Ash grabs the closest child—Chelsea Quinn—and calls out to the others. “DON’T, LOOK!—Bobby! Kourtney! Everybody—don’t look! Follow me! This way—Jennifer, you too! C’mon, if you want to live, come this way! AND DON’T LOOK BACK!”
With one last glance over her shoulder, Ash sees both Ronnie and Dina Nesbit being mauled by the dead. Ronnie has already lost consciousness, and now lies twitching in his death throes as monsters devour what’s left of him in an orgy of glistening entrails and hemorrhaging blood. Dina struggles on the ground next to him, holding off one walker while a half dozen others come at her from all sides. Her final gasp of a scream is the last thing Ash hears before turning away and leading the surviving children as well as a catatonic Jennifer Stack away from the horrors of the forest toward the clearing and the vast, flat soybean fields beyond it … unaware she’s leading them to their doom.
SIX
Lilly snaps the reins and leads her horse team down a winding farm road toward the Coweta County line. She can hear the pounding of the other horse-wagons behind her and can feel the thumping impact of the hooves making the very ground around her tremble. Each wagon is now overloaded with additional cargo taken from Norma’s abandoned tow truck.
The floodwaters have receded in this area to the point of leaving the dirt access roads relatively dry and clear, nothing but a few puddles here and there, some minor washouts in the lower areas. Meriwether County, home of Lilly’s beloved Woodbury, lies only twenty-some miles away. With a little luck, they’ll make it in a couple hours.
Lilly feels the cauldron of emotions burning in her belly, the loss of her friend still pressing down on her, but the ever-looming proximity of her town and her imminent homecoming making her pulse quicken.
In the distance, she can see the heart of Coweta County spanning the horizon, thousands and thousands of acres of tangled soybeans and weeds and rain-softened earth broken only by the occasional split-rail fence or crumbling access road. From this vantage point, it looks like a green Mojave Desert of overgrown farm fields. A sunbaked asphalt two-lane runs down its center like a petrified spinal column. The road appears to be virtually free of wreckage, and only a few scattered walkers dot the pavement or mill about the adjacent gullies and ditches.
“Almost home,” Lilly mutters, her voice drowned by the drumming of the hooves as she whips the reins and steers the contraption toward that main artery of asphalt.
Tommy sits beside her, gazing out at the immense flatlands. He nervously fingers the stock of his shotgun, scanning the horizon. “Wait!” The boy points at the horizon, about half a mile away, the landscape wavering and swimming in the heat rays of the late-afternoon sun. “What the hell is that?”
“Where?” Lilly squints to see through the glare of the sun. “What are you looking at?”
“People!”
“Living people?”
“Yeah, look—straight ahead—between those two fences. See ’em?”
Lilly finally spots the cluster of human souls so far away they look like specks floating through the sun. But the more she scrutinizes those specks, the more she recognizes the fact that Tommy Dupree is correct. The specks are adults and children, running in a single-file line across the scabrous field. “I see them,” Lilly finally says. “Looks like a large family maybe, with kids.”
The modified pickup rattles faster and faster down the slope as Lilly urges the team on, snapping the reins, clucking her tongue, and steering the contraption toward the fleeing adults and children. Soon, Lilly has gotten close enough to see that there are two women running alongside a gaggle of children. As a whole, the group runs with a haphazard, handicapped quality, as though some of them are traumatized or injured.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Lilly announces to Tommy. “But the woman leading the group actually looks familiar.”
“The short one?”
Lilly stares at the adults. “No, the tall one, the one with the dark hair.”
“Is that—?” Now Tommy seems transfixed by the taller female who seems to be leading the bunch.
“No, it couldn’t be.” Lilly hastens the horses across a wide intersection, and then down the central two-lane blacktop cutting through the fields. They raise twin spumes of water as they careen through run-off puddles, closing in on the fleeing group of survivors. “It couldn’t be. Tommy, tell me I’m crazy but that looks like—”
The walkie-talkie crackles, interrupting her words. Musolino’s voice pierces the static. “Lilly, what’s going on? Why are we trying to set a fucking land-speed record all of a sudden?”
