In the Pentecostal church, it is believed the Holy Spirit enters a person at critical times, and the result is this fluid vocalizing of speechlike syllables, which lack any connotative meaning or any comprehensible pattern, but are considered by true believers to be sacred speech. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as “glossolalia” (or the putative speaking of natural languages previously unknown to the speaker). But in Jeremiah’s case, it is clear that the tongues being gibbered are those of his father. The garbled scat issuing out of him comes directly from the old man’s repertoire—all-pervasive, all-encompassing, all-powerful.
“Pardon?” The voice next to him snaps him out of his reverie. “What was that?”
“Huh?” Jeremiah turns and looks into the gaunt, gray, deeply lined face of Louis Packard, his winch operator, as the man puzzles over the sound of the tongues. Jeremiah smiles. “Oh … yes … I was just … humming an old hymn … a favorite of mine. ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’”
“Brother Stephen’s truck is coming up the hill with the walkers.”
“That’s excellent, Louis.”
The gaunt man chews nervously on his cheek. “Brother, you know I’m with ya one hundred and ten percent.”
“What is it, Louis?”
“These people gotta go, and I’m with ya, till the bitter end.”
“What’s wrong?”
The gaunt man lets out a tense sigh and speaks in a low whisper. “We’re never gonna get them things to go inside them tunnels, never in a million years.”
The preacher just smiles. He can smell the rising tide of death on the breeze as if it were a storm front rolling in. He hears the rumble of Stephen’s tow truck, the human screams silent now, the prisoner long ago succumbing to blood loss and exposure. He senses the weight of the throngs coming up through the woods behind the truck, the unholy choir of watery snarling and growling noises rising on the wind.
He glances over his shoulder and sees the tow truck materializing around the corner of the forest road, the sea of shadows rolling in behind it in the flickering strobe light. He turns to the others. “Everybody in your vehicles, lock the doors!”
Then Jeremiah goes over to his RV, snaps the latch on the side door, leans inside, and pulls out a box marked “COX REMOTE CONTROL DUNE BUGGY.”
* * *
At last, a voice crackles through the static spewing out of Lilly Caul’s walkie-talkie: “… Yo! Yo, Lilly! We’re here, we was just dodging a few biters, but I can read you loud and clear now, go ahead!”
Lilly feels the walls of the tunnel contracting around her like the innards of a living thing reacting to poison in its system, and it makes her stomach clench as she thumbs the switch and says into the mike: “Have you made it to the church yet? Over?”
“… Yes, ma’am, got the clothes, now on our way to the safe zone.…”
“Good, awesome … I gotta get the fuck out of here, I’m getting the willies down here all by myself.”
“… Copy that, see you in a few.”
“Right.”
Lilly whirls and hurries down the length of the main conduit toward the manhole. But even now, as she trots along, she feels the cold fingers of claustrophobia tightening around her neck, stealing her breath, sending cold currents of panic down her spine.
Ahead of her, the tunnel seems to blur out of focus, slipping into a double image like motion picture film jumping out of registration. She has dealt with excruciating claustrophobia for most of her life, ever since she accidentally locked herself in a coat closet at her cousins’ house in Macon when she was nine years old.
Now she feels the old prickly panic returning like cold fingers wrapping around her spine.
The tunnel spins. She nearly trips. She slows down and braces herself against the wall. She realizes that she hasn’t been in the tunnels alone in a while, maybe ever; it’s hard to be sure right now. She blinks, rubs her eyes, tries to ignore the dizziness that’s washing over her and to fix her gaze on the steps embedded in the wall at the end of the main conduit.
In her bleary line of sight, about fifteen feet away, the faint indentations in the crumbling stone wall are apparent, and she edges toward them as fast as she can without falling flat on her face. The vertigo courses over her, threatening to knock her off her feet. She holds on to a brace. It feels as though her head is about to loll off her shoulders, and her gorge rises, but she wills herself not to throw up and to keep inching forward.
She reaches the steps at the precise same moment she first hears the sound.
