The preacher pauses to catch his breath. Staring down at the woman, he starts to silently pray. His head is bowed, his lips moving, when all at once he abruptly stops and looks up and narrows his eyes. His head cocks to one side as he listens closely to something in another part of the building. At last, he fixes his gaze on Reese and says softly, “You hear that?”
Reese manages a slow shake of his head.
The preacher looks up at the railings of the choir loft twenty feet above them. He reaches for his knife, pulling the bloodstained instrument from his belt. Then he signals for his men to follow.
* * *
They find the woman in the second-floor bathroom, just down a narrow passageway from the choir loft. A portly African-American gal in a filthy gingham mourning dress, ancient tennis shoes, and a hairnet, she huddles inside a stall, shivering with terror as the men enter the ladies’ room. Jeremiah kicks open the stall door and sees the woman’s enormous derriere sticking out from behind the commode. “Come on outta there, ma’am,” Jeremiah says softly but firmly, as though addressing a family pet.
The woman twists around and pokes a small .38 caliber police special in his face. “Back off, motherfucker! I’ll use it, I swear!”
“Whoa!—WHOA!” Jeremiah raises both hands, eyebrows rising as Reese and Stephen move in behind him with muzzles up and ready. “Let’s all take a breath now.… All right … no cause to go all O.K. Corral on each other.”
“Them people down there,” the woman says, and then stops herself, her expression faltering. Her gun lowers. She slumps, a single tear tracking down her plump face, making a leech trail across her ashy brown cheek. “Them people … they was … they was my family … they was all in my choir and they … they needed to go … I know that.… I just didn’t have the heart.”
Jeremiah holsters his knife inside his boot, and kneels beside her. “Take a deep breath, Sister.”
The woman starts to sob. She drops her gun. Her head lolls forward and her tears and saliva drip into the toilet. “Oh Lordy … Lordy … what a life.”
“It’s all right now.” The preacher reaches out, puts an arm around her. Reese and Stephen back off, lowering their weapons. “It’s all right, Sister.” He pats her tenderly. “Let it out.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking.” She sobs, shaking her head. “Keepin’ them in there like that.” Drool loops off her chin. She pulls a handkerchief from her moist cleavage and dabs her face. “I played organ for them sometimes.… Other times I would read the Bible through the PA system.” She snorts and blows her nose. “Like it was doing any good. I didn’t have the heart to put them outta their misery.” She sniffs, dabs her bloodshot eyes. “I don’t know what the Good Lord wants anymore.”
Jeremiah smiles. “Look at me, Sister. What’s your name, if I may ask.”
“Norma.” She swallows hard and looks up through her tears at him. “Norma Sutters, sir.”
“You know what the Good Lord wants from you, Norma?”
“No sir.”
“He wants you to survive.”
She swallows and nods, and then gives him a heartbreaking look. “Yessir.”
“C’mere, Sister.”
Jeremiah leans in and puts his big arms around her, and she hugs him back, and they stay like that for quite some time, the woman clinging to the preacher like a child waiting for a bad dream to fade.
* * *
“We lost our pastor early on,” the woman says, taking another sip of Mad Dog from an unlabeled bottle and wincing at the burn. “Brother Maywell shot him in the head and buried him out behind the sacristy.” She sits in the back room at her desk, a tattered woolen blanket wrapped around her significant girth. Her face glistens with agony. The pale morning light seeps through the seams of the boarded windows. “Lord, Lord, Lord … what a time we in right now.”
“How did all them folks down there die?” Jeremiah sits back pensively in a desk chair, the bones of the chair creaking with his weight. His head throbs. The bandage the woman applied to his scalp a few minutes ago is too tight. Behind him, Stephen sits on the edge of the windowsill, listening intently, gauze wrapped around his fractured ribs. He wheezes slightly. On the other side of the room, Reese shivers in a folding chair, his forehead crisscrossed with Band-Aids. The woman has already proven to be a gold mine of resources. In addition to medical supplies and first aid kits, she has stashes of canned goods, batteries, candles, dry clothes, bedding, liquor, cigarettes, tools, reading material, an extra box of .38 caliber rounds for the police special, and three sealed boxes of newly printed hymnals that will never be opened, and never be sung.
