The Walking Dead: Invasion (27 page)

This is the big one—the heart attack his doctor back in Augusta had been warning him about for decades—and it couldn't have come at a worse time.

A tear breaks out of the corner of one eye and tracks down the left side of his face. He stares at the wormy, tangled convolutions of the tunnel ceiling in the dim, angular beam of the fallen flashlight, and feels the fist close around his heart and the concrete filling his lungs and halting his blood flow, and everything going all fuzzy and soft focus on him. He knows what comes next, and he thinks about not being able to ever see Lilly again, not being able to fight alongside her, not being able to see her glittering hazel eyes taking in the strange circus the world has become.

All this passes through his mind in a millisecond that feels like an eternity.

He thinks of the kids. He thinks of holding the little Dupree boy, Lucas, on his knee a couple of days ago, playing This is the Way the Gentlemen Ride and getting a magnificent giggle out of the child, and for some reason feeling an enormous and unexpected sense of accomplishment; just to get that giggle in these dark times is a salve on the soul. Bob never married, never knew what it was like to have children, but he loved kids, and he adored these little ragamuffins that Lilly and he had taken in after Woodbury's fall. He loved the Slocum twins, their elfin faces reminding him of two little marzipan dolls, the way their eyes twinkled when Bob showed them a four-leaf clover he found on a supply run last week.

These children represent the hope to someday restore the world to the way it was, and they mean everything to Bob, and now, lying in the throes of cardiac arrest, he thinks of the preacher and his bug-fuck crazies getting their hands on these kids. He thinks of these children in the line of fire. He thinks of them being in grave danger this very instant.

Bob starts to crawl, his left arm completely numb, his legs worthless, his lungs on fire. He makes it a few inches before collapsing. He breathes through his nose, puffing little blooms of cinder dust.

He starts again, dragging his failing body along with agonizing slowness, a few centimeters at a time. It feels as though his chest is about to rupture. He breathes in steel wool, but refuses to give in to the pain.

He keeps crawling, and keeps his hot gaze locked on the unforgiving darkness ahead of him.

*   *   *

The eastern horizon goes from a deep cobalt blue to a washed-out gray, the first light of day pushing back the shadows in the woods around Woodbury.

The air snaps with the chill of early morning and the whir of the aviary as a dark figure emerges from a hole in the ground, hastens across a clearing, and climbs the nearest live oak.

The butcher-birds in the high branches screech their bloodthirsty shrieks as a greeting, or maybe a warning, as the figure finds a vantage point and digs in a pocket for a pair of binoculars. Dressed in his threadbare hoodie, his delicate braids flagging in the breeze, Miles Littleton hooks an arm around the tree's center trunk to steady himself as he scans the barrens out beyond the tobacco fields.

Through the lenses he can see a narrow panorama of derelict farmhouses, wreckage-strewn two-lanes, and dry riverbeds dissecting the Georgia hinterlands like the desiccated veins of a vast corpse. He sees the tinsel shimmer of the Flint River snaking southward in the new light.

He blinks. About two and a half miles away, a low thunderhead of dust rises off Cove Road. He blinks again. He adjusts the focus and gapes at the massive inkblot of vehicles and the myriad shadows fanning out in their wake, coming this way, moving with the slow certainty of a black glacier.

“Fuck me,” Miles mutters, and lets the binoculars dangle and bounce around his neck as he climbs back down in a hurry. He hits the ground and charges back across the clearing to the manhole cover. He lifts it, then lowers himself down through the breach.

Footsteps converge on him as soon as he drops to the tunnel floor.

“Well?” Lilly's voice crackles with tension, her fists clenching involuntarily as she stands before him in her camo jacket, her hair pulled back taut in a ponytail. She has a bandolier belt slung across her chest, the row of fully jacketed bullets nestled between her small breasts.

Miles gives her a grave look. “They've already crossed the Flint.”

“Fuck!” Lilly swallows dryly and looks around the room at the others gathering behind her. Harold Staubach holds a 12-gauge against his hip, his russet brown face shiny with sweat. David Stern stands behind him in the shadows, his AR-15 slung over the shoulder of his silk roadie jacket. Norma Sutters comes trundling up behind David, her plump features coalescing into a frown.

