Invasion

by Jay Bonansinga

  They tell her they understand.

  She nods. “Good.” She looks back out the gap between the barred window and the shade. “Good.” She thinks about it. “No talking unless it’s absolutely necessary. No laughing, no fighting.”

  She hears one of the kids approaching her, the footsteps cautious, hesitant. Bethany Dupree stands beside her. “Mrs. Stern?”

  “Call me Barb.”

  “Okay … Barb? Can I ask you a question?”

  Barbara looks at the child, looks into those soft, guileless blue eyes. “Of course, honey.”

  “Who are we fighting? The walkers?”

  Barbara nods. “Yeah … sort of.”

  The girl licks her lips. “We’re gonna have a war with the walkers?”

  “Yes.”

  The girl thinks for a moment. “But … haven’t we already been doing that?”

  Barbara ponders the question, then looks back out at the multitude of ragged figures shambling aimlessly about the outskirts in the dusky light. When she speaks again, it is in a lower register, her voice shot through with grave foreboding. “Not like this, sweetie … not like this.”

  SIXTEEN

  “FUCK!” Miles Littleton kicks the brake pedal and skids the Challenger across a weathered macadam in the middle of Thomaston Woods. He comes to a screeching halt on a hairpin that sits at the top of Mullins Hill. His headlights throw two beams of silver through the foggy, dense wall of birches in front of him. His heart races. His mouth is dry. He stares as he registers what he’s seeing.

  He slams the shift lever into park, leaves the engine running, and gets out. He pads across the shoulder, down a gravel slope, and through about fifteen feet of oily-dark forest, batting away the gnats and vines and slender pine boughs that claw him in the face. He comes to a gap in the undergrowth, and peers out through the opening.

  In the distance, down in a vast patchwork of fallow brown tobacco fields, in the pale moonlight, he sees the shadows of the slow-moving motorcade. From this distance, illuminated by the pinpricks of light from torches and headlamps, the convoy vehicles look as tiny as figures in an ant farm, and harmless—almost festive—as they churn westward, traveling in a narrow, single-file formation in the center median of Highway 74 like a radiant yellow string of fireflies.

  It takes a moment for the shapes behind the last of the vehicles to register in Miles’s brain.

  At first, it just looks like the wind is blowing up gouts of black earth into the atmosphere behind the caravan, or that perhaps he’s looking at a vast bank of fog rolling in, or that maybe it’s just his eyes playing tricks. He curses himself for not bringing the binoculars. What the fuck was he thinking? Things are moving very fast, and shit is slipping through the cracks. But there’s nothing he can do about it now.

  He squints. Swallows hard. Is that…? No … it can’t be. No fucking way. But the more he stares at that enormous carpet of moving shadows behind the convoy’s rear end, the more he comes to terms with it. “Holy fucking shit,” he murmurs, and turns away from the scene.

  Cobbling up the slope, his heart hammering in his chest, he rushes back to his ride. He throws open the driver’s door and rifles through the contents of the passenger seat, grabbing the RadioShack walkie-talkie.

  He presses the Send button. “Yo! Sister-girl? You there?” He lifts up the button and hears nothing, not even static. He presses it again. “Yo! YO! Norma! Lilly! Anybody! Y’all hear me?!”

  Nothing. Not a single crackle of static or hiss of white noise.

  He looks at the back of the device, opens the tray, and dumps out the single nine-volt battery. He looks at it. The terminals are corroded. It looks ancient. “Goddamn motherfucking batteries!”

  He tosses the worthless two-way radio into the backseat, and he revs the engine. He grips the shift knob, slams the level down into drive, and nudges the foot-feed. The transmission engages, and the car lurches, pressing him into the seat.

  Heading back down the hill, swerving around abandoned wrecks, Miles listens to the ticking clock in his brain and does the math. Woodbury lies seventeen miles to the west. At the rate the convoy is going, they’ll reach the town in eight to ten hours.

  The attack will come at first light the next morning.

  * * *

  Bob Stookey has the shakes. He does his best to deal with them as he power-walks as fast as his arthritic legs will carry him through the narrow, leprous channel of ancient Georgia clay, his flashlight bouncing off the rusty earthen darkness that plunges ahead of him into the void. He’s in a hurry, ignoring the tremors.

