“Almost like a scout,” said Jem.
“Exactly like a scout.” She stared at the far-reaching mass of swirling blackness. “I saw this yesterday, thought it was a storm coming, like my sister did. And it is… in a horrible unimaginable way. There must be thousands of buzzards on the wing, and for each buzzard maybe fifteen or twenty Biters. That’s not a herd… not a horde… that’s an exodus. They may not be here today or even tomorrow, as slow as they stumble and stagger. But they’ll be here before the twenty-fifth. We’re in for a helluva Christmas Eve… literally.”
Levi looked again at the western horizon. “It’s a theory.”
“It’s more than that. And you know it.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “We’ll see.”
And they did.
Chapter 31
Confirmation of Melissa’s theory came the following morning, halfway through the breakfast hour.
Avery looked up from his plate and listened. “I hear something.”
His brother heard it, too. A low roar that gradually grew in volume. “What is that?”
“It’s a car,” Billy said. “And it sounds like it’s heading this way.”
They left the table at a run, picking up their weapons from a rack that stood in the entrance hall. Michelle tripped the four deadbolts and opened the front door.
It was bitter cold that morning and spitting snow. They stood on the concrete porch at the top of the front steps and watched the lane that led from the direction of the main entrance road. The wrought-iron gate had never been repaired following the ramming it had received from Levi’s truck; it would have taken a blacksmith and welder to have done the job. The entranceway between the two stone pillars was open, giving access to anyone who had an inclination to show up.
A moment later, they did just that. It was a white Toyota Camry… except that it was no longer white. Blood and gory clots of tissue covered the frame of the car, which was battered and dented from the front bumper to the rear. Spider-web cracks fissured the windshield and side windows to the point where it would have been almost impossible to clearly see where you were going.
The car was going fast, probably seventy or eight miles per hour. As it roared up the road toward the mansion, they realized that it didn’t intend to stop, either intentionally or due to some mechanical problem.
Billy lifted the M24 sniper rifle he had taken from one of Gentry’s men during his attack on the winery and brought the sight of the scope to his right eye. He centered the crosshairs on the driver’s side of the windshield. Through the shattered glass he saw the face of a woman. She was in her mid-thirties, blonde, and scared clean out of her wits. The Cherokee lowered his weapon and motioned for the others to retreat. “She’s coming straight for us! Get back!”
They stepped through the doorway just as the car hydroplaned on the slick roadway. She fought for control and, rather than run up the steps of the front stoop, the car rammed forcefully into one of the massive stone lions that stood sentry at the side. The impact caused the statue to crack at its base and tumble forward. If it had landed across the right side of the car, it would have killed the driver instantly. Instead, it hit the passenger side, crushing most of the hood and caving in the front portion of the roof in an explosion of glass and buckling metal.
“Let’s go!” ordered Levi. They headed down the steps to the Toyota. The car’s engine was still running, its rear wheels spinning in one spot, throwing a cloud of black smoke in the air as its tires burned rubber. “Be careful! There are Biter guts and bugs all over this thing!”
Avery shucked off his flannel shirt and his brother did the same. They wadded the garments up and attempted to open the doors without coming in contact with the contaminated handles. “It’s locked tighter than a drum, Papa!” said Jem.
Avery looked through the driver’s side window. The air bags had deployed and the woman was lying unconscious, her face buried in the white nylon material. He looked in the back seat and saw a boy of about seven staring at him, utterly terrified. “Hey, boy! Unlock the door, will you?”
The boy said something, but his voice was muffled.
“What’d you say?” Avery asked, trying to hear him over the whining roar of the car’s tortured engine.
“I SAID, IS SHE DEAD?” the boy screamed. “IS MY MOTHER DEAD?”
Avery’s stomach sank. He studied the woman through the cloudy, cracked glass of her window again and saw her stir a little. “She’s going to be okay!” he yelled. Inside the car, he could hear a child crying, younger than the boy who sat behind the driver’s seat. “Can you climb up front and unlock the door for me?”
