* * *
The preacher hears the first explosion coming from behind him as he’s standing on the RV’s running board—a surreal version of Washington crossing the Delaware—his red-stained face, black mourning suit, Wellington boots, and cue-ball head shining dully in the predawn murk. The night sky flickers above him like a photographer’s strobe, and the aftershock thumps against the back of the camper.
At first he ducks instinctively, as though he’s being shot at, and then, momentarily vexed, he twists around to gaze back at the walker horde.
He sees the second and third explosions burst the ground open along the outskirts of Carlinville, in the gloomy light appearing as oil gushers sending particles of black earth heavenward in brilliant orange plumes. The vast black spouts blossom into the pale gray sky, kicking up the tail half of the walker herd like a carpet being rolled up.
Jeremiah once saw a real honest-to-goodness twister while doing a tent revival meeting in Arkansas, and it looked a lot like this—trailer parks, whole communities, entire neighborhoods, seen from a distance, appearing to dissolve and get sucked up into the fury of the tornado. Tiny particles that first appear to be unidentifiable trash or debris turn out to be swing sets, chimneys, entire cars, entire homes. The sight of it makes a person’s soul contract inward with primordial unease—Mother Nature throwing one of her nastiest tantrums. And now this—this abomination—is bringing it all back in one great booming rush.
The preacher ducks again as the first projectile lands on the roof of the trailer, a dark, glistening object that bounces off the bonnet and tumbles across the front quarter panel, landing on the running board a few inches from Jeremiah’s boots. It gets lodged behind the fender long enough for the preacher to identify it as a severed human hand. Other objects begin raining down on the RV—arms, feet, half a torso, a few ruined, decapitated heads—sending particle bombs of blood and tissue down across the windshield so profusely that Reese Lee Hawthorne, who is behind the wheel and struggling to hold the vehicle steady in the storm of carnage, flips on the windshield wipers.
“STAY ON COURSE!” Jeremiah howls at his driver. “KEEP ON GOING!”
The preacher then fishes his walkie-talkie out of his suit pocket and throws a quick glance over his shoulder to assess the damage. In the haze of the blasts, he can see the massive tow truck weaving to and fro, the flickering light and the sounds of human agony still pulsing, and beyond that, he can see that a huge portion of the population of biters has been vanquished, the rear half of the swarm either disintegrated by the explosions or scattered across the seared brown earth in lifeless, smoking lumps of flesh. Jeremiah squeezes the walkie-talkie’s Send button and screams into the mouthpiece: “Brother Stephen, don’t you dare stop that tow truck! Don’t you dare slow down! We still got hundreds of them things marching with us! These people cannot turn back the tide of fate! DON’T YOU EVEN THINK ABOUT STOPPING!”
Jeremiah hears a noise from the front of the caravan and whips around.
His eyes narrow with fury.
Cowards!
* * *
Bob Stookey peers over the top of the overturned coal car, and sees something horrible developing in the distant dark reaches of the tunnel.
He had been crouching behind the wrecked conveyance for the last five minutes, first watching the fuse sparkle and spit and wend its way along the ground to the dynamite, and then ducking down behind the car with each thunderous roar as the sodium carbonate and nitroglycerine did their jobs. But now the aftershocks have started creaking through the tendons of the ancient mine shaft.
Bob turns on his flashlight, shines it down the length of the tunnel from which he has just come, and springs to his feet when he sees the ceiling joists beginning to sift dust down through the darkness a hundred yards away. He starts backing away when he sees the sides of the shaft starting to bow inward like warped, surreal, Salvador Dalí sculptures melting in time-lapse. And he turns and breaks into a trot when the tunnel begins caving in.
Miners call it a bounce. When a shaft bounces, the entire topography of the earth changes. Streams alter their course, boulders crack, and entire tectonic plates shift slightly. Bob hustles along for about a minute—heading back toward the Elkins Creek main branch and the Woodbury sewers—but when he hears the thunderous low rumbling rising, he glances back over his shoulder, aiming the flashlight beam at the depths behind him.
