Austin shudders, wiping his face and watching for a moment, hypnotized by the spectacle of the biter sinking back into oblivion … until the only things that remain are bubbles floating on the surface of the swamp and a dull flickering glow under the muck. Eventually Austin manages to tear his gaze away. He finds his gun and catches his breath.
“Nicely done,” Lilly says with a grudging softness in her voice as she makes her way across the log bridge. “Here … gimme your hand.”
She helps Austin to his feet, holding him steady on the slime-slick log. He gets his breath back, swallows the shock, and shoves his gun back in his belt. He looks into her eyes. “That was close.” He manages a shaky grin. “That thing could have easily gotten you.”
“Yeah … thank God you were around,” she says, a smile on her lips now despite the beating of her heart.
“LILLY!”
The booming voice of Martinez intrudes on the moment, drawing Lilly’s attention back over her shoulder.
Thirty yards away, through a break in the trees, in a pall of acrid, black smoke, Martinez and Gus have found the crash site.
“Come on, pretty boy,” Lilly says, gritting her teeth with nervous tension. “We got work to do.”
* * *
The chopper lies on its side in a dry creek bed, spewing smoke from its breached fuel tank. No victims in sight. Lilly approaches cautiously, coughing, waving the fumes from her face. She sees Martinez approaching the cockpit, crouching down low, holding his hand over his mouth. “Be careful!” Lilly pulls her guns as she hollers at Martinez. “You don’t know what’s in there!”
Martinez touches the hatch release and burns himself, jerking his hand back. “Son of a BITCH!”
Lilly edges closer. The smoke, already clearing, begins to part like a curtain to reveal the soft, scorched ground around the crash site. It dawns on Lilly that the pilot must have aimed for the soft ground of the stream bed, the surrounding leaf-matted earth now torn up by the violence of the crash. The main rotor, detached and lying on the ground twenty feet away, looks as though it’s tied in a knot.
“Gus! Austin! Keep your eyes on the periphery!” Martinez indicates the adjacent wall of white pines higher up the bank. “Noise is gonna draw a swarm!”
Gus and Austin whirl toward the woods and raise their muzzles at the darkness behind the trees.
Lilly feels the heat on her face as she approaches the wreckage. The fuselage lies on its right side, the tail fin and rear rotor horribly bent. One skid is torn off as though from the force of a giant can opener. The canopy and hatch windows are cracked and either steamed up from hyperventilating passengers or clouded over from the smoke. Regardless of the causes, though, it’s impossible to see inside the cockpit. The soot has covered most of the markings on the bulwark and chassis, but Lilly sees a series of letters along the tail boom. She sees a W and maybe an R … and that’s about it.
Martinez raises his hand suddenly as the noise of the fire dies down enough for them to hear the muffled cries coming from inside the cockpit. Martinez duckwalks closer.
Lilly moves in with her Rugers up, cocked and ready to rock. “Just be careful!”
Martinez takes a deep breath, and then climbs onto the side of the fuselage. Lilly moves closer, aiming her twin .22s at the hatch. Balancing on the battered steel frame, Martinez pulls his bandanna off and wraps it around the release handle. Lilly hears a high-pitched voice. “—outta here—!”
Martinez yanks.
The door snaps, squeaking open on shrieking hinges, releasing a puff of smoke and the tattered form of a frantic woman. Clad in a torn down jacket and scarf, stippled in blood, she bursts out of the cockpit, coughing and screaming, “—GET ME OUTTA HERE—!!”
Lilly lowers her guns, realizing that the woman has not yet turned. Martinez pulls the victim out of the death trap. The woman writhes in his arms, her bloodless face a mask of agony. One of her legs is badly burned, the fabric of her jeans blackened to a crisp, glistening with pus and blood. She holds her left arm against her tummy, the fracture at the elbow bulging through the sleeve of her sweater.
“Gimme a hand, Lilly!”
They carry the woman away from the wreckage and lower her to the ground. She looks to be in her late thirties, maybe early forties. Fair skinned, dishwater-blond hair, squirming in pain, her face wet with tears, she babbles hysterically, “You don’t understand! We have to—!”