“Gonna be blowing in here in like maybe a half an hour? Something like that?”

“Okay, okay … all right.” Lilly swallows hard again, focusing with laser intensity on the task at hand, looking down the length of the main tunnel. Less than a hundred feet away from her, the passageway plunges into darkness. They've been trying to conserve power and lightbulbs by burning only the absolute minimum number of cage lights. Now Lilly walks over to the wall and flips the switches Bob installed as a safety measure a few days ago. “Here's what I need: I need everybody to listen closely, because I only got time to go through this once.”

The others get very still as the cage lights flare on, one after another, down the length of the main conduit, past the makeshift nursery with its fleet of cribs and cots, past the side tunnels, past the temporary infirmary and the storage room, and out beyond the far chain-link barriers.

“Norma, I'm going to need you to go get the dummies. Bring them back in here on the double, as many as we have—it'll have to be enough. Miles, you help her.”

Norma and Miles hustle down the center-aisle tunnel toward the storage room.

“David and Harold, I'm going to need you guys to go ahead and set that safe zone up as quickly as you can, then take your places and get into character.”

David Stern looks pained, panicky. “Lilly, we're going to need more than two guys.”

“You'll have Miles and Norma, too, as soon as we're ready down here. And Bob when he gets back.” She remembers that Bob is late, which a bad sign, but she pushes the dread from her mind. “If all goes well, Tommy and I will be able to join you soon enough.”

“How the hell is anybody gonna find us?”

“Look, we got three working walkie-talkies, right? You take one, I'll have one, and I'll give one to Norma. Three teams: Harold and you, Norma and Miles, me and Tommy.”

“But what about Babs?”

“What about her?”

David wipes his mouth. “That stationhouse is really exposed out there—I don't know—seems like we could have found a safer place.”

“There's nothing we can do about it now. C'mon. Let's get to work—WHILE WE'RE YOUNG!”

Lilly claps her hands briskly, and the group scatters. Lilly rushes across the lounge area and starts rearranging chairs. David and Harold head toward the sewer entrance fifty feet away. They vanish around the corner and their footsteps recede into the dripping silence.

By this point, Norma and Miles have returned with the first pair of dummies. Norma speaks quickly, tersely, almost under her breath: “Had enough clothes from the Salvation Army drop to make five of these things but we're gonna have to go back there for more if we want to make all of
us
up all raggedy-ass.” She drags an effigy across the floor and drops it on a chair. “They're pretty rough. But from a distance? I don't know. Like my mama used to say, ‘On a galloping horse, you don't look half bad, babygirl.'”

Garbed in rags and hand-me-downs, the dummies are filled with old newspaper and trash, the faces hewn from pairs of nude-colored panty hose stuffed with more paper. They look like the kind of objects a group of protesters might burn during a demonstration.

“Them walkers are pretty fucking stupid,” Miles ventures, setting a dummy on a chair. “But I wonder if they're stupid enough to buy
this
.”

“They'll buy it,” Lilly says. “Trust me. C'mon. Let's get the others in here.”

A minute later they have five of the effigies sitting in formation around the lounge. It's a surreal sight, even for this place, and Lilly stares at the things for a moment before she looks at Norma and Miles. “Okay, one last thing before I cut you guys loose.”

Norma looks at her. “What's that, child?”

Lilly has already unbuckled her belt and unsnapped her jeans. “Pee on them with me.”

For a moment, Norma looks at Miles, who looks back at Norma, then looks aghast at Lilly.

“C'mon!” Lilly pulls her pants down, shoves off her panties, and hovers over the lap of the first dummy. “Pee on them.”

*   *   *

David Stern and Harold Staubach find the Dromedary Street manhole only minutes after they turn the corner beneath the intersection of Dromedary and Date Lane. The air hangs thick with a fog of methane and ammonia-stench, and they have to wade through six inches of brackish mire in order to reach the exit point.

