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.

  —THUCYDIDES

  53

  GUTSY CONTINUED FOLLOWING THE YELLOW lines. Going deeper. She was relieved that so little of the complex was damaged down on the lower levels.

  Because the hazmat suit she wore was completely sealed, her body heat had nowhere to go, turning her into a walking swamp. So much sweat ran down her legs that her feet squelched inside the boots. But she didn’t dare open the hood and take a sip of water or let a breeze in.

  Everywhere she looked there were signs of panic and violence. An open doorway surrounded by bullet-pocked walls. Blood splashed high from the force of opened arteries. A few corpses with head wounds. A headless man dressed only in boxer shorts. They were evidence of small battles lost, where both the living and the dead had wandered off, recruited by default into the Night Army. Or, perhaps, the wild men.

  The yellow lines ended at a massive metal door set with an airlock. The door stood open, propped by a leather swivel chair. Gutsy stopped and stood looking at a message someone had written on the wall in blood:

  GOD FORGIVE US

  The airlock was set into a concrete wall reinforced with plates of steel. Morton’s notes included a method to bypass the lock, but it wasn’t necessary. She left the swivel chair in place to make sure the door would remain open.

  Directly inside was a kind of mudroom, with clothes hung on pegs and five brand-new and undamaged hazmat suits. They were of better quality than the one she wore, but she didn’t dare change.

  The mudroom led to a much smaller airlock that was similarly blocked open, this time with a small metal trash can. Gutsy stepped over it, placing her feet deliberately to avoid noise. The suit itself rustled a bit, but there was nothing she could do about that except pay attention to the room, listening for sounds, watching for movement.

  Morton had warned her about the facility’s biohazard alert system—something he called a BAMS unit. He’d explained that this was a bioaerosol mass spectrometer, which was a device that could detect infectious particles in the air. There were BAMS units positioned throughout the facility. As she stepped inside, one of the units mounted above the inside of the door began flashing a red light and—exactly as Morton had warned her—two ferocious jets of steam hit her from either side, and a third blasted down on her head with such force that it drove her to her knees. The steam jets, Morton said, were filled with a strong combination of antibacterial, antiviral, and antifungal agents, as well as some kind of solvent like bleach. It blasted her for ten seconds and then abruptly stopped, leaving her gasping.

  She struggled back to her feet, trembling and scared.

  “Keep going,” she urged herself. “Don’t stop.”

  Gutsy moved from beneath those spray heads into a much larger room. She had expected to find a laboratory, but it was really more of a combination clerical office and storage unit. Rows of desks lined one side of the big room, and rank upon rank of heavy metal cabinets faced them across a narrow walkway. The cabinets each had a number stenciled on them, 001 through 012. Morton had been very specific about what things he wanted from cabinets 003 and 009.

  Four emergency lights cast the room in a dirty yellow wash that pushed the shadows into the corners but did not dispel them. Gutsy didn’t trust those shadows, but time was ticking away; so she threw caution to the wind and began moving fast. Morton’s notes told her where to find a durable foam-lined cooler from a stack of them against a back wall. They were each marked with a biohazard symbol like those that could be found on abandoned trucks from the Centers for Disease Control that were everywhere in the Broken Lands, on walls all through this complex, and even on the hazmat suit she wore.

  She hooked a foot around another swivel chair and pulled it over to the cabinets, set the cooler on it, opened the top, and then reached for the handle of 003.

  A sound made her stop, as still as a statue.

  It was not a growl. Not a moan. Not even the scuff of a shambling foot.

  The sound was the cold, sharp, precise click of someone racking the slide on a pump shotgun.

  54

  “DON’T SHOOT,” CRIED GUTSY WITHOUT turning. Her body was rigid with fear.

  There was a scuff of a shoe on the concrete walkway behind. She didn’t know what to do. Most los muertos couldn’t use a weapon, but if this was a ravager, then she was going to die very badly.

  The silence stretched, and Gutsy strained to hear something—anything—that might give shape and meaning to what was happening.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Another scuff. Closer. And now Gutsy could hear the person behind her breathing. It was soft, rapid, and pitched slightly high. She didn’t know for sure, but her gut told her it was probably a woman.

  “My name is Gabriella Gomez,” she said.

  There was no reply, but the breath paused for a moment.

  “My friends call me Gutsy.”

  Nothing.

  “I’m from New Alamo.”

  Silence. Cold sweat beaded all over Gutsy’s face and ran down her body inside the hazmat suit.

  “Look,” said Gutsy slowly, “I’m going to turn around. I’ll do it really slow, okay?”

