Lilly is thinking about all this when she notices a couple members of the church group are missing. The cop—what’s his name? Wade? And the dude from Panama City—Arbogast, Mark Arbogast. Lilly had gotten to know both of these men during supply runs, and she liked them. They were solid, simple, small-town men with simple values. But for some reason, their absence is making Lilly nervous. In fact, she starts searching the far reaches of the stands, looking for them, when she hears a commotion down on the infield.
Raised voices echo on the wind, a few of the parishioners arguing with each other. Lilly snaps her gaze toward the preacher.
In the distance, Jeremiah has come around from behind his makeshift lectern and descended the bleacher steps, and now he angrily pushes his way through the crowd, feeling people’s foreheads and looking closely at their eyes with the hectic attention of an overworked nurse. His expression is hard to read from this distance, but it looks as though he is pallid with shock, and people are yelling at him. It’s difficult to hear the exact words being spoken, but it seems as though Jeremiah is responding at the top of his lungs, “It’s not His will! It’s not! Something’s wrong! You should be going to sleep! You should all be going to sleep!”
Lilly gives the signal—a raised hand, a fist, and then a quick yank downward.
Instantly she sees a flash of movement down on the portico along one side of the infield, about a hundred feet from where the preacher is now weaving through his congregation, trying to figure out what has happened to his poison.
Speed Wilkins lurches out from behind one of the columns, raises the muzzle of his AR-15, and fires a controlled burst into the sky.
TWENTY-FIVE
For one surreal moment, most of the parishioners simply gape in thunderstruck silence, some of them raising their hands as though being robbed. Some of the male congregants go for their guns, but the other rebels—Bob, David, Barbara, Gloria, and Matthew—all come out of hiding then, with weapons raised, each firing off a single round into the air in order to get everybody’s attention and to warn off any would-be heroes. The salvo echoes up into the dark heavens.
Lilly calmly walks out to the edge of the mezzanine balcony a hundred and fifty feet from where the preacher now stands paralyzed, staring up at her as though seeing a ghost. Lilly holds her gun hand up, her voice projecting like an actor in a Shakespearean play. “Jeremiah, I’m sorry … but this can’t happen!”
“What did you do?” His eyes fill with absolute, unadulterated terror. “Oh, dear Lord, what in God’s name did you do?”
“We switched out the poison with water!” She takes a deep breath. “Now it’s time for you to—”
“YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU’VE DONE!” He screams this at her, his face suddenly a mask of abject horror. “YOU HAVE NO EARTHLY IDEA!”
“Calm down,” she calls back down to him, speaking sharply as if to an unruly pet. “Shut up for a second and listen to how this is going to go down!”
“HOW THIS IS GOING TO GO DOWN? HOW THIS IS GOING TO GO DOWN?” He looks around as though he’s about to tear his hair from his skull. The whole arena is silent. He looks at his watch. He looks back up at Lilly, and his eyes practically glow with dread. “YOU HAVE ENSURED THAT WE WILL ALL DIE A HORRIBLE, PAINFUL, HELLISH DEATH—!”
“Calm the fuck down!” Lilly thumbs the hammer back on the .45 and points it at him. “You’ve manipulated these people long enough. This is our town and we’re not going to—”
The first explosion cuts off her words, rocking the stands and ringing in the rafters with a resonant boom of thunder. Lilly instinctively crouches down. What the fuck? She senses a flash and a shockwave of heat off her left flank, and she whirls toward the east.
The second explosion comes from the northeast corner of the barricade, a strobelike flash, followed by a resounding boom, which sends shards of timbers and a mushroom cloud of debris heavenward.
Lilly’s heart skips a beat, her breath clogging in her throat as she realizes what’s happening. But why? Why would they knock down the town’s fortification—especially if they were bent on self-destruction through poisoning? It makes no sense. But Lilly quickly realizes that there’s no time to figure it all out because Bob is spinning toward the makeshift altar with his muzzle raised as people scatter in all directions.
