SEVEN
Two figures move through the woods, through thick drapes of foliage, the shafts of overcast daylight flickering down into their eyes as they scan the distant trees for any sign of their encampment.
They walk silently, stealthily, their pistols gripped tightly in their hands. They have silencers attached to the muzzles of their weapons but they’re low on ammo and conserving their bullets. They carry secondary weapons—the younger man a machete stuffed down his belt, the older man a twelve-inch hunting knife in a sheath on his hip—each using his auxiliary weapon for both slashing thickets of foliage and impaling the skulls of errant walkers. They’ve been lucky these last few hours, running into very few roamers. The herd seems to have coalesced north of here, with only a few stragglers dragging along the back roads of southern Meriwether County.
“Look!” Reese Lee Hawthorne, his face shimmering with sweat, his clothes soaked through, speaks in a loud whisper, cautious about drawing too much attention. “Straight ahead—the other side of that clearing—see it?!”
The two young men come to a halt under a canopy of thick pine boughs. The late afternoon light undulates above them with bugs, the air smelling of wood-rot and forest musk. Stephen Pembry catches his breath and nods slowly. “Thank the Lord, thank the Good Lord.”
Through the brambles he can see the temporary barricade of logs and chicken wire, and the dull silver gleam of Chester Gleason’s Airstream trailer. The circle of vehicles stretches at least a hundred yards in both directions—pickups, SUVs, stake trucks, and all manner of RVs—their battered exteriors camouflaged by the shadows of the deep woods. The two scouts give each other one last fleeting nod of excitement, and then lurch single file through the remaining grove of trees between them and the caravan.
They burst out of the forest and practically leap over the fence.
Reese runs with a limp, his hip panging with agony where he fell earlier that morning trying to cross a dry, rocky riverbed. Stephen wheezes furiously as he runs, his injured rib cage and punctured lung on fire. Their packs feel as though they weigh a thousand tons on their backs, and their eyes bug out with thirst and hunger as they stumble awkwardly toward the huge plastic water jug on the tailgate of the Thorndyke family camper. The noise of their arrival brings dozens of survivors out of their RVs or out from behind temporary latrines to see what all the commotion is about.
Stephen reaches the water jug first and drops to his knees, putting his parched mouth under the tap.
“Careful, Brother,” Reese says, kneeling beside him, cupping his hands to catch the runoff dripping from the tap and Stephen’s chin. “You don’t want to puke it all up before it hits your gut!”
Stephen Pembry gulps the water and then has a coughing attack, dropping to his hands and knees, keeling over, hacking and wheezing into the grass. “Sweet Jesus,” he gasps between coughing fits, his face livid with exertion. “Water has never tasted so good!”
The two men had run completely out of drinking water twelve hours earlier, and figured it was no big deal. They had all the evidence they needed to return to camp, and the caravan wasn’t that far away, and besides, they were driving the Escalade, and as long as the main road was passable, they could be back home before suppertime. But as Stephen’s father, Pastor Evan Pembry of the First Baptist Church of Murfreesboro, Kentucky, was fond of saying when he got in his cups or was trying to make a point about the capriciousness of life, “Man plans and God has a big old laugh.”
“You boys all right?” a voice intones cautiously behind Reese.
Stephen looks up, wiping his mouth and blinking, and sees Rory Thorndyke standing over him. The former bricklayer from Augusta, garbed in a stained wifebeater T-shirt, his tree-trunk arms emblazoned with naval tattoos and hard gristly muscles, holds his cherubic little three-year-old daughter in his arms while he gums a wad of Copenhagen. “Y’all look like you been hit by a truck.”
“We’ll live,” Stephen mutters as he sits back in the grass and tries to catch his breath.
“You see the herd out there—the big one?” Rory wants to know, giving his little girl a bounce on his hip. For weeks now, the gathering hordes of walkers along the backwaters of southern Georgia have been a hot topic of conversation among the members of the convoy. It’s bad enough that the infernal things had managed to get into their beloved Father Murphy’s camper, but the fact that they seem to be coalescing like individual amoebas morphing into a larger and larger organism has everybody spooked.
