Always the same. Always. Always the blast in time-lapse that echoes up in the sky, the distant blood mist enveloping two figures—one large, one small—a woman and a baby, their blood mingling in the ether like a sacrament. The anonymous man is a woman. The bomb is a baby. You just killed both. In cold blood.
On the whim of a madman.
Lilly closes her eyes and tries to drive the inexorable horrors from her thoughts. “You know what,” she says, looking at Bob Stookey. “Gimme some of that.”
He looks up at her, his eyes unfocused, bleary, vexed by this turn of events.
“What … this?”
“Hand it over.” She grabs the bottle away from him. She takes a sip, and the liquid scrapes down her throat like barbed wire, then ignites a fireball in her gut. She flinches, and gulps down the rest. The fourth or fifth swallow turns her tonsils and uvula and soft palate numb.
Bob studies her, watches her shudder at the burning liquid agony. “That’s one way to get me to quit,” he says with zero humor in his voice.
“Crack another one,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.” He turns and pulls another glass bottle from the middle shelf. He twists off the top, and takes a healthy pull. Then he hands it over.
She drinks, wipes her mouth, and looks him in the eye. “We don’t have the luxury to grieve anymore. Are you listening to me? Do you understand what I’m saying? That was for the old times.”
He nods. “Loud and clear.”
Then Lilly tells him exactly what Norma and Miles told her about the preacher.
“I knew we should have finished off that sick fuck when we had the chance,” Bob grumbles after processing the whole thing. The bad news seems to sober him slightly, turning him cranky, like a petulant child who’s just been awakened prematurely from a nap. “Goddamned Holy Rollers are worse than the fucking biters.”
“That’s not all of it,” Lilly informs him. “The worst part—the part she saved for the end—is what he’s got planned for the unveiling of his little grand experiment.”
Bob doesn’t say anything, just takes another sip of the hooch and waits.
“He’s planning an invasion.” Lilly levels her gaze at Bob. The liquor has already started to work on her equilibrium, burnishing the edges of her vision with gauzy, soft-focus sunspots.
“An invasion of what?”
“Us.”
Bob holds her gaze for a moment, wavering a little as though laboring to maintain his end of the stare-down. “How the hell does he think he’s gonna…?”
He stops. They share a glance, and Bob looks away. Lilly can see he’s thinking it over, chewing on it; in his drunken state, the realization comes in waves, like a tide rolling in. Finally he looks at Lilly. “Maybe it’s time for us to just pack it in, cut our losses.”
She scowls at him. “The fuck are you talking about?” Now she has added a few consonants, the “f” coming out like “fffh.” She swallows bile. “You talking about surrender? You want to surrender to this maniac? Are you insane?”
“Did I say ‘surrender’? I’m not talking about surrender. Cool your jets.”
“Then what are you saying?”
Bob rubs his pouchy, bloodshot eyes. “I’m talking about cutting our losses and hightailing it out of here.”
Lilly is silent for a moment.
Bob studies her. “I know what you’re going to say; I know what you’re thinking.”
“What am I thinking?”
“You would never abandon your beloved Woodbury to some cracker redneck preacher with a chip on his shoulder. Am I close?”
Lilly looks down. “Something like that.” She meets his gaze. “Bob, we can take this guy—we did it once before. We can shut him down, go preemptive on his ass.”
“What, a hit squad?”
“Yeah, we could—”
“Now you’re the one’s insane.”
“Bob—”
“Listen to me. This yay-hoo is a lot more than some backwoods Bible thumper. He’s crazy, and he’s the worst kind of crazy—he’s organized. He can pull the wool over people’s eyes. He can marshal large groups. You understand what I’m saying?”
Lilly sighs. The initial rush of intoxication has now transformed into a full-on wave of woozy nausea. She belches silently and feels her stomach acids churning. “Trust me, he can be stopped,” she says finally.
“Lilly-girl, sometimes retreat is the best offensive strategy. Scorched earth. We don’t leave him shit. And we make sure—”
“No! Stop!” Lilly takes quick breaths in a feeble attempt to stanch the warm knot of nausea tightening her gorge. She shakes her head. “I will not destroy my town for one evil asshole.”