Then Lilly sees the preacher lunging toward one of his minions—the man named Anthony—who holds one of the stolen AK-47s. All at once, Jeremiah has an every-man-for-himself look on his face, and he has snatched the assault rifle from the grasp of his disciple and is snapping the cocking mechanism back with a single jerk.
“LILLY, GET DOWN!”
The voice of David Stern from behind her sends a warning alarm down Lilly’s spine and drives her to the ground as the air lights up with a barrage of high-velocity rounds, which strafe the upper balconies of the racetrack in gouts of sparks, dust, and ringing shrapnel.
* * *
In time, Lilly will put the pieces together: That second duffel bag full of ordnance that Bob had mentioned, the one that Stephen had carried—this was earmarked all along to clear a pathway, if not a barricade like the one in Woodbury then perhaps the side of a building or the windows of a warehouse or a citadel. The idea was to let in the horde of undead only after the members of the church had taken their own lives and the sacrificial grounds were littered with freshly deceased bodies. The stampede of walkers would then descend upon the Pentecostal People of God and consume them in some warped inversion of Holy Communion. Somehow, in Jeremiah’s scrambled, through-the-looking-glass worldview, to be devoured by the horde would consecrate those who sacrificed themselves. Perhaps, Lilly reasoned, if Jeremiah’s fractured logic were extended, the process of communion, sacrifice, and consumption would bring the apocalypse to an end.
If only … if only … if only, Lilly finds herself thinking as she ducks behind the pilaster amid the snapping ricochets of high-velocity bullets sparking off the upper stanchions.
More of the armed congregants have followed their preacher’s lead and begun to fire at the rebels. The rest of the bystanders begin to scatter in all directions, trampling seedlings and rows of new vegetables, trying to find cover or routes of escape across the infield. The air inside the arena lights up, crackling with gunfire of all varieties, calibers, and velocities. A few of the adults rush to gather the children and yank them out of the line of fire, but the cordite and smoke and particulate rise almost instantly, turning the racetrack arena into a fogbank.
In a hail of bullets strafing the upper decks, Lilly curls into a fetal position behind the column, covering her head as debris rains down on her, forgetting that she has a gun still gripped in her right hand. She can see blurry movement in her peripheral vision on either side of her, and she catches glimpses of Bob, Speed, Matthew, Gloria, David, and Barbara each diving for cover behind cross beams, empty bleachers, and support columns. In the chaos, Lilly feels a fist of rage clenching her guts, and she rises to her feet, jacking the cocking mechanism on the .45 and peering around the edge of the column.
She sees the faint shadow of a figure wearing a suit jacket, standing near the makeshift altar, spraying bullets up at the cheap seats with an AK-47. He’s lost his mind now, she thinks, he’s finally slipped his gears and has gone completely psychotic.
“IS THIS WHAT JESUS WOULD DO?!” Lilly wails down at him as she fires off three quick bursts, two-handing the antique Smith & Wesson, the muzzle roaring loudly in her ears, making them ring and spitting blowback on her cheek. She misses the preacher by a mile.
Another volley of high-velocity rounds answers her fire, ringing off the girders above her and spraying the stands around her feet.
She jerks back behind the column, thumbing the hammer instinctively, calculating the odds in her traumatized mind. She coughs a lungful of cordite and dust. She’s fairly certain there are three, maybe four shooters down there with assault rifles. If she can coordinate her blasts with the other insurgents, maybe they can pick of
f the gunmen one by one. But what about collateral damage? Where are the children? Lilly peers around the column and gazes into the nebula of pea soup, the arena so foggy with dust and debris now it’s difficult to make out anything but bleary silhouettes of figures scattering in all directions. Every few seconds, another salvo of gunfire crackles and flickers in the dust, pinging and sparking off the bleachers.
