Ash grins. “I grew up in Buffalo, where construction lasts longer than most marriages.”
“So I guess we’re doing okay.”
“Better than okay.” Ash glances over her shoulder at the others scattered along the site. They are currently devouring their lunches, some sitting on the rails, some of them in the shade of enormous, twisted, ancient live oaks. “I’m just wondering if we can keep up the pace.”
“You don’t think we can?”
Ash shrugs. “Some of the folks have been complaining about the time spent away from their people.”
Lilly nods and glances out at the jungle of kudzu twining and weaving over the land. “I’m thinking we can take another break this fall when the rainy months roll in. It’ll give us a chance to—”
“Excuse me if I sound like a broken record,” another voice chimes in from behind Ash, interrupting and drawing Lilly’s attention away from the dense jungle of vegetation to the east. She sees the gangly, knob-kneed man in the fedora and khaki shorts loping toward them from the ring of horses. “But is there a reason nobody has a clue as to what our fuel situation is?”
Lilly sighs. “Take a breath, Cooper. Eat some lunch, get that blood sugar back up.”
“This is no joke, Lilly.” The rawboned man stands before her with his hands on his hips as though waiting for a report. He has a Colt Single Action Army .45 holstered on a Sam Browne belt around his waist and a coil of climbing rope on the opposite hip. He juts his prominent chin as he speaks, affecting an air of rakish adventurer. “I’ve been through this too many times.”
Lilly looks at him. “Been through what? Was there another plague that I missed?”
“You know what I mean. I just came from the depot in Senoia, and they still haven’t found any fuel up there. Lilly, I’m telling you, I’ve seen too many projects fall by the wayside because of fuel issues. If you remember, I was involved in designing—”
“I know, you’ve told us that one before, more than once, we got it memorized, your ‘firm designed more than a dozen of the biggest skyscrapers in Atlanta.’”
Cooper sniffs, his prominent Adam’s apple bouncing with frustration. “I’m just saying … we can’t do a damn thing without fuel. Without fuel, we’re just cleaning up metal rails that go nowhere.”
“Cooper—”
“Back in ’79, when OPEC goosed the oil prices and Iran shut down their fields, we had to completely write off three buildings on Peachtree. Just left their foundations like dinosaurs in the tar pits.”
“Okay, listen—”
Another voice rings out behind Ash. “Hey, Indiana Jones! Give it a rest!”
All heads turn toward Jinx, the young drifter whom Lilly took in earlier this year. A volatile, brilliant, bipolar mess of a person, Jinx wears a black leather vest, myriad tattoos, multiple knives sheathed on her belt, and round steampunk-style sunglasses. She approaches at a fast clip, her hands balled into fists.
Cooper Steeves backs away as if giving quarter to a rabid animal.
Jinx gets in his face, her body as tense and coiled as a watch spring. “What is this compulsion of yours to bust this woman’s balls every fucking day?”
Lilly stands and waves Jinx back. “It’s okay, sweetie, I got this.”
“Back off, Jinx. We’re just having a conversation here.” Cooper Steeves’s bluster thinly veils his fear of the young woman. “You’re way out of line.”
By this point, Miles and Tommy have sprung to their feet behind Ash with cautious expressions knitting their faces. Over the past year, probably more due to the heat than the stress of being out in the open, there have been horrendous arguments and even a few fistfights along the train line. Everybody has their guard up now. Even Norma Sutters—the zaftig, Zen-like former choir leader—now cautiously moves her plump right hand to the grip of her .44.
“Everybody dial it down!” Lilly raises her hands and speaks tersely, firmly. “Jinx, back off. Cooper, listen to me. You’re raising legitimate issues. But the truth is, we’re making progress on cooking up more biodiesel, and we got that one engine in Woodbury we’ve already converted. Beyond that, we’ve got the horse-drawn flatcars and a few handcars to get us where we need to go until we get more engines running. Okay? You happy?”
Cooper Steeves looks down at the dirt, letting out a frustrated sigh.
“Okay, everybody! Listen up!” Lilly gazes out beyond the group around her to the rest of the crew. She squints up at the flinty sky, then back at her people. “Let’s finish up with lunch and get another hundred yards cleared and fenced off before we knock off for the day.”