  It took all her courage to raise her arms very, very slowly out to the sides and then turn.

  There was a rustle of clothes as the person moved suddenly.

  “I’ll kill you,” said a terrified voice. A woman’s.

  “I’m not one of them. I’m not infected,” Gutsy said, forcing her voice to sound reasonable, controlled. Telling the woman, not begging for her life.

  She kept turning. So slowly.

  There she was, half in and half out of a pool of yellow light. A hazmat suit hid her in baggy whiteness that was speckled with drops of red. The shotgun was some kind of military model, with a pistol-grip handle and a second handle on the pump. The weapon shook in the woman’s hands. Her whole body trembled visibly.

  “I’m not infected,” repeated Gutsy slowly.

  The shotgun barrel was pointed directly at her face.

  “Why are you here?” demanded the woman.

  Gutsy had no idea what kind of answer would be safe. Her brain raced past a score of possible responses, discarding each for one reason or another. Finally, she settled on the truth.

  “Dr. Morton sent me.”

  There was a sound like a snarl. “Max is dead,” snapped the woman. “Everyone’s dead.”

  “No!” Gutsy said quickly. “Dr. Morton is in town. He’s hurt, but he’ll be fine. He sent me here.”

  “In town? New Alamo is gone.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Gutsy. “We were attacked, but we won. We’re okay.”

  It wasn’t exactly true, but Gutsy wanted to calm her down. They stood only four feet apart, but Gutsy had no illusions about being able to take that shotgun away. She once read that most shotguns have a trigger pull-weight of about four pounds, and there was probably half of that on the woman’s finger already.

  “I can prove it,” said Gutsy.

  The shotgun wavered for a moment, then the barrel steadied again. “How?”

  “I have a note from Dr. Morton. Do you know his handwriting? It’s in my bottom left vest pocket. I can show it to you.”

  The woman seemed to consider this for a few moments.

  “Do it slowly, or so help me, I’ll kill you,” she said. “Don’t try anything stupid.”

  “Believe me,” said Gutsy earnestly, “I don’t want to get shot.”

  She kept her right hand out to the side and used two fingers of her left to slowly dip into the pocket and pull out the folded piece of paper.

  “See? Just a piece of paper.”

  The woman gestured with the barrel. “Open it up and put it on the cooler. Good. Now turn around and face the cabinet. Hands on your head, fingers laced. Don’t move.”

  Gutsy followed each direction with deliberate care. As she stood facing the cabinet, she heard the crinkle of paper as the note was lifted. Then there was silence for a moment, which was broken by a sob.

  “He’s alive,” cried the woman. “Oh my God, he’s alive.”

  55

  ALICE CHUNG FETCHED BUCKETS OF water from the stove three times to keep the bath hot. Each time she sank back into the tub, soaked a washcloth, and lay back with it over her eyes.

  Their house was just inside the wall, and workers had built a gigantic scaffolding of pipes as a platform for repairing it. She could hear men and women climbing and clanging. There was a huge boom crane up there and she had no idea how they’d managed to get it to the big flat wooden deck. Wouldn’t they need a crane to lift it? Alice smiled, thinking that Gutsy would probably know how it was done. Gutsy knew stuff like that. She was so nuts-and-bolts. Always had been.

  Alice smiled, re-wet the rag, and sighed.

  Thinking of Gutsy Gomez made her smile, but even as she did so, there was an odd feeling to it. As if the smile did not quite fit. Flirting with Gutsy the other day was fun. A lot of fun, really. She’d had her eye on Gutsy for a long time, and had hoped the girl would nerve up and ask her out. But, tough as Gutsy was, she never seemed to find the guts to try.

  Then there was that kiss. The first one. Alice knew that if she hadn’t made the first move, then the sun would burn to a cold cinder before Gutsy ever did.

  There was a heavy caroooom as the boom crane placed another crushed car onto the wall. It made the whole house shake and sent ripples across the surface of her bathwater. Alice understood why they had to work all day and night, but it annoyed her too. Mom was hurt and resting, and this wasn’t going to exactly rock her to sleep.

  For a moment Alice sat up and looked at the closed bathroom door, chewing her lip, debating whether to dry off and go check or let Mom sleep. She listened for a sound, a word of complaint, a call.

  There was nothing.

  The house was silent and the only noise was from the work outside.

  She settled back into the water, refreshed her rag, found a comfortable angle for her head, and thought more about Gutsy Gomez. Were they an official thing? It was impossible to tell. Not with everything going on. Alice liked Gutsy but was far from being in love. Flirting with her—kissing her—had been almost a whim. Gutsy’s response, though, surprised her. The way Gutsy looked at her, the way she held on to her hand with so much strength. Did that mean Gutsy was farther along the path to something serious?