Lilly grabs the toy device and thumbs the button. “You’re not going to believe this, Mus, but I think—”
“Oh my God!” Tommy now recognizes the tall, slender, swimmer’s physique of the woman leading the group across the field. “You’re right! I see her!”
Lilly shoots a glance at Tommy. “I’m not crazy, it’s her, isn’t it?”
They’ve drawn to within fifty yards of the fleeing humans. They can see their old friend from Haralson leading a group of seven children and one adult female across the leprous, soggy ground.
“Pull alongside them!” Tommy leans out his side window and yells at the top of his lungs. “ASH!”
The woman leading the group doesn’t react at first, perhaps leery of mysterious convoys thundering up to her in broad daylight. She just keeps running, shouting something at her brood of children, her expression—even from a distance of thirty yards—knitted with terror. Lilly nudges the horses to come as close to the cluster of children as possible without endangering any of them.
“ASH!” Lilly calls out this time, pulling parallel to the tall woman.
At this close proximity, maybe fifteen feet away, it becomes clear that the woman is spooked beyond anything Lilly has ever seen on the face of a fellow human being. This is no longer the Ashley Duart of the three-martini veranda and quiet nights on the cape in her husband’s schooner. The tall woman now appears to be soaked from head to toe, either from the rains of the previous night or sweat or both, her lean arms tracked with wounds where trees and thorns have clawed her flesh. Her hair stands up as though from electrocution, and dark circles rim her eyes. She glances up at the sound of Lilly’s voice as though poked with a stick, flinching, nearly stumbling, her stride thrown off by the shock of a familiar voice calling out.
Lilly yanks back on the reins, and the horses scuttle to a sudden and violent stop in a spray of filthy water.
Behind her, the closest horse-wagon—Burt Stankowski’s chopped-down panel van—nearly tips over when its team is wrenched to an abrupt stop in order to avoid slamming into the back of Lilly’s pickup. The other contraptions thunder to a stop behind Burt in a chain of snorting, frothing horses and hydroplaning tires.
Meanwhile, Ash has staggered to a stop herself, nearly passing out from hyperventilating so rapidly. The kids and Jennifer Stack gather around her, a motley-looking group in their tattered, soiled clothes and wind-burned faces. Some of them are spattered with layers of blood, while others are gasping for breath and looking as though they’re about to go into cardiac arrest.
“Oh my God, Ash!” Lilly climbs out of the pickup’s front seat, hops to the wet earth, and then lurches across the bean field toward her friend. “Ash!”
Ash is bent over, trying to catch her breath, hands on her knees, murmuring, “Thank God … thank God.” She looks up, a weary, pained, cockeyed grin on her face. “Where did you come from?”
The two women hug each other, a desperate, sweaty embrace, all their collective fear and rage and grief leeching tears from their eyes.
For a moment, neither says a word to the other, they just hold each other in that sunbaked patch of soybeans as the others gather around them. Some of the younger children are crying, clinging to their older siblings. The teenage Stack girls stand on either side of their mother, each holding one of Jennifer Stack’s hands. Bobby Quinn tries to be grown-up but can’t hold off his
own tears, a sister on either side of him, clutching the boy’s shirt.
Lilly’s people approach and keep a respectable distance, occasionally glancing over their shoulders, keeping tabs on the outer edges of the swarm, making sure no stragglers lumber too close. Burt Stankowski pivots in a 360, scanning the trees with his 9-millimeter pistol out, muzzle down, at his side, ready for anything. The four children from the van huddle behind Burt, the Slocum twins each sucking a thumb, the Coogans trying to be cool but revealing the jittery tension in their eyes.
Ash looks into Lilly’s eyes and grins that trademark crooked grin of hers and mutters, “I thought I’d never see you again.”
Lilly inspects Ash’s wounds, looks at the others. “What the hell happened to you? Where’s Quinn?”
Ash lets out a miserable, exhausted sigh. “Long story, I don’t even know where to start.”
Behind Lilly, Eve Betts comes up and stands next to Burt, her cut-down 12-gauge cradled in her arms, her eyes scanning the deserted fields to the north and the adjacent road to the south for any sign of the dead. Boone circles around behind Eve, taking off his goggles, looking flummoxed by the whole tearful reunion.