The boy fought off his panic and fear long enough to lean over the seat and pop the door lock. Avery opened the door and, with some difficulty, reached past the woman and the folds of the air bag, and turned the key in the ignition. Instantly, the engine died and the tires stopped spinning.
After Avery and his brother had opened the doors, they tossed their shirts away. The fabric of the flannel was covered with black parasites. Avery and Levi carefully pulled the woman from the driver’s side. “Be careful,” the man told his son. “I think her arm’s broken.”
Jem helped the seven-year-old out of the back, while Kate entered the car and found a four-year-old girl, every bit as blonde and pretty as her mother, secured in a car seat, screaming her head off. “Mommy! I want Mommy!”
“Mommy’s going to be just fine, honey,” she assured her. Kate was stunned to see that the buckled roof of the car was no more than two inches from the little girl’s head. As she worked to unfasten the straps of the seat, she saw that, like the boy and his mother, the little girl was dirty and disheveled. Junk food bags and cartons littered the seat and floorboards, and a milk jug looked to be nearly full of urine. It was clear to see that they had been stuck in the car for quite a while.
Kate lifted the girl into her arms. The child clung to her, weeping uncontrollably into her shoulder. “Shhhh… it’s going to be alright, baby.”
“What’s your name, son?” Levi asked the boy as he and Avery carried the woman up the steps and through the front door.
“Brandon,” he said. Unlike his mother, he had dark brown hair. “Brandon Stapleton. My sister is Becky and my mommy’s name is Diane.”
“Let’s get y’all inside, Brandon,” the man told him, “and we’ll see to your mom.”
“Is she going to be okay?” he asked anxiously. “Is she going to live?”
“She’ll be okay, buddy,” Jem told him, placing reassuring hands on his narrow shoulders. “Now let’s get in out of the cold and see what we can do for her, okay?”
“Okay,” agreed Brandon. “But we better hurry. They’re coming, you know.”
Michelle frowned at the boy. “Who are they?”
Her sister nodded skyward. “You know who he’s talking about. Look.”
She lifted her eyes and was shocked. The black clouds that had seemed so far away the day before were much closer now… so close that the swooping patterns of the buzzards could be seen for what they were, instead of only guessed at.
“Shit fire and fly my freaking ass to the moon!” said Michelle.
“You’ve got a foul mouth, lady,” Brandon told her bluntly. “My mommy would give me such a spanking for talking like that.”
“Yeah, I know, kid,” she said. “Sorry. It’s a bad habit of mine. Now let’s get inside, before they get here… okay?”
“Okay,” he said, “but it isn’t going to help.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see,” Brandon told her. “When they get here, you’ll see just what I mean.”
“He’s right,” said Diane Stapleton, taking a long sip of hot coffee and settling against the pillows of the big sofa. She grimaced in pain as Kate worked to set her fractured left arm. “When they get here, there will be no stopping them.”
“Why don’t you start from the beginning, Mrs. Stapleton,” Levi said. “So we know
what we’re up against.”
The woman nodded and took another sip of coffee. She looked around, making sure her children were nearby. Brandon was sitting in front of the hearth playing Chinese checkers with Jessie, while Becky sat in Melissa’s lap in the big armchair, flipping through a picture book about Santa Claus and his reindeer. The four-year-old sucked her thumb and stared at the illustrations, on the verge of drifting to sleep from sheer exhaustion.
Satisfied that they were safe and with good folks, she began to speak. “We’re from Lynchburg, Virginia. I was a real estate agent and…” she paused, a pained look crossing her face. “… my husband, Chuck, was a car salesman at a Toyota dealership there. For a while, after all this began, we were okay. There was an empty house about fifteen miles out of town that I was trying to sell for the owner, who had retired to New Mexico. It was on a farm, out in the middle of nowhere. We holed up there the first few months and laid low. If Biters came along, we acted like we weren’t there and they passed on. If looters and troublemakers came, we hid in the cellar until they’d taken what they wanted and left.”
