“Watch those doorways.” Bob has his .357 in his hand, and shuffles toward one of the exits. Many of the archways gape open, their doors dangling on ancient hinges. Bob doesn’t like the odor coming from the far entryway, or the noise rising under the breeze swirling through the place. He approaches the open door.
From the depths of a mossy green vestibule, a shadow looms, the grinding noise of mortified vocal cords. Bob raises the revolver. A lone male walker appears around a corner, thirty-five feet away. It drags along on bony, emaciated legs, its face so skeletal and its mining garb so worn and rotted it lends the creature an air of mummification. The moldering atmosphere of the underground has taken its toll on the thing. Its eyes—or what’s left of them—shimmer in deep, hollowed-out pits. Its teeth drip black ooze as it comes for Bob.
Bob aims the revolver and squeezes off a single shot—the bark as loud as a mortar blast inside the enclosed space, making Gloria jump—and the impact of the 125-grain metal-jacketed hollow point takes off the top of the creature’s head. The soupy fluids of brain matter and blood spill out over the brim of the open skull as the thing collapses into its own spoor.
“Gloria,” Bob mutters calmly, backing away from the archway, hearing more noises. “We gotta get the fuck outta here right now.”
Across the floor, Gloria crouches down by a row of storage lockers. “I understand, I just think we should grab a few things first—this place is a gold mine.”
“Coal mine,” Bob corrects her, holstering his revolver, backing toward her, staring at the shadows looming just inside the far doorway, coming closer and closer, filling the air with the reek of stale feces and wormy meat. Apparently the entire mining company—the mechanics, the secretarial pool, most of the middle-management executives—turned and found themselves trapped in this nightmarish terrarium. Maybe they sought refuge here immediately after the outbreak … maybe they returned here once they died. Regardless, they’re all coming down that baby-shit green hothouse corridor right now, and evidently they’re famished. “Grab what you’re going to grab, Glo, but let’s get our asses in gear soon.”
She breathes hard as she pulls a fuel canister sloshing with diesel out from under a cabinet. “Look at all this shit, Bob!”
“Goddamnit, Gloria—we don’t have time!” Bob hears the chorus of watery growling noises from inside the vestibule. He runs over and slams the broken door against the jamb, the stench of walker practically choking him. He pulls a chair up to the rusted door and wedges it under the knob. “C’mon, just grab the stuff and let’s go!”
Gloria stuffs sticks of dynamite, a first aid kit, axle grease, pickaxes and hacksaws, duct tape, an acetylene torch, miner’s helmets with lamps, wrenches of all sizes, coils of rope, spools of safety fuses, and bottles of alcohol into her pack. She tosses aside canisters of oxygen, old boots, grappling hooks, and various pieces of miners’ gear that she can’t identify. Meanwhile, Bob is hurriedly shoving a stepladder across the leprous floor toward one of the high windows.
The door on the other side of the room rattles with the pressure of walkers trying to get in. Bob positions the ladder under the busted casement. “Glo, c’mon! I’m not kidding! NOW!”
Bob climbs the ladder as Gloria hauls the laden pack across the room. She starts up the ladder, Bob grasping her hand and pulling her, when the corner door busts open and a phalanx of reanimated dead floods into the room.
Two of the creatures are females, their faces desiccated leather, their eyes like milkweed pods. Some of the others still wear the short-sleeve dress shirts and clip-on ties of office drones—probably former Haddonfield employees—their shirts soggy with bile and old blood. They come clamoring and gnashing into the room, their doll’s eyes seeking movement and human flesh.
“Shit—shit—SHIT!” Gloria claws her way up the ladder behind Bob, who is already punching out the remains of the broken windowpane above him. He reaches down to her and tries to pull her up when the closest walker—a former secretary with her reading glasses still dangling on chains around her mummified neck—reaches the bottom of the ladder and lunges at Gloria’s legs.
“GLO! LOOK OUT!”
Halfway up the ladder, Gloria feels a weird pressure on her left boot and glances down right at the same moment the walker goes for her ankle, the female’s slimy teeth snapping only centimeters away from Gloria’s exposed flesh above the top of her boot. Gloria cries out a garbled yelp and kicks and kicks, and smashes her right boot into the sunken face of the dead secretary.
