time right now.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re agreeing with her about going out there,” said Chong, alarmed. “I mean, sure, this sounds like one of your classic idiot ideas, but—”

  “Nope,” said Benny emphatically. “Even I wouldn’t do this, and I’ve had some moderately wacky ideas.”

  “ ‘Moderately’?” Chong echoed faintly.

  They stared at Gutsy. She shrugged. “I still think it’s a good idea.”

  “Despite those wild men, regular los muertos, ravagers, and every disease known to man?” Alethea wondered. “You need help.”

  “I’m open to practical suggestions,” said Gutsy. “We need to do something besides sit here and sulk.”

  “Sure,” said Benny, “we need to keep fortifying the town and wait for Joe and Sam. Going to that base is suicide.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Actually,” said Benny, “I kind of do. I went to one with Joe, Nix, and Lilah. It was at Zabriskie Point in California. That’s where we rescued Dr. McReady. Oh, and Chong was actually in one in Nevada.”

  “Isn’t this a moot point?” Chong said. “The air around that place is basically disease soup. You’d be dead pretty quickly, and probably turn into a wild man.”

  “Wild girl,” corrected Alethea.

  “Wild girl,” agreed Chong. “Or… wild woman.”

  “I could take a hazmat suit from the hospital and…” Everyone glared at Gutsy, and the rest of her sentence trailed off. She raised her eyebrows. “Okay, so tell me a better plan.”

  No one spoke, but Gutsy sat there, arms folded across her chest, steadfast in her opinion.

  “Please,” begged Alethea, “do not do something stupid here.”

  Gutsy endured their stares for almost fifteen seconds before she exhaled and nodded. “Okay, okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “On Mama’s grave,” said Spider, which jolted Gutsy. “Swear it.”

  After a long moment, she said, “I swear on Mama’s grave that I won’t do something stupid.”

  Only then did Spider and Alethea relax, and after a moment, so did Benny and Chong. The conversation resumed, but it was empty chitchat, and soon they all left. Gutsy sat alone in the kitchen, Sombra’s head on her thigh, staring at the wall as if the future was painted there for her to see.

  49

  GUTSY SNUCK OUT AN HOUR after sunset.

  The first thing she did was go over to the hospital to steal a hazmat suit. She’d visited Morton before leaving to ask him to make a map of the base. He’d done it reluctantly, though he apparently bought the lie that it was something she was preparing for when Captain Ledger returned. She’d even flattered him, telling the doctor that this kind of assistance would make him a hero in the eyes of the town.

  She remembered the look on Morton’s face. He was his usual haughty self, and then arrogance gave way to doubt, then fear, and finally a fragile hope.

  “And what about you, Gabriella?” he asked. “I know I’ll never be a hero to you.”

  “Yes, you will,” she lied. “If you help save New Alamo, then you and I are square.”

  He gaped at her, eyes wide, fear sweat beading his forehead. “Even though… ?”

  “Even though,” she said firmly.

  When she’d drained him of every possible detail, Gutsy folded the map carefully and tucked it in a pocket of her fishing vest.

  “Gutsy,” said Morton as she turned to go. She lingered in the open doorway as he spoke. “If there had been some other way…”

  She said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and now the tears fell down his bruised cheeks.

  “Sure,” she said, and left.

  She went home and made thoughtful selections of weapons and equipment, knowing that anything she brought would have to be abandoned because of contamination. Gutsy wasn’t sentimental about tools, though. Practicality was often a shield against small hurts.

  Then she kissed Sombra and hugged him for a long time. The coydog wagged his crooked tail and whined a little. Gutsy slipped out of the house, quiet as a shadow, went to a section of wall that was deep in shadows, and climbed it, taking her time, making no sound, being sly and careful.

  Out in the Broken Lands, she avoided los muertos as diligently as she did the roving patrols of town guards.

  None of the things she did were, in her estimation, stupid. Risky, yes, and possibly suicidal, but not stupid. So, Gutsy wasn’t breaking her word. Or so she convinced herself.

  50

  IN NEW ALAMO, ALICE CHUNG returned home from helping deliver food to some old folks. She was bone-tired and felt icky. The thought of a hot bath, food, and maybe sitting up reading in the living room with her mom sounded like heaven.

  The house was dark, though, with all the lights out. Mom must have gone to bed early. Probably worn out from pain. Those broken fingers looked better today, but the hand was still really swollen. And her mom seemed to be running a fever, too.

  She tapped lightly on her mother’s bedroom door. “Mom… ?”

  There was a faint rustle of bedclothes, then a murmur. “Alice?”

  “I just got home. You okay? Can I get you anything? You want some tea?”

  A pause. Then, “No. I’m fine.”

  “You sure? It’s no problem.”

  Another pause. Longer this time. “I just need to sleep.”

  Alice stood in the hallway, fingers touching the door, waiting for more. But there was only silence in the house. She imagined she could feel pain in the air—Mom’s physical pain, and the deeper pain of having lost family and friends in the attacks.

  Alice leaned her forehead against the door for a long moment.

  “Love you, Mom,” she said softly.

  Then she went to heat water for her bath.

  51

  IT TOOK THREE CAREFUL HOURS to reach the area near the base. It wasn’t the distance that took so much time, but the staying safe. The darkness was alive with shambling creatures. And with faster ones who snarled and howled and tore at the shadows with teeth and fingernails as if trying to consume the night itself.

  Gutsy found a good hiding place a mile from the base, behind the rusted hulk of a Mister Softee truck. She shrugged out of her backpack, removed the hazmat suit, used moonlight to double-check that it was still intact, then pulled it on. She very carefully pulled off strips of duct tape and wound them around the seals at her ankles, wrists, and throat. She’d brought a lanyard to hang the tape roll around her neck. It was the fastest way to seal a tear, Morton had told her. Practical. Then she slipped her vest back on and buttoned it. Last thing she put on was the backpack, which was now empty. The contents—water, some food, and a first-aid kit—were left by the truck. Next to them was a spray bottle of bleach and another of a harsh antibacterial she’d taken from Morton’s lab.

  Gutsy left her shelter and moved with great care, watching and listening before drifting from one piece of cover to the next. When she did move, it was in imitation of the slow, awkward manner of the dead. Los muertos were rarely triggered by their own kind. Up close, their aggression was nullified by some chemical signature. She used to think it was the stench of rotting flesh, but now she knew better. Morton had told her that the active parasites in the living dead gave off a smell that imitated that of rot. It was the parasite protecting itself from other infected hosts. In a weird way, Gutsy admired that. She knew of plants and trees that used chemicals to discourage insects. Some insects did it too, and since the Lucifer 113 plague was made up mostly from several genetically modified insects, this was a smart design choice.

  Motion, though, was different. The dead tended to react to certain kinds of motion. Anything quick, anything that moved with steadiness or speed caused the monsters to want to hunt. Anything that was sluggish or that moved with a broken rhythm was much less of a trigger. Gutsy had long suspected this, but Nix said that Benny’s brother, Tom, had taught them to move in ways that kept the automatic response from kicking in.

  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.