“So why did you leave?” Melissa asked her.
“Daddy was out chopping wood one day and he got bit,” Brandon said absently as he played his game. “A Biter was on top of him before he could turn around. Tore a hunk right out of his right shoulder before he could split its head with the axe.”
Levi looked back to the woman to see tears in her eyes. “What happened to your husband? After he was bit?”
“He got sick,” she said, wiping her eyes. She drained the last of her coffee and set the cup aside. “I tried to treat him, but I knew it wasn’t going to get any better. I could see the bugs in the wound, burrowing into the muscle, and then the bruised color of his throat and neck as they began traveling up to his head. He told me to lock him in the cellar and we did. I could hear him down there moaning and crying; it hurt so badly. Then he stopped. I got up the nerve to go down and check on him. He was curled up on a blanket in the corner. I thought for sure he was dead. I checked his pulse, but couldn’t find a heartbeat. I was heading back up the stairs when I heard something. I turned around and there he was, standing at the bottom, staring up at me. Chuck smiled at me and… God… I could see that his mouth was full of those nasty things. He started coming up after me and… and I kicked him in the chest. He fell down the steps and broke his neck. But we wouldn’t… stop… coming! His head was twisted halfway around, but he was bound and determined to get to me. So I shot him. Took the 9mm pistol I carried with me and put a bullet in his head. And that was the end of it. He fell back down the stairs and didn’t get up again.”
“We’re sorry,” Kate told her. She thought of her own husband and how she had ended up taking him down. A bullet in the forehead would have been much easier… but in Bill’s case, less satisfying.
“Thank you,” the woman said dully. “Could I have more coffee? I can’t seem to get rid of this chill.”
Enolia took her cup. “Of course. I’ll be right back.”
“And after your husband’s death?” Levi asked.
“We stayed there for a week or two,” she said. “Lord, how it stank in that house… him rotting down there in the cellar. But we ignored it and stayed… because it was safe. Then one afternoon it got dark, just all of a sudden. At first, I thought it was a solar eclipse or something. When I went outside, I saw it for what it was.”
“Buzzards,” said Melissa grimly.
“Yes. The sky was full of them for as far as the eye could see. There was a roll of hills west of the farmhouse and those things… the zombies… just poured down into the valley… and didn’t stop. There were thousands of them… maybe millions… I don’t know, it was hard to tell. They were shoulder to shoulder, one behind the other, and they weren’t stopping for anything. I watched as they took down trees and fences with the sheer weight of their bodies, tore down a church like it was made of nothing.
“By the time we grabbed some supplies from the kitchen and got to the car, about a hundred of them were crossing the pasture and coming toward us. We had to drive through them to get to the main road. They clawed and bit at the car, trying to get inside to us. Some of them butted the glass, flailed at the windshield with their fists, leaving bloody smears and flesh all over the car. I thought for sure they would bust the windows out and get us, but we got through them and headed south. We left Virginia and made it to North Carolina. But we kept running into herds of the things… it was like they would never end! Chuck had filled up several gas cans and put them in the trunk before he got bit. I stopped only long enough to add some gas to the tank a couple of times. Once I nearly didn’t make it back inside… they were upon the car so fast. There were so many of them, they almost pushed it onto its side. If they had, we would be dead right now… or worse. Luckily, I made it past them and hit the road again. I thought of this place…” Diane began to cry again, “… because Chuck and I spent our honeymoon here. So I hit the road and didn’t stop until I got here. My tank was nearly on empty when I wrecked in front of the house. I tried to stop, I really did, but I hit that slick spot and… well, that’s all I remember until I woke up on this couch.”
Jem and Billy came into the room, bundled up in heavy coats and stocking caps. There was snow on their heads and shoulders. “It’s starting to come down pretty heavy out there,” the Cherokee told them. “I’d say we’ll have a foot or so by this afternoon.”
“And the buzzards?” asked Levi.
