The Walking Dead: Invasion (14 page)

Lilly lets out an exasperated sigh. She feels as though she's not articulating her side of the argument well enough, not getting through to them. She remembers high school debate class, and how she always got too emotional trying to rally people to her side, how her emotions always stole her eloquence; and she acknowledges to herself now how those same emotions have almost gotten her killed in recent months.

Harold Staubach speaks up. “I have to say, for what it's worth … I'm leaning toward Bob and Gloria on this one.” He looks down as though embarrassed to make eye contact with Lilly. “I guess I just don't see the upside of … going back … well … going back
up
.”

Lilly shakes her head. She pushes herself away from the table and begins to pace. “You guys are not looking at the long term.”

No one responds to this. Bob looks down. The silence weighs on them like a funereal pall. Lilly realizes the question she has posed—the imponderable question of whether there even
is
a long term—torments them in their private thoughts and nightmares. She wipes back a wisp of hair that has fallen across her face, chews on her lip, thinks it over. She can hear the nervous tapping of Tommy's boot-heel on the wall behind her. She finally says, “Okay … fine. Let's put it to a vote. All those in favor of staying put, staying down here in the tunnels for … let's say the
foreseeable
future”—she looks around the table—“raise your hands.”

Slowly, tentatively, Gloria raises her hand. Bob raises his. Harold Staubach throws a nervous glance at the Sterns, and then hesitantly raises his hand. Three votes for staying in the tunnels.

“Okay … cool.” Lilly looks around the group. “All those in favor of working toward one day getting the town back, raise your hands.”

Barbara and David Stern, with zero hesitation, each shoot a hand up.

Lilly nods at them and raises hers. “Who would have guessed … we got a tie on our hands.”

“Hey!” Barbara Stern points at Tommy Dupree, who stands against the tunnel wall. The young man has his hand raised high, his ruddy, freckled face screwed up with indignation. Barbara grumbles, “What is he … chopped liver?”

*   *   *

Two separate supply runs are launched that afternoon, one underground and one at ground level.

The first, comprised of Bob Stookey and Gloria Pyne, disembarks shortly after noon. They follow a map that Bob had hand-copied from a 140-year-old plat survey, and they start out down the main conduit, squeezing through the east barricade and then turning south and proceeding down a side tunnel that up until now has been unexplored. Their target is the defunct mining company equipment that according to county surveys lies just beyond the river to the east. They believe all manner of supplies—including medicine—could very well still be stored there.

Meanwhile, Lilly and Tommy Dupree hike the three miles or so down the main tunnel to the Elkins Creek cave-in, dig their way through the drifts of dirt, and exit the underground near Pilson's Bridge, where scores of ruined walker bodies lie in disarray on the banks of the creek like Civil War casualties bleaching away to powder in the unforgiving sun. The wind and the light and the odors of rotting flesh amid the carpet of pine and pecan shells are so overpowering that Lilly and Tommy get dizzy as they creep through the shadows of the hardwood forest along the banks of the creek. They hike another mile or so until they come to Bob's secret fleet of vehicles parked under the canopy of great live oaks, camouflaged by nettings of foliage draped carefully over the SUVs and pickups. Bob and David Stern had risked their lives the previous week, amidst the building hordes, salvaging these vehicles from Woodbury and Carlinville.

Now Lilly and Tommy quickly and silently commandeer one of the SUVs: pulling off the shroud of leaves, finding the keys in the visor where Bob had left them, kicking the engine to life, and carefully pulling across the threshold and onto the access road that winds along Elkins Creek.

Fifteen minutes later, Lilly pulls down an entrance ramp onto the wreckage-strewn lanes of Highway 19 and heads south. Her plan is to try and reach Tifton or even Valdosta before nightfall—farther than they've ever traveled on a supply run—in order to search for a new source of propane, batteries, lightbulbs, and fuel that hasn't been picked over. She knows of a Home Depot down around Cordele. She makes note that the fuel gauge on the road-worn RAV4 is three-quarters full, and she explains to Tommy that they have to make sure that they don't go beyond the “point of no return.” Tommy has never heard this expression, and it sounds ominous to him, but Lilly explains that it merely means they have to make sure they always have enough gas in the tank to get back home.

