“Good night, sweet prince,” the face says, the voice almost tender.
The blast makes a popping sound, a single bullet penetrating Frank Steuben’s skull, turning the dial, once and for all, mercifully, to Off.
* * *
It takes a minute or two for Spencer-Lee to hear the unexpected noise echoing over the wetlands to the west.
At first, he’s too busy disposing of Frank Steuben’s remains, dragging the body from the rear of the crew cab and dumping it in the marshlands behind the truck. He stands there for a moment, wiping his hands on a towel, watching the portly body slowly sink into the mire, the oily bubbles punctuating the end of the man’s existence on this earth.
Before the plague, Spencer-Lee Dryden had testified in several grand jury hearings involving local mafiosi and hometown hoodlums who had tried to muscle the Atlanta city council. He had studied transcripts of evil deeds, bodies being dumped, assassinations of rival gang leaders, and various and sundry instances of intimidation, violence, and blackmail. He had become obsessed with protecting his constituency from these bad elements. He grew to see the voters in his district as family, and when it came to protecting his family, Spencer-Lee was relentless. He would do anything—short of murder—to shield his people from the wicked and the immoral. And if he were honest with himself, he probably could be pushed to commit atrocities, including homicide, if it meant protecting the ones he loved. Nevertheless, Spencer-Lee doesn’t see the death of Frank Steuben as murder. The man was suffering horribly. The head shot was an act of mercy. Now, Spencer-Lee returns to the crew cab, flips open the map case, pulls out a dog-eared road map of Georgia, and spreads it open on the middle seat.
He remembers passing through the little town of Woodbury a few times when he was younger, taking shortcuts through the deep country while on business trips and vacations to Panama City, Florida. He recalls very little about the place—the village was nothing special to a big-shot politician from the city, pretty much just a wide spot in the road—and now he sees on the map why nobody really ever talked much about it. There’s no main interstate within miles of the town, and many of the railroads that once intersected in the train yards of the little hamlet have now long since gone the way of the dinosaurs.
Perhaps this is why Woodbury—postplague—has become the best-kept secret among the survivor class. Maybe the remote, middle-of-nowhere quality is what makes the place so secure. The very thought of finding a gem of a place that could be a fortress against the swarms and the bandits and all the misfortunes of the plague-ridden tobacco fields touches something deep within Spencer-Lee. His eyes well up as he thinks of his sweet Sally, gone now, perished in such a meaningless, incomprehensible way. He thinks of the children—his extended family—out there somewhere. They have to be close. They may have already gone to Woodbury. Spencer-Lee has always been a deeply intuitive family man—despite the fact that he and Sally never had any children of their own. He always had a sixth sense when he came to his loved ones. He could feel their presence—even when they were out of his reach, out of his sight.
He is thinking about this psychic connection when he hears the faint echo of a revving engine.
At first, he thinks he’s imagining it. The noise wavers and warbles, drifting on the breeze. He turns and cocks his head toward the west. He listens more closely, and sure enough, the unmistakable sound of an engine—a large one—can be heard on the wind, revving and revving, over and over, as though stuck. It makes the hair on the back of Spencer-Lee’s neck stand at attention. Ashley Duart and her arrogant accomplice, Lilly Caul, had fled the accident scene in a Caddy—an SUV—perhaps an Escalade.
This sounds like just such a vehicle stuck in the mud a mile or so away.
Spencer-Lee climbs behind the wheel, fires up the engine, shifts it into gear, and carefully maneuvers the crew cab across the swampy, flood-swollen deltas, heading in the general direction of the noise.
FIFTEEN
Tommy Dupree crouches in the tangled undergrowth on the edge of the encampment with the gnats and the centipedes, his hands sweaty with nervous tension. His heart pounds. His legs cramp. His stomach roils. He grips the stock of the Winchester Model 70—the barrel of which rests on an adjacent log—clutching it so tightly his knuckles are bloodless. In his mind, he goes over Lilly’s plan again and again. He will not let her down. This is his chance to prove himself once and for all.