The faint, far-off noise is so strange and incongruous at this moment—in this dark, moldering place—that she freezes, her brain like an engine seizing up. She doesn’t even look over her shoulder at first. She simply stands there, one hand on the middle rung of the steps, her entire body gripped in glacial, dreamlike paralysis.
Something moves at the dark end of the tunnel, glimpsed only peripherally, at first registering as a small animal darting around the corner.
She whirls around and sees a small remote control toy rolling toward her. What the fuck, she thinks. Is this part of that—?
The closer the toy gets, the more clearly it comes into view: a metal-flake orange dune buggy with fat little tires, a tiny whip antenna, and a couple of outboard devices duct-taped to its hood. It sends up a flash of silver strobe light at odd intervals as it rattles closer and closer, but the strangest and by far worst part is the recording being played back through a miniature speaker affixed to the toy car’s rear bulwark.
* * *
When she was in college, Lilly Caul once accidentally stumbled upon a website called Comeuppance-dot-com on which Islamic fundamentalist terrorists posted old clips of people being beheaded and other various and sundry horrors. Before she had the good judgment to quickly navigate away from the visual trash heap, she got a good look at a grainy video of a British journalist being tortured before the shaky lens of a consumer camera. But oddly, it wasn’t the sudden and tawdry terror of seeing a human being reduced to a naked bloody mass of agony—the man hanging upside down from a meat hook as he’s whipped and scourged with barbed wire—that disturbed Lilly the most. It was the sound—the terrible, indelible screaming noises that were coming off the little YouTube clip.
You can’t fake the sound of human suffering—especially at this intensity. No actor in any horror film can approximate the true texture of a tortured shriek. The quality of the sound is so specific, so harsh and shrill, as to be almost feral in its timbre. The clamor has an unmistakable electric-shock effect on the human ear.
Lilly hears this very sound coming out of a miniature speaker on board that toy, accompanied by the rising odors of dead flesh wafting through the tunnel. But it’s the noise that holds her rapt as the contraption wheels toward her. She stares and stares as the little thing seems to aim itself directly at her feet.
The dune buggy bumps into the toe of her boot and bounces back slightly.
Lilly stares, transfixed, as the thing bumps her again and again, thumping against the steel toe of her work boot, as though trying to plow through her. At this close proximity, Lilly can see the tiny pencil-thin camera taped to the buggy’s hood, the radio signals causing the thing to back up, jack its wheels, and make an attempt to go around her.
She snaps out of her fear-spell then, and gives the thing a hard kick, sending it into a sideways roll.
The toy car smashes against the tunnel wall and breaks apart into shards of plastic and rubber—the camera strobe hanging by a thread, but continuing to blink.
That’s when Lilly sees the shadows at the opposite end of the tunnel, formed by a single yellow cage light dangling down somewhere in the side tunnel, the shapes creeping across the earthen floor like puddles of black ink slowly but inexorably spreading.
She sucks in a tense breath when she sees the first biter coming around the corner. For a terrible moment, Lilly remains motionless, horror-stricken, almost morbidly fascinated by this catastrophic breach of the
area that was only minutes ago living space.
The lead corpse appears to be a former businessman, maybe a salesman—perhaps middle-aged at the time of death—now clad in a tattered seersucker suit so worn and stained with bile it looks like butcher paper. Its bloodless face puckers with hunger as it comes down the tunnel toward Lilly, at a fairly rapid pace for a walker, the others following on its heels, shuffling along with troubling velocity. There’s a female in sun-bleached gingham—maybe at one time a farmer’s wife—and a couple of teenage children in gore-encrusted overalls, most likely farm kids.
Within seconds, there are too many to process at a single glance: twenty, a hundred; Lilly quickly loses count. The tunnel fills with the guttural, watery clatter of putrid vocal cords. The lead creature closes the distance between him and Lilly to fifty feet, the others brushing and scraping against the walls behind him, the stench so thick now Lilly feels as though she might throw up after all, except that she has no time for such frivolities as vomiting.
She scuttles up the embedded steps to the underside of the manhole cover and tries to push the lid open.
