She gazes up at him through eyes filmed in opaque, milky suffering. “Let me go, Bob.”
“Fuck, no!”
Her eyelids sink shut. “It was … a good run.”
He shakes her. “Stay with us! There’s no reason—”
“N-not like this … too much work.”
“Gloria! Gloria!” He shakes her, he slaps her face. He’s not even aware that he’s crying. “There’s no reason!—Glo!—DON’T DO THIS!”
Her eyes are closed now, her head lolling to the side, a soft death rattle wheezing out of her. The faintest words cross her lips, so soft that Bob has to press his ear against her quivering mouth. “Make sure I … don’t…”
“GLORIA!”
“… come back.…”
“GLORIA!”
On a long sigh: “… Please make sure.…”
“GLORIA!” He shakes her and shakes her. He can barely see through his tears. He tastes copper on his tongue—salt and tarnished metal—as the car swerves. Bob falls against the door, shaking Gloria, picking her up. He hardly notices the change in her tiny body. She has gone completely limp.
“GLORIA!—GLORIA!—GLORIA!” Bob holds her and cries and realizes the fingertips of his right hand are softly pressing the tender flesh above her carotid artery.
She has no pulse.
This fact reaches Bob’s brain one nanosecond before he realizes what he has to do now.
He frowns, a tear breaking over the edge of his lower lid and tracking down his face. He pulls the .357 from where it was wedged between the back of his belt and his lower back. He collapses into the seat next to the flaccid, blood-soaked remains of Gloria Pyne.
Then Bob Stookey has a ferocious cry.
* * *
Inside the sealed windows of the muscle car, the blast pops dry and flat, like a balloon bursting, as the vehicle roars around the bend at the intersection of 74 and 18. The distinctive report of a .357 Magnum—when muffled by the glass and steel enclosure of an automobile, and further dampened by the hank of bunched fabric pressed down on Gloria Pyne’s skull—emits a low thump that could easily be mistaken for a tire blowing or a chassis banging over a pothole, were it not for the unmistakable subsonic slap-back echo that now drifts over the treetops of the adjacent woods. To anyone within a five-mile radius, it might actually bring to mind the rattle of heat thunder on the horizon, or the low boil of a storm brewing in the far distance.
Lilly Caul pauses on the trail and looks up. She tilts her head and listens, waiting for more gunfire, but there is only that single muffled blast, now fading on the breeze. For a moment, she wonders if she imagined it. “Did you hear that?” she whispers to the young man coming up behind her.
Tommy lets out an exhausted sigh. “Hear what? No. What was it?—Walkers?”
“No … I thought I heard … Never mind.” Lilly takes a deep breath and shrugs the straps of her knapsack a little higher on her shoulders. The straps have been digging into the nape of her neck for the last couple of miles, and now she hears the faint creak of her tendons as she stretches. Her pack weighs a ton, and feels like it’s getting heavier by the moment. She tightens the bracing strap. “Let’s go.… C’mon … we’re almost there.”
They continue down the stony, weed-riddled path as it snakes through the thickets.
Five minutes later, they see a glint of metal through a break in the foliage, and Lilly silently shoots a hand up, stopping Tommy cold in his tracks behind her. She hears voices. She motions for the boy to get down, be quiet, and hold on for a second. She crouches, wriggles off her pack, fishes in it, finds her binoculars, and peers through the lenses at the shimmer of purple metal-flake steel visible through the pine boughs and tall grass.
Lilly registers the sight as the front quarter panel of a car parked near the access hatch. It looks as though the car’s doors are open, and that there are silhouettes of three or more figures sitting inside the vehicle.
A female voice says something like, “You gonna be okay?”
A gravelly male voice says, “Just gimme a second.… I’m fine.… Just a second.”
Goose bumps crawl over Lilly’s flesh. Several things register in her all at once, in equal measures of panic, confusion, and a weird kind of relief. She recognizes Bob Stookey’s voice, but it sounds wrong—drained and trembly. And she does not recognize the other speaker.
Suddenly she hears the sound of shuffling footsteps behind her, in the middle distance, behind the trees, and the low buzz of growling.