Through a narrow gap in the foliage, he can see the Escalade—about twenty-five yards away, on the opposite side of the clearing—parked on a marshy patch of ground that runs along a weedy, neglected access road. Gouts of carbon monoxide cough out of the tailpipe as Ash guns it repeatedly. It took many anxious minutes to switch the vehicle over to RWD and jack up the rear, rigging the lift apparatus so that it would blend in with the weeds. The elevated rear end and disengaged wheels now create the illusion that the SUV is stuck, the rear tires spinning wildly in the mud, throwing miniature wakes of brackish muck into the air.
The rest of the plan relies on a theory deeply held by Ash as well as Tommy’s marksmanship.
“There are more variables here than I would like, sport,” Lilly had cautioned the boy only moments ago. “The thing could go to hell quickly, it could deteriorate instantly. The man is bug-fuck crazy.”
Tommy nodded. “So he’s the most unpredictable of all the variables?”
“Ash is highly confident that he would never harm a child, so this is our best shot.”
“I’ll take him down, Lilly, don’t worry,” Tommy had assured her then. “I’ll make it count.”
“Just don’t forget, you’re gonna be all by your lonesome at the sniper position—you got no backup.”
“I’ll get the job done.”
This conversation had taken place only moments ago, but now Tommy feels as though he has been crouching in this incessant cloud of insects for days. His knees and upper thighs throb painfully. He’s reminded of the era he played catcher on his little team, and how much he hated it. He loathed the constant squatting. It killed his knees. He tries to clear his mind and focus on the shot. He holds the rifle the way Bob Stookey had taught him—breathing deeply through his nose, body as relaxed as possible, both eyes open, one eye defocused, one eye peering through the scope.
In the telescopic realm of the crosshairs, he can see the Escalade on the edge of the road, gleaming in the sun, Ash hunched at the wheel, her jaw set and tense as she pretends to struggle with the supposedly stuck rear wheels. The ruse is working. Tommy can hear a second car coming up the winding delta road. He can’t see it yet but can sense it coming at a slow, steady, discreet speed. He thinks he’s sneaking up on us, Tommy marvels silently. He thinks he’s going to surprise us. Through the scope Tommy studies Ash.
He can’t imagine how much she hates this guy. This asshole took the life of her boyfriend—the father of her adopted children—and kept her prisoner for months. In fact, ever since the RPG had wasted Jamie Quinn, Tommy has been waiting for Ash to have a full-blown mental breakdown. But the woman is tough. She has remained strong for the kids. Tommy thought for sure that she would be the one to kill this creep. But now it’s up to Tommy. It’s all up to him. The weight of responsibility presses down on him now.
The smell of rotting fish drifts on the breeze, mingling with the mossy odors of the woods. Tommy keeps wondering what point Lilly was making when she had warned Tommy that he would be “all by his lonesome” once he took his position. But now, squatting in the thick odors of decay and ground-rot, he thinks he knows what she meant. The feeling of being exposed courses through the boy on a wave of gooseflesh. Nobody’s watching his back, and it makes the skin on his nape prickle with terror.
The presence of the dead is always pervasive—ever-present outdoors—but right now the sensation of danger looming behind him is almost overwhelming. Tommy can hear strange noises in the deeper woods back there. He can smell rancid meat. Since the weather has changed, and the floodwaters have greatly reced
ed, Tommy has noticed odd noises coming from the forests and gulleys along the Chattahoochee: dripping, snapping, crackling, shifting noises, as though the entire valley is settling, rearranging itself. Like a haunted house. Tommy can remember trying to ignore the bloated darkness behind his open closet door in his childhood bedroom as he slept alone at night. The more he tried to ignore that darkness, the more terrifying that half-open sliding door—and the unknown shadows behind it—would become. He feels that way right now, as the rumble of a heavy-duty pickup truck draws closer and closer.
He presses his brow into the scope’s eyecup and concentrates on the far end of the access road. The road ends at a hairpin turn, which plunges down into the adjacent farm fields. A huge weeping willow has grown wild and contorted above the hairpin, shading the area with deep shadows. The blur of an oncoming vehicle can be seen, a slow-moving shape through the trees.
Tommy pushes his finger into the trigger guard. He applies light pressure to the trigger pad. He breathes regularly. He waits. He hears the crew cab approaching, and then hears it creak to a stop. He adjusts the eyepiece, panning the scope a few centimeters to the left, and he sees the truck standing still behind the trees.
