Ash has already risen off her perch, grabbed the Mossberg 12-gauge, and aimed the muzzle at the figure bursting out of the trees. “Is that—?”
“Wait, hold on.” Lilly sees the scrawny, shirtless figure coming toward them, waving excitedly. “False alarm, gang, sorry, everybody relax.” The relief in Lilly’s tense voice is all too apparent to her own ears.
The stress of the past twenty-four hours, playing cat and mouse with Spencer-Lee Dryden, has taken its toll. The mixture of exasperation, rage, sheer terror, and bone-deep frustration has dogged Lilly at every turn, every false sighting, every failed attempt at luring the lunatic into a trap. Initially, the plan had involved trundling through the ruined, flooded back roads of Whitewater Estates, during which time she would squeeze off regular blasts of the AR-15 in order to draw the madman in, but Lilly soon realized she was merely wasting bullets. Later, she had tried circling back toward the main artery of Highway 85, thinking Dryden would stick to the four lanes whenever possible. But the divided highway proved to be practically impassable, a virtual junkyard of mossy, weed-whiskered, fossilized carapaces of wrecked cars. Now Lilly has shifted her strategy a third time, attempting to stay put, pitch camp, and bait the trap with the odor of campfire smoke and the intermittent revving of the Escalade’s enormous engine, which, so far, has yielded little results other than wasting fuel and drawing walkers.
Every once in a while they hear a large vehicle somewhere nearby, drifting on the breeze—more than likely Dryden’s battered crew cab and trailer—and they all spring into action, taking their places and preparing to ambush the man. But the noise invariably drifts away like a ghost on the wind. But somehow, for some reason, Lilly knows that Dryden has not given up the search for them. His malignant presence is pervasive, just out of sight, just beyond the horizon, as powerful as the smell of walkers on the breeze. The others know this as well. It is unspoken, a vein of anxiety running through every conversation, every attempt to make long-range plans. They know Dryden must be destroyed, he must be surgically removed from the earth like a cancerous tumor.
All of which is why Lilly feels so jumpy as Tommy Dupree approaches the campsite, breathlessly coming up to Lilly, stammering, “I thought he was here, I thought it was him, I was sure of it, I saw the silver metal, I saw it through the trees and I fired at it, but I was, I was—”
“Okay, slow down, Tommy.” Lilly turns to Ash. “Ash, take the kids back to the SUV for a second.” She turns back to Tommy. “C’mere.” She takes him aside, leading him behind a small stand of oaks. “Take a breath, tell me exactly what happened.”
Tommy swallows air, trying to get his bearings and calm down enough to make sense. His shirttail is ripped in several places. “You won’t believe what I found. I thought for sure it was that silver trailer he was driving. But it wasn’t a trailer at all.”
“You said you fired at it? What was it?”
He looks up at her, still trying to catch his breath. “It’s not far from here, let me show you.” He turns and starts toward the woods. “C’mon, it’s not far.”
“Wait a second, hold on!” She grabs his arm, pulls him back. “Where are you taking me? What did you shoot at? What are you up to?”
He gives her a strange grin. “Hint—we should probably bring a few of those plastic gas containers we got under the back deck.”
* * *
The boarded, slumped buildings sit at the end of a dirt road, their opposite walls connected to a weathered, gray dock protruding out across the brackish water of a large inlet. The inlet’s scummy surface—still swollen and high from the floods—buzzes with dragonflies and water bugs. But it’s not the ruins of a deserted pier on which Lilly now latches her awed gaze.
“Holy fucking shit,” she marvels under her breath as she circles the massive storage tank now punctured with three fresh bullet holes. Pieces of Tommy’s shirttails are visible stuffed into the holes.
The boy proudly leads Lilly around the metal monolith with that weird, crooked grin on his face. “You gotta admit, from a distance it looks a lot like that shitty silver trailer. But check this out.” He goes over to the storage tank and pulls one of the cloth plugs.
Yellow liquid shoots out of the hole, and he catches a few drops in his palm.
