Lilly tries to rise to her feet but can only lift herself up to her hands and knees. Her head spins. She can’t hear a thing, and she can barely see. Blinking frantically, she tries to focus on where her gun went. She sees it lying about five feet away. She lunges toward it, grabs it, and swings it up as she springs to her feet. She quickly assumes an offensive stance, but everything has gone all hazy and slow in the aftermath of the explosion.
Ears ringing, Lilly sees the preacher running away, his lanky arms pumping, his tattered waistcoat flapping in the wind as he charges as fast as he can toward the vacant lot to the east. With her gun still gripped in both hands, Lilly shuffles toward the girl. Little Bethany slowly rises, holding her ears, looking up at the sky.
“You okay, sweetie?” Lilly kneels by her, quickly giving her a once-over, looking for wounds. Lilly can barely hear, the ringing in her ears like a drill buzzing in her skull. She sees no injuries. “Talk to me.”
“I can’t hear anything!” The little girl holds her ears, opening her mouth as though trying to make them pop back into service.
“It’s okay, sweetie. It’s temporary. It’s the noise of the explosion.”
“How did you do that?”
Lilly glances over her shoulder. “We’ll talk about it later, honey. Right now we gotta get you back inside and I gotta get to the safe zone.”
In that single feverish moment, Lilly sees several things that quicken her pulse.
About a hundred yards away, the preacher is weaving through a cluster of walkers, slashing at them left and right with his Buck knife, apparently trying to work his way back to the vacant lot east of the switchyard—the same vacant lot across which all the gunfire had been exchanged. Adrenaline trickles through Lilly. She realizes the son of bitch is heading toward the enormous tow truck rig that sits about fifty yards south of the lot, still idling, sending intermittent puffs of inky black smoke out of its exhaust stack.
The second thing that Lilly sees triggers an even bigger spurt of panic: Three sides of the switchyard are now cut off by dense groups of dead shambling this way, drawn to all the tumult and yelling, their arms like divining rods, stiffly reaching, seeking fresh human meat. Lilly spins in a 360-degree pivot, searching for a way out, but seeing none. Even the stationhouse building is engulfed with the things now. Countless decomposing faces close in, pressing inward from all directions, face after face after face, each one featuring the same empty frosted-glass eyes, the same slimy lips curling away from blackened teeth. The noise and the odor of them rises to unbearable levels, and Lilly finds herself going blank again, as though her brain has just crashed.
* * *
Somehow, right then, in that fog bank of rot and decay, under that unforgiving pale sun, her ears still ringing, her heart palpitating, the flood of walkers engulfing her and the child, Lilly Caul realizes she has only one viable option—once again, the simplest solution proving to be the best solution. She sees a grand total of a half dozen creatures between her and the front door of the stationhouse, which lies about fifty feet away.
“Stay right by my side, sweetie,” she says to the girl, and then aims her gun at the two cadavers blocking their path to the door.
The first shot punches a divot in the top of the closest one’s skull, the thing folding in a cascade of black fluids and rancid blood. The second shot rips through the center of the other one’s face, sending a cloud of dirty gray fluids out the exit wound.
Edging her way toward the building, Lilly multitasks now—dumping the empty cylinder, tipping the speed-loader into the chamber, injecting her last six bullets, while simultaneously yanking Bethany toward the door.
They get within three feet of the entrance when a pair of male biters—each one once a teenage farm kid, now clad in tattered, blood-soaked long underwear—lunge single file, one after the other, at the two living humans. The little girl squeals an involuntary shriek as Lilly instinctively points the gun at the closest assailant. The biter inadvertently gets caught on the barrel as it pounces, its mouth gaping, the muzzle going down its throat like a tracheal intubation. Lilly instantly squeezes off two shots. The first one blows the back of the thing’s skull off, and the second strikes the walker coming up behind it. Both males collapse in showers of putrid blood.
Lilly throws the door open and shoves the girl inside the shadows of the stationhouse, then follows her inside, slamming the door behind them.