The delicate bones of the thing’s brow ridge begin to crack, and Gloria keeps kicking until the creature lets go of her and blood bubbles from its nostrils, mouth, and ears. Then Gloria delivers one last tremendous kick to its forehead, its skull finally caves in, and the female slides down the bottom of the ladder and hits the floor with a watery smack.
“Hold on to my hand!” Bob pulls Gloria the rest of the way up as the other walkers reach the base of the ladder. He shimmies through the gaping window, and then yanks Gloria over the sill and out the jagged maw. Shards tear at her clothes and skin. Her overstuffed backpack nearly gets stuck, but she finally wriggles through and lands on a rocky spit of earth under the window.
* * *
The pine-scented breeze and overcast daylight calm Gloria down, allow her to breathe. She lies curled in a semi-fetal position in a clearing swimming with cottonwood snow. Her head spins from the excess adrenaline as she rolls onto her back. She feels as though she’s been underground for a year. She looks up at the sky.
Bob kicks the ladder off the ledge and it falls down into the room, smashing on top of the ravenous walkers. Gloria stares at the treetops. She catches her breath. Bob kneels next to her. “You okay, kiddo? Talk to me.”
“I’m good,” she says, and gazes up through the canopy of massive, twisted, ancient live oaks. A thin, wispy layer of fog clings to the tops of the boughs and limbs, giving the forest a primordial cast.
“You sure?” Bob hovers, looking concerned.
“Absolutely.” Though her head is still swimming, she manages to sit up. The weight of her pack drags on her shoulders. “That was a close fucking call, wasn’t it?”
“A little too close,” Bob says, touching her cheek. “You sure you’re okay?”
She takes a deep breath. “Yep. All good. Let’s get outta here.”
He helps her up and takes a look around. The woods seem fairly quiet. There’s a road visible through the trees, maybe a hundred yards away, up on a hill, a narrow blacktop ribbon cutting through the forest. Bob looks back at Gloria. “Can you walk?”
She nods. “You bet.”
They’ve just started toward the edge of the clearing when pain stabs Gloria’s hip. She stumbles, and Bob catches her. “Whoa, easy does it.”
“I’m okay, I just need to rest a second.” She shrugs off the pack, drops it, and lowers herself to the ground. Bob kneels in front of her, and she looks at him. “Sit down, Bob, you’re making me nervous.”
“Sorry.” He sits next to her on a soft padding of old pine needles. “You’re a trouper, Glo. Can’t believe you got all that shit.”
She smiles at him, takes off her visor, runs fingers through her hair. “I couldn’t resist—you never know when you’re gonna need a good stick of dynamite to liven up your next barbecue.”
“You have a point there … sadly.”
“Thanks for getting me outta there in one piece.” She leans over and gives him a peck on the cheek. “Wouldn’t have made it without you.”
“Don’t mention it.” He smiles at her, and she can see something sparkling in his dark eyes, something thoughtful crossing his deeply lined face. “Gotta watch each other’s backs nowadays.”
“Hmmm … I thought I caught you watching my back the other day,” she says with a smirk.
“You got me.” Bob winks at her. “Guilty as charged.” He pulls a canteen from his pack and offers it to her. “You want to wet your whistle?”
“Don’t
mind if I do.” She takes a big pull off the bottle and hands it back. She watches him take a drink. “I understand that’s about the only thing you’re drinking nowadays.”
He gives her a nod. “Yeah, well, this or maybe a bottle of Coke if I’m feeling festive.”
“I’m proud of you, Bob.”
“Hey, anybody can quit.… It’s staying quit that separates the men from the drunks.”
“I believe you’re there, Bob. You made it.”
They look into each other’s eyes for a moment. Gloria gets very still. Bob reaches out and touches her hair, and she reaches up and touches his hand. He leans down, and she leans in, and they kiss.
The kiss goes on for a long moment, the passion kindling in both of them, the heat rising, so much so that neither hears the distant low burble of a high-powered engine, the squeak of brakes, or the sound of two car doors opening.
* * *
“I swear on my mama’s grave I saw two people coming out of that shaggy-ass building down there.”
