“HEY!” Norma’s voice from the pilothouse. “SOMEBODY ANSWER ME!”
“We’re good, Norma!” Lilly calls out. “We’re all good. You can take the speed down a notch.”
As the train slows back down to around thirty miles an hour, Lilly motions for everybody to stay low and meet her in the rear of the engine.
* * *
The sudden stillness of the passenger enclosure is a shock to the system. Lilly’s ears ring from the gunfire. Her gloved hands are charred. She feels her spine tingling with emotion as she closes the hatch behind them, sealing them in that airless chamber of broken-down bench seats and discarded detritus. “Stay away from the windows,” she advises.
“Why?” Jinx looks out at the blur of the passing nightscape. “What are you thinking?”
“The trap, the fire—they can’t be far. They knew somebody would retaliate, they knew we’d come after them. They’re scorching the earth.”
Miles thinks about it for a second. He sits near the rear hatch, shivering, his goateed ebony face furrowed in thought. The fabric of his hoodie is torn and burned in spots. “But how would they ever fucking know we’d use a train?”
“They didn’t.” Lilly looks at him. “My guess is, they’re covering their asses.”
Jinx gives her a nod. “You think they’re watching us right now?”
“If so, they just got one hell of a show. Just so we’re prepared for whatever.”
Jinx nods, takes a breath, wipes her sweaty face. “You think they got snipers on us?”
Lilly shakes her head. “I don’t know. It’s doubtful—I don’t think they can afford to stay in one place. But you never know.”
The muffled clatter of the rails and the low snorting of the horses outside the hatch punctuate the gravity of their situation. Lilly can feel the sand in the invisible hourglass leaking out, the clock in her head ticking down. They are using the last of their biodiesel and the last of their ammunition.
Tommy sits across the aisle from Miles, holding on to his 12 gauge in a valiant effort to conceal his trembling hands. “What now, Lilly?” he asks.
“We’re going to be reaching the end of the usable track pretty soon.” She looks at her watch. “Sun’s coming up soon, so hopefully we’ll have daylight when we have to switch over to horseback. I’m thinking we—”
Norma’s voice from the pilothouse cuts her off. “LILLY! GET IN HERE—WE GOT A SITUATION!”
The moment she enters the pilothouse and smells the musky odor of fear coming off Norma Sutters, Lilly can tell something is wrong. Through the windshield, she can see the familiar deep woods rising up on either side of the track, the pine barrens north of Thomaston passing in a blur. Dawn isn’t far off. The sky has turned ashy black, the stars receding, and now the wind blowing in through the vents has that cool, blue smell of imminent morning.
“What’s the problem, Norma?”
“You recognize this neighborhood?”
Lilly shrugs. “Yeah, sure, we got another couple miles of finished track, at least.”
Norma lets out a grunt of frustration. “While y’all were having a big laugh back there, we crossed the line into Coweta County.”
“So…?”
Norma’s voice is thick with panic. “You ain’t gettin’ it.”
“Getting what?”
“We’re gonna hit the halfway point any minute now, the place we left off yesterday.”
“I understand, and we’ll break out the horses when it’s time.”
“You still ain’t gettin’ it.”
“Would you just tell me what you’re worried about?”
Norma stares through the windshield, teeth clenched with anger. “Does Bell’s bridge ring a bell?”
“Bell’s bridge?”
All at once, the events of the previous day come back to Lilly, and she remembers the massive wooden trestle, and she recalls the fact that Bell had neglected to check it for load worthiness. And now it looms a few short miles dead ahead in their path. “Okay, I get it … I get it.” Lilly gathers her thoughts. “I want to be as far north as possible before we go to the horses.”
Norma shoots a glance at her. “You’re kidding me! You’re gonna trust that thing enough to cross it?”
Lilly takes a deep breath. “If it was going to fail, it would have collapsed a long time ago.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
“Look, it’s not that far across, and the creek is only twenty feet or so down.”
“Are you messing with me now?” Norma throws another skeptical glance. “Because I can’t tell anymore, I can’t tell if you’re the same old Lilly or if you’ve blown a gasket because of all this.”