“Are you okay?” Lilly asks Ash.
“I’m hanging in there.”
“What happened?”
“We got snatched by a crazy fuck, Lilly, kidnapped, me and Quinn’s kids.”
Lilly feels a fist clenching her guts. The wind blows the smell of walkers across the fields, the acrid stench making her eyes water. Across the clearing, the horses fidget and nicker. Lilly looks off at the distant clouds above the Chattahoochee. “Not again … Jesus. What is happening to us?” Lilly doesn’t elaborate. By “us” she means humankind. The human race. People in general.
“It wasn’t what you think. We got put on ice.”
“Ice?”
“Like a prison, Lilly. It was insane. This maniac thought he was … keeping us safe. These poor kids, they’ve been through hell.”
Lilly shakes her head, letting out a sigh, trying to wrap her mind around this concept. The sound of Musolino’s Escalade roaring up pierces her thoughts.
The vehicle comes to skidding halt on the shoulder of the two-lane, the driver’s door creaking open. The big man climbs out, grabbing his M16 rifle from beneath the front seat. In the low afternoon sun, he looks like an olive-skinned monolith, muscles bulging under his dago T, his sculpted Portuguese face and dark eyes alert and vigilant as he marches over to the two women, the rifle on his shoulder. “What’s going on?” He furrows his brow. “Not crazy about stopping here, middle of nowhere, being this exposed. Tried to reach you on that piece o’ shit two-way.” He stops himself, noticing all the kids. “Oh. Sorry. Pardon my language.”
“Johnny Musolino,” Lilly says, making a grand gesture toward the larger-than-life man in the sleeveless T, “meet Ashley Duart.”
Ash smiles at the man and shakes his hand. “Otherwise known as Ash.”
Musolino gives her a polite nod and smile. “My pleasure, Ash.”
Lilly turns and indicates the others, introducing them one at a time. “This is Tommy, Boone, Eve, Burt … and those little ones are Tyler, Jenny, Tiff, and Mercy. And those little munchkins in the back of the pickup pretending you can’t see them right now. That’s Bethany and Lucas.” Lilly turns to Ash’s group. “Looks like we got enough kids for a baseball team with all of yours.”
Ash turns and starts introducing all of her people when a strange sound interrupts, a muffled snapping noise, like a mousetrap springing underwater.
Lilly executes a quick pivot to her right—whirling toward the sound—just as a spattering of blood hits the side of her face. Musolino jerks forward as though shoved by an invisible hand, an exit wound blossoming almost magically just below his Adam’s apple, sending a puff of blood mist and bone fragments out the front of his neck like a champagne cork popping.
This is followed by the echoing boom of a high-powered rifle, the sound emanating from the hills several hundred yards to the north.
PART 2
Welcome to the Terrordome
Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant.
—Samuel 15:3
SEVEN
Sidearms such as .38-caliber revolvers, .22-caliber pistols, and 9-millimeter semiautos have muzzle velocities well below the speed of sound. But large-caliber sniper rifles—such as the one fired at Lilly Caul’s group from the trees above Calister Hill on the northern edge of Coweta County—send their fully jacketed rounds spiraling through the air at speeds almost twice the rate of sound waves. All of which is why the bullet seemed to reach its target—the huge one in the sleeveless wifebeater—well before the thunderous blast of the M1 carbine even reached the ears of those standing around him.
The shooter keeps his eye—the only part of his face not heavily bandaged—pressed against the scope for several minutes after hitting the target, the air around him surprisingly still as he watches the silent chaos unfold in the bean field four hundred yards away. All that can be heard around the shooter now are the buzz of gnats and the sound of his own thick, mucusy breathing through the nose holes of his bandages.
Through the scope, he can see all of the adults almost involuntarily diving to the ground, crawling for cover. Then a few of them, mostly the women, realize the children are just standing there like silhouettes in a shooting gallery—sobbing, sucking their thumbs, gaping in terror. The ladies spring into action, climbing to their feet and lunging toward the kids. Heroically, they shield the young bodies with their own as they shove everybody back toward the cover of their modified horse-wagons.
