Matthew wields the largest knife—and he runs alongside Lilly—keeping an eye on the errant biters that might make note of them.
They cross the sparsely populated grounds in less than a minute, and Matthew has to drive his knife into the decaying craniums of a mere handful of walkers before they get to the pasture.
Which leads to the third thing that registers fully at that point in Lilly’s brain: The configuration of the herd has now spontaneously shifted to the north. Like a teeming mass of ants, they swarm around something dark and glistening on the ground fifty feet from the farthest vehicle.
The noise of the feeding frenzy reaches her ears as she leads the group toward her truck—the massive vehicle still sitting with its cab doors open exactly as she left them the day before—and she calls out to the others as they crane their necks to see the gruesome scene along the north edge of the pasture: “DON’T LOOK!”
Lilly’s voice sounds almost robotic in her own ears—all emotion blanched out of her now by the scalding rush of adrenaline—as she comes around the driver’s side of the cab. She jerks to a stop when she sees the ragged female in a soiled sundress inside the cab, wedged behind the steering wheel, her threadbare dress tangled on the stick shift. Lilly quickly raises her .22 and puts the female out of her misery, sending the back of the girl’s skull across the glass of the passenger door.
Dark blood washes the inside of the windshield as the female sags to the cab floor. Lilly kicks the body toward the door, ripping the dress free. Gloria Pyne reaches in from the passenger side and yanks the body out of the cab, dumping it in the grass.
The others rush around to the rear hatch and start climbing onto the truck. First, Hap Abernathy … then Speed, then Matthew, and finally Ben. Lilly throws a glance out the driver’s-side window and sees—in the cracked reflection of the shattered mirror—that Ben Buchholz has to struggle to heave his way on board. The contents of the truck—crates of ordnance and supplies—have shifted and spilled, and now the four men have to huddle dangerously close to the rear gate in order to fit into the cluttered cargo bay.
The sound of a muffled knock on the rear wall signals they are all safely on board.
The keys still dangle from the ignition, and Lilly kicks the engine to life. Gloria takes her place on the passenger side, shutting the door behind her as quietly as possible. She gazes out her open window. On the edges of the herd, some of the stray biters have noticed them, turning languidly in their direction, starting to drag toward them.
Gloria sticks the barrel of her Glock 19 out the open window, preparing to fire a few suppressing shots as Lilly slams the gearbox into reverse, but Gloria freezes when she catches a glimpse of just exactly what lies on the ground in the heart of the swarm.
Already torn apart and eviscerated beyond recognition, the human remains feature familiar clumps of long curly hair, shredded leather, and an ammo vest now torn to pieces. Two biters fight over a single motorcycle boot, the visible white fibula bone and part of a bloody ankle still lodged inside it. Gloria sucks in a breath. “Oh dear Jesus God … what have we done?”
“Don’t look,” Lilly utters under her breath as she kicks the accelerator.
The gears shriek, and the truck lurches into reverse. The gravitational forces shove Lilly and Gloria forward, nearly slamming them into the dash as the vehicle’s undercarriage shudders and threatens to break into pieces. The massive tires cobble and bump over dead bodies—both walkers and humans alike—which still lie strewn across the battlefield. Lilly keeps the foot-feed pinned. A few errant biters get bowled over by the rear bumper in a succession of watery, arrhythmic thuds as the truck careens.
“DON’T LOOK!”
She cries it out in a strangled voice—addressing herself more than Gloria or the others—as the vehicle screams backward, skirting the edges of the swarm. The stench engulfs the rattling truck, the air black with smoke and carbon and gouts of exhaust enveloping the open windows, as the countless creatures flock like carrion crows fifty yards to the north around the pathetic human remains, which are now scattered across an entire square acre of scabrous, blood-sodden, sacrificial ground.
Don’t look, Lilly tells herself as she slams on the brakes thirty feet from the edge of the wooded slope, smashing Gloria into the folds of the passenger seat. Lilly wrestles the shift lever into second gear and guns it.
