The Walking Dead: Invasion (28 page)

Barbara lets out a sigh. “Some bad people are coming here to kill us.”

The children all go very still—even Lucas Dupree, the youngest of them, only a year or two out of diapers, stares gravely back at Barbara—which pinches Barbara's heart. To see the face of a child looking so sullen, so weary, so grim—maybe in some ways this is the worst part of the plague, worse than getting devoured by the dead. To see a child devoured by
life
. At last, Bethany summons up a response. “Is it because they want our stuff?”

Barbara shrugs. “I swear to you, sweetheart, I don't know what they want. Revenge? The town itself?” She pauses and looks into the faces of these miniature old souls, as spectral and haunted as ghosts. “They believe God is on their side, which makes them even more dangerous—especially the preacher, Jeremiah.”

Bethany cocks her head. “You mean that big guy in the black suit?”

Nodding glumly, Barbara can't lie anymore. “That's right, sweetie.”

“That's stupid!” Bethany tries to wrap her brain around this. “He's not a bad man. He showed me a magic trick once, gave me licorice. He's a good man.”

Barbara slowly shakes her head. “Not so much, honey … not so much.”

The little girl starts to say something else when the strangest sound echoes on the wind outside, the sheer incongruity of it silencing her and stiffening each child's spine.

Barbara shushes the children one last time. “I want everybody to stay together, stay very still, and stay as quiet as possible until I tell you it's okay.” She looks at them as the noise outside rises. Under the rumble of machines, the keening, knife-edged sounds of human screaming drift across the outskirts of town. “I'm going to go back to the window now, but nobody move.”

Her binoculars bounce on her chest as Barbara hurries across the room.

She stands with her back against the jamb and carefully pushes aside the makeshift shade until a thin wisp of light shines in. She peers through the binoculars, scanning the southeast corner of town.

In the long shadows of dawn, about a quarter of a mile away, where Gates Road splits off from Highway 74 and the milky rays of sunlight cant down through the adjacent woods, she can see a thundercloud of dust and exhaust approaching.

With one hand, Barbara slowly, instinctively reaches down to where her revolver is tucked into its holster on the side of her muumuu, her hand caressing the waffled surface of her .44 caliber Bulldog's grip.

 

EIGHTEEN

At precisely 6:53 a.m. Eastern Standard Time that morning, in the gelid air and pale blue light of the forest south of Woodbury, without warning or precedent, an outsider with very specific orders enters the town limits on foot from Reeves Road, then creeps under the trees, a heavy pack jangling on his back. He consults a hand-drawn map as he moves silently through the undergrowth, his heavy lumberjack boots snapping twigs and crunching over ancient humus.

He finds the red bandanna fluttering in the breeze, tied to the tip of a stick thrust into the ground. He turns west and walks about ten paces, past a pair of softly humming generators camouflaged under skeins of leaves and twigs. A moment later, he locates the manhole cover embedded in the dirt, a relic from earlier in the century when a new sewage system was introduced to the area. He kneels, shrugs off his pack, and takes out his tools.

C-clamps go down on the edges of the lid, securing it to the paving stones around the outer ring. He tightens the clamps with channel locks. Then, just to be sure, he moves a small boulder from its mossy home under a nearby tree and sets it down on the manhole cover.

A few more stones go on top of the cover, and then, satisfied with his work, he goes searching for the other manhole entrance.

Twenty minutes later, at exactly 7:13 a.m., 250 yards southeast of the Woodbury train yard, the remaining members of the preacher's convoy boom across the Woodbury town limits in a cyclone of noise and dust and the rising stench of the dead. The tow truck driven by Stephen Pembry has lagged behind a mile or two, awaiting orders, keeping the throngs occupied in an adjacent tobacco field with the mesmerizing intervals of flickering light.

Meanwhile, the caravan follows the access road that winds along the edge of the forest, traveling single file, until they come to a dry riverbed where a yellow bandanna flaps and flags at the apex of yet another stick thrust into the ground. The flag stands near the mouth of a culvert, the gaping maw of which is crisscrossed by rusty, barnacled iron bars. Reese Lee Hawthorne and Stephen Pembry discovered this culvert on one of their reconnaissance trips, and now it will serve the mission well as a back door into the tunnels.

