The Walking Dead: Invasion (19 page)

Something blocks out the sun all of a sudden, something enormous in the sky, which rips Tommy's attention up to the heavens directly above the treetops. The entire sixty-foot-long flatcar has gone airborne. It rotates lazily in midair for a brief moment as it arcs out across an adjacent clearing—creating a surreal sight worthy of a Magritte painting, a locomotive in a fireplace—and then it crashes down in the grass beyond the bend.

The ground shakes.

Tommy lets out a sigh of air—half shock, half relief—as he watches the massive train car roll another hundred feet or so before shuddering to a stop, several of its axles and wheel assemblies broken loose, lying in the tall grass behind it. The air fills with a nebula of dust, which rises over the crash site and quickly dissipates in the breeze. Tommy lowers his head and lets out another breath of relief. Lilly has already managed to rise to her feet about ten yards away from him. “You okay, buddy?” she asks as she limps over to him.

“Yeah, I think so.” Tommy levers himself up to a standing position. Dizziness makes him reel for a moment. “That was … yeah.”

She inspects him for wounds. “Looks like you're fairly unscathed.”

“Whaddaya talking about? I'm totally scathed. That was totally messed up.”

She manages a tepid chuckle. “Yeah. Totally. But it was better than the alternative back there.”

They hear a noise. Maybe a twig-snap somewhere behind the trees. Maybe shuffling footsteps.

Lilly looks over her shoulder and doesn't see anything … yet. “No time to pat ourselves on the back,” she says, indicating the shadows of the woods. “All the noise of our little derailing incident is gonna draw the swarm. C'mon.” Lilly starts picking up the goodies that fell from Tommy's pack. “Let's get this stuff squared away and get the fuck outta here.”

*   *   *

Gloria's shriek erupts in the enclosed space of the Challenger's interior with the force of an air-raid siren. Blood backwashes all over Bob, and the car swerves. Bob bears down on the ankle, the handle of the hacksaw getting greasy from all the blood gushing up across his arms, down into his lap, and into the seams of the seats.

He knows he has to hurry. The slower he cuts, the more agonizing the pain.

Gloria screams louder—a raspy, keening howl, the sound of it almost metallic—as Bob feels the serrated blade of the hacksaw catch suddenly on the bone, the teeth seizing up, getting caught on the hard, brittle core of the ankle. He bears down harder. Gloria passes out, her body going limp. “Almost, almost,
almost,
” he utters between grunts as he tries to hack through her ankle, making her entire body jiggle with each nudge of the blade. “GodDAMNit!” Bob barks as he pulls the blade loose. “Gotta get better leverage!”

“Oh dear Jesus Lord, Lord, Lordy-Lord,” Norma Sutters murmurs desperately into her lap, shaking her head, her shoulders slumped with sorrow.

Bob awkwardly pulls himself out from under the bloody mess of Gloria's legs, and he struggles to reverse his position, squeezing around between the seat-backs and Gloria to face her and then quickly finish the job. She moans. Partially conscious, delirious with pain, her head lolling, she manages to utter a name.

“I'm here, darlin',” Bob softly replies, and then says, “You gotta bite the bullet one more second and then it'll all be over.”

Time seems to slow down, and suddenly stop, as Bob saws through the remaining few centimeters of Gloria's bone and finally wrenches the woman's right foot off, along with three inches of her leg above the ankle. It slips out of Bob's blood-slimy hand and splash into the puddle of blood that has formed on the floor mats. Blood floods the seats. Bob quickly grabs the torch and the lighter, and thumbs the acetylene on, and sparks the nozzle.

The faint thumping sound of the blue flame makes Norma Sutters jerk in the front seat, despite the fact that she's looking away, having averted her gaze for most of the procedure.

Bob cauterizes the ragged, oozing stump. The odor wafts, and it's terrible—a black, acrid fume—but the worst part isn't the smell. The worst part is the sound. The sizzling of burning flesh will live in the memories of each inhabitant of that Dodge Challenger from that day on. Bob feels something coming undone inside him, and lifts his finger off the torch's trigger, extinguishing the flame and leaving a black tarry cap on the stump.

*   *   *

Somehow, Miles has managed to keep the car at a steady fifty miles an hour throughout the entire procedure. Now he glances in the rearview at the aftermath in the rear seats. “Is it done?”

