“Foxes are on the run, boys!” he bellows to his crew as he approaches the circle of trucks. He climbs into the cab of a gray Ford F250 crew cab connected to an armored Airstream Flying Cloud trailer, giving the man behind the wheel a nod. Spencer-Lee gazes at the gleaming trailer in the side mirror. Pocked with rust spots, much of it ravaged by fire damage, the retro-futuristic camper has become Spencer-Lee’s sanctum, and now, it shall be his command post in this dangerous but necessary mission.
In a thunderhead of exhaust and noise, the caravan of scorched vehicles booms out of that scenic area and starts down the winding road that leads into the vast, fecund flatlands of Coweta County.
* * *
Five miles to the east, just outside the ghost town once known as Newnan, Georgia, lay the ruins of a massive cloverleaf connecting Highway 85 with rural routes 34 and 127. Much of the overpass has caved in on itself, the upper tiers now lying in great fragments of mossy, crumbling cement across the intersection below. What remains is a single fragment of the overpass, broken off midspan, sticking out over the ruins of the cloverleaf like a balcony, terminating in tentacles of rusty, exposed rebar.
Right now, three heavily armed men stand at the edge of this outcropping, noticing something strange in the hazy distance.
“What do you make of this?” one of the men inquires somewhat rhetorically, peering through his binoculars at a distant row of vehicles—too far away to identify—picking up speed as they move across the horizon. The youngest of the three onlookers, his long, raven-black hair gathered into a ponytail, a bandolier of bullets across the breast of his denim shirt, the young man tightens his grip on the binocs. “You don’t think this has something to do with…?”
The question is posed with world-weary fatigue creasing the young face of the dark-haired, dark-eyed man. Lean to the point of emaciation, sunburned and weathered by endless days of combing the entire southern half of the state, Jamie Quinn has been searching for his woman and his children for so long now he almost can’t bring himself to speak the names aloud. He lowers the binoculars.
“Ash and the kids?” The man standing to his immediate right completes the sentence. A fifty-something former landscaper from Arkansas, Frank Steuben is built like a German sedan—all round and sturdy and practical—with a huge belly jutting over his jeans and arms as thick as tree trunks from lifting fifty-pound bags of peat moss all his life. “I don’t know.” He wipes his thick, leathery neck with a handkerchief. “We’re running on fumes already, and that’s a long way away.”
“It does seem weird, though,” the third man comments. “Folks burning that much fuel, traveling that fast.” A skinny, wiry little man with a .45 pistol holstered on each hip, Caleb Washburn is a former life insurance agent from Louisville and has the jittery-eyed look of a ferret. “Something’s going down out there, that’s for sure.”
Quinn raises the binoculars to his eyes again. He watches the faraway drama unfolding, the distant players in the silent race—both horse-drawn and motorized—moving faster and faster in a southerly direction, kicking up larger and larger clouds of dust, water, and debris. It’s hard to tell from this far-flung vantage point, but Quinn starts to see little indicators that suggest it’s not necessarily a race as much as a chase. He can see two distinct clusters of conveyances—the one in the lead mostly horse-drawn, the one pursuing them mostly motorized—and even from this great distance it’s obvious the vehicles with engines are gaining on the ones pulled by animals. Again, Quinn lowers the binoculars and looks at the man on his right. “How far away is that little fracas, do you think?”
Frank Steuben lets out a long, weary sigh and purses his lips. “I don’t know … maybe a mile and a half, two miles at the most.”
Caleb says, “Quinn, you want to go check it out, just give us the word.”
Quinn shrugs. “We’ve come all this way, seems crazy not to.”
Frank Steuben shakes his head skeptically. “Hate to be devil’s advocate here, but we have no clue what kind of wasps’ nest we’d be stumbling into out there.”
Caleb starts to object. “Frank—”
“Plus, I ain’t even sure we got enough gas to get back to Haralson,” Steuben adds. “Let alone go off on some cockamamie wild-goose chase.”
“Frank, c’mon.” Caleb’s voice is hoarse, scalded by stress and exhaustion. “These are Quinn’s kids we’re talking about here.”
