The Walking Dead: Invasion (11 page)

The little propeller spins and spins.

*   *   *

Miles Littleton has heard enough. On his hands and knees under the window of the preacher's RV, his skinny form shielded from the eyes of other campers by a curtain of foliage and poplar trees, the young car thief has been listening to the conversation going on inside the camper for nearly a half an hour now, and with each passing minute he has gotten more and more disgusted.

Considering the fact that Miles has been in and out of jail for petty crimes for most of his life, he knows a con man when he hears one.

The trouble is, this bat-shit preacher seems to have won over most of the members of the caravan. In fact, there may be only one person around here other than Miles who has the bullshit detector turned on, and it's high time Miles went and talked to her about it.

He turns away from the RV and silently crawls through the trees.

He emerges on the other side of the clearing and then goes searching for Norma.

She'll know what to do.

 

PART 2

The End of the Whole Mess

“For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not seen since the beginning of the world … nor ever shall be seen again.”

—Matthew 24:21

 

EIGHT

Days later, in the main sewer conduit beneath the outskirts of Woodbury, Georgia, two figures splash through six inches of brackish muck, walking side by side in the darkness. The older of the two, a slender woman of wan complexion and auburn hair, wears a miner's helmet she found in one of the maintenance offices in a neighboring water treatment plant. The single battery-operated light attached to the helmet sends a thin shaft of luminous yellow across the passageway in front of her, shimmering dully off the ancient terra-cotta tiles of the tunnel wall.

The younger of the two—a gangly boy of twelve dressed in a flannel shirt that's two sizes too big for him—trundles along beside the woman, cheerfully babbling, “I heard what you said to Bob the other day, and I totally agree with you, Lilly. I mean, I think we can and we
should
take Woodbury back from the slugs, and I know it's not up to me, but I'm like totally down with you on this, and I'll do whatever I can do to help, you know what I mean?”

Lilly shoots a glance at the boy, but doesn't break her stride. “You were spying on us?”

He shrugs as he walks. “I wouldn't call it spying, I was just sort of—”

“You were pretending to be asleep.”

“Sort of.”

“You were eavesdropping.”

“All right, yeah, I admit it, but the point is, I totally agree with you.”

She shakes her head. “You heard the whole thing about me being claustrophobic?”

He nods. “I'm not sure what that means.”

Lilly sighs. “It means—literally—a fear of enclosed spaces.”

The boy walks and thinks for a moment. “That's kinda bad, huh, considering where we're living nowadays?”

“You think?”

“Lilly, can you keep a secret?”

“What do you mean?”

“There's something I want to show you.”

“Right now? Down here?”

“Yeah.”

“We don't have a lot of time, Tommy, we're supposed to be checking the culvert opening.”

“It'll just take a—”

“Wait, hold on.” Lilly slows down, detecting a troubling odor in the fusty, airless atmosphere of the sewer. Beneath the stench of human waste wafts a secondary stench—greasier, more acrid. “Just a second,” she says, and stops.

The boy halts, and waits, and stares at her. “What is it? A slug?”

Lilly cocks her head and listens.

“Slug” is the boy's latest slang word for the reanimated dead. For weeks now, he has been using a seemingly infinite number of monikers for the creatures—stinkers, empties, geeks, rotters, shells, stiffs, carcasses, chewies, dicks, reekers, meat-flies, feeders, mofos—to the point that Lilly has lost count of all the nicknames. She believes it's a defense mechanism—a way for the twelve-year-old to objectify the monsters and minimize the horror of seeing human beings reduced to these repulsive parasitic
things
—so she goes along with it, trying in vain to keep up with the latest terminology. Right now, in fact, as she listens closely to the watery smacking noises coming from the shadows ahead of them, she thinks “slug” is a fairly accurate appellation for the sewer corpses she has been encountering underground lately.

“You hear that?” Lilly says finally.

“Yeah.” The boy goes stone-still as the watery sounds rise into a tortured, raspy, moaning noise. “Sounds like it's coming from that side tunnel up there.” He indicates a dark intersection of tunnels about fifty feet away, a workman's shovel leaning against the wall. They've traveled almost a mile west of their barracks, their position somewhere under Gable's Pond. In the thin beam of light from the miner's helmet, a series of ripples agitate the standing water.

