“No kidding.”
“Seriously, he was a self-taught intellectual, read all the time. Drove an eighteen-wheeler most of his life, listened to books on tape.”
“Sounds like a good man.”
“He was.” Gloria keeps walking, but wipes her mouth at the thought of her old man. “He was kind, and he was kinda shy, but he knew a little bit about a lot of stuff.”
They walk in silence for a few moments until Bob says, “Your dad … is he…?”
“He passed before all this shit went down, thank God. I was an only child. My mom was in a nursing home in Savannah at the time of the outbreak. Her heart didn’t hold out when it all went south. I buried her myself in a potter’s field up to Hinesville.” She swallows the unexpected wave of grief and sorrow as she walks. “Not the happiest moment of my life, I’ll be honest with ya.”
“Sorry to hear that, Glo.”
She waves it off. “It’s a miracle I made it to Woodbury. Told myself I was gonna go out west, go to the mountains, be a hermit.” She laughs. “Hitchhiking ain’t the best mode of travel these days, I can tell you that.” A beat of silence passes, boot steps crunching, the rattle of her lamp. “How did you end up there, Bob?”
“I was traveling with—” He cocks his head, raises his Coleman, sees something in the darkness ahead of them. “Wait … hold on.”
They come to a sudden halt. Bob gently puts a hand on Gloria’s arm. She doesn’t move. About fifty feet away from them, blocking their path, shimmering in the pool of light from the lantern, sits a small coal car. They cautiously approach. The little conveyance is about the size of a baby buggy, covered with mold and cobwebs, petrified, its wooden wheels almost fossilized with age. The closer they get, the more Gloria realizes the thing is covered in blood.
Bob pauses next to it and takes a closer look. Gloria leans in, holding her lamp high. “Is that blood?”
Bob wipes a fingertip across the surface of the carrier. “Sure is. Looks old.”
“How old, d’ya think?”
“Hard to tell. Not ancient old. Not decades … but maybe a year or two.”
He looks down. Gloria follows the pool of light as it sweeps across a pair of rails embedded like hardened arteries in the dirt floor of the tunnel.
“We’re definitely in the neighborhood of that mining office,” Bob ventures. “According to the map, should be right above us.” He follows the rails. “Stay close.”
Gloria does as he says, following along on his heels. Her hackles go up immediately. She feels that familiar tingling sensation at the base of her spine—she gets it every time something seems wrong—but she ignores it. She trusts Bob implicitly.
Shuffling along behind him, close enough to touch the fringe of thick dark hair hanging over his collar, she realizes that she actually yearns to do just that: touch his hair, run her fingers through those beautiful, gray-flecked black locks. Immediately she shoves the urge back down her throat, telling herself it’s merely professional curiosity, an occupational hazard of being a lifelong employee of a beauty parlor.
For over twenty years, she had been the go-to colorist and cut-girl at the Curl Up and Dye Salon in the sprawling metropolis of Portersville, Georgia. She long ago lost count of how many heads she tinted, teased, and trimmed—but now that the world has hung up its going-out-of-business sign and the members of the post-plague society have let their hair go, she longs to get her hands on a pair of clippers.
On the other hand, Gloria realizes that she might as well face the fact that her interest in the texture of Bob Stookey’s greasy mop-top is more than mere muscle memory. She has a thing for the man. But in this day and age, having a thing for somebody can lead to major problems—it can break your heart, or worse, it can get you killed.
“Okay … here we go,” Bob murmurs from about a half step ahead of her, and the sound of his voice sends a cold current down Gloria’s spine. She sees his hand shoot up, and then, in the light of their lanterns, she sees what he sees.
“Holy crap.” She stops, and stares, and swallows hard as she registers the fact that the man slumped against the wall of the tunnel thirty feet away is missing the top of his head. He also seems to be missing his lower jaw. Dressed in the standard filthy dungarees and work shirt of a coal miner, with a blossom of inky-dark arterial spray visible across the tunnel wall above him, he still holds his suicide pistol in one cold, dead hand at his side.
