Fifteen minutes later, Lilly pulls down an entrance ramp onto the wreckage-strewn lanes of Highway 19 and heads south. Her plan is to try and reach Tifton or even Valdosta before nightfall—farther than they’ve ever traveled on a supply run—in order to search for a new source of propane, batteries, lightbulbs, and fuel that hasn’t been picked over. She knows of a Home Depot down around Cordele. She makes note that the fuel gauge on the road-worn RAV4 is three-quarters full, and she explains to Tommy that they have to make sure that they don’t go beyond the “point of no return.” Tommy has never heard this expression, and it sounds ominous to him, but Lilly explains that it merely means they have to make sure they always have enough gas in the tank to get back home.
It’s slow going for quite a while, the graveyard of wrecked cars and trucks petrified now by the turning of the seasons into leafy heaps, their kudzu-covered carcasses glued to the pavement in emulsified, pasty puddles. Weaving in and out of the wreckage, Lilly and Tommy idly talk about the future, hoping that there actually is a future. Tommy starts reminiscing about his late mother and father, both of whom perished in the tumult that took Woodbury down last month. He speaks of them as heroes, forgiving them for their zealotry. Lilly is taken aback by the boy’s maturity. Perhaps she’s seeing a side effect of the plague. Maybe it weans a kid off childhood. Maybe it girds a person for the inevitable loss that will sooner or later touch every living human. The tragic events of the last few months seem to have made Tommy Dupree more comfortable in his skin, and this is thoroughly, endlessly fascinating to Lilly.
They drive and talk, and drive some more, and talk about the afterlife, and God, and the apocalypse, and the possible causes of the plague, and everything else under the sun that Tommy can think of. They pass at least a half a dozen gas stations that lie in ruins, the pumps overturned, the offices ransacked, the storage tanks as dry as coffins. They talk some more.
They talk for so long, and the conversation is so interesting to Lilly, that she does something she’d have thought she would never do in a million years.
She forgets about the fuel gauge.
TEN
The battered RAV4 skids to a stop, kicking up a whirlwind of dust, the g-force slamming Tommy into the dash, his shoulder belt preventing him from breaking his nose. He jerks back in the seat, blinking convulsively. The silence shrieks. Lilly holds on to the steering wheel with a death grip, staring straight ahead, taking deep breaths.
“What—? What happened?” Tommy looks at her. “What is it?”
“I can’t believe it.”
“What?”
“I can’t believe what I just did.”
“What—? Tell me! What?!”
“The point of no—” She starts to explain, but all at once she gets distracted by her surroundings: the thick woods on either side of the highway, the overturned bus in the culvert a few hundred yards up the road. Things are reacting all around them to the introduction of an alien car into the poisonous ecosystem—trees are shivering in the deeper woods, noises drifting on the breeze, smells wafting. Lilly can’t believe what she’s done.
Tommy cranes his neck in order to see the gas gauge. The needle is a hair above “E.” “Oh shit … shit.”
He glances out the windshield. In the gray middle distance, behind columns of diseased pines, shadows stir. In the opposite lane, something crawls out from under a wreck, a pasty white cadaver with half its face missing. A hundred yards farther up the road, a pair of ragged reanimated corpses in bloodstained hospital smocks shuffle slowly out from behind a faded, torn billboard for the Florida Commission on Tourism showing a bikini-clad siren on a sun-drenched beach and the words “When you got it bad, we got it good.”
Lilly pounds angrily on the steering wheel. “Fuck!—Fuck!—FUCK!”
“Okay, so, we got a little bit of gas left, right? Don’t we?!”
Lilly stops banging in the wheel and gazes down into her lap with equal parts despair, rage, shame, and terror. “What was I thinking? How could I have been so fucking stupid?! Stupid! STUPID!!”
“But we got a little bit left, right?”