The leading edge of the cave-in has closed the distance to about a hundred feet, and it’s gaining. The entire mine system is collapsing behind Bob, and within seconds will reach him and devour him and bury him in the cold black eternal void and that’ll be all she wrote. This gets Bob moving in a dead run, which isn’t easy in such a narrow, confined space. He bangs and scrapes against the fossilized surfaces of the wall as he charges westward. The cave-in gains on him, practically nipping at his heels.
He reaches the underside of the creek just as the tributaries on either side of him fold. The noise is immense—like a series of depth charges at the bottom of the ocean—and it makes Bob quicken his pace. Now he’s hurtling as fast as his poor old legs will carry him, sucking dusty air into his lungs, the tidal wave of blackness pushing up behind him, swallowing everything in its path. He gasps and flails and sprints down the main conduit while the flashlight beam bounces chaotically across the ceiling and walls, and the weight of the encroaching collapse—now right behind him—presses in on him. The noise deafens him and threatens to drag him down. He drops the flashlight. He charges through absolute darkness for another eternal moment of agonizing terror before his knees buckle.
He trips and falls, sprawling face-first, sliding for a few yards in the cinders.
He bangs against the corner of two intersection tunnels and then lies still, waiting for the cold, dark, final curtain to draw down over him.
SEVENTEEN
“C’mon, baby, it’s now or never! DO IT!”
The sound of Molly Frazier’s voice from the Winnebago’s passenger seat girds the driver, and he shoots a feverish glance over at his wife, nods, and then yanks the wheel. The RV sends up a shriek as it skids into a sharp turn, then roars down the narrow dirt road that disappears into the forest.
James Frazier has had enough. He’s not going to fight some insane war against people he doesn’t even know, using walkers as weapons, alongside some preacher who seems to have lost his mind.
Hands welded to the steering wheel, James can see in the mirror the foliage and limbs scraping the sides of the camper. He can also see the rest of the convoy behind him in disarray, some of the other vehicles pulling away and making a break for it in the opposite direction. Thank the Lord, he’s not the only one.
The young, sandy-haired man with the kind eyes and scraggly beard has been debating with his wife for over twenty-four hours now about whether they should stay with the preacher or slip away as so many others have already done. James and Molly Frazier both come from Pentecostal church backgrounds, with extremely conservative, strict parents and overbearing fathers. They never truly clicked with Father Murphy—too liberal, too Catholic, too ethnic, too something—but it was better than struggling on their own. They needed the familiar security of church people—no matter the denomination.
But when Jeremiah Garlitz came along, the Fraziers—and many others, for that matter—saw a kindred spirit, a man from their world, a leader who spoke their language. This is the saddest part of this whole mess to James Frazier—what they could have had if Reverend Garlitz had kept his wits about him. They could have had the peace and satisfaction of not just surviving the plague, but truly living in the Holy Spirit.
Now, as the pale predawn light starts to bruise the shadows of the forest along Elkins Creek, and James steers the camper toward the farmland to the north, both he and his wife sit in the desolate silence of the RV’s cab, unsure of what sins they’re committing by fleeing the caravan … or what fate has in store for them up north.
* * *
Bob Sto
okey opens his eyes.
He lies in darkness, a cold weight pressing down on his legs, but he realizes with some measure of pleasant surprise that he’s still breathing. A faint glint of light is visible out of the corner of his eye, and he has to twist around into an awkward position in order to see that his flashlight has fallen and rolled about thirty feet away, and now lies on the tunnel floor, shining off an adjacent wall.
Bob takes deep breaths and rises to a kneeling position, his joints screaming with pain and stiffness. His greasy black hair hangs in his face. He wipes it back and shakes off the dizziness and looks around the dark, crisscrossing tunnels, the ancient joists above him dripping with condensation and whiskers of roots. He quickly pieces together what just happened. The cave-in must have run its course to the point that the wave bumped up against the reinforcing beams and stonework of the intersecting tunnels.
