Footsteps converge on him as soon as he drops to the tunnel floor.
“Well?” Lilly’s voice crackles with tension, her fists clenching involuntarily as she stands before him in her camo jacket, her hair pulled back taut in a ponytail. She has a bandolier belt slung across her chest, the row of fully jacketed bullets nestled between her small breasts.
Miles gives her a grave look. “They’ve already crossed the Flint.”
“Fuck!” Lilly swallows dryly and looks around the room at the others gathering behind her. Harold Staubach holds a 12-gauge against his hip, his russet brown face shiny with sweat. David Stern stands behind him in the shadows, his AR-15 slung over the shoulder of his silk roadie jacket. Norma Sutters comes trundling up behind David, her plump features coalescing into a frown.
“Gonna be blowing in here in like maybe a half an hour? Something like that?”
“Okay, okay … all right.” Lilly swallows hard again, focusing with laser intensity on the task at hand, looking down the length of the main tunnel. Less than a hundred feet away from her, the passageway plunges into darkness. They’ve been trying to conserve power and lightbulbs by burning only the absolute minimum number of cage lights. Now Lilly walks over to the wall and flips the switches Bob installed as a safety measure a few days ago. “Here’s what I need: I need everybody to listen closely, because I only got time to go through this once.”
The others get very still as the cage lights flare on, one after another, down the length of the main conduit, past the makeshift nursery with its fleet of cribs and cots, past the side tunnels, past the temporary infirmary and the storage room, and out beyond the far chain-link barriers.
“Norma, I’m going to need you to go get the dummies. Bring them back in here on the double, as many as we have—it’ll have to be enough. Miles, you help her.”
Norma and Miles hustle down the center-aisle tunnel toward the storage room.
“David and Harold, I’m going to need you guys to go ahead and set that safe zone up as quickly as you can, then take your places and get into character.”
David Stern looks pained, panicky. “Lilly, we’re going to need more than two guys.”
“You’ll have Miles and Norma, too, as soon as we’re ready down here. And Bob when he gets back.” She remembers that Bob is late, which a bad sign, but she pushes the dread from her mind. “If all goes well, Tommy and I will be able to join you soon enough.”
“How the hell is anybody gonna find us?”
“Look, we got three working walkie-talkies, right? You take one, I’ll have one, and I’ll give one to Norma. Three teams: Harold and you, Norma and Miles, me and Tommy.”
“But what about Babs?”
“What about her?”
David wipes his mouth. “That stationhouse is really exposed out there—I don’t know—seems like we could have found a safer place.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it now. C’mon. Let’s get to work—WHILE WE’RE YOUNG!”
Lilly claps her hands briskly, and the group scatters. Lilly rushes across the lounge area and starts rearranging chairs. David and Harold head toward the sewer entrance fifty feet away. They vanish around the corner and their footsteps recede into the dripping silence.
By this point, Norma and Miles have returned with the first pair of dummies. Norma speaks quickly, tersely, almost under her breath: “Had enough clothes from the Salvation Army drop to make five of these things but we’re gonna have to go back there for more if we want to make all of us up all raggedy-ass.” She drags an effigy across the floor and drops it on a chair. “They’re pretty rough. But from a distance? I don’t know. Like my mama used to say, ‘On a galloping horse, you don’t look half bad, babygirl.’”
Garbed in rags and hand-me-downs, the dummies are filled with old newspaper and trash, the faces hewn from pairs of nude-colored panty hose stuffed with more paper. They look like the kind of objects a group of protesters might burn during a demonstration.
“Them walkers are pretty fucking stupid,” Miles ventures, setting a dummy on a chair. “But I wonder if they’re stupid enough to buy this.”
“They’ll buy it,” Lilly says. “Trust me. C’mon. Let’s get the others in here.”
A minute later they have five of the effigies sitting in formation around the lounge. It’s a surreal sight, even for this place, and Lilly stares at the things for a moment before she looks at Norma and Miles. “Okay, one last thing before I cut you guys loose.”
Norma looks at her. “What’s that, child?”
