The Walking Dead: Invasion (20 page)

She hears a commotion behind her and then hears Bob's voice barking suddenly, “GET OUTTA MY WAY!”

A blur of movement draws Lilly's attention over her shoulder. She sees Bob lurching away from the car, then stumbling toward her. Before Lilly can even react, Bob has grabbed the machete out of her hands.

“BOB, WAIT—!!”

He lunges toward the creatures, snorting with the mad pent-up rage of a wild bull. He lashes out at the first one, striking it between the pectoral and shoulder, making a divot so deep in its neck the entire cranium peels away and flops down across its back. Black blood oozes out of the crater the instant before the thing collapses, its head dangling upside down against its own back, the threads of arteries and tendons like the defunct wiring of some out-of-service automaton.

“Bob—?!”

Lilly stares as Bob Stookey grips the rusty, blood-stippled machete with both hands—Babe Ruth at bat, about to swing for the fences—and in front of his horror-stricken, wide-eyed fellow survivors, proceeds to lose himself in his labors.

*   *   *

Lilly Caul has seen walker massacres before. She witnessed the man known as the Governor rain the hellfire of an entire armada of .50 caliber machine guns and countless automatic assault rifles down upon a swarm of the things that had accumulated outside the fences of a medium-security prison in rural Georgia. The clouds of blood mist and physical matter that had filled the air from
that
particular mass annihilation would live for a long time in her memory. She had seen smaller, more intimate slaughters as well—like the time that band of men in Marietta had cornered a small group of biters in a loading dock area behind a Piggly Wiggly and systematically dismembered them and crushed their heads with the rear tires of massive stake trucks. But she has never—
ever
—witnessed anything quite like this.

Bob's cathartic rampage through that cluster of decrepit monsters continues with a wide, arcing, roundhouse blow of the machete to the skull of the next closest walker. The blade strikes the thing's cranium just above the earlobe, and slices the top two-thirds of the skull clean off as though Bob were popping a bottle cap. The ragged scalp and partial upper-fascia jettisons into the air on a meteor-tail of pink matter, falling end over end to the ground. What remains is a hollow, trembling mess of bloody mantislike mandibles and exposed teeth that shudder and chatter for a surreal instant before the rest of the body gives out and folds to the ground.

The surviving two creatures make futile attempts to close in on Bob, but the dark-haired man turns to them and makes primal grunting noises as he quickly, efficiently, rams the tip of the blade, one at a time, hard, at upward angles, through the roofs of each of their mouths, into their nasal cavities, through their parietal lobes, and out the tops of their skulls. One by one, the remaining walkers drop.

Bob takes in a deep breath and lets out an enormous howl of pure, unadulterated rage—shot through with the agony of loss—right before he slams a boot down as hard as he can on the head of one of the fallen. The wet crunch makes most of the spectators behind him turn away in disgust—all except Lilly. She puts her arm around Tommy Dupree and hugs his face against her midsection and softly whispers, “I really don't think you need to see this.”

Meanwhile, Bob still has that machete gripped in both hands, and now he starts in on the motionless heaps. He slams the blade down on the moldering limbs and torsos as though beginning a vigorous session of firewood chopping. Lilly watches almost stoically, morbidly curious. The truth is, she loves this man, and she's proud of him—proud of him for kicking his drinking habit, proud of him for finding the tunnels, proud of him for saving the lives of his fellow survivors, for being the voice of reason, being loyal, and being a friend. For days now, Lilly has noticed little signs that Bob had grown sweet on Gloria, and now
this
.…

Lilly continues to look on without much emotion as Bob slashes and hacks and buries the blade in the gristle of mortified joints and stubborn bones, yanking it out with the help of his boot-sole. Blood spatters and blows back up at him, freckling his gaunt face, stinging his burning eyes. He looks like a demonic entity, and it begins to stir something deep inside Lilly Caul.
Whatever it takes,
she thinks.

