Lilly turns back to the children. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I just—”
Lilly stops herself. She hears a noise coming from outside the tent, from up in the trees. It sounds like the creaking bulwark of a listing ship … or the slow squeak of a door in a haunted house … or, more likely, the weight of a zombie’s foot on a deadfall log.
“Girls, I’m—”
Another noise cuts off Lilly’s words. She spins toward the tent’s opening at a loud rustling sound, which rings out from the east, shattering the stillness a hundred yards away, coming from a thicket of wild rose and dogwood.
A flock of rock pigeons suddenly takes flight, the swarm bursting out of the foliage with the inertia of a fireworks display. Lilly stares, transfixed for a single instant, as the flock fills the sky with a virtual constellation of gray-black blots.
Like controlled explosions, along the far edge of the camp, another two flocks of pigeons erupt. Cones of fluttering specks punch up into the light, scattering and re-forming like ink clouds undulating in a clear pool.
The rock pigeons are plentiful in this area—“sky rats” they’re called by the locals, who claim the pigeons are actually quite delicious if boned and grilled—but their sudden appearance in recent weeks has come to signify something darker and more troubling than a possible food source.
Something has stirred the birds from their resting place and is now making its way toward the tent city.
THREE
“Girls, listen to me.” Lilly quickly shuffles over to the youngest Bingham girl and scoops her up in her arms. “I’m gonna need you to come with me.”
“Why?” Sarah gives Lilly that patented teenage sulk. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t argue with me, sweetie, please,” Lilly says softly, and the look in Lilly’s eyes straightens the teenager with the power of a cattle prod. Sarah hastily turns and takes the twins by their hands, then starts shepherding them toward the exit.
Lilly stops in her tracks in the middle of the tent’s opening when she sees the first zombie burst out of the trees forty yards away—a big male with a hairless scalp the color of a bruise and eyes like milk glass—and all at once Lilly is shoving the kids back into the pavilion, clutching Ruthie in her arms and uttering under her breath, “Change in plans, girls, change in plans.”
Lilly quickly urges the kids back into the dim light and moldy air of the empty circus tent. She sets the seven-year-old down on the matted weeds by a steamer trunk. “Everybody be very quiet,” Lilly whispers.
Sarah stands with a twin on either side of her, the teenager’s face aghast, wide-eyed with terror. “What’s going on?”
“Just stay there and be quiet.” Lilly hurries back to the tent opening and wrestles with the massive flap, which is cinched ten feet up with rope ties. She yanks at the ropes, until the tent flap falls across the gap.
The original plan—which flickered instantaneously across Lilly’s mind—was to hide the kids in a vehicle, preferably one with its keys still in its ignition, in case Lilly had to make a quick escape. But now, all Lilly can think of doing is huddling silently in the empty pavilion and hoping that the other campers fend off the assault.
“Let’s all play a different game now,” Lilly says when she returns to the huddling girls. A scream rings out from somewhere across the property. Lilly tries to stanch her trembling, a voice resonating in her head, Goddammit, you stupid bitch, you gotta grow some balls for once in your life, for these kids.
“A different game, right, right, a different game,” Sarah says, her eyes glittering with fear. She knows now what’s going on. She clutches the small hands of her twin sisters and follows Lilly between two high stacks of fruit crates.
“Gonna play hide-and-seek,” Lilly says to little Ruthie, who is mute with horror. Lilly gets the four girls situated in the shadows behind the crates, each child crouched down low now and breathing hard. “Have to stay very still—and very, very, very quiet. Okay?”
Lilly’s voice seems to comfort them temporarily, although even the youngest knows now this is no game, this is not make-believe.
“I’ll be right back,” Lilly whispers to Sarah.
“No! Wait! NO, DON’T!” Sarah clutches at Lilly’s down jacket, holding on to her for dear life, the teenager’s eyes pleading.
“I’m just going to grab something across the tent, I’m not leaving.”
Lilly extricates herself and scuttles on her hands and knees across the carpet of pressed grass to the pile of buckets near the long central table. She grabs the shovel that leans against the wheelbarrow, then crawls back to the hiding place.
All the while, terrible sounds layer and build outside the windblown walls of the pavilion. Another scream pierces the air, followed by frantic footsteps, and then the sound of an axe sinking into a skull. Lydia whimpers, Sarah shushes her, and Lilly crouches down in front of the girls, her vision blurring with terror.
The frigid wind tosses the skirt of the tent’s walls, and for a brief moment, under the momentary gap, Lilly glimpses the onslaught in progress. At least two dozen walkers—only their shuffling, muddy feet visible like a brigade of upright stroke victims—converge on the tent-strewn field. The running feet of survivors, mostly women and elderly, are fleeing in all directions.
The spectacle of the attack temporarily distracts Lilly from the noise behind the girls.
A bloody arm lurches under the tent flap only inches away from Sarah’s legs.