Lilly twists around and makes eye contact with the exhausted boy. “Tommy,” she whispers. “Listen to me. Get your crowbar out.”
“Okay, but—”
“Sshhhh, just do it, and follow my lead.” Lilly reaches down to her pack, puts back the binoculars, and zips it shut. Then she draws her Ruger from her belt, and whispers, “We got walkers coming up behind us, and I’m not totally sure what’s going on up there with Bob and those folks, or who they are, or what they want. But I can tell something’s wrong. I’d prefer to be safe rather than sorry.”
The boy nods. “I get it—I’m ready.”
“Let me do the talking.”
Another nod.
Lilly rises, silently pushing her way through the foliage toward the clearing, and grips the Ruger with both hands—commando style—despite the fact that it’s out of ammo. As she approaches the parked car, she sees that it’s a vintage hot rod and it tics and diesels like a snoring beast as it sits at an angle across the clearing from the tunnel hatch. As she gets closer, she sees Bob kneeling down just outside the car’s open rear door, as though praying, or supplicating, to someone sprawled across the rear seats. His shoulders are slumped miserably, as if his head weighs a million tons.
An enormous black woman in a threadbare floral dress and bouffant hairstyle stands outside the front passenger door, wringing her hands, waiting respectfully for Bob to finish whatever it is he’s doing.
Lilly pauses just inside the netting of cattails and undergrowth that borders the clearing. She holds her gun on the portly woman. “Bob?!”
Bob’s head rises with a start. “Lilly?” He looks around. “That you?”
Lilly steps out of the thicket and into the clearing, followed by the boy, who holds his crowbar as menacingly as possible. “What the fuck is going on?” Lilly demands as she trains the Ruger’s muzzle on the woman. “Who are these people, Bob?”
“Take it easy, Lilly-girl.” Bob speaks in halting wheezes, as though he can barely muster the energy to talk. “They’re friendlies.”
Lilly starts to say something else when the car’s driver-side door squeaks open and a young African-American in a ragged hoodie and tight little braids emerges from the car with his hands up. “We’re on your side, ma’am!”
“That’s right.” The portly woman has her hands up as well, and she gives Lilly a convivial little smile. “I’m Norma, and this here is Miles.”
“Bob, what’s wrong?” Lilly sees the lump of a figure lying prone across the backseat and sees the backwash of deep scarlet blood spattered everywhere inside the car, and it makes her stomach clench. She can hear the scuttling of walkers closing in from the woods. “Is that Gloria? What happened? Is she okay?”
Bob looks up at Lilly, and with a single, forlorn, anguished shake of his head, he tells Lilly practically everything she needs to know about what happened without uttering a single word. She lowers her gun, and she feels her chest go cold. She bows her head and lets out a heartbreaking sigh. “Oh God … Don’t tell me she was … and you had to…”
“Lilly—?” Tommy’s voice from behind her penetrates her shock. “We got four cold ones coming.”
Lilly turns and shoves her gun in the back of her belt, then draws her rusty machete from its makeshift sheath on her hip. “Get back, Tommy.”
“But what about—?“
“Just do what I say!” Lilly sees the foursome pushing through the foliage about thirty feet away, a female and three males in ra
gged work clothes. They have at least a couple of years of decay on them, their faces and exposed areas of flesh so corroded with decomposition that they appear to be made of stucco, with ghastly veneers of gray tissue vacu-formed around their sharp-angled skulls. Lilly starts to say, “Get back, everybody, and—”
She hears a commotion behind her and then hears Bob’s voice barking suddenly, “GET OUTTA MY WAY!”
A blur of movement draws Lilly’s attention over her shoulder. She sees Bob lurching away from the car, then stumbling toward her. Before Lilly can even react, Bob has grabbed the machete out of her hands.
“BOB, WAIT—!!”
He lunges toward the creatures, snorting with the mad pent-up rage of a wild bull. He lashes out at the first one, striking it between the pectoral and shoulder, making a divot so deep in its neck the entire cranium peels away and flops down across its back. Black blood oozes out of the crater the instant before the thing collapses, its head dangling upside down against its own back, the threads of arteries and tendons like the defunct wiring of some out-of-service automaton.