Lilly has already unbuckled her belt and unsnapped her jeans. “Pee on them with me.”
For a moment, Norma looks at Miles, who looks back at Norma, then looks aghast at Lilly.
“C’mon!” Lilly pulls her pants down, shoves off her panties, and hovers over the lap of the first dummy. “Pee on them.”
* * *
David Stern and Harold Staubach find the Dromedary Street manhole only minutes after they turn the corner beneath the intersection of Dromedary and Date Lane. The air hangs thick with a fog of methane and ammonia-stench, and they have to wade through six inches of brackish mire in order to reach the exit point.
They can see thin beams of the day’s first glimmer of sunlight slicing down through the seams of the ancient manhole, celestial rays of light piercing the motes and demarcating the sewer’s egress. Neither man says a word as they reach the bottom of the embedded stone steps. Working quickly and silently, David helps Harold up the steps first, then follows with his assault rifle dangling and twisting on its strap.
The older man struggles for a moment with the rusty cover, but eventually manages to force it open a few inches, wide enough to let in an enormous rush of acrid, reeking walker-stench. Harold pulls a small mirror from behind his belt and sticks it up into the daylight. Bob Stookey procured a dozen of these small makeup mirrors earlier in the month from the ruins of the town drugstore, and they have been invaluable to the tunnel dwellers.
Now Harold Staubach probes the mirror far enough to see a reflection of the street corner.
In the small oval of glass, scores of walkers are visible milling about the central intersection. To the left, a row of boarded storefronts overlooks a sidewalk riddled with the dead. Some of them continually brush against each other, while others idle in slumped, stationary positions in front of jagged broken windows, drooling black bile from their liver-colored lips as though waiting for their reflection to deliver some imminent message.
Harold rotates the mirror forty-five degrees to the left until he can see their destination.
Beyond the walker-infested street corner, a half a block north, two enormous semitrucks sit facing each other across the massive town entrance. Harold’s heart rate kicks up a few notches. He can see the vacant lot adjacent to the gate, a square acre of wild, overgrown prairie grass littered here and there with overturned oil drums, discarded tires, and human remains all but picked clean by birds and weather and the ravenous dead. Some of the skeletons are so sun-bleached they look almost white, but other than these macabre reminders of the plague, the lot is fairly clear of walkers.
“You ready for this, my friend?” Harold asks somewhat rhetorically.
No response from David.
* * *
“We’ve been as quiet as mice for like a million hours now—when do we get to talk?”
The voice—as soft as the coo of a little bird, but also full of righteous indignation—penetrates Barbara Stern’s racing thoughts and makes her whirl away from the window with a start.
In the dim light of dawn, which seeps through the cracks of the boarded windows, Barbara sees little Mercy Slocum standing directly behind her, hands on her hips in an elfin impression of long-suffering annoyance. The girl’s frowning, cherubic face has chocolate stains on it; Barbara broke out the last of the stale candy bars twenty minutes ago, and they were gone in seconds. The walkie-talkie was then turned off to prevent the frenzied voices of David and t
he others from making the kids more nervous than they already were. Now Barbara is resorting to games in order to keep the group as quiet as possible.
“Get away from the window, sweetheart,” Barbara says, gently, shooing the girl back toward the others. “You’re gonna lose the game.”
The other children huddle together at the opposite end of the room, standing around a couple of makeshift cots, watching this exchange with keen interest. Their toys and books are strewn across the floor around them. Bethany Dupree—the de facto spokesman for the children—also has her hands on her hips in a melodramatic display of exasperation. “These games are just a trick,” she announces.
Mercy Slocum shuffles over to her twin sister, and the two of them stand there, facing Barbara in their matching threadbare pinafores, arms crossed sullenly across their little chests as though waiting for an apology. To Barbara they look like a Diane Arbus photograph, more wraithlike than childlike, as though torn from an album of Dust Bowl American poverty. “You’re treating us like babies,” Tiffany Slocum weighs in. “We want to know the truth.”
“Ssshhhhhhhh!” Barbara comes up and kneels before them, speaking very softly and yet forcefully. “The time to be the most quiet is now!”
