The Walking Dead: Invasion (23 page)

Now Jeremiah turns his back on them, and appears to be pondering the flickering horde in the distance. But what he's really doing is waiting.

He doesn't have to wait long.

*   *   *

The next afternoon, the caravan sets out on its grandiose mission in earnest. The ten remaining vehicles cut a swath of dust and carbon monoxide up the Interstate 75 basin, avoiding the petrified wreckage blocking much of the four-lane by traveling single file along the arid ditches running parallel to the shoulder. The three heavy-duty trucks lead the convoy, setting the glacial pace at about three miles an hour. The five RVs rumble along behind them, some of their roofs occupied by gunmen armed with sniper rifles.

Jeremiah's command center—the rust-spotted, eggshell-colored Winnebago formerly owned by Father Patrick Murphy—rolls along near the end of the procession, fishtailing over intermittent patches of decomposing remains, throwing a wake of dust and rotting organic matter off its massive rear wheels. Behind the Winnebago rattles the big tow truck, with its enormous rear crane, its gigantic twin rear tires crunching through the detritus. They pass a mile marker, its battered green facing faded and bullet-riddled.

They are exactly thirty-five miles from the town of Woodbury, Georgia. At this pace, their estimated time of arrival would be dawn the next day.

Very few of the drivers or passengers in the caravan keep close watch on the sea of shadows behind the tow truck. Every so often, on the shifting winds, they hear the watery, creaking chorus of growls, and the fading screams of the prisoner. If they chose to do so, they could catch a glimpse in their peripheral vision of the long shadows of countless shambling bodies. The mob is growing. With each passing hour, more and more of the dead come out from behind dilapidated, derelict barns and groves of sickly oak trees and piles of overturned cars. Most of the convoy's members are somewhat disturbed by this spectacle, but these are the repressed, the sheep, the stalwart. They now have their own flashing strobe light, in the form of Reverend Jeremiah Garlitz.

At this moment, in fact, this volatile guiding force sits on a bunk in the rear of his RV, while his minions, Reese and Stephen, take turns at the wheel.

Jeremiah sits barefoot, in shirtsleeves and trousers, gazing into a small rectangular mirror that he has canted against the headboard. Using a disposable razor and skin lotion, he carefully shaves the last nubs of hair from his head, leaving behind a pale dome of mottled skin, as smooth as a peach. He believes now, like the monastic clergy of yore, that he must shed all his pride and vanity and worldly possessions before he leads his flock into battle. He ponders his blotchy, reddened face. Aside from the psoriasis, he looks very presentable.

He finishes, wipes his scalp with a towel, and then moves to the window embedded in the rear door—a slat of grimy glass no wider than a necktie—and peers out. In the ashen sunlight, he can see the throngs of his new congregation.

They are hundreds strong, their styles of clothing, their facial features, even their genders, worn away by the rot and ruin of maggots and weather and time. They move almost as one, brushing against each other languidly, twitching in the pale sun, bumping shoulders and snarling in excruciating, oblivious hunger, the hundreds of sets of teeth visible even at this distance, like tiny kernels of white corn in the rotten husks of their faces.

Silver light blinks across their rank and file, apparent in even the bright daylight, flashing with metronomic regularity—the strings of the puppeteer—and accompanied by the echoes of human suffering.

The onyx-colored tow truck spews a swirling fog bank of smoke from the homemade biodiesel, the miasma rising out of its vertical stack, curling around, and engulfing the rear of the truck, where the human bait writhes in agony on its sacrificial gantry. The subject is the last of the surviving bikers—a big, pear-shaped, bearded Viking with teardrop tattoos and enormous sagging pectorals—now reduced to a sobbing mess in his shit-stained underwear and bloody, lacerated skin. A loop of barbed wire is wound around his expansive belly, gathered behind him, and connected to a winch. Each time his shrieking fades and deteriorates to garbled sobbing, the tow truck driver thumbs the winch button and the barbed wire tightens slightly, eliciting more agony.

The previous subject had not been as boisterous, and had died prematurely, the shrieking going silent shortly after the winch had literally cut the man in half. But the preacher had learned from the fiasco, and now the pressure is being applied with great moderation, calibrated for optimum pain rather than catastrophic injury. Plus, the Viking's girth should provide hours and hours of racket, the slow bleed-out unlikely to kill the man for at least a day or two. The preacher had found that the beasts responded better to live sound than recorded.

