Lilly’s eardrums pop and ring as she keeps the reins taut and snapping.
The thoroughbred makes a sharp turn to avoid another wall of the dead and slams into a middle-aged male in a tattered burial suit. The hardware on the horse’s bridle strikes the walker’s face so hard, the thing’s rotting eyeballs pop out of its skull like corks, flying through the air on tails of bloody nerve bundles. Another one gets ground under the huge animal’s hooves, the horse letting out high-pitched whinnies and vocalizations as it bobs and weaves through the morass of stiff-legged dead.
The horse roars as it makes another turn to the left, knocking down a half dozen lumbering cadavers before it bursts out the other side of the cluster and crosses a bald spot—almost an acre of bare ground—devoid of any walkers. Lilly takes the opportunity to peer out at her side mirror at Jinx and Miles.
The two of them charge into the clearing, their legs and horses covered with oily black matter. Each of the riders wields a long-edged weapon crusted with gore—Jinx a three-foot-long machete, Miles a tarnished Civil War sabre cribbed from a derelict museum back in Michigan—and each huffs and puffs with fatigue after slashing their way through scores of dead.
Lilly snaps the reins. The big horse gallops across the clearing, snorting and foaming. Lilly yanks on the left rein in order to steer the animal back onto a northerly path.
Nobody notices that the clearing is starting to collapse in on itself.
* * *
Another facet of the bald spot phenomenon is that the random formation of these empty cells seems to change constantly, fluidly, without warning, with the suddenness of waves rolling back out to sea. In fact, at this very instant, Lilly can tell that the closest circle of dead people—maybe fifty feet away—have already sniffed out their presence and have whirled around awkwardly, reaching for the humans in their midst. The bald spot begins to shrink. The herd presses in.
Up until this moment, Lilly hasn’t registered much about the individual walkers on this journey other than blurs of menacing, reeking, slimy teeth. But now, in broad daylight, as the creatures close in on all sides of the clearing, Lilly sees a woman with half her body torn open, one side of her face dangling like a fleshy scarf, her green teeth chattering robotically as she approaches. Lilly sees another one, a male, very old, dragging toward her with a hole so big in its midsection the daylight shines through it like a portal. Another one, an older female, dressed in a filthy nurse’s frock, has a four-foot length of rebar impaled between its breasts.
Lilly scans the distant horizon to get her bearings. She sees the beginnings of a forest in the middle distance, enrobed in the shadows of a vast gulley.
All at once, she notices, just beyond that forest, in the heat waves of the afternoon sky, a rusty water tower rising up with the Moreland, Georgia, town seal on it, and she realizes that Cooper Steeves and his armory lie just over that next wooded hill, and she decides instantly, without much hesitation, to make a mad dash for those trees. She yanks on one rein, and then snaps both of them as hard as she can. “THIS WAY, EVERYBODY!”
They won’t learn what a terrible mistake they have just made until minutes later.
* * *
For a few frenzied moments, it seems that Lilly has made the right decision. The muscular thoroughbred barrels through the oncoming wave of the dead with the inertia of a battering ram, knocking down corpse after corpse before any of them have a chance to sink their teeth into the animal’s sweaty hide. Pasty white faces snap back upon impact; bodies go down in great heaving eruptions of tissue and fluids, the hooves grinding through seething masses of organic matter. Clawlike hands grab for a passing wheel or a churning fetlock but the duct tape holds, protecting the horse’s legs. The noise of it is incredible—a symphony of hissing, gasping, growling vocalizations drowned by the thunder of the hooves and the carriage wheels.
Directly behind the makeshift carriage, Jinx and Miles follow along at dead runs. The flash of their long blades in the sun forms a lethal steel blur as they slash at the waves of dead pressing in on either side, slicing a passageway through the horde, keeping their eyes on the rear of the carriage as it fishtails on the slime of human remains. Spumes of blood and bile splash up at them with each strike, looping through the air like stringers of black crepe. The odors are so strong now, it’s difficult to breathe.
Ahead of them, the carriage thunders toward the crest of a hill.