“Stop saying that,” Lucas Dupree commands, his tiny chin jutting indignantly.
“You told us this was a field trip,” Bethany says. “That was a lie. And then you told us there’s a war coming but you won’t say with who!”
“Sssshhhhhh!” Barbara puts her finger to her lips. “I’ll answer your questions only if you promise to whisper.”
“What’s going on?” Bethany demands in a petulant whisper that comes out more like a grunt. “And don’t lie because we can tell when you’re lying—kids can always tell. That’s something adults will never, ever, ever understand. Kids know. Trust me on that, Mrs. Stern.”
“Call me Barb.”
“What’s going on? Is it like a walker attack or what?”
Barbara lets out a sigh. “Some bad people are coming here to kill us.”
The children all go very still—even Lucas Dupree, the youngest of them, only a year or two out of diapers, stares gravely back at Barbara—which pinches Barbara’s heart. To see the face of a child looking so sullen, so weary, so grim—maybe in some ways this is the worst part of the plague, worse than getting devoured by the dead. To see a child devoured by life. At last, Bethany summons up a response. “Is it because they want our stuff?”
Barbara shrugs. “I swear to you, sweetheart, I don’t know what they want. Revenge? The town itself?” She pauses and looks into the faces of these miniature old souls, as spectral and haunted as ghosts. “They believe God is on their side, which makes them even more dangerous—especially the preacher, Jeremiah.”
Bethany cocks her head. “You mean that big guy in the black suit?”
Nodding glumly, Barbara can’t lie anymore. “That’s right, sweetie.”
“That’s stupid!” Bethany tries to wrap her brain around this. “He’s not a bad man. He showed me a magic trick once, gave me licorice. He’s a good man.”
Barbara slowly shakes her head. “Not so much, honey … not so much.”
The little girl starts to say something else when the strangest sound echoes on the wind outside, the sheer incongruity of it silencing her and stiffening each child’s spine.
Barbara shushes the children one last time. “I want everybody to stay together, stay very still, and stay as quiet as possible until I tell you it’s okay.” She looks at them as the noise outside rises. Under the rumble of machines, the keening, knife-edged sounds of human screaming drift across the outskirts of town. “I’m going to go back to the window now, but nobody move.”
Her binoculars bounce on her chest as Barbara hurries across the room.
She stands with her back against the jamb and carefully pushes aside the makeshift shade until a thin wisp of light shines in. She peers through the binoculars, scanning the southeast corner of town.
In the long shadows of dawn, about a quarter of a mile away, where Gates Road splits off from Highway 74 and the milky rays of sunlight cant down through the adjacent woods, she can see a thundercloud of dust and exhaust approaching.
With one hand, Barbara slowly, instinctively reaches down to where her revolver is tucked into its holster on the side of her muumuu, her hand caressing the waffled surface of her .44 caliber Bulldog’s grip.
EIGHTEEN
At precisely 6:53 a.m. Eastern Standard Time that morning, in the gelid air and pale blue light of the forest south of Woodbury, without warning or precedent, an outsider with very specific orders enters the town limits on foot from Reeves Road, then creeps under the trees, a heavy pack jangling on his back. He consults a hand-drawn map as he moves silently through the undergrowth, his heavy lumberjack boots snapping twigs and crunching over ancient humus.
He finds the red bandanna fluttering in the breeze, tied to the tip of a stick thrust into the ground. He turns west and walks about ten paces, past a pair of softly humming generators camouflaged under skeins of leaves and twigs. A moment later, he locates the manhole cover embedded in the dirt, a relic from earlier in the century when a new sewage system was introduced to the area. He kneels, shrugs off his pack, and takes out his tools.
C-clamps go down on the edges of the lid, securing it to the paving stones around the outer ring. He tightens the clamps with channel locks. Then, just to be sure, he moves a small boulder from its mossy home under a nearby tree and sets it down on the manhole cover.
A few more stones go on top of the cover, and then, satisfied with his work, he goes searching for the other manhole entrance.
