The animals look as though they’re about to burst blood vessels, their muscular necks like massive pistons firing, their haunches churning as their hooves thunder over sodden, weathered earth. Lilly can feel the land very gradually begin to descend into a valley.
In the far distance, to the east and to the west, under a high, cloudless blue sky, clusters of dark ragged figures materialize like cockroaches emerging from the woods and from the ruins of old barns and from the empty shells of farmhouses, drawn to the noise and chaos of the chase coming their way. Lilly makes a series of instant calculations.
The flatlands ahead of them will be overrun in a matter of minutes, and the heart of this megaherd will be directly in their path. There is no escape, no way out. To the east the woods are too thick to navigate with the horses, the trees too densely packed. To the west, it’s the same story. The pines are so profuse now with postplague overgrowth, the daylight turns to night behind the first row, the old-growth treetops scraping the sky.
Lilly’s pulse rate shifts into a higher gear, the realization dawning on her that the only mode of escape is to eliminate the threat, obliterate the enemy by any means necessary. She has been in tight situations before, has looked disaster in the eyes, but nothing like this. Over the span of a single instant, which seems to unfurl with glacial slowness, she thinks of her precious children and the delicacy of their lives, and the absolute imperative of their survival. As the assailants close in on both sides, the thunder of large-caliber gunfire crackling in the sky, Lilly Caul goes down into that cold, dark, silent place—that primordial, ancient, limbic part of the brain.
An idea occurs to her there, in that cobra calm, in the eye of the storm.
She knows now exactly what she’s going to do.
EIGHT
“Lilly!—LILLY!!—What do you want me to do?!” Tommy’s voice rips Lilly’s attention back to the cargo bay, where Musolino lies still now, barely a tic or a twitch left in him, as the two younger children look on, their brother trying to maintain pressure on the oozing, mortal wound that has already run its course.
“Okay, so, forget the wound.” Lilly’s voice sounds almost serene in her own ears, a voice coming from someone else. “Tie the cloth around his throat! Not too tight, just enough to stanch any more bleeding!”
Tommy wraps the bloody cloth around the throat. “Okay, now what?”
“Okay, so, push down on the center of his chest, hard, with one hand over the other, hard and fast—and do it over and over.”
Tommy starts to palpate the sternum. “How many times should I do it?”
“At least thirty!”
“Then what?”
“Tilt his head back and—”
A bullet sparks off the roof of the pickup, making Lilly jump.
She sees in her side mirror the pattern and formation of the assailants changing. A Kodiak flatbed truck barrels directly toward her on her left flank, a machine-gun turret on his roof, an operator firing controlled bursts at her pickup. They seem to be going for her tires, but the rough ground keeps throwing off the gunner’s aim. Lilly sees the Escalade coming up fast on her flank, passing Burt’s van and Eve’s trailer.
The sinister Airstream can be seen careening after the Escalade, a gun barrel protruding from the side of the cab, the muzzle flashing intermittently, bullets sparking and ricocheting off the ground behind the SUV. Another pair of trucks box in Burt Stankowski’s van, the attackers coming to within inches on either side. Automatic gunfire sizzles on either side. The van fishtails, bullet holes puncturing its quarter panels. The van’s rear doors suddenly snap, flapping open in the wind. Lilly sees cartons and boxes sliding off the edge, all their treasures from Ikea tumbling out of Burt’s van—the lamps and boxes of cereal and bags of charcoal and portable grills—scattering across the sodden field. Some of the trucks swerve to avoid the surprise obstructions. One of the marauders skids out of control, his stake truck going into a violent roll, the massive chassis coming apart at the seams.
Turning her attention back to Tommy, she cries out, “You have to clear the airway! Tilt his chin up, Tommy! Do it now!” For a frantic moment, Lilly glances over her shoulder and sees the boy tilting the bodybuilder’s head back. Lilly nods. “Now pinch his nose shut and breathe into his mouth. Do it, Tommy!”
Tommy takes a deep breath, pinches the dead man’s nose, and blows air into his mouth.
“Now listen to see if he’s breathing, listen close to his mouth.”