Stephen shakes his head. “Nope … Other than the swarms that have settled down on some of the towns south of Atlanta, we didn’t see no herd.”
“Well, y’all better get your shit together, the preacher said he wanted to see you two the minute you got back.”
Reese and Stephen share another loaded glance and then begin to brush themselves off and run fingers through their hair as though preparing for a court appearance.
* * *
“What in tarnation happened to your dad-blamed vehicle?” The preacher sits at the RV’s dining table, his hat off, his huge hair greased back from his forehead. He is dressed in shirtsleeves, slacks, and his big Wellington boots, and he sits back against the bulwark, one boot propped up rakishly on the seat cushion as he plays with a child’s toy. His enormous gnarled hands fiddle with the tiny propeller, turning it as though he’s never seen a remote control helicopter before. This morbid fascination with toys—in fact, the mere idea of toys, and the existential absurdity of them in this day and age, as though the very idea of someone playing with toys now is an offense to God—practically crackles in his brain with a strange effervescence. His pappy didn’t take kindly to the concept of play.
“Ran outta gas about ten, fifteen miles from here,” Stephen reports from across the camper. He paces nervously and wheezes between sentences as he speaks. “Didn’t bargain on all the driving around in circles.”
“We’ll get it back. I’ll send Chester and Harlan out for it.”
Stephen nods. “Appreciate it, Brother. Sorry about having to leave it.”
“And you say the Caul woman and her party is now livin’ in this tunnel like a bunch of sewer rats?”
“Not sure how many are down there—at least a half dozen or so adults. That Bob fella, Harold, and some ladies, a few kids maybe.”
“Brother Staubach is with them?”
Jittery nods.
“Makes you wonder what kinda firepower they’re packin’ down there.”
Reese looks at Stephen and gives a shrug. “Mostly small arms, looks like, and they don’t seem to have a heck of a lot of ammo. I’m thinking they’re pretty much running on fumes down there, even though they got gennies providing power and whatnot.”
The preacher chews on this for a moment. “I thought for sure old Harold had met his maker during all that hubbub in Woodbury.” He twirls the little plastic propeller. “Man is a traitor to his church.”
“What are you fixing to do, Brother?” Reese wrings his hands as he sits on the flip-down love seat at the rear of the camper.
Jeremiah takes a deep breath as the rage turns in him, churning into something new, something ingenious and grand and almost biblical in nature. His great notion, his brilliant idea, smolders like a white-hot ember in the back of his brain. “Found this little gizmo in the back of Thorndyke’s camper, was in a toy box, belonged to the previous owners—a few batteries that hadn’t turned to dust, some other stuff, little gadgets and things.”
It becomes obvious the other two men have no idea what Jeremiah is talking about.
Jeremiah holds the little olive drab–colored plastic helicopter aloft as though illustrating his point. “‘Then I saw heaven standing open, and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Truth.’”
The two younger men share a nervous, fleeting glance. Reese recognizes the quote from Revelations but hasn’t a clue as to what it means in this context. The preacher gazes lovingly at the remote control chopper. “‘W
ith justice he judges and makes war,’” he murmurs, his eyes getting far away. “‘For he is vengeance.’”
“Brother Jeremiah, are you—?”
“‘The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile … they shall be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.’”
“Brother—?”
“‘They will be tormented day and night,’” Jeremiah recites dreamily, lost in his great plan, his brilliant idea. He can’t hear the voice of the younger man. He hears imaginary screams, temples falling. He leans forward and carefully blows on the tiny rotor.
“’They shall be in agony … day and night … forever and ever and ever.’”
The little propeller spins and spins.
* * *
Miles Littleton has heard enough. On his hands and knees under the window of the preacher’s RV, his skinny form shielded from the eyes of other campers by a curtain of foliage and poplar trees, the young car thief has been listening to the conversation going on inside the camper for nearly a half an hour now, and with each passing minute he has gotten more and more disgusted.