The thing won’t budge. The monsters are closing in. She shoves harder against the bottom of the cover, the clamps on the lid holding tight. The former salesman is now thirty feet away and closing.
Some of the other creatures have meandered toward the lounge area, where the urine-soaked effigies sit in a macabre tableau around the spool table. But the half dozen or so creatures in the lead have locked on to Lilly’s scent, and come toward her in a blur of clenching teeth and palpitating jaws and arms stiff with rigor mortis reaching blindly for her tender flesh.
She frantically pushes against the stubborn manhole cover until her fingers throb with pain and her arms twinge—all to no avail.
The salesman reaches the bottom of the steps, coming to within three feet of Lilly’s boot soles, and now she’s forced to make some instantaneous choices and calculations: She has one extra ten-round ammo magazine wedged behind her belt, and one .22 caliber Ruger on her hip, sheathed in leather and with ten rounds in the grip. She also has a twelve-inch Buck knife on her other hip for close-quarter confrontations.
In one awkward motion, she holds fast to the top rung with her free hand and quickly draws the Ruger with the other. She squeezes off a single blast into the top of the salesman’s skull. The pop sets off the tinnitus in her ears, and the backsplash of oily matter makes her flinch, as a rosette of bone and tissue in the top of the creature’s head shuts off his reanimated nervous system.
More of the creatures clamor toward her. She aims the gun at the manhole cover, shields her face, and blindly fires point blank at the outer edges of the iron. The blast makes her jump. The ricochet sings past her face, hot spit on her cheek, ears deadened further.
No good. Waste of bullets. Now what? Think, think, think.
Her mind goes as blank as a television screen at the end of the programming day.
White noise.
* * *
The plague has had a strange and somewhat unexpected winnowing effect on people. Traits that were once considered flaws, even personality disorders, now help a person survive. Paranoia, narcissism, impulsiveness, greed, sociopathy, even cruelty now become assets. Indeed, the one cross that Lilly Caul had always borne in the old world has proven to be a rarity among the survivor class, and perhaps has enabled her to emerge as a leader. Call it pathological persistence.
Even now, with the discovery of the locked manhole, followed by her mind going blank, Lilly refuses to allow a scintilla of doubt to enter her mindscape. She hears the dissonant chorus of phlegm-clogged snarling and the clacking of teeth, and she doesn’t even have to look. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see dead things pressing in on her, dozens of them—males in bile-stained dungarees, females dragging useless mangled limbs, grotesque former children chewing at the air, and assorted senior citizens now reduced to emaciated bags of brittle bones and weathered flesh stretched taut like Visqueen. The gruesome party has Lilly on its radar now, and the partygoers want their hors d’oeuvres.
Hopping to the floor of tunnel, she bangs into a gangly male before the thing can bite and knocks it back on its heels into three others, all of whom go down like bowling pins. More move in, and Lilly kicks at them as they lunge at her, one at a time, doubling them over, sending them to the floor. She shoots a younger female in the head, turning its face to pulp as it lurches at her.
Blood spatters Lilly’s face as she backs deeper into the tunnel, counting bullets. Three down, seven to go in the gun, ten behind her belt. She’s going to need all the ammo she can conserve.
More and more biters pour into the tunnel, a slow-motion stampede coming around the far corner, in all shapes and sizes, flowing toward Lilly with the certainty of a rising tide as she coughs and gags and flinches at the terrible odor. The stench is incredible, so powerful and thick that she can feel it on her skin as she continues to back into the darkness. She reaches down and draws the Buck knife from its hip sheath. She brings it up just in time.
A younger male with parchment brown skin shrink-wrapped around its skeletal face suddenly pounces at her, mouth gaping, black gums filled with slimy teeth. She thrusts the knife at it. The roof of its mouth impales itself on the point of the curved blade.
Lilly swings the male into two females, and the former young women stagger and fall backward over their clumsy feet. Lilly shoves the male—its mouth still engaged with the knife like a fish on a hook—back in the other direction, slamming it into two other males lumbering toward her.
The impaled creature shudders backward, knocking the others over.
