The Walking Dead: Invasion (24 page)

Bethany Lucas is the first child to emerge, peering nervously over the lip of the hole. Barbara helps the little girl wriggle the rest of the way up, and then assists her little brother, who comes out still clutching the tail of Bethany's Hello Kitty sweatshirt. Barbara motions for Bethany to stay put and whispers, “Stay right there, honey, until I get everybody else out.”

Bethany crouches down, her little brother beside her, furiously sucking his thumb.

Barbara gives her a reassuring nod and whispers, “It's okay, just stay there until we get everybody out.” She turns back to the hole. The others come out one by one. The Slocum twins emerge, wide-eyed, scanning the woods in fits and jerks. Tiff Slocum looks as though she's already hyperventilating. Barbara strokes the girl's shoulder and points to a spot on the mossy ground behind Bethany and Lucas. “Girls, just stay right over there for a second.”

Jenny Coogan comes out next. She has a tragic look on her face, her lips pressed together tightly, chin jutting, fists clenched, eyes glassy with fear. Barbara can tell the poor little thing is fighting a losing battle with her fears, but God bless her, she's trying. That's all Barbara can ask of anyone. Just try to be fucking brave and get the fucking job of survival
done
.

“Okay, everybody, look at me now, and remember what I told you earlier,” Barbara addresses the gaggle of children in a low whisper after the last of them, Tyler Coogan, has emerged and shoved the manhole cover back across the top of the aperture, then quickly brushed dirt across the lid to camouflage it as best he can. Barbara whispers, “We're going to hurry—but not too fast—across that train track to the building on the other side.”

A shadow looms behind little Tyler, something slithering out of the foliage.

Things start happening quickly. Barbara can't get off a shot quick enough to neutralize the sudden attack, and the biter lunges at Tyler. It's a gangly middle-aged male in farmer's overalls with a sunken skull, milky white eyes, and flesh weathered to the consistency of parchment. It snaps its jaws at the empty space that Tyler's foot occupied a moment ago before being yanked out of harm's way.

One of the girls lets out a piercing little wail, as shrill as a teakettle whistling, and a switch goes off inside Barbara:
That's it—cover blown—now it's a race
. There are more screams as Tyler kicks at the monster. Barbara fires at the thing—the blast of her Charter Arms .44 Bulldog making a thin, muffled pop, like a wet firecracker—and the tree behind the creature erupts.
C'mon, Annie Oakley
, she thinks frantically. Tyler scoots away as fast as his little butt and legs can carry him. The walker claws at the boy, snagging a piece of his OshKosh jeans. Barbara fires again. The blast chews a chunk out of the thing's shoulder, barely fazing it, hardly slowing it down. But her third shot hits the bull's-eye, creating a trough through the crown of the thing's skull and punching through half its rotting frontal lobe.

Pink soupy fluid gushes out the back of its head as it deflates and collapses.

Tyler scurries into Barbara's arms. She catches him and hugs him to her breast, and lets him silently sob for a moment, but only a moment. The shift in the tide of shadows behind the trees all around them can be felt more than seen, can barely be heard under the rustle of the wind through the pine boughs. “That was a badass move on your part,” Barbara soothes the little boy in her arms. “But now, the thing is, we have to move even faster.”

He looks up at her through tears. “What are we waiting for?!”

*   *   *

In Olympic track and field, a gold medalist can traverse a hundred yards in a little under ten seconds. A high school track star can do it in maybe eleven seconds flat, perhaps a little less. But on
this
day, as the dusk begins to close in on the outskirts of Woodbury, and the horde—drawn to the noise of terrified squealing—surrounds the children, Barbara's gaggle charges across that weed-whiskered lot toward the train station with a purpose far more intense than that of those competing in a track meet. There is no official record-keeping for preschoolers running the hundred-yard dash, but if there were, one would have a difficult time dissuading Barbara Stern that each and every one of her kids now deserves a medal.

They reach the side door of the ancient wood-sided edifice at the same moment the horde crosses the adjacent tracks and starts toward the fresh young meat in their midst. Tiff and Mercy Slocum begin jumping up and down in panic, and Lucas goes deeper into himself and the folds of his sister's sweatshirt. Barbara refrains from looking over her shoulder—she's too busy fishing for a key in her dress pocket, while recalling that the last time she visited this building, the Governor was in charge of things around here, and they were using the station warehouse for the safekeeping of valuables and confiscated items. Barbara finds the key, thrusts it into the lock, turns the tumblers, and throws open the door.

