The Walking Dead: Invasion (36 page)

Then, an instant later, he makes a critical error. He looks back up into the rearview. He just wants to see if there's any sign of the tow truck behind him. But his gaze lingers there too long. When he looks back at the road he lets out a yelp of shock.

Two large mobile homes lie wrecked across both lanes of the highway.

The Challenger crashes through the center of the wreckage, slamming Miles against the wheel, breaking a tooth, concussing his skull. The car barrels through another hundred feet of twisted metal and goes into a skid. Miles wrestles with the wheel. The Challenger spirals into a wild 360.

Miles blacks out as the car slides off the edge of a precipice and goes into a roll.

It rolls a total of five revolutions before landing in a dry riverbed.

*   *   *

Two figures crane their necks to see over the top of a makeshift barricade on the northeast corner of town.

“I'm going after him,” the man mutters, peering through binoculars. In the oval field of vision, he can see the gigantic combine lying on its side in a gravel parking lot at the end of Kendricks Road.

“You think that's a good idea?” Norma Sutters stands next to David Stern, wiping her plump hands in a towel. Her face still has the stains of offal she'd smeared on herself to blend in with the horde. But her smock is now covered with the fresh blood shed by Harold Staubach. She'd been caring for him for the last hour now.

David looks at the woman. “We can't leave the poor kid out there.”

“The boy might be gone, David. I'm sorry to be so damn harsh but—”

“Norma—”

“Listen, we don't want to be losing another one of us in order to save somebody who's already dead.”

David wipes his gray goatee, thinks about it. “I'm going. That's all there is to it.”

He climbs down the ladder and goes off in search of ammo for his Tec-9.

*   *   *

Lilly comes to in the smoky interior of the overturned truck. Blinking at first, squinting in the harsh glare of overcast daylight flooding down through the gaping driver's-side window—which is now the ceiling—she silently takes inventory of her injuries. Her back throbs, wrenched by the impact, and she tastes coppery blood where she bit her tongue, but she doesn't seem to have any broken bones.

She suddenly registers the fact that the preacher—still unconscious—is slumped over the steering wheel above her, his lanky limbs akimbo, tangled in his shoulder harness. She regards his limp form. She considers the possibility that he might already be dead. His flesh is gray and pallid. She watches his big barrel chest, and sees that it is slowly, subtly rising and falling—he's clearly alive—and Lilly is about to start looking for the gun when his eyes pop open and he pounces on her.

Lilly screams and the preacher responds by wrapping his big, callused hands around her throat.

He lowers the rest of his weight down upon her, the sound of tearing fabric coming from behind him as his waistcoat stays tangled in the steering wheel, the seams ripping apart. Lilly gasps, convulses—the common reactions to stage one of asphyxia—and tries to get air into her lungs, but the preacher's fingers tighten. She instinctively reaches up and tries to pry them from her neck, but this is easier to do in theory than in practice. His vise-grip lock on her throat is steadfast, immovable.

Jeremiah stares into her eyes with surprising calm, whispering something under his breath that sounds at first almost incantatory, as though he's putting a spell on her. Their faces are close enough for her to see the yellow tobacco stains between his teeth and the tiny capillaries of red lining the whites of his eyes, as well as the grain of the psoriatic skin patches on his cheeks. She enters stage two: the onslaught of hypoxia.

It feels to her as though he's been strangling her for hours. Her lungs catch fire, and her vision blurs, and she feels her entire body tingling as the tissues become oxygen-starved. She begins to involuntarily shudder in his grasp—a series of violent paroxysms resembling an epileptic fit. Her legs kick and tremble. Her boot heels bang off the floor. Her arms flail futilely, making feeble attempts to hit the man, when all at once her right hand brushes against something metallic and cold and familiar on the floor next to her, wedged between the mat and the door.

She is about to enter stage three—unconsciousness, a short jaunt to death—when it registers in her brain what she's touching:
the 9mm pistol
.

This revelation is the last blip of conscious thought that zips across Lilly's synapses before everything shuts down and she passes out.