It's slow going for quite a while, the graveyard of wrecked cars and trucks petrified now by the turning of the seasons into leafy heaps, their kudzu-covered carcasses glued to the pavement in emulsified, pasty puddles. Weaving in and out of the wreckage, Lilly and Tommy idly talk about the future, hoping that there actually
is
a future. Tommy starts reminiscing about his late mother and father, both of whom perished in the tumult that took Woodbury down last month. He speaks of them as heroes, forgiving them for their zealotry. Lilly is taken aback by the boy's maturity. Perhaps she's seeing a side effect of the plague. Maybe it weans a kid off childhood. Maybe it girds a person for the inevitable loss that will sooner or later touch every living human. The tragic events of the last few months seem to have made Tommy Dupree more comfortable in his skin, and this is thoroughly, endlessly fascinating to Lilly.

They drive and talk, and drive some more, and talk about the afterlife, and God, and the apocalypse, and the possible causes of the plague, and everything else under the sun that Tommy can think of. They pass at least a half a dozen gas stations that lie in ruins, the pumps overturned, the offices ransacked, the storage tanks as dry as coffins. They talk some more.

They talk for so long, and the conversation is so interesting to Lilly, that she does something she'd have thought she would never do in a million years.

She forgets about the fuel gauge.

 

TEN

The battered RAV4 skids to a stop, kicking up a whirlwind of dust, the g-force slamming Tommy into the dash, his shoulder belt preventing him from breaking his nose. He jerks back in the seat, blinking convulsively. The silence shrieks. Lilly holds on to the steering wheel with a death grip, staring straight ahead, taking deep breaths.

“What—? What happened?” Tommy looks at her. “What is it?”

“I can't believe it.”

“What?”

“I can't believe what I just did.”

“What—? Tell me!
What?!
”

“The point of no—” She starts to explain, but all at once she gets distracted by her surroundings: the thick woods on either side of the highway, the overturned bus in the culvert a few hundred yards up the road. Things are reacting all around them to the introduction of an alien car into the poisonous ecosystem—trees are shivering in the deeper woods, noises drifting on the breeze, smells wafting. Lilly can't believe what she's done.

Tommy cranes his neck in order to see the gas gauge. The needle is a hair above “E.” “Oh shit …
shit
.”

He glances out the windshield. In the gray middle distance, behind columns of diseased pines, shadows stir. In the opposite lane, something crawls out from under a wreck, a pasty white cadaver with half its face missing. A hundred yards farther up the road, a pair of ragged reanimated corpses in bloodstained hospital smocks shuffle slowly out from behind a faded, torn billboard for the Florida Commission on Tourism showing a bikini-clad siren on a sun-drenched beach and the words “When you got it bad, we got it good.”

Lilly pounds angrily on the steering wheel. “Fuck!—Fuck!—FUCK!”

“Okay, so, we got a little bit of gas left, right? Don't we?!”

Lilly stops banging in the wheel and gazes down into her lap with equal parts despair, rage, shame, and terror. “What was I thinking? How could I have been so fucking stupid?! Stupid! STUPID!!”

“But we got a little bit left, right?”

She wipes her mouth, tries to gather her thoughts. In her peripheral vision, she can detect shadowy figures shambling out of the woods, slowly but steadily moving toward them. The sky roils with dark clouds, a storm threatening. The smell of black decay filters through the vents. “Not enough to get back, Tommy. That's the main problem. We don't have enough to get back because we went way beyond the—”

“But maybe we should turn around and head back anyway and see how far we get.”

Lilly sees three walkers in her rearview, closing the distance. They hobble robotically toward the RAV4 with arms outstretched—two males and a female, each of them very old, both in age and state of decay, perhaps former residents of a nursing home—working their black teeth with the fervor of piranhas, chewing at the air with feral hunger. They make the flesh on the back of Lilly's neck bristle. “I'm not sure that's going to get us anywhere.”

“We can't just sit here.”

“Hold on.” Lilly opens the map case next to her, quickly fishing through the loose candy wrappers and garage door remotes. She grabs a lighter, a pocketknife, a flashlight, and a box of .22 caliber 36-grain bullets for the Ruger. “Grab the backpacks!”

“We're getting out?!”