Tommy does as he’s told while a salvo of gunfire draws Lilly’s attention back to the churning, galloping, sweaty horse team in front of her. In the whirlwind, bullets are strafing the front corner of the pickup, sparking into the back draft. They’re aiming for the horses. Lilly grabs one of her Rugers off the seat, thumbs the hammer, and fires a series of .22-caliber responses out her side window. Then she yanks the right rein, and the horses split off from the caravan, hurling off to the west.
This buys her enough time to glance once again over her shoulder.
Through the gaping hatchway, she can see Tommy looking crestfallen, eyes wet, shaking his head as he hovers over the lifeless bodybuilder. “Tommy?” She sees the boy lick his lips and reach for his Buck knife. “Tommy!” The boy draws the blade from its sheath on his thigh. “TOMMY!” Lilly screams at him. “DON’T DO IT!!”
“I have to,” he murmurs. “For Musolino.” He grips the knife with both hands now, raising it over the dead man’s skull. “He would have done the same thing for me.” And the boy is about to drive the tip of the knife down through the man’s cranium when Lilly’s voice pierces the boy’s trancelike misery.
“Goddamn it, Tommy, listen to me! DO NOT DESTROY HIS HEAD!!”
Tommy looks up suddenly, the knife still poised in his hands, his siblings gaping in shock on the other side of the cargo bay. The boy stares at Lilly. For a moment, the knife just stays like that—poised in midair, inches above the big man’s bloodless face—as though Tommy’s internal workings have seized up. “What?”
“Listen to me! Do you understand what I’m telling you? I’m telling you to not destroy his brain! Nod if you understand me!”
The boy drops the knife, the blade clattering noisily to the truck’s metal deck. Tommy’s head droops, and he starts to tremble, shuddering with tears. “We have to do it—we can’t just let him—”
“Tommy! Snap out of it! Come take the reins! You hear me? COME TAKE THE GODDAMN REINS, TOMMY—NOW!”
The boy finally wakes up from his momentary stupor of grief. “Okay, okay, okay.…” He starts climbing through the hatch.
* * *
She who hesitates is lost. The nattering refrain echoes incessantly in Lilly’s head as she hurriedly climbs through the hatchway into the cluttered rear cargo bay. Meanwhile, Tommy has taken the reins from her and now snaps them furiously, keeping the sweaty horses at full steam. Over the last few seconds, the Kodiak truck has loomed closer and closer on their left side, the machine gun about to roar again.
Lilly does not hesitate. In the windy, vibrating cargo area, she crawls over to where Musolino’s remains lie in a bloody heap, his limbs akimbo, one leg folded under the other. His skin is the color of wet cement. His eyes are still open. Lilly reaches down and tenderly pushes his eyelids shut. Then she unwraps the cloth from his neck. She twists the fabric into a ropy segment and turns it into gag, wedging it into his mouth and tying it off in a neat little bow behind his head. The bow is critical.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can sense the two younger children transfixed by all this gruesome minutiae, as though they’re watching a ritual of some sort, which perhaps they are. Lilly lifts Musolino’s remains into a sitting position against a stack of boxes. His head lolls as the pickup swerves.
Lilly looks at the children cowering in a cubbyhole between two boxes. Eleven-year-old Bethany Dupree—a former wallflower, reborn in this plague world as hard and brave as a miniature Navy SEAL—holds her little seven-year-old brother, Lucas,
tightly in her arms. Both kids stare glassy-eyed and silent.
“He was a good man,” Lilly assures them, keeping close tabs on the dead man’s eyes. “And we already miss him. But I promise you. His death will not be meaningless.”
Both children nod and say nothing.
Lilly gives them a hard look. “Do you both know what I mean by that?”
They nod again.
“Good,” she says. “Now I want you both to be brave, no matter what happens. Just like Mr. Musolino. He was always brave.”
They nod.
The thing that was once John Musolino opens its eyes to reveal the pale corneas like white sparrow eggs nested in the sockets.
“TOMMY!” Lilly calls over her shoulder, moving between the monster and the children. “GET AS CLOSE TO THE FLATBED TRUCK AS YOU CAN—RIGHT NOW!”
* * *
The Chevy Kodiak closes in on the pickup’s left side, cutting the distance to twenty yards, now fifteen, now ten. The gunner, up top, strapped to the firewall with mountain climbing gear, gets inspired, and aims the Browning’s muzzle at the horses. In that brief, tumultuous moment before squeezing the trigger, the man lets out a hysterical guffaw—half laugh, half war cry—which sounds more like a bark or a yelp. What was he thinking, shooting at the fucking tires?
