“God,” said Ford, “now what?”

  * * *

  Gutsy was the fastest of all of them and burst into the hospital ahead of Nix and Benny.

  Karen Peak was in the hall talking to a nurse, and yelled as they blew past. “What is it?” she demanded. “Did you find another tunnel, or—?”

  “Collins got away,” cried Gutsy without breaking stride. “Not sure if she left town yet, but we think she might want to take Morton with her. Do you know where he is?”

  Karen hurried to keep up, talking as she ran. “He finished his triage work, so he’s either in his office or out back having lunch. When he’s not working, we’re keeping him under guard and away from people.”

  “Smart,” said Gutsy.

  They raced through the hospital, which was still crowded with the injured and the dying. The sound of weeping filled every corner of the suite of treatment rooms and echoed down the corridors set aside for intensive care and recovery.

  The only relative quiet was the research wing, where senior staff had offices next to various small labs and storage rooms. It was also where Dr. Morton’s office was. The bulk of the research data was stored there, and the entrance to the military access tunnel was hidden behind a false cabinet.

  The hallway leading to Morton’s office was empty.

  “Where are the guards?” asked Karen, but from the note of despair in her voice she already knew. There was a splash of bright blood on the outside wall of the doctor’s office.

  Everyone drew their weapons, but Sam and Lilah took the lead, each of them ready for anything. Ledger and Grimm were behind as they cautiously opened the office door, fading left and right to avoid possible gunfire.

  There was none.

  The two guards were inside. They turned toward the intruders, moaning piteously and reaching with dead hands.

  “No… please, not again,” breathed Spider. He looked sick and turned his face away.

  “I’ll do it,” said Lilah, hefting her spear. A moment later both of the los muertos lay still and forever silent. Alethea took two lab coats down from pegs on the wall and covered them.

  Benny hurried to the big cabinet in the far corner. Gutsy followed, watching as Benny pulled the doors open, her crowbar raised, ready to strike if there were more los muertos in there. The cabinet was a fake, hiding the entrance to a flight of stairs leading down to an underground passage that ran beneath the walls and far out into the desert. Benny and his friends had come through that tunnel and hidden door during the assault on the town. Now, Collins, Dr. Morton, and the others who were part of their twisted research project used it to get in and out of New Alamo.

  The doorway and the dark mouth of the stairway were empty. Both dogs, however, growled down into the shadows.

  “She went that way,” said Benny, pointing to a few drops of blood on the top step. He started to follow, but Sam’s strong hand shot out and caught his arm.

  “If she’s down there, she’ll kill you,” said the sniper.

  Benny took half a pace back. “We can’t just stay here.”

  “You can,” said Sam as he unslung his rifle. “Hunting is more my thing.”

  Benny studied his half brother for a moment, then nodded.

  “Okay, Sam, you take point,” said Ledger. He clicked his tongue for Grimm, and the three of them went down the stairs into the black mouth of the tunnel. Gutsy listened but didn’t hear them make a single sound. Not even the big armored dog.

  They all waited, weapons ready. The office became unnaturally still and quiet. Time seemed to hold its breath as if in fear of the next moment. Karen Peak had her pistol out, but Gutsy could see her hands tremble. The woman was on that ragged edge between violent anger and total exhaustion.

  “There’s one good thing,” said Nix, breaking the silence but speaking in a hushed voice. When the others looked at her in surprise, she said, “When we first came here, there were ravagers and zoms in that tunnel. We dealt with them. But since then there doesn’t seem to have been any more.”

  “So?” asked Karen. “They dug a whole new tunnel under the barn.”

  “Sure, but this is a bigger and better one, and yet the ravagers didn’t use it.”

  “You’re right, Nix,” said Gutsy, brightening. “Maybe the Raggedy Man doesn’t know about this one. We might have lucked out here.”

  “ ‘Luck’ is a weird word to use,” said Spider.

  “With you on that,” agreed Benny.