* * *
By four o’clock that afternoon, a thin layer of clouds has rolled in and stalled over Central Georgia, turning the afternoon gray and blustery. The breeze carries the smell of rust and decay. The daylight diffuses to a pasty glow behind the hilltops to the west. Exhausted, sweaty, the back of her neck prickling with inexplicable nervous tension, Lilly calls an end to the workday when she finally sees Bell’s offending trestle in the middle distance ahead of them. The rails follow the span across a densely forested gulley like the bulwark of a Gothic drawbridge, an ancient broken-down span of mildew-black timbers tangled in vines and wild ivy, crying out for repair and reinforcement—a massive undertaking that Lilly is more than willing to put off until tomorrow.
She decides to ride home alongside Tommy Dupree in one of the makeshift horse-drawn carriages—a burned-out shell of a former SUV, the engine, front wheels, and quarter panels removed to accommodate a pair of draft horses tied to the jutting stubs of its frame. Tommy has rigged a system of elaborate reins and slipknots to the team, and between the snorting and clopping of the animals, and the creaking and squeaking of the jury-rigged cab, the whole thing makes quite a racket as they wend their way down the dirt access road that descends into the tobacco fields to the south.
They travel mostly single file, Tommy’s carriage in the lead, followed by the rest of the work crew, some on horseback, some in similar hodgepodge conveyances.
When they reach Highway 85, some of the team splits off from the group to return to their communities to the north and east. Bell, Cooper, and others proffer nods as they turn westward and vanish into the haze of the dying afternoon. Ash gives Lilly a wave as she leads a half dozen of her fellow residents of Haralson around the petrified remains of an overturned Greyhound bus lying across the northbound lanes of the highway. The years have blanched and covered the wreckage with such thick vegetation that it looks as though the earth itself is in the process of reclaiming the bus’s metal shell. Lilly looks at her fob watch. It’s already after five. She would prefer to make it home before nightfall.
* * *
They don’t see signs of the attack until they reach the covered bridge at Elkins Creek.
“Wait—hold on—what the fuck?” Lilly has moved to the edge of the cab’s bench seat, and now leans forward, peering up at the tarnished pewter sky over Woodbury about a mile and a half away. “What the hell is—?”
“Hold on!” Tommy snaps the reins and leads the carriage through the darkness of the covered bridge. “What was that, Lilly? Was that smoke?”
The gloomy shadows swallow them for a moment as the horses labor to pull the buggy through the malodorous enclosure, the noise bouncing off weathered planks. When they come out the other side, Jinx has already zoomed past them and spurred her horse up an adjacent hill.
Lilly’s heart begins to race. “Jinx, can you see it? Is that smoke?”
At the crest of the hill, Jinx yanks her horse to an awkward halt and reaches for her binoculars. She peers through the lenses, then goes perfectly still. Fifty feet below her, Tommy Dupree brings the carriage to a rattling stop on the access road.
Lilly can hear the others pulling up behind her. Miles Littleton’s voice: “What’s going on?”
Lilly hollers up at the young woman on the horse. “Jinx, what is it?”
Jinx has gone as stiff as a mannequin as she peers through the binoc
ulars. In the distance, a column of smoke as black as India ink spirals up from the center of town.
TWO
They approach from the northeast, the horse-cart rumbling over petrified rails as it crosses the switchyard. The air crackles and reeks with the odors of burning timber and cordite. Walker bodies litter the vacant lot near the train yard, the adjacent barricade punctured with necklaces of bullet holes. Inside the wall, several buildings exude thin spires of smoke from either fires or sustained volleys of gunfire. Lilly pushes back the urge to charge into the fray with guns blazing—she needs to assess the situation first, gauge what they’re up against. For the last ten minutes, she has been trying unsuccessfully to raise David Stern on the hand-cranked two-way, and now the radio silence reverberates in her brain.
