Lost roads, p.29
Lost Roads, page 29
“We need to run,” Morton wheezed, his voice sanded raw by the horrors of the night. Gutsy looked at him—at each of them in turn—and then closed her eyes and turned once more into the wind.
“Mama,” she said. “Oh, Mama, muchas gracias…”
And she smiled.
“She’s lost it,” complained Morton. “Her mind’s snapped. Come on, boys, we need to go right now. Those monsters will be here in five minutes or—”
“The wind,” Gutsy said, cutting him off.
“Wind?” sputtered Benny, frightened and impatient. “Who cares, Guts? We have to…”
Benny’s words died as if the wind had snatched them away. He stared at her, past her to the fires that were already being fanned by the wind. He stared at the struggling wild men, ravagers, reapers, and shamblers. His lips formed words without sound.
A single word. Repeated over and over.
Gutsy nodded and spoke it aloud.
“Dòmi.”
They stared at each other, and now he, too, smiled. The kind of smile only the truly desperate would smile. It matched her own.
“I know that look,” said Chong, looking accusingly at Benny. “You two just had a really, really, really bad idea.”
“Really bad,” agreed Spider, recognizing the smile Gutsy wore.
100
“WE NEED TO GET OUT of here,” Morton yelled, his voice thin and high with terror.
“We need a better vantage point,” murmured Gutsy. Benny tapped her and pointed to a big old billboard a hundred feet up the road. It had the faded face of a smiling man holding up a piece of fried chicken, promising that it was going to be dee-eee-licious. The two of them went over and circled it.
“There’s a ladder over here,” she observed, pointing to a set of rusted metal rungs nearly hidden in shadows.
“Perfect,” said Benny.
“Perfect for what?” Flores demanded. “You think we can hide from them up there? They already saw us.”
Benny pulled Chong to his feet. “Listen, man, you need to get out of here. You and Spider; get Morton and Mr. Flores out of here. Get the research stuff to Site B.”
“We can’t get the stabilizer out of here in time,” protested Flores. “The cart’s too heavy.”
“Yeah, but if we leave it and just run,” said Spider, “then we lose our only shot.”
They all flinched as a few bullets, fired by ravagers far down the slope, struck the billboard. They were wild shots, but it proved the closest of them were already in range. Time was boiling away.
All around them the wind howled louder than the wild men, roaring like a gale. It was as if the night itself had become so furious that it wanted to shriek as the drama entered its final, bloody act.
Dr. Morton tried to pull on the cart. “What are you idiots doing? We have to—”
“Shut up and listen,” Gutsy snapped as she hurried to the cart and grabbed a heavy bag of the stabilizer. “The Dòmi is already mixed in, right?”
“You know it is. So what?”
She reached down, tore a handful of grass out of the ground, and threw it at the doctor. He put a hand up to block it, but before he did, the wind whipped it away. Morton blinked at her, still confused.
“You said we needed a delivery system, right?”
Morton stared for a moment, and then his eyes went wide. “My God…”
Flores got it too, but he frowned. “It won’t work yet. Not against los muertos.”
“I know,” said Gutsy. “We need to let the wild men win.”
They all looked at the billboard.
“Up there,” said Benny.
“What if the wild men don’t reach you first?” asked Spider.
“Shamblers don’t climb,” said Gutsy, “and the reapers don’t have guns. They’d have to climb the ladder one at a time, and we’ll have the advantage.”
Chong shook his head. “Not against the ravagers,” he said sharply. “They’ll pick you off from the ground.”
As if to emphasize his point, another bullet struck the billboard ten feet above their heads.
“We’re out of other options,” Gutsy said determinedly. “You’re plan B. Now go, before we lose even this chance.”
Chong and Spider looked horrified. Flores was dubious and frightened. Only Morton was anxious to go.
“Let them try it,” he said quickly. “It might work.”