The engine booms and the rear wheels dig into the muddy turf for a moment, spinning in place, and Lilly realizes—for one terrible split second—that she now has a fleeting opportunity to get a good view of the feeding frenzy that saved their lives transpiring right this instant through the blood-slimy windshield. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, she keeps repeating to herself in her mind as the rear wheels finally find purchase, and the truck plunges forward in a huge wake of dirt and detritus.
She manages not to look for the entire span of time it takes them to circle around the slope to the access road and start to weave headlong up the side of the hill, the engine bellowing.
But just as the vehicle crests the hill, Lilly shoots an involuntary glance out at the hairline fractured reflection of the side mirror.
The first thing she takes in is the entirety of the prison—the grounds now completely overrun, demolished, abandoned of all life, littered with bodies, some of the towers still smoldering faintly with the aftermath of the firefight—and she registers this in a single microsecond of a synapse firing in the deepest part of her limbic brain: This is both the end and the beginning.
Then, in that single horrible instant before reaching the road along the edge of the woods, she does the one thing she promised herself she would not do.
Eyes drawn involuntarily to the corner of the mirror still reflecting the swarm of biters to the north, at this distance looking like a million black maggots burrowing into a cairn, she does the thing that will scar her soul forever.
She looks.
* * *
“Lilly?—Sweetie?—You okay?—Talk to me.” Gloria Pyne breaks the excruciating silence of the rumbling cab about five miles down the road as the cargo truck wends its way along the snaking asphalt highway.
The desolate two-lane cuts a swath through the dense, biter-infested shadows of primordial woods, the blur of ancient pines on either side of them making Gloria feel almost claustrophobic. Lilly just keeps silently driving. They are closing in on Woodbury. The town lies in a valley just up ahead, around a bend in the road, maybe ten minutes away, maybe less.
“Lilly?”
No answer.
Gloria chews her lip. The relief of fleeing the prison in one piece has been short-lived for her, the thing her mother called “woman’s intuition” revving now in her brain at the advent of Lilly Caul’s stony, ashen, miserable silence. Her hands welded to the steering wheel, her eyes shiny and cratered out with agony, Lilly hasn’t said a single word since they escaped the prison.
“Talk to me, honey,” Gloria says. “Yell … scream … cry … curse … something.”
Lilly suddenly throws a glance at her, and the two women make eye contact for a single moment. Gloria is taken aback by the clarity in Lilly’s eyes. “We were going to have a baby,” Lilly says at last in a clear, calm voice.
Gloria stares at her. “Oh my God … I’m so sorry, honey. Did you—?”
“He saved our lives,” Lilly adds then, as if to put the final punctuation on something.
“He surely did,” Gloria says with a nod, her mind reeling for a moment. She looks at Lilly. “So did you, honey. You saved us when you—”
“Oh no.” Lilly sees something troubling up ahead of them as they round the bend. “Oh Jesus no.”
Gloria snaps her gaze toward the windshield, and she sees what Lilly sees as the air brakes kick on, hissing noisily and slowing the truck to a crawl.
In the middle distance, about a quarter mile away, above the tops of the swaying pine boughs bordering the eastern outskirts of town, an enormous cloud of black smoke billows up in
to the sky.
Woodbury is burning.
TWENTY
The cargo truck thumps across the derelict railroad crossing outside Woodbury’s southernmost outskirts. The air crackles with the noise of burning timber, and the acrid stench of scorched flesh and tar hangs thick over the streets. Lilly slams on the brakes a couple hundred yards from the barricade.
In the middle distance, the east wall burns, sending up a noxious, swirling cloud of smoke. Lilly can see the place is under attack—from this distance it looks like a small herd of walkers has pressed in from the south woods—and now the remaining twenty or so townspeople, most of them seniors and children, struggle to stave off the onslaught with torches and bladed weapons.
For a brief moment, Lilly is almost mesmerized by the sight: Some of the biters along the breaches in the barricades have caught fire, and now stumble without direction or purpose, like phosphorescent schools of fish, wreathed in flame, radiant and surreal in the morning sun. Some of the sparks issuing from the creatures are touching off sections of the outbuildings, adding to the chaos.