She sees a car with its windshield shattered, its driver’s door gaping near the corner of Dogwood and Main, indigo smoke billowing up into the winds from a nearby section of the barricade that’s been knocked down. Lilly’s heart chugs faster as she takes it all in—the smoldering fires inside the wall, the bullet-riddled panels, the shattered windows, and the tire tracks and debris strewn across the vacant lot between Jones Mill and Whitehouse Parkway. Those circular tracks and the innumerable pieces of shredded cardboard and broken glass hadn’t been there earlier that day when the construction team departed town.
Lilly checks her pistol. The Ruger SR22 has been by her side since the early days of the plague. A former resident of Woodbury named Martinez found six in a Walmart once, and he gave Lilly two of them. From the beginning, the best thing about the weapon has been the abundance of compatible ammo: .22 long rifle bullets were sold in most sporting goods stores across the South for less than five cents per round, and Lilly had usually managed to scavenge cartons on shelves or in lockers or desk drawers wherever she went. There always seemed to be leftover boxes of American Eagle or Remington hollow points lying around. But that was then, and now is now, and lately the larder has been bare. Lilly is down to her last hundred CCI copper-plated rounds, so she’s using them judiciously, trying not to waste them on walkers when an edged or blunt weapon will do just as well.
“Let’s ditch the carts and horses, go in on foot,” she orders Tommy, who snaps the reins and guides the team around the north corner of town. He pulls up next to a small grove of palmettos, yanks the horses to a stop, and climbs out of the carriage to tie the reins to a branch. Lilly throws a glance over her shoulder and sees Jinx and Miles coming up fast on their horses, Norma on her carriage, raising dust devils in the noxious wind. They awkwardly tug their animals to a stop, dismount, and check their weapons. Lilly clicks the Ruger’s release and pulls the magazine, checking the rounds. The mag is full, ten rounds ready to rock. “It looks like whatever happened here already happened.”
The grave tone in her voice—an unintentional doom-laden air that speaks more of exhaustion than of terror—gets Tommy’s attention.
“Who would do this?” Tommy’s voice comes from the depths of his gorge, thick with anguish and horror, as he gazes out across a derelict red-brick post office with boarded windows and ancient, faded signboards of smiling postal carriers and freshly scrubbed families overjoyed to be receiving parcels from their aunt Edna. “Why the fuck would anybody—?”
“Focus, Tommy.” Lilly points off at the dense thicket of trees to the south. “We’ll go in through the south gate … if the fucking gate is still there.” She glances over her shoulder at the others. “Keep your eyes open for hostiles. Stay low, keep quiet, and watch your backgrounds.” Nods all around. “Okay, let’s do it.”
A tide of emotion rises in Lilly as she turns and leads them past the Piggly Wiggly toward the gate. The silence presses down on them. No sign of David or Barbara yet, no sounds of any residents inside the barrier. No walkers in sight. Where the fuck is everybody? Electric adrenaline jolts down Lilly’s spine, the urge to storm the town so strong it nearly takes her breath away. She thinks of the Dupree kids in there somewhere, the Sterns, Harold and Mama May and Clint Sturbridge. But she bites down on the compulsion to charge inside. Right now, the immediate priority is threat assessment. They need to investigate quietly, quickly, and see what they’re up against.
For a moment, Lilly finds her gaze being drawn to the woods beyond the supermarket parking lot. She can see dozens of walker remains along the edge of the forest, still bound in a thick blue haze of gun smoke.
In the back of her mind, the forensic details accumulate, painting a picture of the attack. Whoever invaded the town probably came from the northeast, taking out the undead stragglers that populated these woods this morning. And from the looks of the carnage—most of the creatures are dispatched with single head shots, neatly lined up along the periphery of the pines—Lilly starts to deduce that the assailants were very organized, very skilled. To what end, though? Why spend the resources and energy on such a costly venture as attacking a town?
She stuffs the panic back down her throat as they scuttle across Folk Avenue and approach the gate. Over the last year, Woodbury has grown more and more self-sustainable—another long-term goal of Lilly’s—both outside the wall and within its confines. These small single-story homes along Folk have been retrofitted with makeshift solar panels, huge tanks of filtered pond water for showering and laundry purposes, and massive compost areas in the backyards for fertilizer. A few months ago, David Stern began collecting horse droppings for the compost heaps in an effort to put every last shred of their natural resources to good use.