A lanky, tall, sinewy former convict with a knife scar down one side of his neck, a barbed-wire tattoo down the other, Antoine Spanic grips the cocking lever with his Carnaby-gloved hand and yanks it quickly, charging the weapon, injecting a round in the chamber. He can see very clearly now the boxes and crates—many of them with the yellow Ikea logo—stacked ten feet high in the pickup’s rear hold, straining the integrity of their restraint straps with each bump. He believes passengers lurk back there, hidden by the payload, but the smart move right now is to go for the animals.
Those horses get waxed, and it’s game over for these motherfuckers.
Spanic yells down at Barret Deems, the stocky little man at the wheel: “BEAR! Get me as close as you can!”
“Will do!” the gravelly voice below replies with a bellowing yell, the sound of it barely audible above the din of engines and horses and wheels on bumpy ground.
The truck roars and drifts closer, and the gunner centers the crosshairs on the closest horse. Over the pounding noise of the steel-belted radials and the wind whistling across the open windows in the cab below, Spanic can hear the rhythmic grunts and snorts of the draft horses, and the noises touch off a deep well of rage and resentment in Antoine Spanic. The very sights and sounds of these majestic animals, their sweat-shiny coats churning underneath with the massive peristalsis of their muscles, stir something profoundly ugly in Antoine Spanic—his lost childhood, his days on the work farm, the smell of cow shit and moldy hay, the beatings, getting molested by the warden—and he begins to squeeze off the killing shot when something in his peripheral vision catches his eye.
The teenager at the reins has yanked the left rein with all his might, causing the team to rear up midgallop and swerve sharply to the left.
All at once, Spanic sees the entire contraption that was formerly a pickup truck lurch toward the Kodiak, the horses howling and tossing their heads. Spanic realizes that the thing is going to ram the side of the flatbed. He tries to squeeze off a volley of gunfire but before he can pull the trigger, the side of the pickup slams into the Kodiak, whiplashing Spanic sideways and breaking his harness. Something moves behind the Ikea boxes.
Spanic freezes as the boxes suddenly topple apart, someone pushing them aside. A huge male figure appears behind them, teetering, standing upright on the edge of the pickup’s cargo bay.
It transpires in that dreamy time-lapse motion like a film developing in Spanic’s mind. For the briefest instant, the thing that was once John Musolino stands there, gagged, pale as alabaster, black drool flagging in the wind, eyes like white pilot lights, teeth gnashing as it snarls at Spanic from the rear of that hurling pickup. At first, the gunner doesn’t see the woman named Lilly Caul standing behind the creature, holding the monster up as though helping an inebriated friend get home. She steadies the thing in the wind, gripping the knot behind the gag as the creature reaches for Spanic.
Then, Lilly Caul heaves the massive walker onto the rear of the Kodiak.
The Browning submachine gun slips from Spanic’s grasp, the long muzzle of the .50-cal tilting skyward, spinning on its greased tripod. Barret Deems yells something from below but all Antoine Spanic can do now is stagger backward, horror-struck, as the enormous walker lands on its belly only inches from him on the Kodiak’s flatbed. Spanic tries to spin away but the thing that once spoke fluent Portuguese and entertained the Dupree children with impressions of Muppet characters now reaches out with its grappling hook fingernails and catches a corner of Spanic’s denim shirt.
Antoine Spanic manages to get his hand around the grip of the Taurus 380 snub nose wedged behind his belt, but before he can raise the muzzle and fire at the thing’s skull, a bolt of enormous agony explodes in his leg. The Musolino-Thing has already sunk its teeth into the fabric of Spanic’s jeans a few inches above the knee—in the meaty part of the thigh. The dead teeth penetrate the flesh beneath the fabric and sink into the gunner’s femoral artery. A geyser of blood fountains into the wind and atomizes into a fine mist.
In his convulsive pain, Spanic drops the pistol and almost instinctively tries to roll away across the flatbed. But the monster has both hands now dug into the gunner’s waist, hooked into that belt, holding him in place. Spanic shrieks. The Musolino-Thing feeds, tearing up the gunner’s leg, gobbling denim, and rooting down into the flesh of his groin. Spanic’s scream rises an octave, sounding almost like a baby being born, as the creature’s incisors sink down into Spanic’s genitals.