The woman hangs her head. “It only takes one,” she says softly.
“Pardon?”
She looks up at the preacher. “Before this whole tribulation started up, I was a damn teetotaler. Drinking had gotten the better of me so I quit. ‘It only takes one drink,’ they used to say at them meetings.” She shakes her head slowly and looks down, the immensity of her grief making her shoulders slump and her lower lip tremble again. “Even after the outbreak, we kept on with the services. Even after Reverend Helms passed. We kept on. We just figured … that’s what you do.”
She pauses.
Jeremiah leans forward on his swivel chair. “Go on, Sister.”
She breathes in a pained breath. “One day, one of our regulars, a family, they brought in a kid with them to our Sunday service. Kid had been bit.” She pauses, swallows the urge to weep. “Guess they thought the Lord would take care of things. It only takes one … know what I’m sayin’? It took less than a week for it to spread. The screaming—y’all should have heard it. I locked them all in the chapel; it was all that I could think of doing. Before long, I was the last one … holed up in this dirty-ass office, all by my lonesome, listening to the scratching and clawing.” Pause. “I guess you get so you don’t hear it no more.”
Reese speaks up from across the room. “Why didn’t you just get on outta here, pack up and leave?”
She chuckles ruefully. “I don’t know if y’all have noticed, but a person’s odds ain’t too good out there all alone.”
Silence.
Jeremiah smiles at her. “Well, you ain’t all alone no more.”
The woman gives Jeremiah a look. “You is a big one, ain’t ya?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Heard them callin’ ya ‘Brother’ and ‘Rev’—you a preacher, too?”
“Yes, ma’am, guilty as charged.” He sniffs, tries to put the tumult of the past few days into words. “I had a grand vision once, and the Good Lord decided it didn’t measure up, and He left us all behind.”
She cocks her head at him. “You one of them Rapture preachers?”
“Right at this moment, I don’t rightly know what I am.”
She shudders. “You sure seemed to know what you were doing down there in that chapel.”
“I’m sorry you had to see that.”
She chews on the inside of her cheek, thinking, pondering. She gives Jeremiah a strange look. “Can I trust y’all?”
Jeremiah looks at the others, then looks back at the zaftig choir mistress. “Yes, ma’am, you can trust us … you got my word on that.”
The black woman purses her lips. “Reason I ask … I might know a way we can improve on our situation a little bit.” She looks around the room at each man. “It’s a long shot, but if y’all are up to it … we just might make it.”
She takes their silence as a sign of mild interest, so she explains further.
THREE
It takes them the rest of that day to find enough fuel to get them where they need to go. They pack a wheelbarrow and three large satchels with supplies, including a twenty-five-gallon container of gasoline from the toolshed behind the building. By the time the light in the southwestern sky has begun to soften, fading from pale gray to pink over the coastal backwaters of the panhandle, they’re ready.
They slip outside through the rectory’s side door
and creep single file along the edge of the property.
Jeremiah takes the lead, periodically glancing over his shoulder for any sign of the herd that had crossed the highway around the state line. He carries his Glock with a full magazine. Crickets roar, and the dusky air gets clammy and cool on the back of Norma’s neck as she follows them toward the abandoned Escalade.
They hurriedly climb in, stowing their provisions in the rear cargo bay. Jeremiah kicks the engine on, and Norma settles down in the passenger seat next to him, unfolding a dog-eared map. “They usually stick pretty close to the ocean,” she says, almost to herself, calculating the mileage between them and the gulf. “Probably should start our search down around Perry or Crawfordville.”
She senses movement ahead of them, through the windshield, on the road, and glances up in time to see a couple ragged shadows emerging from the woods about a hundred yards away, drawn to the noise of their engine. The garbled growls can be heard above the drone of crickets, the smell like a faint trace of garbage on the breeze.