She wipes her mouth, tries to gather her thoughts. In her peripheral vision, she can detect shadowy figures shambling out of the woods, slowly but steadily moving toward them. The sky roils with dark clouds, a storm threatening. The smell of black decay filters through the vents. “Not enough to get back, Tommy. That’s the main problem. We don’t have enough to get back because we went way beyond the—”
“But maybe we should turn around and head back anyway and see how far we get.”
Lilly sees three walkers in her rearview, closing the distance. They hobble robotically toward the RAV4 with arms outstretched—two males and a female, each of them very old, both in age and state of decay, perhaps former residents of a nursing home—working their black teeth with the fervor of piranhas, chewing at the air with feral hunger. They make the flesh on the back of Lilly’s neck bristle. “I’m not sure that’s going to get us anywhere.”
“We can’t just sit here.”
“Hold on.” Lilly opens the map case next to her, quickly fishing through the loose candy wrappers and garage door remotes. She grabs a lighter, a pocketknife, a flashlight, and a box of .22 caliber 36-grain bullets for the Ruger. “Grab the backpacks!”
“We’re getting out?!”
“Just do it, Tommy! Don’t ask any questions, just do what I say!”
He twists around and grabs their rucksacks from the backseat, then hands Lilly’s over. She stuffs the items from the map case into it, checks the box of ammunition, pulls her Ruger pistol, checks the magazine. “Look under your seat, should be a crowbar under there—grab it!”
The boy finds the crowbar.
“And open the glove box!” Lilly orders.
Tommy flips the panel down. “What am I looking for?”
“Maps—any maps you see in there, grab them!”
The boy does so as Lilly glances back up at the rearview and sees the three dead senior citizens closing in on them. The creatures approach the SUV with heads cocked, mouths drooling black bile, eyes geeked open like silver reflectors. Lilly yanks the shift lever down into reverse. “Hold on, Tommy!” she cries.
She kicks the accelerator, and the engine howls. The steel-belted radials spin wildly for a moment on the sandy pavement, then find purchase and the SUV lurches backward. The walkers loom in the mirror for a single instant, their eyes getting big right before the impact.
The SUV shudders as the muffled sounds of wet bones and cartilage crunching travels under them, making them momentarily lose traction on the grease of dead remains. The RAV4 fishtails furiously as it continues to back away from the gore-soaked pavement.
A moment later, Lilly slams down the brake pedal and brings the careering SUV to a noisy halt.
“HOLD ON!”
She jerks it into drive and rockets forward. By this point, the pair of billboard lurkers have traversed out across the shoulder and lumbered onto the highway, and are now shuffling directly toward them—smack-dab in the middle of their lane—oblivious to the 3,500 pounds of Japanese steel rushing toward them.
The impact throws one of the creatures into the air with the force of a catapult and rips the other one in two, sending half its torso into the woods on a comet tail of glistening red entrails and the other half thumping under the chassis of the speeding SUV, grinding it into bonemeal. Lilly keeps the foot pedal pinned, the steering wheel steady. The RAV4 charges away from the scene.
“What now?!—What now, Lilly?!” The boy twists in his seat, gazing out the rear window at the carnage receding into the distance.
“Grab everything you brought with you! Pack, machete, water, the other pistol!”
The boy scrambles to gather up his things and secure them in the pack on his belt. The SUV rumbles over a series of potholes as Lilly steers it toward suitable cover. “We’ll ditch the car in a safe place, hide it somewhere, and try to find some gas!”
They roll into a rest area on fumes, and then have to get out and push the vehicle by hand around the back of one of the buildings.
By the time they light out on foot, heading south, the afternoon has already started to give way to evening.
* * *
“Easy does it, hotshot!” Norma Sutters braces herself against the car’s passenger door as Miles Littleton careens down Georgia State Road 520 just west of Albany. He weaves the muscle car in and out of the slew of abandoned vehicles as though skiing down an Olympic slalom course, barely avoiding the corners, nearly sideswiping every other wreck. He drives with the practiced ease of a veteran wheelman, a street kid whose DNA has been recombined with axle grease and carbon monoxide. He wears a tricolored Bob Marley beret on his tight dark curls, and his long-lashed eyes fix themselves on the white lines clocking under the car as though they are the flash of a hypnotist’s watch. His gold tooth glistens. He’s in a hurry.