Lilly pulls her .22 caliber Ruger and starts screwing on the suppressor attachment. “You stay here, and I'll go and—”

“No.” The boy puts a hand on her arm. “Let me take care of it.”

“Tommy—”

“I can do it.” His chin juts with determination, his eyes blazing. His expression nearly breaks Lilly's heart. Newly orphaned, steeped in death and loss, the boy is a born survivor. “I'll be fine,” he says. “Let me do it.”

Lilly nods. “I'll be right behind you. Be careful. No hesitating.”

“I'll be okay.”

Lilly follows the boy through the mire, her gun at her side, her finger poised on the trigger pad. Tommy approaches the intersecting tunnels slowly. He carefully picks up the shovel.

Something moves around the corner, making little radiating ripples across the flooded floor. The boy silently sucks in a breath and raises the shovel. Lilly moves in behind him as he turns the corner.

Something shoots toward his leg, and cold fingers clutch his ankle.

The boy yelps and rears back, and Lilly gets a fleeting glimpse of the thing before the shovel comes down—a flash of the miner's light illuminating a pasty, bloated, fish-belly face, its slimy, piranha-like teeth clacking. The bottom of the creature's torso is missing, a spaghetti knot of entrails flagging off. The rot and months of being submerged in the swampy muck have inflated its upper half to twice its normal size, giving it the appearance of being artificial and rubbery, like a discarded doll.

Tommy Dupree slams the shovel down on the thing's sodden skull, the sound like wet celery snapping. The creature instantly sags, its cadaverous hand releasing the boy's ankle. Tommy strikes it again. The thing has already expired, its flattened head now sinking below water level, but Tommy keeps smashing the shovel down on its remains. Again and again … until Lilly grabs the implement and makes Tommy inhale with a gasp as though waking from a dream.

“Good job, good job … you did it.” Lilly soothes the boy by patting him on the back and tousling his hair. “You killed that thing real good.”

“Yeah … okay.” The boy is breathing so hard he's about to hyperventilate. “Okay … um … yeah.”

“You all right?” Lilly holsters her gun, takes the shovel, and leads the boy over to the opposite corner of the intersecting tunnels. “Look at me.”

The boy looks at her. His eyes are red. He's still breathing hard. “I'm okay, Lilly.”

“You sure?”

He nods. “Yep.” He takes a deep breath, wipes his mouth, and looks as though he just woke up. “Can I show you something now?”

Lilly smiles at him. “Why not?”

*   *   *

An hour or so later, after leading Lilly down a mile of narrow passageway, the boy shines the light at the tunnel ceiling. “There it is!” he marvels, abruptly coming to a halt.

Lilly gazes up, her miner's light canting up at the leprous ceiling, where tendrils of roots and wormy gray icicles of calcium dangle down, whiskering the edges of a large drainage grate. A patina of grit and age cover the rusty underside of the grating, but it's apparent by a series of fresh scratches and gouge marks that somebody has forced it open in recent days. Lilly's heart beats a little faster.

“Okay, hold the light for a second,” Tommy says. She does so as he scuttles up the ancient steps embedded in the masonry. He pushes open the grating with a grunt and shimmies up through the gap.

“You mind helping an old lady up?!” Lilly says. She sees nothing but darkness on the other side of the hatch as the pale face of Tommy Dupree stares down at her.

“Here, take my hand.”

He helps her into the fetid atmosphere of a cavernous boiler room.

She rises to her feet and brushes herself off, gazing around at the shadowy convolutions of ductwork, furnaces, hot water heaters, and ancient plumbing like the tentacles of prehistoric beasts. The air smells of the centuries, a faint whiff of old rubber and overworked heating elements. Tommy leads her over to a staircase with rickety metal treads going up one flight.

Lilly aims her light at the top of the stairs and sees the word “SHOWROOM” stenciled across the backside of a latched metal door. Tommy reaches the door first, and pauses. He smiles at her.

“Get a load of this,” he says. He opens the door as though ushering a guest into an exclusive club, and Lilly takes a single step into the room.

*   *   *

At first, she goes still, as though gobsmacked by the sheer scale of the place. It takes a long moment for the vast, spacious room filled with enormous shadowy objects to even register in her brain.

