She peers into the trees ahead of them and sees the faint haze of smoke building in the woods. The air, hectic with bugs, smells of burned circuitry and scorched metal. The wreckage is still a few hundred yards off in the distant pines. The faint crackle of fire can be heard, barely audible above the wind rustling in the treetops.
Off to the right, maybe twenty yards ahead of Lilly, Martinez has taken the lead, weaving through the undergrowth, slicing through foliage with his bowie knife. On a parallel path to the left, Gus trudges along, his hound-dog eyes surveying the shadows for biters, his machete on his shoulder. The sky is barely visible above him, blocked by skeins of tree limbs and vines.
Lilly starts to say something else when a figure appears in front of Gus.
Lilly halts, her gun coming up fast, her breath seizing up in her throat. She sees Gus raise the machete. The large male walker, clad in tattered overalls, has its back turned to him, teetering on dead legs, its head cocked toward the crash site like a dog hearing an ultrasonic whistle. Gus sneaks up behind it.
The machete comes down fast, the blade making a crunching noise as it embeds itself in the gristly dura of the walker’s cranium. Fluids gush, making watery sluicing noises in the silence of the woods, as the walker collapses. Lilly hardly has a chance to breathe again when another noise draws her attention to the right.
Fifteen feet away, Martinez lashes out at another stray walker—a spindly female with gray hair matted like spider webs—probably a former farmer’s wife skulking around the brush. His knife impales the back of her head above the neck cords, putting her down with the speed of a silent embolism. She never saw it coming.
Letting out an involuntary sigh of relief, lowering her pistol, Lilly realizes that the walkers are currently mesmerized by the sights and sounds of the crash.
Martinez pauses to glance over his shoulder at the others. “Everybody good?” he says in a low voice, almost a stage whisper.
Nods from everyone. And then they’re moving again, slowly but steadily forward, into the denser trees and fog-bound shadows. Martinez motions for them to hurry up. The ground is spongy and soggy beneath their feet, slowing them down. The shadows close in, the odors of scorched metal and burning fuel engulfing them, the crackling noises rising.
Lilly feels nauseous, her skin prickling with nerves. She senses Austin’s eyes on her. “Do you think maybe you could stop staring at me?”
“It’s not my fault you’re so hot,” he says with that same nervous smirk.
She shakes her head in dismay. “Can you just try and focus?”
“I am totally focused, believe me,” he says, still gripping his gun with that fake cop-show grip as they continue on.
* * *
Less than a hundred yards from the crash site, they come to a washout—a bug-infested, swampy clearing blocking their path—the bog crisscrossed by enormous deadfall logs. With silent hand motions, Martinez directs them to use the logs as bridges. Gus goes first, crabbing across the largest deadfall. Martinez follows. Lilly goes next, and Austin brings up the rear. As he reaches the other side, Austin feels a tugging sensation on his jeans. The others have already crossed, and are now trudging toward the clearing. Austin pauses. At first he thinks he’s caught on a piece of bark, but then he looks down.
Decomposing hands rise out of the marsh, clawing at his pants leg.
He lets out a cry and fumbles with his gun as dead fingers clutch at him, pulling him downward. Rising out of the mire, the slimy top half of a moldering creature goes for his legs. Filmed in black gunk, its hairless skull unidentifiable as man or woman, its eyes as white and opaque as light bulbs, it snaps its black turtlelike mouth on the creaky hinges of a ruined jaw.
Austin gets off a single muffled gunshot—the silencer spitting sparks—but the bullet misses its mark. The blast grazes the top of the swamp biter’s head, and then plunks harmlessly into the swamp.
Fifty feet away, Lilly hears the blast. She spins around, reaching for her guns. But her legs tangle and she slips on the mud. She sprawls to the weeds, the guns flying out of her hands.
Austin tries to get a second shot off but the swamp biter is going for his leg. It rises out of the mire like a slimy black whale, its jaws unhinging and emitting a noxious growl. Austin jerks back involuntarily—a high-pitched cry blurting out of him—and the gun slips out of his hand. He kicks at the creature’s mouth, the toe of his boot getting caught in the mouthful of rotting black teeth and putrid drool. The swamp biter clamps down.