As they move closer, the lantern light illuminates two more dead miners. One lies about twenty-five away from the suicide, the other is slumped against the opposite wall. Each of these men bears the grisly trauma of a point-blank head-shot wound. Bob crouches down next to the suicide victim with the quiet, world-weary authority of a seasoned homicide detective. “Looks like this one put the others outta their misery, then turned his own lights out.”
Gloria pauses next to one of the other bodies and shines her light down at the gruesome remains. The maggots have long since had their fill of these poor gentlemen, and have left behind gray sunken shells inside the coal miner garb. Gloria shivers. “Looks like this happened a while back.”
Bob looks around. He sees a set of iron steps embedded in the wall, and shines his light up at the top of the stairs, where a huge funnel of dirt slopes down through a manhole-style opening, blocking off entrance or exit. “Can’t tell if they got trapped down here and then offed themselves when they realized it was a lost cause, or…”
He pauses, as though seeing the futility in the act of finishing the thought. Gloria looks up at the cave-in above the stairs. “Or they shut themselves off on purpose.” She looks back at the pistol, frozen for eternity in the dead man’s hand. “The outbreak happened about a year and a half ago … right? So this all coulda gone down right around that time.” She sniffs, her allergies acting up. “You think the gun is still operational?”
Bob goes over and pries the .38 caliber police special from the dead hand. He sees old, faded, congealed candy wrappers on the floor around the man, a broken pencil, wads of paper smashed into the dirt. He checks the cylinder and finds three rounds remaining.
Gloria finds a shovel lying against the wall near the other two men. “This might come in handy,” she says.
“Let me see that for a second.”
Bob takes the shovel and walks over to the steps, prodding the wall of earth descending from the ceiling, extruding through the manhole. Granules of sandy dirt avalanche down, the cave-in shifting above him. “Stand back, Glo,” he says with a grunt as he stabs at the earth. “Looks like the moisture has loosened it up.”
A minute later, after Bob has grunted and groaned his way through several feet of earth, the cave-in gives, and he jumps out of the way as dirt starts flowing down the slope in one great heaving avalanche. The tunnel fills with dust, an acrid fog bank that drives Gloria back against the far wall. She coughs and coughs, and holds the collar of her pink Hello Kitty sweatshirt over her mouth and nostrils.
When the black dust finally clears, the steps become visible, leading up into the darkness on the other side of the manhole.
Bob looks at Gloria. “I would say ‘Ladies first,’ but I probably should take point.”
“After you, Bob.”
She motions at the steps, and Bob gives her a nod. He pulls his Glock, clips the lantern to his belt, and starts up the risers.
Gloria watches as Bob’s upper body vanishes into the ceiling. Then she follows him up, neither of them yet comprehending the fact that the presence of the shovel indicates not only that the miners were able to get out, but that they wanted to be cut off …
… or wanted to cut off whatever it was that was in the room above them.
ELEVEN
Lilly and Tommy destroy three more walkers on their way across the switchyard, part of the same rail line that runs through Woodbury. Tommy runs in the lead position, clutching the crowbar, and Lilly brings up the rear, running backward, firing controlled blasts with her silencer on, first at the re
mains of a brakeman, then at a former yard worker, and finally at another dead engineer. They hustle past water towers, station buildings, warehouses, shipping containers, and flatbed train cars lined up along loading docks under tall, dark, powerless streetlights. Lilly deftly hops over track after track, each of which radiate across the weed-whiskered ground like the spokes of a giant wagon wheel.
Eighteen months of neglect has turned the switchyard into a swamp of standing water, bugs, and rust; and creeping kudzu and vines of ironweed slather every inch of the place. They close in on the small two-story frame building on the northeast corner of the property that faces the main track and parking lot (Lilly figures the abandoned passenger station is the best bet for harvesting supplies), and she begins to scan the place for a way in. The tall louvered windows are locked up tight and boarded, but there are numerous entryways, cloisters, and service doors. They reach the loading dock, leap onto the platform, hurry over to a closed garage door, and try unsuccessfully to open it. They move to an unmarked service door and find it equally stubborn, fossilized on rusty bolts and hinges.