Norma Sutters stands in front of a thicket of prairie grass and dense foliage, gazing down at the roof of the mining outpost. Her pinafore dress flaps in the wind, her abundant cleavage shiny with sweat. She squints to see better and cranes her neck, all to no avail. The rest of the forest is shrouded in shadow and the vaporous haze of cottonwood and dust motes, making it nearly impossible to discern any movement behind the trees. “I’m not imagining it, Miles, I’m telling you I saw them—a man and woman.”
“You think it was them, the folks from the tunnel?” The young car thief stands behind her, fiddling with the lens dial on a pair of cheap binoculars. The Dodge idles behind him, both doors wide open.
“I just don’t know.”
Miles looks through the binoculars. “Wait … wait … I think I see somebody!”
“Give ’em here, sonny-boy.” Norma snatches the binoculars away from the young man.
She looks through them, scanning the woods around the mining headquarters.
At last, she sees the shadow-bound couple on the ground in the darker shade of the pines. She adjusts the focus. She stares through the lenses and lets out a little cluck of her tongue. “Well, well … Them two don’t seem too damn worried about getting attacked.”
* * *
Bob gently lowers Gloria to the ground, his lips still locked on hers.
His senses fill with her smell—Wrigley’s Spearmint, soap, sweat, and musk—and his mind goes blank. Sound fades, time stops. He doesn’t think of Megan, his one post-plague crush, a relationship that crashed and burned in a charade of pity-fucks and death. He doesn’t think of his impotence, which has plagued him ever since he was wounded by a mortar blast in Kuwait during the first Gulf War. He doesn’t think of those vague wet-dream recollections of being a horny teenager in Slidell, Louisiana, frequenting the Bottoms Up Gentlemen’s Club. He doesn’t think of any neurotic obsession, fear, or insecurity. He thinks only of a calm sea, a great void in his mind—which is suddenly filled up with the essence of Gloria Pyne: her tender fingertips on his neck, her lips, her gray-green eyes, her breath on his face. The plague is gone, and the universe is now infinite in the cleft between Gloria Pyne’s breasts.
Bob presses his face down into her bosom and breathes in her fragrance and feels as though he is floating. Gloria lets out a faint moan. She opens her legs and pushes up against him, and their faces return to each other.
Something stops them. Bob pulls back, cupping her face in his hands.
She looks up at him. “What is it? What’s the matter? Did I do something—?”
Bob can tell something is wrong. He stares. “You feel hot.”
“What?”
Bob puts the back of his hand on her forehead. “You’re burning up.”
She blinks, swallows hard, looks at him. “Yeah, I thought it was…”
“Oh no. No. No.” Bob feels along the length of her arms, her hands, her fingers. He looks down her midriff, down her legs. He freezes when he sees her ankle. “Oh God no, no, shit!”
She sees it as well now: just above the top of her boot, where an inch-and-a-half-wide area of skin is exposed below the cuff of her Capri pants, a small nip the size of a kernel of corn, a bloody tooth mark—probably from the former secretary that had lunged at her on the ladder.
Bob hears a sound in the trees to the north, and instinctively draws his revolver, then levers himself to his feet. He aims at the noise.
* * *
Norma Sutters calls out to them: “Excuse me!—Hello!?!—Folks?!”
Her plump body wedged between two trees fifty feet above the mining company building, she musters up as much deference and humility as she can manage. “Sorry to interrupt y’all! Ain’t got no gun or weapon!—We mean no harm!”
She waves her hands over her head in a gesture of amity, looking like a traffic controller on the tarmac of an airport, the flesh on the backs of her arms jiggling. “Got one question for ya! Is the lady named Lilly by any chance? We’re looking for a gal by the name of Lilly Caul!”
TWELVE
The stationhouse window bursts open, two sections of loose boarding flinging off into space with the impact of Lilly’s shoulder. Tommy Dupree appears in the maw and leaps over the sill, vaulting through the air and landing awkwardly on the hard-packed earth outside the building, fifty pounds of vending machine products rattling on his back. Lilly comes next, squeezing through the opening and jumping off the sill while gripping her Ruger with both hands, landing hard, instantly assuming the Israeli commando posture that Bob taught her, both feet planted firmly on the ground, maintaining her equilibrium fairly well considering that she has the equivalent of a small wardrobe locker roped to her back and a twenty-gallon container of fuel oil tied to her waist.