Jeremiah's RV skids to a stop, the other trucks slamming on their brakes behind him.

In the aftermath of the mass exodus that followed James and Molly Frazier's surprise flight from the fold, only a half dozen vehicles remain, and now these six small-duty pickups and flatbed trucks raise a fog bank of fumes—the homemade biodiesel burning dirty—as they scuttle to a halt behind the preacher.

By this point, the morning sun has crested the palisades of black oaks along Elkins Creek, and the woods south of town appear almost Paleolithic, with celestial sunbeams cutting down through the motes of fluff and insects that teem in the chill air. God has bestowed a beautiful day for a reckoning. And adding to all of the preacher's euphoria and good fortune is the fact that the immediate area is far enough away from the tunnel entrance for him and his followers to remain unheard and undetected by the heathens underground.

The RV's cab doors squeal open, and the preacher hops out one side, Reese Lee Hawthorne out the other. The preacher's gleaming bald pate shimmers in the shafts of light filtering through the trees, his black coattails flapping in the wind as he pulls his walkie-talkie out and presses the switch. “Brother Gleason! Talk to me!”

Through a crackle of static, Chester Gleason's voice squawks out of the device. “
It's done! It's done, Brother! All of them rabbit holes are locked up tight—and I can hear them down there!
”

“Well done, Brother!” Jeremiah releases the button, his hands shaking in the cold sunlight. His skull feels too big for his scalp. His flesh crawls with adrenaline as he ticks off the to-do list in his head. “All right, next!” He turns to the men gathered around him, his disciples, his holy warriors, his wolves. “Louis, use the winch to pull them bars.”

One of the men hurries back to his truck, hops in, and throws it in reverse. He backs up to the riverbank, twelve feet away from the culvert opening. Reese Lee Hawthorne circles around the back of the pickup and disengages the winch hook, pulling the cable across the dry ditch and then hooking the end around the ancient grillwork of bars covering the culvert opening. He gives a signal.

The engine revs. Black exhaust spumes from the vertical pipe. The truck lurches, pulling the cable taut. Rear wheels dig into the muck, spinning for a second. The bars creak and groan. Off to the side, the bald preacher watches with voices in his head and the fire of madness in his eyes.

The bars finally snap, slamming down on the ground and sliding across the riverbed.

*   *   *

Lilly Caul finishes up making her last-minute adjustments to the tunnel, stuffing bloody bandages from the infirmary into the torsos of the makeshift mannequins, when she feels a slight tremor in the bones of the sewer—a faint temblor that is
sensed
more than
felt
—resonating up through the soles of her boots.

She stands very still for a moment, cocking her head, listening. The silence seems laden with potential, a tuning fork still vibrating slightly but not revealing anything specific.

She grabs her walkie-talkie off the spool table and squeezes the button. “Miles? Can you hear me?”

Nothing but static from the other end.

*   *   *

Nobody hears the gibberish tumbling out of Jeremiah's mouth as he stands back in the warmth of the morning sun, surveying the cool shadows of the woods around the gaping culvert opening. His voice has a low, musical, and breathless tone as the nonsensical syllables pour out of him, sounding like an approximation of an actual language but not a real one, more like the patois of a babbling infant possessed by the spirit, preverbal, preliteral.

In the Pentecostal church, it is believed the Holy Spirit enters a person at critical times, and the result is this fluid vocalizing of speechlike syllables, which lack any connotative meaning or any comprehensible pattern, but are considered by true believers to be sacred speech. Scientists refer to this phenomenon as “glossolalia” (or the putative speaking of natural languages previously unknown to the speaker). But in Jeremiah's case, it is clear that the tongues being gibbered are those of his father. The garbled scat issuing out of him comes directly from the old man's repertoire—all-pervasive, all-encompassing, all-powerful.

“Pardon?” The voice next to him snaps him out of his reverie. “What was that?”

“Huh?” Jeremiah turns and looks into the gaunt, gray, deeply lined face of Louis Packard, his winch operator, as the man puzzles over the sound of the tongues. Jeremiah smiles. “Oh … yes … I was just … humming an old hymn … a favorite of mine. ‘The Old Rugged Cross.'”

