“The place is gone, babydoll,” Josh says under his breath. “S-O-L … forget it.”
Bob and the others join Josh and Lilly, and for a brief instant they stand there, still in shock, catching their collective breaths. Bob still clutches the shotgun in his sweaty palms. Megan looks sick. “What the fuck happened?” she mutters almost rhetorically.
“Folks must have tried to get away,” Josh speculates. “Must’ve had a passenger that got bit, and they turned in the car.”
Inside the wrecked building, a zombie emerges from the sedan like a deformed fetus being born.
“Bob, you got your keys on ya?”
Bob looks at Josh. “They’re in the truck.”
“In the ignition?”
“Glove box.”
Josh turns to the others. “I want y’all to wait here, keep your eye on that walker, might be more in there. I’m gonna get the truck.”
Josh turns away but Lilly grabs him. “Wait! Wait!! You’re telling me we’re just gonna leave all our stuff in there, all our supplies?”
“No choice.”
He heads around the left side of the smoking pumps while the others stand there stunned and speechless. Twenty-five feet away, the SUV thumps, a half-ajar door creaking open, the firelight blooming. Lilly jerks. Megan gasps as another dead thing pushes its way out of the vehicle.
Bob fiddles a shotgun shell into the breech with shaking hands.
The others back away toward the road, Scott mumbling hysterically, “Shit, man, shit … shit … shit … shit … shit … shit … shit…”
The thing that emerges from the SUV, burned beyond recognition, staggers toward them, its mouth gaping with black drool. The back of its collar and part of its left shoulder still crackle with tiny flames, the smoke around its skull like a halo. Apparently an adult male, half the skin of its face burned off, it barely remains upright as it shuffles slowly toward the smell of humans.
Bob can’t get the shell seated properly, his shakes are so bad now.
No one sees the flare of taillights across the lot behind the row of wrecks, and no one hears the rumble of the king cab’s engine firing up or the squeal of its rear tires digging in as the engine roars.
The burning zombie approaches Megan, who turns to run and trips on a patch of loose gravel. She sprawls to the pavement as Scott cries out and Lilly tries to help her up and Bob struggles with the shotgun.
The walker gets within inches of them when the blur of metal appears.
Josh backs the Ram directly into the zombie, and the impact of the protruding trailer hitch impales the thing, sending the charred corpse flying in a cloud of sparks. The thing breaks apart in the middle, the torso flinging off one way, the lower extremities spinning in the other.
One of the blackened, sizzling organs strikes Megan in the back, splattering her with hot, oily bile and fluids. She lets out a scream.
The pickup skids to a stop next to them, and they pile in, yanking a hysterical Megan in through the back hatch. Josh floors it.
The truck barrels out of the lot and down the winding access road.
All told, a mere three and a half minutes have elapsed since the onslaught … but in that time, the destinies of all five survivors have irrevocably changed.
* * *
They decide to head down the hill and turn north, weaving through the forest toward the tent city. They proceed cautiously, with their lights off and eyes wide open. In the rear camper, Scott and Megan peer through the firewall window, while Bob and Lilly, side by side in the cab next to Josh, scan the landscape with feverish concentration. No one says a word. They all harbor the unspoken dread of investigating the extent of the damage to the tent city—the resources of the vast encampment now paramount to their survival.
By this point, dawn has broken, the edges of the horizon—pale blue behind the trees—already beginning to drive the shadows from the gullies and culverts. The air is bitter cold and scented with the char of recent fires. Josh keeps both hands on the wheel as the pickup snakes through the cool shadows rising above the tent city.
“STOP! JOSH! STOP!”
Josh stomps on the brakes at the zenith of a hill overlooking the southern edge of the camp. The pickup scrapes to a halt.
“Oh, my God.”
“Christ Almighty.”
“Let’s turn around.” Lilly chews on her fingernail, gazing through a break in the foliage. She can see what’s left of the tent city in the distance. The air reeks of burned flesh and something worse, something deathly foul, like a mass infection. “There’s nothing we can do here.”
“Hold on a second.”
