He pauses and stands calmly before the swarm, as if impervious to the dangers coalescing near the hole in the barricade less than a hundred feet away. Several of the biters have reacted to the noise of the convoy and the sound of the preacher’s rich baritone voice calling out over the wind. The monsters turn, one by one, and lock their sharklike gazes on the man in black and his associates fanning out on either side of the lot.
Jeremiah calmly surveys the southeast corner of Woodbury and the throngs gathered inside the gap in the wall, and he’s about to give the order to fire … when he frowns. He clearly remembers two massive semitrucks parked grille to grille across the huge gaping opening in the barricade—the makeshift castle gate. Where the hell are they? And something else is bothering him: The configuration of the wall seems to have changed.
More of the walkers have started to shamble toward him, sniffing him and his men, locking on to them like ravenous dogs on the hunt, drooling and snarling wetly, closing the distance to fifty feet or so. Jeremiah stares at the street corner just inside the break in the barricade, and he notices that somebody has moved the wall, perhaps recently, and most definitely hurriedly. He can see the marks on the pavement, and the new boards shored up against the weathered planks of the original wall. It doesn’t occur to him that there could be a safe area behind this hastily repositioned section of barricade spanning a square block between Dogwood Lane and Jones Mill Road. It doesn’t register immediately because he smells the encroaching wave of dead and sees the walkers coming toward him—now only thirty feet away.
He decides it’s time to clear this town for good, clear it in the name of the Lord.
* * *
Crouching down in the rancid darkness of the tributary, the air buzzing with the moaning of the dead, Lilly Caul feels her soul sinking into the primordial sediment beneath her, draining out of her as she holds the limp form to her chest, stroking the dead man’s hair, cradling the back of his skull as though he were a sick child.
She can still detect the faintest whiff of Juicy Fruit gum radiating off the body—that sickeningly sweet, powdery candy smell—just beneath the pervasive stench of mortified flesh, and this breaks Lilly’s heart. It’s as though Bob Stookey’s life force stubbornly refuses to relinquish this realm. In the form of a stale piece of Wrigley’s chewing gum still lodged somewhere in the man’s mouth, Bob’s essence holds on long past his death. Lilly’s tears trace the edges of her cheeks. As hot and bitter as scalding vinegar, they soak the edges of Bob’s filthy chambray shirt.
Lilly’s right hand slowly moves down to her right thigh. “I’m so, so, so, so, so, so, so sorry, Bob.… We could have made this town work.”
She feels the tiny, nubby beavertail grip of her bowie knife. She closes her eyes and wills her hand to wrap around the knife’s hilt. The webbing between her thumb and forefinger presses against the handle as she slowly, reluctantly draws it out of its sheath. Her other hand remains on the back of Bob’s head, gently cradling his skull. She discreetly lifts the blade.
“I love you, Old Hoss,” she whispers into his ear, tenderly kissing a hairy earlobe. Her voice is drowned out by the churning, rasping chorus of growls rising up behind the barrier of chain link twenty feet away.
With one hard, sharp thrust, she drives the tip of the blade into the back of the man’s skull between the cords of his neck, never once breaking her embrace, never once pulling away from his ear.
The blade sinks at least six inches into his brain.
* * *
Jeremiah gazes up at the darkening sky, takes a deep, girding breath, turns, and starts to give the order to clear the walkers when he hears a strange sound.
A voice coming from behind him, emanating from the heart of the swarm, belonging to a living person, piercing the din: “NOW!—FIRE!”
Jeremiah whirls around just in time to see the four walkers leading the pack suddenly throw off their tattered overcoats and bile-spattered rags.
The preacher stares, paralyzed with shock, his gun still gripped at his side as he utters under his breath, “What has Satan wrought…?”
The four lead walkers reveal themselves to be living humans camouflaged in the garb of the dead, covered with gruesome muck, their scents drowned by layers of death-stench harvested from a corpse. Each of them is holding an assault-style rifle. Jeremiah manages to raise his Glock and get off a single shot before diving for cover under the RV.
The preacher’s round goes high and to the left, pinging off a high-tension wire.