For a moment, Lilly bends down and catches her breath as the little girl races over to Barbara Stern. Lilly takes in great, heaving breaths, her hands on her knees, the rage crackling behind her eyes, as bracing as smelling salts. The image of the preacher racing off toward that tow truck has burned itself into her mind’s eye. The thought of him getting away makes her spine tingle with hate. More than just the desire to wreak vengeance, more than the mere satisfaction of evening a score, she needs to end this man.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” a voice says next to her, making her jump.
Lilly looks up at Barbara Stern, who stands nearby holding Bethany Dupree against her midriff. The girl softly cries into the folds of Barbara’s muumuu. The older woman breathes through her mouth, her face severely swollen, both her eyes rimmed in swelling bruises, her nose enflamed to twice its size, blood crusted around her nostrils. Lilly stares. “Speaking of sore eyes … what the hell happened to you?”
“The preacher happened to me.” Barbara takes a deep breath. “I’ll live.”
Lilly looks at her for a long time. “Yeah … but I promise you he won’t.”
“What?—What are you talking about?—You’re not going after him!”
Lilly doesn’t answer, simply checks her gun, flipping open the cylinder and seeing she has four rounds left. The children watch her from behind the shelves. She snaps the cylinder shut and hurries across to the room to the back window. Barbara follows her.
“Lilly, answer me. You’re not thinking of going after him, are you?”
Lilly is too busy to answer, as she peers out a thin slat of daylight along the edge of the boarded window, gazing at the Woodbury town limits in the middle distance. At first, all she can see is the enormous combine mowing through columns of dead along Dogwood Street—a surreal sight, even from this great distance, like some kind of insanely elaborate irrigation system. Dark matter spews out a tall chimney stack, arcing up at least fifty feet in the air and then diffusing into a rainbow of wet tissue that sleets down and soaks the ground and the sides of buildings over half a block away.
Lilly gawks. Upon further scrutiny, it has become clear that the tall stack is actually the vertical vent on the huge farm machine that Tommy Dupree discovered only a few days ago in that gleaming showroom a few miles south of here. Originally designed for the laborious job of separating grain from chaff across wide expanses of land, it’s now being repurposed—just as Lilly and Tommy had devised—for the task of mowing down row after row of shambling cadavers. And for a brief moment, seeing that thirty-foot-long mouth of rotating teeth gobbling the roiling masses of dead with the furious efficiency of a macabre assembly line fills Lilly with a sense of inevitability, fate, and maybe even a higher purpose. The sight of that putrescent geyser of gore soaring out through the air behind the harvester synchronizes with her rage. She wants to feed the preacher into the great steel oblivion of those circular teeth.
The preacher!
Lilly scans the outer limits of the town, sweeping her gaze across the adjacent switchyard, past the grove of sickly pecan trees, and into the vacant lot where the grisly remains of the battlefield still lie in mangled unidentified heaps like forgotten piles of kindling. In the far distance, beyond the dry creek bed, a lanky, tall figure in black hurriedly climbs up into the cab of a huge, heavy-duty tow truck. The back of the truck, including the massive tow crane, still drips with carnage, the top portion of a prisoner still lashed to the gantry, the bottom half of his torso ripped clean off by the horde, leaving entrails to dangle and dry in the sun. Lilly j
erks away from the window. She turns and looks around the room as though she’s lost something.
“Answer me, Lilly.” Barbara gazes skeptically at the younger woman.
Lilly looks up. “Where’s the walkie-talkie? You had one with you, right?”
“Don’t do this, Lilly.”
“Where is it?! C’mon, Barbara!”
“All right, all right!” Barbara sighs, gently moves the little girl aside, and quickly pads across the room. “It’s right here.” She digs through her pack, which sits on a peach crate near the shelving units. The children remain huddled in the shadows behind the adjacent shelves, peering through the gaps like stray puppies held captive in a pound, their eyes huge and bright with terror as they look on.
Barbara finds the device and brings it to Lilly, who has nervously returned to the window to peer back out at the edges of the vacant lot. The tow truck hasn’t moved, the preacher still visible inside the cab, hunched over the wheel. It looks as though the thing won’t start. Maybe it’s out of gas.