“I’m aware of that fact, Caleb. I’m just saying, we ain’t gonna do anybody any favors by—”
He stops abruptly when the distant clap of a high-powered rifle pierces the afternoon stillness, making all three men start, Quinn jerking nervously. They look at each other. The sonic boom of the distant gunfire seems to take forever to fade into the wind.
Quinn turns and hurriedly starts to climb down the service ladder embedded in the stone overpass.
For one brief instant, the other two men remain at the crest of that ruined cloverleaf, looking at each other, momentarily dumbstruck.
Finally, giving Frank a sidelong glance, Caleb turns to leave. “Looks like you’re overruled, brother.”
* * *
Another volley of gunfire crackles through the air, one of the high-powered rounds blowing a three-inch hole in the pickup’s side mirror as the modified horse carriage careens toward a distant forest preserve.
The impact makes Lilly twitch at the reins. She blinks as though waking up. Up until this moment, she has been lost in a daze of panic, confusion, and grief—reeling from the horrors of Musolino’s shooting. It happened so quickly—the man she has secretly been admiring from afar, thinking about late at night, fantasizing about romantic scenarios that she knows will never come to fruition—now ravaged without warning by the impact of a large-caliber slug slamming through his neck.
Since the early days of the plague’s outbreak, Lilly Caul has seen too many loved ones go down in similarly tragic, nightmarish circumstances. She has seen her father, Everett, devoured by the dead as he tried to squeeze his way on board a bus. She has witnessed her lover and protector, Josh Hamilton, shot in the back of the head by one of the Governor’s psychotic disciples. She has seen her best friend, Megan, hanging from the end of a rope, a suicide committed in the wake of the Governor’s evil. She has watched in mortified terror as her boyfriend Austin was sacrificed to the horde outside a prison. And she has shared Bob Stookey’s final moments on earth, cradling the old medic in her arms, close enough to hear the whisper of his death rattle. Each one of these deaths took another chunk of her soul—to the point at which she was starting to wonder if she had any soul left. But today, in the aftermath of Musolino’s fall, she experienced a strange and sudden disconnect. Her mind has gone inward, snapping, plunging into a catatonic state of shock—a disassociation as palpable as a television losing its signal.
The horses gallop full tilt a few feet in front of her, their saliva frothing into the wind, spraying back in Lilly’s face, their hooves kicking up clods of wet earth. The modified pickup bounces and slams over the corrugated terrain.
In the broken side mirror, now punctured by the 7.62mm armor-piercing round, she can see a blurry reflection of the armada bearing down on her. In that narrow slice of cracked mirror, the assailants look almost like a futuristic band of pirates with their makeshift gun turrets like crows’ nests on the rooftops of their trucks, and the ramshackle chain of trailers like Spanish galleons bringing up the rear to plunder and pillage.
There was a day when Lilly Caul would have wondered why in God’s name such a motley assortment of people would be expending this much energy, blood, and treasure. Why go to such lengths to kill Ash, take her children back, and destroy any person, place, or thing that gets in their way? There was a time when Lilly would have tried to communicate with these people, negotiate with them, and work something out that would benefit all. But the days of communicating, negotiating, and talking through problems in order to avoid bloodshed are long gone.
“I can’t sto
p the bleeding!” Tommy Dupree’s voice comes from the burrow of crates and boxes in the cargo bay. Lilly glances over her shoulder.
Through a small doorway cut into the rear of the cab—no bigger than a hatch one might find on a submarine—Lilly can see the chaos unfolding in the open cargo area, illuminated ironically by the warm, serene, sharply angled rays of late-afternoon sunlight. Musolino lies supine on the hard iron floor, convulsing, as Tommy Dupree huddles over him in a crouch, holding a towel on the wound. Blood flows around Tommy’s cloth in rivulets, the cargo bay floor already swimming in the big man’s blood.
The two younger children—profoundly callous and hardened by witnessing many similarly grisly sights over the last four years—sit off to the side and watch sullenly, the wind tossing their cherubic hair. Lucas compulsively sucks his thumb, a pathological habit even for a seven-year-old. Bethany plays nervously with a strand of her hair, staring at the gruesome proceedings with the casual ennui of a child waiting in the cafeteria line.