Lilly crawls toward her guns. Martinez and Gus, by this point, have both whirled toward the commotion, but it’s too late to intercede. The giant dripping biter is about to chew through Austin’s Timberland hiking boot, and Austin is fumbling madly for something in his pocket. Finally Austin gets his hand around the road flare.
At the last possible instant—before the swamp biter is able to break the skin of Austin’s foot—the young man sparks the flare and rams it into the biter’s left eye. The creature rears back suddenly, releasing its hold and tossing its ragged head back in a fountain of sparks.
Austin stares for a moment, mesmerized by the sight of flames inside the rotten cavity of the biter’s skull. The left eye glows for one horrible instant, shining with the intensity of a caution light. The biter stiffens in the muck. The back of its head suddenly bursts, spewing flames like the nozzle of a welding torch.
The left eye pops like a bulb overloading, spitting hot tissue on Austin … and then the creature sinks into the black void.
Austin shudders, wiping his face and watching for a moment, hypnotized by the spectacle of the biter sinking back into oblivion … until the only things that remain are bubbles floating on the surface of the swamp and a dull flickering glow under the muck. Eventually Austin manages to tear his gaze away. He finds his gun and catches his breath.
“Nicely done,” Lilly says with a grudging softness in her voice as she makes her way across the log bridge. “Here … gimme your hand.”
She helps Austin to his feet, holding him steady on the slime-slick log. He gets his breath back, swallows the shock, and shoves his gun back in his belt. He looks into her eyes. “That was close.” He manages a shaky grin. “That thing could have easily gotten you.”
“Yeah … thank God you were around,” she says, a smile on her lips now despite the beating of her heart.
“LILLY!”
The booming voice of Martinez intrudes on the moment, drawing Lilly’s attention back over her shoulder.
Thirty yards away, through a break in the trees, in a pall of acrid, black smoke, Martinez and Gus have found the crash site.
“Come on, pretty boy,” Lilly says, gritting her teeth with nervous tension. “We got work to do.”
* * *
The chopper lies on its side in a dry creek bed, spewing smoke from its breached fuel tank. No victims in sight. Lilly approaches cautiously, coughing, waving the fumes from her face. She sees Martinez approaching the cockpit, crouching down low, holding his hand over his mouth. “Be careful!” Lilly pulls her guns as she hollers at Martinez. “You don’t know what’s in there!”
Martinez touches the hatch release and burns himself, jerking his hand back. “Son of a BITCH!”
Lilly edges closer. The smoke, already clearing, begins to part like a curtain to reveal the soft, scorched ground around the crash site. It dawns on Lilly that the pilot must have aimed for the soft ground of the stream bed, the surrounding leaf-matted earth now torn up by the violence of the crash. The main rotor, detached and lying on the ground twenty feet away, looks as though it’s tied in a knot.
“Gus! Austin! Keep your eyes on the periphery!” Martinez indicates the adjacent wall of white pines higher up the bank. “Noise is gonna draw a swarm!”
Gus and Austin whirl toward the woods and raise their muzzles at the darkness behind the trees.
Lilly feels the heat on her face as she approaches the wreckage. The fuselage lies on its right side, the tail fin and re
ar rotor horribly bent. One skid is torn off as though from the force of a giant can opener. The canopy and hatch windows are cracked and either steamed up from hyperventilating passengers or clouded over from the smoke. Regardless of the causes, though, it’s impossible to see inside the cockpit. The soot has covered most of the markings on the bulwark and chassis, but Lilly sees a series of letters along the tail boom. She sees a W and maybe an R … and that’s about it.
Martinez raises his hand suddenly as the noise of the fire dies down enough for them to hear the muffled cries coming from inside the cockpit. Martinez duckwalks closer.
Lilly moves in with her Rugers up, cocked and ready to rock. “Just be careful!”
Martinez takes a deep breath, and then climbs onto the side of the fuselage. Lilly moves closer, aiming her twin .22s at the hatch. Balancing on the battered steel frame, Martinez pulls his bandanna off and wraps it around the release handle. Lilly hears a high-pitched voice. “—outta here—!”
Martinez yanks.
The door snaps, squeaking open on shrieking hinges, releasing a puff of smoke and the tattered form of a frantic woman. Clad in a torn down jacket and scarf, stippled in blood, she bursts out of the cockpit, coughing and screaming, “—GET ME OUTTA HERE—!!”