  “Luck’s relative, I guess,” said Gutsy. “Maybe we’ll never know the exact reason the whole horde didn’t try to use the tunnel. But we can be glad they didn’t.”

  “No joke,” said Benny. Then he glanced in the general direction of the school. “Still don’t get how the ravagers got to the school without anyone seeing them in town.”

  “Same for those ones Chong said were yelling,” said Nix. “The ones in street clothes. Where’d they come from?”

  No one had an answer to that. Gutsy exchanged a look with Alethea, who raised her eyebrows.

  “Gosh,” she said, “another mystery. Fun times.”

  A few minutes later, Ledger, Sam, and Grimm returned, and they did not look happy.

  “She’s gone,” said Ledger. “Killed both guards stationed at the far end of the tunnel. Head shots. Took their weapons and spare ammunition. At a guess I’d say she forced them to move the cases of canned goods we stacked to block the door. Maybe promising to let them go if they cooperated, but…”

  Alethea snorted and leaned on the knob end of her baseball bat. “So what if she’s gone? Maybe the ravagers will get her. It’s not like she has anywhere else to go. The base was blown up, right? She can’t go there.”

  “Where else is there?” asked Spider.

  Ledger shook his head. “Not exactly sure. There are weapons caches out there somewhere. Sam’s been trying to figure out where. Or… who knows, she could be hoping to make it all the way to Asheville.”

  “Isn’t that where you’re from?” asked Gutsy.

  “Only kind of,” said Ledger. “It’s the capital of the American Nation, and there are lots of people there. No doubt Collins has some friends there too. If so, they’re keeping a low profile; I don’t who they might be, and that’s weird, because it’s the kind of thing I should know.” His mouth tightened, and his eyes seemed to go hard as polished stone. “If I ever get back to Asheville, I intend to find out who knew about what was going on down here. I’m going to pin some people to the wall and get some answers; you can count on that.”

  “We don’t know if that’s where Collins is going, though,” said Sam.

  “He’s right,” said Gutsy. “There could be another base somewhere else. Or another lab.”

  “At this point, anything’s possible,” said Ledger darkly.

  “Why are we talking about this?” asked Benny. “Let’s go get her.”

  “I’m for that,” said Gutsy, and Alethea made a nasty sound of agreement.

  “Well… that’s the other thing,” said Ledger heavily. “Collins took one of the quads and slashed the tires on the other machines. She smashed some stuff on each of them. Stuff I don’t know if we can repair.”

  “Oh no…,” breathed Nix.

  Benny gripped Sam’s arm with sudden desperation. “Which quad did she take? Did she take the blue one? God, please, please, please tell me she didn’t take the blue one.”

  “Why?” asked Alethea. “What’s so special about the blue one?”

  “That’s Chong’s bike,” said Nix in a very small voice.

  “So?”

  “It’s the one that had his extra medicine in the saddlebags.” Nix turned pleading eyes toward Sam. “Chong has some with him, but he left the rest down there for safety because… well… we weren’t planning on staying all that long. It wasn’t the blue one… was it?”

  They all looked at Sam. He closed his eyes and nodded.

  Interlude One The Hated

  SIX YEARS AGO

  THE BOY DIDN’T HAVE A name. Not really.

  In his earliest memories he was always called “Boy.” If his parents had ever given him a name, it was lost when they vanished. The boy couldn’t recall a single detail about them. Not voices, not faces. He had been unloved forever, and only barely cared for. Less generously than a stray dog would have been treated, and usually much worse.

  He fell in with one group of people after another. Some were killed by the gray people, the biters, the dead. Some died from diseases that swept through whole camps. Many were slaughtered by gangs who raided refugee settlements and took whatever they wanted. One day they came and took all the children.

  The years that followed were an obscenity that his mind refused to hold on to. He ran away nine times and was found each time. There were fists and whips and worse.

  Then the raiders were themselves raided and butchered by a bigger group. And another. And another. He was passed along with the others. With a dwindling few.

  Until the people in black came along and killed the killers.