“It ain’t your town, Lilly. It belongs to all of us.”
“Well, right now it belongs to the walkers, and I’m not gonna turn tail and run. That’s a chickenshit move, Bob, and you know it.”
Bob throws the bottle against the wall. The glass shatters, the liquid exploding. It makes Lilly jump. Bob’s voice gets low and taut. “That’s right, I’m a chickenshit. I’m a coward. Why? Because I’m a natural born-survivor. It comes with the ‘coward’ part. Being a fuckin’ hero gets you killed.” He stares hard at her, pursing his lips bitterly. “Listen, you got a better idea, I’m all ears.”
“Yeah, I got a better idea. I say we find this prick and put him down like a rabid dog.”
“Lilly, blow the cobwebs outta your head. This guy’s surrounded by his little army of followers, plus now it sounds like he’s found a way to weaponize the goddamn stiffs. You want to traipse into that, you be my guest. I’m leaving! And I’m taking them kids with me. And whoever else has the common sense to come along, they’re welcome to join me.”
Lilly kicks the legs of the shelving unit and knocks over a row of bottles, which tumble to the floor, several of them shattering. “Fine! Whatever! Go! I’ll deal with this guy myself!”
“Lilly—”
She springs to her feet, nearly knocking over the entire shelving unit. “Go! Take off! What the fuck are you waiting for?!”
“Hold your horses, calm down.…” Bob speaks softly now, standing, taking her by the shoulders. “I know you have big dreams for this place, and you see us getting it back one day, and that’s great, I get that, but these people don’t deserve to die just because one young lady’s maybe got a bigger set of balls than everybody else.”
“GO!” The volume of her voice makes her stagger, the dizziness and adrenaline and nausea coursing through her all at once, nearly knocking her over. She has to grab the shelf just to steady herself. “Go with God! I’ll pack you a fucking lunch!”
Bob faces her with clenched fists, his face reddening with fury. “YOU CAN’T JUST DICTATE—!!”
He abruptly stops. The sound coming from behind them, from the tunnel’s entryway, instantly stiffens his back and cuts off his rant. Lilly hears it, too, and it diffuses her rage like a bucket of cold water splashing in her face. She turns and sees Tommy Dupree standing in the opening, silhouetted by the lantern light behind him.
“I know how we can beat them bastards,” he says softly, his voice coarse with gravity.
* * *
In his father’s ratty cardigan sweater, his ruddy little face furrowed with grim determination, Tommy Dupree looks far older than his years. His fists clenched at his side as he stands in the arched opening, his slender form framed by worm-eaten beams and ancient earthen walls, he looks like a miniature sentry in some obscure Hummel diorama. Maybe his time spent in the wild with Lilly has changed him. He seems to have aged years over the course of the last horrible months.
Bob turns and looks at the boy. “I’m sorry, son, I didn’t catch that.”
Tommy takes a deep breath and repeats what he just said: “I know how we can send each and every one of them shit-bags back to the hell they come from.”
Lilly looks at Bob, and then glances back at the boy, and then feels a hot, greasy belch coming as she falls to he
r knees and roars vomit across the tarp-covered tunnel floor.
PART 3
The Great Steel Oblivion
“Behold I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents.”
—Matthew 10:16
FIFTEEN
In the carbon black darkness of the clearing, as crickets drone and engines tick in the background, a voice seems to come from thin air, deep and modulated like the voice of a god, disembodied at first as the eyes adjust. “We pretty near lost half our people tonight.… Just slipped away under the cover of darkness.”
The voice pauses, and the listeners—five men, each in their third decade of life, former laborers and tradesmen, all spooked now as never before—look down at the ground and remain silent.
“I understand the latest ones to leave were the Thorndykes,” the voice says, and pauses again, a single orange speck of light from a cigarette glowing brighter as the speaker takes a vigorous drag off a hand-rolled smoke. “The Kentons, too.” Another pause. “I understand people are troubled by my … methods … the events of the last few days … my experiments on them bikers. People don’t appreciate my … using walkers in such a manner.”
