The Walking Dead: Invasion (15 page)

She throws him a look. “Can we just concentrate on finding these people?”

“I say fuck these people. I say we just boogie on outta this part of the world!”

“Miles, we been over this a million times—”

“I don't want no part of this crazy-ass shit,” he grumbles. “Bat-shit fucking preachers waging holy wars and shit—fuck it! That don't have nothing to do with me. You neither! What that motherfucker is planning with them toys and shit—it ain't just crazy, it's fucking
evil
. I say we find an island somewhere, roll some fatties, and stay high for the rest of our natural lives.”

“I thought you was a Christian!” She aims her scornful gaze at her surrogate son. “We can't just turn a blind eye to this shit, Miles.”

“How the fuck we gonna find these people in the first place?”

“We'll find 'em—don't you worry.” She taps her finger on the crumpled road map in her lap. “Just stay on this road until we get to 29, then head south. They gotta be somewhere around that Woodbury place.”

“They're in a motherfucking tunnel, girlfriend, they're belowground—remember? How the fuck you expect to find them in a motherfucking tunnel?! You're the one's gonna get us killed.”

“We'll find them. They gotta come up for air every once in a while.”

“I ain't even sure I got enough go-juice to make it all the way down there.”

“I thought you told me you had enough of them tanks in the trunk to make it to the coast and back two times over. You lying to me, boy?”

“Didn't plan on taking that side trip up the Chattahoochee with that motherfucker.”

Norma lets out a weary sigh and rings her plump little hands. She wears a ratty cardigan sweater over her church dress, and still she shivers in the cool of the day's waning hours. It's almost dusk. The edges of the sky have turned indigo blue, and the low clouds are moving in, scudding the horizon with brooding gray monoliths. “Lord have mercy … what a world,” she murmurs.

Miles shakes his head. “Suppose we do find these people, what the fuck you gonna tell them?”

She looks down. “I'm gonna tell them everything.”

“What if these folks are as bug-fuck crazy as that preacher? Ever think of that? What if these people are just as fucking evil as Garlitz?”

Norma gazes back out the passenger-side window, the passing landscape tinted red now by the blood-filmed glass. “Then God help us all.”

*   *   *

Darkness closes in around Lilly and Tommy as they creep silently down a farm road cutting between two scabrous tobacco fields. They move in a single-file line along a split-rail fence and communicate mostly with nods and gestures in order to avoid attracting the attention of lurkers.

For the last hour, they've noticed an increasing number of dead in the area, a few of which they have taken down with their bladed weapons. One came from inside a culvert, lunging at them with alarming velocity. Lilly managed to cleave its skull at the last moment with her rusty machete. Minutes later, another one surprised them as they passed a derelict grain elevator, the walker stumbling out of a musty storage room. The boy rose to that occasion by driving his crowbar through the thing's left ear.

Lilly now worries that they risk inadvertently stumbling upon a swarm. She has her silencer on her Ruger, but she wants to avoid using up her limited supply of ammo. She would like to be indoors—or at least under cover—by nightfall, and by the looks of the sky, that's not too far off. The roar of crickets has already risen like a tide around them, and the air has that clammy, pithy chill that it gets in the open country at sunset. The worst part, though, is the scent of death on the wind. Lilly can recognize the acrid, festering, sickly stench of a swarm a mile away. Only a mob of walkers can reek like that, and the odor is now sending a continuous wave of gooseflesh down Lilly's back.

They reach a lonely crossroads and pause. Lilly is about to whisper something to the boy when the tobacco leaves to their immediate left begin to rustle and quake. Lilly sees a massive figure moving toward them from behind the stalks, the breathy growling noise rising above the crickets. She pushes the boy aside and draws her Ruger.

From the tobacco plants bursts an enormous male in greasy dungarees, reaching and growling with monstrous hunger etched on its cadaverous face, its sharklike eyes practically luminous in the twilight. It wears a strange little hat that looks almost comical on its huge, livid head, and it smells of maggot-infested meat and scorched shit.

Lilly fires a single blast—the noise like a gunshot fired through a wet blanket, still loud but dampened—directly into the creature's cranium. The back of its head erupts in pink plumes of matter as the thing instantly folds.