“It’s okay, it’s all right,” Lilly says to her, gently brushing her damp hair from her face. “We can help you, we have a doctor not far from here.”
“Mike—! He’s still—!” Her eyelids flutter, her body spasming from the pain, her eyes rolling back in her head from the shock. “We can’t leave—we have to—have to get him out—we have to—!!”
Lilly touches her cheek, the flesh as clammy and slimy as an oyster. “Try to stay calm.”
“—we have to bury him … it’s something I … before he—” The woman’s head lolls to the side, and she sinks into unconsciousness with the suddenness of a candle flame snuffing out.
Lilly looks up at Martinez.
“The pilot,” Martinez utters, meeting Lilly’s gaze with a hard look.
By now the smoke has cleared and the heat has dwindled, and both Gus and Austin have returned to gaze over their shoulders. Martinez rises to his feet, and he goes back to the wreck. Lilly follows. They climb up onto one of the mangled skids and boost themselves up enough to see into the open hatchway. The odor of charred meat assaults their senses as they gaze inside.
The pilot is dead. In the hazy, sparking enclosure, the man named Mike sits slumped in his scorched leather bomber jacket—still harnessed to his seat—the entire left side of his body blackened and disfigured from the in-flight fire. The fingers of one gloved hand have melted and fused to the control stick. And just for an instant, staring into that hellish cockpit, Lilly gets the feeling this guy was a hero. He brought the craft down in the spongy cleavage of the creek, saving the life of his passenger—his wife, his girlfriend?
“Too late to do anything for this guy,” Martinez murmurs next to her.
“Obviously,” she says, lowering herself back to the ground. She glances across the clearing, where Austin now kneels by the unconscious woman, feeling her neck for a pulse. Gus nervously keeps an eye on the woods. Lilly wipes her face. “But we should probably honor her request, right?”
Martinez climbs down and looks around the clearing, the smoke wafting away on the wind. He wipes his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“Boss!” Gus calls out from the edge of the woods. Troubling sounds from the surrounding forest drift on the wind. “We ought to be thinking about gettin’ the hell outta here pretty soon.”
“We’re coming!” Martinez turns to Lilly. “We’ll take the woman back.”
“But what about—?”
Martinez lowers his voice. “You know what the Governor’s gonna do with this guy, right?”
Lilly’s spine tingles with rage. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Governor.”
“Lilly—”
“This guy saved this woman’s life.”
“Listen to me. We’re gonna have a hell of a time just getting her back through these woods.”
Lilly lets out an anguished sigh. “And you don’t think the Governor’s gonna find out we left the pilot?”
Martinez turns away from her and spits angrily. Wipes his mouth. Thinks it over.
“Boss!” Gus calls out again, sounding exceedingly nervous.
“I said we’re coming, goddamnit!” Martinez stares at the scorched ground, thinking and agonizing … until the whole issue becomes a foregone conclusion.
SIX
They get back to the truck just as the sun is starting to set, the shadows of the forest lengthening around them. Exhausted from the trip back through the hollow, where they encountered an increasing number of walkers, they enlist the help of David and Barbara in order to drag the bodies—each one tied to a
makeshift stretcher of birch logs and willow switches—quickly toward the truck’s rear hatch. They lift them one at a time into the crowded cargo bay.
“Be careful with her,” Lilly cautions as David and Barbara shove the stretcher bearing the woman between two stacks of food crates. The woman is slowly coming back around, her head lolling back and forth, her eyes fluttering. There’s not much room for extra bodies in the truck, and Barbara has to hastily rearrange the boxes and stacks of cartons in order to make space.
“She’s hurt pretty bad but she’s hanging in there,” Lilly adds as she climbs up into the cargo hold. “Wish I could say the same for the pilot.”
All heads turn toward the rear hatch as Gus and Martinez lift the dead pilot—his disfigured remains still strapped to the gurney—up and into the back of the truck. David has to make room for the corpse by shoving a stack of canned peaches against one wall, and clearing a narrow strip of corrugated floor between a tower of Hamburger Helper cartons and a half-dozen propane tanks.