“Here.” Barbara hands her the two-way. “But please don’t do this.”
Lilly ignores her. She turns the power on and thumbs the Send button. “This is Lilly. Miles, are you there? Can you hear me? Over!”
Barbara lets out another anguished sigh. “The preacher is gone, Lilly—you’ll never see him again, And good riddance, I say.”
Lilly waves her back. “Sssssshhhhhhh!”
The walkie crackles, a voice on the other end of the line breaking though the static: “… Lilly…?”
Lilly presses the switch. “Miles, is that you?”
Through the speaker: “… Yes ma’am!”
Barbara clutches Lilly’s arm. “Lilly, don’t go and get yourself killed over this—it’s not worth it.”
Lilly yanks her arm away and then barks into the walkie’s mike as she stares through the slat of daylight at the far edge of the vacant lot. She can see a black cloud belch out of the tow truck’s exhaust pipe as the preacher finally gets the engine started. “Miles, where are you? Are you with the others?”
Through the static: “… In the safe zone, with Norma, David, and Harold, just like we planned.…”
Lilly squeezes the button. “Miles, can you get to your car?”
Another splash of static sizzles from the tiny speaker, and then, after a beat: “… I guess so, yeah, she’s parked out behind the willow.…”
Lilly says into the mike: “By the river, you mean? East of the tunnel entrance?”
“… That’s right.…”
“How fast can you get there?”
“… You mean like now…?”
“Yes! Fuck yes! Now, Miles! How soon can you meet me there?!”
Another beat of staticky silence, then the voice of the car thief sounding skeptical:
“… Lotta walkers between us and the river, Lilly.…”
“Just do it!” Her voice slices through the interference like a bolt of lightning. “Everything depends on us getting to your car ASAP! You understand? Tell me you understand, Miles.”
Through the speaker: “… I understand.…”
“Good!” Lilly looks at Barbara, then back out the window at the tow truck pulling away in a cloud of exhaust and dust. “Get moving, Miles. And bring some firepower, whatever’s left. And some extra ammo. I’ll meet you there in five minutes, maybe less if I get lucky. The preacher’s got a head start but those wheels of yours oughtta do the trick.”
A burst of static, and then Miles’s voice: “… What are we doing, Lilly…?”
Lilly licks her lips and looks at Barbara. She squeezes the switch. “Tying up a loose end.”
TWENTY-THREE
Miraculously, they both make it to the small clearing east of town, at approximately the same time—Lilly circumnavigating the herd by taking the long way around the switchyard, avoiding the thickest pockets of dead, Miles getting there by exiting the safe zone along Flat Shoals Road and then circling around the northeast corner of town. Once they get there, things start moving very quickly, far too quickly for them to notice any signs of tampering, such as fluid dripping from the convolutions of the Challenger’s undercarriage.
By the time they reach the car, they are each far too winded and pumped up with adrenaline to see the broken boughs and branches on the west edge of the clearing or the freshly formed tire tracks angling across the ground. Sheltered by the shaggy boughs of willow trees, surrounded by thickets of ironweed, the area is bordered on one side by the Flint River and barely large enough to accommodate a full-sized sedan. The neon purple Dodge Challenger sits in the center of the clearing, gleaming in the pale daylight filtering down through the skeletal branches of black oaks.
They don’t say much to each other at first, communicating mostly through gestures and nods and quick hand signals. They’re in a big hurry. Lilly figures the preacher has a ten-minute head start. If they’re lucky, they can locate him by the wake of dust and exhaust kicked up by the massive tow truck. But luck will also have to play a part. The preacher could easily take an unexpected turn and be off the grid in the blink of an eye.
Miles fires up the 426 cubic inches as Lilly climbs in through the passenger door. The gargantuan V8 gargles to life, emitting a belch of black exhaust and the roar of a mint-condition hemi cold block with zero catalytic converters to slow things down. Neither of them notice the recently formed imprint of a body in the dirt beneath the car, nor do they see the oily puddle of crimson brake fluid just beginning to form beneath the front end.
The car lurches backward.