For a moment, Lilly and the boy just stand there, staring at the fallen walker. For some reason, its attire gets Lilly's attention. She kneels and takes a closer look. The creature's hat has come askew in the fall, and Lilly picks it up. The pinstriped material, the silver, grime-flecked brim, the shape of it—all of it looks familiar. But at first Lilly can't identify it. She looks at the gore-streaked dungarees, the gray fabric pinstriped, an empty tool belt still attached to the thing's midsection.

“He was an
engineer
.” Tommy Dupree points excitedly at the creature's boots.

Lilly looks at the boy. “Yeah … exactly … a train engineer.” She stands up and looks to the north. “Which means … I bet there's a station around here somewhere, or maybe a switchyard or something.”

The boy stands up and excitedly looks toward the darkening horizon to the north. “You know what? It does look like there's something up there on the other side of that farm.” He points. “See the water tower? I bet that's your train yard—c'mon!” He starts hustling northward, a spring in his step now.

*   *   *

“Who's ‘Stupid'?” Bob breaks the silence, his voice echoing slightly in the long, straight mine shaft.

For almost an hour, he and Gloria have been trudging along the tributary tunnel—their boot steps crunching in the fine ashy dust—looking for the mining company outpost, exchanging small talk, discussing their inevitable bid to return to Woodbury. Bob believes the miners may have very well left a wealth of resources down here when they closed up shop years earlier.

“Say what?” Gloria walks along behind Bob with her lantern in one hand, the yellow pool of light shining down the endless channel of stone and the occasional dusty, cobweb-filmed support beam. About ten minutes ago, they had come upon a caved-in area that had evidently been worn away over the years by sewage runoff, leaving behind a narrow channel through which they could both, with some effort, squeeze. On the other side of the cave-in was an ancient mine shaft that smelled of fuel oil and dry rot.

“The hat,” Bob says, shooting a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the visor Gloria is wearing, and always seems to be wearing, as though the thing is a good luck charm. “Says you're with Stupid, so I was just wondering—”

“If that was somebody in particular?” She smiles to herself.

“Yeah. Husband? Boyfriend?”

“Nope. Nobody in particular, Bob. I guess you could say it's every man I ever dated.”

“Ouch. That bad?”

“Oh, you don't want to know.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Guess I ain't a very good judge of character, when you get right down to it.”

“Well, I hope your luck changes someday.”

“I appreciate that, Bob.” She looks at the back of his head as they walk along single file in the narrow tunnel. “That's why it's good to meet somebody like yourself with some semblance of an intellect.”

“Oh, I don't know about that.” He chuckles. “I been accused of a lot of things.”

“You remind me of my dad in a lot of ways.”

“No kidding.”

“Seriously, he was a self-taught intellectual, read all the time. Drove an eighteen-wheeler most of his life, listened to books on tape.”

“Sounds like a good man.”

“He
was
.” Gloria keeps walking, but wipes her mouth at the thought of her old man. “He was kind, and he was kinda shy, but he knew a little bit about a lot of stuff.”

They walk in silence for a few moments until Bob says, “Your dad … is he…?”

“He passed before all this shit went down, thank God. I was an only child. My mom was in a nursing home in Savannah at the time of the outbreak. Her heart didn't hold out when it all went south. I buried her myself in a potter's field up to Hinesville.” She swallows the unexpected wave of grief and sorrow as she walks. “Not the happiest moment of my life, I'll be honest with ya.”

“Sorry to hear that, Glo.”

She waves it off. “It's a miracle I made it to Woodbury. Told myself I was gonna go out west, go to the mountains, be a hermit.” She laughs. “Hitchhiking ain't the best mode of travel these days, I can tell you that.” A beat of silence passes, boot steps crunching, the rattle of her lamp. “How did you end up there, Bob?”

“I was traveling with—” He cocks his head, raises his Coleman, sees something in the darkness ahead of them. “Wait … hold on.”