Then things begin to transpire very quickly, over the course of a single minute and a half, all of it practically happening at once, beginning with Harold Staubach’s answering the blast with a quick controlled burst from his Bushmaster, lighting up the air between him and the other men, strafing the side of the RV with a necklace of sparks as the preacher rolls under the camper’s massive chassis. Some of the other caravan members immediately lunge behind open truck doors and fenders, instinctively taking cover, while others try to get off shots before leaping behind vehicles. Within seconds, the four faux monsters unleash hellfire. David Stern empties a Tec-9 machine pistol on full auto directly at Chester Gleason. The grizzled laborer tries to return fire with his HK416, but the weapon jams, and the volley of armor-piercing rounds perforates his chest and his left shoulder and his neck, sending him staggering backward in an envelope of blood mist. He’s dead before he hits the ground. At the same time, Norma Sutters stands on David’s right flank, firing her AR-15 wildly, not really presenting much of a threat, but howling a spontaneous war cry supercharged by her skills as a gospel choir director. Fifty yards away, Stephen Pembry leaps out of his tow truck with an old M16, and tries to fire, but before he can squeeze off a single shot, one of Norma’s stray rounds strikes him full-on between the eyes—the definition of a lucky shot—and sends him staggering backward, his skull snapping back in a fog of pink spray, the impact knocking him to the ground, where he will lie and expire over the remaining seconds of the skirmish. Miles Littleton fares a little better in the aiming department, as he brooms the area with a fusillade of .308 caliber bullets from his AK-47, some of the rounds finding the two gunmen crouched behind pickups thirty yards due west. The armor-piercing bullets penetrate the flimsy layers of Detroit steel, fiberglass, and upholstery, hitting each gunman dead center, perforating lungs and carotid arteries and sending the men flinging backward, arms pinwheeling into the oblivion of weeds and organ failure. By this point, the preacher has attempted to return fire from under the enormous Winnebago, but his 9mm pistol is woefully outmatched, its fire rate far too low to make a dent in the attack. The three avengers are now simply spraying the general vicinity with uncontrolled volleys—spitting centipedes of dust and debris off the ground, strafing the sides of vehicles, leaving chains of divots and tufts in the metal, pinging and ringing off grillwork and fenders, bursting door glass, vaporizing windshields into sheets of sparkling particles that implode across dashboards and seats. Three more acolytes go down. Earl Jerico, a pear-shaped man in denim and a Braves cap, gets it in the neck and shoulder, spinning in a bloody pirouette before slamming into the side of his pickup and sliding to the ground. A skinny, tattooed former biker-for-Jesus named Thurston Breen manages to dodge the spray of high-caliber slugs as he races for cover, but absorbs a series of gut shots while trying to crawl under the chassis of his flatbed stake truck. He rolls out from under the vehicle and curls into a fetal ball and dies more slowly than the rest. Many of the stray ricochets and errant blasts go into the oncoming surge of walkers, but it doesn’t take long for the mass of reanimated corpses to overrun the vacant lot—despite the crossfire turning the air into a cloudbank of blue smoke—most of the dead flowing in from the adjacent streets and meadows. The four disguised guardians of Woodbury now slam new magazines into their weapons and begin to back away slowly—according to plan—as the oncoming horde engulfs the lot. Chester Gleason’s body attracts a large number of the early arrivals, at least a dozen or more of
the creatures descending upon his remains, their hunched forms rooting down into him for the truffles of his still-warm organs. The feeding frenzy intensifies as more of the things flood the battleground and find the other victims of the gunfight: the wounded, the fallen. David Stern orders his fellow counterassailants back into the safe zone behind the wall at Dogwood Street—his voice hollering above the din: “HURRY!—HURRY!—HURRY!” They all turn and trot after him. Harold Staubach doesn’t see the glint of gunmetal fifty yards behind him, sticking out from under the Winnebago, as Jeremiah takes aim. Nobody sees the preacher fire off a single shot until it’s too late. Harold is approaching the safe zone when the solitary round rips through his shoulder, throwing him off his feet and sprawling him across the asphalt road. Almost instantly, without a word, two things happen in response: Miles Littleton opens up on the camper, firing three controlled bursts from his AK, driving the preacher back under the RV, and David and Norma simultaneously grab hold of Harold by the shoulders and start to drag him toward the fence at Dogwood Street. But they’re too late.