Lilly takes a closer look, smells the liquid, and detects the sweet, delicious, life-affirming fragrance of high-test gasoline. She looks at the boy. “Oh my God, you did it. You just put us back in action.” She drops her container, grabs the boy, and pulls him into a tight, loving embrace. “Great work, Junior.”
“Thanks,” the boy says softly, his voice muffled by her shoulder pressed against his face. He hugs her back with reciprocal emotion. He closes his eyes, soaking in the human contact, the love, the protectiveness, the longing to have a family again. He loves this woman unconditionally. He would walk into hell for her.
“C’mon,” she says, finally releasing him from her embrace. “Let’s get as much as we can into these babies.”
She grabs the container, unscrews the cap, and then holds it up under the spewing fuel. Tommy does the same, pulling a second piece of cloth from a second bullet hole, the nectar spurting profusely. Gas flows into both containers—each holding five gallons—until the level reaches the brim and bubbles over.
Lilly puts her container down, replaces the cap, and then thumps the side of the massive tank with her knuckles. “Sounds like the damn thing is almost full. How the hell did this end up untouched for so many years?”
“I know, right?” Tommy fills his container and sets it down, screwing the cap back on. “Too bad we can’t take all of it with us.”
“I’m thinking there’s another way.” Lilly looks around the boat dock, a dragonfly buzzing past her. The drone of crickets is almost jet-engine loud, the sun hot on the back of her neck. “We could camo the hell outta this thing, draw a map, and come back to this place in the future.” She surveys the neighboring foliage. “C’mon, gimme a hand.”
She starts gathering up branches, palm fronds, old timber, fence wire, and anything else she can drape over the huge storage tank. Tommy finds a soggy piece of canvas that was once stretched over a boat, designed to winterize watercraft. He drags it over and throws it across one side of the silver beast.
They work for another fifteen minutes or so, disguising the storage tank as best they can, when Lilly hears something weird drifting over the treetops to the east. She stops. Putting her finger to her lips, she shushes Tommy and cocks her head and listens closely to the noise.
“Is that somebody screaming?” Tommy asks nervously, glancing up at the colorless sky.
“Yeah, I think it is.” Lilly listens to the echoing shrieks. They echo for a moment over the river, then fade. They sound as though they’re coming from a great distance, maybe miles away. “Could be somebody getting swarmed out there.”
The screams start up again, horrible keening sounds that set Lilly’s teeth on edge.
Tommy frowns. “Usually, somebody getting swarmed, the screams will stop for good. You know what I mean? Because the person is getting … you know.”
“I guess I follow you, yeah.”
“What I’m saying is, you don’t hear them start up again like this.”
In the time it has taken to complete this last exchange, the screams have stopped and started again, and now the noise deteriorates into garbled, watery sobbing, praying, begging.
Lilly listens closely to this for a second. She looks at Tommy and says, “You definitely don’t hear people begging walkers to stop.” She grabs her container. “It’s gotta have something to do with—”
“Dryden?” Tommy utters the words as though they’re a curse. He grabs his container. He looks at Lilly.
“Oh my God, do you think it’s—?”
Lilly has already started back down the embankment toward the creek bed. “We gotta warn the others,” she calls over her shoulder. “This might be our only chance.”
Tommy hurries after
her, lugging at least thirty pounds of fuel.
They’re going to need it.
* * *
By all normal laws of physics and biology, Frank Steuben should be dead by now. The human body simply isn’t equipped to withstand the kind of trauma inflicted upon Steuben’s squat, muscular frame in the explosion that rocked Jamie Quinn’s Jeep. The secondary fireball that erupted after the initial impact of Spencer-Lee’s RPG—instantly killing Quinn and Caleb Washburn—had catapulted Frank Steuben out the rear of the vehicle on a wave of concussive fire, slamming him into a fence post, and then tossing him to the ground in a flaming heap.
Somehow, Steuben had managed to roll several yards until the fire had snuffed itself out, and there he lay for countless agonizing minutes, his spine fractured in two places, his left thigh impaled on a two-foot shard of wood. One leg and a large portion of his left side had been seared by third-degree burns, and his blood loss was significant. But Frank Steuben is a tank, a human Humvee. Gripped in shock and paralysis, he lay there, helpless, while a swarm of biters passed him on either side like distracted commuters brushing past a homeless man on a train platform. Through some quirk of fate or random act of God, the walkers left Steuben alone. Maybe they thought he was already dead and turned. Regardless of the reasons, though, the former landscaper from Arkansas with the huge belly and ham-hock arms managed to survive long enough to be saved by the tall man in the face bandage.
