The Walking Dead: Invasion (10 page)

“Bob—”

“We can't keep talking about this. You can see for yourself. It's a foregone conclusion.”

“Bob, these kids deserve to live as normal a life as possible, and that means getting Woodbury back. We can do it, if we all pitch in.”

“It's too soon.”

Lilly feels a twinge of anger. “The time is
now
, Bob. The horde has stabilized; it's not getting any bigger.”

“Yeah, and it's not getting any smaller.”

“Bob—”

“Put it to a vote, you don't believe me. Let everybody vote on it, kids too.”

She sighs and looks over her shoulder at the others. Fifty feet away, the youngest kids are splashing and giggling inside the confines of a huge galvanized washtub. Gloria squats next to them in her threadbare Capri pants and high-top sneakers, helping the Slocum twins and Lucas Dupree take sponge baths with the last of the dishwashing liquid.

Gloria has taken it upon herself to be the interior decorator of the group, her latest creation visible in the dim light just beyond the washtub. The little makeshift lounge has pieces scavenged from Woodbury's Dew Drop Inn—bar stools, highboy tables, plastic flowers in tin cans, a dartboard, and even a poster that says, “BEER IS THE ANSWER.… BUT WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?”

Right now, Harold Staubach and the Sterns sit at one of these highboys, drinking instant coffee and fiddling with exposed wires and circuitry from one of the generator junction boxes. None of these people seems as restless or displaced as Lilly, as she softly murmurs now, almost to herself, “Bob, it's not legislation … it's not an act of Congress.”

“What's wrong with taking a vote? Isn't that the way you always wanted to run the town?”

She looks at him and lets out another bitter sigh. “I don't want to get into this now.”

“Are you saying you don't want to get into a discussion about taking Woodbury back or you don't want to get into a voting situation?”

“I mean, I don't want to go over this again.”

“Why not?”

“Bob, these people have no idea what the implications of staying down here are.”

“It's the lesser of two evils, Lilly.”

“I don't see it that way. We had something good up there, or at least we saw glimmers of it.”

“I ain't saying we didn't. All I'm saying is, this place is our best bet for now. It ain't gonna be forever. But for now, we got everything we need down here.”

She exhales a derisive little breath. “We got food and water, electrical power, fucking beans and rice, but we really don't have anything.”

“Lilly, come on.”

“Anything that
matters
.” She fixes her gaze on him. “We don't have light, air … the earth, the sky … freedom.”

Bob shakes his head with mock dismay, a crooked little smile creasing his deeply lined features. “How can you say that? We got plenty of earth—just look around.”

“Very funny, Bob. Maybe you should do stand-up comedy down here for the gang Fridays and Saturdays. You'll have a captive audience.”

He cocks his head at her, his smile fading. “Is it the claustrophobia flarin' up again?”

Another anguished sigh from Lilly. She would take a bullet for this crusty old medic, she would die for him, but he makes her so goddamned crazy sometimes. “What are you asking me? You asking if I'm willing to put everybody else's life at stake because I get the shakes or a few headaches every once in a while?”

“I didn't say—”

“We can't stay down here indefinitely, Bob. You know that as well as I do.”

He puts his big, grime-stained hand around her shoulder, his touch both tender and deferential. “Look, I'm not saying we stay down here till the twelfth of forever. I'm just saying we stay put until it gets a little less hairy up there. Right now it's Grand Central Station up there, and I don't want to lose any more people if I don't have to.”

She gives him a hard look. “How do you know it's ever going to get any better?”

He removes his hand from her shoulder and doesn't say anything.

Lilly glances off toward the barricade. In the shadows next to the fencing, a single heavy-duty power cable snakes down from the ceiling and into a rectangular light fixture aimed down at a row of flowerpots on a shelf. Lilly's beloved petunias stick out of the potting soil in the purple glow, spindly, sickly, looking like wadded tissue paper. She has given up on her flowers. Now, each day, she watches them die. She mutters, “How do we know they're not going to be there a thousand years?” She looks at Bob. “Maybe this is the new normal.”