He turns away from the window and wipes the last spot of lotion from his gleaming, shaved head. He tosses the towel, looks around the RV's cabin, and decides to rest. Tomorrow will be a big day. He sees his Bible on a shelf above the sleeping berth to his left, tented open to Revelations, the chapters and verse he had been studying the previous night. He picks up the worn black book and lies down and continues reading about dragons and horsemen and slaughtered lambs and angels clothed in clouds and the number 666.

At length, he falls into a deep and profound sleep and dreams he's sitting on a stone bench on the edge of a precipice overlooking a valley of scorched, burned, blackened woods. He wears a tunic, as though from another time. The wind tosses his hair.

“Are you my son?”

The voice comes from behind him, a soothing, oily voice … the kind of voice one would expect a snake or a lizard to have if snakes or lizards could talk.

Jeremiah turns and sees a tall, dark man in a long black robe. The man's face is gaunt, sunken, cadaverous, his long coal black hair loose. His yellow eyes seem to absorb not only the light but all the energy around them. A pair of knoblike polyps extrude off the top of his skull like horns. His smile makes Jeremiah's flesh crawl.

“I've never even met you,” Jeremiah finally replies in a breathless, nervous whisper. Then he says, “I have a church—I'm tax-exempt.”

The tall man glides over to the bench, takes a seat next to Jeremiah. “I bid you greetings at long last.”

“Are you…?”

The tall man nods. At this close proximity, his flesh looks iridescent, like the scales of a fish. He smells of smoke and embers. “I am indeed,” he purrs. “You once thought of me as your adversary.”

“You're the Enemy…?”

The man raises a tapered index finger, its nail sharpened to the point of a claw. “Ironically, no. I am no longer the enemy. I am merely a cog in the machine of prophecy.”

“Prophecy?”

The man nods. “You are the son, the follower of fate, and this is the Rapture, and it is your destiny to turn the entire human race.”

Jeremiah doesn't understand. “Turn them to Jesus?”

The laughter that tumbles out of the tall man recalls a million barking hyenas. “Oh, dear, no … That's adorable. Your destiny is no longer to proselytize Christianity. That ship has sailed.” More oily laughter. “On the contrary, your destiny is to turn every human being into the walking dead, each and every last soul.”

“This is my destiny,” Jeremiah repeats as though learning a lesson in school.

The tall man puts his arm around Jeremiah, the touch of the man's hand like a cold compress. “It is written, you shall be the last of the human race, the last true human on earth. You shall rule the hordes as a king. You shall become a god in human form.”

In the dream, Jeremiah jerks back with a start when he realizes the tall man has his father's bulbous, ulcerated nose, his father's droopy, bloodshot eyes, his father's crow's-feet and cleft chin and five o'clock shadow, and Jeremiah opens his mouth to say something but nothing comes out.

His father smiles.

*   *   *

Barbara Stern hurriedly gathers the six children at the end of the main tunnel near the west exit. She catches her breath, adjusts the straps of her pack, then pulls her unruly gray curls back into a ponytail and quickly snaps a rubber band around the hank of hair. Clad in her anachronistic floral-print muumuu with the gun belt around her midsection, Barbara surveys her young charges. “All right, here's the deal.” She speaks to the kids in her patented tone, a mixture of two parts den mother and one part drill instructor, and she fiddles with her gun belt as she talks, securing the cumbersome pistol with its long suppressor into the holster. “We're going to go up top on a little adventure.”

“Like a field trip?” Tiff Slocum asks with wide-eyed wonder. One of two identical twins, the cherubic little eight-year-old girl wears the same soiled jumper as her sister, Mercy Slocum. The two girls have been compulsively wearing the things since the group went underground. Weeks ago, Barbara had discovered a forgotten box of hand-me-downs in the courthouse basement earmarked for Goodwill, and had brought different outfits into the tunnels, but the twins insisted on dressing in the same threadbare jumpers every day of their lives from that point on, forever and ever, amen. They claim the blue gingham jumpers are good luck, and had informed Barbara of this just this morning.

“
Exactly
like a field trip,” Barbara replies, cupping her hand around Tiff's little cheek and giving the girl an encouraging smile.