“Jesus Christ, we gotta help them!” Gloria blurts out, wrenching open her door.
“Wait—WAIT!” Lilly grabs the woman, holds her back. In her side mirror, Lilly can see the others in back leaning out of the rear hatch, their eyes hot and wide with panic, some of them hopping off the gate and cocking their weapons. Lilly calls out to them. “EVERYBODY WAIT!”
Lilly climbs out of the cab. She has two or three bullets left in each Ruger, but Matthew has at least two dozen rounds of armor-piercing slugs still tucked into his gear, and the magazine in Gloria’s Glock 19 is nearly full. The other men have a few bullets each, but considering the fact that there appears to be no more than fifty walkers—give or take—engulfing the south side of town, they should have enough ammo to intercede.
Matthew comes around the front of the cab, jacking back the charging handle on his AK. His youthful face furrows with panic, his dark eyes blazing with tension. “What’s the plan?”
A gust of wind rife with sparks and death-stench slams into them, and they all crouch down by the front of the cab, each of them starting to breathe faster.
Ben Buchholz speaks up from the other side of the cab. “I say we go in blazing—what other choice do we have?”
“No, we’re going to—” Lilly starts to say when a voice cuts her off from the other side of the truck.
“Whatever we do,” Gloria Pyne says, gaping at the fires and the monstrous apparitions robed in flame staggering here and there along the crumbling barricade, “we better do it quick. These people can’t hold them off much longer with matchsticks and bare hands.”
“Listen up, listen up!” Lilly raises her hand, and turns to Hap Abernathy, who crouches behind the truck’s fender. “You used to drive buses, right?”
The older man nods furiously. “Thirty-four years and a gold Timex from the Decatur School District—why?”
“You’re gonna drive the truck.” She looks at the others, making eye contact with each tense face. “The rest of you, how are your singing voices?”
* * *
Minutes later, Barbara Stern sprints around the corner of Main and Mill with a chemical fire extinguisher in her arms when she hears the strangest sound warbling on the winds above the chorus of moaning, reanimated corpses.
Her iron-gray hair pulled away from her deeply creased face, her peasant dress and denim jacket soaked with sweat and chemicals, she feels responsible for this disaster. So does David. The Governor thought enough of them to leave them in charge of the town during the battle and now this!
All of which makes Barbara Stern bristle when she hears the advent of human voices singing out from the south, ululating like a tribe of Bedouin maidens, their piercing cries rising above the din of burning wood and flesh. Barbara sniffs back the panic and alters her course slightly, charging toward the railroad crossing at the end of Mill Road—the place where the largest number of biters now swarm and press in through the holes in the fortification.
She sees something moving out beyond the blazing inferno, something raising a thunderhead of dust into the sky, and the closer she gets, the more she hears an engine—as distinct as a bell—grinding through its low gears: a truck! Her heart beats faster as she closes in on the chaos at the wall. Heat punches her in the face as she approaches the haze-bound corner of Mill and Folk Avenue.
She sees her husband near the abandoned railway office, shouting orders to the others. Some of the older citizens are stationed at key junctures along the tracks, awkwardly flailing torches at swarming biters, fighting a losing battle, the human shouts drowned by the noise. Barbara’s eyes water as she closes in on the scene.
Near the office building, Barbara sees three other seniors spraying dwindling amounts of chemical foam on the burning facade. David has a hunting bow in his trembling hands and pulls another arrow from the pack as Barbara approaches. They found the bow in the warehouse with an old quiver filled with a couple dozen arrows, and now David shakily aims one of the last arrows at an oncoming walker.
Flames envelop a huge male in greasy workman’s overalls as it lumbers toward David, its flaming face still biting at the air, arms sleeved in flame but still reaching. The arrow pierces its moldering skull between the eyes, and the walker staggers backward in a miasma of sparks, opening its gaping maw of a mouth—smoke curling out of its black gorge—before collapsing to the oily pavement.
“DAVID! LOOK!” Barbara drops the fire extinguisher as she approaches her husband, the tank rolling across the cobblestones of the intersection. “LOOK!—OUT BEYOND THE TRACKS!—DAVID, IT’S THEM!”