Lilly frantically snaps the reins, keeping the horse at top speed, heading northward, but it’s not easy to see over the horse’s rear end, or over the edge of the natural plateau ahead of them, which runs along the edge of the meadow overlooking the wooded gulley. All Lilly can see now are the treetops and the sky. She has no idea how steep that slope is, or if the downgrade is free of walkers, or if the carriage can even negotiate the rocky ground of the hill beyond it.
When they finally reach the ledge, Lilly lets out a gasp as the horse careens down a forty-five-degree angle. The stray walkers clinging to the hill are catapulted into the air as the animal and carriage plummet.
Lilly pulls back on the reins with all her might in a futile attempt to slow their descent.
* * *
The fear of falling is primal (and virtually universal)—the psychological analogue to the terror of losing control. It fuels Lilly Caul’s nightmares, and when it unfolds—as it’s about to—in her waking life, it devastates her.
When the horse reaches the bottom of the hill, it slams into a cluster of a half dozen large, moving cadavers. Mostly decomposed, their wormy flesh hanging by threads, the enormous monsters literally burst apart upon impact like the pulpy eruption of overripe fruit. Faces explode, heads snapping off careening bodies, limbs flying through the air, waves of guts erupting in a black wave across the gulley.
The massive horse slips on all the greasy matter now collecting beneath it.
For one terrible moment, the animal literally skates on the slime. Its front legs scurrying in place, churning wildly, it begins to slide sideways. Lilly feels the center of gravity shift, the entire metal buggy spinning out of control. Her ears ringing, her heart in her throat, she can barely hear Tommy Dupree’s scream as the horse-cart begins to tip. The entire universe pitches on its axis.
The carriage slams down on its side, throwing Lilly on top of Tommy.
Lilly doesn’t even see the other two horses behind them trying to stop until it’s too late. Miles and his animal slide across the bottom of the gulley, lose their balance, and slam into the rear of the carriage, toppling over and sprawling to the ground in a slimy heap. The horse-cart shudders, throwing Lilly and Tommy against the sidewall. The contraption slides another ten feet.
Jinx and her horse career into the wreckage, slamming into the back of the carriage.
A moment later, her head spinning, her ears deafened, Lilly tries to get her bearings inside the fallen conveyance. She can see through the haze of dust that Miles Littleton is pinned beneath his horse. He struggles to pull himself free as Jinx crawls toward him, favoring her right leg. It looks as though she injured herself in the fall.
Lilly starts to call out when she hears another sound that stops her cold.
From the threshold of the forest, less than fifty yards away, oozing out between crooked live oaks and columns of pines, comes another wave of ragged figures. Like an oily, black tide issuing forth from the woods, they emerge in droves, snarling and dragging toward the humans.
EIGHT
“What now, Cap?” The man with the binoculars speaks with a jacked-up cadence, like a record playing a couple of revolutions per minute too fast. A hand-rolled cigarette dangles from one corner of his mouth, bobbing and dropping ashes as he talks. “Gonna let the pus balls take ’em out?”
“Lemme see.” Bryce snatches the binoculars away from his second in command and peers out his open window at the action down in the meadow.
In the pale sunlight slanting down through the high boughs of the neighboring forest, Bryce can see
the army of dead closing in on the Woodbury assholes, the outcome inevitable. The brown-haired chick—the tough one, the one who seems to be in charge—is helping the teenage boy and black lady out of the carriage. Then the chick spins, hauls off and fires at the incoming pus bags. Just like that. She takes down three of them without blinking, then turns back to the buggy and by God she fucking single-handedly shoves the carriage back onto its wheels. All this while the herd is closing in on her, and she’s pretty much dead meat, and why bother, but she won’t give up, this chick. She is one badass motherfucker, and Bryce can’t figure out what to do with her.
Meanwhile, the other chick—the dykie one—is pulling one of the horses off the black guy.
Theodore “Beau” Bryce—former sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division, twice deployed in Afghanistan—fiddles with the huge signet ring on his right hand as he continues to spectate and ponder what to do with these shitheads. It’s a nervous habit he acquired after his discharge while teaching recruits at Fort Benning. As he speculates on some intractable problem or some recalcitrant buck private, he will compulsively thumb the bottom of that massive gold ring with its enormous ruby stone and Latin phrase across the band: STAMUS IN STATIONE PRO TE (we stand on guard for thee). Now he turns it and rubs it and turns it some more as he ponders how to deal with these half-assed rescuers.