  He has a job to do.

  The tunnel wends its way east toward Elkins Creek, and with each passing support beam it gets shaggier and shaggier with stalactites of roots and calcium deposits hanging down like chandeliers. The passageway—once a zinc mine—feels as though it closes in on a person the farther west he goes, like it’s a giant gullet swallowing all who dare to traverse its depths.

  Currently Bob can’t tell if this phenomenon is imaginary or real, but he currently can detect a quickening of his pulse and a feeling that his pack is getting heavier and heavier the deeper he penetrates the mine shaft. His boots squeak rhythmically on the stony floor, and his breath wheezes out of him with the syncopated huff of a lame horse. Because his hands are greasy with cold sweat he can barely hold on to the flashlight, but that’s okay. Lives depend upon his getting to the cave-in, and he won’t let his relapse get in the way of his mission.

  They say your first reaction is the truest. They say your original thought, your initial gut feeling, is always the correct course of action. But when Bob heard the boy laying out his plan—a deceptively simple way of not only fighting back, but fighting back hard and decisively—he experienced a wave of emotion. The Dupree boy reminds Bob of some of the young Marines he patched up over in the Middle East so many years ago—not in specific ways but in the intangibles: the way young men will go inside themselves when threatened, the way a street fighter will get that cobra calm before striking out with feral intensity. The boy had looked almost dreamy as he’d proposed the insane stages of his strategy.

  The more Bob thinks about it, the more it makes sense. Choose your favorite cliché: You fight fire with fire. Take the battle to the enemy. A strong defense is a strong offense. Remember the fucking Alamo.

  He stops for a moment, ears ringing, guts burning with nausea. He digs in his pocket and finds his medicine—the battered metal flask a remnant of his hard drinking days after the death of Megan Lafferty—and he thumbs off the cap. He takes a quick swig. Not too much. Just enough to keep the trembling under control. Like methadone. It’s funny. Bob used to joke with the Governor that he needed his medicine to get through the day. Now the alcohol is serving as just that: medicine. For the last twenty-four hours, Bob had secretly been treating his condition with measured doses of hooch. There’s no pleasure in it, no high, no buzz … just a constant leveling of his nerves, like outboard directional jets on a spacecraft.

  Bob knows this is the only way. Otherwise he would either drink himself into oblivion or go through the horrible symptoms of withdrawal again—the delirium tremens—resulting in seizures and dry heaves. Either way, he would be no good to anybody right now. So he calibrates and administers these sips at regular intervals, and he focuses on the task at hand. He replaces the cap and continues on.

  He makes a turn and starts to see the telltale signs of a stream carving its way above him through the earth—in the beam of his flashlight, the icicles of sandstone and calcium dangle down, growing longer and longer, the roots glistening with moisture and the barnacles of mold clinging to the formations. He notices the air getting more and more fetid and musty, like the inside of a rotten gourd. He shines his light on an object looming straight ahead.

  In the murk of the flashlight beam, the overturned coal car looks like a fossilized baby carriage lying upside down—the landmark Bob remembers from the last time he came here, ironically to rescue that bug
-fuck crazy preacher and his flock of followers. Bob knows the creek is above him. He picks up his pace.

  As he trundles along, he pulls the walkie-talkie from his belt. Thumbing the Send button, he says, “Hey Lilly-girl, you got your ears on?”

  Nothing but static.

  He thumbs the button. “Can you hear me? Lilly? It’s Bob. Over?”

  Through the sizzle of bad reception, he hears a ghostly wisp of a voice: “… Go ahead, Bob.…”

  “I’m coming up on the cave-in.”

  “… Good, Bob, set it up as quickly as possible.…”

  “Copy that.”

  He puts the walkie back on his belt, and stops suddenly. His heart pounds. He hears a noise. He clicks off the flashlight. The tunnel plunges into darkness. Radiant fireflies swim in his field of vision, a faint blur of purple methane glowing as his eyes adjust. He pulls his .357 Magnum and carefully flicks the safety off. Then presses the flashlight against the barrel and clicks it back on. The beam reveals a slight curve in the tunnel fifty feet ahead of him. He remembers the turn from the last time he visited this area, and the cave-in that lies just beyond it.

