All at once it comes rushing back to her. How they ended up in a sideways truck cab, and how he was strangling her, and how she felt the gun right before blacking out. Now she realizes she hit the bull’s-eye.
She catches her breath, rubs her neck with her free hand, and tries to speak, but only a thin, wispy cough comes out. She swallows hard, and touches her windpipe. It feels as though it’s intact. She takes in a few more breaths and manages to rise to a kneeling position in the upended cab. She ejects the ammo magazine, sees that it has plenty of rounds left, slams it back in, and points the gun at the preacher.
“Shut the fuck up.” Her voice is hoarse and weak, but resolute, determined, cold. “And do what I say or the next one goes into your skull.”
The preacher manages to sit up, swallowing thickly, breathing hard and fast. His bald head is stippled in blood. He winces. He holds his bloody crotch. He swallows again and finally utters, “Just get it over with.”
“Get out.” She indicates the door in the ceiling that used to be the driver’s side. “Now!”
He cocks his bald head so that he can see the door directly above him. He looks at her. “You gotta be kidding.”
She aims the gun at one of his knees, but before she can fire he struggles to his feet.
“I’m going,” he moans, and with great, laborious effort rises up to his full height.
* * *
It takes forever for the wounded preacher to struggle out of the massive cab, lower himself down the front grille, and drop to the ground with an agonizing grunt. His pants are soaked with blood, his flesh is the color of wallpaper paste, his breathing is tacky with fluids.
Lilly climbs out of the cab behind him and hops to the ground. “Get on your knees,” she says flatly, aiming the gun at him.
He takes a deep breath, stands up, faces her, and squares his shoulders as though prepared to fight. “No.”
She shoots one knee.
Jeremiah screams. The blast takes a tuft out of his trousers, sends a gout of blood out the back of his leg, and tosses him staggering backward. He goes down in a heap, holding his knee, howling in pain. His face is a mask of agony. He looks up at her with tears in his eyes. “Why…? Why are you doing this?”
She stands over him, expressionless, thinking of Bob and Woodbury. At last, she says, “Because the universe wants me to.”
Covered in blood and tears and snot, he gazes up at her and begins to laugh. Nothing joyous. Just a dry, ironic, icy chuckle. “You think you’re God?”
She stares unmercifully at him. “No, I’m not God.” She aims at his shoulder. “And neither are you.”
The gun barks.
This time the blast takes a chunk from his left pectoral and exits in a fog of red tissue out his trapezius, spinning him in an awkward arabesque and sending him sprawling to the ground. He gasps and tries to crawl away. He collapses. He huffs painfully into the dirt, rolls over, and stares at the sky.
She calmly walks over to him. She doesn’t say anything at first, just gazes down at him.
“M-missy, p-please…” He’s nearly hyperventilating now, his game-show-host face marbled with blood, his shaved pate looking almost comical. “P-please … f-finish it … p-put me outta my misery.”
Then she smiles—perhaps one of the coldest smiles ever shared between two human beings—and says, “Nope … I got a better idea.”
TWENTY-FIVE
It won’t be long now.
Crouching in the tight quarters of the harvester’s cab, out of ammo, out of options, David Stern thinks this, but he doesn’t say it, not in the presence of this kid, this brave, heroic, badass twelve-year-old who took on the entire super-herd single-handedly in this giant monster that he barely knew how to operate—that he’d learned how to run by scanning the fucking manual, of all things.
Now the boy huddles next to David in the metal coffin, shivering, waiting to die.
The cab shudders once again, making creaking noises like a sinking ship as the swarm continues pressing in, harder and harder against all sides of the overturned harvester. Through the jagged opening of broken glass that used to be a windshield, three feet to his left, David can see the massive blade enclosure, still slimy with the entrails of countless dead, now bent into two pieces from the impact of the crash. He can also see the horde flocking to the wreckage, many more than when David first charged across those three blocks between the safe zone and the ruined machine with grandiose ideas of rescuing the boy.