Lilly lowers her guns, realizing that the woman has not yet turned. Martinez pulls the victim out of the death trap. The woman writhes in his arms, her bloodless face a mask of agony. One of her legs is badly burned, the fabric of her jeans blackened to a crisp, glistening with pus and blood. She holds her left arm against her tummy, the fracture at the elbow bulging through the sleeve of her sweater.
“Gimme a hand, Lilly!”
They carry the woman away from the wreckage and lower her to the ground. She looks to be in her late thirties, maybe early forties. Fair skinned, dishwater-blond hair, squirming in pain, her face wet with tears, she babbles hysterically, “You don’t understand! We have to—!”
“It’s okay, it’s all right,” Lilly says to her, gently brushing her damp hair from her face. “We can help you, we have a doctor not far from here.”
“Mike—! He’s still—!” Her eyelids flutter, her body spasming from the pain, her eyes rolling back in her head from the shock. “We can’t leave—we have to—have to get him out—we have to—!!”
Lilly touches her cheek, the flesh as clammy and slimy as an oyster. “Try to stay calm.”
“—we have to bury him … it’s something I … before he—” The woman’s head lolls to the side, and she sinks into unconsciousness with the suddenness of a candle flame snuffing out.
Lilly looks up at Martinez.
“The pilot,” Martinez utters, meeting Lilly’s gaze with a hard look.
By now the smoke has cleared and the heat has dwindled, and both Gus and Austin have returned to gaze over their shoulders. Martinez rises to his feet, and he goes back to the wreck. Lilly follows. They climb up onto one of the mangled skids and boost themselves up enough to see into the open hatchway. The odor of charred meat assaults their senses as they gaze inside.
The pilot is dead. In the hazy, sparking enclosure, the man named Mike sits slumped in his scorched leather bomber jacket—still harnessed to his seat—the entire left side of his body blackened and disfigured from the in-flight fire. The fingers of one gloved hand have melted and fused to the control stick. And just for an instant, staring into that hellish cockpit, Lilly gets the feeling this guy was a hero. He brought the craft down in the spongy cleavage of the creek, saving the life of his passenger—his wife, his girlfriend?
“Too late to do anything for this guy,” Martinez murmurs next to her.
“Obviously,” she says, lowering herself back to the ground. She glances across the clearing, where Austin now kneels by the unconscious woman, feeling her neck for a pulse. Gus nervously keeps an eye on the woods. Lilly wipes her face. “But we should probably honor her request, right?”
Martinez climbs down and looks around the clearing, the smoke wafting away on the wind. He wipes his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Boss!” Gus calls out from the edge of the woods. Troubling sounds from the surrounding forest drift on the wind. “We ought to be thinking about gettin’ the hell outta here pretty soon.”
“We’re coming!” Martinez turns to Lilly. “We’ll take the woman back.”
“But what about—?”
Martinez lowers his voice. “You know what the Governor’s gonna do with this guy, right?”
Lilly’s spine tingles with rage. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Governor.”
“Lilly—”
“This guy saved this woman’s life.”
“Listen to me. We’re gonna have a hell of a time just getting her back through these woods.”
Lilly lets out an anguished sigh. “And you don’t think the Governor’s gonna find out we left the pilot?”
Martinez turns away from her and spits angrily. Wipes his mouth. Thinks it over.
“Boss!” Gus calls out again, sounding exceedingly nervous.
“I said we’re coming, goddamnit!” Martinez stares at the scorched ground, thinking and agonizing … until the whole issue becomes a foregone conclusion.
SIX
They get back to the truck just as the sun is starting to set, the shadows of the forest lengthening around them. Exhausted from the trip back through the hollow, where they encountered an increasing number of walkers, they enlist the help of David and Barbara in order to drag the bodies—each one tied to a makeshift stretcher of birch logs and willow switches—quickly toward the truck’s rear hatch. They lift them one at a time into the crowded cargo bay.
“Be careful with her,” Lilly cautions as David and Barbara shove the stretcher bearing the woman between two stacks of food crates. The woman is slowly coming back around, her head lolling back and forth, her eyes fluttering. There’s not much room for extra bodies in the truck, and Barbara has to hastily rearrange the boxes and stacks of cartons in order to make space.
