“Curiosity killed the cat,” Norma goes on, “and I get close enough to finally see what’s going on in them woods without givin’ myself away.” She pauses again, and the others hang on her silence. “Now remember, this crazy preacher’s been gathering these walkers for God knows what reason, and he’s been torturing them biker fellas for days, and I have no earthly idea what he’s up to, but I just know deep down in my bones it’s all connected. So I hide behind a tree, and I see the strangest thing.”
The momentary pause weighs down on Lilly like a massive yoke.
“The preacher’s got about ten of them monsters, and I’ll be damned if it don’t look like he’s playing with them.”
David Stern knits his brow. “Whaddaya mean ‘playing with them’?”
Norma looks down and takes another deep breath as though the very telling of this continues to take a physical toll. “Down in Florida, they used to have them dog races? Terrible things, those races, all that hard-earned money getting lost on liquor and shenanigans. Anyway, I don’t know if y’all ever saw one of them things, but there’s a little metal rabbit on a rail that pops up and then charges around that track so the dogs’ll chase it real good?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” David breaks in. “All due respect, what the hell does this have to do with the price of peas? If you’ll pardon my impertinence.”
She gives him a hard look. “I’m comin’ to that part, if you’ll just be patient with me; my mama always used to say that if words was nickels I’d be a rich girl. Anyway … you gotta understand, all the pieces to this puzzle was right in front of me—the torturing of them bikers, the collecting of walkers as though they was bobblehead dolls.” She breathes deeply and shakes her head. “One of the RVs we found along the way—it had toys in it. Must have been a rich family and the children must have been spoiled and all, because there was remote control cars and planes and such, rechargeable batteries, cameras, electric guitars, and all kinds of gadgets you would never think you’d have any use for … but guess what?”
She glances around the dimly lit tunnel at all the dour faces soaking in her story, and she takes a deep breath. Here it comes.
“Here I am looking at this crazy-ass preacher leading this pack of walkers around like they was square dancers havin’ a two-step. He’s got this contraption rigged up, a battery-operated tape recorder, and a camera light flickering, and a little remote control car … and it’s playing a recording of men dying. I swear. I ain’t never heard anything like it—the screams of men being tortured to death, and a light blinking like that.”
She makes a pulsing gesture with her plump little hand. She shakes her head, but before she can continue, Lilly Caul says what she’s thinking in a soft whisper, almost under her breath. “Pavlov…”
All heads turn toward Lilly. She feels their hot, nervous gazes on her skin. She says, “Pavlov … as in Pavlov’s dog … He’s training them.”
David Stern looks down and barely utters the words, “Can’t be done.”
“Well, now, see, that’s kinda open for debate,” Norma counters, “because I saw them walkers following that thing around like sheep following a sheepdog. That preacher’s got a remote control—one of them little toggle switches—and he’s leading them monsters around like … like the damn Wizard of Oz. And that ain’t all.” She swallows air for a moment. “Couple days later, he’s got half the men in the place with him, off on some mission that he wouldn’t tell the rest of us about. I was real curious by that point, so I got Miles to drive me out to the barrens, this flat meadow not far from our camp, where the preacher’s got an old tow truck.”
Miles Littleton, still an unknown quantity to Lilly, mumbles something from his seat behind the plump woman. Lilly can’t quite make out what he’s saying. He speaks softly, his face downturned, his voice garbled with nerves and self-consciousness.
“Go ahead, Miles,” Norma Sutters urges. “You tell ’em what he was doing.”
The young man takes a deep breath and looks up. “Okay, so, we been using this tow truck for hauling shit, right? Pulling wreckage off the roads and shit. But when I saw what they was doing with that motherfuckin’ truck that night I could not believe what I was seeing. They had one them bikers strung up on the back, tied to the tow-arm like a carcass of some dead animal, bleeding and shit, and he was … he was still … he was making…”
The young man falters for a moment, at a loss for words, vexed by the very act of describing what he’d seen. Norma twists around, pats the man’s knee, and says, “Take your time, Brother. It’s okay.”