“Josh—”
“What in God’s name happened down there?” Bob murmurs to nobody in particular, staring through the gap in the trees that opens like a proscenium above the meadow fifty yards below. Early-morning sunbeams shoot down through scrims of smoke, making the devastation look almost unreal, like footage from a silent movie. “Looks like Godzilla attacked the place.”
“You think somebody went crazy?” Lilly keeps staring at the smoking ruins.
“I don’t think so,” Josh says.
“You think walkers caused this?”
“I don’t know, maybe there was a big old swarm of ’em and a fire started.”
Down in the meadow, along the edges of the encampment, flaming cars sit in disarray. Scores of smaller tents still burn, sending up black gouts of smoke into the acrid sky. In the center of the field, the circus tent has been reduced to a smoldering endoskeleton of metal poles and guide wires. Even the hard-packed ground burns in places, as though someone spooned out dollops of liquid flames. Smoking bodies litter the grounds. For a brief, surreal moment, Josh is reminded of the Hindenburg disaster, the flaming debris of the airship in its catastrophic death throes.
“Josh…”
The big man turns and looks at Lilly, whose face is turned away now, scanning the edges of the forest on either side of the king cab. Her voice lowers several registers until she sounds almost groggy with terror. “Josh … um … we have to get out of here.”
“What is it?”
“Holy fuckin’ Jesus.” Bob sees what Lilly sees, and the air in the cab crackles with tension. “Get us outta here, captain.”
“What are you—”
Then Josh sees the problem: the countless shadowy figures emerging from the trees—almost in synchronous marching order—like a vast school of fish stirred from the depths. Some of them still smolder with thin wisps of smoke leaching off their tattered rags. Others trundle along with robotic hunger, their curled claws outstretched. Hundreds and hundreds of cataract-white eyes reflect the pale light of dawn as they lock on to the lone vehicle in their midst. The hairs on Josh’s thick neck stiffen.
“JOSH, GO!”
He yanks the steering wheel and slams the pedal down, and the three hundred and sixty cubic inches roar. The truck lurches into a one-eighty, plowing through a dozen zombies and taking down a small pine in the process. The noise is incredible, the wet wrenching of dead limbs and snapping of timbers as the debris and blood kick up across the front quarter panel. The rear end wags violently, smashing into a cluster of walkers and tossing Megan and Scott around the camper. Josh pulls back onto the road and floors it, booming back down the hill in the direction from which they just came.
* * *
They barely make it to the adjacent road at the bottom of the hill before they realize at least three zombies have attached themselves, barnaclelike, to the pickup.
“Shit!” Josh sees one in his side mirror, clinging to the vehicle on the driver’s side, near the rear quarter panel, feet on the running board, tangled in strapping ropes, its tattered clothing caught in the camper’s metal trim. “Stay cool, everybody—we got some hangers-on!”
“What!” Lilly turns toward the passenger window and sees a dead face pop up across the glass like a jack-in-the-box. The face twitches and snarls at her, its inky drool flagging in the wind. Lilly lets o
ut a startled gasp.
Josh concentrates on the road, making a wild turn, then heading north at a steady forty-five miles an hour, moving toward the main two-lane, purposely swerving in an attempt to fling the zombies off the pickup.
Two of the walkers have clamped on to the driver’s side, one on the passenger side—and they hold fast—either caught on the truck, or strong enough in their spastic hunger to hold on. “Bob! You got any more of them shells in the cab?”
“They’re in the back!”
“Shit!”
Bob shoots a glance at Lilly. “Darlin,’ I believe there’s a crowbar on the floor behind the passenger seat—”
The truck swerves. One of the walkers tears free, tumbling to the road and pinwheeling down an embankment. Muffled screams come from the back. The sound of glass breaking comes through the wall. Lilly finds the greasy three-foot length of iron with the hooked end on the rear floor. “Found it!”
“Give it to me, honey!”
Josh looks out at the side mirror and sees a second zombie slip free of its mooring and fall to the rushing pavement beneath the wheels. The truck bumps over the corpse and keeps barreling.