  Maybe.

  Alice wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Even if things were normal in town, she was the furthest thing from impulsive. She didn’t want to rush anything. Not romance. Not relationships. Not anything.

  Not even her bath.

  She smiled and let out a long sigh.

  Alice was asleep in minutes, and she slept a long time. She slept for much too long.

  56

  THE WOMAN’S NAME WAS SERGEANT Angela Holly. She was a lab technician, in her midtwenties, with brown skin and very dark brown eyes that were jumpy and filled with terror. She and Gutsy stood a few feet apart again, but now the shotgun hung loose in Holly’s left hand as she reread the note.

  “I thought the ravagers killed everyone,” she said. “Or the wild men. Both, I guess.”

  “It was close,” admitted Gutsy. “Glad to meet someone alive down here.”

  “Things fell apart, and I’ve mostly been hiding.”

  “Alone?”

  Holly hesitated, and her eyes shifted away. “Not at first. There were ten of us. But the others mostly got sick. One by one. We had to… we had to…” She couldn’t finish, and Gutsy didn’t need her to.

  “You said the others ‘mostly’ got sick,” Gutsy said gently. “What happened to the rest?”

  All Holly would give in reply was a fierce shake of her head. “I hid. I kept waiting for someone to come and take charge. No one did, though. Not even the captain.”

  “Collins?”

  Holly beamed with relief. “You know her? You’re a little young to be a nurse, and you’re definitely not a soldier.”

  “My mom worked for Dr. Morton. I was, um, kind of apprenticing with him. I met Captain Collins a couple of times.”

  “Is the captain okay?” asked Holly, seeming to accept the apprentice lie.

  “She was the last time I saw her,” Gutsy said, sidestepping what would certainly be an ugly truth.

  Holly set the note down on the cooler. “What about town? Tell me what happened.”

  “Sure,” Gutsy said, “but would you mind putting the gun down?”

  Holly glanced down at it and grunted. “Oh. Right. It’s empty anyway.” She leaned it against a cabinet.

  “Empty… ?” echoed Gutsy.

  “It was all I had,” said Holly. “If you turned out to be a ravager or wild man, then I guess I’d be dead.”

  “You could have used it as a club,” Gutsy suggested, but Holly didn’t comment. So, Gutsy said, “Look, I’ll be happy to tell you everything, but Dr. Morton wants the Dòmi stuff. Wild men tried to get into town through the secret door at the car wash. Do you know about that?”

  “The door? Sure.”

  “Good. The wild men are going to be a problem because a huge wave of los”—she stopped and switched from the town nickname for the dead to the word Morton used—“reanimates is going to hit us. The Night Army. If the wild men infect them, then they’ll just overwhelm us.”

  Holly nodded. “That’s what we’ve always been afraid of,” she said. “Ever since Homer Gibbon escaped and started organizing the ravagers. He’s like a god to the reanimates. He destroyed this place. I figured he’d have wiped New Alamo off the map.”

  “Not for lack of trying,” said Gutsy. “But, look, Morton is hurt. He’s been bitten. We have people looking for Site B to try and get the supplies he needs for his treatment, but he sent me here to get the Dòmi stuff.”

  It was only partly true, but Angela Holly kept nodding as if it was all reasonable. “You came all the way from New Alamo?” She shuddered again. “You’re out of your mind. Those things are out there.”

  “I was careful. Look… why don’t you come back with me?”

  “I… I’m okay down here.”

  “Really?” Gutsy asked frankly. “How much gas do you have left for the generator?”

  Holly’s eyes shifted away again. “Enough, I guess.”

  “How much is ‘enough’?”

  “Another week. Maybe more.”

  “And then what?” asked Gutsy.

  “Well, by then most of the reanimates will have wandered off. I figured I’d risk opening the south exit, load up a Humvee, and drive out to Site B.”

  Gutsy stared at her.

  “Whoa, wait—you have a vehicle that works?”

  “Of course we do,” Holly said. “Humvees, Strykers, Fast Attack Vehicles, some of those deuce-and-a-half trucks. They’re in the motor pool on sublevel one. But we can’t get there from here because part of sub-one collapsed. We have to go up to the main floor and then take stairway F to get there.”

  “How do you know that hasn’t collapsed?”

  “I’ve been there. Just to make sure, you know? But there are too many reanimates out there, so I came back down to wait.” She paused and frowned. “You seem surprised, but how else were you going to get the Dòmi back to the lab? Didn’t Doc Morton tell you to take a jeep or Humvee?”