Jem shook his head. “The snow’s not slowing them down… or what they’re circling over either, I’d say. They’re even thicker than before. And they’re close enough that you can see with binoculars what they are. Sometimes they swoop down and come back up with something in their claws… maybe pieces of Biters. I reckon they get tired of flying all the time… need meat to keep their strength up.”
“Gross,” muttered Becky from the armchair, half asleep.
“Mrs. Stapleton…”
“Diane,” she insisted.
“Diane,” continued Levi, “do you think we can make a stand here? Do you think we’ll be able to hold them off?”
“No,” she said truthfully. “I’m sorry, but there are too many. I don’t know where they all came from or why their migrating to the east, but they are moving as one and they aren’t stopping. I saw them take down an old railroad bridge at the state line… wooden timbers that had stood for a hundred years, just torn down like it was nothing at all. These walls might withstand the weight of them, but the doors and windows won’t, no matter how much you’ve fortified them. If they sweep through here, they’ll be in the house before you know it.”
“So staying here is pointless,” said Levi solemnly. “I thought as much.”
“Oh no,” moaned Michelle. She looked on the verge of tears. “Not this place.”
“I’m afraid so,” he told her. “Our best bet would be to prepare to head out of here as soon as possible. Pack whatever we can and head east. From the way that that cloud of buzzards stretches north to south, I’d say they are two hundred miles strong. If we wait to fight them and get stuck in the middle, there will be no hope for us.”
“I hate the thought of them taking this house,” said Melissa. “Our father cherished this place. For those… those things… to get inside here, to walk through its halls… the thought of it is unbearable.” She shook her head and sighed. “I’d rather see it fall to the ground, than to see them overtake it.”
A thought suddenly came to Avery, a memory that surfaced from a couple of months ago… one that he had hoped to forget, but now was glad he did. “Papa,” he said, “there’s fifty pounds of C-4 out there in that Humvee, along with the wiring and blasting caps to go with it. And there are two signal receivers like the one Gentry used at the bridge.”
Levi knew exactly what he was driving at. “How would you manage it? A house this big… this sturdy?”
“I could rig the supports of the foundation,” his
son suggested. “If I could figure out exactly where they were.”
“Richard Hunt’s original blueprints are in the library,” said Michelle. The very thought of what they were planning to do made her sick to her stomach. “I can show you where they are.”
Melissa was horrified. “You mean you’re going to…”
“Turn the tide on those Biters, if they make it into the house,” said Avery. “Blow the supports and bring the whole place falling down around their nasty, bug-ridden heads. We did it before, back on Hobbs Ridge. We can do it here, too. It won’t take out but a fraction of them, but it’ll be that many that we won’t have to worry about any longer.”
Levi could tell that the idea devastated the twin girls. “In my way of thinking, you two hold ownership of this place. Your pa left it to you, to use as a sanctuary and do with as you please. It’s not our decision. It’s yours.”
Michelle and Melissa looked at one another. They knew what each other was thinking, knew the decision that that had been mutually made. “Let’s squash the bastards and the things inside them,” said Michelle.
“And if it takes destroying the Biltmore to do it,” agreed Melissa, “so be it.”
Chapter 32
As late morning passed into early afternoon, time moved quickly.
Levi knew that they had a very narrow window of opportunity if the darkening of the sky and the growing stench of putrid, decomposing flesh was any indication. Their plan was to pack a few necessities—food, water, and clothing—then depart in the four drivable vehicles. They would take an access road southeast away from the estate and head toward the state border and South Carolina beyond. If they could outrun the tsunami of Biters and continue south, perhaps they would have a chance of surviving.
He thought of Nell and wished that she was there with them. Not only for the obvious reasons, but for her sense of “joy and dread”, as she put it. He couldn’t help but think they could have prepared for their escape if his wife had shared a feeling of impending disaster, like she had many times before. Levi suspected that Melissa Webb possessed a bit of an intuitive nature similar to Nell’s, but not as strong and developed. True, she had sensed that something was potentially wrong, but the realization of what it was had come too late to motivate them into action.
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