“Yeah, it's done,” Bob says, looking down at the severed foot, wiping his blood-slick hands on a towel. “Get us home as soon as you can.… We ain't out of the woods yet.” He regards the profuse amount of blood that has gathered on the floor mats, on the seats, and even across the inside of the windows. It looks like an animal was slaughtered. He drops his towel on top of the amputated foot and then tenderly puts a hand on Gloria's cheek.

She tries to speak, but all that comes out of her is a thin, wispy whistle of a sigh.

“You're gonna make it, kiddo,” Bob tells her softly, stroking her feverish cheek.

She barely utters a labored response. “I'm sorry, Bob … but … I would … I'd …
rather not
.”

Bob looks at her. He tips his head to the side in confusion. He's not sure he just heard what he thinks he just heard. He leans down and puts his ear next to her quavering, blood-spattered lips. “Say again, sweetie?”

The words come out on a sigh, a dwindling volume to the voice. “I would … prefer to … just … you know … have this be … the end of the whole mess for me.”

 

THIRTEEN

“Wait.…
What?
” Bob Stookey stares down at the face of a woman at peace, the eerie calm setting into her pug-nosed features. Bob panics. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

She gazes up at him through eyes filmed in opaque, milky suffering. “Let me go, Bob.”

“Fuck, no!”

Her eyelids sink shut. “It was … a good run.”

He shakes her. “Stay with us! There's no reason—”

“N-not like this … too much work.”

“Gloria! Gloria!” He shakes her, he slaps her face. He's not even aware that he's crying. “There's no reason!—Glo!—DON'T DO THIS!”

Her eyes are closed now, her head lolling to the side, a soft death rattle wheezing out of her. The faintest words cross her lips, so soft that Bob has to press his ear against her quivering mouth. “Make sure I … don't…”

“GLORIA!”

“… come back.…”

“GLORIA!”

On a long sigh: “… Please make sure.…”

“GLORIA!” He shakes her and shakes her. He can barely see through his tears. He tastes copper on his tongue—salt and tarnished metal—as the car swerves. Bob falls against the door, shaking Gloria, picking her up. He hardly notices the change in her tiny body. She has gone completely limp.

“GLORIA!—GLORIA!—GLORIA!” Bob holds her and cries and realizes the fingertips of his right hand are softly pressing the tender flesh above her carotid artery.

She has no pulse.

This fact reaches Bob's brain one nanosecond before he realizes what he has to do now.

He frowns, a tear breaking over the edge of his lower lid and tracking down his face. He pulls the .357 from where it was wedged between the back of his belt and his lower back. He collapses into the seat next to the flaccid, blood-soaked remains of Gloria Pyne.

Then Bob Stookey has a ferocious cry.

*   *   *

Inside the sealed windows of the muscle car, the blast pops dry and flat, like a balloon bursting, as the vehicle roars around the bend at the intersection of 74 and 18. The distinctive report of a .357 Magnum—when muffled by the glass and steel enclosure of an automobile, and further dampened by the hank of bunched fabric pressed down on Gloria Pyne's skull—emits a low thump that could easily be mistaken for a tire blowing or a chassis banging over a pothole, were it not for the unmistakable subsonic slap-back echo that now drifts over the treetops of the adjacent woods. To anyone within a five-mile radius, it might actually bring to mind the rattle of heat thunder on the horizon, or the low boil of a storm brewing in the far distance.

Lilly Caul pauses on the trail and looks up. She tilts her head and listens, waiting for more gunfire, but there is only that single muffled blast, now fading on the breeze. For a moment, she wonders if she imagined it. “Did you hear that?” she whispers to the young man coming up behind her.

Tommy lets out an exhausted sigh. “Hear what? No. What was it?—Walkers?”

“No … I thought I heard … Never mind.” Lilly takes a deep breath and shrugs the straps of her knapsack a little higher on her shoulders. The straps have been digging into the nape of her neck for the last couple of miles, and now she hears the faint creak of her tendons as she stretches. Her pack weighs a ton, and feels like it's getting heavier by the moment. She tightens the bracing strap. “Let's go.… C'mon … we're almost there.”

They continue down the stony, weed-riddled path as it snakes through the thickets.