A tall, lean, crew-cut man of indeterminate age, Bryce wears dusty body armor over his faded fatigues and has a craggy face that bears the remnants of every battle he ever fought. He’s been shadowing these Woodbury cocksuckers for practically twenty-four hours now and he’s starting to get cranky as he sits behind the wheel of his heavily armored Humvee. The vehicle is parked and idling on a scenic turnoff about a quarter mile east of the meadow in question, the rest of Bryce’s group awaiting orders on their dirt bikes and in their vehicles farther down the winding two-lane. Ironically, the spot on which Bryce now sits once went by the name Lover’s Leap or some shit like that—it’s all on a sign by the guardrail. Bryce has very little time for such nonsense now that the plague has taken his family, his friends, most of his fellow veterans, and basically everybody he ever knew.
“Should we—what—intervene?” Daniels, the skinny, bald scarecrow of a man in the shotgun seat, keeps compulsively sucking on his skunky cigarette as he looks wide-eyed at his superior. “That’s the good doctor’s favorite word, isn’t it? Intervene? Whaddaya think, Captain?”
The man behind the wheel doesn’t reply or correct Daniels’s idiocy—Bryce was never an officer, he worked for a fucking living—he just keeps looking through the open window with the field glasses, pursing his lips as he deliberates. He has to get back soon, or the old man will chew his ass for hours. The smart play would probably be to head back to HQ immediately, just let the maggots feast on these pricks. But something stops Bryce. Is it morbid curiosity? Is it the brown-haired chick? Maybe it’s just boredom. “How many of those testing kits we got left?”
Daniels shakes his head at him. “Not a single one, Cap, we’re out of ’em.”
“What are you talking about?” The older man launches a searing glare at his subordinate. “We had two dozen of those things when we deployed this time.”
Daniels shrugs. “They go fast, especially when you’re going house to house.”
“Goddamn it, I’m not bringing anybody else back with us on this run. We’re outta room.”
“What about Hopkins’s van?”
“That piece of shit isn’t even remotely secure. I’m not taking any chances.”
“So let’s just leave ’em. Who gives a fuck? They’re toast, Cap. Problem solved.”
“Yeah? You think?” He looks back through the binoculars. “I’m not so sure.” He watches the action down in the meadow, his voice going low and cold. “This chick is resourceful. I’m telling you.”
Through the lenses of his field glasses, Bryce can see the horses getting devoured. The commotion of the feeding frenzy has apparently provided enough of a diversion to give the brown-haired chick time to lead her people away from the throng of biters. And for a moment, with a sadistic kind of fascination, Bryce follows the small group of living as they dash alongside their leader, who is now hurtling toward the nearest grove of ancient, twisted oak trees. This chick is something else. Without much forethought, without hesitation, she chooses the largest, knottiest oak and helps her compatriots climb its cankered trunk. One by one they shimmy up the petrified monolith to safety—at least momentary safety—each of them awkwardly clinging now to a different gnarled offshoot. The chick-in-charge is the last to climb up the trunk, which she does with nimble facility, making Bryce speculate that she was once a tomboy.
He returns his gaze to the horses, or what’s left of them, which sends a pang of revulsion through his gut. Bryce grew up in Virginia, the grandson of a horse breeder, and he learned to give the animals the respect they deserve. His grandpa was responsible for nearly two dozen blue-ribbon hunter-jumpers, a Grand Prix team member for twenty consecutive years. Bryce used to be a groom for many of his grandpa’s clients, and spent the majority of his childhood—right up until the year he left for basic training—in one reeking stable after another, brushing and wrapping and cleaning and combing show horses. Now he flinches with sympathetic anguish as he watches the frenzy reach its peak down in the meadow.