“Keep the pressure on it!” Lilly’s voice sounds distant and warbly in her own ears, as if underwater. “Press down really hard!”
“I’m pressing as hard as I can, the blood’s still gushing out!”
“Just keep pressing down!”
Lilly hears another salvo of gunfire from the .50-caliber machine guns coming up swiftly on her left flank—an unmistakable noise which sounds like chains rattling, the links snapping apart—which draws Lilly’s attention to the fractured side mirror.
In the spiderwebbed reflection, she sees Burt Stankowski in his chopped-down panel van about five car lengths back, weaving wildly while the .50-cal bullets strafe the ground by his tires. Burt makes feeble attempts to return fire by squeezing off random rounds with his 9 millimeter out his side window as the marauders close the distance and increase the rate and frequency of their fire. Lilly makes a frantic mental note—a checklist—ticking off which vehicle is carrying which children. The Quinn kids and the Nesbits are in the Escalade with Ash. Kayla, Kourtney, and Jennifer Stack are with Burt. The Coogan kids and the Slocum twins are riding on the enormous flatcar with Eve and Boone.
Lilly swallows her fear. She focuses on the team of horses. She snaps the reins, stirring them up as fast as they can run, and she sinks into the seat.
* * *
The stocky fireplug of a man sits at the wheel of the tricked-out Chevy Kodiak truck, 250 horses of turbo engine roaring beneath him, guzzling biodiesel as the rig thunders across the scabrous fields, closing the distance on the fleeing mongrels in their cut-down horse buggies to about a quarter mile. The Kodiak’s second passenger is only partially visible overhead, through the makeshift sunroof, manning the Browning.
The driver, his right arm bandaged from third-degree burns stretching almost from his wrist to his shoulder, sniffs at another twinge of deep pain itching under his dressings. He wants so badly to wreak havoc upon the skinny bitch who started the fires. But he will wait for the signal from the Big Guy. That’s what the driver does best. He does what he’s told.
Formerly a janitor in the Georgia state capitol building, his bald, scabby pate like a missile sitting on the launchpad of his thick neck, Barret Deems had learned to listen closely to the great Spencer-Lee Dryden. When Mother Nature went insane, and the plague broke out, it was only natural that Deems would become Spencer-Lee’s right-hand man, part bodyguard, part all-purpose muscle.
Now he can see the four modified vehicles in the middle distance—maybe five hundred yards away, three of them easy pickings with their broken-down horse teams—and he can taste the revenge on his tongue like a bittersweet liqueur. He wants so badly to see that skinny chick Ash burn to real ashes, afterward maybe feed her scorched bones to the walkers. Every twinge of pain, every phantom flame that still licks up Deems’s arm feeds his hunger for revenge.
He sniffs back the agony and tightens his grip on the steering wheel, altering his course slightly toward the Escalade that is now bringing up the rear of the mongrel caravan. A few torrents of .50-cal rain will fix that bitch once and for all.
Without warning, the two-way clipped to the dash crackles with a voice. “Barret, what are you doing? I told you she’s mine.”
Deems grabs the walkie, thumbs the switch, and says, “Sorry, Spence, I thought—”
“Don’t think!” The voice cuts through the static with brittle anger. “Just do what I say.”
“Of course,” Deems says into the mic. “What do you want us to do?”
Through the speaker, Spencer-Lee Dryden explains the attack formation, the importance of sparing the lives of the children, and the absolute necessity of doing all this quickly and decisively. Deems listens closely, then signs off and swerves to the east.
* * *
Lilly urges the team to the west, swerving past an obstruction looming directly ahead of her—a pile of deadfall logs—when she sees something terrible unfolding in the side mirror’s reflection. She’s about to deal with it when a voice pierces her chaotic thoughts.
“Lilly!” Tommy calls from the rear. “Lilly, I—I think he’s—!”
“We got a situation up here, Tommy!” Lilly’s mind swims with panic, overloading with information streaming in from all quarters. “Just keep pressure on it!”