David wipes his arthritic hands on his silk jacket as he gazes down at the scorched remains of the pilot. “This presents somewhat of a dilemma.”
Lilly glances over her shoulder at the open hatch, as Martinez peers into the shadowy chamber. “We need to bury him, it’s a long story.”
David stares at the cadaver. “What if he—?”
“Keep an eye on him,” Martinez orders. “If he turns on the way back, use a small-caliber round on him. We promised the lady we’d—”
“Not gonna make it!”
The sudden outburst yanks Lilly’s attention back to the woman, who writhes on the iron floor, still cocooned in willow branches, her bloodstained head drooping back and forth. Her feverish eyes are wide open, her gaze pinned to the truck’s ceiling. Her mutterings come fitfully, as though she’s talking in her sleep. “Mike, we’re south of there.… What about … what about the tower?!”
Lilly kneels next to the woman. “It’s okay, honey. You’re safe now.”
Barbara goes to the opposite corner of the hold and quickly rips the protective lid off a gallon of filtered water. She returns to the injured woman with the jug. “Here, sweetheart … take a sip.”
The woman on the stretcher cringes at a wave of pain that ripples through her, as the water dribbles into her mouth. She coughs and tries to speak. “—Mike—is he—?”
“Shit!”
Austin’s voice rings out from the rear as he struggles to climb into the truck. Shooting nervous glances over his shoulder, he sees a pack of walkers lurching out of the woods—about twenty yards away and closing—at least ten of them, all large males, their hungry mouths working busily as they approach. Their milky eyes gleam in the dusky light. Austin climbs on board with his gun still gripped in his sweaty hand.
“GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!”
The slamming of the cab doors makes everybody jump. Gears grind. The chassis shudders and vibrates beneath them. Lilly holds on to the crates as the truck heaves into reverse in a whirlwind of fumes and dust.
Through the flapping rear tarp, Lilly sees the walkers looming.
The truck barrels directly into the dead, knocking them over like bowling pins, making wet thuds beneath the massive wheels. The truck bumps over them as the engine whines noisily, and the tires spin for a moment in the grease of rotten organs.
The wheels gain purchase on the pavement, Gus slams it into drive, and the truck rumbles out of there, fishtailing down the two-lane in the direction they had come. Lilly looks back down at the woman with the dishwater hair. “Just hang in there, sweetie, you’re gonna be okay … gonna get you to a doctor.”
Barbara tips more water across the woman’s chapped, burned lips.
Lilly kneels closer. “My name’s Lilly, and this is Barbara. Can you tell me your name?”
The woman utters something inaudible, her voice drowned out by the roar of the truck.
Lilly leans closer. “Say it again, honey. Tell me your name.”
“Chrisss … Chris-tina,” the woman manages through clenched teeth.
“Christina, don’t worry … everything’s gonna be okay … you’re gonna make it.” Lilly strokes the woman’s sweat-damp brow. Shivering, twitching on the stretcher, the woman takes shallow, quick breaths. Her eyes close to half mast, her lips moving, forming a silent, pained litany that nobody can hear. Lilly smooths her matted hair. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” Lilly keeps muttering, more to herself than to the victim.
The truck rumbles down the two-lane, the rear flap snapping in the wind.
Lilly glances out the back and sees the tall pines outside, passing in a blur. The setting sun behind the treetops causes a strobelike effect that is almost hypnotic. Lilly wonders for a brief moment if everything will indeed be okay. Maybe Woodbury has stabilized now. Maybe the Governor’s Machiavellian methods will actually keep them safe, keep a lid on the place. She wants to believe in Woodbury. Maybe that’s the key … simply believing. Maybe that alone will get them through.…
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe …
* * *
“W-where am I?” The voice is hoarse, choked, unsteady.
Dr. Stevens stands over the bed in his shopworn lab coat and wire-rimmed glasses, gazing down at the woman from the chopper. “Gonna be a little groggy for a while,” he says to her. “We gave you a couple happy pills.”