He looks down and sees the shards of plastic and electrical guts of his two-way radio. He must have fallen on the device in all the excitement and smashed the thing to pieces. His pulse races, a cold rivulet of panic traveling down the pathways of his spine.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” he mumbles as he struggles to his feet, his ribs stitched with pain where he smashed into the wall.
Time continues ticking away—he’s not sure how long he’s been lying incapacitated here—and now there’s no way of keeping in touch with Lilly. He has a feeling the dynamite blasts were too little too late—something about the urgency in Lilly’s voice, the rumbling overhead. Now that bat-shit crazy preacher could already be attacking. Bob goes over and snatches up the flashlight, and then starts trotting down the central conduit, heading back toward town as fast as his battered old bones will allow.
His side starts aching immediately, but he ignores it. He picks up his speed. The flashlight beam bounces ahead of him. He has no way of gauging how far away he is, or how long it will take him to get back home. The long main branch that connects Woodbury with Elkins Creek goes on for almost three miles, and has a sameness to it, a regularity of ceiling slats and congealed hardpack walls and intermittent dead cage lights hanging down on antique cables.
He looks for a milestone as he lopes along, huffing and puffing laboriously, his .357 banging on his hip. He looks for a sign he’s closing in on the home tunnels, but the gray rotting walls and calcium deposits and random discarded tools pass in a blur. He picks up his pace. His heart hammers against his chest. He knows he’s already put a mile or two between him and Elkins Creek, but how long will it take to cover the remaining mile or so?
The dry silver oval of light dances across the darkness ahead of him, illuminating more and more of the depths of the mine shaft. He feels like a rat in a maze. He thinks of Lilly and David Stern and Harold and that poor hapless gal Norma and that kid Miles trying to hold off the preacher’s army of sycophants. He thinks of those children locked up in the stationhouse with Barbara. He runs faster.
It takes him a while to realize that his chest has started to pang and that his huffing and puffing has deteriorated into painful wheezing. Again, he ignores it. He keeps charging along as swiftly as possible, leaping over wrecked coal cars and errant detritus from generations of runaway slaves, miners, and undocumented fugitives.
The tunnel seems to stretch away from him, a telescope turned backward, a dream in which he can’t get anywhere no matter how hard he runs. His chest throbs with pain, the pressure squeezing in on it now. His neck gets stiff. His left arm twinges with knifing jolts, his joints seize up. He slows down slightly, and then he gets mad and runs harder. The light beam bounces. The walls blur. He gasps for breath. He’s getting dizzy. His ears—deafened by the blasts—can now hear only the syncopated drumbeat of his huffing breaths. His jaw begins to ache. Pain shoots down his arms.
He slows to a hobble, holding the flashlight with one sweaty hand, the other hand now on his belly. Nausea churns in his gut. It feels as though a metal band is tightening around his chest. The back of his throat burns, flaring molten hot with each breath. He moves his free hand up to his sternum, where it feels like an elephant is standing on his chest between his pectorals.
His hobbling slows to an awkward trundle as he hunches in pain. The vomit comes up without warning, retching out of him on a watery, garbled yawn, spattering the front of his filthy chambray shirt and his clodhoppers. There’s not much in his stomach so the puke isn’t very productive, but it’s noisy and slows him down to a stagger.
He finally stops and leans down and puts his hands on his knees. He’s soaked in perspiration, and his sweat has gone icy cold and clammy. He drops the flashlight. The pressure on his chest is immense now, a thousand-ton headstone weighing down on his heart.
His heart.
His goddamn heart.
He falls to his knees. Holds his chest. His situation registers in stages. First, he can think only of Lilly and the others, and how he has to simply work through this momentary delay because he knows better than most that a boatload of other causes can bring on symptoms that merely resemble a heart attack.
That’s when the vertigo and breathlessness pour over him and drag him down. He collapses, still holding himself, heaving and gasping ragged breaths off the tunnel floor, the puffs blowing up little clouds of black dust.