Lilly’s internal alarm starts going off—not because she senses danger inside the building, or even around the immediate vicinity, but because she gets a faint whiff of an odor on the wind that straightens her spine. The deep, black, oily nature of the odor speaks of swarms joining swarms joining swarms. And the last thing she wants to do is get pinned down in this godforsaken train yard. She points at one of the boarded windows. “Tommy, try jimmying one of those panels off.”
The boy shuffles over to a boarded, arched window and slams the bar’s teeth into a seam. The sound of cracking, wrenching wood issues forth as Tommy Dupree puts everything he has into his levering motions. The window gives with a creak, the bar forcing open a narrow gap. Tommy pushes the slat inward far enough to allow a human body to pass—barely. Tommy goes first, squeezing into the stationhouse. Lilly follows, cursing herself for having that second Pop-Tart that morning.
She lands on a cold parquet floor, scarred with decades of scuffling shoe leather and the wobbling wheels of Pullman dollies. She takes in the cavernous room, the graffiti-stained murals, and the high, skylighted ceiling, its fixtures hectic with bats, its gantries clogged with spiderwebs and bird nests. She scans the detritus and overturned carts and trunks, the ransacked offices behind broken glass doors, the cash registers rifled behind ticket booths, the cluttered box office counters strewn with coin wrappers and old canceled tickets. The place has been picked over. Lilly’s heart sinks. In her dreams, she enters places such as this and finds cornucopias, treasure troves, steaming plates of roast beef and garlic mashed potatoes waiting for her on fine china.
She turns to the boy and has just started to say something to him when he cries out.
“Look!” He darts across the trash-strewn floor to the front corner of the station. “There’s all kinds of stuff in there!”
“Oh my God.” Lilly sees the object of his excitement and hurries up behind him. In her sudden delight, she doesn’t smell the stench building outside the edifice, nor does she hear the telltale noise way, way off in the distance like the rasping of high-voltage power lines. “I can’t believe this is still intact—holy shit!”
They stand for a moment in awe of the vending machine. Either too much of a bother for previous looters, or perhaps missed in the race to grab all the cash in the place, the machine stands untouched, at least seven feet tall—an enormous convenience food dispenser with an unbroken glass front and coin-operated arm. Lilly sees Gatorade, soda, juice, bottled water, tortilla chips, popcorn, candy bars, gum, Life Savers, licorice, Fruit Roll-Ups, and even toenail clippers, disposable razors, toothbrushes, lint rollers, and travel pillows.
“It’s beautiful,” Tommy exclaims, sounding as though he’s describing the Sistine Chapel.
“Look, there’s even batteries.” The awe in Lilly’s voice is palpable—she might as well be talking about the Fountain of El Dorado.
“And Hostess fruit pies—I thought they stopped making those!”
“Let’s look for something we can use to carry stuff. C’mon!”
They scour the disaster area of a station, looking behind closet doors, in vestibules, under ticket counters. In one of the offices they find a big gray duffel bag marked “BRINKS” crumpled in a corner, emptied long ago by God-only-knows-who. “Perfect!” Lilly grabs it, too excited to register the reeking odor of walkers building out in the neighboring woods. “Let’s use that crowbar on the machine!”
They carry the duffel back to the vending machine and try forcing open the service door in the back of the thing, with no luck. The lock holds tight, the forked end of the crowbar merely gouging the steel. Finally, Tommy says, “Stand back for a second.”
He swings the crowbar at the glass front as hard as he can.
Glass erupts with a harsh cracking noise, the shards falling into the guts of the machine, some of it spilling out across the floor, forcing Lilly to jump back.
They scramble to harvest all the goodies from the cubbies of the machine as quickly as possible, stuffing them into the huge duffel. Tommy wrenches some of the bigger items out with his crowbar. Soda cans roll across the floor and small bags of pretzels and Funyuns topple, Tommy kneeling down and scooping up every last one as though picking gold nuggets out of a stream. When they’re done with the contents of the vending machine, they scramble to check out the rest of the rooms.