“You said to step on it,” he mutters almost to himself. “I’m stepping on it.”
“I didn’t say get us killed.” Norma gazes through the windshield for a moment, noticing a cluster of walkers up ahead, milling about the gravel shoulder. They look like commuters waiting for a train that will never come. Miles steers the car straight for them. Norma closes her eyes. “Lordy, Junior, don’t do this to me again!”
She feels a thump, as though the car has just cobbled over a bump, and she opens her eyes.
The outside of the passenger window has turned deep red in the backwash of blood tossed up by the impact. Particles of brain matter and hair and tissue run horizontally across the glass, blowing off the side of the car in the slipstream. Miles is giggling. Norma glances in the side mirror and sees the human remains receding into the distance behind them, the walkers sideswiped by the Challenger now reduced to gruesome body parts and headless torsos strewn across the shoulder.
She throws him a look. “Can we just concentrate on finding these people?”
“I say fuck these people. I say we just boogie on outta this part of the world!”
“Miles, we been over this a million times—”
“I don’t want no part of this crazy-ass shit,” he grumbles. “Bat-shit fucking preachers waging holy wars and shit—fuck it! That don’t have nothing to do with me. You neither! What that motherfucker is planning with them toys and shit—it ain’t just crazy, it’s fucking evil. I say we find an island somewhere, roll some fatties, and stay high for the rest of our natural lives.”
“I thought you was a Christian!” She aims her scornful gaze at her surrogate son. “We can’t just turn a blind eye to this shit, Miles.”
“How the fuck we gonna find these people in the first place?”
“We’ll find ’em—don’t you worry.” She taps her finger on the crumpled road map in her lap. “Just stay on this road until we get to 29, then head south. They gotta be somewhere around that Woodbury place.”
“They’re in a motherfucking tunnel, girlfriend, they’re belowground—remember? How the fuck you expect to find them in a motherfucking tunnel?! You’re the one’s gonna get us killed.”
“We’ll find them. They gotta come up for air every once in a while.”
“I ain’t even sure I got enough go-juice to make it all the way down there.”
“I thought you told me you had enough of them tanks in the trunk to make it to the coast and back two times over. You lying to me, boy?”
“Didn’t plan on taking that side trip up the Chattahoochee with that motherfucker.”
Norma lets out a weary sigh and rings her plump little hands. She wears a ratty cardigan sweater over her church dress, and still she shivers in the cool of the day’s waning hours. It’s almost dusk. The edges of the sky have turned indigo blue, and the low clouds are moving in, scudding the horizon with brooding gray monoliths. “Lord have mercy … what a world,” she murmurs.
Miles shakes his head. “Suppose we do find these people, what the fuck you gonna tell them?”
She looks down. “I’m gonna tell them everything.”
“What if these folks are as bug-fuck crazy as that preacher? Ever think of that? What if these people are just as fucking evil as Garlitz?”
Norma gazes back out the passenger-side window, the passing landscape tinted red now by the blood-filmed glass. “Then God help us all.”
* * *
Darkness closes in around Lilly and Tommy as they creep silently down a farm road cutting between two scabrous tobacco fields. They move in a single-file line along a split-rail fence and communicate mostly with nods and gestures in order to avoid attracting the attention of lurkers.
For the last hour, they’ve noticed an increasing number of dead in the area, a few of which they have taken down with their bladed weapons. One came from inside a culvert, lunging at them with alarming velocity. Lilly managed to cleave its skull at the last moment with her rusty machete. Minutes later, another one surprised them as they passed a derelict grain elevator, the walker stumbling out of a musty storage room. The boy rose to that occasion by driving his crowbar through the thing’s left ear.