Bob separates a leg from a hip with a single blow, a head from a neck, an upper body from a lower body, and the blood covers him now. Is he reenacting the amputation fiasco in the car? Is he exorcising something deeper, thornier? Lilly can't quite figure it out, but that's okay with her. Bob gets winded. The blade gets stuck for a moment and Bob lets out another feral yawp, almost simian in its guttural rage, but with pain in it.

That's when Lilly realizes that Bob is crying as he flails at the dead things. His tears fly off his face with each furious blow, his hitching sobs mingling with his hyperventilated gasps.

“Okay,” Lilly says, taking a step toward him. “That's enough now.”

She comes up behind him as he continues to lash away at the things on the ground. His energy has begun to flag. His head droops as he slashes wildly, fecklessly now. The sobbing has gotten the better of him. Lilly cautiously approaches. She puts a tender hand on his shoulder and he jumps, taken aback by her touch.

He turns and meets her gaze with his own feverish eyes, which now glitter with the madness. “What!—
WHAT!
”

Lilly doesn't say anything. She just nods her head, and keeps her hand on his shoulder, and keeps nodding and doesn't look away.

Bob lets the sobbing take him down into her arms, the grief loosening his grip on the blood-lacquered machete. The weapon falls to ground.

Then Bob loses it.

Lilly holds him and lets him cry it all out until there's nothing left.

*   *   *

They reconvene underground, in the private shadows of a side tunnel, in the deathly silence. They sit on folding chairs, and hold paper cups of instant coffee, and stare gravely at the floor as they listen to Norma Sutters' low, raspy voice give them the bad news.

Some of them had hoped the preacher was dead, figuring he must have perished in the chaos of the hordes that descended upon Woodbury last month. Now they sit very still and listen with morose expressions on their faces as Norma explains how the preacher stumbled upon her church with his two minions. She describes how he joined her in her search for Miles and the infamous caravan, and how the preacher had taken over the convoy when the priest had died, and how he had started acting strange and erratic almost immediately.

Then she pauses. The others wait. She licks her chapped lips as she looks into the eyes of each listener for a moment, gauging if and when and how she should tell them the gist of what she came here to say. At last, she clears her throat and says very softly, very casually, “He's building an army out of walkers.”

*   *   *

Lilly asks her to repeat what she just said, and Norma does so, and Lilly has to hear it a third time just to register its meaning, and to take stock of it.

Her memories of the Governor's horror shows in the speedway arena with their gladiatorial walkers and grisly death matches are still fresh enough to make nightly appearances in her dreams, and she remembers all too well the defensive swarm of biters positioned outside the fences of that horrible prison at which she had killed Philip Blake. She also remembers Jeremiah attempting to wreak havoc in Woodbury by knocking down the barricades and summoning the herd. Over the two years since the plague broke out, many others have certainly tried to use walkers in various ways—as shields, as weapons, or as threats of one kind or another—but nobody else ever attempted it in such a delusional and grand manner as this.

“I'm afraid you're gonna have to explain just exactly what you're talking about,” Lilly says finally to the plump black woman sitting across from her.

Dressed in a threadbare floral-print dress that strains at the seams with her girth, her décolletage brimming with massive bosoms, Norma Sutters has that warm, open, earthy face that Lilly has always associated with nurses, teachers, and den mothers. Against her better judgment, Lilly finds herself trusting this woman and her young juvenile delinquent of a companion.

Norma takes a sip of her tepid coffee and says, “Couple of nights ago, I couldn't for the life of me sleep one wink … tossing and turning all night to beat the band. I guess the old brain was just overloading with worry. So I got up and took a little walk.”

In another part of the tunnels, a child's laughter rings out, making Lilly and the others jump. Barbara Stern has agreed to keep the kids occupied with games and lunch while Norma and Miles tell their story to the rest of the adults, but every few moments the children inadvertently make their presence known. Lilly looks down at her hands and sees that they're shaking ever so slightly, and this touches off some deep well of anger within her. She has barely come to terms with Gloria Pyne's death—they have to bury her sometime soon—and now
this
.