The woman named Christina lies in a supine position on a makeshift gurney in the cinder block–lined catacombs beneath the racetrack. Clad in a cast-off terrycloth robe, her right arm wrapped in an improvised cast of kindling and medical tape, she turns her pale, ashen face away from the harsh halogen light shining down on her.
“Hold this, Alice, just for a second.” Stevens hands the plastic vial of IV fluids to the young nurse. Also in a tattered lab coat, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Alice forces a smile as she holds the vial aloft, its line connected to a stick in the injured woman’s arm.
Again Christina manages to croak, “W-where am I?”
Stevens goes to an adjacent sink, washes his hands, and towels off. “I could level with you and say the Ninth Circle of Hell but I’ll refrain from the editorial comments for the moment.” He turns back to her and says with a warm but slightly cynical smile, “You’re in the sprawling metropolis of Woodbury, Georgia … population who-the-hell-knows. My name is Dr. Stevens and this is Alice, and it’s a quarter after seven, and I understand you were fished out of the wreckage of a helicopter this afternoon…?”
She manages a nod, and then flinches at a twinge in her midsection.
“That’s gonna be a little tender for a while,” Stevens says, wiping his hands on the towel. “You had third-degree burns over twenty percent of your body. Good news is, I don’t think you’ll need any skin grafts … just a little edema we’re treating intravenously. Lucky for you, we had three liters of glucose left. Which you’re sucking down like a drunken sailor. You managed to fracture your arm in two places. We’ll watch that as well. They said your name is Christina?”
She nods.
Stevens clicks a penlight, reaches down, and checks her eyes. “How’s your short-term memory, Christina?”
She inhales an excruciating breath, which whistles softly in her throat. “Memory’s fine.… My pilot … Mike is his name … was his name.… Did they—?”
Stevens puts his penlight back into his pocket and gets serious. “I’m sorry to say your friend died in the crash.”
Christina manages a nod. “I’m aware of that … but I just wondered … his body … Did they bring him back?”
“As a matter of fact, they did.”
She swallows thickly, licks her dry lips. “That’s good … because I promised him a Christian burial.”
Stevens looks at the floor. “That’s very admirable … a Christian burial.” Stevens and Alice exchange a glance. Stevens looks back at the patient and smiles. “One step at a time … okay? For now, let’s just concentrate on getting you up and running.”
> “What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”
Stevens ponders the injured woman. “It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.”
“Is there a problem with me wanting to give my pilot a proper burial?”
Stevens sighs. “Look … I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
Christina lets out a grunt as she struggles to a sitting position. Alice helps her sit up, gently keeping her arm elevated. Christina looks at Stevens. “What the hell is the problem?”
Stevens looks at Alice, then back at the patient. “The Governor is the problem.”
“Who?”
“Guy who runs this place.” Stevens takes off his glasses, pulls out a handkerchief, and cleans the lenses carefully as she speaks. “Fancies himself a civil servant, I guess. Hence the name.”
Christina furrows her brow, confused. “Is this guy—?” She searches for the words. “Is he—?”
“Is he what?”
She shrugs. “Is he—what would you call it? ‘Elected’? Is he an elected official?”
The doctor shoots another loaded glance at Alice. “Um … wow … that’s an interesting question.”
Alice grumbles, “He’s elected, all right … by a single vote … his own.”
The doctor rubs his eyes. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” He measures his words. “You’re new here. This man … he’s the alpha dog here in our little kennel. He leads by default. Keeps order by doing the dirty work.” A thin smile crosses Stevens’s narrow features. The smile drips with disdain. “Only problem is, the man has developed a taste for it.”
Christina stares at the doctor. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Look.” Stevens puts his glasses back on and wearily runs his fingers through his hair. “Whatever happens to your friend’s remains … take my advice. Grieve on your own, pay tribute silently.”
“I don’t understand.”
Stevens looks at Alice, his smile fading. He looks into Christina’s eyes. “You’re gonna be okay. A week or so … when your arm’s healed up … you might think about leaving this place.”