The Walking Dead: Invasion (9 page)

“I prefer my fallen arches, thank you very much.”

“You're starting to sound like my wife.”

“I'll take that as a compliment,” Lilly retorts, and gestures to the east, toward a clearing. “Let's get in and out, make this short and sweet. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

David Stern follows her as she marches down the trail toward the closest access road.

As she walks, she keeps one hand on her backpack and the other on the grip of her Ruger, which is thrust down a homemade holster tied to her belt. Barbara Stern did the leather stitching on the thing, and even burned the initials “LC” into the sheath—the monogram being more of a practical measure than a frivolous luxury: People in the tunnels were constantly taking the wrong guns from the rack near the exit steps. In the aftermath of the violent and surreal events of the last couple of months, Lilly has come to feel as if the tunnels are a prison, or at best a sort of limbo between two worlds. She relishes these times aboveground, however dangerous or brief they may be. Her claustrophobia is a constant dissonant thrum of tension beneath the surface of her subterranean life, and today, even the threat of rain can't dampen her enjoyment of this little field trip.

“Wait up, Lilly!” David Stern trots up behind her, breathing heavily. “It's not a race.”

“Just want to make it back before nightfall.”

“Where we headed first? Drugstore?”

Lilly waves the idea off like a bad smell. “That place is picked clean, even the basement—plus we can always get there through the side tunnels.”

“You gonna make me guess?”

Lilly smiles to herself as she walks. “Thought we'd hit the guardhouse at the reservoir and the supermarket warehouse on the way over to lovers' leap.”

“Lovers' leap? You want to go all the way out there?”

“That's right.”

“Lilly, there's no fuel up there; there's nothing but bird shit and walkers.”

Lilly shrugs as she lopes along the narrow dirt trail, her sensory organs dialed up high now, absorbing every noise in the isolated forest. “It won't take long.”

David Stern rolls his eyes. “You're not fooling anybody, Lilly.”

“What do you mean?”

“You just want to get another gander, don't you?”

“A what?”

“A look-see, a glimpse.”

“David—”

“You're just torturing yourself, Lilly.”

“I'm just trying to—”

“There's nothing anybody can do about Woodbury. We've been through this a million times.”

“Wait!” She comes to an abrupt stop, David nearly colliding with her. “Hold on a second.”

“What is it?” David glances over his shoulder, whispering now. He reaches for his axe, which dangles from a clasp on the side of his pack. “Walkers?”

She shakes her head, gazing around the immediate area, scanning the shadows, listening to the rustle of the breeze through the leaves. She thought she heard a twig snap, or perhaps a series of shuffling footsteps, behind them, in the middle distance, but she can't be sure.

“Humans?” David licks his lips and gazes again over his shoulder.

“I don't know. Just hearing things, I guess.” She continues on.

David follows, his hand on his axe now. They walk for another mile or so without saying much to each other. When they get to the intersection of Country Club and Rosewood, they turn north.

The sensation of being followed never completely fades from the back of Lilly's mind.

*   *   *

By the time they reach the winding road that meanders up the side of Emory Hill along the eastern edge of Carrol Woods, a low cover of dark afternoon clouds have rolled in, and Lilly and David are exhausted and cranky. So far, they've found very little in the way of fuel—a few ounces from a generator at the reservoir guardhouse, and another liter or so in the tank of a wrecked minivan out on Highway 18. Other than that, a few scraps of vending machine food and over-the-counter medication scavenged from the ruins of a truck stop on Interstate 85, and that's it. They've basically come up empty.

All of which makes the climb up that narrow two-lane a more arduous task than usual.

“Just let me do this and stop nagging me,” Lilly grumbles as they finally reach the scenic pull-off that marks the crest of Emory Hill.

“Did I say you couldn't?” David Stern follows her, exhausted and spent. He has sweated through his silk jacket, and now he has it tied around his waist as he trudges along. His gray chest hair and sagging pectorals are visible through his stained sleeveless T. They had encountered a couple stray roamers about a mile back down the hill, and David cleaved in their skulls with the axe as casually as if he were chopping a few extra cords of firewood. Now he follows Lilly as she steps over a low guardrail and strides across a dirt clearing to the edge of a gravel precipice. “It's a free country,” he mutters as he shrugs off his pack and sets it down.