“Can I say something?” James Frazier speaks up. The young man with the sandy hair scratches the side of his grizzled cheek as he measures his words. He runs fingers through his hair. “It’s just … some of the folks with kids … they get a little nervous with this kinda stuff going on.”
“I understand that,” Jeremiah Garlitz says with a paternal nod. In the darkness behind the glow of the cigarette, his deeply lined face and prominent jaw give off the feeling of a jack-o’-lantern. “They have every right to abandon the cause, and I wish them all well. Every last one of ’em.”
“Look, I’m not saying we don’t—”
James abruptly falls silent, his thoughts, the big speech he wanted to make, all of it tumbling down like a house of cards when he hears another surge of atonal screams and growls—hundreds of feral vocalizations—swelling on the night breezes from the east. He glances over his shoulder and takes another reluctant look at the area beyond the circle of trucks and RVs, down a wooded slope and across a vast tobacco field.
In the darkness, it’s impossible to make out the details of the throng—except at regular intervals when the strobe flashes. Each time the light flickers, a swath of the super-herd is momentarily illuminated, from this distance looking like a vast leper colony stuck in mid-shamble, a necropolis of the damned, all of them hunched and mesmerized by the noise and light, some of them reaching futilely for the source of this magical pied piper of screams, the sea of mottled, putrid faces a monolithic audience waiting for a play.
After only a couple flashes, James Frazier has to look away, back at his spiritual guide.
“They don’t understand what we’re up against,” the preacher says as he tosses the butt and pushes himself off his perch on the stump. “They don’t understand the savagery of these tunnel dwellers.”
The preacher ambles over to the edge of the clearing and gazes out at the meadow of the dead, the arrhythmic pulsing and flickering stamping their afterimages on the darkness. His coattails flap in the wind. His big hair tosses. His voice comes out deep and cold. “These people took us in, me and my congregation, what was left of us. Offered us refuge at first. But they had no intention of giving us solace and succor.”
He turns and gazes at James and the four other men. Chester Gleason looks up from the ground, his eyes gleaming with nervous tension. “What’d they do?”
“They began to kill us, one by one,” the preacher utters in a low tone, the lies flowing off his tongue. “The idea was to feed us to the swarm outside the walls of their town. Use our bodies as fodder, as bait, as a way to keep the herd at bay. They were going to slaughter all of us.” He looks at each man now, and the way he fixes each of them in his smoldering gaze makes James Frazier look away at the dark horizon. “They did it before, and they’ll do again … do it to some poor unassuming family that hobbles into their web.” The preacher pauses and lets out a sigh. He kicks the dirt. “I understand if y’all don’t want to be a part of this mission that I have been charged with by God.”
“We didn’t say that,” Chester murmurs mildly as he stares at the ground.
The preacher takes a step closer to the men. “In the book of Revelation it says, ‘He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity; he that kills with the sword must be killed with the sword.’”
Chester keeps looking at the ground, but he’s starting to nod.
“I’m going to bring the medicine for these people in the form of the dead, an army of the damned—an eye for an eye.” Another big dramatic pause. “Gonna make damn sure these people never victimize another survivor again. Gonna take that town back in the name of the Lord, and whoever wants to be along for the ride is welcome to stay with me. Whoever wants to leave has my blessing.”
Now Jeremiah turns his back on them, and appears to be pondering the flickering horde in the distance. But what he’s really doing is waiting.
He doesn’t have to wait long.
* * *
The next afternoon, the caravan sets out on its grandiose mission in earnest. The ten remaining vehicles cut a swath of dust and carbon monoxide up the Interstate 75 basin, avoiding the petrified wreckage blocking much of the four-lane by traveling single file along the arid ditches running parallel to the shoulder. The three heavy-duty trucks lead the convoy, setting the glacial pace at about three miles an hour. The five RVs rumble along behind them, some of their roofs occupied by gunmen armed with sniper rifles.