The street before them crawls with walkers, drawn to the commotion of the firefight, so many that David freezes practically in mid-stride, surveying the ragged mob of the dead weaving toward him, drunk with hunger and kill-lust, arms reaching, and yells at the top of this lungs: “PLAN B!—PLAN B!”
* * *
For a long while, in the noisy darkness of the tributary, Lilly remains in a desperate embrace with Bob’s remains, the knife still buried to the hilt in his skull. Her eyes have welled up again as the warmth of his cerebro-spinal fluids continues to gush around the knife’s hilt and run down her arm and under her sleeve. She’s soaked with it. She hears a slight release of something that sounds like a faint puff of air, but Lilly can’t tell if it’s coming from the wound or from Bob’s lungs. His body remains limp and lifeless in her arms.
The noise of the dead rumbles and chugs nearby, drowning out the faint and distant crackle of gunfire. It feels to Lilly as though a storm is gathering inside her as she gently lays the body back down on the tunnel floor. She positions the head so it’s facing straight up. The puddle of blood beneath it has spread like black motor oil across the cracked hardpack floor. She carefully rests Bob’s hands on his midsection.
Ancient Egyptians buried their dead with family pets, tools, scrolls, food, even coins for the afterlife, as though the deceased were simply embarking on a trip. Lilly digs in her pocket.
She puts her lucky coin—an old Buffalo nickel that her father, Everett, had given her—on Bob’s eyelid. She leans down and softly kisses the bridge of his nose. She touches his cheek one last time, feeling the storm front moving in from deep within her core. Black clouds of rage start to migrate up through her, pulling a dark shade down across her field of vision.
Rising to her feet, she gazes back down the tributary and sees the swarm—now at least a hundred or more squeezed into the main conduit—pressing against the waffle of metal links. Their wormy gray faces puckering with hunger, their milky eyes wide with bloodlust, they drool and sputter and moan and try to squeeze their blackened fingers through the two-inch-square triangles. The Cyclone fencing barely holds, creaking with the pressure of their collective weight. It looks as though the barrier is about to snap.
Lilly reaches down to Bob’s holster and pulls his .357. She snaps open the center and sees only two rounds remaining in the cylinder. She feels along the underside of his belt and finds the tiny leather pouch with the speed loader. She pulls it free and sticks it in her pocket. She digs some more and finds his lighter and a roll of safety fuse. She removes his watch and pockets it. The anger fuels her now, courses through her veins, galvanizes her, gets her up and moving. She rises to her feet, and walks across the tunnel to the chain-link barrier, and she stands there for a moment.
Her close proximity stirs the creatures into frenzies. The growls rise into gravelly ululations, like the howls of hyenas, the cold eyes widening, teeth gnashing frantically to get a piece of her. Some of them push harder, warping the chain-link fencing inward to its absolute limit. The odor is incredibly horrible.
Lilly stares impassively at them. She comes to within inches of their moldering mouths. She stares into their empty eyes. The rage-storm inside Lilly has begun to unleash torrents of adrenaline, lightning and thunder rumbling, squalls of emotion erupting in her veins.
The bundle of dynamite sits on the floor near the chain-link barrier.
Lilly pulls the detonator cord and the roll of safety fuse from her pocket, never once taking her eyes off the creatures trying to squeeze through the screen of fencing and get to her tender flesh. She goes over to the explosives, picks them up, and pushes the detcord into the spongy end-cap—her gaze still riveted on the walkers. She sits the bundle of dynamite on the floor in front of them as though setting down a food dish for a family pet.
“There ya go,” she murmurs, her voice sounding foreign to her ears. It sounds thick and coarse with fury, the voice of a gladiator about to enter the ring. “Chew on that for a while.”
She turns and starts on her way eastward, carefully unfurling the fifty feet or so of safety fuse as she goes along, hastening toward the sewer manhole under Riggins Ferry Road.
* * *
Soaked in sweat, heart racing, Jeremiah breathes in and out through his mouth, the stench so thick it threatens to strangle him. He lies prone on the cold ground beneath the greasy chassis of the RV, still holding his 9mm pistol. Chaos surrounds the vehicle. All his followers are gone. Bodies are strewn across the lot like driftwood. But the Good Lord is still with Jeremiah. Fate always wins out, and it will prevail today if the preacher can just manage to get out of this mess.