The air hangs heavy with putrid death-stench and vibrates with the collective vocalizations of three or four hundred walkers. Tommy doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even break his stride as he heads directly for the main branch of the railroad tracks, despite the fact that the switchyard is virtually standing-room-only with walkers, scores of them blocking his path to the middle rails. Gripping the crowbar with white-knuckle pressure, letting out a garbled war cry, he puts his head down like a miniature fullback and barrels toward the tracks. He slams into a column of three, flinging two male adults and a female teenager backward, stumbling willy-nilly on their heels, emaciated arms pinwheeling stupidly, knocking others down.
The closest line of walkers—amounting to about twenty or thirty—turn their seemingly inebriated attention toward the commotion, locking their sharklike gazes on to Tommy. Swarms move with the hive behavior of bees—the outer rings of dead still oblivious to the humans in their midst, even while the inner rings begin to react chemically, turning, locking sights on their prey, slowly trundling heavy-footed toward the warm, breathing bodies.
If asked to describe the physical bearing of a walker, the first thing to pop into the average person’s head might be a stroke victim—albeit an angry, starving, ferocious, cannibalistic stroke victim. But a swarm has a different feel. When walkers swarm—and sometimes grow to a number that would be considered a herd—they present dangers and wreak catastrophes that are almost biblical. They coalesce into a tsunami of menace that strums the deepest chords of primal, genetic terror in a person. They are an inexorable force of nature.
Lilly Caul feels this bone-deep fear start to work its cancer on her as she follows the boy toward the central track. Dizziness threatens to slow her down, make her stumble, steal her breath, and perhaps drag her down into a deadly blackout. She keeps her gaze locked on to Tommy Dupree.
The boy charges along in front of her, banging into walker after walker, screaming, kicking, flailing at them, pushing one onto another at the last possible instant to avoid getting snagged or bitten or slashed by the grinding of countless teeth. He buries the crowbar in the cranium of a ragged old woman with stringy, mossy white hair and pulls it out with a high-pitched howl tha
t resembles the hysterical bark of a hyena. He slashes the crowbar wildly at another phalanx lunging at him from the left.
Lilly moves in tighter behind him, the Ruger gripped hard in her cupped hands. She squeezes off a few more blasts, scoring head shots on either side of the boy, sending body after body to the ground in wet, crumpled heaps. Her heart races, her vision blurring with each jarring stride as she pounds across the rocky earth.
Tommy reaches the turntable area, vaults across the outer rails, and scrambles up onto a lone flatcar in the center of the tracks. Lilly arrives at the turntable one instant behind the boy, and has to fire on three more walkers, each one of them old, gray, desiccated, and cadaverous—by the looks of them, former farm people in tattered work garb. Her blasts send chunks of aged skulls flying in mists of pink matter glistening in the sun, the dead collapsing to the ground, returning to the stillness that should have claimed them in the first place.
On the flatcar, Tommy has already shrugged off his pack and grabbed one of the giant tree limbs.
Behind him, Lilly climbs onto the rear of the conveyance and slips off her cargo, dropping the huge duffel and fuel canister onto the rotting planks. The flatcar rocks slightly as Tommy chooses one of the larger tree limbs, picks it up, and then steadies it on the ground next to the car. He glances over his shoulder.
“ON MY SIGNAL … PUSH!” Lilly yells from the rear. She, too, has grabbed one of the limbs, and now holds it as one would hold an oar on a boat.
By this point, the herd has shifted, drawn to the commotion on the flatcar. Many of them awkwardly cobble over corrugations of iron rails and weeds, approaching the central flatcar, their talonlike hands clawing at the air, their blackened lips as gelatinous as earthworms undulating around decaying teeth.
“Let’s go already!” Tommy yells, jabbing his tree limb as one of the first walkers to reach the flatcar claws at his pant legs.
“TOGETHER NOW—PUSH!” Lilly pushes off with her tree limb as hard as she can, while Tommy does the same at the front end of the car.