Behind her, the boy—Quinn can’t quite remember if his name is Tommy or Timmy—has turned and rushed back to the Escalade with Lilly. The two of them begin to furiously rock the entire sideways monstrosity back and forth, as hard and fast as they can, in a frantic attempt to roll the thing back over onto its wheels. Quinn lowers the scope and waves back at her wildly. “YES!—ASH!—IT’S ME! STAY THERE, WE’RE COMING!!”
Quinn’s excitement has distracted all three men to the point that nobody hears the rumblings of walkers emerging from the deeper woods behind them, at least twenty-five large adult creatures, drawn to all the gunfire. As the men climb back into the Jeep, not a single one of them notices the two former farmhands—now decomposed into shriveled, desiccated corpses in filthy, threadbare denim overalls—lurching toward the Jeep just as it roars into motion, its rear wheels spraying sludge into the air.
The larger of the two creatures manages to clasp its bony claw of a hand around Caleb Washburn’s ankle. The forward momentum of the Jeep instantly hauls the walker off its feet, carrying it away with the vehicle. Caleb lets out a yelp that sounds almost canine, a burst of involuntary shock that makes him kick wildly with his right leg as he goes for his gun.
The monster latches on to Caleb’s foot with its teeth. Rotting incisors penetrate the leather welt of Caleb’s work boot. Quinn sees all this unfolding and tries to swerve in an attempt to throw the creature off the Jeep. But all this does is send Caleb Washburn slipping off the edge of his seat and over the ledge of the running board, sprawling to the ground behind the Jeep, the walker still attached to him.
Quinn makes a tight turn and roars back toward Caleb and the walker, throwing a wake of soggy humus off the rear wheels, while Frank Steuben squeezes off four quick blasts from his .44 Taurus revolver at the two figures on the ground thirty feet away. Jostled by the fishtailing Jeep, Frank’s aim gets thrown off, the bullets missing their mark by only inches, ripping through the attacker’s shoulder and ribs, doing very little to slow it down.
Meanwhile, beneath the creature, Caleb wriggles and fights as the monster goes for his neck, tearing into him with ferocious hunger. Finally Caleb gets his Glock 9 millimeter in his right hand and presses the muzzle to the side of the beast’s skull. A single shot spews brain matter out the opposite side of the thing’s head, making it sag instantly, collapsing onto Caleb, then slipping off him onto the ground.
* * *
Standing amid the battlefield of contorted, disfigured walker remains, her pulse racing, her body like a tuning fork vibrating with adrenaline, Ashley Lynn Duart gets so excited by the appearance of Quinn that she loses track of her surroundings. She barely registers the fact that Tommy and Lilly are right next to her, madly rocking the Escalade, trying with all their might to tip it back onto its wheels. All Ash can perceive is Quinn’s Jeep hurling toward them, coming across the field, closing the distant with each passing second.
Ash doesn’t even notice the second wave of walkers coming from the long shadows of the scabrous orchards to the west. Nor does she notice the injured man in Quinn’s Jeep as it approaches, the poor soul now writhing in pain in the rear, his left foot, left leg, and lower abdomen bleeding profusely from the walker attack. Nor does Ash notice Frank Steuben trying valiantly to stanch Caleb’s bleeding with a piece of his shirttail serving as a makeshift tourniquet. But these are trivial developments compared with the most important thing that Ash misses.
She doesn’t see the battered, hobbling Ford crew cab coming toward the Escalade from the north, pulling a rust-pocked silver Airstream trailer, mowing down row after row of walking dead.
* * *
“Slow down, Daniel, please … slow way down.” The man leaning out of the jagged, broken passenger window of the crew cab speaks with an eerie calm behind the stained gauze of his facial bandages, despite the fact that his brain blazes with rage and sorrow and pain. His wife of thirty-two years is dead, their dreams of a better world—a safe place to live, children nurtured well, tranquil days—all of it literally gone up in smoke. His compound has been destroyed. All his children and extended family are either dead or kidnapped. His body and soul have been blighted by an evil woman—the same one now visible in the distant heat waves and waning sunlight struggling to turn a sideways SUV over onto its wheels before the next regiment of the dead moves in.