She slowly scans the showroom, which is arrayed with shiny new farm implements, the beam of her miner's light passing across the high-gloss Kelly green fenders of John Deere tractors, the gleaming candy apple red tusks of Case harvesters, the gigantic scoops of backhoes, the enormous blades of reapers, and the countless rows of riding mowers, diggers, transports, wagons, and attachments sitting in the dark like cadavers in a carpeted morgue. The high ceiling, at least fifty feet above the floor, houses massive gantries, inverted lighting long ago gone dark, the rustle of birds up in the ironwork like termites eating away at the place.

“Is this sweet or what?” the boy enthuses, striding across the showroom floor, his footsteps silent on the thick pile carpet. Lilly sees a massive company sign on a banner spanning the back wall: “CENTRAL MACHINERY SALES.”

“Good God,” she utters, taking a few more steps in toward the center of the room. She can smell the welcoming perfume of new upholstery, fresh lubricant, immaculate tire treads, and shimmering steel joints like jewels in elaborate settings. “How the hell did you find this?”

“I kind of accidentally found that opening in the basement,” he explains with a sweeping gesture of his skinny arms, indicating the totality of the dark showroom, a modicum of pride in his voice as though explaining the genesis of a winning science fair project. “I was just wandering, and I noticed some parts of the ceiling were, like, dripping, like water draining or something. And then I realized that the drain was in the floor of a basement. C'mon.”

He takes her by the hand and leads her across the showroom to a side door behind a cashier's desk. Lilly draws her pistol. They make their exit carefully, stepping through a malodorous vestibule into the overcast afternoon. Trash blows around their feet as they survey the grounds of Central Machinery Sales—the deserted parking lot, the security fence, the streetlights and power lines.

“Holy Christ, is that what I think it is?” Lilly nods toward a holding tank. The size of a Volkswagen Bug, the horizontal tank is rust-pocked and sun-faded, but the legend stamped on the side is still faintly visible: “F U E L.”

“Is that full?” Lilly asks.

“I think so. C'mere.” The boy crosses the gravel lot to the edge of the fuel tank, makes a fist, and pounds on the side. The ringing sound is flat, and accompanied by the slosh of fluid inside the reservoir. “Sounds like it's half full.”

Lilly looks around. “Looks like the fence is still intact. And the place is walker-free?”

“Yep.”

“Oh my God.” She looks at the boy. “Oh … my … God.”

“I know.” He grins. “Whaddaya think?”

“Oh. My. God.”

“Sweet, huh?”

She stares at him. “I'm not sure yet, but this place might just change everything.”

*   *   *

“Reverend, with all due respect … you're leading us straight into Injun territory.”

The voice comes from the rear of the Winnebago, the sound of it warbling as though coming through a tissue of liquid. James Frazier stands behind the pilot seat, bracing himself on the nearest cupboard as the vehicle clamors over rough road, rattling and thudding furiously, knocking dishes askew and sending books tumbling off shelves. Some of the preacher's remote control toys topple, sending plastic airplanes, model cars, transmitters, and batteries skittering across the floor. James cringes with each bump, his flannel shirt sweat-damp under the arms. He glances out the passenger window as the camper roars past a fence post on which a walker head has been impaled as some sort of warning, the pasty cadaverous face still openmouthed, still looking hungry, still gripped in agony for eternity.

“Trust, James! Trust in the Lord, and trust in your humble clergy!” Jeremiah buzzes with energy, despite the fact that his rosacea has returned with a vengeance this morning. Dressed in his trademark black frock coat, now bunched in the middle with a heavy bullet bandolier, he glances up at the rearview and takes in his square-jawed reflection: the rosy patches across his cheeks and chin, the moistness of his eyes, his prominent nose already broken out in darkened capillaries as though he were a skid-row juicer on his last bender. The skin disorder has a habit of breaking out when the preacher least expects it, often in times of great upheaval or stress. It also seems to be advancing. For years, it had only caused a faint swelling in his eyes and a reddening of the cheeks, as though he were blushing. But lately the condition brings on severe flushing, a burning in the eyes, and visible blood vessels. And today is shaping up to be the worst outbreak yet. It's been brewing ever since they left camp.