Twenty minutes later, at exactly 7:13 a.m., 250 yards southeast of the Woodbury train yard, the remaining members of the preacher’s convoy boom across the Woodbury town limits in a cyclone of noise and dust and the rising stench of the dead. The tow truck driven by Stephen Pembry has lagged behind a mile or two, awaiting orders, keeping the throngs occupied in an adjacent tobacco field with the mesmerizing intervals of flickering light.
Meanwhile, the caravan follows the access road that winds along the edge of the forest, traveling single file, until they come to a dry riverbed where a yellow bandanna flaps and flags at the apex of yet another stick thrust into the ground. The flag stands near the mouth of a culvert, the gaping maw of which is crisscrossed by rusty, barnacled iron bars. Reese Lee Hawthorne and Stephen Pembry discovered this culvert on one of their reconnaissance trips, and now it will serve the mission well as a back door into the tunnels.
Jeremiah’s RV skids to a stop, the other trucks slamming on their brakes behind him.
In the aftermath of the mass exodus that followed James and Molly Frazier’s surprise flight from the fold, only a half dozen vehicles remain, and now these six small-duty pickups and flatbed trucks raise a fog bank of fumes—the homemade biodiesel burning dirty—as they scuttle to a halt behind the preacher.
By this point, the morning sun has crested the palisades of black oaks along Elkins Creek, and the woods south of town appear almost Paleolithic, with celestial sunbeams cutting down through the motes of fluff and insects that teem in the chill air. God has bestowed a beautiful day for a reckoning. And adding to all of the preacher’s euphoria and good fortune is the fact that the immediate area is far enough away from the tunnel entrance for him and his followers to remain unheard and undetected by the heathens underground.
The RV’s cab doors squeal open, and the preacher hops out one side, Reese Lee Hawthorne out the other. The preacher’s gleaming bald pate shimmers in the shafts of light filtering through the trees, his black coattails flapping in the wind as he pulls his walkie-talkie out and presses the switch. “Brother Gleason! Talk to me!”
Through a crackle of static, Chester Gleason’s voice squawks out of the device. “It’s done! It’s done, Brother! All of them rabbit holes are locked up tight—and I can hear them down there!”
“Well done, Brothe
r!” Jeremiah releases the button, his hands shaking in the cold sunlight. His skull feels too big for his scalp. His flesh crawls with adrenaline as he ticks off the to-do list in his head. “All right, next!” He turns to the men gathered around him, his disciples, his holy warriors, his wolves. “Louis, use the winch to pull them bars.”
One of the men hurries back to his truck, hops in, and throws it in reverse. He backs up to the riverbank, twelve feet away from the culvert opening. Reese Lee Hawthorne circles around the back of the pickup and disengages the winch hook, pulling the cable across the dry ditch and then hooking the end around the ancient grillwork of bars covering the culvert opening. He gives a signal.
The engine revs. Black exhaust spumes from the vertical pipe. The truck lurches, pulling the cable taut. Rear wheels dig into the muck, spinning for a second. The bars creak and groan. Off to the side, the bald preacher watches with voices in his head and the fire of madness in his eyes.
The bars finally snap, slamming down on the ground and sliding across the riverbed.
* * *
Lilly Caul finishes up making her last-minute adjustments to the tunnel, stuffing bloody bandages from the infirmary into the torsos of the makeshift mannequins, when she feels a slight tremor in the bones of the sewer—a faint temblor that is sensed more than felt—resonating up through the soles of her boots.
She stands very still for a moment, cocking her head, listening. The silence seems laden with potential, a tuning fork still vibrating slightly but not revealing anything specific.
She grabs her walkie-talkie off the spool table and squeezes the button. “Miles? Can you hear me?”
Nothing but static from the other end.
* * *
Nobody hears the gibberish tumbling out of Jeremiah’s mouth as he stands back in the warmth of the morning sun, surveying the cool shadows of the woods around the gaping culvert opening. His voice has a low, musical, and breathless tone as the nonsensical syllables pour out of him, sounding like an approximation of an actual language but not a real one, more like the patois of a babbling infant possessed by the spirit, preverbal, preliteral.
Invasion Page 21