He looks to his immediate left and sees through the reeds of wild grass and stiff-legged walkers brushing against the camper a small swarm still hovering over Chester Gleason’s body, sucking the marrow from what’s left of him.
Jeremiah lets out a pained sigh, his breath blowing dust off the ground next to his lips. He looks to his right and sees countless ragged legs, some of them sticking out of dresses, looking spindly and cadaverous as they trundle aimlessly back and forth. Intermittently, the preacher catches glimpses of his other disciples—half of Reese Lee Hawthorn over here, his remains spilling its purple, glistening delicacies for the swarm; Stephen Pembry over there, reduced to a pile of partially clothed guts—and the sight of such carnage makes Jeremiah twitch with cognitive dissonance. Is this what God wants? Is this what awaits Jeremiah himself in this everlasting darkness of the Rapture?
He manages to twist around and gaze down the length of the Winnebago’s undercarriage toward its tail end.
He blinks. Is he hallucinating? He starts crawling toward the daylight at the rear of the RV, his gaze locked on a gap in the throng. He reaches the rear phalanx of exhaust pipes and trailer hitch and looks out beyond the adjacent switchyard of petrified train tracks and ancient directional signage. He sees a clear opening—an empty corridor of space between two halves of the multitude—where the mob of walkers has randomly separated.
On the far side of this opening sits a small building that looks relatively secure, its windows boarded or barred. If Jeremiah can slip unnoticed through the momentary break in the herd, he might be able to get to that building and gain entrance before he too is reduced to bloody fodder. His heart speeds up. He sucks in a searing hot breath.
Then he crawls out from under the RV, springs to his feet, and charges as fast as he can toward the stationhouse, where the children secretly huddle in the shadows, trying so desperately to be quiet.
TWENTY-ONE
Barbara Stern sits on the floor behind the dusty shelving units at the northeast corner of the litter-strewn stationhouse, bracing herself on the shelf legs as though waiting out a tornado. The kids sit on each of her flanks, trying to concentrate on their coloring books and sketch pads and Little Golden Books like The Poky Little Puppy and The Little Red Hen while the world is turned upside down ou
tside their boarded windows.
Every time a burst of gunfire crackles in the distance, or a sonic boom from a shotgun lights up the sky, or a cluster of walkers brushes up against the wood-frame outer walls, the older kids twitch and flinch, while the younger ones whimper under their breaths as though they’ve been kicked in the gut. Barbara keeps whispering for them to relax, it’s going to be okay, they have a good plan and Lilly and Bob know what they’re doing, but her nerves are as raw and exposed as those of the children. She grips those shelf legs with white-knuckle pressure at the boom of each salvo, holding on so tightly that the molded steel has begun to make bloody indentations on her palms.
She keeps thinking she can identify the make and model of each gun as she hears its blast, and that she doesn’t hear the blat of David’s Tec-9, and this is driving her crazy. The machine pistol that they found a few weeks ago in the storage rooms of the Meriwether County National Guard Depot has a distinctive sound: a sort of shrill metallic rattle, like a baby howitzer. She hasn’t heard that noise for many minutes, and her brain keeps going to the worst-case scenario, flashing on images of David lying bullet-riddled and torn apart by walkers, and this makes her grip the shelf legs even tighter.
In fact, she’s trying to drive these very images from her brain when she hears a noise coming from across the room that sets her teeth on edge and makes her flesh rash with goose bumps.
“Don’t move!” she hisses at the children, pulling herself up and switching off the safety on her .44 Bulldog. The gun is extremely heavy for a snub-nosed revolver, and it seems to have gotten heavier over the last few hours. In addition, the trigger action is stiff, hard to pull. But at the moment, Barbara feels as though she could crack the grip in half with her bare hand.
The noise of someone trying to force the knob on the side door rattles again across the room, and Barbara assumes the shooting position as she approaches, gun in both hands, finger on the trigger pad, shoulders squared while she blows a long tendril of gray hair from her face. She makes sure to hold her zaftig body at an angle to the door so her right shoulder will absorb much of the recoil from the massive handgun.
The Walking Dead: Invasion Page 24