They come to a sudden halt. Bob gently puts a hand on Gloria's arm. She doesn't move. About fifty feet away from them, blocking their path, shimmering in the pool of light from the lantern, sits a small coal car. They cautiously approach. The little conveyance is about the size of a baby buggy, covered with mold and cobwebs, petrified, its wooden wheels almost fossilized with age. The closer they get, the more Gloria realizes the thing is covered in blood.

Bob pauses next to it and takes a closer look. Gloria leans in, holding her lamp high. “Is that blood?”

Bob wipes a fingertip across the surface of the carrier. “Sure is. Looks old.”

“How old, d'ya think?”

“Hard to tell. Not ancient old. Not decades … but maybe a year or two.”

He looks down. Gloria follows the pool of light as it sweeps across a pair of rails embedded like hardened arteries in the dirt floor of the tunnel.

“We're definitely in the neighborhood of that mining office,” Bob ventures. “According to the map, should be right above us.” He follows the rails. “Stay close.”

Gloria does as he says, following along on his heels. Her hackles go up immediately. She feels that familiar tingling sensation at the base of her spine—she gets it every time something seems wrong—but she ignores it. She trusts Bob implicitly.

Shuffling along behind him, close enough to touch the fringe of thick dark hair hanging over his collar, she realizes that she actually yearns to do just that: touch his hair, run her fingers through those beautiful, gray-flecked black locks. Immediately she shoves the urge back down her throat, telling herself it's merely professional curiosity, an occupational hazard of being a lifelong employee of a beauty parlor.

For over twenty years, she had been the go-to colorist and cut-girl at the Curl Up and Dye Salon in the sprawling metropolis of Portersville, Georgia. She long ago lost count of how many heads she tinted, teased, and trimmed—but now that the world has hung up its going-out-of-business sign and the members of the post-plague society have let their hair go, she longs to get her hands on a pair of clippers.

On the other hand, Gloria realizes that she might as well face the fact that her interest in the texture of Bob Stookey's greasy mop-top is more than mere muscle memory. She has a thing for the man. But in this day and age, having a thing for somebody can lead to major problems—it can break your heart, or worse, it can get you killed.

“Okay … here we go,” Bob murmurs from about a half step ahead of her, and the sound of his voice sends a cold current down Gloria's spine. She sees his hand shoot up, and then, in the light of their lanterns, she sees what he sees.

“Holy crap.” She stops, and stares, and swallows hard as she registers the fact that the man slumped against the wall of the tunnel thirty feet away is missing the top of his head. He also seems to be missing his lower jaw. Dressed in the standard filthy dungarees and work shirt of a coal miner, with a blossom of inky-dark arterial spray visible across the tunnel wall above him, he still holds his suicide pistol in one cold, dead hand at his side.

As they move closer, the lantern light illuminates two more dead miners. One lies about twenty-five away from the suicide, the other is slumped against the opposite wall. Each of these men bears the grisly trauma of a point-blank head-shot wound. Bob crouches down next to the suicide victim with the quiet, world-weary authority of a seasoned homicide detective. “Looks like this one put the others outta their misery, then turned his own lights out.”

Gloria pauses next to one of the other bodies and shines her light down at the gruesome remains. The maggots have long since had their fill of these poor gentlemen, and have left behind gray sunken shells inside the coal miner garb. Gloria shivers. “Looks like this happened a while back.”

Bob looks around. He sees a set of iron steps embedded in the wall, and shines his light up at the top of the stairs, where a huge funnel of dirt slopes down through a manhole-style opening, blocking off entrance or exit. “Can't tell if they got trapped down here and then offed themselves when they realized it was a lost cause, or…”

He pauses, as though seeing the futility in the act of finishing the thought. Gloria looks up at the cave-in above the stairs. “Or they shut themselves off on purpose.” She looks back at the pistol, frozen for eternity in the dead man's hand. “The outbreak happened about a year and a half ago … right? So this all coulda gone down right around that time.” She sniffs, her allergies acting up. “You think the gun is still operational?”

Bob goes over and pries the .38 caliber police special from the dead hand. He sees old, faded, congealed candy wrappers on the floor around the man, a broken pencil, wads of paper smashed into the dirt. He checks the cylinder and finds three rounds remaining.