David notices what she’s babbling about just as a cornerstone collapses and half the railway office caves in on a fountain of sparks. The heat and noise and tendrils of flame spewing out like a particle bomb make every survivor jerk back with a start, some of them diving for cover, falling to the ground on their brittle, aging joints. David stumbles backward and trips over his own feet, dropping the bow and arrows. The flames catch on an oil spill and lick across the road. Voices cry out, and Barbara goes to David.
“Sweetie, this is no time for a nap,” she taunts him breathlessly, lifting him up with a grunt. “Look, David!—Look!—They’re backing off!—LOOK!”
Sure enough, David Stern manages to get his bearings back and look up, and all at once he sees what she’s talking about. In the middle distance, the swarm has changed course, many of the biters still sparking and smoking as they clumsily turn toward the engine noises and howling sounds emanating from the vacant lot beyond the tracks. A large vehicle now slowly rumbles across the lot, drawing their attention. The plumes of black exhaust are visible above the wall, and the clamor of crooning voices fills the air. Barbara and David rise to their feet and scurry across the intersection.
They find a vantage point near the old wooden water tower and gaze through a break in the flaming barricade at the military cargo truck now prowling the hard-packed gravel on the far side of the tracks. “Oh my God,” Barbara utters, putting her hand to her mouth. “It’s Lilly!”
David gapes at the strange spectacle unfolding in the defunct train yard.
The truck rattles over petrified tracks as the horde of walkers, many of them still smoldering, fuming with smoke and sparks, follow the sounds of human voices trumpeting out the rear of the vehicle. Three men sit on the hatch with guns, yammering and whooping and hollering at the throng, and every now and then shouting out off-key choruses from old Southern rock tunes—“Green Grass and High Tides,” “Long Haired Country Boy,” “Whipping Post”—and the strangeness of it, the very incongruity of a bunch of good old boys hollering and crooning, mesmerizes every walker and human within hearing distance. Then the shooting starts.
The muzzle flashes from the rear of the truck take down monster after monster. Some of the creatures stagger and whirl in swirls of sparks and blood spume before going down. Others collapse like bags of rocks. One by one,
like clay pigeons, they get picked off by the falsetto-howling noisemakers in the rear of the truck.
Lilly stands behind them, holding on to a side brace, overseeing the operation with her laser-focused gaze, until suddenly, without warning, the truck hits a rut. The bump knocks Speed Wilkins—the youngest of the three—off the rear of the truck.
From her vantage point behind the burning water tower, Barbara Stern inhales a startled breath. “Oh Jesus … Jesus, Jesus … shit!”
Out in the vacant lot, the man behind the wheel of the cargo truck evidently doesn’t see the accident and keeps rolling slowly away from the fallen man, who is now rising to his knees just as a phalanx of biters surrounds him. Speed madly searches the ground for his gun, but the biters are pressing in on all sides—at least a dozen of them—most of them still smoking from tufts of ragged clothing that are still on fire. One of them—a wiry female with a scorched face, dead flesh burned as crisp as parchment—unhinges her creaking jaws to reveal rows of slimy, sharp teeth.
Speed lets out a yelp and dives away from her, shoulder-rolling into three more monsters.
This all happens within the space of a few seconds, Barbara and David Stern watching helplessly from behind the tower. David fecklessly raises his bow, thinking he might be able to hit the three attackers now converging on the boy—but he is so far out of range he might as well be in the next county. Just as he stretches a metal-tipped arrow back in the sling, several things transpire with neck-snapping swiftness.
Barbara sees a flash leap out of the truck, vaulting through the air before the other two men even get a chance to raise their guns.
Lilly lands fifteen feet away from Speed Wilkins, just as the three smoldering corpses pounce on him. Wilkins rolls away, flailing wildly, kicking out at the smallest one with his work boots. Lilly charges across the gap, pausing only for a split instant to scoop up Speed’s Bushmaster—the rifle has maybe two rounds left, if that, but it’s something—and she simultaneously raises the .22 in her left hand while tossing the rifle to Speed with the other.