“Hand me the binocs, would ya?”

He fishes in his pack, hands over the binoculars, and stands there waiting.

She puts the lenses to her eyes and gazes out across miles of farmland.

Woodbury can be seen in the binoculars' hazy, milky panorama, so far away that, even at 10x magnification, it looks like a quaint little toy village of dollhouses, a LEGO town, adorable but stained black and rotten with oily floodwaters undulating and oozing down its main drag and branching into every side street, alleyway, and cul-de-sac. Lilly adjusts the focus. The flood reveals itself to be an incomprehensible number of dead, shambling aimlessly, shoulder to shoulder, standing-room-only, ping-ponging around with the random madness of electrons. Woodbury is literally submerged in a sea of cadavers. The countless ragged corpses crowd every square foot of pavement, every doorway, every alcove, every yard, every parking lot, every knoll, and from this distance, the impenetrable quality of it—the sheer finality that radiates off the sight—makes Lilly's capillaries go cold, her solar plexus clenching suddenly with a massive wave of sorrow and despair so black and toxic that she drops the binoculars.

“You okay?” David looks up from his absent nail-biting. “What's the matter?”

Lilly has already started back down the sloping pavement of the turnoff.

David grabs the binoculars and hustles after her, calling out in the stillness, “Slow down!”

*   *   *

The sound of a small tin can rattling—a makeshift entryway bell—fills the dank air of the cluttered subterranean passageway.

“I'll be damned if that doesn't sound like our intrepid scouts returning to the fold.” Bob Stookey, his dark, greasy locks pomaded back from his corrugated brow, his chambray denim shirt damp under the arms, looks up from his cup of coffee and sees the thin shaft of pale light shining down from the tunnel ceiling fifty feet away. It's almost dawn. “About freaking time.”

“Thank God,” Gloria Pyne says from the other side of the rickety wooden table, which was once a cable spool but is now one of the many items repurposed for the narrow stretch of brick-lined tunnel. Gloria has her trademark visor—emblazoned with the faded words “I'M WITH STUPID”—tilted to one side of her graying head, a stick of stale gum snapping nervously on one side of her mouth.

The cluttered tunnel is about the length of half a city block, maybe a little less, with intersecting tunnels at each end barricaded with brightly painted chain-link barriers, installed to keep the underground walkers—dubbed “moles” by Gloria—from invading the space. Once a section of the old antebellum Underground Railroad, the tunnel was transformed almost single-handedly by Bob Stookey into a barracks and living space for the surviving residents of Woodbury, Georgia. Now the air smells of both decay and disinfectant, mold and coffee freshly brewed on a hot plate. Cage lights dangle down, running off the power supplied by two propane-fueled generators situated aboveground, over the far end of the passageway, their feed cable snaking down like octopus tentacles from the stalactite-lined ceiling.

Bob and Gloria push themselves away from the table and creep as silently as possible—not wanting to awaken the children—toward the main entrance portal. In a mirror aimed up at the opening, Bob can see Lilly's leg thrusting down toward the inner steps, and hears her raspy voice saying, “I never thought I would say this, but it's good to be back.”

Lilly lowers herself down the footholds embedded in the mortar-lined tunnel wall.

“What in the Sam Hell took you so long?” Bob gives Lilly the once-over, inspecting her pack, her ammo belt, her muddy boots.

She gives him a look. “Don't ask.”

“Lilly thinks walkers are stalkers now.” David Stern's voice filters down as he lowers himself, gingerly maneuvering his sore, rheumatic limbs toward the tunnel floor. He lands with a grunt, the contents of his heavy pack rattling, and adds, “She's convinced we were being tracked by the dead.“

“Nice of you two to drop by!” Barbara Stern's voice echoes. A middle-aged earth mother in a faded floral-print muumuu and wild gray locks approaches, her eyes shimmering with love and relief. “You had us worried sick, by the way.”

“Don't start with me, Babs,” David says, his own eyes filling with emotion, reaching for her. She grabs him and pulls him into a desperate embrace. He hugs her back, stroking her soft curves, murmuring, “I'm cranky and tired and in no mood to be chastised.”