  At first the boy thought he had been saved. Truly saved, because these killers wore angel wings on their chests, and they spoke of faith and church and god. But they were not there to save him. No.

  They beat him and tied him up along with hundreds of others. More children, and some adults, were added to the long, tethered lines of prisoners as they moved across the blighted face of the world. At first they called him Little Sinner, because of what had been done to him by other people. But because the boy kept trying to escape, and searching for him took time and a lot of effort, they gave him a new name.

  They called him the Hated, or merely Hated.

  And Hated he became.

  “Come here, Hated.”

  “Do this, Hated.”

  “Kneel and pray for forgiveness, Hated.”

  When the captives numbered one thousand, the people in black—reapers, they called themselves, soldiers of the Church of Thanatos—began a pilgrimage. All of the prisoners were to be taken to a place where they would meet and be judged by a man called Saint John. Even the reapers feared—but also loved—the saint.

  The pilgrim-captives all looked like scarecrows: emaciated and starved, bruised from countless beatings, numb from loss. They were like the gray people except that the dead felt no pain and had no awareness of their lot; the sinners were all too aware.

  They staggered along from Texas to Wyoming, through lands blasted by bombs and blighted by strange diseases. From one wasteland to another, following a beaten trail that many bare feet pounded flat over countless travels. They marched in long lines, bound front and back with rope tied around their waists, links in an awkward chain of staggering bodies. If anyone fell, they were cut from the line and left to bleed out with dozens of bloody red mouths cut into their skin. The ropes would be retied, the line tightened, and the march continued.

  There was a girl tied directly in front of Hated. He ached to know her real name but did not dare ask, because conversation of any kind was punishable by beating. A second offense meant being cut from the line and left like a scrap of meat. In his mind he called her Leafy, because one morning several small autumn leaves got caught in her long hair, and they stayed there all day. He watched them dance as she walked.

  Over the terrible days of that pilgrimage he created scenarios in his head about how he could escape and save Leafy. How he could get a tree branch—or maybe steal a knife from the guards—and open red mouths in them. Tear them into carrion meat and slash the bonds holding Leafy. Even if he had to die while doing it.

  Dying for something would be wonderful. To save Leafy, to make sure she escaped, and to stand fast and kill enough of the guards to erect a mountain of safety between them and that beautiful girl.

  Then they would forever after speak of the Hated with dread rather than contempt. And when Leafy remembered him, it would transform him into something possessing wonderful new meaning. She would learn his name. Not “the Hated” but something else. Maybe she would give him a hero’s name.

  On a day when the reapers said they were nearing the end of the journey, he decided that he had to act. During a rest break he’d found a piece of broken shell and hid it in the waistband of his torn trousers. As the day wore on, he quietly and secretively began sawing at the rope around his waist. One single stubborn strand at a time.

  The line of stumbling figures moved out of the brilliant sun and into a valley of shadows created by a bleached billboard and a rusting big rig truck. The shadows were inky black, and that’s when he made his move. He took a firmer grip on the shell and ferociously cut at the rope. The last strands fell away.

  Before anyone knew what was happening, he rushed the closest guard. He slashed with the shell with such unbridled force that it cut like a razor, opening a screaming red mouth below the guard’s chin. The Hated turned as a shower of red splashed him.

  The prisoners began screaming. Leafy too. In the shadows he could see only her outline, but her scream was there, filling his ears, filling the world. The sound of it drove him deeper into his rage. He ran past her and attacked a second startled guard. This time it took four cuts to drop him. Then the Hated tossed away the piece of shell, knelt, and tore the knife from the guard’s twitching fingers. Although he had never once held a fighting knife, it felt oddly familiar—as if it belonged to him. As if the weapon completed him in a way he could not understand.

  He should have lost that fight. He knew it. The guards knew it. And everyone watching knew it. He was a prisoner, a sinner. He was nothing. A hated thing with no training.