Jeremiah’s command center—the rust-spotted, eggshell-colored Winnebago formerly owned by Father Patrick Murphy—rolls along near the end of the procession, fishtailing over intermittent patches of decomposing remains, throwing a wake of dust and rotting organic matter off its massive rear wheels. Behind the Winnebago rattles the big tow truck, with its enormous rear crane, its gigantic twin rear tires crunching through the detritus. They pass a mile marker, its battered green facing faded and bullet-riddled.
They are exactly thirty-five miles from the town of Woodbury, Georgia. At this pace, their estimated time of arrival would be dawn the next day.
Very few of the drivers or passengers in the caravan keep close watch on the sea of shadows behind the tow truck. Every so often, on the shifting winds, they hear the watery, creaking chorus of growls, and the fading screams of the prisoner. If they chose to do so, they could catch a glimpse in their peripheral vision of the long shadows of countless shambling bodies. The mob is growing. With each passing hour, more and more of the dead come out from behind dilapidated, derelict barns and groves of sickly oak trees and piles of overturned cars. Most of the convoy’s members are somewhat disturbed by this spectacle, but these are the repressed, the sheep, the stalwart. They now have their own flashing strobe light, in the form of Reverend Jeremiah Garlitz.
At this moment, in fact, this volatile guiding force sits on a bunk in the rear of his RV, while his minions, Reese and Stephen, take turns at the wheel.
Jeremiah sits barefoot, in shirtsleeves and trousers, gazing into a small rectangular mirror that he has canted against the headboard. Using a disposable razor and skin lotion, he carefully shaves the last nubs of hair from his head, leaving behind a pale dome of mottled skin, as smooth as a peach. He believes now, like the monastic clergy of yore, that he must shed all his pride and vanity and worldly possessions before he leads his flock into battle. He ponders his blotchy, reddened face. Aside from the psoriasis, he looks very presentable.
He finishes, wipes his scalp with a towel, and then moves to the window embedded in the rear door—a slat of grimy glass no wider than a necktie—and peers out. In the ashen sunlight, he can see the throngs of his new congregation.
They are hundreds strong, their styles of clothing, their facial features, even their genders, worn away by the rot and ruin of maggots and weather and time. They mo
ve almost as one, brushing against each other languidly, twitching in the pale sun, bumping shoulders and snarling in excruciating, oblivious hunger, the hundreds of sets of teeth visible even at this distance, like tiny kernels of white corn in the rotten husks of their faces.
Silver light blinks across their rank and file, apparent in even the bright daylight, flashing with metronomic regularity—the strings of the puppeteer—and accompanied by the echoes of human suffering.
The onyx-colored tow truck spews a swirling fog bank of smoke from the homemade biodiesel, the miasma rising out of its vertical stack, curling around, and engulfing the rear of the truck, where the human bait writhes in agony on its sacrificial gantry. The subject is the last of the surviving bikers—a big, pear-shaped, bearded Viking with teardrop tattoos and enormous sagging pectorals—now reduced to a sobbing mess in his shit-stained underwear and bloody, lacerated skin. A loop of barbed wire is wound around his expansive belly, gathered behind him, and connected to a winch. Each time his shrieking fades and deteriorates to garbled sobbing, the tow truck driver thumbs the winch button and the barbed wire tightens slightly, eliciting more agony.
The previous subject had not been as boisterous, and had died prematurely, the shrieking going silent shortly after the winch had literally cut the man in half. But the preacher had learned from the fiasco, and now the pressure is being applied with great moderation, calibrated for optimum pain rather than catastrophic injury. Plus, the Viking’s girth should provide hours and hours of racket, the slow bleed-out unlikely to kill the man for at least a day or two. The preacher had found that the beasts responded better to live sound than recorded.
He turns away from the window and wipes the last spot of lotion from his gleaming, shaved head. He tosses the towel, looks around the RV’s cabin, and decides to rest. Tomorrow will be a big day. He sees his Bible on a shelf above the sleeping berth to his left, tented open to Revelations, the chapters and verse he had been studying the previous night. He picks up the worn black book and lies down and continues reading about dragons and horsemen and slaughtered lambs and angels clothed in clouds and the number 666.