  He can hear the watery vocalizations of a biter, faint but unmistakable, coming from somewhere in the darkness just around the bend. He carefully moves forward, holding the flashlight against the revolver. The noise rises. He shuffles cautiously around the corner and suddenly comes to a halt.

  The cave-in that occurred only a couple of months ago lies thirty feet away from Bob in the oval pool of the flashlight beam. The forty-five-degree slope of loose earth blocking the tunnel is the color of mildew, and a single reanimated corpse protrudes from its center as though it’s a prisoner yoked and bound by stocks. Only its hairless, mottled head and part of its shoulders stick out of the dirt, and the confinement somehow seems to be eternally agitating it.

  Bob approaches it with a sigh. “Look what we have here,” he says under his breath.

  Snarling noisily, its iridescent eyes widening at the glare of a flashlight in its face, it bites at the space in front of Bob.

  “Something I want you to know,” Bob says. He presses the barrel against the creature’s forehead. At this close proximity, with Bob standing only inches away from the thing, the smell is overwhelming, its flesh the consistency of spackling compound, as pallid as bread dough. It’s not often Bob gets a chance to address one of these things in such an intimate fashion—just the two of them, close quarters, smelling each other. “Her name was Gloria Pyne,” Bob informs the creature, then squeezes off a single blast that blows a divot through the top of its skull.

  Magnified by the enclosed space, the roar deafens Bob for a moment.

  He jumps back, trying to avoid the flood of black cerebro-spinal fluid gushing down into the dirt as the thing’s ruined head and shoulders instantly sag and hang lifeless in the merciless beam of light. Bob spits. He scowls at the ventilated scalp, the decaying mass of brain matter now visible and glistening inside the gaping hole in the bone and dermal layers.

  In his life, Bob Stookey has never felt such hatred deep in his marrow.

  The muffled sound of other cadavers milling about behind the wall of loose earth shakes Bob out of his daze. He swallows the grief welling up in him—just his mere mention of Gloria’s name, spoken aloud in this lonely, godforsaken tunnel, has put the squeeze on his heart—and he spits again, shaking it off, taking a deep breath. “Don’t worry, folks, I haven’t forgotten you.”

  Time to get down to business. He carefully shrugs off his pack and sets it gently on the ground. He unzips it, fishes around, and gingerly pulls out the wooden cigar box with the words “DYNO NOBEL” stenciled on the sides. He crouches, shines the flashlight on it, and opens the lid. The sticks are nestled in sawdust.

  “Got a message from Gloria for ya,” Bob murmurs under his breath as he pulls the first stick of dynamite from the box he and Gloria found in the mining office. He rises up and carefully inserts the dull end of the stick into the cave-in wall near the ceiling.

  He inserts three more sticks into the cave-in at key junctures along the ceiling, then winds the ancient safety fuse from blasting cap to blasting cap. There’s no telling if the fuse is viable; God only knows how long the stuff was down there in that mining office. Bob’s not even sure if it’ll ignite the explosives. Nor is he certain the caravan will pass this way en route to Woodbury. It’s all guesswork at this point, but what else can they do?

  He inserts a half dozen more sticks into the dirt ceiling. Then he unwinds the fuse-coil along the tunnel about fifty feet or so and finds a bucket on which to sit. He sits down, and he pulls his walkie-talkie. “Okay, it’s all set. Over.”

  A moment later, Lilly’s faint voice crackles through the static: “… Okay, stand by.…”

  Bob says, “Will do,” then releases the button and puts the walkie back on his belt.

  Then he waits.

  And waits.

  * * *

  Miles Littleton yanks the wheel and careens off River Cove Road, then rushes headlong down a narrow dirt path that winds through the dark woods, his headlamps sweeping across dense walls of foliage, the vibrations rattling his bones and making the rear end of the Challenger fishtail in the dirt. The muscle car throws a tidal wave of dust behind it as it roars toward the grove of trees outside the tunnel entrance.

  Normally—as instructed by Lilly—Miles would park about a mile away, where the fleet of vehicles used by the tunnel dwellers lies hidden under the cover of thick live oaks. But time is of the essence now, and he can’t spare the fifteen-minute walk from the fleet to the tunnel entrance.

  He slams on the brakes just as the car rounds the final curve.