“YOU FUCKING ARROGANT, SANCTIMONIOUS HYPOCRITES!” Lilly shrieks over the din of screams and intermittent blasts. “IS THIS WHAT JESUS WOULD DO?” An enormous blast booms next to her, and she jumps back with a start. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”
Matthew Hennesey stands in a swirling miasma of dust off her right flank, about thirty feet away, pumping shells into his shotgun’s chamber and firing one at a time, crazily, without much thought or precision, in the general direction of the altar, bellowing some string of profanities at the top of his lungs each time he fires—gangster-style—a series of words and threats that Lilly can’t quite decipher. She starts to shout something at him when a barrage of return fire slices through his midsection and sends him pinwheeling backward over empty bleachers, the shotgun flying out of his hands, a gout of bloodred tissue spewing from the exit wounds in his back as he lands supine on a bench.
“MATTHEW!” Lilly crawls on her hands and knees across the thirty-foot gap to the fallen man. “OH, SHIT! OH, GOD! MATTHEW, HOLD ON!”
The former bricklayer from Valdosta lies faceup, draped over the metal bench, blood streaming from his mouth, coughing, trying to speak, his gut ravaged with bullet wounds, his organs already starting to shut down. He’s a big man, but he seems to shrink before Lilly’s eyes as the life drains out of him. She manages to get to him right before he winks out, cradling his head.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t much help—” he says, and coughs up blood and chokes and tries to put his dying thoughts into words. “I need you to—I need you to go ahead and—I need you to—to—so I don’t—”
“Ssshhhhhh,” Lilly comforts him. Without much forethought she says, “Close your eyes, Matthew. Just close your eyes and go to sleep.”
He closes his eyes.
She puts the muzzle of the .45 against his temple and turns her face away.
* * *
David and Barbara Stern have been in rough scrapes together since the plague broke out … but nothing like this. At the moment, David is dragging her along the chain-link barrier on the south side of the arena, choking on the smoke, trying to stay low as the crackle of crossfire buzzes and zings over their heads. The only thing David has going for him at the moment is the fact that he’s one of the few people down in the fogbank of dust with a fully automatic assault rifle. On the negative side of the equation, he has lost track of his comrades, has no idea who he should be shooting at, can smell the telltale stench of the horde closing in, and can’t get his pain-in-the-ass wife to move.
“We can’t just leave them!” Barbara wriggles in his grasp, trying to tear herself away. Her gray tendrils of hair hang down across her sweat-damp face. “David, stop! We have to go back!”
“Gloria’s got the kids, Babs! In case you didn’t notice, the wall’s down, and we gotta get inside … or we’re gonna end up somebody’s dinner!”
“Goddamn it, I’m not leaving her with those kids!” Barbara finally tears herself free, pivots on her tennis shoes, and charges back toward the dust cloud.
“Why did I have to marry this woman?” David asks himself somewhat rhetorically as he starts after her. He jacks the cocking mechanism on his AR-15 and catches up with her within seconds. “Barbara, stay low! Get behind me!” He moves ahead of her. “Keep your head down and—”
A single burst of automatic gunfire from the opposite side of the arena interrupts.
The Sterns duck while errant blasts ricochet off gantries above them, but through it all they keep moving along the chain-link barrier toward the southeast corner of the infield. They can see the small cluster of little people slipping into the mouth of a vestibule fifty feet away, being led by a small, stocky woman in a visor.
Barbara calls out to her. “Gloria!”
The woman in the hat pauses, turns, and peers around the edge of the vestibule. “Get your butts in here already!” she shouts. “What the hell are you doing?”
The Sterns duck-walk another forty feet or so and then plunge into the cement passageway, both hyperventilating with nervous exhaustion. The darkness and musty smell of wet cement and the body odors of a half dozen children immediately engulf them. The high ceiling drips with condensation, a single cobweb-covered EXIT sign dark and powerless. The children—ages five through ten—huddle against one leprous wall, some of them softly moaning, trying to be brave, stifling tears.
The passageway extends another hundred feet of ancient concrete before opening out onto the dark, deserted gravel lot on the south side of the arena.
“We gotta get these munchkins somewhere safe ASAP,” Gloria Pyne announces to the Sterns, stating the obvious. Each adult can smell the darker odors on the night breezes teasing at the vestibule opening. The faint stench of rotten meat, infected tissue, and black mold has risen to the point of making eyes water and stomachs heave. The distant chorus of feral growling noises has already begun to echo over the tops of neighboring trees.