In the mirror, she can see enemy trucks closing in on both sides, roaring in diagonal vectors toward her pitifully slow horse-drawn contraption. She bullwhips the reins but the horses are already running at a high gallop, and Lilly’s not too sure how long they can keep that up. She wants to give Tommy the reins and go to Musolino’s side, try and save the man, do anything she can for him. But she also sees the troubling development in her side mirror.
She yells at Tommy: “Just keep pressing down on the wound!”
In the cracked reflection to her immediate left, Lilly can see the Escalade about a hundred and fifty yards back, several car lengths behind Eve and Boone’s enormous horse-drawn flatcar. Something silvery looms behind Ash and the SUV like a lunatic valkyrie, the blinding sun shining off its dull finish. Lilly has no idea who’s in that retro-futuristic camper, but whoever it is, they’re on a collision course with the Escalade, fifty yards behind it and closing. Forty … thirty … twenty … until Lilly is certain the camper’s front cab is about to ram into the SUV’s rear end.
Then Lilly remembers the chintzy walkie-talkie. She grabs it off the unoccupied seat next to her and thumbs the Talk button. “Ash! It’s Lilly! Pick up that piece o’ shit walkie-talkie! Pick it up now! Can you hear me?! Ash! Pick that fucking walkie-talkie up and talk to me! ASH!? ASH, CAN YOU—?”
Through crackling static: “Lilly? What is it? What’s going on?”
Lilly thumbs the button, gaping at the side mirror and the Airstream rig hurling toward the Escalade. “MAKE A SHARP LEFT! RIGHT NOW!—A SHARP LEFT!!”
In the reflection, the Escalade swerves just in time, the Airstream’s cab plunging toward it, missing its rear hatch by inches. The barrel of an assault rifle protrudes suddenly from the Airstream’s front crew cab. Silver magnesium fire spits from the muzzle, accompanying a salvo of high-caliber rounds, which puncture a string of holes in the Escalade’s left rear quarter panel.
“You still there, Ash? You still with me?” Lilly hollers into the walkie-talkie. “Bastards got your tank, I can see the fuel leaking!”
Through the static: “Fuck—FUCK! They just missed one of the kids by inches!”
“Listen to me, Ash. Put the hammer down. Go as fast as you can, try to make it to my wagon!”
Static. “Okay … will do. Got the pedal floored. On our way.”
“Lilly!” From the cargo bed of the pickup comes Tommy’s frenzied voice. “I can’t stop the—!”
“What is it? What’s wrong?” She throws a quick glance over her shoulder, and sees the boy huddled over the twitching, jerking body of John Musolino. “Tommy, what’s going on? Are you keeping pressure on the wound?”
“I can’t stop the bleeding!”
> Lilly can only take her eyes off the horses for a few moments at a time. Otherwise, they could easily slam into one of the split-rail fences that occasionally loom in their path. Adding to the difficulty is the fact that the rearview mirror was removed in the process of cutting the front end off the truck’s body, so there’s no way to see into the back other than looking over one’s shoulder. Which she does right now.
What she sees sends chills down her spine. Beneath Tommy, Musolino lies faceup on the floor, convulsing and shuddering, soaked in his own blood. Tommy presses his blood-sodden hand down on the neck wound, valiantly stanching the blood loss, but it looks grave for Musolino. His face is a blood-marbled death mask. His mouth gapes, strangled like a fish wrenched from life and tossed on the dry deck of a boat.
Now Tommy presses both hands down on the exit wound with all his might, leaning into it, pressing down hard. “He’s not breathing anymore.” Tommy looks up, mortified, eyes wide and blazing. “Lilly, what do I do? He’s not breathing!”
“Do you know CPR?”
“Do I know who?”
“C-P-R!-C-P-R!—it’s something you learn in swim class!”
“Like when somebody drowns?”
“Yes! YES!”
“I think so, I mean, I think I remember learning it at the Y!”
“Okay, so—!”
Gunfire off their left flank makes Lilly start, jerking her attention back to the horses.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 11