Miles breathes as he remembers the terrible thing. “This dude was still alive … barely. He was screaming like a stuck pig … and they had one of them photo strobes blinking … and they were driving pretty slowly … and then I realized that the swarm was following them, the monsters were following that horrible noise of that dude dying … and then … then I realized what that preacher was doing.”
Lilly stares at him. “What the hell was he doing?”
“He was teaching them things.”
Lilly gapes. “I get that part, I get it, but why? What’s the end game? What the fuck is he teaching these walkers to do?”
For a long while, Miles and Norma just look at each other. In fact, they take so long to get up the nerve to answer that the pause begins to make Lilly and the others in the tunnel that day feel very uncomfortable.
FOURTEEN
The preacher stands alone and unarmed in the purple glow of twilight on the soft, spongy ground of a secluded meadow. The air has grown still at day’s end, the chill of night rolling in, the motes of cottonwood tufts drifting lazily through the dying rays of the setting sun. The drone of cicadas and crickets provides a white noise in his head, lulling him into a state of transcendent semiconsciousness, a state of meditative reminiscence.
CLICK-FLASH!
Jeremiah blinks, momentarily blinded by the ghostly corona of light lingering for a moment on his line of vision. He blinks again until his eyes adjust. Now he can plainly see that the walkers have surrounded him, some of them close enough to reach out and touch. The black odors and the low snoring of mortified vocal cords weigh down upon him with tremendous force. And yet … and yet … not a single one of the hundred or so reanimated corpses makes a move. It’s as though they’re idling, stationary, their mind-screens frozen, their calcified, desiccated brains processing some external stimuli for which they have no bandwidth. And this causes Jeremiah to feel ennobled, buoyant, all-powerful standing there, engulfed in the horde like this, surrounded by myriad silhouettes of the dead, the shimmer of a hundred pairs of eyes mesmerized now by something in the sky.
CLICK-FLASH!
Amidst the throng, the preacher recognizes a former mail carrier to his immediate left, the thing that was once a man now leaning to one side with its uniform torn and gouged and spilling entrails into the mail sack that still hangs habitually from its emaciated shoulder. It has been carrying its own entrails around like this for months, as if searching for an addressee. Many of the others have now aged and weathered and decomposed to the point of being unrecognizable as anything other than sacks of putrefied flesh that still manage to nominally walk. Someday soon, some of them will collapse and begin to disintegrate into the earth, never once pausing from their autonomic mission to feed. Will their teeth continue to gnash long after the soft tissues have turned to dust?
CLICK-FLASH!—CLICK-FLASH!—CLICK-FLASH!!
Jeremiah holds his ground, standing rock-steady, and he doesn’t worry, doesn’t panic. He hears his father’s voice, the deep whiskey rasp that held him in such horrible awe in the darkness of his bedroom most nights: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.” Jeremiah remembers the time his father had sent away for the beehives—one of the old man’s crackpot ideas for augmenting his military retirement pay and pension benefits—turning the backyard of their Jacks
onville ranch home into a honeybee colony. Jeremiah had been in the throes of adolescence that summer, and had been acting out, rebelling—drinking and smoking and hanging out with the loose girls from that heathen institution known as Florida State University.
The old man had gotten drunk one night and dragged his only son out to the hives. And what he did to the boy on that hot August night still scars not only the flesh of the preacher’s right arm, but the marrow of his soul. The echo of the old man’s boozy baritone still reverberates in Jeremiah’s dreams. “Boy, it’s high time you learned to inoculate yourself against the temptations of worldly women, the venom of the queen bee.” Jeremiah remembers starting to scream like a stuck pig as his father gripped his arm and then thrust it down into the guts of the largest hive.
It had felt as though a million needles were penetrating Jeremiah’s flesh that night, setting his arm on fire, spreading waves of horrible, hot electric agony up his tendons and nerves. He remembers passing out from the pain a minute later, the fading sound of the old man’s voice, “It’s the only way, boy … the scourging of the flesh … the only way to become immune … the only way to withstand the poison of them fast women.”
CLICK-FLASH!—CLICK-FLASH!—CLICK-FLASH!—CLICK-FLASH!!