“Bob—?!”
Lilly stares as Bob Stookey grips the rusty, blood-stippled machete with both hands—Babe Ruth at bat, about to swing for the fences—and in front of his horror-stricken, wide-eyed fellow survivors, proceeds to lose himself in his labors.
* * *
Lilly Caul has seen walker massacres before. She witnessed the man known as the Governor rain the hellfire of an entire armada of .50 caliber machine guns and countless automatic assault rifles down upon a swarm of the things that had accumulated outside the fences of a medium-security prison in rural Georgia. The clouds of blood mist and physical matter that had filled the air from that particular mass annihilation would live for a long time in her memory. She had seen smaller, more intimate slaughters as well—like the time that band of men in Marietta had cornered a small group of biters in a loading dock area behind a Piggly Wiggly and systematically dismembered them and crushed their heads with the rear tires of massive stake trucks. But she has never—ever—witnessed anything quite like this.
Bob’s cathartic rampage through that cluster of decrepit monsters continues with a wide, arcing, roundhouse blow of the machete to the skull of the next closest walker. The blade strikes the thing’s cranium just above the earlobe, and slices the top two-thirds of the skull clean off as though Bob were popping a bottle cap. The ragged scalp and partial upper-fascia jettisons into the air on a meteor-tail of pink matter, falling end over end to the ground. What remains is a hollow, trembling mess of bloody mantislike mandibles and exposed teeth that shudder and chatter for a surreal instant before the rest of the body gives out and folds to the ground.
The surviving two creatures make futile attempts to close in on Bob, but the dark-haired man turns to them and makes primal grunting noises as he quickly, efficiently, rams the tip of the blade, one at a time, hard, at upward angles, through the roofs of each of their mouths, into their nasal cavities, through their parietal lobes, and out the tops of their skulls. One by one, the remaining walkers drop.
Bob takes in a deep breath and lets out an enormous howl of pure, unadulterated rage—shot through with the agony of loss—right before he slams a boot down as hard as he can on the head of one of the fallen. The wet crunch makes most of the spectators behind him turn away in disgust—all except Lilly. She puts her arm around Tommy Dupree and hugs his face against her midsection and softly whispers, “I really don’t think you need to see this.”
Meanwhile, Bob still has that machete gripped in both hands, and now he starts in on the motionless heaps. He slams the blade down on the moldering limbs and torsos as though beginning a vigorous session of firewood chopping. Lilly watches almost stoically, morbidly curious. The truth is, she loves this man, and she’s proud of him—proud of him for kicking his drinking habit, proud of him for finding the tunnels, proud of him for saving the lives of his fellow survivors, for being the voice of reason, being loyal, and being a friend. For days now, Lilly has noticed little signs that Bob had grown sweet on Gloria, and now this.…
Lilly continues to look on without much emotion as Bob slashes and hacks and buries the blade in the gristle of mortified joints and stubborn bones, yanking it out with the help of his boot-sole. Blood spatters and blows back up at him, freckling his gaunt face, stinging his burning eyes. He looks like a demonic entity, and it begins to stir something deep inside Lilly Caul. Whatever it takes, she thinks.
Bob separates a leg from a hip with a single blow, a head from a neck, an upper body from a lower body, and the blood covers him now. Is he reenacting the amputation fiasco in the car? Is he exorcising something deeper, thornier? Lilly can’t quite figure it out, but that’s okay with her. Bob gets winded. The blade gets stuck for a moment and Bob lets out another feral yawp, almost simian in its guttural rage, but with pain in it.
That’s when Lilly realizes that Bob is crying as he flails at the dead things. His tears fly off his face with each furious blow, his hitching sobs mingling with his hyperventilated gasps.
“Okay,” Lilly says, taking a step toward him. “That’s enough now.”
She comes up behind him as he continues to lash away at the things on the ground. His energy has begun to flag. His head droops as he slashes wildly, fecklessly now. The sobbing has gotten the better of him. Lilly cautiously approaches. She puts a tender hand on his shoulder and he jumps, taken aback by her touch.