Twenty-four hours of dreamlike floating followed—with cycles of mind-numbing pain followed by narcotic relief—as Steuben lay in the rear seats of the beat-to-hell crew cab driven by this two-bit Phantom of the Opera with the weird mummified face. The man behind the wheel exhibited the scars of old burns as well as fresh ones as he chased after Ash and Lilly Caul and the others, murmuring insane nonsense and singsong diatribes.
In his twilight state, Steuben had difficulty hearing just exactly what this southern-fried Phantom was mumbling about, his psychotic ramblings muffled by the bloody face bandages. But one thing was clear. The man wanted to keep Steuben alive as long as possible as the pursuit of the women and children dragged on into the next day. Every hour or so, the bandaged man would pull over, bring the crew cab to a stop, dig in his huge doctor’s bag, and administer another injection to Steuben’s left arm. The substance in the hypodermic—whatever it was—had both a painkilling effect as well as a hypnotic aspect. The cool numbing agent would course through Steuben like mother’s milk, lulling him into a woozy state of dislocation and confusion. But at least the pain would momentarily be stanched.
Then, something changed in the driver’s mercurial demeanor.
Early this morning, frantically searching the Chattahoochee River Valley along the deserted, ramshackle backwaters of Franklin and Whitewater Estates, the man behind the wheel had stopped administering the drug. The pain had crept back into Frank Steuben’s consciousness like a wild dog returning to its bone, gnawing at the wound in his leg with more and more fervor. Pain can come in a startling array of flavors, textures, and colors. Some comes in low, throbbing, purple aches. Other pain pinches and shoots like fireworks behind the eyes, sharp and metallic. The pain in Steuben’s leg—where the massive splinter of fence wood still protruded like a signpost—had begun to scream a dissonant high soprano of agony.
Somewhere, deep down in his flailing consciousness, Frank knew he only had a little while longer to live. He had been around heavy machinery enough to know an injury as catastrophic as this would almost instantly lead to shock, hypovolemia, and sepsis, all of which were now taking him down the long tube toward the permanent dark. But somehow, in some miracle of stubborn bullish strength, as well as the cocktail of whatever this lunatic had been pumping into him, he still clung to semiconsciousness, his vision blurry, fixed on light at the end of the tunnel that was quickly closing around him.
Now Frank is dimly aware that the bandaged man has stopped the crew cab on a low stretch of bare earth along a ditch and has come around to the side door where he can get better leverage on Steuben’s mangled leg.
“Gonna have another little talk, you and I,” the man had said only moments ago in a voice that was suddenly crystal clear behind the gauze. “Gonna ask you a few questions. No big deal. Just some background information.” He had paused then for dramatic effect. “If you answer honestly—and I’ll know if you’re lying, believe me, I’m good at that part—then I’ll give you relief.” He had held up the hypodermic at that point, its needle dripping a pearl of blessed nectar. “But if you don’t comply, I will bring you pain the likes of which you have never dreamt.”
At that point, Spencer-Lee Dryden grasped the end of the wood sticking out of Steuben’s leg and wrenched it backward hard like a lever.
The shriek that had burst out of the stocky, muscular, tattooed former landscaper at that point could have easily been mistaken for the caterwaul of an animal being skinned alive—a high, razor-sharp squeal—which issued spontaneously from deep within Frank Steuben’s lungs. The pain slammed through Steuben with all the garish hues of a kaleidoscope in his brain, stealing his breath, sending his testicles retracting up into his groin and causing him to shit his pants.
A series of calls and responses followed. Spencer-Lee would holler out a question, and Steuben would attempt to answer it as sincerely and completely as possible with his breathless stammer. Spencer-Lee asked the name of the woman with Ash—the alpha girl with the auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail—and Steuben told him it was Lilly Caul. At certain points, the pain would get the best of Steuben, and he would stumble over his answer, and Spencer-Lee would yank back on the wood again, eliciting another series of screeching yelps and garbled pleas for mercy.