He keeps looking at the floor, shrugging, not saying anything.

She stares at him. “All this aside … we're vulnerable down here, Bob. And it's not just the risk of walkers getting in. We're vulnerable to human attack.”

Bob finally looks at her and gives her his patented sideways grin. His voice drops an octave, coming out with smug certainty: “Who the hell in their right mind would bother us down
here
?”

 

SEVEN

Two figures move through the woods, through thick drapes of foliage, the shafts of overcast daylight flickering down into their eyes as they scan the distant trees for any sign of their encampment.

They walk silently, stealthily, their pistols gripped tightly in their hands. They have silencers attached to the muzzles of their weapons but they're low on ammo and conserving their bullets. They carry secondary weapons—the younger man a machete stuffed down his belt, the older man a twelve-inch hunting knife in a sheath on his hip—each using his auxiliary weapon for both slashing thickets of foliage and impaling the skulls of errant walkers. They've been lucky these last few hours, running into very few roamers. The herd seems to have coalesced north of here, with only a few stragglers dragging along the back roads of southern Meriwether County.

“Look!” Reese Lee Hawthorne, his face shimmering with sweat, his clothes soaked through, speaks in a loud whisper, cautious about drawing too much attention. “Straight ahead—the other side of that clearing—see it?!”

The two young men come to a halt under a canopy of thick pine boughs. The late afternoon light undulates above them with bugs, the air smelling of wood-rot and forest musk. Stephen Pembry catches his breath and nods slowly. “Thank the Lord, thank the Good Lord.”

Through the brambles he can see the temporary barricade of logs and chicken wire, and the dull silver gleam of Chester Gleason's Airstream trailer. The circle of vehicles stretches at least a hundred yards in both directions—pickups, SUVs, stake trucks, and all manner of RVs—their battered exteriors camouflaged by the shadows of the deep woods. The two scouts give each other one last fleeting nod of excitement, and then lurch single file through the remaining grove of trees between them and the caravan.

They burst out of the forest and practically leap over the fence.

Reese runs with a limp, his hip panging with agony where he fell earlier that morning trying to cross a dry, rocky riverbed. Stephen wheezes furiously as he runs, his injured rib cage and punctured lung on fire. Their packs feel as though they weigh a thousand tons on their backs, and their eyes bug out with thirst and hunger as they stumble awkwardly toward the huge plastic water jug on the tailgate of the Thorndyke family camper. The noise of their arrival brings dozens of survivors out of their RVs or out from behind temporary latrines to see what all the commotion is about.

Stephen reaches the water jug first and drops to his knees, putting his parched mouth under the tap.

“Careful, Brother,” Reese says, kneeling beside him, cupping his hands to catch the runoff dripping from the tap and Stephen's chin. “You don't want to puke it all up before it hits your gut!”

Stephen Pembry gulps the water and then has a coughing attack, dropping to his hands and knees, keeling over, hacking and wheezing into the grass. “Sweet Jesus,” he gasps between coughing fits, his face livid with exertion. “Water has never tasted so good!”

The two men had run completely out of drinking water twelve hours earlier, and figured it was no big deal. They had all the evidence they needed to return to camp, and the caravan wasn't that far away, and besides, they were driving the Escalade, and as long as the main road was passable, they could be back home before suppertime. But as Stephen's father, Pastor Evan Pembry of the First Baptist Church of Murfreesboro, Kentucky, was fond of saying when he got in his cups or was trying to make a point about the capriciousness of life, “
Man plans and God has a big old laugh.
”

“You boys all right?” a voice intones cautiously behind Reese.

Stephen looks up, wiping his mouth and blinking, and sees Rory Thorndyke standing over him. The former bricklayer from Augusta, garbed in a stained wifebeater T-shirt, his tree-trunk arms emblazoned with naval tattoos and hard gristly muscles, holds his cherubic little three-year-old daughter in his arms while he gums a wad of Copenhagen. “Y'all look like you been hit by a truck.”