“Back home one second and already he's whining.” Barbara clings to him. “Look at you. You've got sweat stains under your sweat stains.”

“I love you, too, sweetheart.”

“Walker stalkers?” Bob Stookey asks Lilly, giving her an incredulous smirk.

Lilly shrugs, wriggling out of her pack, dropping the ruck to the tunnel floor, the contents clanking. “
Something
was following us. If it wasn't walkers … I don't know who the hell it was, or why they were being so … what's the word?”

David chimes in from across the tunnel. “Furtive?”

Lilly nods. “Yeah, exactly.”

Bob studies her, his grin fading. “You okay, Lilly-girl?”

“Yeah, peachy … Why?”

Now Bob gives
her
a shrug. “Just asking.”

“Well, I'm fine.”

Bob looks at the others. “Okay, people, let's give them some air. Gloria, can you go put another pot of hot water on? These folks look like they could use some coffee.”

*   *   *

They sit in the lounge area and sip instant coffee and chat for nearly an hour about the possibility of a walker actually stalking someone. Bob assures Lilly that the dead have no tactical skills whatsoever. “Biters have the intellect of a snail,” he proclaims at one point, after which David Stern wisecracks, “That's an insult to snails.” Everybody roars at that one except Lilly. Bob can tell something's wrong, and he thinks he knows what it is.

During the conversation, Tommy Dupree, the oldest of the children, stirs in his sleeping bag on the other side of the tunnel. Amid the propane tanks, food crates, folding chairs, and bundles of electrical cords running down the walls like vines, the area directly above Tommy's sleeping pad is plastered with clippings and pages from various magazines salvaged from Woodbury's library, giving the area the look of a teenager's room on a submarine.

Roused by the sound of Lilly's voice, the gangly twelve-year-old jerks awake and scampers barefoot over to her table, hugging Lilly to the point of making David Stern wonder aloud if he's chopped liver. In recent weeks, the boy has latched on to Lilly—his mentor, his teacher, his big sister, and maybe, just maybe, much to Lilly's chagrin, his adopted mother—largely in compensation for the tumult that took his parents' lives.

At length, the adults finish their debate regarding walker behavior, the other kids start waking up, and Gloria and Barbara begin their day of shepherding a half dozen children under the age of eleven through their morning rituals of sponge bathing, eating instant oatmeal, playing card games, and complaining about the smell in the tunnels. David goes off to help Harold Staubach rewire one of the gennies, and Lilly is left alone with Bob.

Bob stares at her. “Something's wrong—I can see it in your eyes.”

Lilly sips her coffee. “We went out, we didn't find much, and then we were followed by somebody.… End of story.”

“You sure that's all?”

Lilly looks at him. “What do want me to say? Where are you going with this, Bob?”

“You saw something out there.”

She lets out a pained sigh. “Bob, don't go down that road.”

“Just be honest with me.”

“Always.”

For a moment, Bob burns his gaze into her eyes, the worry lines forming deep folds in his forehead under his dark pomaded hair, his kind, sad eyes buried in crow's-feet. Beneath his gruff, coarse exterior, the former army medic and reformed alcoholic is a tenderhearted, doting mother hen. “You looked, didn't you? You went and looked at the town again.”

“Bob—”

“What did I tell you?”

“I just—”

“What good does it do right now?” He crosses his arms over his chest and lets out a puff of exasperation. “Lilly-girl … c'mere for a second.” He gestures toward a dark corner of the tunnel. “C'mere, I want to talk to you.”

Bob leads her past the folding tables of the dining area, past stacks of crates containing their supplies of canned goods and dry cereal, past the racks of weapons, past the hooks upon which winter coats and thrift-shop clothing hang, past the curtained-off bathroom facility (people do their business in a bucket, then empty it down a trough leading into the sewer), and finally over to an alcove of crates stacked in front of the Rust-Oleum-painted hurricane-fence barricade. The shadows deepen around them as the faint, breathy smell of the grave filters through the chain-link barrier. Bob speaks in an urgent whisper. “You're confusing these people, Lilly.”