“I, um, don’t know how to drive,” Gutsy admitted. “But, look, we need to get moving. Will you help me get the stuff on Dr. Morton’s list?”

  Holly seemed indecisive, but then nodded. “Sure.”

  Gutsy picked up the list again and moved to cabinet 003. She dialed in the code on the manual lock, opened the cabinet, and began removing small plastic devices, each marked with a code of mixed numbers and letters matching Morton’s list. Gutsy knew that these were flash drives, which she’d heard about but never seen before. It was still hard to believe that vast amounts of information could be stored on such tiny devices.

  “Do you have any, um, computers?” she asked. “Doc wanted one. A lap one.”

  “No problem,” said Holly, as if that was nothing. “We can grab a couple of laptops.”

  Something occurred to Gutsy. Sergeant Holly was only about ten years older than she was. “Were you raised down here?” asked Gutsy.

  “Oh, sure,” said Holly. “My folks were both staff here. I went to a local school until the outbreak, and then grew up in the base with the other kids.”

  “Wait… other kids?”

  Holly met her eyes for a moment, then looked away. “Of course there were other kids.”

  The word “were” hovered in the air, and Gutsy did not want to pursue it. They finished packing the thumb drives into the cooler and Gutsy stepped over to cabinet 009, but Holly touched her hand.

  “Wait a sec,” said the sergeant. “These units run off a generator, but to transport we’ll need to keep the stuff cold. Let me get some ice packs.” She hurried across the room to a big gray metal box that, when opened, exhaled a frosty breath of refrigerated air. Holly removed four blue plastic bricks and brought them back. “These will keep the samples secure for six hours.”

  Gutsy took one of the blue bricks and almost dropped it. The brick was made from plastic but was as solid as ice. She watched as Holly placed the other bricks securely in the cooler and then added the one she held. They turned to cabinet 009. Despite looking identical to the others, this one hissed open, and icy mist wafted out.

  Inside there were rows and rows of small, clear vials filled with liquid that ranged in color from lemonade yellow to pumpkin orange. Most, though, were a golden hue, and each of these was marked with DM, which had been on the list.

  Dòmi.

  “Is that everything?” Gutsy asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Then let’s go. We need to—”

  A sound cut her words to silence. They both spun toward the door. Outside in the hallway there was a noise so strange, so alien, that it chilled Gutsy to the bone. Not a moan, or a yell, or a howl.

  This was much, much worse.

  “Oh God…,” Holly breathed as she backed away from the open airlock. “Oh God, they found us.”

  The sound that floated through the polluted air was the high, sweet, evil laughter of children. And it chilled Gutsy to the bone.

  Interlude Eight Brother Mercy and the Raggedy Man

  TWO YEARS AGO

  SAINT JOHN LEFT THE TWO young reapers in the care of the king of the dead.

  They remained with him for over a year, becoming his apprentices, as they had once been apprenticed to Brother Peter and Saint John.

  It was a strange time. On one hand, they were required to sit and listen to the Raggedy Man ramble on and on about his plans for the world. Much of it was incoherent, though, and the dead king would throw out references to people and things from the old world that Brother Mercy did not understand—Sith Lords and CSI and supervillains and cable news. He laughed a lot, even though he was often the only one who understood the jokes.

  However Brother Mercy privately wondered if the rambling was some kind of test, because the Raggedy Man’s eyes were always sharp and alert. He always seemed to be enjoying some enormous private joke, and occasionally threw out comments or questions that required a good memory for things that had been said. Brother Mercy and Sister Sorrow learned to be very alert, and in their private moments often went over the details to make sure they would not be caught short.

  It was clear that the Raggedy Man was not as educated as Saint John, but he was highly intelligent and very sly. Much more subtle than he appeared. It would be to his great peril, Mercy knew, to underestimate this creature.

  After the first few weeks of merely being with the Raggedy Man, Brother Mercy finally summoned the courage to ask, “How can we be of service to you?”

  The king of the dead grinned his wormy grin. “I was wondering when you’d stop being so afraid of me and get ’round to asking that.”

  The reapers shared a glance. So this had been a test.

  As if he could read their minds, the patchwork king said, “You kids are supposed to be sharp. Fine. Let’s see how sharp. Here’s what you’re going to do for me. First, you’re going to start recruiting more of you breathers.”

  “For what reason, lord?” asked Sister Sorrow.

  “Because I’m going to need a strike force. Call it special ops. Reapers like you can go places my ravagers can’t. So, you are going to recruit and train as many as you can. Make ’em kneel and kiss the knives, or whatever it is you do. They need to be one hundred percent loyal—or they’re lunch for my friends over there.” He jerked a thumb toward the hordes of the dead.

  “We can do that,” promised Sorrow. “What else?”

  The king leaned forward, elbows on rotted thighs. “There are some towns out there. Small cities, fortified camps. Strong ones. I could take ’em down by force of numbers, but I don’t want to waste my people doing it. Saint John tells me you kids have a real talent for cracking those kinds of places open from the inside. Well, that’s what I want you to do for me.”

  “Which towns?” asked Mercy. “Where?”