In an old musty administrative office, they find a treasure trove in a closet: nine-volt batteries, toner ink, paper, staplers, a magnifying glass, flashlights, paper clips, sealed cans of coffee, sweeteners, and powdered creamers. On the top shelf, Lilly finds the holy grail. “Bingo,” she utters gleefully as she pulls down two ancient, shrink-wrapped, dust-filmed cartons of GE sixty-watt lightbulbs.
They carefully wrap the bulbs in layers of paper towels from the men’s room before putting them in the duffel.
“That’s getting a tad heavy,” Lilly says, lifting the bag off the floor. She is far too distracted now to hear the chirring noises gathering outside, the buzzing sound of a hundred garbled growls closing in. “How the hell are we gonna carry this thing?”
“Use the strap,” Tommy suggests.
“Yeah, but, the problem is—”
“Here, like this.” Tommy snatches the strap out of her hands. He maneuvers himself under it and then lifts the bag with his shoulder. “See? Easy-peasy!” He starts to demonstrate how easy it is to walk with it when suddenly its massive weight buckles his knees and he collapses to the floor, landing hard on his ass.
“Yeah, I totally see what you mean,” Lilly comments, deadpan.
Tommy looks down. “Fuck.”
“Easy-peasy,” Lilly says, and she’s just started to laugh when she suddenly cocks her head at an angle as though hearing something important. “Wait a minute … fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“What?” Tommy looks at her. “What’s wrong?”
“You smell that?”
“No … What?”
She rushes across the room, hurrying over to the window they’d breached in order to get inside. “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” she murmurs as she peers through the crack in the boards. “Goddamnit.”
The figures appear in the distance, emerging from the trees and the road and the meadow, like a slow-motion flood tide rolling across the grounds of the switchyard. Dragging and bumping into each other, making those horrible raspy vocalizations that cause the hair on the back of Lilly’s neck to stand up, the swarm practically encloses the property—bees drawn to the nectar of human activity, human smells, human noises.
“Okay, let’s not panic.” Lilly turns back to the room and chews a fingernail as she grasps for a way out. She looks around the room. No basement; surrounded on all four sides.
Tommy picks up her nervous tension as if he’s a tuning fork. “Is it a swarm?” He peers out the window. “Holy fucking shit.” He turns back to her. “Fuck.”
“Okay, le
t’s stay calm, and let’s watch our language.”
“Seriously?”
“Let me think, I’m not thinking straight.” The odor intensifies as though the foundation is suddenly a rotting, festering morgue. The noise outside rises like a turbine that’s growling, turning, revving higher and higher.
“Maybe we can stay inside this place.” Tommy peers back through the window slat. “Maybe we can wait them out. Maybe they’ll move on.”
“That’s a lot of maybes.” Lilly paces, does a one-eighty, scans the walls, gazes into broken-down offices, thinking, panicking. “I don’t think we can stay here.”
“Why not?”
She looks at him, swallows. “Because I think they can smell us.”
Tommy looks back out the window, sees something important, and points. “Wait!” He whispers now, afraid the front line of the horde closing in on the building might hear them. “Hold on!”
“What?”
He turns and gives her a grave look. “I think I know how we can escape.”
* * *
For quite some time, Bob and Gloria gaze in silent awe at the strange interior of the Haddonfield Mining Company staging area, now illuminated in soft, green, ambient daylight. The place is apparently sunken into the side of a hill, and what was once a labyrinth of service bays, storage rooms, and work desks—the entirety of the space encompassing the breadth and width of an airplane hangar—has been reduced to a surreal nest of creeping vines, roots, and mossy decay. All the surfaces look as though they’ve been in a snowstorm of mold and dust. The high casement windows have all been breached, either by weather or walkers, the roots of ancient pines probing down through the gaps and spreading tentacle-like across the walls and the floor. A carpet of moss and snot green lichens covers everything—desktops, cabinets, coal cars, tools, gas tanks, shovels, and augers—and the smell of humus and earth chokes the air. A chill wind ripples through the place, tossing leaves across the floor.
“Looks like the inside of the Keebler elf tree,” Gloria remarks, pulling her Glock and cautiously crossing the spongy floor.