Sarah shrieks as a dead hand clamps down on her ankle, its blackened fingernails digging in like talons. The arm is gouged and tattered, clad in the ripped sleeve of a burial suit, and the girl convulses in shock. Moving on instinct, the teenager crawls away—the force of her movement yanking the rest of the zombie inside the tent.
A dissonant chorus of squeals and shrieks rings out from the sisters as Lilly springs to her feet with the shovel clutched tightly in sweaty palms. Instinct kicks in, Lilly spinning and cocking the shovel high. The dead man bites at the air with snapping-turtle fury, as the teenager writhes and crawls across the cold ground, crying out garbled yelps of terror, dragging the zombie with her.
Before the rotting teeth get a chance to penetrate, Lilly brings the shovel down hard on the zombie’s skull, the impact making a flat clanging noise like the chime of a broken gong. The crack of the cranium vibrates up Lilly’s wrists and makes her cringe.
Sarah breaks free of the cold fingers and struggles to her feet.
Lilly brings the shovel down again … and again … as the iron scoop rings its flat church-bell clang and the dead thing deflates in a rhythmic black gush of arterial blood and rotting gray matter. By the fourth blow, the skull caves in, making a wet cracking noise, the black spume bubbling across the matted grass.
By this point, Sarah has joined her sisters, each girl clinging to the other, each bug-eyed and whimpering with horror as they back toward the exit, the great canvas flap billowing noisily in the wind behind them.
Lilly turns away from the mangled corpse in the tattered pin-striped suit and starts toward the opening twenty-five feet away, when all at once she freezes in place, grabbing Sarah’s sleeve. “Wait, Sarah, wait—WAIT!”
At the other end of the circus tent, the giant tarpaulin flap furls upward in the wind, revealing at least half a dozen walkers crowding in on the exit. They shuffle spastically into the tent—all adults, both male and female, clad in torn, blood-spattered street clothes, bunched together in an awkward grouping—their wormy cataract-filmed eyes fixing on the girls.
“This way!” Lilly yanks Sarah toward the opposite end of the circus tent—maybe a hundred and fifty feet away—and Sarah scoops the tike up into her arms. The twins scurry after them, slipping on the wet, matted grass. Lilly points at the bottom of the canvas wall—now a hundred feet away—and whispers breathlessly, “Gonna sneak under the tent.”
They get halfway to the opposite wall when another walker appears in their path.
Apparently this slim
y, mutilated corpse in faded denim dungarees—with half its face torn away on one side in a ragged starburst of red pulp and teeth—got in under the tarp and now comes straight for Sarah. Lilly steps between the zombie and the girl and swings the shovel as hard as she can, making contact with the mangled cranium and sending the thing staggering sideways.
The zombie slams into the center pillar, and the raw inertia and deadweight knocks the timber out of its mooring. Guidelines snap. There’s a cracking noise like a ship breaking through ice and three of the four Bingham girls let out ululating shrieks as the massive big top collapses into itself, snapping the smaller rigging posts like matchsticks and pulling stakes out of the ground around it. The conical ceiling sinks like a vast soufflé.
The tent falls on the girls and the world goes dark and airless and full of slithering movement.
Lilly flails at the heavy fabric and struggles to get her bearings, still grasping the shovel, the tarpaulin pressing down on her with the sudden weight of an avalanche. She hears the muffled squealing of the children and she sees daylight fifty feet away. She crabs under the tent toward the light with the shovel in one hand.
At last she brushes a foot against Sarah’s shoulder. Lilly cries out: “Sarah! Take my hand! Grab the girls with the other and PULL!”
* * *
At this point, for Lilly, the passage of time—as it often does in catastrophes-in-progress—begins to retard, as several things transpire almost simultaneously. Lilly reaches the end of the tent and bursts out from under the deflated canvas, and the wind and cold wake her up, and she yanks Sarah out with all her might, and two of the other girls get dragged out behind Sarah—their voices shrieking like teakettles on the boil.
Lilly springs to her feet and helps Sarah up with the other two little girls.
One girl—Lydia, the youngest of the twins by a “good half an hour,” as Sarah claims—is missing. Lilly pushes the other girls away from the tent and tells them to stay back but stay close. Then Lilly whirls toward the tent and sees something that stops her heart.
Shapes are moving under the fallen circus tent. Lilly drops the shovel. She stares. Her legs and spine seize up into blocks of ice. She can’t breathe. She can only stare at the small lump of fabric undulating madly twenty feet away—little Lydia struggling to escape—the sound of the child’s scream dampened by the tarp.
The worst part—the part that encases Lilly Caul in ice—is the sight of the other lumps tunneling steadily, molelike, toward the little girl.
At that moment, the fear pops a fuse in Lilly’s brain, the cleansing fire of rage traveling through her tendons and down her marrow.