Flores gave him a look of utter contempt, but then he turned and shoved the cart toward the slope down to the paved road. Morton hurried after, limping and weak. Spider gave Gutsy a fierce hug and then turned, wiping tears from his eyes. He ran to catch up and threw his weight against the cumbersome cart, too. Gutsy ordered Sombra to go with Spider, and Benny told Grimm to protect Chong. Both dogs looked at each other and then ran to stand with Gutsy and Benny.
“Wait,” Gutsy said and ran over to the cart. She reached in, took two heavy bags, and tossed them to Benny before taking two more for herself. “Let’s go have some fun.”
Benny grinned. “You’re even crazier than I am.”
101
“I’LL TAKE AS MUCH AS I can carry to the top of that billboard,” Gutsy said quickly. “When the wild men get close, I’ll throw the Dòmi up into the wind.”
“You mean we’ll throw it,” Benny corrected.
She gave him a hard, steady look. “You do know what’s probably going to happen, even if I succeed, Benny. You should go help the others. You can keep them safe. You’re a better fighter.”
“And you’re smarter and maybe weirder,” he said, walking toward the ladder. “You want to go up first, or me?”
The monsters were coming. Wild howls filled the night to one side of the road, and ungodly moans tore the air everywhere else. The flatbed with the Raggedy Man was less than three hundred yards away.
There was no time left for debate. Gutsy took a firm grip on the bags of Dòmi-infused dried manure and began climbing. It wasn’t easy; she had to hold the bags with one hand and climb with the other. The rungs were old and rusted, and they creaked under her feet. Benny was right behind her, and she could hear him grunting with effort.
Up and up they went. Gutsy thought about Spider and Alethea, about the Chess Players and Karen, and about Alice. She would never see any of them again; of that she was certain. This was a true suicide mission.
But if it worked…
Up and up. A stray shot burned through the air, sounding like a furious bee, five inches from her face.
Just climb, she ordered herself. No matter what happens, just climb.
The wind was getting worse and worse, as if it was turning into some kind of summer hurricane. Pieces of debris whipped past. The breeze was so weirdly strong it nearly plucked her from the ladder. She dropped one of the bags, and it clipped Benny’s shoulder, almost knocking him down.
“Sorry!”
“Climb,” he bellowed back.
A roar made them both whip around to see a group of reapers—at least a dozen of them—zooming at them on quads, blades out. Gutsy hurried and reached the top rung.
“Gutsy,” Benny yelled, “take this.”
Gutsy turned and saw him holding up one of his bags. She leaned down and took the bag, hoisting it and her remaining bag onto a narrow catwalk at the top of the ladder. Then she took Benny’s other bag and gasped as he immediately began climbing back down.
“What are you doing?”
“Stick to the plan,” he yelled. “You’re not the only one with really bad ideas.”
Benny let go and jumped the last few yards, landed in a crouch, pitched forward, and rolled back to his feet to slough off the force of the impact. As he straightened, he whipped his sword free and took a stance at the base of the ladder while reapers on quads raced toward him.
The wind suddenly howled louder than ever, sounding almost like a teakettle.
And then the entire group of reapers, quads and all, exploded.
It happened at once. Something seemed to streak through the whistling wind and strike the second quad in the pack, and then a massive fireball snatched them all off the ground and hurled them into the night. The sound of it was titanic, and a shock wave punched into Benny and Gutsy and knocked them flat.
They lay there, dazed, completely stunned by what had just happened. Gutsy’s logical mind was already trying to make sense of it, conjuring a dozen different possible explanations, but all of them were wrong.
A second shriek split the air, and something smoky and gray blew past them and slammed into the front rank of ravagers just as the killers opened up a fresh barrage of automatic gunfire. The explosion seemed even bigger and louder than the first.