They pour into the building one at a time, some of them tripping over discarded packing straps and trash on the floor. A few of them tumble and fall. Barbara brings up the rear and slams the door shut behind her.

She lets out a heavy sigh of relief as the thudding noises of walkers bumping into the door and brushing up against the boarded windows start reverberating. Barbara pulls the shade down on the barred door-window and leans back against the wall, another sigh issuing out of her. The kids help one another up, some of the younger ones still whimpering. Barbara asks if everybody's okay, and she gets nods all around from the little troupers.

Catching her breath, Barbara drops her pack—heavy with her extra ammo, batteries, a walkie-talkie, and provisions—and then regards the dusty room.

The high ceiling has long fluorescent fixtures that haven't seen power in over a year. The tall windows on the west side of the room are boarded on the outside, painted over with black Rust-Oleum on the inside, the air permeated with sour-smelling must. Boxes and crates rise to the rafters on all sides, some of the stacks forming aisles down the center of room, where more crates and pallets brim with forgotten riches such as oil paintings, cash drawers from store registers, home safes, wardrobes draped with furs, and all sorts of expensive knickknacks, ivory, fine china, and heirlooms.

Barbara shakes her head as she takes a closer look at the center aisle. She remembers the Governor scouring the abandoned homes along Bartee and Narnina Streets, trolling for valuables that might be of use if the apocalypse ever slouched to an end. Barbara remembers thinking it was sick, and thinking of Hitler harvesting gold teeth from the dead.

She reaches down and opens a velvet-lined jewelry box. Inside the compartments lie the tarnished and gleaming worldly treasures of some long-forgotten Southern dowager. Barbara picks up a tiny diamond-encrusted broach in the shape of a uniformed black attendant, a racist symbol reminiscent of little black lawn jockeys—“Pickaninny Pins,” they used to call them—and it brings on a wave of unexpected emotion. She shakes her head some more as she throws the ridiculous lavaliere back in the ridiculous jewelry box.

“Listen up, everybody!” She doesn't take her eyes off the jewelry box. “I want everybody to move to the other side of the room where there are no windows. Do it now, please.… No talking, just move!”

The kids drift to the far side of the room, each of them wide-eyed, nervous, jittery. Bethany Dupree takes charge and motions for Lucas and the younger kids to hurry up. They all crowd together under a huge Regulator clock that stopped at midnight many months earlier and will probably never tell the correct time again.

Barbara pulls the .44, double-checks the safety, and calls out, “I want everybody to go ahead and cover your ears!” The four-inch suppressor apparatus—contrary to what the movies say—does not completely silence a pistol; it only suppresses the blast, taking it down a few decibels from its normal harsh, sibilant boom.

She fires a single shot into the jewelry box, sending shards of wood, velvet, stainless steel, and precious gemstones up into the air.

The echo finally dies down, and then an avalanche of silence presses down on the warehouse. The kids freeze—gaping, terrified. Barbara sighs. She holsters her gun, then turns and walks over to the side door.

She pushes the shade aside a couple centimeters and peers outside at the grounds, the far outskirts of Woodbury, the wall off to the right, and the rooftops of the town buildings beyond the barricade. “I know you are all too smart, too grown-up, and too brave to be treated like babies.” She says this loud enough for the kids to hear her, but she doesn't take her eyes off the horde of walking corpses outside in the setting sun, crowding the train yard and milling about the town's welcome sign. “Am I right?”

A few of them—Bethany Dupree, the Coogans—mumble affirmatively.

“Then I'll give it to you straight. There's a war coming. Not a play war, not a pretend war—a real one. It's not a game.” She turns and looks at them. “We have a job to do. We need to be very, very quiet—above all other things—no matter what happens. Do you understand?”

They tell her they understand.

She nods. “Good.” She looks back out the gap between the barred window and the shade. “Good.” She thinks about it. “No talking unless it's absolutely necessary. No laughing, no fighting.”