The intermittent pop of silver light shakes Jeremiah out of his terrible reverie, drawing his attention over his shoulder.
He can see the small crane that rises off the back of the rusty, battered tow truck thirty yards away. He can see the photo-strobe that he’d found in that Chicago family’s RV, now duct-taped to the apex of that block and tackle, a beacon flashing, implanting the horde with silent, behavioral triggers, the invisible strings of the puppeteer. The air trembles with the grating, grinding music of human suffering—the screams of the dying—now pouring out of ceramic loudspeakers. It soothes Jeremiah in the strangest of ways—he can feel the mob around him like schools of fish flocking around a living coral reef, ignoring him, brushing past him, spellbound by the noise and the light.
The preacher feels almost safe within this putrid sea of cadavers. He is finally inside the hive, and he is immune and he is all-powerful, a messenger from God, the last evangelist on the dying earth.
He remembers the early autumn chill that had swept through Jacksonville that summer, turning the honeybees into sluggish, intoxicated revenants of what they once were. He remembers waking up right after his scourging on the hard ground next to the hive and feeling nothing—a cold, numb, empty sensation spreading through him. He remembers seeing the flesh of his blood-pocked arm where all the stingers had embedded themselves in the skin like the barbs of long-stemmed roses. By that point, it had felt like his arm was asleep, prickling faintly. And yet he harbored no hatred for his father, who still stood over him like a redneck golem, like an angry Old Testament god. The old man had been smiling. Surely, he was thinking of the life cycle of the honeybees.
When the honeybee stings a person, it can’t pull its thorny stinger back out. It leaves behind not only the stinger but also a large part of its abdomen and digestive tract, plus a bundle of muscles and nerves and tissue. This enormous abdominal rupture kills the honeybee, but not before it flutters off into the ether, an engine dieseling long after it’s been shut off.
My bees, Jeremiah Garlitz thinks, rather grandly surveying the outer boundaries of the horde that surrounds him. He breathes in the cloud of rubbery, rancid-meat odors, the stench of flesh deteriorated long past its crumbling point. He raises his sinewy arms to the heavens and rejoices: My bees, my faithful bees …
* * *
Late that night she finds him at the end of a side tunnel earmarked as a temporary infirmary.
The air smells of peat and musk, and the minimal light comes from a single battery-powered lantern sitting on a stool at the end of the tributary. At one time a channel for an underground spring, its walls of petrified roots long since worn smooth, its floor of hard-packed earth covered with tarp, the side tunnel now houses the meager sick bay. Makeshift gurneys of wooden planks on carpenters’ sawhorses sit along each wall. A metal shelving unit with boxes of gauze, tubes of ointments, cotton tape, and bottles of homemade grain alcohol stands in the corner.
Bob Stookey sits on the floor next to the metal shelves, cross-legged, his head slumped, his back turned to the visitor who approaches cautiously. He hums softly, an old country tune that he’s absently mangling. A body draped in a moth-eaten blanket lies on the sawhorse next to him, a pale hand dangling down. Bob clasps the tiny hand in his own, holding it as though comforting a small child rather than a full-grown woman who’d once worn the visor that now sits cradled in Bob’s lap.
“Bob?”
Lilly’s voice rises barely above a whisper. She can tell what’s going on, and the sight of it presses in on her heart like a vise.
“Bob, I’m sorry but we have to talk.”
He doesn’t say anything. He just keeps humming a song that Lilly suddenly recognizes. Early on, Bob used to always play a George Jones cassette in his big old Dodge Ram pickup, and his favorite tune—one that he had practically worn out—had been “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Now he hums the soggy tearjerker with off-key indifference.
“Bob, we have a situation, and I need to—”
Lilly sees something that stops her in her tracks. Cold panic slithers down her midsection like an icy snake. In setting up the little medical bay, Bob and Lilly had procured several different kinds of antiseptics. One type—rubbing alcohol—they had found in profusion, in fact cases and cases of it, in the rear of the derelict drugstore. Another type Bob had retrieved from the burned, charred husk of the Dew Drop Inn, the Woodbury watering hole that he had frequented during his drinking days. He had remembered seeing bottles of Everclear and grain alcohol behind the bar that had been untouched by fire.