Considering the fact that Miles has been in and out of jail for petty crimes for most of his life, he knows a con man when he hears one.
The trouble is, this bat-shit preacher seems to have won over most of the members of the caravan. In fact, there may be only one person around here other than Miles who has the bullshit detector turned on, and it’s high time Miles went and talked to her about it.
He turns away from the RV and silently crawls through the trees.
He emerges on the other side of the clearing and then goes searching for Norma.
She’ll know what to do.
PART 2
The End of the Whole Mess
“For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not seen since the beginning of the world … nor ever shall be seen again.”
—Matthew 24:21
EIGHT
Days later, in the main sewer conduit beneath the outskirts of Woodbury, Georgia, two figures splash through six inches of brackish muck, walking side by side in the darkness. The older of the two, a slender woman of wan complexion and auburn hair, wears a miner’s helmet she found in one of the maintenance offices in a neighboring water treatment plant. The single battery-operated light attached to the helmet sends a thin shaft of luminous yellow across the passageway in front of her, shimmering dully off the ancient terra-cotta tiles of the tunnel wall.
The younger of the two—a gangly boy of twelve dressed in a flannel shirt that’s two sizes too big for him—trundles along beside the woman, cheerfully babbling, “I heard what you said to Bob the other day, and I totally agree with you, Lilly. I mean, I think we can and we should take Woodbury back from the slugs, and I know it’s not up to me, but I’m like totally down with you on this, and I’ll do whatever I can do to help, you know what I mean?”
Lilly shoots a glance at the boy, but doesn’t break her stride. “You were spying on us?”
He shrugs as he walks. “I wouldn’t call it spying, I was just sort of—”
“You were pretending to be asleep.”
“Sort of.”
“You were eavesdropping.”
“All right, yeah, I admit it, but the point is, I totally agree with you.”
She shakes her head. “You heard the whole thing about me being claustrophobic?”
He nods. “I’m not sure what that means.”
Lilly sighs. “It means—literally—a fear of enclosed spaces.”
The boy walks and thinks for a moment. “That’s kinda bad, huh, considering where we’re living nowadays?”
“You think?”
“Lilly, can you keep a secret?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s something I want to show you.”
“Right now? Down here?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t have a lot of time, Tommy, we’re supposed to be checking the culvert opening.”
“It’ll just take a—”
“Wait, hold on.” Lilly slows down, detecting a troubling odor in the fusty, airless atmosphere of the sewer. Beneath the stench of human waste wafts a secondary stench—greasier, more acrid. “Just a second,” she says, and stops.
The boy halts, and waits, and stares at her. “What is it? A slug?”
Lilly cocks her head and listens.
“Slug” is the boy’s latest slang word for the reanimated dead. For weeks now, he has been using a seemingly infinite number of monikers for the creatures—stinkers, empties, geeks, rotters, shells, stiffs, carcasses, chewies, dicks, reekers, meat-flies, feeders, mofos—to the point that Lilly has lost count of all the nicknames. She believes it’s a defense mechanism—a way for the twelve-year-old to objectify the monsters and minimize the horror of seeing human beings reduced to these repulsive parasitic things—so she goes along with it, trying in vain to keep up with the latest terminology. Right now, in fact, as she listens closely to the watery smacking noises coming from the shadows ahead of them, she thinks “slug” is a fairly accurate appellation for the sewer corpses she has been encountering underground lately.
“You hear that?” Lilly says finally.
“Yeah.” The boy goes stone-still as the watery sounds rise into a tortured, raspy, moaning noise. “Sounds like it’s coming from that side tunnel up there.” He indicates a dark intersection of tunnels about fifty feet away, a workman’s shovel leaning against the wall. They’ve traveled almost a mile west of their barracks, their position somewhere under Gable’s Pond. In the thin beam of light from the miner’s helmet, a series of ripples agitate the standing water.