Bob hollers in his gravelly wheeze, twisting around toward the sleeper window, raising the crowbar. “Get back, Lilly, cover your face!”
Lilly cowers, shielding herself, as Bob strikes out at the zombie in the window.
The curved end of the crowbar slams against the window but merely chips a divot out of the reinforced safety glass. The zombie snarls, tangled in bungee cords—its toneless growl a Doppler echo on the wind.
Bob lets out a cry and then slams the crowbar into the window again and again, as hard as he can, until the curved tip breaks through the safety glass and plunges into the dead face. Lilly turns away.
The crowbar impales the cadaver through the roof of its mouth and gets stuck. Bob gapes in horror. Behind the mosaic of fractured glass the skewered head hangs suspended in the wind for a moment, the dull glow behind its sharklike button eyes still animated, the mouth still pulsing around the iron as if trying to eat the crowbar.
Lilly can’t look. She presses back against the corner, shaking convulsively.
Josh swerves again, and the zombie finally tears loose in the wind, falling to the pavement and vanishing under the wheels. The rest of the window blows away, a tissue of shattered glass imploding and swirling into the cab. Bob flinches, awash in adrenaline, and Josh keeps barreling forward as Lilly curls into a fetal position in back.
They finally reach the main access road and Josh heads south, picking up speed, calling out loud enough for the folks in the back to hear: “Everybody hold on!”
Without another word, Josh accelerates, hands welded to the steering wheel, weaving and lurching around pockets of wrecked, abandoned vehicles for another couple of miles, keeping an eye on the side mirror, making sure they are clear and safely out of range of the swarm.
* * *
They put five miles between them and the cataclysm before Josh applies the brakes and stops on the gravel shoulder of a deserted stretch of rural wasteland. The silence that descends on the truck is unreal. Only the sound of their heartbeats in their ears and the high, lonesome whistle of the wind can be heard.
Josh glances over his shoulder at Lilly. The look on her faintly bruised face, the way she’s curled up in the corner of the floor, hugging her bended knees against her chest, shivering as though suffering from hypothermia—all of it worries him. “You okay, babydoll?”
Lilly manages to swallow the lump of terror in her throat and gives him a look. “Just peachy.”
Josh gives her a nod, then hollers loud enough to be heard back in the camper. “Everybody okay back there?”
Megan’s face in the window says it all. Her ruddy features screwed up with nervous tension, she grudgingly gives them a noncommittal thumbs-up.
Josh turns and gazes through the windshield. He breathes hard, as though recovering from a sprint. “Damn things are definitely multiplying.”
Bob rubs his face, breathing hard, fighting the shakes. “Getting more brazen, too, you ask me.”
After a pause Josh says, “Must’ve happened fast.”
“Yeah.”
“Poor bastards didn’t know what hit ’em.”
“Yeah.” Bob wipes his mouth. “Maybe we oughtta go back, try and draw them things away from the camp.”
“What for?”
Bob chews the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know … could be survivors.”
Another long pause hangs in the cab, until Lilly finally says, “Not likely, Bob.”
“Could be supplies left over we could use.”
“Too risky,” Josh says, scanning the landscape. “Where the hell are we, anyway?”
Bob roots a map out of a cluttered door pocket. He unfolds it with shaking hands and traces his nail across the tiny capillaries of unmarked farm roads. He still labors to catch his breath. “Best I can tell, we’re somewhere south of Oakland—tobacco country.” He tries to hold the map steady in his shaking hands. “Road we’re on ain’t on the map—at least it ain’t on this map.”
Josh stares into the distance. The morning sun hammers down on the narrow two-lane. The unmarked road, which is fringed in weeds and littered with an abandoned wreck every twenty yards or so, snakes along a plateau between two tobacco farms. On either side of the unmarked two-lane, the fields have overgrown with neglect, the weeds and kudzu twining up the slats of weather-beaten guardrails. The shaggy, ramshackle nature of the fields reflects the months that have transpired since the plague broke out.
Bob folds up the map. “What now?”