Spencer-Lee Dryden gets very calm as the cab and trailer grinds to a halt, sending ripples across a flooded dirt road fifty yards from the Escalade—surprisingly calm, considering the ceaseless agony radiating outward from his third-degree facial burns under his bandages. He turns to the driver and says, “Keep it running, Daniel.”
“Wait, um … yeah but … what about…?” Daniel Klouse nervously slams the Ford’s stick into Park and glances over his shoulder at the shifting population of dead creeping across a square mile of matted weeds, withered crops, and flooded farmland. A gnarled, gangly ex-con garbed in sleeveless flannel and Oakley sunglasses, a cornucopia of tattoos adorning his gristly musculature, Klouse used to play chess in the joint. He remembers being taught by one of the best—an old, grizzled arsonist—who kept hammering the primary directive of great chess masters into Klouse’s head: always imagine at least four moves ahead of your opponent. Which is why Klouse can’t stop thinking right now that they should get the fuck out of here immediately.
Four moves ahead of the current one will likely involve Klouse and every other human within a mile radius becoming dinner for the outrageously huge second swarm that is just now coming out of the ravines and gulches of the surrounding wetlands.
“This won’t take long,” Spencer-Lee informs him, gazing out the windshield. He reaches down to a long, rectangular lockbox between the seats. The stencil says APD SWAT TACTICAL ONLY and the lock displays evidence of tampering. Up until this moment, Spencer-Lee was not able to use the weapon in the box due to the chances of endangering the children. He would rather die than jeopardize the lives of his precious, sweet, innocent young brood. They are everything to Spencer-Lee. They are all that he has left.
Inside the battered metal lid, Spencer-Lee finds the oiled, shiny weapon nestled in its felt concavity. It was procured years ago—right around the start of the outbreak—from the SWAT team’s tactical storeroom in Spencer-Lee’s congressional district. His congressman owed him a big favor, and had traded the keys to that warehouse for the lives of the congressman’s family.
Now he quickly pulls the thing out, assembles the tailpiece, and loads a projectile. Klouse watches with morbid interest. He’s seen these things in movies but never in real life.
Meanwhile, Spencer-Lee opens the cab door and climbs out with the heavy, bulky weapon on his shoulder like a yoke. He splashes through the standing water.
He sees the Jeep coming—still maybe forty or fifty yards away—and he lowers himself to one knee. He carefully aims the RPG, leading the Jeep ever so slightly in the crosshairs.
ELEVEN
Quinn and his men are still a good thirty yards away from the Escalade, circling around a patch of flooded ground—Ash giggling with the giddy emotions of a teenager—when the rocket-propelled grenade is launched a little over fifty yards to the north.
Off a nearby log, a flock of crows erupts into flight at the boom of the RPG—an inkblot spreading poisonously upward across the pastels of the setting sun—heralding the flight of a decidedly more dangerous man-made projectile.
The blur of the shark-finned rocket tracing through the humid air, spiraling toward the Jeep, looks almost surreal as it seeks its moving target. It happens so quickly and unexpectedly that Ash just stands there, her waving hand still raised but now paralyzed, motionless. The Jeep explodes twenty-five yards away from the Escalade.
The force of the blast levitates the entire vehicle ten feet straight up into the air, the sonic boom shaking the earth. The secondary explosion follows as the gas tank goes up, the fireball immolating the Jeep, as well as the remains of all walkers lying strewn across the groun
d within a radius of fifty yards.
The shock wave lifts Ash off the ground and catapults her backward twenty feet before depositing her in a flooded, swampy patch. The spongy wet ground probably saves her life; had she hit something hard she would have certainly been killed. At the same time, that violent surge of energy cashes into the underbelly of the Escalade, ironically pushing the SUV over onto its wheels—right side up—as Lilly and Tommy dive out of the way of the debris, shrapnel, and particles flying in all directions.
Twisted metal, shards of molten hot plastic, and a supernova of shattered glass hurl through the air, some of it strafing the sides of the Airstream fifty yards away with the force of a vertical storm. The backdraft throws Spencer-Lee Dryden to the ground, a jagged piece of the Jeep’s transaxle, shaped like a spear, crashing through the crew cab’s windshield.