“What are we studying?” little Lucas Dupree asks, his blond bangs, badly in need of a trim, dangling down across his big doe eyes. He clutches at his sister's dress, as he's been doing all day. In fact, Lucas and Bethany Dupree have been clinging to each other, practically without a break, from the moment they were brought into the tunnels. Still shell-shocked from the loss of both of their parents, they are indispensable to each other, and that's fine with Barbara. She needs all the comfort and succor for these children she can get, and she'll get it wherever she can find it.

“We're studying how to survive an attack,” Barbara says, choosing not to mince words. “Now, I want everybody to follow me in a single file. Do you all remember what that means? ‘Single file'?”

In the back, Jenny Coogan shoots her little hand up as though sitting in the fourth grade back at Marietta Park Elementary. The little girl wears thick eyeglasses, one of the lenses cracked. “It means, like, walking in like a single line?”

“Everybody knows what ‘single file' means!” Tyler Coogan snaps at his sister, making an exaggerated, dramatic gesture of complete exasperation with his sibling's colossal ignorance. The ten-year-old wears OshKosh jeans and a Braves baseball cap and looks like the Campbell's Soup Kid. He shakes a lot, which breaks Barbara's heart. It's one thing to see an adult trembling like this, whether it's illness, terror, the cold, or withdrawal … but it's quite another to see a child this age with a chronic case of the shakes. Somehow, it puts something that Barbara can't quite come to terms with in perfect perspective—whatever that perspective might imply. She's not sure. But she knows it's not good.

“Okay, enough with the squabbling.” Barbara claps her hands and then points at her eyes. “Look at me. Everybody, look at me. I'm going to climb up and make sure the coast is clear, and then I want you all to follow me quickly, quietly, in an orderly fashion, and try not to talk unless it's absolutely necessary. Okay? Everybody clear on that? We good?”

Most of the children give her earnest nods or shrugs, except Tyler, who has his hands on his little hips, his petulant expression suddenly puzzled. “There's no coast in the middle of Georgia. What coast are you talking about?”

Barbara gives the boy a look. “I'm lost. What are you referring to?”

“You said—”

“Oh, right, right. Very astute. That's correct—there's no coast up there.” She pats the boy on the shoulder. “But there's walkers, so I want you to follow me quickly and quietly, okay?”

“Sure, whatever.” The boy shrugs, trying to keep himself from shaking by thrusting his hands in his pockets. “You already said that.”

“Okay, so right now I'm going to climb up there, and I want you all to make a line and keep your eyes on me and wait for the signal.” She looks around at all the little faces. The fear is so thick it seems to pollute the air. Barbara manages a smile. “Here goes.”

She turns and maneuvers her feet into the steps embedded in the petrified hardpack of the wall.

She climbs. The manhole cover is locked in place by vise clamps that Bob procured from the ruins of Woodbury Paint and Wallpaper. The moisture tends to rust and congeal everything in the tunnels within days, and Barbara has to struggle a bit with the clamps in order to loosen them. She grunts and finally loosens the lid, then feels the half dozen pairs of young eyes on her as she pushes it up and partially open.

The fecund odors of the forest and the acrid stench of the dead greet her, wafting on the afternoon breeze. It's almost six o'clock and the daylight has faded to an indigo glow behind the trees.

“Okay, listen up, people,” Barbara whispers over her shoulder to the kids. “When I say go, everybody follow Bethany up the ladder.”

She glances back outside at the immediate area—a narrow clearing in the woods bordered by thickets of creeping vines and foliage—and it appears to be walker-free at the moment. About a hundred yards away, through a break in the trees, Barbara can see her destination:
the main building of the derelict train station
.

“All right … ready, set, go!”

She pushes the manhole the rest of the way open, and the iron lid flops to the dirt. She climbs out and pauses on the edge of the opening. She pulls the .45 tactical pistol with its four-inch suppressor (originally taken off the remains of one of the Governor's men) out of its holster, thumbs the safety off, and sets it to single action. Now
she's
shaking. She can hear the distant dead getting agitated. Twigs snapping nearby. Her post-outbreak gun skills—if not the accuracy of her aim—have improved dramatically, but she wants to avoid having to shoot in front of the kids if at all possible.