Josh shrugs. “Ain’t seen a farmhouse for miles, seems like we’re far enough out in the boonies to avoid another swarm of them things.”
Lilly climbs back onto the bench. “What are you thinking, Josh?”
He puts the truck into drive. “I’m thinking we keep heading south.”
“Why south?”
“For one, we’ll be moving away from the population centers.”
“And…?”
“And maybe, if we keep movin’ … we can keep the cold weather in our rearview.”
He gives it some gas and starts to pull back onto the road when Bob grabs his arm.
“Not so fast, captain.”
Josh stops the truck. “What is it now?”
“Don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news.” Bob points at the gas gauge. “But I just put the last drops of my reserves in her last night.”
The needle is riding just below E.
SEVEN
They search the area for tanks to siphon or gas stations to plunder, and they come up empty. Most of the wrecks along this desolate stretch of farm road are burned to crisps or abandoned with bone-dry tanks. They notice only scattered dead roaming the distant farmlands—lone cadavers wandering aimlessly, far enough away to easily elude.
They decide to sleep in the Ram that night, taking shifts sitting watch and rationing their canned goods and fresh water. Being this far out in the boonies proves to be a blessing as well as a curse. The worrisome lack of fuel and provisions is offset by the lack of walker activity.
Josh admonishes everybody to keep their voices down and make as little noise as possible during their exile in this barren hinterland.
As darkness closes in that first night, and the temperature nose-dives, Josh runs the engine as long as possible, then resorts to running the heater off the battery. He knows he can’t keep this up for long. They cover the broken sleeper window with cardboard and duct tape.
They each sleep fitfully that night in the cramped quarters of the truck—Megan, Scott, and Bob in the camper, Lilly in the rear of the cab, and Josh in the front, barely able to stretch his massive body out across the two large bucket seats.
The next day, Josh and Bob get lucky and find an overturned panel van a mile to the west, its rear axle broken but the rest of it intact, its gas tank almost full. They siphon eighteen gallo
ns into three separate containers, and make it back to the Ram before noon. They take off and make their way southeast—crossing another twenty miles of fallow farmland—before stopping for the night under a desolate train trestle, where the wind sings its constant mournful aria through the high-tension wires.
In the darkness of the reeking truck, they argue about whether they should keep moving or find a place to light. They bicker about petty things—sleeping arrangements, rationing, snoring, and stinky feet—and they generally get on each other’s nerves. The floor space inside the camper is less than a hundred square feet, much of it covered with Bob’s cast-off detritus. Scott and Megan sleep like sardines against the back hatch while Bob tosses and turns in his semisober delirium.
They live like this for almost a week, zigzagging in a southwesterly direction, following the tracks of the West Central Georgia Railway, scavenging fuel when they can. Tempers strain to the breaking point. The camper walls close in.
In the dark, the troubling noises behind the trees get closer every night.
* * *
One morning, while Scott and Megan slumber in back, Josh and Lilly sit on the Ram’s front bumper, sharing a thermos of instant coffee in the early-morning light. The wind feels colder, the sky lower—the smell of winter in the air. “Feels like more snow’s coming,” Josh softly observes.
“Where’s Bob gone off to?”
“Says he saw a creek off to the west, not far, took his fishing rod.”
“Did he take the shotgun?”
“Hatchet.”
“I’m worried about him, Josh. He’s shaking all the time now.”
“He’ll be okay.”
“Last night I saw him sucking down a bottle of mouthwash.”
Josh looks at her. Lilly’s injuries have almost completely healed, her eyes clear now for the first time since the beating. Her bruises have all but faded, and she removed the bandages around her ribs the previous afternoon to find that she could walk almost normally without them. But the pain of losing Sarah Bingham still gnaws at her—Josh can see sorrow etched on her sleeping face, late at night. From the front seat, Josh has been watching her sleep. It’s the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. He longs to kiss her again but the situation hasn’t warranted such luxuries. “We’ll all be doing a lot better when we find some real food,” Josh says then. “I’m getting mighty tired of cold Chef Boyardee.”
The Walking Dead Collection Page 42