  “There’s a bunch. Freetown, right here in Ohio, is where we’ll start. Then we’ll work our way up to the big enchilada.”

  “Do you mean Asheville in North Carolina?”

  “Yeah. We’ll take that, too. But I have a very personal score to settle with a couple of places in south Texas. A military base where they tried real hard to kill this ol’ boy.” He touched his patchwork skin. “We’re going to take that, and a juicy little town a few miles away called New Alamo.”

  PART FOURTEEN THE ROAD TO ASHEVILLE

  The question is not, Can they reason?nor, Can they talk?but, Can they suffer?

  —JEREMY BENTHAM, WRITING ABOUT THE NATURE OF ANIMALS

  57

  THEY STOPPED FIVE MORE TIMES that day.

  Morgie hated that he was slowing them, but he couldn’t help it. Whatever this was made any flu or cold he’d ever had feel like nothing by comparison. He had the shivers but no fever, and it felt like there were ants crawling around in his stomach.

  Even so, they made it all the way to Beaumont, staying well away from the dangers of Houston. The town was as empty and ghostly as the others had been, but everywhere they looked it was clear people had lived here until recently.

  “You think the swarms chased them off?” Morgie asked. After some bland food—a bowl of rice and chicken broth made from stores found in an abandoned house—he was feeling a little better.

  “Ah,” said Riot, “the zombie speaks.”

  “I’m not a zombie, thank you very much.”

  “Yeah? You run into anyone who doesn’t know you and they’d quiet you quicker than a chicken on a June bug.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Whatever.” They were in a big house that had clearly been occupied by a family both before and after First Night. There were pictures on the wall that showed two people smiling at their wedding; a picture of the woman holding a tiny baby as the man beamed down at her; another of them with a four-year-old girl and another baby; and so on, all the way to what looked like grandkids. The furniture was old and patched but clearly cared for, and except for recent dust, the place was clean. Riot walked slowly along the hall looking at the pictures. Morgie, seated on the couch with a blanket around him, followed her with his eyes. She stopped and touched one photo that showed the mother of the family standing with her daughter, who held a sleeping infant.

  After a moment Riot took the framed picture down from the wall and stared at it, and Morgie wondered what was going on in her head. Riot had originally been raised by her birth father, who’d gotten custody following a divorce. Riot’s mom had been a drug addict and was plagued by mental problems. Then, during First Night, her mother had been found and rescued from a gang by a man who called himself Saint John. Although Saint John had been a violent mass murderer and serial killer, he’d been kind to Riot’s mom, and to a bunch of orphaned children she had tried to protect during those first wild days after the dead rose and all sense of law and order crumbled.

  Riot’s mother became “Mother Rose,” and the children became the very first reapers in what would become Saint John’s Night Church, all of them dedicated to what he believed was his holy mission to exterminate all human life. Saint John believed that the zombie plague was god’s way of cleansing the world, removing a race that had failed to live up to what their god wanted of them. As Saint John saw it, anyone left alive was doing so in direct opposition to god’s will. His reapers slaughtered tens of thousands of people, and planned—once all the killing was done—to take their own lives in an orgy of suicide. Riot’s father had died, and Riot was taken and raised by this new and even more twisted version of her mother. By Mother Rose.

  It hurt Morgie to know this, because he’d come from a loving home, and Riot never had a chance to know what that was like.

  “Riot… ?” he asked softly.

  She stiffened, gave a last lingering look at the picture, and hung it carefully back on its hook, straightened it, and brushed dust from the glass. Then she turned, pasting on her usual sardonic expression.

  “Yeah, I heard you, son. I guess the people here packed and run off.” She walked over to the living room window, which had been modified with light-blocking shutters on the inside. The doors were reinforced, too, set with panels of sheet aluminum. Loopholes had been cut through the walls, each covered with a leather flap for privacy, but easy to use for shooting without opening a window or door. “They fixed this place up smart, and looks like they had time to do it right. I ’spect the other houses round here will be the same. They lived here, maybe for years. Then they left, and in a right hurry, too.”

  “How can you tell that?”

  “They left behind stuff they would have taken if there’d been time. I checked around. There’s some bedding missing, and some clothes, but if they had time, they’d have taken the cots in the closet and medicines from the bathroom. And in the kitchen pantry, there are cans of stuff missing, but sacks of rice, flour, and cornmeal are still here. Nah—they left fast and just took what they could carry.”

  She sat down on a threadbare overstuffed chair. Since arriving, she’d stripped off the heavy body armor and carpet coat, and was now in jeans and her leather vest, which she wore over her bare skin. Morgie, sick as he was, had trouble not staring at her. He loved the way she was made. Lean and muscular, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, and long legs made for running. Or dancing. He wondered if, had the world been different, she might have been a dancer. There were a couple of people in town who’d been dancers before First Night, and they had the same athletic grace.

  But the world had not been that kind to her. Riot’s tanned skin was marked with pink and white scars, and there were permanent lines etched around her mouth that should have been laugh lines.