Five minutes later, they see a glint of metal through a break in the foliage, and Lilly silently shoots a hand up, stopping Tommy cold in his tracks behind her. She hears voices. She motions for the boy to get down, be quiet, and hold on for a second. She crouches, wriggles off her pack, fishes in it, finds her binoculars, and peers through the lenses at the shimmer of purple metal-flake steel visible through the pine boughs and tall grass.

Lilly registers the sight as the front quarter panel of a car parked near the access hatch. It looks as though the car's doors are open, and that there are silhouettes of three or more figures sitting inside the vehicle.

A female voice says something like, “You gonna be okay?”

A gravelly male voice says, “Just gimme a second.… I'm fine.… Just a second.”

Goose bumps crawl over Lilly's flesh. Several things register in her all at once, in equal measures of panic, confusion, and a weird kind of relief. She recognizes Bob Stookey's voice, but it sounds wrong—drained and trembly. And she does
not
recognize the other speaker.

Suddenly she hears the sound of shuffling footsteps behind her, in the middle distance, behind the trees, and the low buzz of growling.

Lilly twists around and makes eye contact with the exhausted boy. “Tommy,” she whispers. “Listen to me. Get your crowbar out.”

“Okay, but—”

“Sshhhh, just do it, and follow my lead.” Lilly reaches down to her pack, puts back the binoculars, and zips it shut. Then she draws her Ruger from her belt, and whispers, “We got walkers coming up behind us, and I'm not totally sure what's going on up there with Bob and those folks, or who they are, or what they want. But I can tell something's wrong. I'd prefer to be safe rather than sorry.”

The boy nods. “I get it—I'm ready.”

“Let me do the talking.”

Another nod.

Lilly rises, silently pushing her way through the foliage toward the clearing, and grips the Ruger with both hands—commando style—despite the fact that it's out of ammo. As she approaches the parked car, she sees that it's a vintage hot rod and it tics and diesels like a snoring beast as it sits at an angle across the clearing from the tunnel hatch. As she gets closer, she sees Bob kneeling down just outside the car's open rear door, as though praying, or supplicating, to someone sprawled across the rear seats. His shoulders are slumped miserably, as if his head weighs a million tons.

An enormous black woman in a threadbare floral dress and bouffant hairstyle stands outside the front passenger door, wringing her hands, waiting respectfully for Bob to finish whatever it is he's doing.

Lilly pauses just inside the netting of cattails and undergrowth that borders the clearing. She holds her gun on the portly woman. “Bob?!”

Bob's head rises with a start. “Lilly?” He looks around. “That you?”

Lilly steps out of the thicket and into the clearing, followed by the boy, who holds his crowbar as menacingly as possible. “What the fuck is going on?” Lilly demands as she trains the Ruger's muzzle on the woman. “Who are these people, Bob?”

“Take it easy, Lilly-girl.” Bob speaks in halting wheezes, as though he can barely muster the energy to talk. “They're friendlies.”

Lilly starts to say something else when the car's driver-side door squeaks open and a young African-American in a ragged hoodie and tight little braids emerges from the car with his hands up. “We're on your side, ma'am!”

“That's right.” The portly woman has her hands up as well, and she gives Lilly a convivial little smile. “I'm Norma, and this here is Miles.”

“Bob, what's wrong?” Lilly sees the lump of a figure lying prone across the backseat and sees the backwash of deep scarlet blood spattered everywhere inside the car, and it makes her stomach clench. She can hear the scuttling of walkers closing in from the woods. “Is that Gloria? What happened? Is she okay?”

Bob looks up at Lilly, and with a single, forlorn, anguished shake of his head, he tells Lilly practically everything she needs to know about what happened without uttering a single word. She lowers her gun, and she feels her chest go cold. She bows her head and lets out a heartbreaking sigh. “Oh God … Don't tell me she was … and you had to…”

“Lilly—?” Tommy's voice from behind her penetrates her shock. “We got four cold ones coming.”

Lilly turns and shoves her gun in the back of her belt, then draws her rusty machete from its makeshift sheath on her hip. “Get back, Tommy.”

“But what about—?“

“Just do what I say!” Lilly sees the foursome pushing through the foliage about thirty feet away, a female and three males in ragged work clothes. They have at least a couple of years of decay on them, their faces and exposed areas of flesh so corroded with decomposition that they appear to be made of stucco, with ghastly veneers of gray tissue vacu-formed around their sharp-angled skulls. Lilly starts to say, “Get back, everybody, and—”