The shock wave loosened Gutsy’s grip on the catwalk and she began to fall, but her hands darted out just in time to grab the uprights of the ladder. Her momentum was plummeting, though, and she slid down toward the ground at an insane speed. She braced the inside arches of her shoes against the pole and they acted like brakes, so hitting the ground was merely painful instead of crippling. Gutsy flopped over onto one side and looked at the trails of gray smoke lingering in the sky being pulled apart by the wind. She had no idea what was happening. The world refused to make sense. But then she followed the smoke trails back to their source. What she saw froze the whole night into something impossible.
She saw two figures standing on the crest of the next hill. Two men, each with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher in their hands.
Two bruised, battered, and bloody old soldiers.
102
THE RAGGEDY MAN RULED THE night. That’s how he saw it, even though things were not going according to his well-laid plans.
To one side of his flatbed, the wild men were destroying a huge chunk of his army. In front of him, someone was using rocket-propelled grenades to kill his ravagers and reapers. Somehow the people of this bloody town had outfoxed him, made a fool of him. Lured him into a trap.
He snarled and spat into the teeth of the wind.
“You may be smarter,” he said very softly, “but I’m stronger. You watch.”
He raised his hands, and the entire mass of the army, nearly eight hundred thousand of the living dead, surged forward. The reapers and ravagers still held the line between him and the wild men. The Raggedy Man was wise. He understood something of this new threat from things he’d learned and overheard while a prisoner of the research base. He knew about Wodewose, and seeing it here, as a terrible reality, sweeping through his beloved dead, was horrifying.
Would it do the same to him? If all it did was to wake up the brain of the undead, how would it work on someone whose brain was already fully alive?
Part of him wanted to jump down from the flatbed and wade into the sea of wild men, to prove to himself and to everyone that he was invulnerable. He was the king of the dead. He could no longer be killed. Not by anything.
Another part of him wanted to flee. Let Wodewose take the million he had here. What was that to him? He had seven billion more dead he could call. Everyone who had died since the plague began, every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth who’d fallen to the Reaper Plague, belonged to him. He would find some way to make them better fighters. See if he could wake up enough of their minds to let them handle guns. Or…
“Reapers!” he bellowed, and when some of the children of Thanatos ran to him, Homer Gibbon pointed to the wild men. “Burn them. Burn them all. Set fire to the gray people and shove them into those maniacs. Set fire to the grass. Burn every one of them.”
The reapers ran to obey, and within moments fires began igniting all along the lines of battle. The wild men, driven by a madness more powerful than any fear of harm or death, ran at the reapers and the burning zombies, and they, too, burned.
Then the Raggedy Man turned back to the small knot of survivors by the billboard. He watched a squad of reapers zoom toward them on quads.
And then he saw the burst of flame from another hill, and the streak of gray, and the massive explosion that picked up the quads and hurled them in all directions, most of them with reapers still gripping the handlebars with burning hands.
There was a second explosion, and Homer stood at the edge of the flatbed and stared through the night. Two teenagers at the foot of the billboard, and two older men with RPGs. They looked like soldiers, and their hands moved with practiced ease as they fitted new rockets into their weapons.
“Kill them!” roared the king of the dead. “Tear them apart and bring me their hearts!” The mass of zombies and ravagers surged forward, some of them stumbling, others beginning to run because he willed it. Focused now, because he drove them. The greatest assault force in the history of Planet Earth, toward the figures on the hill. Let them fire their little RPGs. Go ahead. There weren’t enough bullets or bombs in the world to stop the Night Army.
“Kill them all,” he whispered. “Leave nothing. No trace they ever lived. Do it!”
103
THE MEN WERE BLOODY, SOILED, wearing tattered clothes.
“Joe…,” breathed Gutsy, totally stunned.
“Sam!” yelled Benny. Grimm howled in delight and ran like a puppy toward his master. Sombra ran, too, sniffing and prancing and barking. Gutsy and Benny followed, hugging the big men, staring at them in frank amazement.
“How? I mean… how?” demanded Benny, unable to frame a better question.
“We found Site B,” Sam said simply.