“Just do it, Tommy! Don't ask any questions, just do what I say!”

He twists around and grabs their rucksacks from the backseat, then hands Lilly's over. She stuffs the items from the map case into it, checks the box of ammunition, pulls her Ruger pistol, checks the magazine. “Look under your seat, should be a crowbar under there—grab it!”

The boy finds the crowbar.

“And open the glove box!” Lilly orders.

Tommy flips the panel down. “What am I looking for?”

“Maps—any maps you see in there, grab them!”

The boy does so as Lilly glances back up at the rearview and sees the three dead senior citizens closing in on them. The creatures approach the SUV with heads cocked, mouths drooling black bile, eyes geeked open like silver reflectors. Lilly yanks the shift lever down into reverse. “Hold on, Tommy!” she cries.

She kicks the accelerator, and the engine howls. The steel-belted radials spin wildly for a moment on the sandy pavement, then find purchase and the SUV lurches backward. The walkers loom in the mirror for a single instant, their eyes getting big right before the impact.

The SUV shudders as the muffled sounds of wet bones and cartilage crunching travels under them, making them momentarily lose traction on the grease of dead remains. The RAV4 fishtails furiously as it continues to back away from the gore-soaked pavement.

A moment later, Lilly slams down the brake pedal and brings the careering SUV to a noisy halt.

“HOLD ON!”

She jerks it into drive and rockets forward. By this point, the pair of billboard lurkers have traversed out across the shoulder and lumbered onto the highway, and are now shuffling directly toward them—smack-dab in the middle of their lane—oblivious to the 3,500 pounds of Japanese steel rushing toward them.

The impact throws one of the creatures into the air with the force of a catapult and rips the other one in two, sending half its torso into the woods on a comet tail of glistening red entrails and the other half thumping under the chassis of the speeding SUV, grinding it into bonemeal. Lilly keeps the foot pedal pinned, the steering wheel steady. The RAV4 charges away from the scene.

“What now?!—What now, Lilly?!” The boy twists in his seat, gazing out the rear window at the carnage receding into the distance.

“Grab everything you brought with you! Pack, machete, water, the other pistol!”

The boy scrambles to gather up his things and secure them in the pack on his belt. The SUV rumbles over a series of potholes as Lilly steers it toward suitable cover. “We'll ditch the car in a safe place, hide it somewhere, and try to find some gas!”

She follows the highway around a bend, past a deserted industrial park, and down a sloping hill into a valley of long-neglected farm fields—now completely overgrown and gone to seed—before she realizes that the RAV4 has burned the last drops of fuel in its tank.

They roll into a rest area on fumes, and then have to get out and push the vehicle by hand around the back of one of the buildings.

By the time they light out on foot, heading south, the afternoon has already started to give way to evening.

*   *   *

“Easy does it, hotshot!” Norma Sutters braces herself against the car's passenger door as Miles Littleton careens down Georgia State Road 520 just west of Albany. He weaves the muscle car in and out of the slew of abandoned vehicles as though skiing down an Olympic slalom course, barely avoiding the corners, nearly sideswiping every other wreck. He drives with the practiced ease of a veteran wheelman, a street kid whose DNA has been recombined with axle grease and carbon monoxide. He wears a tricolored Bob Marley beret on his tight dark curls, and his long-lashed eyes fix themselves on the white lines clocking under the car as though they are the flash of a hypnotist's watch. His gold tooth glistens. He's in a hurry.

“You said to step on it,” he mutters almost to himself. “I'm stepping on it.”

“I didn't say get us killed.” Norma gazes through the windshield for a moment, noticing a cluster of walkers up ahead, milling about the gravel shoulder. They look like commuters waiting for a train that will never come. Miles steers the car straight for them. Norma closes her eyes. “Lordy, Junior, don't do this to me again!”

She feels a thump, as though the car has just cobbled over a bump, and she opens her eyes.

The outside of the passenger window has turned deep red in the backwash of blood tossed up by the impact. Particles of brain matter and hair and tissue run horizontally across the glass, blowing off the side of the car in the slipstream. Miles is giggling. Norma glances in the side mirror and sees the human remains receding into the distance behind them, the walkers sideswiped by the Challenger now reduced to gruesome body parts and headless torsos strewn across the shoulder.