He is covered with a fine layer of gore the color of stomach bile, the suction of the wind blowing a mist of the walkers’ tissue through the vents of the pilothouse. Tommy doesn’t care. He also doesn’t notice that the fuel gauge is on “E” and that the engine is starting to sputter.
Fiddling with the gearbox, increasing the speed of the windshield wipers, he steers the machine toward the next wave of walkers coming toward him from the parking lot of the derelict grocery store on Millard Road. Through the slime-coated glass, he sees them reaching for the blades as though deliverance awaits in the rushing metal teeth, and then go down in a chain reaction, faces furrowed and vexed, eyes popping out of their skulls.
The engine dies.
The great revolving shredder in front slowly jangles to a rusty, creaking stop.
Tommy leans forward with a jerk, the silence terrifying. Entrails drip down into the works of the reaper. Tommy looks at the gauge to his right, taps it, sees the needle resting on the pin below “E,” and starts to panic. He unbuckles his safety harness and is climbing out of his bucket seat when the first impact shudders through the cabin, as though the earth itself has buckled under the machine. Something is pushing on the side of the combine. Tommy climbs across the cab to the side window and looks down.
Scores of biters, all shapes and sizes, all whipped into frenzies, push up against the side of the machine. Tommy grabs hold of the seat-back as another shudder passes through the interior. The right side of the machine levitates a few inches and then bangs back down as more and more walkers swarm the combine. Tommy holds on tightly, fingers digging into the upholstery.
The machine begins to list, leaning to the left on its enormous wheels, as the collective pressure of hundreds of the dead press in on the right side.
Tommy lets out a scream—his voice gone, only a hoarse rasp coming out—as the combine begins to tip over.
* * *
“Check that shit out! Down in the northbound fucking lane! There’s that motherfucker!”
As the Challenger roars along the plateau overlooking Elkins Creek, Miles Littleton sees the distant bloom of dust about a quarter mile away on Highway 74. He points down at the valley of tobacco fields spreading off to their right like a vast patchwork quilt in the washed out sunlight. The tow truck roars eastward, burning oil, sending up gouts of black smoke into the atmosphere.
“Take the next turnoff!” Lilly indicates an intersection up ahead, a narrow dirt road snaking down the side of the hill toward the farmland.
“Fuck!—FUCK!” All at once Miles is looking down at the dashboard. “FUCK!!”
“What’s the matter?” Lilly sees the intersection coming up fast, the turnoff on the right marked by reflectors on sticks. “Slow the fuck down!”
“The brakes are fucked!”
“WHAT?!”
“The brakes ain’t working!”
“Turn here, goddamnit—TURN!” Lilly grabs the steering wheel and yanks it at the last possible moment, sending the Challenger into a skid, eliciting an angry cry from Miles as he wrestles the wheel back in line.
The car careens around the corner and plunges down the slope.
For a brief instant, Lilly feels the weightless sensation of a roller coaster, as though she might levitate out of her seat. The trees blur by them on either side, the wind whipping across their open windows, whistling above the engine. The car squeals around a series of curves and then the road straightens out.
The Challenger picks up speed.
“We. Got. No. Fucking. Brakes!” Miles restates this fact as though it is an imponderable cosmological formula that only a handful of astrophysicists might truly grasp. He struggles with the wheel, keeping a white-knuckle grip, teeth clenched inside the shadow of his hoodie. The speedometer inches past eighty, past eighty-five. “Motherfucker must have cut our lines, if you believe that shit!”
“Just keep it steady!” On the straightaway Lilly can now get a clear line of sight on the tow truck in the distance, a little over a quarter mile ahead of them, a watery image in the heat rays of the highway.
The Challenger reaches the bottom of the hill, their speed exceeding ninety miles an hour now, and the gravitational forces suck Lilly into her seat. Miles lets out an angry grunt and steers the car onto a forking entrance ramp. The wheels drum and complain on the weathered pavement as they roar onto the highway. The wind buffets them, pounding against the open window.