*   *   *

Lilly Caul has experienced lost time on several occasions in her life—drunken binges at college, druggy parties with Megan Lafferty, the time she got in that terrible car wreck in Fort Lauderdale—but nothing even remotely compares with this. It's as though some cosmic film editor has cut a scene out of her time line.

She has no idea how the gun got picked up, how it got raised, how the trigger got pulled, or how the bullet found its way to such a critical part of the preacher's anatomy. The fact is, Lilly cannot for the life of her remember aiming it, let alone
firing
it.

All she remembers is awakening to the strangest noise, which at first sounded like a baby crying—a high, shrill whine that deteriorated into a rusty, creaking groan. Now she feels as though she's a deep-sea diver with the bends, frantically swimming up toward the surface of the ocean, toward sweet, sweet oxygen, toward release, toward life.

Bursting out of the black water, she gasps and breathes in great, heaving gulps of air.

Sensory overload assaults her. Her neck throbs as though rope-burned. She's holding the Glock, and it's as hot as a branding iron, and the air is thick with blue smoke, and Jeremiah lies in a fetal position on the other side the cab. He's holding his groin, which is soaked in blood, and he's caterwauling in agony, all of which explains the crying-baby sound.

All at once it comes rushing back to her. How they ended up in a sideways truck cab, and how he was strangling her, and how she felt the gun right before blacking out. Now she realizes she hit the bull's-eye.

She catches her breath, rubs her neck with her free hand, and tries to speak, but only a thin, wispy cough comes out. She swallows hard, and touches her windpipe. It feels as though it's intact. She takes in a few more breaths and manages to rise to a kneeling position in the upended cab. She ejects the ammo magazine, sees that it has plenty of rounds left, slams it back in, and points the gun at the preacher.

“Shut the fuck up.” Her voice is hoarse and weak, but resolute, determined, cold. “And do what I say or the next one goes into your skull.”

The preacher manages to sit up, swallowing thickly, breathing hard and fast. His bald head is stippled in blood. He winces. He holds his bloody crotch. He swallows again and finally utters, “Just get it over with.”

“Get out.” She indicates the door in the ceiling that used to be the driver's side. “Now!”

He cocks his bald head so that he can see the door directly above him. He looks at her. “You gotta be kidding.”

She aims the gun at one of his knees, but before she can fire he struggles to his feet.

“I'm
going,
” he moans, and with great, laborious effort rises up to his full height.

*   *   *

It takes forever for the wounded preacher to struggle out of the massive cab, lower himself down the front grille, and drop to the ground with an agonizing grunt. His pants are soaked with blood, his flesh is the color of wallpaper paste, his breathing is tacky with fluids.

Lilly climbs out of the cab behind him and hops to the ground. “Get on your knees,” she says flatly, aiming the gun at him.

He takes a deep breath, stands up, faces her, and squares his shoulders as though prepared to fight. “No.”

She shoots one knee.

Jeremiah screams. The blast takes a tuft out of his trousers, sends a gout of blood out the back of his leg, and tosses him staggering backward. He goes down in a heap, holding his knee, howling in pain. His face is a mask of agony. He looks up at her with tears in his eyes. “Why…? Why are you doing this?”

She stands over him, expressionless, thinking of Bob and Woodbury. At last, she says, “Because the universe wants me to.”

Covered in blood and tears and snot, he gazes up at her and begins to laugh. Nothing joyous. Just a dry, ironic, icy chuckle. “You think you're God?”

She stares unmercifully at him. “No, I'm not God.” She aims at his shoulder. “And neither are you.”

The gun barks.

This time the blast takes a chunk from his left pectoral and exits in a fog of red tissue out his trapezius, spinning him in an awkward arabesque and sending him sprawling to the ground. He gasps and tries to crawl away. He collapses. He huffs painfully into the dirt, rolls over, and stares at the sky.

She calmly walks over to him. She doesn't say anything at first, just gazes down at him.

“M-missy, p-please…” He's nearly hyperventilating now, his game-show-host face marbled with blood, his shaved pate looking almost comical. “P-please … f-finish it … p-put me outta my misery.”

Then she smiles—perhaps one of the coldest smiles ever shared between two human beings—and says, “Nope … I got a better idea.”