Daniel Krouse attempts to duck but is not fast enough, and the pointed end of the iron scrap impales his head, fixing it to the firewall behind the seats.
* * *
A moment later, the air sizzles with the aftermath of the explosion. Ears ringing, pain throbbing in her spine, Lilly Caul rolls onto her lower back and gapes up at the heavens as though shell-shocked by the eerie colors painted across the darkening sky. The ringing in her ears seems to drown out all other ambient sound for a moment. She sits up and notices the Escalade is upright now, on its four wheels, and she starts to regain her bearings. She can see the kids in the back rows moving, peering out the windows, apparently unharmed. Where is Tommy? In her deafened ears, a faint, high-pitched whistling rises above the ringing noise.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the boy on his hands and knees about twenty feet away from her. He looks as though he’s been vomiting, his pale face partially powder burned, his gaze downturned and fixed on the swampy grass. She manages to rise to her feet, dizziness threatening to knock her over. That’s when she sees the Airstream rig fifty yards away behind a deadfall pile, sitting still, blood swathed across the inside of its crew cab’s windshield. She assumes both men in the cab have bitten the dust, but just before turning away she catches a glimpse of a large, middle-aged man behind the Airstream, lying supine on the ground, writhing in pain, dazed by the percussive blast of the RPG, his face covered in bandages.
This gets her moving. She rushes over to the boy, grabs him, and yanks him to his feet. Her hearing still impeded by the traumatic aftereffects of the blast, her ears still ringing incessantly, she sees the boy’s lips moving but can’t hear a word. All she hears is that high-pitched whistling rising above the tinnitus like a teakettle boiling over. She yanks Tommy toward the SUV. “Get in! Quick! We have to get outta here! NOW!”
Lilly can barely hear her own voice but she sees Tommy staggering toward the front passenger door, clawing at the handle, getting it open, and climbing in. The door slams shut but Lilly hears only that thin, falsetto shrieking noise that seems to be coming from the rear of the Escalade. With great effort, her spine stiff and panging, she steadies herself on the Escalade’s quarter panel and hurriedly makes her way around the rear of the vehicle.
Ash is on her knees behind the SUV, shoulders slumped, her face a mask of agony, her eyes locked on the smoldering wreckage across the clearing. She is screaming. Lilly goes to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. “Ash! We have to go! Now! ASH! ASH!”
In all the miserable, tragic events that have transpired between humans throughout the years of the plague—and that includes grand larceny, starvation, torture, kidnappings, rape, mass murder, guerilla warfare, and all manner of brutality—Lilly Caul has yet to hear a person shriek in this manner. Ash’s scream is a scream of existential horror—a naked, unbridled, primal cry of loss—her eyes so wet with tears and agony they look almost luminous. Her tears track down her face. Her shriek finally deteriorates into strangled, convulsive sobbing.
Lilly, her hearing partially restored, pulls on Ash’s sleeveless blouse and says, “Ash, listen to me. Listen. If we don’t get out of here right now—and I mean right now—the children will most likely die.”
“Leave me. Fuck it … leave me.” Ash looks up at Lilly with heartbreaking grief sweeping over her face. Her voice crumbles. “Leave me here, I don’t want to go anywhere, it’s over, it’s useless and it’s over, the plague won, who gives a shit.…”
In her peripheral vision, Lilly can see the next wave of the horde—hundreds, maybe thousands in number—coming this way from the lengthening shadows of surrounding forest preserves and ruined homesteads. The dusk has almost given over to evening, the sky now the color of a wound, pink and salmon with streaks of crimson. In the far distance, the horizon flickers with spangles of heat lightning, as though the storms of recent days are refusing to leave quietly, a vast engine continuing to diesel after being turned off. Darkness is closing in.
Lilly’s pulse quickens, her focus narrowing, and that steel enclosure clamping down on her emotions. She slaps Ash across the cheek—nothing vicious in it, just sharp enough to cut through the trauma. “Goddamn it I’m not leaving you here, and it’s not over! You’re gonna get your shit together for the kids! You understand? Nod! If you understand what I’m telling you, nod your fucking head. Look at me, Ash! Look at me! I SAID NOD YOUR FUCKING HEAD!”