“AIN’T EVEN GIVING IT ANY GAS!” Miles marvels at this new development above the noise. “ABOUT TO HIT THE CENTURY MARK, AIN’T EVEN TOUCHING THE FOOT-FEED!—MOTHERFUCKER FUCKED WITH THE ENGINE!”
As Lilly checks the two pistols wedged behind her belt, their speed holds at around the 100-mph mark—a surprisingly bumpy ride on the original shocks and pinions. The distance between the two vehicles is closing fast. Apparently, Jeremiah has the tow truck opened up, running at top speed, judging by the way the thing is weaving from lane to lane and smoking profusely. This section of the highway is relatively free of wreckage, but every now and then, Miles is forced to swerve to avoid the carcass of an abandoned car or the fossilized remnants of a camper lying on its side.
“Shit!” Lilly drops the speed-loader, and it rolls under the seat.
Up ahead, the preacher’s truck looms closer and closer. At this distance—a little less than a hundred yards—the human remains hanging off the tow crane are visible, a grisly simulacrum of something that used to be a man, the arms and legs long gone, the object now resembling a side of beef hanging in a meatpacking plant. The strobe, evidently connected to the truck’s battery, still flickers at odd Pavlovian intervals.
Lilly stops looking for the bullets and stares at that blinking strobe.
Something breaks loose inside her—something unseen and deeply buried—triggered by that silver beacon flashing its cryptic signal. Looming closer and closer, the Challenger draws to within a hundred feet of the fishtailing, smoking, gore-draped heap of a truck, and Lilly feels the tide of rage inside her crash up against the wall of something far darker.
A psychologist might call this “hypomania.” Active-duty soldiers call it a “kill frenzy.”
“What the fuck are you doing now?!” Miles demands to know when Lilly tosses the gun into the backseat, her focus still locked on to that flickering signal light. He alternates his gaze from her to the front of the vehicle, which is closing in on the rear of the tow truck, the carnage-festooned crane close enough now to reach out and touch. “Hold on, girlfriend! Gonna ram it!”
The wide grille of the Challenger smashes into the truck’s trailer hitch.
This shoves both Miles and Lilly forward, smashing them into the dash, sending shards of pain up the bridge of Lilly’s nose, galvanizing her, electrifying her as the pale silver light goes on flashing like some out-of-kilter disco ball. In the cab of the tow truck, Jeremiah ducks down for a moment, flinching at the impact.
Miles holds the car steady as a large fragment of the tow truck’s bumper tears away and clatters to the road, bouncing off into an adjacent field.
Lilly pushes herself up and out the open passenger window. The noise of the slipstream drowns out Miles’s bellowing shouts of anger and confusion. All Lilly can hear now are the gusts of wind and the dissonant harmony of the two power plants roaring in unison as she climbs out onto the window frame, grasping the side mirror for purchase. Then she clambers onto the hood.
The car swerves slightly.
She braces herself on the air injector, rises up, coils herself, bending her knees and fixing her gaze on the rear deck of the massive tow truck, and leaps.
TWENTY-FOUR
Lilly lands on the rear edge of the truck’s deck, her combat boots slipping off the ledge. She slides a few feet, clawing for a handhold. The toes of her boots brushing the pavement. Lilly grabs the tow arm. The metal is greasy with the blood of the dangling corpse.
For one terrible moment, she hangs there. Her feet drag along behind the truck on the rushi
ng highway, causing the toes of her boots to heat up to the point of smoking. The truck swerves. Lilly flops to the right. The human remains break off the crane and tumble across the oncoming lanes and into a ditch. The truck jerks the other way.
Lilly nearly falls off, but now she finds the strength—probably through the sheer force of her hatred—to haul herself back up.
The wind buffets her. The gusts threaten to blow her off the truck as she climbs onto the blood-slick cargo area. She crouches down. The wind burns her eyes. She peers through the cab’s rear window and sees the back of the preacher’s head as he wrestles with the wheel and reaches for something on the seat—probably his gun. She quickly surveys the contents of the cargo hold. She sees small cable spools and railroad spikes and empty bottles rolling around. She sees an iron pry bar. She grabs it.
She glances back at the cab window.