  “I don’t get it,” said Morgie. “What’s the point of all this? Of these swarms? Of these ravager monkey-bangers herding them like cattle and attacking towns? It can’t be just for food, because they left all those dead people behind.”

  Riot shrugged. “Beats me.” She cut him a look. “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s say we try that again, and you give me a straight answer.”

  Morgie ate some more of the soupy rice. “Better than I did.”

  “But—?”

  “But not all that good. And it’s freaking me out, because it came on all of a sudden.”

  She thought about it and shook her head. “I don’t even know how to guess at this,” she admitted. “You grew up in Mountainside, on a mountain in the middle of California. We’re in Texas. Different everything out here—different animals and plants, different things to be allergic to, different mutations everywhere we look. Maybe there’s different kinds of flu viruses out here.”

  Morgie said nothing to that, because what she said was pretty much what he was most afraid of. Back home, the doctors in town managed to scavenge or make some antibiotics for bacterial infections, but they had no real way of making effective antiviral medicines. Luckily, Mountainside was a closed community, so it was mostly a matter of people handing the same strains back and forth, and after fifteen years most people were immune. Or close enough.

  Not out here.

  Captain Ledger had told them all stories of how diseases—old ones running rampant with no hospitals to combat them, and new strains—killed more people than the zombies ever did. Rotting corpses in rivers and lakes, new diseases born from the wild mutations, and strains made stronger by groups of survivors misusing the antibiotic and antiviral drugs they found. Measles, mumps, whooping cough, rabies, and dozens of other diseases stalked the Rot and Ruin like invisible armies.

  Since leaving home, Morgie and the others had been exposed to thousands of zombies in a prison, to mutated animals, to a dying soldier, and to a polluted landscape that was warping—season by season—into something out of a nightmare.

  “You better be careful yourself,” Morgie said.

  “I never get sick,” Riot replied, but then he saw something flicker in her eyes. A flare of awareness that he was sure he understood. The previous night they’d held each other for hours. They’d kissed and touched. If he was sick, then…

  Riot cleared her throat, got up quickly, and took the map from her pack. She spread it out on the dining room table and bent over to study it. Morgie watched her, studying how the lines around her mouth stretched tighter.

  “I think we should take it easy tomorrow,” she said without looking up. “Try for Lake Charles, Louisiana. That’s only sixty miles, and all along Route 10.” She paused. “We can stop as often as you need, no problem.”

  “Sure,” said Morgie. “Whatever.”

  The house was secure, the windows and doors shut, shutters secured, and curtains drawn, but it seemed to him as if there was a cold wind blowing through the spacious rooms. It smelled of sadness and loss.

  Or maybe it smelled of memories.

  Stop it, he scolded himself. Deal with it, or this is going to kill you.

  PART FIFTEEN NEW ALAMO

  Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

  —MAHATMA GANDHI

  58

  GUTSY WHIPPED HER MACHETE FROM its scabbard as shadows filled the airlock opening.

  “Oh God, oh God, oh God…” That was all Sergeant Holly seemed able to say, and with each repetition her voice lost more of its force, becoming emptier.

  Despite what Gutsy knew had to be the source of that childish laughter, she wanted the shadows to be different. At that moment she would have given almost anything for the shapes out there to be adults. Even if they were wild men and this would be where she died, that would be better than what she actually faced.

  Gutsy stepped toward the airlock, raising her machete as if it weighed ten tons.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said, but there was no answer.

  The shadows outside capered like demons as the laughter increased.

  “Are they wild men?” Gutsy asked in a fierce whisper.

  Holly swallowed audibly and gave a single, weak nod. “Wodewose was… it was… designed for adult brain chemistry. Wodewose works on the reanimates, not the living. Those kids were already infected by the Lucifer pathogen in the air, and that made them turn. With kids, it… it had a different effect. We never expected it to affect neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Wodewose crosses the blood-brain barrier. It would do all kinds of damage to any developing neurosystem, but we never studied how the mutated form would affect children’s brains. They’re so different—still growing and changing at that age. The brain doesn’t fully form until age twenty-five. These kids died down here, reanimated, and then were exposed to Wodewose. We never did studies on something like that. If we had, then we’d know the pathogenesis of this and…”

  Holly rattled on and on, explaining too much, trying to hide her fear behind the science while at the same time using the truth of that same science to chip away at her defenses. Gutsy had no idea if any of what Holly said made sense, or if she was totally losing it.

  “Those… things out there,” said the sergeant in a ghastly whisper, “they’re from here. They’re ours. They’re the kids who were born down here. Now they’re wild men. Wild kids. Whatever.”

  Gutsy and Holly were near the back wall, more than fifty feet from the open airlock. The shadows still moved, making distorted monster shapes, but so far none of the children showed themselves. “How many of them are there?”

  Sergeant Holly shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  From the laughter outside, Gutsy figured that there had to be at least half a dozen, maybe more.

  “Why aren’t they coming in?”

  Holly pointed to the BAMS units above the door. “The steam jets are toxic. Three of them chased me in here a few days ago, and… well, you know. Now the others stay outside. Waiting.”

  Gutsy hefted her machete. “Is there any other way out of here?”