For the longest time, the driver just sits there, perhaps debating what to do.
* * *
Lilly whispers, “You ready, sweetheart?”
The little girl crouched in the shadows behind a massive live oak trembles as she whispers, “Am I supposed to say anything?”
“No, honey … just look scared. Remember it’s like a play.” Lilly looks at the others. “Remember, all of you, just stand behind us and look really, really scared.”
Bethany Dupree speaks up in her patented snarky adolescent snarl. “That won’t be a problem.”
Lilly nods, finding no humor in this comment. She swallows hard and gives them all a nod. “Okay, here we go. Remember to look really, really frightened.”
Right then, Lilly Caul steps out from behind the tree, her heart pounding.
She yanks Trudy Quinn, the youngest little girl, out into the open first. Lilly clutches the child by the shoulder strap of her filthy little denim jumper. The child’s cornflower-blue eyes are huge with horror. Her lips quiver. She doesn’t have to act.
“DRYDEN!”
Lilly’s voice booms, making the other children jump as they crowd in behind little Trudy. Lilly presses the muzzle of her Ruger .22-caliber pistol hard against the downy-soft head of the seven-year-old. “GET OUT OF THE TRUCK! UNARMED! HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM! OR I WILL PUT THIS CHILD OUT OF HER MISERY!”
The timbre of Lilly’s voice—the coarse, frantic texture of it—is truly terrifying. Drenched in madness, desperation, and soul-searing rage, it is so fearsome, in fact, that some of the younger kids start to cry—for real—and Lilly has a momentary thought: so be it. The crying will help sell the routine.
“SHE’S GOING TO BE TRAUMATIZED FOR LIFE BECAUSE OF YOUR SICK SHIT! I’LL BE DOING HER A FAVOR, PUTTING HER DOWN!! GET OUT OF THAT FUCKING TRUCK OR THE CHILD DIES!”
Earlier that day, Ash had cautioned Lilly that Spencer-Lee Dryden is many things—mentally ill at the top of the list—but one thing he isn’t is stupid. He would likely see through the ploy the moment Lilly started threatening the kids. But Lilly was privy to a little-known fact about such things. She knew that the angst that lives in all human hearts can spill out at a moment’s notice. There’s no need to coax the desperation and insanity from the imagination. In these plague times, the thin veneers of self-control, civility, rational thought, and basic humanity can easily snap—whether consciously or unconsciously—resulting in mayhem, madness, and acts such as child murder. For Lilly, the trick here is to not let things go too far.
Even now, with her back to the other kids, her heart hammering in her chest, she feels her tether stretching to its breaking point. “YOU HAVE TEN FUCKING SECONDS! GET OUT OF THAT VEHICLE NOW!!”
Something twists and contorts within Lilly. Her hand tightens on the girl’s jumper. Her right index finger tingles on the Ruger’s trigger. Her stomach clenches. Her brain swims with contrary emotions, fragments of past trauma, painful memories, a dust devil rising off a prison yard, a stainless steel speculum stippled with her vaginal blood, a bleary memory of losing her only chance to have a baby in a makeshift infirmary beneath the Veterans Memorial Speedway of Woodbury, Georgia, dissolving into machete blades cracking open rotting skulls, and the self-loathing, the disgust, the blinding rage and gut-wrenching guilt after inadvertently shooting a mother and child on the grounds of that same prison, and finally, like a coda to a dissonant symphony, Lilly sees in her imagination an assault rifle in her hands, the back-sight rising to her eye, the trigger closing down, the boom, and the lurid spectacle of a bullet smashing through the skull of a man named Philip Blake.
Right then Lilly makes a critical error, changing the dynamics of the standoff in the spark of a single cerebral synapse firing.
She makes the mistake of looking down at the poor little girl who is attempting to play her role to the hilt. Lilly can see the genuine terror on that tiny angelic face, the miniature tulip lips shivering with fear. The girl’s flaxen curls are matted with blood. Her forehead has deep abrasions from the rollover accident, and her chin is bruised. The sight of it cuts through Lilly’s rhino-thick skin, her angst, her memories of human travesties that she uses to bolster her courage. The pathos of that tiny face penetrates Lilly down to the deepest core of her being. She can’t do this to this innocent little creature, this gift to the world from God. She simply can’t put this poor child through this ordeal anymore. She looks down at Trudy Quinn and winks.