Jeremiah is aiming his Glock 9mm at her. Before he can shoot, she swings the pry bar. The hooked end bangs against the glass but doesn’t break it. The preacher flinches, the truck swerving again. Lilly stumbles and falls. The pry bar goes flying. Jeremiah sees an obstruction coming up fast in the left lane.
He swerves the other way to avoid it and sends Lilly tumbling back against the opposite side of the bulwark. Behind the truck, the wide, grimacing front grille of the Challenger hovers mere feet off the back of the tow arm. Miles refuses to abandon Lilly, bad brakes be damned. He’ll stay with this truck forever.
Lilly gets back on her feet and grabs the iron bar and swings it harder at the window—once, twice, three times, the third impact shattering the safety glass into a sheet of diamonds.
The glass implodes. Glittering particles swirl into the cab. The truck swerves wildly. Lilly can hear the preacher’s scream. Jeremiah’s Glock goes spinning across the seat. Lilly lifts herself up on the edge of the broken window. Her hands impale themselves on the jagged glass. The pain drives her into the cab.
She grabs Jeremiah’s arm. Half her body hangs out the broken window as she tugs on him. Jeremiah writhes and curses. Lilly yanks on his arm. The steering wheel jerks. The tow truck swerves across the two lanes toward the gravel shoulder. The tires squeal. The roar of the engine intensifies. The truck skirts along the edge of the ditch at seventy-five miles an hour. The wheels drum wildly over craggy, rutted sections of bare earth. The vibrations turn the cab into pandemonium.
Jeremiah tries to strangle Lilly. He gets one huge gnarled hand around her throat. Lilly pulls away. She falls the rest of the way into the cab. Jeremiah takes a wild swing at her and connects. The impact of his gigantic fist makes her see sparks and gasp.
Lilly has short fingernails but she slashes at the side of his face as the truck weaves and fishtails on the dirt slope. The truck leans at a forty-five-degree angle. Lilly’s nails rake across the preacher’s right eye and cheek. Jeremiah bellows in pain. He loses control of the truck. It starts to tip.
The preacher slams on the brakes. The rear tires dig in. Lilly bangs into the dash as the truck goes into a skid. Jeremiah tries to steer into it. The truck slides sideways for a moment.
Then Lilly screams as the whole world seems to turn on its axis and throw her against the ceiling.
* * *
Miles lets out a wail. He sees the truck tipping. He swerves. The tow truck slams down on its side. In a cloud of dust, the Challenger roars past the site. It has no brakes but Miles angrily stomps on the useless brake pedal.
In the rearview mirror, he can see the tow truck violently sliding along on its side. It slides and slides for almost a hundred yards, digging a grove out of the ground. Then it comes to a dusty stop in a ditch.
Miles frantically tries everything he can think of to stop. He stands on the brake pedal with both feet. He puts the car in low gear. The engine groans and revs but only slows the car down incrementally. The Challenger keeps barreling along—a mile, two miles past the wrecked truck.
He tries putting the car in neutral and letting it coast along the shoulder. This starts to work. But when a pile of wreckage looms, he has to shift back into drive and swerve around the obstruction.
Then, an instant later, he makes a critical error. He looks back up into the rearview. He just wants to see if there’s any sign of the tow truck behind him. But his gaze lingers there too long. When he looks back at the road he lets out a yelp of shock.
Two large mobile homes lie wrecked across both lanes of the highway.
The Challenger crashes through the center of the wreckage, slamming Miles against the wheel, breaking a tooth, concussing his skull. The car barrels through another hundred feet of twisted metal and goes into a skid. Miles wrestles with the wheel. The Challenger spirals into a wild 360.
Miles blacks out as the car slides off the edge of a precipice and goes into a roll.
It rolls a total of five revolutions before landing in a dry riverbed.
* * *
Two figures crane their necks to see over the top of a makeshift barricade on the northeast corner of town.
“I’m going after him,” the man mutters, peering through binoculars. In the oval field of vision, he can see the gigantic combine lying on its side in a gravel parking lot at the end of Kendricks Road.
“You think that’s a good idea?” Norma Sutters stands next to David Stern, wiping her plump hands in a towel. Her face still has the stains of offal she’d smeared on herself to blend in with the horde. But her smock is now covered with the fresh blood shed by Harold Staubach. She’d been caring for him for the last hour now.