You stupid, arrogant asshole, David thinks, wallowing in your own hubris.
Only fifteen minutes or so had passed since the moment David had run out of ammo and realized he had made a huge mistake, tossing his weapon aside and climbing into this battered crypt with the boy. Now hundreds, maybe thousands more biters have arrived to push inward on the crumpling steel shell of the combine without forethought, without purpose other than to feed; a thousand-plus pallid, mottled faces creased with torturous hunger, thousands of milky, cataract-crusted eyes fixed on the lone pair of humans hunkering in the tiny tomb that used to be a cab; thousands of blackened, clawlike fingers raking the metal skin of the machine like fingernails on a chalkboard.
“What if we go out the bottom!” The boy, with his bile-soaked sweatshirt and Little Rascal wheat-straw hair that’s standing straight up as though electrocuted, is pointing at the single square foot of a corrugated metal trapdoor embedded in the bottom of the cab, which is now the wall to Tommy’s immediate right. “We could—”
“No, it’s no good.” David sighs painfully. “Too many of them. We’re safer in here for the time being.”
The boy looks at him. “We can’t just sit here forever—we gotta try something.”
“I’m thinking.”
The boy crawls to the trapdoor. He fiddles with the latch, which was damaged in the capsizing. “I think we could sneak out this—”
“Get away from it!” David Stern hisses his words at him. “They’ll get in!”
“I don’t think they—”
The trapdoor suddenly bursts inward with a metallic clang that sends the boy reeling backward, blinking convulsively, shuddering in shock. Dozens of hands reach into the enclosure, hooklike fingers with blackened nails clawing at the air, flailing for food. Tommy lets out a yelp. David lunges for the hatch and tries to kick the medusa knot of arms and hands back out the opening, when all at once a series of gigantic cracking noises spread through the infrastructure of the wreck, and David Stern turns just in time to see a nightmare unfurl before his very eyes.
The walls of the cab begin to bow outward under the pressure of a sudden surge of the dead, and the seams of the combine start to split apart down the middle. Rivets pop like firecrackers. Death-stench and the clamor of collective snarls fill the airless chamber. Tommy shrieks and backs up against the vertical floor.
David madly searches the cab for a weapon, but the shift in gravity as the machine tips and collapses into itself sends him to the floor.
Tommy falls on top of the older man, and the two of them hug each other almost instinctively as the last intact section of windshield breaks apart. Ragged figures tumble into the cab. David pushes Tommy into the corner and grabs a mangled four-foot section of window frame. The closest biter gets the pointed edge of the frame thrust through its eye, sending spurts of fluid down on top of Tommy Dupree. The boy howls with a primal mixture of rage, terror, and repulsion.
David swings at the next one, and the next, and the next, knowing all along that it’s just a show, a charade for the boy. David Stern has no hope of fighting off an endless clown car of monsters flooding the breached enclosure. But he keeps at them, slashing one across the temple, stabbing another through the eye socket, gouging yet another one through the roof of the mouth. Fluids and blood and tissue engulf the chamber, and soon the bodies collect on the floor of the cab inches away from where the boy struggles not to cry out loud. He just sits there, shoulders trembling, moist eyes taking it all in, tears tracking
down his freckled face.
And when the older man is finally overcome, and he stumbles backward, tripping over his own feet and collapsing only inches away from the boy, the two living humans look away. They don’t want to watch, they don’t want to see the end come in its ghastly form of a feeding frenzy. They can sense the faces full of teeth looming over them, snarling, ravenous, teeth gnashing, lowering down toward them—and then nothing. No searing pain from the first bite, no convulsions of agony as more of them dig into the soft middle and the delicacies within.
David pops his eyes open. Dozens of dead hover motionless over him and the boy, as still as mannequins in a forgotten store window, each biter resembling a dog being summoned by an ultrasonic whistle. One by one, they twitch their empty gazes off to the south as though tracking the source of the silent whistle. David stares. The faintest clicking noise drifts on the wind; a flash of heat lightning flickers off the faces of the dead. The tableau is all very dreamlike at first, but with each passing second, it intensifies. An engine in the distance rises on the breeze.