They can see thin beams of the day's first glimmer of sunlight slicing down through the seams of the ancient manhole, celestial rays of light piercing the motes and demarcating the sewer's egress. Neither man says a word as they reach the bottom of the embedded stone steps. Working quickly and silently, David helps Harold up the steps first, then follows with his assault rifle dangling and twisting on its strap.

The older man struggles for a moment with the rusty cover, but eventually manages to force it open a few inches, wide enough to let in an enormous rush of acrid, reeking walker-stench. Harold pulls a small mirror from behind his belt and sticks it up into the daylight. Bob Stookey procured a dozen of these small makeup mirrors earlier in the month from the ruins of the town drugstore, and they have been invaluable to the tunnel dwellers.

Now Harold Staubach probes the mirror far enough to see a reflection of the street corner.

In the small oval of glass, scores of walkers are visible milling about the central intersection. To the left, a row of boarded storefronts overlooks a sidewalk riddled with the dead. Some of them continually brush against each other, while others idle in slumped, stationary positions in front of jagged broken windows, drooling black bile from their liver-colored lips as though waiting for their reflection to deliver some imminent message.

Harold rotates the mirror forty-five degrees to the left until he can see their destination.

Beyond the walker-infested street corner, a half a block north, two enormous semitrucks sit facing each other across the massive town entrance. Harold's heart rate kicks up a few notches. He can see the vacant lot adjacent to the gate, a square acre of wild, overgrown prairie grass littered here and there with overturned oil drums, discarded tires, and human remains all but picked clean by birds and weather and the ravenous dead. Some of the skeletons are so sun-bleached they look almost white, but other than these macabre reminders of the plague, the lot is fairly clear of walkers.

“You ready for this, my friend?” Harold asks somewhat rhetorically.

No response from David.

*   *   *

“We've been as quiet as mice for like a million hours now—when do we get to talk?”

The voice—as soft as the coo of a little bird, but also full of righteous indignation—penetrates Barbara Stern's racing thoughts and makes her whirl away from the window with a start.

In the dim light of dawn, which seeps through the cracks of the boarded windows, Barbara sees little Mercy Slocum standing directly behind her, hands on her hips in an elfin impression of long-suffering annoyance. The girl's frowning, cherubic face has chocolate stains on it; Barbara broke out the last of the stale candy bars twenty minutes ago, and they were gone in seconds. The walkie-talkie was then turned off to prevent the frenzied voices of David and the others from making the kids more nervous than they already were. Now Barbara is resorting to games in order to keep the group as quiet as possible.

“Get away from the window, sweetheart,” Barbara says, gently, shooing the girl back toward the others. “You're gonna lose the game.”

The other children huddle together at the opposite end of the room, standing around a couple of makeshift cots, watching this exchange with keen interest. Their toys and books are strewn across the floor around them. Bethany Dupree—the de facto spokesman for the children—also has her hands on her hips in a melodramatic display of exasperation. “These games are just a trick,” she announces.

Mercy Slocum shuffles over to her twin sister, and the two of them stand there, facing Barbara in their matching threadbare pinafores, arms crossed sullenly across their little chests as though waiting for an apology. To Barbara they look like a Diane Arbus photograph, more wraithlike than childlike, as though torn from an album of Dust Bowl American poverty. “You're treating us like babies,” Tiffany Slocum weighs in. “We want to know the truth.”

“Ssshhhhhhhh!” Barbara comes up and kneels before them, speaking very softly and yet forcefully. “The time to be the most quiet is now!”

“Stop saying that,” Lucas Dupree commands, his tiny chin jutting indignantly.

“You told us this was a field trip,” Bethany says. “That was a lie. And then you told us there's a war coming but you won't say with who!”

“Sssshhhhhh!” Barbara puts her finger to her lips. “I'll answer your questions only if you promise to whisper.”

“What's going on?” Bethany demands in a petulant whisper that comes out more like a grunt. “And don't lie because we can tell when you're lying—kids can always tell. That's something adults will never, ever, ever understand. Kids know. Trust me on that, Mrs. Stern.”

“Call me Barb.”

“What's going on? Is it like a walker attack or what?”