Lilly glares at her, acid roiling in her empty stomach. “You signed up for this, Norma. I gave you an out, and you insisted on coming, so you better fucking get your brain wired right.”
“It would be a hell of a lot easier to get with the program if you just were honest with us.”
Lilly looks at her. “What the fuck are you talking about? What is wrong with you? I’ve been totally honest. I told you, like I told the others, I’m going to get those kids back. Period.”
Norma’s voice gets huskier, lower. “I didn’t sign on for some crazy-ass suicide mission.” Another rueful glance. “I know what you’re doing.”
“Oh really? What am I doing, Norma? You tell me! What am I doing?!”
Norma unleashes her full church-choir-trained voice in a single bellowing shout from deep within her lungs: “YOU’RE USING US AS BAIT!!”
* * *
It takes a moment for Lilly to realize that the others have gathered in the hatchway behind her and now look on with grim, tense expressions. Lilly feels the heat of their gazes on the back of her neck. The rumbling silence stretches. She never asked to be the leader of this community. The role was foisted upon her. But now, deep down in some secret place inside her, she has ripped free of Woodbury’s orbit and operates in some feral, lizard-brain place that she never knew existed within her. More than mere bloodlust to destroy these kidnappers, more than all the pent-up grief and rage that has been building inside her for so long now, she has taken an evolutionary step in her development, a genetic imperative: she will save her children or die.
She glances over her shoulder at the others, then looks back at Norma and says, “I’m sorry.” In a soft, almost tender voice, she adds, “You’re right.” Another glance over her shoulder. “I should have explained it to all of you. We have no hope of catching up to these people unless we can ferret them out. Draw them out of the sticks by acting as bait. It’s the only way we’re going to save our kids.”
Norma keeps her white-knuckled grip on the stick, gaze locked on the horizon ahead of them. Her dark face gleams in the predawn glow through the windshield. She looks down for a moment. “I just wish you had been straight with us.”
“Lilly—” Jinx starts to say something but her words are cut off by Lilly’s contrite voice.
“I wouldn’t blame you all for bailing on me right now—I probably would myself if I were you. I swear to you, though … I will die before I let harm come to any of you. The thing of it is, this is not an exact science.”
“Lilly—”
“We have one thing going for us, though, which is the fact that they’ve taken our children. They’ve taken our kids. This is how we will—”
“LILLY!”
Jinx’s voice finally penetrates, and Lilly looks up to see that Jinx is pointing at the windshield.
In the middle distance, maybe two to three hundred yards away and closing, stretches the dark span of ancient timbers and rusty iron girders known as Bell’s Trestle.
* * *
Norma instinctively pulls back on the throttle, the train shuddering for a moment as the engine slows. The air fills with the odor of scorched oil. Through the windshield, the encroaching dawn bruises the edges of the horizon with pale-green light, the stars gone now, the moon retracted up in
to the wan canvas of the sky.
“Okay, I’m asking you to trust me on this,” Lilly says to Norma. “I’m going to need you to go ahead and keep it steady, not too slow, but not too fast.”
Norma nods, her face glistening with flop sweat, the smell of BO heavy in the pilothouse. The others bunch into the hatchway, nervously watching.
Lilly grips the edge of the vent so tightly she tears through the palm of her glove and doesn’t even notice the sharp edge of the ledge breaking her skin. Ahead of them, the trestle looms. The closer they get, the more the sunrise illuminates the massive silhouette of the bridge, the mossy side rails enrobed in mist, the early rays of sunlight filtering through the lattice. The thing looks ancient, as though it were built by Aztecs or Paleolithic men, the cross ties as black as mildew, the oxidized railing the color of pond scum. Old, brown, dead kudzu twines up through its convolutions and shades the middle of the span.
“Keep it down around twenty miles an hour,” Lilly says. “Maybe twenty-five.”
Norma does so as the train approaches the bridge. All gazes turn to see down below, their necks craning to glimpse the dry creek bed twenty-two feet beneath the bridge clogged with leaves and trash and dark shapes that may or may not be human remains. Walker activity has been brisk up around these parts, and the stream features a trough of rusty, stagnant water down its center that looks suspiciously like old blood.