Tommy starts to whisper something in a startled voice when the strangest thing happens: The monsters begin to retreat, backing slowly out of the enclosure, brushing against one another as they awkwardly withdraw and turn to seek out the source of that flashing light. They are wandering off en masse toward the sound of the engine, and the flickering silver light.
David sits up. He rubs his eyes as though awakening from a dream, and he looks at Tommy, who also levers himself up to a sitting position.
“What the fuck,” Tommy says almost rhetorically as he watches the mass exodus of the dead.
* * *
Lilly keeps a close watch on the cracked side mirror of the battered tow truck as she pulls slowly past the ruins of Ingles Market. She moves along at less than five miles per hour—walking speed—in order to allow the greatest number of supplicants to follow along. The town is surprisingly quiet considering the population of dead currently filling the streets and lumbering along in the wake of the truck. The air smells of brimstone and scorched electrical terminals as the breeze wafts through the cab’s broken window vent.
Lilly downshifts and turns south, heading toward the train yard.
In the reflection of her side mirror, she can see the preacher lashed to the massive tow arm at the back of the truck. Still clad in his stained shirtsleeves, black trousers, and boots, his gunshot wounds oozing now from under his clothes, he looks like a living figurehead on the prow of a ship, his arms dangling limply, his bald head lolling as he wavers in and out of consciousness.
The strobe light continues to blink above him, a beacon drawing the herd.
Every few seconds, Jeremiah lets out a garbled cry—a mishmash of words and nonsense syllables in which Lilly has absolutely no interest. She merely appreciates the Pavlovian effect the sound of his voice is having on the mass congregation following the tow truck. More and more of the dead are gathering—they’re already at least fifty rows deep behind the preacher, and their number is growing.
Lilly drives slowly past the stationhouse, where the children still huddle with Barbara in the shadows, waiting for the all-clear signal.
From the train yard, Lilly turns west and makes a large, slow circle around the far corner of town. Lured by the eldritch noises of Jeremiah’s voice, as well as by the flashing signal flare, walkers skulk out of speedway cloisters, out from behind abandoned semitrailers, out of ditches and culverts and nooks and crannies. The mob grows. In her hairline-fractured mirror, Lilly sees an ocean of dead trailing after the mumbled ravings of the madman.
From the top of Whitehouse Parkway, she turns east and heads back the way she came.
By the time she reaches the east side of town, the preacher is near death, and practically the entire herd is following along behind the truck, a vast field of walking dead spanning one and a half city blocks and at least two hundred yards deep. She marvels at the breadth and width of the throngs, visible in the funhouse reflection of her side mirror. The herd is so enormous that the seething masses in the rear, at the farthest point, are just a hazy blur in the overcast afternoon.
Lilly slowly passes the wreckage of Tommy Dupree’s combine. She gazes over her shoulder as two figures climb out of the battered, overturned cab. Tommy comes first, lowering himself down the jagged length of windshield, looking like an animal coming out of hibernation. David comes next. The older man struggles out and squints into the steel gray sky, taking a deep breath of life-affirming air.
Tommy gapes at the receding multitude, robotically following the blinking light. He stares, and stares, his mouth hanging open. David stands next to him. The older man just shakes his head in awe as he watches.
Lilly makes a slight turn at Riggins Ferry Road and heads toward the wide expanse of desolate lots and fallow fields along the Flint River Valley.
Her destination is eleven miles away—roughly two and a half hours, at this speed—so she settles back in her seat, and lets out a long sigh.
Her thoughts wander, the mythic drama going on at this very moment directly behind her the furthest thing from her mind.