But then things go from bad to worse, as the knife finally slices up through the thing’s putrefied nasal cavity and the skull opens up. The knife pops out the top, and the creature’s head cracks apart—coconut-like—into halves, each fragment tumbling to the floor. A geyser of tarry fluids gush out of the thing for a moment, the lack of blood pressure causing the blood to ooze more than spray, as the headless creature remains upright for a single horrible moment.
“DIE ALREADY!!”
Lilly slashes at the air in front of the headless thing as it finally sags to the floor. Others instantly move in to take its place. Lilly keeps slashing and screaming and slowly backing deeper into the labyrinth.
* * *
David Stern had been in the process of naming these side tunnels, and the one Lilly is backing toward now is called Tributary B—a narrow channel of hard-packed earth that connects the deeper maze of zinc mines to the town sewer. Lilly realizes if she can make it to the chain-link barrier drawn across its opening, and maybe get the thing open quickly enough, she can escape.
More biters move in—a cross section of ages and genders, most of them slimy with mold and sun-bleached—too many for hand-to-hand combat. Lilly fires off six more shots in quick succession. Brain matter spumes and splatters the tunnel walls all around her, bodies collapsing to the floor, one by one, making watery splats.
Lilly has spent almost a year practicing her aim, ever since Josh Hamilton had taught her how to quick-draw and hit moving targets, and she has gotten pretty good at it, better than most, but now she sees the far end of the tunnel—the makeshift infirmary and the lounge with its pee-soaked effigies and the dining area with all its broken crockery and the storage nooks—completely overrun with monsters. They squeeze elbow to elbow into every square foot of space, pressing up against the walls, faces mashing against one another in a macabre, twisted corruption of a subway at rush hour.
The horrible sight of it weighs down on Lilly so heavily that she doesn’t notice the next wave of assailants lunging at her until it’s too late. A former obese woman—now with flaccid drapes of flesh hanging off her like excess dress fabric—manages with her hooked claw of a hand to snag a piece of Lilly’s sweatshirt. Lilly rears back and fires. The bullet misses the top of the fat lady’s head by a mile and goes into the ceiling. More biters close in. Lilly fires again. T
he gun clicks empty.
“FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!!”
Fumbling awkwardly with the gun, ejecting the clip, fishing for the fresh magazine, trying to get it into the hilt, hands oily with fear-sweat, more creatures coming at her, slamming the magazine home, cold-dead fingers reaching for her, cocking the slide, teeth chattering inches away from the exposed flesh of her hands and arms … she makes a tactical error. It’s an honest mistake. Anybody could have made it.
She shoots a quick glance over her shoulder to see how close she is to the tributary.
The change in the center of balance is just enough to throw off her equilibrium, and she stumbles over her feet. She feels herself falling. Again, she compensates too severely by clawing at the wall for a handhold, a brace or a board or something to stop her fall, and in the process, the gun slips from her grip.
She collapses onto the small of her back, the Ruger skittering off across the floor.
NINETEEN
All at once everything slows down, and the ringing in Lilly’s ears drowns out every other sound, and the pain bolts up her spine and seizes her arms and legs. She tries to scoot away from the onslaught, but now an enormous male moves in on her. A former farmhand in blood-soaked work pants, its shirt torn in half, revealing sagging pectorals the color of earthworms, it pounces on her legs.
Lilly wriggles under its dead weight, trying to get to her knife, but the thing has her pinned to the floor, and the creature’s mottled face is folding open like a clamshell, exposing rows of greasy, moldering incisors, which gnash and clack noisily as they close in on her throat. Lilly manages to get her hands around its head.
For a moment she prevents it from devouring her, holding it at arm’s length.
Over the course of that terrible instant, holding that snapping turtle of a head, engulfed in the odor of its hellish spoor—a mixture of rotting meat and that inimitable lower note of oily, black death-stench—Lilly looks into the thing’s eyes. Just for a split second, she registers something glinting behind the dead sharklike cataracts. Cruelty? Madness? Rage? Agony? Maybe all of these things shimmer for a moment behind the creature’s gaze as it regards its human food. But then, something breaks the spell.
Invasion Page 22