“There’s always a situation, Lilly, haven’t you noticed?” In Bob’s other hand, the one that isn’t clutching the hand of the deceased, is a fifth of grain alcohol. He takes another sip and winces at the burn. “We live in a goddamn constant situation.”
Lilly’s spirit deflates. Almost audibly, her hope and faith in Bob and in Bob’s future, and in the future of all of them, drain out of her on a long, agonizing sigh. “Oh, Bob … don’t do this. C’mon.”
He looks down, ashamed. “Leave me be.”
“You can’t let this destroy you.” She gently maneuvers her way past the gurney and sits down on the floor next to him. “There isn’t a person here doesn’t know what it’s like to lose somebody.”
He looks everywhere but at her. “I don’t need a shrink, I just need to be left alone.”
She looks at the floor. Out of the corner of her eye she can see the old cotton visor that Gloria used to wear—so old and worn, the balloon letters spelling out the phrase “I’M WITH STUPID” have faded to shadows—sitting on Bob’s lap. Every few seconds he puts the bottle down and caresses the visor as though it’s an infant sparrow needing to be nursed back to health. Lilly shakes her head. “She was a great lady.”
Bob swallows another gulp. “That’s for sure, Lilly-girl.” He slurs her name as though it contains an extra “l,” then adds, “That’s for sure.”
“She was a badass.”
“Yep.”
“We’ll have a service.”
“That’s fine, Lilly-girl. You do that.” His voice is flinty now, sharp with thinly veiled rage. “You have a service, I’ll make sure to show up.”
Lilly takes a deep breath and lets a few moments pass before saying, “I remember when Josh took that shot in the head by the Butcher, I thought I would never see the light of day again. I just figured it was over for me, and there was nothing I could do about it, and why even bother. But I didn’t give up, I just figured … you know … one day at a time.”
“Goody for you.”
“Bob, c’mon. Don’t do this to me.”
He gives her a look. “I’m not doing anything to you.… It’s not about you!” His bark makes
her jump. “It’s not always about you!”
She swallows back the urge to slap him. “That’s not even remotely fair.”
“Life ain’t fair.” His voice softens. “It never was … and it sure as hell ain’t now.”
Lilly shakes her head, gazes at the floor, and allows another long, anguished beat of silence to ensue while Bob quietly drinks and stews in his misery. Lilly tries to take deep breaths and figure out how to get him back. She needs him now, maybe more than ever. She starts to say something else but thinks better of it.
Who is she to give advice to this man? Who the fuck does she think she is—trying to be a role model, trying to force a particular mode of behavior on Bob Stookey? Lilly has her own foibles, her own fucking problems. Her nerves are as tightly wired as Bob’s, maybe more so. And she’s noticed that her temper is quicker, her shaking worse, her nightmares more intense since they’ve been driven underground.
Almost every time Lilly manages to get a wink of sleep—which is somewhat infrequent since they’ve been in the tunnels—she weathers a storm of claustrophobic, bloody, inchoate scenarios: bus doors closing on her dead father, her friend Megan dangling on the end of a rope, her former lover Josh lying decapitated in a trench of carnage, and every iteration imaginable of traps, cages, locked chambers, prison cells, and endless, featureless tunnels going nowhere. But the one that recurs the most, the one that truly haunts her, is an almost photo-realistic rendering of that day she killed the baby.
You know it’s coming. It always starts the same way. You’re ducking down behind a bullet-riddled truck while the air outside that Georgia state prison boils with gunfire. You always rise up the same way: your teeth gritted, your high-powered rifle clutched in sweaty hands, the taste of old pennies in your mouth, and the washed-out sunlight glaring in your eyes as you see the amorphous figure seventy-five yards away, trundling across the hot zone of the prison exercise yard. It always goes down the same rabbit hole. You feel the cold pressure of the scope on your eye, the blurry image behind the crosshairs (an anonymous man with the bomb cradled against his solar plexus). And that huge, greasy, sweat-glistening head with the eye patch yelling at you, “TAKE THEM OUT, NOW!”
Invasion Page 16