The little girl looks up, picks up on the signal, and manages to return Lilly’s wink with a tepid smile.
The sound of a truck door bursting open makes Lilly jerk with a start.
Maybe Spencer-Lee Dryden saw the subtle transaction between woman and child. Perhaps he had been peering through the foliage with binoculars, and he caught the exchange, the reassuring wink and the little grin from the girl. Whatever it was that changed his mind, it now propels him out of that crew cab on a wave of madness and rage, a 12-gauge, pistol-grip shotgun in one hand like a grotesque magic wand. He bats away the branches with the hog leg of a gun as he emerges from the undergrowth, his attitude as fearsome as a golem rising out of the mystical mud. His face comes into view, his exposed teeth shimmering in the mossy green light of the clearing. It is the face of a demonic entity, the gruesome mask of a death skull. “I AM COMPLYING WITH YOUR DEMANDS!” he booms. He holds the shotgun above his head. Slowly, carefully, like a coiled snake, he lowers it to the ground, leaving it there. He holds his empty hands up palms open.
Lilly can plainly see that he has a second firearm tucked inside his belt.
“Let them children be.” He speaks in the voice of a mad pilgrim, nasally, the consonants buzzing in the back of his scorched throat. He slowly approaches with righteous, Old Testament swagger. He walks with a limp, which makes his ghastly appearance all the more imposing. “Listen to me now—them babies ain’t bargaining chips. You got no right negotiating with them.”
From her position in the shadows of a live oak fifty feet away, Lilly can clearly tell he is reaching around for the sidearm.
Several things happen then, all at once, as though choreographed to accompany the burned man and his tirade. The droning insects fall silent. Ash ducks down beneath the level of the Escalade’s dashboard. Lilly grabs the little girl and dives to the ground, protecting the child’s head.
The other kids scramble for cover, bracing for the kill shot to ring out.
* * *
At that moment, Tommy Dupree—crouching apelike behind drapes of willow branches and layers of foliage—is unaware of the shadow behind him closing in. He is focused only on the single head shot that will solve the Spencer-Lee Dryden problem. Tommy doesn’t hear the garbled vocalizations or smell the thickening stew of death-rot. He is concentrating solely on what Bob Stookey
and Lilly Caul taught him on the makeshift shooting range behind Woodbury’s speedway.
He holds his breath, eye pressed against the cup, and centers the man’s head in the nucleus of the miniscule circle at the intersection of the crosshairs. He pulls the trigger at the precise moment the lurker pounces on him.
The rifle barks as the ragged creature rams into Tommy, a rusty growl accompanying the blast, the impact of the corpse causing the gun’s barrel to waver a just a hair sideways. The fully jacketed armor-piercing 7.62mm round rips through the humid atmosphere, striking the ground at Spencer-Lee Dryden’s feet, sending a puff of debris up into the air. The tall man reels, unhurt, instinctively discharging his own weapon.
That second blast goes into the sky, hitting nothing, echoing over the treetops, as Tommy rolls across the matted pine needles and kudzu with a reanimated cadaver latched on to his legs.
Kicking and swinging the rifle as a bludgeon, Tommy tries to beat the thing off him. The creature—a withered, leathery female in tattered farmwife attire, with slimy black teeth and eyes like dull gray opals sunken into its face—absorbs the blows with robotic resilience. It tries to get its rancid teeth into the meaty part of Tommy’s thigh but Tommy is too quick for the thing and connects a hard blow of the gun’s barrel to the monster’s forehead.
The sharp end of the muzzle cracks through the skull and embeds itself in the pulpy matter of the frontal lobe, gushing black fluids down across the cadaver’s gaunt features. The creature folds, landing on Tommy’s legs, a surprising amount of weight that precipitates a spontaneous grunt from Tommy as he tries to pulls himself clear.
He can see other creatures emerging from the deeper foliage to his right, a couple of males with bloated, waterlogged flesh, and a large female—formerly obese, but now a sack of soggy flesh-folds jiggling off the corners of a waddling, reanimated skeleton. These ragged creatures lock their sights on Tommy as the boy struggles to extricate himself from the weight of the former farmwife.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 20