“She’s hurt pretty bad but she’s hanging in there,” Lilly adds as she climbs up into the cargo hold. “Wish I could say the same for the pilot.”
All heads turn toward the rear hatch as Gus and Martinez lift the dead pilot—his disfigured remains still strapped to the gurney—up and into the back of the truck. David has to make room for the corpse by shoving a stack of canned peaches against one wall, and clearing a narrow strip of corrugated floor between a tower of Hamburger Helper cartons and a half-dozen propane tanks.
David wipes his arthritic hands on his silk jacket as he gazes down at the scorched remains of the pilot. “This presents somewhat of a dilemma.”
Lilly glances over her shoulder at the open hatch, as Martinez peers into the shadowy chamber. “We need to bury him, it’s a long story.”
David stares at the cadaver. “What if he—?”
“Keep an eye on him,” Martinez orders. “If he turns on the way back, use a small-caliber round on him. We promised the lady we’d—”
“Not gonna make it!”
The sudden outburst yanks Lilly’s attention back to the woman, who writhes on the iron floor, still cocooned in willow branches, her bloodstained head drooping back and forth. Her feverish eyes are wide open, her gaze pinned to the truck’s ceiling. Her mutterings come fitfully, as though she’s talking in her sleep. “Mike, we’re south of there.… What about … what about the tower?!”
Lilly kneels next to the woman. “It’s okay, honey. You’re safe now.”
Barbara goes to the opposite corner of the hold and quickly rips the protective lid off a gallon of filtered water. She returns to the injured woman with the jug. “Here, sweetheart … take a sip.”
The woman on the stretcher cringes at a wave of pain that ripples through her, as the water dribbles into her mouth. She coughs and tries to speak. “—Mike—is he—?”
“Shit!”
Austin’s voice rings out from the rear as he struggles to climb into the
truck. Shooting nervous glances over his shoulder, he sees a pack of walkers lurching out of the woods—about twenty yards away and closing—at least ten of them, all large males, their hungry mouths working busily as they approach. Their milky eyes gleam in the dusky light. Austin climbs on board with his gun still gripped in his sweaty hand.
“GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!”
The slamming of the cab doors makes everybody jump. Gears grind. The chassis shudders and vibrates beneath them. Lilly holds on to the crates as the truck heaves into reverse in a whirlwind of fumes and dust.
Through the flapping rear tarp, Lilly sees the walkers looming.
The truck barrels directly into the dead, knocking them over like bowling pins, making wet thuds beneath the massive wheels. The truck bumps over them as the engine whines noisily, and the tires spin for a moment in the grease of rotten organs.
The wheels gain purchase on the pavement, Gus slams it into drive, and the truck rumbles out of there, fishtailing down the two-lane in the direction they had come. Lilly looks back down at the woman with the dishwater hair. “Just hang in there, sweetie, you’re gonna be okay … gonna get you to a doctor.”
Barbara tips more water across the woman’s chapped, burned lips.
Lilly kneels closer. “My name’s Lilly, and this is Barbara. Can you tell me your name?”
The woman utters something inaudible, her voice drowned out by the roar of the truck.
Lilly leans closer. “Say it again, honey. Tell me your name.”
“Chrisss … Chris-tina,” the woman manages through clenched teeth.
“Christina, don’t worry … everything’s gonna be okay … you’re gonna make it.” Lilly strokes the woman’s sweat-damp brow. Shivering, twitching on the stretcher, the woman takes shallow, quick breaths. Her eyes close to half mast, her lips moving, forming a silent, pained litany that nobody can hear. Lilly smooths her matted hair. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” Lilly keeps muttering, more to herself than to the victim.
The truck rumbles down the two-lane, the rear flap snapping in the wind.
Lilly glances out the back and sees the tall pines outside, passing in a blur. The setting sun behind the treetops causes a strobelike effect that is almost hypnotic. Lilly wonders for a brief moment if everything will indeed be okay. Maybe Woodbury has stabilized now. Maybe the Governor’s Machiavellian methods will actually keep them safe, keep a lid on the place. She wants to believe in Woodbury. Maybe that’s the key … simply believing. Maybe that alone will get them through.…
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