Most of the answers Frank had learned from either Ash or Quinn over the last two years of living in Haralson. He knows Lilly Caul casually—he had worked with her on the railroad restoration project the previous year—and he likes her. She’s a no-nonsense kind of gal, a natural leader with a soft touch that Frank Steuben can appreciate. He had run his landscaping company in Little Rock in a similar manner. He was tough but fair with his employees. He sees that same integrity in Lilly. But the truth is, he owes the woman nothing. Extreme pain will do that to a person. It denatures heroism into pure expediency. It purifies intent into simple survival instinct.
Now Frank Steuben struggles to hear the current question through the noise of his agony. His vision has blurred. He sees only a ghostly figure in a mask of white gauze hovering over him. He can’t see the man’s lips, and can only hear the muffled words faintly through the breathing hole in the Betadine-stained face bandages. “P-p-please … s-s-say it again,” Steuben begs. It is now almost impossible for Steuben to decipher that nasally, disembodied voice. “I … c-can’t … un-der-s-s-stand … the … question.”
“Oh for chrissakes!” The tall man reaches up to his face and picks at the corner of the bandages. It takes him a second or two but he finally manages to carefully peel back the multiple layers of gauze that have adhered to his burns over the last few days, now pulling on the thing with enough force to remove it. The bandage comes off with a sticky, gluey crackling sound. He tosses the grotesque wad of gauze away with the ease of a snake shedding its own skin. “There! You happy now?”
The face looking down at Steuben is straight out of a nightmare. Much of it scorched beyond recognition, with flesh the consistency of axle grease, it stares through bloodshot eyes set deep in singed craters. Much of Dryden’s hair is burned off, the rest reduced to the bristles of a hog’s hide. One corner of his mouth has been burned away by the fire, leaving behind a row of exposed yellow teeth gleaming in a perpetual grimace.
He aims the hypodermic at one side of his face, and plunges the needle into his own jaw, injecting enough of the agent to numb any residual pain. “Okay,” he says. “One last time.” His words are clear now and yet slightly impeded by the mangled corner of his mouth. “I’ll ask you where the girl named Lilly is originally from—the name of the to
wn or the settlement where she’s been living—the place they’re probably heading back to as we speak. What is it?”
Steuben feels himself sinking into the folds of the backseats. He knows the answer, but his reflexes are slow now, his bodily functions failing. He can feel the warmth of his bladder emptying in his pants. He tries to pronounce the name of that little village plopped down smack-dab in the middle of nowhere about seventy-five miles south of Atlanta but can only make a faint, breathy noise that sounds more like, “Wwwwuhd … wwwuh … wwhh.”
Spencer-Lee Dryden leans down so closely that Steuben, even in his debilitated state, can smell the pus and cheesy odors of infection radiating off the scorched face. The smell of Spencer-Lee’s breath is caustic, sulfurous. “You can do it now, Bubba,” Spencer-Lee urges softly. “Tell me the name of the town where this woman is from … that’s all I need you to do. No big deal.”
“Wwwwwuhhhd … wwwuh.”
Spencer-Lee grasps the end of the wooden sliver and prepares to once again yank the thing.
“Wwwwoodbury!—W-w-woodbury!—The n-name of the t-town is Www-w-woodbury!”
Spencer-Lee lets go of the splinter and gives the dying man a satisfied nod. “There ya go, Bubba! That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”
Steuben feels himself sinking into the seat, which has become almost liquid, the light fading to black all around him as though the day is on a rheostat and some godlike being is dialing it down. In his imagination, Frank Steuben sinks through the upholstery, down through the chassis, into the ground, sinking, sinking into the cold abyss of the earth. He doesn’t even register the fact that Spencer-Lee Dryden has drawn a small 9-millimeter pistol from a hip holster. Steuben can barely feel the cool, oily touch of the gun’s muzzle on his temple. He can hardly make out the sight of a burned face looming over him, twisting into an expression of sympathy.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 19