Ash looks up as though her head weighs a thousand pounds and she nods, swallows thickly, and nods again and swallows again, hard. She nods a third time. Her voice changes, flattens out, all emotion leeched out: “Let’s go.”
* * *
Lilly drives. Tommy sits in the front passenger seat with his shotgun between his legs, his gaze shifting nervously to the side mirror. Ash sits in the second row between Bobby and Chelsea Quinn, holding the kids as they softly struggle to keep from crying. The other kids are squeezed like nesting dolls into the second and third rows of bench seats, nine tiny people clinging to each other, crammed together in sweaty catatonia, the fear keeping them still.
Nobody speaks for the longest time. It’s as if their hearts and minds are readjusting to the loss, the new dynamic in Musolino’s Escalade. The children have witnessed everything—every violent episode over the last several hours—through that narrow tailgate window. Even when they had fallen sideways, stacked on top of each other, they saw every exchange of gunfire, every kill, every edged weapon going into every skull. Now their agonizing silence is troubling to Lilly. She keeps glancing in the rearview, watching them watch her. Most of their little soiled faces are bloodless and blanched with exhaustion and trauma. Some of them have dirty streaks snaking down their cheeks where the tears have dried; others suck their thumbs obsessively and compulsively. They all seem to have fallen into a collective daze, as though the terror and uncertainty have finally blown fuses within them.
Lilly finds a shit-strip of leprous dirt that once served as an access road for tobacco farmers, and she takes it slowly and steadily in a westerly direction, away from the most concentrated portions of the megaherd, away from the invisible fog bank of death-stench, away from the continuous grinding chorus that sounds even from a distance, even under the noise of an engine, like a dissonant symphony of chainsaws. She keeps her speed at around thirty-five to forty miles an hour—radio off, A/C off, headlights off—in order to conserve fuel. The gauge says they’re almost empty. They have plugged the bullet hole in the tank with cloth, but they will need to properly patch it and find fuel soon.
Darkness is closing in, the sky turning the color of black lung disease, the air cooling down, the thickening forest to the north falling into dense shadows, as opaque as velvet drapes.
Lilly Caul knows this sprawling rural area south of Atlanta better than anyone but even she will not be sure exactly where they are until they come upon a road sign or landmark. She thinks the chase has led them astray of Woodbury by many miles. She estimates that they are at least halfway to the Alabama border, if not farther. They have to at least be west of Luthersville, but may be even west of LaGrange, and that will present both advantages and disadvantages. Sh
e vaguely remembers a Love’s Travel Stop somewhere around here, if she can find the ruins of what used to be Highway 85.
Next to her, Tommy keeps shooting glances at that side mirror. Lilly can see what he’s looking at: the vast, walker-riddled farmlands behind them, the smoking wreckage of Quinn’s Jeep, and that battered Airstream rig receding into the distance and gathering darkness. She’s keeping an eye on that silver camper and its crew cab as well, but not for the same reasons as Tommy. She has her own reasons, and she plans to reveal them to the others in due time.
* * *
Five minutes later, they come upon the crumbling remains of what once was a major transportation artery along the Georgia–Alabama border. Now, in the moonlit darkness, the four-lane divided interstate looks like some obscure ancient ruins one might find listed in the back pages of a Roman guidebook—the Lost Portico of Cement, perhaps, or the Concrete Coliseum of Pine Valley—stretching into the night in either direction as far as the eye can see. Some of the overpasses have been washed away or have collapsed out of neglect, and now all that remains are desecrated support columns rising up against the sky like snuffed-out candles. Old wreckage and carcasses of vehicles weathered beyond recognition.
Lilly pulls onto the road and heads north, toward the ghost towns of Hogansville and Franklin, and the wilderness of the Chattahoochee River delta beyond them. She drives for another mile or so, weaving between the overturned, rusted-out shells of abandoned cars and the kudzu-carpeted viaducts, when she suddenly, without any warning to the others, pulls over and stops.
Ash has already begun looking around the gloomy interchange with confusion. Tommy also glances over his shoulder at a bullet-riddled road sign that says COLUMBUS 57 MI, a frown creasing his brow.
“Isn’t Woodbury in the other direction?” he asks, looking at Lilly.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 15