She hears one of the kids approaching her, the footsteps cautious, hesitant. Bethany Dupree stands beside her. “Mrs. Stern?”

“Call me Barb.”

“Okay … Barb? Can I ask you a question?”

Barbara looks at the child, looks into those soft, guileless blue eyes. “Of course, honey.”

“Who are we fighting? The walkers?”

Barbara nods. “Yeah … sort of.”

The girl licks her lips. “We're gonna have a war with the walkers?”

“Yes.”

The girl thinks for a moment. “But … haven't we already been doing that?”

Barbara ponders the question, then looks back out at the multitude of ragged figures shambling aimlessly about the outskirts in the dusky light. When she speaks again, it is in a lower register, her voice shot through with grave foreboding. “Not like this, sweetie … not like this.”

 

SIXTEEN

“FUCK!” Miles Littleton kicks the brake pedal and skids the Challenger across a weathered macadam in the middle of Thomaston Woods. He comes to a screeching halt on a hairpin that sits at the top of Mullins Hill. His headlights throw two beams of silver through the foggy, dense wall of birches in front of him. His heart races. His mouth is dry. He stares as he registers what he's seeing.

He slams the shift lever into park, leaves the engine running, and gets out. He pads across the shoulder, down a gravel slope, and through about fifteen feet of oily-dark forest, batting away the gnats and vines and slender pine boughs that claw him in the face. He comes to a gap in the undergrowth, and peers out through the opening.

In the distance, down in a vast patchwork of fallow brown tobacco fields, in the pale moonlight, he sees the shadows of the slow-moving motorcade. From this distance, illuminated by the pinpricks of light from torches and headlamps, the convoy vehicles look as tiny as figures in an ant farm, and harmless—almost festive—as they churn westward, traveling in a narrow, single-file formation in the center median of Highway 74 like a radiant yellow string of fireflies.

It takes a moment for the shapes behind the last of the vehicles to register in Miles's brain.

At first, it just looks like the wind is blowing up gouts of black earth into the atmosphere behind the caravan, or that perhaps he's looking at a vast bank of fog rolling in, or that maybe it's just his eyes playing tricks. He curses himself for not bringing the binoculars. What the fuck was he thinking? Things are moving very fast, and shit is slipping through the cracks. But there's nothing he can do about it now.

He squints. Swallows hard.
Is that…? No … it can't be
.
No fucking way
. But the more he stares at that enormous carpet of moving shadows behind the convoy's rear end, the more he comes to terms with it. “Holy fucking shit,” he murmurs, and turns away from the scene.

Cobbling up the slope, his heart hammering in his chest, he rushes back to his ride. He throws open the driver's door and rifles through the contents of the passenger seat, grabbing the RadioShack walkie-talkie.

He presses the Send button. “Yo! Sister-girl? You there?” He lifts up the button and hears nothing, not even static. He presses it again. “Yo! YO! Norma! Lilly! Anybody! Y'all hear me?!”

Nothing. Not a single crackle of static or hiss of white noise.

He looks at the back of the device, opens the tray, and dumps out the single nine-volt battery. He looks at it. The terminals are corroded. It looks ancient. “Goddamn motherfucking batteries!”

He tosses the worthless two-way radio into the backseat, and he revs the engine. He grips the shift knob, slams the level down into drive, and nudges the foot-feed. The transmission engages, and the car lurches, pressing him into the seat.

Heading back down the hill, swerving around abandoned wrecks, Miles listens to the ticking clock in his brain and does the math. Woodbury lies seventeen miles to the west. At the rate the convoy is going, they'll reach the town in eight to ten hours.

The attack will come at first light the next morning.

*   *   *

Bob Stookey has the shakes. He does his best to deal with them as he power-walks as fast as his arthritic legs will carry him through the narrow, leprous channel of ancient Georgia clay, his flashlight bouncing off the rusty earthen darkness that plunges ahead of him into the void. He's in a hurry, ignoring the tremors.

He has a job to do.

The tunnel wends its way east toward Elkins Creek, and with each passing support beam it gets shaggier and shaggier with stalactites of roots and calcium deposits hanging down like chandeliers. The passageway—once a zinc mine—feels as though it closes in on a person the farther west he goes, like it's a giant gullet swallowing all who dare to traverse its depths.