* * *
The great and honorable Reverend Jeremiah Garlitz preaches his last sermon that day, lashed to a gantry twelve feet above the scabrous land that he thinks of as Zion. In his scrambled final thoughts, he speaks to his vast megachurch of lost souls, who shamble dutifully after him in the dust of the holy land. He speaks much of his homily in old Latin, floating in midair, surrounded by angels. He spreads his arms and smiles beatifically at the great assembly of the faithful following him—his Christian soldiers, his righteous disciples—their dark, dirty, impoverished faces full of noble savagery. God bless his congregants.
This goes on for hours, Jeremiah recalling all the great chapters and verses, all the best sermons he delivered over his life in sweaty tents and backwater churches. The flicker of the votive candle above him illuminates his altar as the ragged parishioners follow him for miles and miles, many of them barefoot, bleeding, crippled, leprous, sick, old and infirm. Toward the end of the journey, Jeremiah feels a loosening of his soul, a shade coming down on his field of vision, and he rejoices. He feels his chariot speeding up, his wings spreading, catching the wind, the angels lifting him up through the stratosphere to paradise.
His last act is a singing out of joyous testimony in an ancient language.
While the heavens embrace him.
* * *
It happens almost too quickly for Lilly to notice the sound. She opens the driver’s-side door a hundred feet from the edge of the precipice, on the south side of Emory Hill—the place where she used to gaze longingly upon her walker-riddled town—and now she wedges the crowbar between the seat and the accelerator pedal.
The tow truck lurches as Lilly leaps out onto the rocky earth, the thunder of wind and the revving engine drowning out all other sounds, except for the voice.
Even as she’s running for the trees of the adjacent forest, hurrying to avoid contact with the herd, and the tow truck is careening over the edge of the precipice, Lilly can hear the faint sound of the preacher’s voice. As the truck soars over the ledge and plummets seventy-five feet to the boulder-strewn river’s edge below, Lilly hears the bizarre vocalizations of someone speaking in tongues.
Then the sound is drowned out by the collective growls of hundreds of walking cadavers dragging themselves over the edge—lemminglike, faithful to the last—as the light flickers all the way down into oblivion. From behind a thick grove of trees, breathless after the sprint, Lilly watches the mass migration over the precipice, a magnificent cascade of the dead as row after row plunges off the ledge.
Just before turning away, Lilly realizes an excoriating irony: At last, Jeremiah gets to partake in the mass suicide he’d always dreamed of experiencing.
TWENTY-SIX
David Stern is about to give up on his watch for the night. Lowering the binoculars, he lets out a pained breath, shaking his head.
He has no idea what time it is, or how long it’s been since he’s slept, or how many hours he’s been perched on the roof of this godforsaken semitrailer, gazing over the top of the barricade, ceaselessly scanning the distant woods and hills of the neighboring tobacco country, hoping he might see a ghostly figure returning, beating the impossible odds of the previous day’s climactic series of events. He stretches his sore, arthritic joints.
“And how long are you gonna keep waiting for her to magically appear?” a voice says from below.
David jumps with a start. “Jesus, Babs!” He looks down at his wife. “How long have you been standing down there?”
“About a year and half.”
“Very funny.” He starts climbing down a ladder that leans against the trailer. “Did the kids finally nod off?” he asks as he hops down to the street.
The safe zone, which encompasses four square blocks of Woodbury, includes several merchants whose shelves haven’t been completely picked clean, as well as a small bed-and-breakfast formerly called The Green Veranda, whose rooms are currently occupied by the six children. Earlier that night, they set up a makeshift infirmary in the front room of the inn, where Norma Sutters, if she’s still awake, is continuing to look after Harold.
On the whole, though, compared with the hardships of living underground, the place is an oasis of luxury.
“All except Tommy,” Barbara says with a weary shrug. Her face is bandaged, and her voice has gone a little nasal due to the swollen bridge of her nose. But to David, in the moonless dark, illuminated only by a torch burning in front of the inn, she is the most beautiful woman on earth. “The boy insists on staying on at his sister’s bedside with a shotgun across his knees.”
Invasion Page 28