“We'll live,” Stephen mutters as he sits back in the grass and tries to catch his breath.

“You see the herd out there—the big one?” Rory wants to know, giving his little girl a bounce on his hip. For weeks now, the gathering hordes of walkers along the backwaters of southern Georgia have been a hot topic of conversation among the members of the convoy. It's bad enough that the infernal things had managed to get into their beloved Father Murphy's camper, but the fact that they seem to be coalescing like individual amoebas morphing into a larger and larger organism has everybody spooked.

Stephen shakes his head. “Nope … Other than the swarms that have settled down on some of the towns south of Atlanta, we didn't see no herd.”

“Well, y'all better get your shit together, the preacher said he wanted to see you two the minute you got back.”

Reese and Stephen share another loaded glance and then begin to brush themselves off and run fingers through their hair as though preparing for a court appearance.

*   *   *

“What in tarnation happened to your dad-blamed vehicle?” The preacher sits at the RV's dining table, his hat off, his huge hair greased back from his forehead. He is dressed in shirtsleeves, slacks, and his big Wellington boots, and he sits back against the bulwark, one boot propped up rakishly on the seat cushion as he plays with a child's toy. His enormous gnarled hands fiddle with the tiny propeller, turning it as though he's never seen a remote control helicopter before. This morbid fascination with toys—in fact, the mere
idea
of toys, and the existential
absurdity
of them in this day and age, as though the very
idea
of someone playing with toys now is an offense to God—practically crackles in his brain with a strange effervescence. His pappy didn't take kindly to the concept of
play
.

“Ran outta gas about ten, fifteen miles from here,” Stephen reports from across the camper. He paces nervously and wheezes between sentences as he speaks. “Didn't bargain on all the driving around in circles.”

“We'll get it back. I'll send Chester and Harlan out for it.”

Stephen nods. “Appreciate it, Brother. Sorry about having to leave it.”

“And you say the Caul woman and her party is now livin' in this tunnel like a bunch of sewer rats?”

“Not sure how many are down there—at least a half dozen or so adults. That Bob fella, Harold, and some ladies, a few kids maybe.”

“Brother Staubach is with them?”

Jittery nods.

“Makes you wonder what kinda firepower they're packin' down there.”

Reese looks at Stephen and gives a shrug. “Mostly small arms, looks like, and they don't seem to have a heck of a lot of ammo. I'm thinking they're pretty much running on fumes down there, even though they got gennies providing power and whatnot.”

The preacher chews on this for a moment. “I thought for sure old Harold had met his maker during all that hubbub in Woodbury.” He twirls the little plastic propeller. “Man is a traitor to his church.”

“What are you fixing to do, Brother?” Reese wrings his hands as he sits on the flip-down love seat at the rear of the camper.

Jeremiah takes a deep breath as the rage turns in him, churning into something new, something ingenious and grand and almost biblical in nature. His great notion, his brilliant idea, smolders like a white-hot ember in the back of his brain. “Found this little gizmo in the back of Thorndyke's camper, was in a toy box, belonged to the previous owners—a few batteries that hadn't turned to dust, some other stuff, little gadgets and things.”

It becomes obvious the other two men have no idea what Jeremiah is talking about.

Jeremiah holds the little olive drab–colored plastic helicopter aloft as though illustrating his point. “‘Then I saw heaven standing open, and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Truth.'”

The two younger men share a nervous, fleeting glance. Reese recognizes the quote from Revelations but hasn't a clue as to what it means in this context. The preacher gazes lovingly at the remote control chopper. “‘With justice he judges and makes war,'” he murmurs, his eyes getting far away. “‘For he is vengeance.'”

“Brother Jeremiah, are you—?”

“‘The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile … they shall be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.'”

“Brother—?”

“‘They will be tormented day and night,'” Jeremiah recites dreamily, lost in his great plan, his brilliant idea. He can't hear the voice of the younger man. He hears imaginary screams, temples falling. He leans forward and carefully blows on the tiny rotor.

“'They shall be in agony … day and night … forever and ever and ever.'”