“All right, let’s take them across the—” David Stern starts to say, when all at once an enormous clap of thunderous noise comes from outside the far mouth of the passageway—a sound not unlike a massive redwood keeling over in the forest, slamming down so hard it shakes the ground—and all heads snap toward the north and the general direction of the damaged, still-burning barricade.
The air swells with a wave of chirring, snarling, watery yawping noises.
TWENTY-SIX
The herd shambles into town from three directions—north, east, and south. If viewed from the sky, the slow-motion infestation might resemble a steady, incessant assault on a giant organism by an invading army of cancer cells. They pour through the smoky ruins of the barricade down near Folk Avenue and spread out across the train yard, bringing the infection of their stench, their yellow eyes scanning the property ravenously, arms outstretched in the darkness like those of a deadly, psychotic chorus line. They push in from the woods, entering through the blown sections of wall near the intersection of Pecan and Dogwood, seeking warm flesh, brushing against each other in their communal hunger, each and every one of them growling in unison, creating a rising drone like a great turbine engine turning faster and faster. They trample the burning, fallen segments of barricade across Durand Street and unfurl like a riptide across the vacant lots, oozing down sidewalks and pushing into the town’s square. The incredible stench spreads inklike through the darkness, invading homes through open windows, permeating the back alleys and alcoves and cul-de-sacs, the odor so powerful it clings to the skin of those few humans now scattering for cover, screaming in terror, frantically seeking shelter.
On the north edge of the town square, Speed Wilkins tries to outrun a cluster of walkers latching on to his scent, but he inadvertently gets surrounded when he takes a wrong turn at the old live oak in the center of the grassy square. He gets pinned down by three separate waves of the things converging on the square and he has only ten rounds left in his AK-47 but he still tries to shoot his way out. Big mistake. In the time it takes him to spray the leading edge of the walkers coming toward his right flank—heads erupting like rotten melons bursting, ragged figures doing the boogaloo death dance in the torchlight—he not only uses up the last of his ammunition but also gives the row of monsters coming up behind him an opportunity to reach him unscathed.
The gun clicks empty at the exact moment a huge male in a scorched, fire-ravaged hospital smock pounces from behind him and sinks its black teeth into the nape of his muscular neck. He screams and drops the useless weapon. He whirls, but it’s already too late. There are so many of them, the very act of heaving the big male off his back draws another dozen or so from the other
direction like leeches, clamping their jaws on his arms and legs and shoulder blades. He fights valiantly, but the sheer number of them—the raw inertia of their weight and volume—finally drives Speed to the ground.
At this point, three separate groups of humans pass within shooting distance of Speed as they charge across the center of town, frantically seeking refuge, firing willy-nilly at the converging horde. Jeremiah and two of his minions—Reese and Stephen—are fleeing in tandem, blasting away with small arms, when they notice Speed being devoured under the tree. The former football player lashes out blindly as the walkers feed on his legs, his throat already breached and gushing. Passing within fifty feet of the feeding frenzy, Reese pauses for one horror-stricken moment. It occurs to him that maybe he should try to intercede—maybe that would truly be the Christian thing to do—when suddenly he feels an iron-tight grip on his arm. “C’mon, Brother, he’s gone!” Jeremiah drags him away. “There’s no time, c’mon!”
As the preacher and his disciples race off into the darkness, the walkers swarm Speed, tearing into him, rooting for his organs, ripping open flesh and snapping tendons like ribbons on a package. Speed is still conscious when the second group passes within earshot.
David Stern, with his AR-15 blazing, leads the group of six children—along with Gloria and Barbara bringing up the rear—toward the shelter of the courthouse. When David sees the grisly feeding going on, he turns and yells at the kids, “Everybody look at me, eyes up here! Eyes on me, look at me!” He backs toward the courthouse as quickly as he can on his arthritic joints. “That’s good! Keep moving and keep your eyes on me!” As they vanish around the corner of the building, searching for a back way in—the front steps already crawling with walkers—the third and final group of survivors passes within view of Speed.
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 27