David looks at the woman. “We can’t leave the poor kid out there.”
“The boy might be gone, David. I’m sorry to be so damn harsh but—”
“Norma—”
“Listen, we don’t want to be losing another one of us in order to save somebody who’s already dead.”
David wipes his gray goatee, thinks about it. “I’m going. That’s all there is to it.”
He climbs down the ladder and goes off in search of ammo for his Tec-9.
* * *
Lilly comes to in the smoky interior of the overturned truck. Blinking at first, squinting in the harsh glare of overcast daylight flooding down through the gaping driver’s-side window—which is now the ceiling—she silently takes inventory of her injuries. Her back throbs, wrenched by the impact, and she tastes coppery blood where she bit her tongue, but she doesn’t seem to have any broken bones.
She suddenly registers the fact that the preacher—still unconscious—is slumped over the steering wheel above her, his lanky limbs akimbo, tangled in his shoulder harness. She regards his limp form. She considers the possibility that he might already be dead. His flesh is gray and pallid. She watches his big barrel chest, and sees that it is slowly, subtly rising and falling—he’s clearly alive—and Lilly is about to start looking for the gun when his eyes pop open and he pounces on her.
Lilly screams and the preacher responds by wrapping his big, callused hands around her throat.
He lowers the rest of his weight down upon her, the sound of tearing fabric coming from behind him as his waistcoat stays tangled in the steering wheel, the seams ripping apart. Lilly gasps, convulses—the common reactions to stage one of asphyxia—and tries to get air into her lungs, but the preacher’s fingers tighten. She instinctively reaches up and tries to pry them from her neck, but this is easier to do in theory than in practice. His vise-grip lock on her throat is steadfast, immovable.
Jeremiah stares into her eyes with surprising calm, whispering something under his breath that sounds at first almost incantatory, as though he’s putting a spell on her. Their faces are close enough for her to see the yellow tobacco stains between his teeth and the tiny capillaries of red lining the whites of his eyes, as well as the grain of the psoriatic skin patches on his cheeks. She enters stage two: the onslaught of hypoxia.
It feels to her as though he’s been strangling her for hours. Her lungs catch fire, and her vision blurs, and she feels her entire body
tingling as the tissues become oxygen-starved. She begins to involuntarily shudder in his grasp—a series of violent paroxysms resembling an epileptic fit. Her legs kick and tremble. Her boot heels bang off the floor. Her arms flail futilely, making feeble attempts to hit the man, when all at once her right hand brushes against something metallic and cold and familiar on the floor next to her, wedged between the mat and the door.
She is about to enter stage three—unconsciousness, a short jaunt to death—when it registers in her brain what she’s touching: the 9mm pistol.
This revelation is the last blip of conscious thought that zips across Lilly’s synapses before everything shuts down and she passes out.
* * *
Lilly Caul has experienced lost time on several occasions in her life—drunken binges at college, druggy parties with Megan Lafferty, the time she got in that terrible car wreck in Fort Lauderdale—but nothing even remotely compares with this. It’s as though some cosmic film editor has cut a scene out of her time line.
She has no idea how the gun got picked up, how it got raised, how the trigger got pulled, or how the bullet found its way to such a critical part of the preacher’s anatomy. The fact is, Lilly cannot for the life of her remember aiming it, let alone firing it.
All she remembers is awakening to the strangest noise, which at first sounded like a baby crying—a high, shrill whine that deteriorated into a rusty, creaking groan. Now she feels as though she’s a deep-sea diver with the bends, frantically swimming up toward the surface of the ocean, toward sweet, sweet oxygen, toward release, toward life.
Bursting out of the black water, she gasps and breathes in great, heaving gulps of air.
Sensory overload assaults her. Her neck throbs as though rope-burned. She’s holding the Glock, and it’s as hot as a branding iron, and the air is thick with blue smoke, and Jeremiah lies in a fetal position on the other side the cab. He’s holding his groin, which is soaked in blood, and he’s caterwauling in agony, all of which explains the crying-baby sound.