  The inertia sucks him forward, throwing debris, as the Challenger goes into a sideways skid. He jerks the wheel into the skid, expertly preventing the massive, low-slung sedan from going into a spin. The car scrapes to a noisy stop a thousand feet south of the tunnel entrance near a dry riverbed.

  Miles lets out a tense breath, throws the door open, and leaps out.

  He charges through the shadows until he comes to the ragged red bandanna on the stick, barely visible in the darkness. He sees the string sticking out of the ground, tied to a stump, and he grabs and pulls. “Hey! Lilly! Norma! It’s me!”

  He waits.

  “Yo! YO! Folks! Let me in! It’s Miles!” He tries to pry open the manhole cover, but they have the clamps in place, the tunnels on high alert. He knocks. “Yo!—People!—LET ME IN!”

  The ground around the manhole vibrates slightly as somebody pulls off the clamps and pushes it open. All at once, Lilly Caul’s sweaty face appears in the darkness below, and her arm shoots up, and she clutches the collar of Miles Littleton’s worn hoodie. “Jesus Christ, Miles, you’re going to draw the whole fucking swarm!”

  He climbs down the embedded steps behind her and hops down onto the hardpack floor of the tunnel. The impact sends stars across his field of vision, and he’s momentarily blind in the gloomy atmosphere of the underground. He hears Norma’s voice.

  “What in the love of Christ is going on? Wasn’t you supposed to radio in?”

  “Goddamn batteries,” Miles says between heaving breaths, blinking as his eyes adjust.

  Lilly’s voice is closer. “Didn’t we check them?”

  “I don’t think so.” Miles leans down with his hands on his knees as he catches his breath. He can see Lilly Caul standing over him with an ammo magazine in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other. Miles looks at her. “Them damn things were shot, leaking shit all over the insides of the radio. Walkie was dead as fuck.”

  “Damnit, I told Bob we should’ve—” Lilly starts to say when Miles speaks up.

  “They’re closer than we thought. Dude. I think they’re gonna be here by sunup.”

  Lilly looks at him. “What?” She licks her lips, looks around the narrow chamber of petrified earth and ancient pilings. By this point, Tommy Dupree, David Stern, and Harold Staubach have each heard the co
mmotion and have come over to stand behind Lilly with tense expressions. Speaking almost to herself, Lilly says, “That’s like, what … like an hour from now?”

  Miles shrugs and meets her gaze, but he doesn’t say anything.

  David Stern compulsively wrings his hands. He wears a black windbreaker with the Falcons logo almost completely worn off its breast pocket, the underarm areas already damp with stress sweat. “Are you absolutely sure?” He gapes incredulously at the young car thief. “We need to be sure.”

  Miles nods. “I saw ’em on the west side of Thomaston Woods, heading up 74, about five miles away from the crossroads.”

  “From Highway 18, you’re talking about?”

  Miles nods. “And the worst part, they got like twice as many walkers as we thought—it’s like a fucking army following along behind them—like a hundred motherfucking marching bands—just following along as happy as ya please!”

  Lilly looks down, chews her lip, thinks, and then looks up at Miles. “How long ago was it you saw them at Thomaston Woods?”

  Miles shrugs. “Like half an hour ago?”

  “Fuck!—FUCK!” Lilly raises the walkie-talkie to her lips and thumbs the button. “Bob? Can you hear me?”

  * * *

  Sitting in the darkness of the Elkins Creek tunnel, directly under the town of Carlinville, Georgia, Bob jumps at the sound of Lilly’s voice crackling out of his two-way, echoing in the desolate passageway. “… Bob!—BOB!—BOB!!—GODDAMNIT, TALK TO ME!…”

  Bob hits the button: “I’m still here, girlie-girl, you don’t have to yell.”

  “… Light it up, Bob, do it now—NOW!”

  He stares at the two-way. “Now?”

  “… YES, DO IT NOW!—WE WERE WRONG ABOUT THEIR ETA—DO IT RIGHT NOW!!”

  He drops the radio and fumbles with his lighter and finds himself praying that the antique fuses will work.

  Bob Stookey is no atheist. He has his own conception of who God is, and how busy the man must be. But right now, as Bob touches the Bic flame to the end of the safety fuse, and the jute sparks to life, he asks if God might perhaps have a moment to do him this one favor.