Lilly pulls her .22 caliber Ruger and starts screwing on the suppressor attachment. “You stay here, and I’ll go and—”
“No.” The boy puts a hand on her arm. “Let me take care of it.”
“Tommy—”
“I can do it.” His chin juts with determination, his eyes blazing. His expression nearly breaks Lilly’s heart. Newly orphaned, steeped in death and loss, the boy is a born survivor. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Let me do it.”
Lilly nods. “I’ll be right behind you. Be careful. No hesitating.”
“I’ll be okay.”
Lilly follows the boy through the mire, her gun at her side, her finger poised on the trigger pad. Tommy approaches the intersecting tunnels slowly. He carefully picks up the shovel.
Something moves around the corner, making little radiating ripples across the flooded floor. The boy silently sucks in a breath and raises the shovel. Lilly moves in behind him as he turns the corner.
Something shoots toward his leg, and cold fingers clutch his ankle.
The boy yelps and rears back, and Lilly gets a fleeting glimpse of the thing before the shovel comes down—a flash of the miner’s light illuminating a pasty, bloated, fish-belly face, its slimy, piranha-like teeth clacking. The bottom of the creature’s torso is missing, a spaghetti knot of entrails flagging off. The rot and months of being submerged in the swampy muck have inflated its upper half to twice its normal size, giving it the appearance of being artificial and rubbery, like a discarded doll.
Tommy Dupree slams the shovel down on the thing’s sodden skull, the sound like wet celery snapping. The creature instantly sags, its cadaverous hand releasing the boy’s ankle. Tommy strikes it again. The thing has already expired, its flattened head now sinking below water level, but Tommy keeps smashing the shovel down on its remains. Again and again … until Lilly grabs the implement and makes Tommy inhale with a gasp as though waking from a dream.
“Good job, good job … you did it.” Lilly soothes the boy by patting him on the back and tousling his hair. “You killed that thing real good.”
“Yeah … okay.” The boy is breathing so hard he’s about to hyperventilate. “Okay … um … yeah.”
“You all right?” Lilly holsters her gun, takes the shovel, and leads the boy over to the opposite corner of the intersecting tunnels. “Look at me.”
The boy looks at her. His eyes are red. He’s still breathing hard. “I’m okay, Lilly.”
“You sure?”
He nods. “Yep.” He takes a deep breath, wipes his mouth, and looks as though he just woke up. “Can I show you something now?”
Lilly smiles at him. “Why not?”
* * *
An hour or so later, after leading Lilly down a mile of narrow passageway, the boy shines the light at the tunnel ceiling. “There it is!” he marvels, abruptly coming to a halt.
Lilly gazes up, her miner’s light canting up at the leprous ceiling, where tendrils of roots and wormy gray icicles of calcium dangle down, whiskering the edges of a large drainage grate. A patina of grit and age cover the rusty underside of the grating, but it’s apparent by a series of fresh scratches and gouge marks that somebody has forced it open in recent days. Lilly’s heart beats a little faster.
“Okay, hold the light for a second,” Tommy says. She does so as he scuttles up the ancient steps embedded in the masonry. He pushes open the grating with a grunt and shimmies up through the gap.
“You mind helping an old lady up?!” Lilly says. She sees nothing but darkness on the other side of the hatch as the pale face of Tommy Dupree stares down at her.
“Here, take my hand.”
He helps her into the fetid atmosphere of a cavernous boiler room.
She rises to her feet and brushes herself off, gazing around at the shadowy convolutions of ductwork, furnaces, hot water heaters, and ancient plumbing like the tentacles of prehistoric beasts. The air smells of the centuries, a faint whiff of old rubber and overworked heating elements. Tommy leads her over to a staircase with rickety metal treads going up one flight.
Lilly aims her light at the top of the stairs and sees the word “SHOWROOM” stenciled across the backside of a latched metal door. Tommy reaches the door first, and pauses. He smiles at her.
“Get a load of this,” he says. He opens the door as though ushering a guest into an exclusive club, and Lilly takes a single step into the room.
Invasion Page 8