 

TWENTY-FIVE

It won't be long now
.

Crouching in the tight quarters of the harvester's cab, out of ammo, out of options, David Stern
thinks
this, but he doesn't say it, not in the presence of this kid, this brave, heroic, badass twelve-year-old who took on the entire super-herd single-handedly in this giant monster that he barely knew how to operate—that he'd learned how to run by scanning the fucking manual, of all things.

Now the boy huddles next to David in the metal coffin, shivering, waiting to die.

The cab shudders once again, making creaking noises like a sinking ship as the swarm continues pressing in, harder and harder against all sides of the overturned harvester. Through the jagged opening of broken glass that used to be a windshield, three feet to his left, David can see the massive blade enclosure, still slimy with the entrails of countless dead, now bent into two pieces from the impact of the crash. He can also see the horde flocking to the wreckage, many more than when David first charged across those three blocks between the safe zone and the ruined machine with grandiose ideas of rescuing the boy.

You stupid, arrogant asshole,
David thinks
, wallowing in your own hubris
.

Only fifteen minutes or so had passed since the moment David had run out of ammo and realized he had made a huge mistake, tossing his weapon aside and climbing into this battered crypt with the boy. Now hundreds, maybe thousands more biters have arrived to push inward on the crumpling steel shell of the combine without forethought, without purpose other than to feed; a thousand-plus pallid, mottled faces creased with torturous hunger, thousands of milky, cataract-crusted eyes fixed on the lone pair of humans hunkering in the tiny tomb that used to be a cab; thousands of blackened, clawlike fingers raking the metal skin of the machine like fingernails on a chalkboard.

“What if we go out the bottom!” The boy, with his bile-soaked sweatshirt and Little Rascal wheat-straw hair that's standing straight up as though electrocuted, is pointing at the single square foot of a corrugated metal trapdoor embedded in the bottom of the cab, which is now the wall to Tommy's immediate right. “We could—”

“No, it's no good.” David sighs painfully. “Too many of them. We're safer in here for the time being.”

The boy looks at him. “We can't just sit here forever—we gotta try something.”

“I'm thinking.”

The boy crawls to the trapdoor. He fiddles with the latch, which was damaged in the capsizing. “I think we could sneak out this—”

“Get away from it!” David Stern hisses his words at him. “They'll get in!”

“I don't think they—”

The trapdoor suddenly bursts inward with a metallic clang that sends the boy reeling backward, blinking convulsively, shuddering in shock. Dozens of hands reach into the enclosure, hooklike fingers with blackened nails clawing at the air, flailing for food. Tommy lets out a yelp. David lunges for the hatch and tries to kick the medusa knot of arms and hands back out the opening, when all at once a series of gigantic cracking noises spread through the infrastructure of the wreck, and David Stern turns just in time to see a nightmare unfurl before his very eyes.

The walls of the cab begin to bow outward under the pressure of a sudden surge of the dead, and the seams of the combine start to split apart down the middle. Rivets pop like firecrackers. Death-stench and the clamor of collective snarls fill the airless chamber. Tommy shrieks and backs up against the vertical floor.

David madly searches the cab for a weapon, but the shift in gravity as the machine tips and collapses into itself sends him to the floor.

Tommy falls on top of the older man, and the two of them hug each other almost instinctively as the last intact section of windshield breaks apart. Ragged figures tumble into the cab. David pushes Tommy into the corner and grabs a mangled four-foot section of window frame. The closest biter gets the pointed edge of the frame thrust through its eye, sending spurts of fluid down on top of Tommy Dupree. The boy howls with a primal mixture of rage, terror, and repulsion.

David swings at the next one, and the next, and the next, knowing all along that it's just a show, a charade for the boy. David Stern has no hope of fighting off an endless clown car of monsters flooding the breached enclosure. But he keeps at them, slashing one across the temple, stabbing another through the eye socket, gouging yet another one through the roof of the mouth. Fluids and blood and tissue engulf the chamber, and soon the bodies collect on the floor of the cab inches away from where the boy struggles not to cry out loud. He just sits there, shoulders trembling, moist eyes taking it all in, tears tracking down his freckled face.