The second stage of his realization comes to him then on a tide of white-hot anger: You idiot, you fool, you’re supposed to be a man of medicine, and now look at you. Look at you. At the worst possible moment! All the careless living finally catches up to you!
All the booze and late nights and cigarettes and red-eye gravy and grits dripping with butter and bacon grease and fried chicken and banana cream pie—all the punishments he doled out to his heart over the years—were coming home to roost.
Flopping onto his back in a sudden paroxysm of agony, the sharp pain slicing a chasm down through the center of his chest, he hugs himself and gasps for air. He stares at the ceiling through tears. His lungs heave for air that comes only stubbornly. His flesh crawls. The third and final revelation comes then, on a wave of despair.
This is the big one—the heart attack his doctor back in Augusta had been warning him about for decades—and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
A tear breaks out of the corner of one eye and tracks down the left side of his face. He stares at the wormy, tangled convolutions of the tunnel ceiling in the dim, angular beam of the fallen flashlight, and feels the fist close around his heart and the concrete filling his lungs and halting his blood flow, and everything going all fuzzy and soft focus on him. He knows what comes next, and he thinks about not being able to ever see Lilly again, not being able to fight alongside her, not being able to see her glittering hazel eyes taking in the strange circus the world has become.
All this passes through his mind in a millisecond that feels like an eternity.
He thinks of the kids. He thinks of holding the little Dupree boy, Lucas, on his knee a couple of days ago, playing This is the Way the Gentlemen Ride and getting a magnificent giggle out of the child, and for some reason feeling an enormous and unexpected sense of accomplishment; just to get that giggle in these dark times is a salve on the soul. Bob never married, never knew what it was like to have children, but he loved kids, and he adored these little ragamuffins that Lilly and he had taken in after Woodbury’s fall. He loved the Slocum twins, their elfin faces reminding him of two little marzipan dolls, the way their eyes twinkled when Bob showed them a four-leaf clover he found on a supply run last week.
These children represent the hope to someday restore the world to the way it was, and they mean everything to Bob, and now, lying in the throes of cardiac arrest, he thinks of the preacher and his bug-fuck crazies getting their hands on these kids. He thinks of these children in the line of fire. He thinks of them being in grave danger this very instant.
Bob starts to crawl, his left arm completely numb, his legs worthless, his lungs on fire. He makes it a few inches before collapsing. He breathes t
hrough his nose, puffing little blooms of cinder dust.
He starts again, dragging his failing body along with agonizing slowness, a few centimeters at a time. It feels as though his chest is about to rupture. He breathes in steel wool, but refuses to give in to the pain.
He keeps crawling, and keeps his hot gaze locked on the unforgiving darkness ahead of him.
* * *
The eastern horizon goes from a deep cobalt blue to a washed-out gray, the first light of day pushing back the shadows in the woods around Woodbury.
The air snaps with the chill of early morning and the whir of the aviary as a dark figure emerges from a hole in the ground, hastens across a clearing, and climbs the nearest live oak.
The butcher-birds in the high branches screech their bloodthirsty shrieks as a greeting, or maybe a warning, as the figure finds a vantage point and digs in a pocket for a pair of binoculars. Dressed in his threadbare hoodie, his delicate braids flagging in the breeze, Miles Littleton hooks an arm around the tree’s center trunk to steady himself as he scans the barrens out beyond the tobacco fields.
Through the lenses he can see a narrow panorama of derelict farmhouses, wreckage-strewn two-lanes, and dry riverbeds dissecting the Georgia hinterlands like the desiccated veins of a vast corpse. He sees the tinsel shimmer of the Flint River snaking southward in the new light.
He blinks. About two and a half miles away, a low thunderhead of dust rises off Cove Road. He blinks again. He adjusts the focus and gapes at the massive inkblot of vehicles and the myriad shadows fanning out in their wake, coming this way, moving with the slow certainty of a black glacier.
“Fuck me,” Miles mutters, and lets the binoculars dangle and bounce around his neck as he climbs back down in a hurry. He hits the ground and charges back across the clearing to the manhole cover. He lifts it, then lowers himself down through the breach.