Miles yanks the wheel, then rams the shift lever forward and steps on it, sending the Challenger into a fishtailing rush across greasy weeds, then blasting out through the south end of the clearing, where a dirt road wends along the Flint for about a mile and a half before giving way to the Crest Highway. If Miles had been less engaged with the mission and paying closer attention to the function of the brake pedal, he might have noticed the squishiness in the brakes when he brought the car to a stop in order to throw it into drive. But things are too chaotic now to detect such nuances, and besides, the line was only partially cut minutes earlier, and is still functioning. The intention of the saboteur, apparently, is for it to blow out under pressure.
Lilly glances over her shoulder at the walker-riddled landscape around the little town as it recedes into the distance behind them. She can see the gore shooting into the air a mile away, the vertical stack of Tommy’s harvester spewing like a Texas gusher. The sight of the combine mowing down rows of walking dead while the beleaguered town sits in a miasma of smoke puts a crimp in her heart.
She shakes it off and turns back to gaze out the steeply angled windshield at the overcast sunlight beating down on the weathered pavement of the two-lane rushing under their car. Miles has already hit sixty miles an hour, a lot faster than the state police would recommend on an access road such as this, and now the kid has his hoodie up and over his head. Lilly can see only the front of his narrow nose, a few strands of his dreadlocks, and his boyish chin with its little peach-fuzz goatee jutting out as he concentrates with practiced intensity, scanning and not staring, steering with his left hand, his right on the shift knob. Lilly figures the hood is an affectation, an obsessive-compulsive habit donned whenever the young man is on the job, and that’s fine with her. She needs this kid at the peak of his game if they’re going to catch up with the preacher’s tow truck—a vehicle that can’t hope to match the Challenger for speed, agility, and handling. In fact, the preacher is about the only thing Lilly can think about right now.
The need for closure—for the termination of this madman’s reign—burns as bright as magnesium behind Lilly’s eyes. This bloodlust so preoccupies her thoughts that she’s completely oblivious to the fact that the car is starting to exhibit obvious signs of tampering.
Of course, Lilly has no idea that Jeremiah Garlitz was once employed as a service station attendant when he was in his teens, and that he knows all t
he tricks, especially the ones employed to quickly and discreetly sabotage cars. Mechanics talk about this kind of stuff all the time. They have chat lines on the Internet and they share inside information about how this kind of thing is not like it’s shown in the movies. How would Lilly ever know this? How would she ever guess in a million years that Jeremiah would try such a thing in order to ensure that nobody pursued him? How would she ever know that his scouts had found the Challenger’s secret parking place?
The truth is, even if Lilly had known all these things, she probably would have still gone after the preacher. Rage is pulling her strings now, narrowing her thoughts into a tunnel, crackling in her brain like an overloading circuit. She can taste the man’s death on her tongue.
But all this is about to change as soon as they hit their first big downgrade.
* * *
Tommy Dupree loses his voice after nearly twenty minutes of sustained howling—his triumphant howls accompanied by the collective din of hundreds and hundreds of walkers turned to pulp under the churning devastation of the combine’s massive cutting skid. Over the rumbling of the engine and the clatter of the whirling blades, the wet, garbled, crunching noise of cadavers being ground to pieces is tremendous, addictive, surreal.
Tommy’s voice finally crumbles into a hoarse hissing noise as he cries out for his dead parents, for his lost childhood, for his ruined world.
The black geyser of tissues continues to leap up and wash across his machine, wave after wave, sluicing down the window glass, pulsing and streaking in the wipers, feeding Tommy’s psychotic state. He has turned half of the super-herd into paste, cutting a swath of annihilation from the edge of the safe zone all the way east to Kendricks Road, and he keeps going, and he will keep going until he runs out of gas or dies—whichever comes first—because he was born to do this. All those summer landscaping jobs, commandeering the riding mower until his neck blistered in the sun and his arms seized up with cramps, all to help his parents dig their way out of bankruptcy, and maybe to also thumb his nose at the kids at Rolling Acres grade school who made fun of him because he was poor and he had to wear those Kmart tennis shoes all the time—all of it has led to this: his destiny, his true calling.
Invasion Page 26