From this distance, the dead appear as fleshy wasps swarming a scarlet flowerbed, draining every last drop of nectar from the writhing, shrieking horses. Blood swirls in rivulets out from under the flock, running in waves across the bare ground, as the sacrificial victims finally go still. This seems to send the throngs of walkers into deeper orgasmic convulsions of gluttony, their faces rooting down into the steaming innards of the horses’ flanks and bellies, the furry flesh splayed and torn open now by countless sets of teeth digging in until Bryce literally has to look away. He has seen the most horrible carnage imaginable in the war zone. But this—somehow this eats at his soul more than most of the terrible sights he’s seen. A pained breath escapes him as the nausea rises up past his windpipe and into his throat.
He scans the binoculars back across the middle distance to the forest of crooked live oaks.
In the binoculars’ circular field of vision, Bryce can see the Woodbury contingent huddling precariously now on the boughs of a giant mother oak. Some of them hold tightly to the snaking branches with desperate horror-struck expressions on their faces as they witness the final stages of the feeding frenzy. In the late-afternoon light, their eyes blazing with awe and disgust, they look like owls.
Bryce finds himself once again focusing the telescopic lenses on the woman with the tight auburn ponytail, the intense eyes, the look that’s all business, and the flannel shirt, ripped jeans, and jackboots that make her come off like some kind of lost Sandinista or guerrilla warrior in some forgotten banana republic. He steadies the binos and studies her behavior. Maybe he does it for later data retrieval—know thine enemy, that sort of thing—or maybe he’s smitten with her. He can see her gaping now, her teeth clenched in thinly veiled anguish, mortified by the spectacle of her horses being devoured. Some of the others in her party look away. But not this tough little chickadee. She just stares and stares as her prize equestrian stock goes down the bloody drain. She looks as though she’s about to scream but, of course, she holds it all in like a good soldier. Bryce knows that look well—that clenched, constipated scowl. He has exhibited it himself at times, when he’s lost men on the battlefield, or lost friends to the biters.
Daniels’s voice penetrates Bryce’s ruminations. “What’s the verdict, Cap?”
Bryce looks up at his second in command as though coming out of a dream. “What?”
“What’s the verdict? Do we leave them for the skels or what?”
Bryce shakes his head. “No … they’ve come this far to get those kids back. I respect that. Here’s what we’re gonna do.” He looks back into his binoculars. “Get Boyle and them on the blower, tell them to go
ahead and take the kids back to the ranch. Tell them the rest of us are gonna wait here until dark, and then we’ll see who’s left standing out of this group. We’ll take the leftovers quick and clean, test them when we get back to headquarters.” He looks at Daniels. “You got that, Daniels?”
Daniels gives a nod. “Copy that.”
“Good. And do me a favor … calm the fuck down.” Bryce looks back into the binoculars and continues pondering the hard-ass girl with the ponytail. “We may be here awhile.”
* * *
Dusk comes early that night, the summer giving way to autumn, the days getting shorter, some of the trees already starting to turn from deep green to faded teal to pale yellow. Shadows lengthen. The sky goes indigo blue and the temperature plummets. In the waning daylight, the rural hinterlands look different now than they did before the outbreak—darker, thornier, almost Amazonian. The topography of the land isn’t the only thing that the plague has transformed. The very trees themselves have sprouted deformities, blight-riddled leaves and malformed limbs like the shriveled extremities of terminal patients exposed to massive amounts of radiation. Old-growth forests have twined and tangled together with the voracious speed of metastasizing cells. Even the massive, contorted, antediluvian monster on whose central trunk Lilly and her posse now perch themselves like stranded birds seems to have grown riot in the plague years, its knotted limbs forming insane networks of sinewy musculature. Some of the huge tributaries of the trunk have literally dipped so low over the decades that they now grow in and out of the ground like great leprous eels diving for sustenance.
Every few moments, Lilly gazes up through the chimney of branches to remind herself that the sky is still there, albeit now as dark as a funeral shroud, stippled with early stars. The constant, incessant, nerve-jangling drone of walker voices coming up from the ground forty feet below them has set Lilly’s teeth on edge, and the density of the darkness is only making matters worse. The swarm has stalled. In the gloomy light, the meadow to the south teems with so many of the dead, it looks as though a moving carpet of shadows has unfurled across the land. The stench grips the air around the trees, mingling with the sappy odors of bark and moss and decay.
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