The engine cobbles onto the bridge.
The high-pitched keening of the rails instantly dampens and changes into muffled wooden drumming noises, hollow sounding and syncopated with the throbbing of the turbine. Out of the corner of her eye, Lilly sees dust and debris falling from the timbers beneath her, sifting down through the shadows onto the leafy carpet of the creek bed. She can hear the horses stirring, the low snorting sounds of alarm filling the air. The flatcar comes next, bumping onto the bridge.
The entire structure of the trestle beneath them shifts suddenly with the full weight of the train, one side sagging and creaking like an aging sailing vessel tossed by a wave. They feel the center of gravity pitch slightly, the pilothouse leaning at a twenty-five-degree angle as the wheels lose traction for a moment. Lilly can feel the loss of purchase. The train slows to a crawl. The creaking noises rise, the pilothouse listing severely.
“PUNCH IT!” Lilly’s cry gets drowned by a massive cracking noise, which pierces the air. Gravity shifts as the trestle floor begins to rupture, a weightless feeling rising in Lilly’s gorge. Norma shoves the throttle forward, the steel wheels spinning in place like knives on a whetstone. A scream from the rear hatch slices through the air as the span begins to collapse, sending up a great cloud of dust in the harsh morning light.
Lilly slams her hand down on Norma’s throttle hand, pinning the lever against the panel, causing the engine to scream and churn, sending waves of vibrations through the undercarriage. The engine reaches the end of the trestle, its wheels still spinning, traction nearly gone. The machine jumps the track and slides into the mud.
In that horrible instant before Lilly glances over her shoulder, the entire rear of the train shudders suddenly as though yanked backward by a massive hand. Lilly and Norma are thrown forward. Someone yells a garbled warning as Lilly looks back through the open hatch and feels a wave of cold terror travel through her midsection.
A thunderhead of dust explodes beneath the flatcar right before the entire trestle gives way.
SIX
It seems to happen in slow motion. The bridge rends in the middle and collapses into itself, wrenching apart with the speed and finality of a house of cards. The horses tumble into each other as the flatcar rips free of its coupler and slides backward at a severe angle. The rear end hits the ground first, most of the animals skidding across the pitching platform, guide ropes snapping.
The animals land in a heap, mostly on top of each other, their plunge broken by both the trash heap of the creek bed and each other’s girth.
Meanwhile the flatcar has broken apart on impact, the rucksacks and duffel bags flying, giant pieces of the frame falling on either side, sending up a virtual mushroom cloud of dust. The last few shards of the platform splash into the brackish mire of the creek, followed by a shocking silence, a square acre of dust obscuring the writhing animals and wreckage in the ditch.
Twenty-two feet above the scene, coughing, waving away the dirty haze, Lilly leans out the rear of the engine. Spindly lengths of rebar, bent sections of railroad tracks, and long shards of ancient timbers overhang the miniature dust storm below. The sounds of the animals snorting, struggling, squealing in pain and confusion, all of it suddenly drifts up through the brown miasma. Lilly starts to say something when she sees the first animal dart out of the cloud.
Jinx is the first to speak. “Shit!—shit!—shit!—SHIT!”
The huge seal-brown thoroughbred is instantly recognizable, despite the fact that massive creature is now covered in dust, thorns, and oily muck from the stagnant creek. A gash is visible in the hide of her rear haunch, the wound shiny with blood and filth. The horse leaps over a logjam and gallops up the side of the muddy slope.
“ARROW! NO!” Jinx pushes her way through the crowded hatch.
Down below, in the creek bed, other horses burst out of the dust cloud, following Arrow’s lead. Within moments, all five animals have staggered across the creek bed and then vaulted, one after another, up the slope. Jinx climbs over the coupler, drops herself to the ground, and then rushes headlong down the muddy slope, moving as fast as she can, her boots sinking into the soft earth.