“I was about to go back to bed,” Norma is saying. “I'd been walkin' for maybe a half an hour, circling the entire wagon train, when all of a sudden I see a light flickering in the woods. Thought I was seeing things at first. I get a little closer and I hear noises comin' from behind the trees, and that flickering light. I hear the most god-awful sounds coming from that light—human screams, walkers growling and such, I don't know what all.”

Norma shudders, and Lilly feels a cold finger tracing down the back of her spine, eliciting a wave of gooseflesh along the back of her legs as she recalls Jeremiah's used-car-dealer face and huge pompadour of hair. David Stern sits on one side of Lilly and Harold Staubach on the other, and she can sense each man's hackles going up. Tommy Dupree sits behind her, and she can hear the boy's steady breathing, and it sounds rapt, transfixed. Bob is off somewhere dealing with his grief over Gloria. Lilly's worried about him. He's lost a lot in recent months.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Norma goes on, “and I get close enough to finally see what's going on in them woods without givin' myself away.” She pauses again, and the others hang on her silence. “Now remember, this crazy preacher's been gathering these walkers for God knows what reason, and he's been torturing them biker fellas for days, and I have no earthly idea what he's up to, but I just know deep down in my bones it's all connected. So I hide behind a tree, and I see the strangest thing.”

The momentary pause weighs down on Lilly like a massive yoke.

“The preacher's got about ten of them monsters, and I'll be damned if it don't look like he's
playing
with them.”

David Stern knits his brow. “Whaddaya mean ‘playing with them'?”

Norma looks down and takes another deep breath as though the very
telling
of this continues to take a physical toll. “Down in Florida, they used to have them dog races? Terrible things, those races, all that hard-earned money getting lost on liquor and shenanigans. Anyway, I don't know if y'all ever saw one of them things, but there's a little metal rabbit on a rail that pops up and then charges around that track so the dogs'll chase it real good?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” David breaks in. “All due respect, what the hell does this have to do with the price of peas? If you'll pardon my impertinence.”

She gives him a hard look. “I'm comin' to that part, if you'll just be patient with me; my mama always used to say that if words was nickels I'd be a rich girl. Anyway … you gotta understand, all the pieces to this puzzle was right in front of me—the torturing of them bikers, the collecting of walkers as though they was bobblehead dolls.” She breathes deeply and shakes her head. “One of the RVs we found along the way—it had toys in it. Must have been a rich family and the children must have been spoiled and all, because there was remote control cars and planes and such, rechargeable batteries, cameras, electric guitars, and all kinds of gadgets you would never think you'd have any use for … but guess what?”

She glances around the dimly lit tunnel at all the dour faces soaking in her story, and she takes a deep breath. Here it comes.

“Here I am looking at this crazy-ass preacher leading this pack of walkers around like they was square dancers havin' a two-step. He's got this contraption rigged up, a battery-operated tape recorder, and a camera light flickering, and a little remote control car … and it's playing a recording of men dying. I swear. I ain't never heard anything like it—the screams of men being tortured to death, and a light blinking like that.”

She makes a pulsing gesture with her plump little hand. She shakes her head, but before she can continue, Lilly Caul says what she's thinking in a soft whisper, almost under her breath. “Pavlov…”

All heads turn toward Lilly. She feels their hot, nervous gazes on her skin. She says, “
Pavlov
 … as in Pavlov's dog … He's
training
them.”

David Stern looks down and barely utters the words, “Can't be done.”

“Well, now, see, that's kinda open for debate,” Norma counters, “because I saw them walkers following that thing around like sheep following a sheepdog. That preacher's got a remote control—one of them little toggle switches—and he's leading them monsters around like … like the damn Wizard of Oz. And that ain't all.” She swallows air for a moment. “Couple days later, he's got half the men in the place with him, off on some mission that he wouldn't tell the rest of us about. I was real curious by that point, so I got Miles to drive me out to the barrens, this flat meadow not far from our camp, where the preacher's got an old tow truck.”

Miles Littleton, still an unknown quantity to Lilly, mumbles something from his seat behind the plump woman. Lilly can't quite make out what he's saying. He speaks softly, his face downturned, his voice garbled with nerves and self-consciousness.