Lilly pauses outside the gate and speaks quickly, whispering loud enough to be heard above the wind. “Stay together, eyes wide open, no talking unless absolutely necessary, and conserve your ammo. You run into a walker, use a blade. And don’t wander. I don’t want anybody getting ambushed.”
Tommy swallows hard. “What if it’s a trap?”
Lilly looks down, draws back the Ruger’s slide, peeks in the chamber, and confirms that there’s a round ready to go. Then she makes sure that the safety is disengaged and finally glances up at Tommy. “If it’s a trap, we fight our way out of it.”
With a nod, she grips her gun with both hands and leads them through the gap.
* * *
For the first couple years of the plague, survivors learned a hard truth about each other: while the walking dead certainly pose major challenges for people, the sad truth is, the real dangers come from the living. For a while, the world of the living evolved into a crucible of tribal conflicts, barbarism, opportunistic crimes, and territorial pissing matches. But lately, it seems that instances of survivor-on-survivor violence have become more and more rare. Unprovoked attacks are far less frequent now. It’s almost as though survivors have grown leery of the cost of conflict—too time-consuming, disruptive, and just plain illogical. Egos have been sublimated by the imminence of extinction. Energy is better spent on the defensive now. All of which is why Lilly and her crew are so mystified by the aftermath of this inexplicable attack. Even more confounding is what they find lying on the ground at the base of the courthouse steps.
“Hold up!” Lilly hisses at the others, jerks a hand up, and then waves everybody against the wall of an adjacent alley, which faces the wooded square in front of the quaint little building.
With its chipped white paint, decorative columns, and copper-colored capitol dome, the Roman-style courthouse has been around for over a hundred years, and since the outbreak it’s served as a sort of community nerve center for the town. The various regimes that have been in power here—including the tyrannical Philip Blake—have used the building for ceremonial meetings, debriefings, planning sessions, and the storage of common resources. To this day, the council of the five villages meets in the building’s back room. But now, the double doors at the top of the steps stand wide open, stray pieces of paper and trash blowing around inside the front hall. The place looks ransacked. But that’s not what’s bothering Lilly right now. In the eerie silence that grips the town—the fires almost completely dw
indled, the pockets of blue haze dissipating, the assailants apparently long gone—what’s bothering Lilly more than anything else is the fact that they have yet to see any of their people.
Until now.
“Lord have mercy,” the strangled voice of Norma Sutters rings out behind Lilly. “Is that Harold? Lilly, is that Harold?!”
“Norma, keep it together!” Lilly shoots a glance at the others. “Everybody, keep it together and stay put for a second!”
Fifty yards away, the body of an elderly African American lies in a motionless heap, soaking in a pool of its own blood. Miles Littleton moves closer to Norma and puts an arm around her. “It’s okay, sis.”
“Let go!” Norma lets out a snort of agony as she wriggles out of his arms. “That’s Harold!”
“Keep it together, goddamn it!” Lilly keeps her pistol at “low ready”—in front and to the side just below her peripheral vision, as Bob taught her—as she quickly surveys the general vicinity around the crumpled body at the bottom of the stone steps. Despite the disturbing silence, and the barren, empty wind blowing through the heart of town, the strange tableau feels like a trap to Lilly.
She gazes from rooftop to rooftop, from the sun-bleached water tower to the old-fashioned white-washed gazebo at the northwest corner of the square. No sign of snipers. No indication of anybody lying in wait. Even the stray walkers who have apparently wandered in through the open gates have been destroyed quickly and efficiently by the unknown assailants, many of the ragged remains still lying along the town’s parkways and gutters. Now the village sits quietly, as sleepy and bucolic as it must have been back in 1820 when it first sprouted from the red Georgia clay as a tiny railroad burg.
“LET GO OF ME!”
Norma Sutters breaks free from Miles Littleton’s grasp. The portly woman races across the street corner.
“NORMA!” Lilly hurries after her, the others following. Norma reaches the courthouse lawn and nearly trips on the curb as she hops up and dashes across the grass. Still gripping her .44 Bulldog in one hand, she hurtles toward the crumpled body on the cobblestones. Lilly and the others chase after her, their gazes scanning the periphery.
Search and Destroy Page 2