Lilly sees this and for a brief instant is paralyzed with panic and indecision, a cold fist squeezing her guts, clenching her innards. If they lose these horses, they might as well give up. At last, Lilly turns to the others. “Norma, you and Tommy stay here and guard the supplies!” She looks at Miles. “How fast can you run?”
* * *
In this part of the world—especially after a long, brutal dry spell—the wetlands and the swampy areas of West Central Georgia get covered with a thick sediment of dead leaves, twigs, kudzu vines, moss, and windblown trash. The ground cover can mask extremely hazardous bodies of water—former ponds that have transformed due to the overgrowth of the plague years into soupy, marshy, unsteady swamps. On that morning, after galloping side by side across nearly a mile of farm fields—the animals bunched together due to herd instinct—the runaway horses cross just such a patch of swampy water. Jinx is the first to see the horses go down, and she yells something that Lilly can’t quite hear. Lilly lopes along behind the younger woman, heaving and panting, drenched in sweat, her side stitched with pain. She can see what Jinx is screaming about now.
About a hundred yards in the distance, on the edge of a marshy section of land bordered by densely packed pines, the five horses abruptly sink into the earth as though running down a ramp. Their elongated heads periscope above the surface of the sinkhole, tossing and shaking the muck off themselves, throwing stringers of foam through rays of intense early-morning sunlight, trying to swim their way out of the vortex of mire pulling them down. Lilly can see the dark, ragged silhouettes of the dead emerging from the woods on either side of the marsh, meandering toward the noise and commotion of living things in trouble.
Miles rushes past Lilly, and then past Jinx, and reaches the edge of the pond within seconds. He dives in headfirst, making a phosphorescent splash of green scum, and then dog-paddles as fast as he can toward the closest horse, Jinx’s big thoroughbred, who’s in trouble, barely able to hold its muzzle above the surface of the sludgy water. Miles reaches the horse and manages to tread water while he lifts the majestic head above the mire.
But the suction of all the frantic movement starts to pull Miles down.
Meanwhile, Jinx approaches the scene. Slipping on the wet ground, skating to a stop along the edge of the marsh, she sees that Miles is now also in danger of drowning and she pulls her belt free. She leaps into the sinkhole feetfirst and swims toward Miles. “ARROW!” sh
e calls to her steed. “ARROW! OVER HERE, GIRL!”
Jinx throws the end of the belt to Miles, who manages to latch on to it. The other horses gurgle and snort as they go under a second and third time. Arrow starts paddling madly toward his master, Miles holding on. Jinx tries to yank on the belt but it slips out of her hand, and she staggers backward, slipping under the surface for a second. She bursts back out of the water gasping, spitting, cursing.
Lilly sees all this from a distance as she closes in on the sinkhole, but just as she’s about to leap into the water, she notices about a half dozen walkers pressing in from the east, and another five or six approaching from the west. Lilly has four rounds left in her magazine, not enough to take down all of the dead. She draws a bead on the closest walker and squeezes off a single shot. The thing jerks backward as though electrocuted, the top of its head opening, disgorging a flood of black fluid that flows down its body in runnels before the thing collapses and sinks into the marsh. She shoots another, and another, and another, things happening very quickly now, almost all at once. Faces cleaving, heads erupting, ragged forms sinking out of sight, Ruger clicking empty, Jinx screaming wet, choked cries thirty feet away, Miles bobbing in the muck, the horses wriggling and tossing heads in futile survival instinct mode, the whole scene captured in radiant slanting rays of brilliant sunlight.
* * *
At a certain point, an enormous deadfall lying nearby catches Lilly’s eye, and she acts without hesitation or forethought. It takes all her strength to shove the massive log across the surface of the sinkhole. The timber splashes into the muck, nearly hitting one of the horses in the head. Miles manages to grab hold of it, as does Jinx. Miles holds on with everything he has, clutching Arrow’s bridle, keeping the huge horse from sinking into oblivion. Meanwhile, another half dozen biters are approaching from the east, shambling toward the commotion with arms outstretched and mouths working and eyes reflecting the sun like tarnished coins. One by one, they tumble into the swamp, vanishing under the surface of the sinkhole.
Search and Destroy Page 6