  And yet…

  He never quite knew how many of the guards he’d killed. Six? Seven? Even the toughest of them fell back in fear and surprise as he came charging. He was covered in red and shrieked as he fought. He yelled at Leafy to run, but she did not know that name. She stood with the others, staring in shock at the monster he’d become.

  The prisoners did not join the fight. They did not run. They didn’t say a word. Even those who screamed had fallen into silence.

  The Hated turned as another guard fell, looking back to see where Leafy was. But he was out in the blinding sunlight now, and she remained in darkness. There were a dozen uninjured guards left, and they formed a ring around him, closing in, their blades ready to tear him apart.

  “STOP!” cried a voice so sharply that everyone froze. The reapers turned and immediately knelt, pressing their fists to their chests as a figure came walking out of the shadows and into the sunlight. It was a tall man, very slim and wiry. Like all of the reapers, he was dressed in loose black clothes, with dark red streamers tied to his wrists and ankles. On his chest was a beautifully rendered chalk drawing of angel wings, and his shaved head was covered with elaborate tattoos of thorny vines.

  He stopped a few feet from the Hated. Although handles protruded from sheaths on his belt, thighs, and wrists, he held no weapon. And he stood well within striking range, as if he had no fear of the sharp knife in the Hated’s bloody hand.

  He was older than the other reapers, but seemed to hold more power than all of them put together. His eyes seemed older still, and there was a strange sadness in them despite the kindly smile on his lips.

  “What is your name?” he said. It was a question no one had ever asked the Hated.

  It was so unexpected that the Hated could not at first answer it.

  “H-Hated,” he finally managed. The name came at last. Ugly to his own ears.

  “No,” said the man. “That is not your name.”

  He took a step closer. The Hated could have killed him right then.

  Except that he knew he couldn’t. Not this man. The truth of it seemed to burn hotter than the sun.

  The man reached out very slowly and touched the Hated’s cheek. It was a gentle act, an alien thing. No one was kind to him. No one had been, except a few random strangers here and there.

  “You are not hated, my son,” said the man. “You are loved.”

  “Wh-what… ?”

  “You have opened red mouths in these others, and in doing so released them to be with god. You have shown them such kindness and mercy.”

  The Hated did not know how to reply to that. He lowered his knife, having nearly forgotten that he held it.

  “From now on, to all in my hearing,” said the man, raising his voice, “and to every believer of the true faith of Lord Thanatos—praise his darkness—you will be Brother Mercy. This I have said, and thus it is so.”

  And, to the Hated’s complete surprise, the guards all lowered their knives and yelled it out.

  “Brother Mercy!” they cried. Over and over again, and soon the prisoners picked up the words, chanting them, turning them into a prayer. The Hated could feel his shame and emptiness die. He could feel the Hated crumble into dust and blow away.

  From then on, he was Brother Mercy.

  He raised the knife again, offering the weapon to the sad-eyed man.

  “Oh, no,” said Saint John of the Knife, “keep it, Brother Mercy. You will need it.”

  PART TWO THE ROAD TO ASHEVILLE

  The sound of snow in trees makes silence, makes the poem in my pocket sing through the holes, the loose change of angels, all those fallen lights into the world we came in on sound, the stranger cadence of wave, and drum. And our inner work is to never stop hearing ourselves for the rest of our lives when everything conspires to drown the silence of us out.

  —ANNE WALSH, “GRIEF IS THE THRONE WE ALL SIT ON”

  10

  MORGIE MITCHELL SAT IN THE saddle of the rumbling quad and studied the farm. The sun was low in the sky, and this looked like a good place to spend the night.

  Despite being with Riot, Morgie felt very alone. Benny and the others had gone off to warn the people in the small town of New Alamo—which they’d learned about from a dying soldier—while Morgie and Riot continued on their way to Asheville. Since leaving their friends behind in a forest near the ruins of Harlingen, Riot and Morgie had followed Route 77 north, planning on using it to skirt the radioactive wasteland of Houston. From there they would merge onto Route 90 and head east.