“Brother Stephen's truck is coming up the hill with the walkers.”

“That's excellent, Louis.”

The gaunt man chews nervously on his cheek. “Brother, you know I'm with ya one hundred and ten percent.”

“What is it, Louis?”

“These people gotta go, and I'm with ya, till the bitter end.”

“What's wrong?”

The gaunt man lets out a tense sigh and speaks in a low whisper. “We're never gonna get them things to go inside them tunnels, never in a million
years
.”

The preacher just smiles. He can smell the rising tide of death on the breeze as if it were a storm front rolling in. He hears the rumble of Stephen's tow truck, the human screams silent now, the prisoner long ago succumbing to blood loss and exposure. He senses the weight of the throngs coming up through the woods behind the truck, the unholy choir of watery snarling and growling noises rising on the wind.

He glances over his shoulder and sees the tow truck materializing around the corner of the forest road, the sea of shadows rolling in behind it in the flickering strobe light. He turns to the others. “Everybody in your vehicles, lock the doors!”

Then Jeremiah goes over to his RV, snaps the latch on the side door, leans inside, and pulls out a box marked “COX REMOTE CONTROL DUNE BUGGY.”

*   *   *

At last, a voice crackles through the static spewing out of Lilly Caul's walkie-talkie: “…
Yo! Yo, Lilly! We're here, we was just dodging a few biters, but I can read you loud and clear now, go ahead!
”

Lilly feels the walls of the tunnel contracting around her like the innards of a living thing reacting to poison in its system, and it makes her stomach clench as she thumbs the switch and says into the mike: “Have you made it to the church yet? Over?”

“… Y
es, ma'am, got the clothes, now on our way to the safe zone
.…”

“Good, awesome … I gotta get the fuck out of here, I'm getting the willies down here all by myself.”

“…
Copy that, see you in a few
.”

“Right.”

Lilly whirls and hurries down the length of the main conduit toward the manhole. But even now, as she trots along, she feels the cold fingers of claustrophobia tightening around her neck, stealing her breath, sending cold currents of panic down her spine.

Ahead of her, the tunnel seems to blur out of focus, slipping into a double image like motion picture film jumping out of registration. She has dealt with excruciating claustrophobia for most of her life, ever since she accidentally locked herself in a coat closet at her cousins' house in Macon when she was nine years old.

Now she feels the old prickly panic returning like cold fingers wrapping around her spine.

The tunnel spins. She nearly trips. She slows down and braces herself against the wall. She realizes that she hasn't been in the tunnels alone in a while, maybe ever; it's hard to be sure right now. She blinks, rubs her eyes, tries to ignore the dizziness that's washing over her and to fix her gaze on the steps embedded in the wall at the end of the main conduit.

In her bleary line of sight, about fifteen feet away, the faint indentations in the crumbling stone wall are apparent, and she edges toward them as fast as she can without falling flat on her face. The vertigo courses over her, threatening to knock her off her feet. She holds on to a brace. It feels as though her head is about to loll off her shoulders, and her gorge rises, but she wills herself not to throw up and to keep inching forward.

She reaches the steps at the precise same moment she first hears the sound.

The faint, far-off noise is so strange and incongruous at this moment—in this dark, moldering place—that she freezes, her brain like an engine seizing up. She doesn't even look over her shoulder at first. She simply stands there, one hand on the middle rung of the steps, her entire body gripped in glacial, dreamlike paralysis.

Something moves at the dark end of the tunnel, glimpsed only peripherally, at first registering as a small animal darting around the corner.

She whirls around and sees a small remote control toy rolling toward her.
What the fuck
, she thinks.
Is this part of that
—?

The closer the toy gets, the more clearly it comes into view: a metal-flake orange dune buggy with fat little tires, a tiny whip antenna, and a couple of outboard devices duct-taped to its hood. It sends up a flash of silver strobe light at odd intervals as it rattles closer and closer, but the strangest and by far worst part is the recording being played back through a miniature speaker affixed to the toy car's rear bulwark.