All of this takes about sixty seconds to transpire, although the sniper is fairly certain that the span of that time probably seems much longer to those scrambling for cover down in the soybeans. In the crosshairs of the scope, the shooter can see the miniature people clamoring back on board their makeshift horse-wagons and modified vehicles, frantically securing their younger passengers in the rear compartments and cargo bays for safekeeping. Some of the adults attempt to return fire, the small florettes of light from their guns visible for one split second before their bullets zing impotently through the trees a mile away, the resulting reports echoing across the sky.
One of the women—a tough little thing in an auburn ponytail and ripped jeans—drags the victim’s body back to the rear of her cut-down pickup, enlisting the aid of her teenage accomplice. The victim twitches, clinging to life, as he is lifted by the twosome into the payload area. The gate is slammed, and then the woman and kid hurry back around to the front of the cab, staying low, hyperaware of the threat from the hills now. The restless horses toss their heads as the woman flops down on the bench and snaps the reins, the modified pickup lurching into sudden movement.
The sniper then pans the scope’s field of view over to the tall amazon nicknamed Ash, who is just now throwing open the door of the Escalade, piling her kids in the back, and lunging behind the wheel. Hatred burns in the shooter’s guts for this horrible ingrate, this arrogant snob. Resentment and disgust and even a small amount of pity stir in him for this misguided, narcissistic soul. Full name, Ashley Lynn Duart: the sound of it reverberates in his brain like the echo of a scream, like a nail scraping across Sheetrock. He hates her and pities her in equal measures. He will teach her a lesson if it’s the last thing he does.
Spencer-Lee Dryden exhales and lowers the scope from his eye, backing away from his shooting position. He kneels, bracing himself against the mossy boulder to his left and letting out a sigh. The faint pounding of his burns and facial injuries thrum in his nerve endings like distant, muffled summer thunder. He has anesthetized himself with enough drugs and antibiotics to soothe a hippopotamus, but his rage prickles in his nervous system, touching off fireworks of agony in his skull. He hadn’t planned on his escapees being rescued like this. For the love of God, all he had wanted to do was hunt down
the woman who assaulted him, kill her, and take back the children. He hadn’t anticipated interference by a third party, but so be it.
He glances over his shoulder, peering through the branches of spruce trees. Fifty yards away, his convoy of six medium-duty trucks of different makes and models—some of them scorched and smoke damaged—sit idling, revving their engines, awaiting further orders in the humid air of a Georgia afternoon.
A little farther down the hill, parked along the shoulder of a crumbling blacktop access road, the modified mobile homes sit in the shade of ancient pines. Some of them are so badly fire damaged, they’re missing entire sections of their bulwark, the soot-stained interiors visible through gaping holes. Others merely exhibit streaks of smoke stains rising off the windows and the lintels and the tops of doors. Each trailer has been secured to the one in front of it with a makeshift coupler in the style of a small train, the entire chain pulled by a massive Kenworth cab-over with an enormous power plant, which also now idles in a low, basso profundo rumble, every few seconds belching a puff of black smoke out of its stack. Sally Dryden sits behind the wheel of the Kenworth, garbed in her work shirt—a prototype from the Dickies catalogue, YOUR NAME HERE on one breast pocket, YOUR BUSINESS NAME HERE on the other—a fashionable scarf tied around her graying hair. Her face is a map of rage, as though a mask has been removed, revealing the true personality underneath.
Spencer-Lee takes all this in as he rises to his full six-foot-plus height, shaded by the tall trees lining the scenic turnoff. A lifelong hunter, he was taught to shoot by his daddy while hunting pheasant in the hills north of Talladega National Forest. Now he slings the rifle over his shoulder and carefully descends the sloping road, his line of vision dramatically cut down by the thick, Betadine-stained bandage covering 90 percent of his head. The burns he sustained from Ashley Duart’s attack now throb constantly, a low simmer of agony, which in a strange way, he appreciates. It keeps him sharp, alert, focused. It’s a tricky business being a patriarch. One can’t allow anger issues to cloud one’s judgment. One must not let one’s fury pour out, as it used to do in Spencer-Lee’s drinking days. One has to be fair but at the same time ruthless in one’s acts of discipline. Adults sometimes have to be taught a lesson in the same manner as children.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 10