Norma feels a slight hitch of chills in her solar plexus. Considering the fact that the world has been infested with these things for almost two years now, she still hasn’t seen that many of them out in the open like this. She feels like Rip Van Winkle—as though she’s been asleep inside that church for a hundred years—and now the light and space of the outdoors is making her dizzy.
The preacher gooses the accelerator, and the Escalade lurches away.
Norma sinks into her seat as they roar down the road, swerving to avoid the half a dozen or so walkers now skulking out of the woods and blocking their path. They sideswipe one of the creatures, tearing a chunk out of its shoulder and the side of its face, spattering gore up across the glass of her window.
“You get used to it, sis,” the preacher mutters after Norma flinches.
The woman takes deep breaths, smooths her dress across her wide belly, and tries to avoid looking at the splatter outside her window: flecks of bone chips, a long smudge of black bile. “I ain’t sure a person could ever get used to this crazy-ass shit,” she comments.
* * *
Night falls, and the darkness deepens behind the trees on either side of the road. Most of the streetlights in this part of the country have gone the way of the Internet and broadcast television, so the road gets darker and darker as they head south toward the steaming thickets and festering swamps of the coastal lowlands.
The going is slow. Most of the two-lane is crowded with rusted-out wreckage and the carcasses of cars and trucks so old now that the weeds and switch grass have begun to grow up through the metal endoskeletons. The two young men in the backseat breathe heavily, thickly, half asleep, while the preacher drives and softly hums gospel hymns. They had passed around the beef jerky and grape Kool-Aid a few minutes ago—their standard supper fare while on the run—and now their bellies growl and their eyelids droop with exhaustion.
Sitting in the shotgun seat, her plump, tawny hands folded nervously in her lap, Norma is still trying to wrap her brain around this good old boy preacher who calls himself Brother Jeremiah. On one hand, he seems trustworthy enough—friendly, a good listener, courteous, and capable of single-handedly taking out an entire chapelful of reanimated corpses—but on the other, he seems like a walking time bomb, a human hair trigger that could go off at any moment.
The sad fact is, Norma Sutters doesn’t have a large array of options. Staying hunkered down in that claustrophobic rectory for the rest of her life, listening to the drooling groans of the dead in the next room while she drained the last of her Mad Dog supply, was quickly beginning to lose its charm. Watching the preacher clean house back there with that big hunting knife had given Norma a strange sort of charge—a cathartic release—but now it’s starting to worry her a little bit. If this dude is capable of such violence, God only knows what he’s capable of doing to a plump little sister-girl from Macon with flat feet and no living relatives. But Norma also knows that she would never be able to find the caravan on her own. She really has no choice but to go along with these scruffy-ass men and hope for the best.
Fortunately, Norma has grown accustomed to taking risks. Born poor and fatherless in the Pleasant Hill area of South Macon, the youngest in a family of six kids, she quit school her sophomore year in order to support her family after her mama passed. She played organ in bars and taverns, sang the blues in horrible places, and took a lot of shit from men who thought they were better than her. Maybe that’s why she never hooked up with anybody. She saw men at their worst—drunk, abusive, arrogant, getting thrown out of clubs, throwing their weight around, acting like babies. Her faith got her through those years, and led her to a job as assistant choir director at Calvary Baptist in Jasper, Florida. This was where she had hoped to find men at their best: God-fearing men, decent men, faithful men. No such luck. Here the men were just as bad, but now the shenanigans were coated with a slimy veneer of hypocrisy.
Miles Littleton was the exception. Who would have thought a twenty-three year old former meth-head from Atlanta—a convicted car thief who had gotten clean in rehab and gotten right with the Lord at Calvary Baptist—would restore Norma’s faith in men? Miles was the little brother whom Norma Sutters had always wished for, and their relationship had blossomed in those quiet months before the Turn, a friendship both platonic and healing.