Lilly now worries that they risk inadvertently stumbling upon a swarm. She has her silencer on her Ruger, but she wants to avoid using up her limited supply of ammo. She would like to be indoors—or at least under cover—by nightfall, and by the looks of the sky, that’s not too far off. The roar of crickets has already risen like a tide around them, and the air has that clammy, pithy chill that it gets in the open country at sunset. The worst part, though, is the scent of death on the wind. Lilly can recognize the acrid, festering, sickly stench of a swarm a mile away. Only a mob of walkers can reek like that, and the odor is now sending a continuous wave of gooseflesh down Lilly’s back.
They reach a lonely crossroads and pause. Lilly is about to whisper something to the boy when the tobacco leaves to their immediate left begin to rustle and quake. Lilly sees a massive figure moving toward them from behind the stalks, the breathy growling noise rising above the crickets. She pushes the boy aside and draws her Ruger.
From the tobacco plants bursts an enormous male in greasy dungarees, reaching and growling with monstrous hunger etched on its cadaverous face, its sharklike eyes practically luminous in the twilight. It wears a strange little hat that looks almost comical on its huge, livid head, and it smells of maggot-infested meat and scorched shit.
Lilly fires a single blast—the noise like a gunshot fired through a wet blanket, still loud but dampened—directly into the creature’s cranium. The back of its head erupts in pink plumes of matter as the thing instantly folds.
For a moment, Lilly and the boy just stand there, staring at the fallen walker. For some reason, its attire gets Lilly’s attention. She kneels and takes a closer look. The creature’s hat has come askew in the fall, and Lilly picks it up. The pinstriped material, the silver, grime-flecked brim, the shape of it—all of it looks familiar. But at first Lilly can’t identify it. She looks at the gore-streaked dungarees, the gray fabric pinstriped, an empty tool belt still attached to the thing’s midsection.
“He was an engineer.” Tommy Dupree points excitedly at the creature’s boots.
Lilly looks at the boy. “Yeah … exactly … a train engineer.” She stands up and looks to the north. “Which means … I bet there’s a station around here somewhere, or maybe a switchyard or something.”
The boy stands up and excitedly looks toward the darkening horizon to the north. “You know what? It does look like there’s something up there on the other side of that farm.” He points. “See the water tower? I bet that’s your train yard—c’mon!” He starts hustling northward, a spring in his step now.
* * *
“Who’s ‘Stu
pid’?” Bob breaks the silence, his voice echoing slightly in the long, straight mine shaft.
For almost an hour, he and Gloria have been trudging along the tributary tunnel—their boot steps crunching in the fine ashy dust—looking for the mining company outpost, exchanging small talk, discussing their inevitable bid to return to Woodbury. Bob believes the miners may have very well left a wealth of resources down here when they closed up shop years earlier.
“Say what?” Gloria walks along behind Bob with her lantern in one hand, the yellow pool of light shining down the endless channel of stone and the occasional dusty, cobweb-filmed support beam. About ten minutes ago, they had come upon a caved-in area that had evidently been worn away over the years by sewage runoff, leaving behind a narrow channel through which they could both, with some effort, squeeze. On the other side of the cave-in was an ancient mine shaft that smelled of fuel oil and dry rot.
“The hat,” Bob says, shooting a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the visor Gloria is wearing, and always seems to be wearing, as though the thing is a good luck charm. “Says you’re with Stupid, so I was just wondering—”
“If that was somebody in particular?” She smiles to herself.
“Yeah. Husband? Boyfriend?”
“Nope. Nobody in particular, Bob. I guess you could say it’s every man I ever dated.”
“Ouch. That bad?”
“Oh, you don’t want to know.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Guess I ain’t a very good judge of character, when you get right down to it.”
“Well, I hope your luck changes someday.”
“I appreciate that, Bob.” She looks at the back of his head as they walk along single file in the narrow tunnel. “That’s why it’s good to meet somebody like yourself with some semblance of an intellect.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” He chuckles. “I been accused of a lot of things.”
“You remind me of my dad in a lot of ways.”
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