“But… but… what about Captain Collins?” asked Gutsy. “Wasn’t she there?”
“Sure,” said Ledger, “she was there.”
Gutsy looked from him to Sam and back again. “Didn’t she try to stop you?”
Ledger touched a bloody bandage wrapped around his chest. “She tried,” he said in the coldest voice Gutsy had ever heard.
And that’s all he said. It was enough.
Gutsy and Benny exchanged a look.
“Jeez,” Benny said.
“We’ve got bigger fish to fry,” said Sam. “The dead are coming.”
They looked down the hill. The first waves the Raggedy Man sent had been destroyed, but there were still countless more behind.
“What the heck are you two numbskulls doing here?” asked Ledger. “I saw Chong and Spider and the eggheads hotfooting it down the road with a laundry cart. Why are you two not with them?”
Gutsy explained her plan very quickly. Sam looked doubtful, but Ledger began smiling.
“Jeez, guys,” he said, “you two don’t lack ambition.”
“But we won’t have time,” said Benny.
Despite the heavy wind, they could hear a voice, and when they looked in that direction, they could see the Raggedy Man himself striding toward them, not a hundred yards distant. Reapers and ravagers flanked him, and hell followed him.
“How many of those rockets do you have left?” asked Benny.
Ledger shook his head. “Not enough for all of that.”
And yet he did not look worried. Not nearly as much as he should be.
Ledger looked up at the billboard and then at the approaching wall of death. “I like your plan,” he said.
“Really?” asked Gutsy.
“No. But it’s what we have.”
“Even though it involves us dying before we can make it work?”
“Remains to be seen, kiddo,” said Ledger. “Let’s see what Sam and I can do to slow these bad boys down a tad.”
“ ‘A tad’?” Gutsy echoed. “By the time the wild men infect enough of the army, we’ll be long dead.”
“Maybe,” said Ledger. “And maybe not. Look—half the wild men are burning, and five times as many zoms. It’s cool.… Sam and I have been in worse situations.”
“No, we haven’t,” said Sam.
“Work with me here, man,” said Ledger. His jokey manner was completely at odds with the reality of the moment.
“Joe—” Gutsy began, but he pointed to the billboard.
“You two get back up there. Do it now.”
“But—”
“No time to argue. Go.”
Benny took Gutsy by the elbow and pulled her away. They went to the other side of the billboard, and then every part of the plan fell apart.
A figure came racing out of the shadows, a glittering knife in each fist. It was the reaper, Brother Mercy, screaming a single word that didn’t make sense to either of them.
“Leafy! Leafy!”
The first cut caught Benny completely off guard and he staggered back, blood erupting from a deep slash across his shoulder. He fell, his sword dropping to the grass as Brother Mercy jumped over him and slashed at Gutsy.
Then the Raggedy Man’s ravagers opened fire on Ledger and Sam.
104
LEDGER DOVE ONE WAY AND Sam the other, each of them grabbing one of the dogs and pulling them down as bullets filled the air like a swarm of hornets.
Grimm, trained for combat, stayed low, flattening out in the tall grass, but Sombra panicked and tried to get up. Sam yelled at him to obey, but the coydog tore free and ran.
Ledger rolled down behind the crest of the hill, drew his sidearm, and began firing into the oncoming mob. There were at least twenty armed ravagers, though not all of them had guns. Ledger fired from forty feet away, one hand steadying the other wrist as he took fast, careful aim. With every shot one ravager went down, but not every shot was fatal. Some of those who fell struggled to get back up again.
Sam rolled down the hill, then got up and ran in a fast zigzag pattern to the hilltop behind, where he and Ledger had left their gear bags. The fight was too close for the grenade launchers, so he tore the bag open and pulled out an M4, pivoted, dove, rolled, and came up with the stock of the weapon tucked into his shoulder. He opened up on the ravagers, careful of his friend and the armored mastiff.