Unfortunately, after the outbreak had taken everything to hell on a horse, Miles had started raving to Norma about this magical caravan that he had heard about from Pastor Helms. Norma hadn’t believed a word of it—Reverend Helms had been known to tip a few now and again—and after the walkers had gotten to the minister, there was nobody left to confirm these tall tales. But young Miles had been such a believer that he had finally decided to set out in his beat-up muscle car to find the Travelers. Norma had always believed that one day he would return to save her.
But that day had never come.
Now she is putting all her chips down on the hopes that Miles hadn’t been crazy and he’s still alive and the caravan is real.
“That sign back there … said ‘Cross City 12 Miles.’” Norma glances up from the map and gazes out the side window at the stewing darkness of Dixie County, Florida. “I got a feeling we’re getting close.”
The vast patchwork of wetlands passes in a blur on either side of them, the land oozing a low blanket of methane, as gray as mold and clinging to the shadows of pine thickets and gullies like dirty lace. The air smells briny and rotten with dead fish. Every few miles they pass the ruins of a small town or a wreckage-strewn trailer park. No signs of survivors in these parts, though, only the occasional silhouette of an upright corpse shambling through the trees, its eyes like twin yellow reflectors in the darkness.
“We can’t just keep burning gas all night,” Stephen says from the backseat, his voice all cranked up with pain and panic. “And we can’t just go on feelings.”
“We’re in the right ballpark,” Norma persists. “Believe me, gonna be hard to miss ’em.”
“Do we know exactly what we’re looking for, though?” Jeremiah grips the steering wheel with his huge hands, his jaw working overtime on a piece of gum, snapping and chewing compulsively as he drives. “For instance, how many vehicles they got in this convoy?”
“No idea … but it’s quite a few, I can tell ya that for sure.”
“That’s pretty general.”
“They’ll be easy to spot,” Norma says, gazing out at the darkness. “Our best bet is to just to follow the coast. They like to keep close to the water.”
“Why is that?”
She shrugs. “According to Miles, they keep their eyes peeled for ships … or any possible way they might get their asses the hell outta this place. Most of the big boats around here been destroyed in the hurricane that hit a couple years ago, so it’s a long shot they’re gonna find anything.”
Reese speaks up from the back. “Why didn’t this Miles dude come back for you?”
Norma g
lances down at the floor mats. “We had a little bit of a falling-out.” She wipes her mouth. “It was my fault, and I ain’t too proud of it.”
After a pause, Reese says, “But why didn’t you try and find these people yourself?”
She glances over her shoulder at him. “Travel alone in this god-awful back country crawling with dead folks?”
Silence returns to the Escalade’s dark interior as they all chew on the prospects of being alone and isolated in a forestful of walkers.
* * *
They’re about to give up the search when they start to climb a gentle slope—at first so gradual it’s almost unnoticeable—up the side of a vast malodorous landfill. The barren, trash-strewn scrubland to their left reaches across miles of sandy berms, all the way down to the deserted, ghostly boardwalks that wind their way along the beaches. The sky has begun to bruise pink with predawn light, and the preacher has just started to say something when Norma sees the first faint streaks of red dots on the distant haze.
“Wait! Wait!” She points a plump finger down at the far dunes of ashen white sand winding along the coast, the surface so pocked and windswept it resembles the dark side of the moon. “There!—See ’em?!”
“Where?” The preacher cranes his neck, slowing the vehicle down to a crawl. “I don’t see a thing.”
“About a half mile up yonder, see?” The woman is positively vibrating with excitement. “Whole slew of ’em! See the taillights?”
Jeremiah Garlitz takes in a deep, cleansing breath as he finally sees the caravan chugging along the coastal road. In the predawn light, it looks like a ribbon of burning embers throwing gouts of smoke in its wake. “Yes, ma’am, I surely do!” Jeremiah’s big, barrel-shaped chest puffs with relief. “Whaddaya think of that, boys?”
The two young men in the rear seats lean forward, transfixed by the sight, each of them rapt and silent as they gaze at the convoy.
Invasion Page 3