Gun blasts ring out from the cab, the firewall sprouting holes from Barret Deems’s .357 revolver, the Kodiak swerving. The pair of figures roll in a death-lock-embrace across the deck, slamming into the opposite bulwark. The monster gets hit in three places—shoulder, ribs, and hip—none of which has any effect.
Convulsing under the weight of the massive creature, Spanic gasps for air, flailing, losing blood by the pint, but somehow he marshals enough strength to reach up and make a valiant attempt to hold the head of the Musolino-Thing in place. It’s like wrestling with an industrial-sized wood chipper, and it is Antoine Spanic’s last conscious act on this earth. The creature bites into the gunner’s fingers as nonchalantly as if he were sucking the meat off a barbequed rib, and the pain is so massive, so all consuming, that Spanic passes out.
At that point, the merciful darkness claims Antoine Spanic for eternity.
More gunshots bark up front, more holes dimpling the Kodiak’s steel partition. The truck weaves and swerves wildly now, drifting away from Lilly Caul’s horse-drawn contraption.
In the Kodiak’s cab, behind the wheel, Barret Deems frantically twists around in a futile attempt to aim the gun at the monster. He empties the rest of the cylinder in a flurry of firecracker pops, then struggles to reload with a speed cartridge. His stubby hands are slick with panic-sweat, greasy on the steering wheel, his stocky body soaked with perspiration. The noise of the creature snarling and growling rises, reaching his ears like a death knell. He twists around to his right, then to his left, but he sees nothing through the narrow rear window, which is stained with the aerosol of the gunner’s blood. But where the fuck is that giant biter?
Deems’s hands fumble with the speed loader, which gets stuck, then slips from his grasp, spilling bullets all over the floor mats. He can smell the deathly rancid stench filling the cab, and he can hear the low droning growl of the creature, but still he can’t see a goddamn thing.
He leans down and tries to scoop up one of the bullets, most of which are rolling around on the floor. And in that horrible instant, the ridiculous quality of his doom registers somewhere deep in his midbrain. All the shame, guilt, insecurity, and self-loathing flood his awareness. In one single split-second
, he is back at his job sweeping up the capitol building after hours, trying to prove himself to big Spencer-Lee Dryden.
He looks up at the windshield and his eyes practically pop out of his skull.
The massive tangle of deadwood and old, fallen timbers from a storm-lashed fence loom directly in his path, and all he has time to do is cry out and yank the steering wheel. He gets sucked into the centripetal force of the turn, and he holds on, bracing himself for a tip-over. Somehow the truck manages to stay on two wheels for a moment, then slams down onto the other two. He holds his breath as he pulls the truck out of its skid. The rear wheels fishtail, and then dig in, regaining their traction.
Barret Deems is letting out a deep sigh of relief when the dead hand reaches in the side window and grabs a hank of his shirt.
* * *
“Holy shit—HOLY SHIT!” Tommy Dupree has the horses charging in a wide, arcing turn to the right, whipping the reins as hard as he can, the froth and sweat from the team blowing back in his face, when he hears a scream rising above the din behind the pickup. He shoots a look at his side mirror and sees the closest vehicle, the Kodiak flatbed, fish-tailing wildly. Then Tommy sees the huge, ragged creature that was formerly John Musolino climbing into the Kodiak’s cab and devouring the driver, the inside of its windshield running red with blood. At this distance, it’s hard to discern any details but it looks as though the creature is eating the face off the man behind the wheel.
“Oh my god, oh-my-god-oh-my-god!” Tommy sees the Kodiak going into another wild spin. “Lilly—LILLY!”
Over the space of the next few seconds, the dominoes tumble in a violent chain reaction that neither Tommy nor Lilly can do anything to stop. The Kodiak has listed to the side, tipping onto two wheels, the g-forces sending the truck into a roll. The Browning is ripped off its tripod and launched through space, and the eviscerated body of the gunner is catapulted into the air, coming apart at the seams in a bloody display. What remains of the truck lands on its roof, smashing the two figures in the cab into pulp.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 12