He turns and meets her gaze with his own feverish eyes, which now glitter with the madness. “What!—WHAT!”
Lilly doesn’t say anything. She just nods her head, and keeps her hand on his shoulder, and keeps nodding and doesn’t look away.
Bob lets the sobbing take him down into her arms, the grief loosening his grip on the blood-lacquered machete. The weapon falls to ground.
Then Bob loses it.
Lilly holds him and lets him cry it all out until there’s nothing left.
* * *
They reconvene underground, in the private shadows of a side tunnel, in the deathly silence. They sit on folding chairs, and hold paper cups of instant coffee, and stare gravely at the floor as they listen to Norma Sutters’ low, raspy voice give them the bad news.
Some of them had hoped the preacher was dead, figuring he must have perished in the chaos of the hordes that descended upon Woodbury last month. Now they sit very still and listen with morose expressions on their faces as Norma explains how the preacher stumbled upon her church with his two minions. She describes how he joined her in her search for Miles and the infamous caravan, and how the preacher had taken over the convoy when the priest had died, and how he had started acting strange and erratic almost immediately.
Then she pauses. The others wait. She licks her chapped lips as she looks into the eyes of each listener for a moment, gauging if and when and how she should tell them the gist of what she came here to say. At last, she clears her throat and says very softly, very casually, “He’s building an army out of walkers.”
* * *
Lilly asks her to repeat what she just said, and Norma does so, and Lilly has to hear it a third time just to register its meaning, and to take stock of it.
Her memories of the Governor’s horror shows in the speedway arena with their gladiatorial walkers and grisly death matches are still fresh enough to make nightly appearances in her dreams, and she remembers all too well the defensive swarm of biters positioned outside the fences of that horrible prison at which she had killed Philip Blake. She also remembers Jeremiah attempting to wreak havoc in Woodbury by knocking down the barricades and summoning the herd. Over the two years since the plague broke out, many others have certainly tried to use walkers in various ways—as shields, as weapons, or as threats of one kind or another—but nobody else ever attempted it in such a delusional and grand manner as this.
“I’m afraid you’re gonna have to explain just exactly what you’re talking about,” Lilly says finally to the plump black woman sit
ting across from her.
Dressed in a threadbare floral-print dress that strains at the seams with her girth, her décolletage brimming with massive bosoms, Norma Sutters has that warm, open, earthy face that Lilly has always associated with nurses, teachers, and den mothers. Against her better judgment, Lilly finds herself trusting this woman and her young juvenile delinquent of a companion.
Norma takes a sip of her tepid coffee and says, “Couple of nights ago, I couldn’t for the life of me sleep one wink … tossing and turning all night to beat the band. I guess the old brain was just overloading with worry. So I got up and took a little walk.”
In another part of the tunnels, a child’s laughter rings out, making Lilly and the others jump. Barbara Stern has agreed to keep the kids occupied with games and lunch while Norma and Miles tell their story to the rest of the adults, but every few moments the children inadvertently make their presence known. Lilly looks down at her hands and sees that they’re shaking ever so slightly, and this touches off some deep well of anger within her. She has barely come to terms with Gloria Pyne’s death—they have to bury her sometime soon—and now this.
“I was about to go back to bed,” Norma is saying. “I’d been walkin’ for maybe a half an hour, circling the entire wagon train, when all of a sudden I see a light flickering in the woods. Thought I was seeing things at first. I get a little closer and I hear noises comin’ from behind the trees, and that flickering light. I hear the most god-awful sounds coming from that light—human screams, walkers growling and such, I don’t know what all.”
Norma shudders, and Lilly feels a cold finger tracing down the back of her spine, eliciting a wave of gooseflesh along the back of her legs as she recalls Jeremiah’s used-car-dealer face and huge pompadour of hair. David Stern sits on one side of Lilly and Harold Staubach on the other, and she can sense each man’s hackles going up. Tommy Dupree sits behind her, and she can hear the boy’s steady breathing, and it sounds rapt, transfixed. Bob is off somewhere dealing with his grief over Gloria. Lilly’s worried about him. He’s lost a lot in recent months.
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