She lurches into action, the burst of adrenaline driving her to the edge of the fallen tent, the rocket fuel of anger in her muscles. She yanks the canvas up and over her head, crouching down and reaching for the girl. “LYDIA, SWEETIE, I’M RIGHT HERE!! COME TO ME, SWEETIE!!”
Lilly sees in the pale diffuse darkness under the tarpaulin the little flaxen-haired girl, fifteen feet away, frog-kicking and scrambling to escape the clutches of the canvas. Lilly hollers again and dives under the tarp and reaches out and gets a piece of the little girl’s jumper. Lilly pulls with all her might.
That’s when Lilly sees the ragged arm and bloodless blue face appearing in the dark only inches behind the child, making a drunken grab for the little girl’s Hello Kitty sneaker. The rotting, jagged fingernails claw the sole of the child’s tennis shoe just as Lilly manages to yank the nine-year-old out from under the folds of reeking fabric.
Both Lilly and child tumble backward into the cold light of day.
They roll a few feet, and then Lilly manages to pull the little girl into a bear hug. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay, I got you, you’re safe.”
The child sobs and gasps for breath but there’s no time to comfort her. The din of voices and rustling canvas rises around them as the camp is attacked.
Lilly, still on her knees, waves the other girls over to her. “Okay, girls, listen to me, listen, we have to be quick now, quick, stay close, and do exactly as I say.” Lilly huffs and puffs as she stands. She grabs the shovel, turns, and sees the chaos spreading across the tent city.
More walkers have descended upon the camp. Some of them move in clusters of three and four and five, growling and drooling with rabid, feral hunger.
Amid the screams and pandemonium—settlers fleeing in all directions, car engines firing up, axes swinging, clotheslines collapsing—some of the tents shudder with violent struggles going on inside, the assailants burrowing through gaps, ferreting out the paralyzed inhabitants. One of the smaller tents falls onto its side, legs scissoring out one end. Another enclosure quakes in a feeding frenzy, the translucent nylon walls displaying silhouettes of blood mist like ink blots.
Lilly sees a clear path leading to a row of parked cars fifty yards away and turns to the girls. “I need you all to follow me … okay? Stay very close and don’t make a sound. All right?”
After a series of frantic, silent nods, Lilly yanks the girls across the lot … and into the fray.
* * *
The survivors of this inexplicable plague have quickly learned that the biggest advantage a human enjoys over a reanimated corpse is speed. Under the right circumstances, a human can easily outrun even the stoutest walking cadaver. But this physical superiority is overwhelmed in the face of a swarm. The danger increases exponentially with each additional zombie … until the victim is engulfed in a slow-moving tsunami of ragged teeth and blackened claws.
Lilly learns this harsh reality on her way to the closest parked car.
The battered, gore-streaked silver Chrysler 300 with the luggage cap on the roof sits on the gravel shoulder of the access road less than fifty yards from the circus tent, parked at an angle in the shade of a locust tree. The windows are up, but Lilly still has reason to believe they can at least gain access, if not start the car. The odds are about even that the keys are in the ignition. People have been leaving keys in cars for a while now for quick escapes.
Unfortunately, the property now teems with the dead, and Lilly and the girls barely traverse ten yards of weed-whiskered turf before several attackers move in on each flank. “Stay behind me!” Lilly cries out to her charges, and then swings the shovel.
The rusty iron bangs into the mottled cheek of a female in a blood-spattered housecoat, sending the walker careening into a pair of nearby males in greasy dungarees, who tumble like bowling pins to the ground. But the female stays upright, staggering at the blow, flailing for a moment, then coming back for more.
Lilly and the girls get another fifteen yards closer to the Chrysler when another battery of zombies blocks their path. The shovel zings through the air, smashing through the bridge of a younger walker’s nose. Another blow hits the mandible of a dead woman in a filthy mink coat. Yet another blow cracks the skull of an old hunched crone with intestines showing through her hospital smock, but the old dead lady merely staggers and backpedals.
At last, the girls reach the Chrysler. Lilly tries the passenger door and finds it—blessedly—unlocked. She gently but quickly shoves Ruthie into the front seat as the pack of walkers closes in on the sedan. Lilly sees the keys dangling off the slot in the steering column—another stroke of luck. “Stay in the car, honey,” Lilly says to the seven-year-old, and then slams the door.
By this point, Sarah reaches the right rear passenger door with the twins.
“SARAH, LOOK OUT!”
Lilly’s keening scream rises above the primordial din of growling that fills the air, as a dozen or so dead loom behind Sarah. The teenager yanks open the rear door, but has no time to get the twins inside the car. The two smaller girls trip and sprawl to the grass.
Sarah screams a primal wail. Lilly tries to get in between the teen and the attackers with the shovel, and Lilly manages to bash in another skull—the huge cranium of a putrified black man in a hunting jacket—sending the attacker staggering back into the weeds. But there are
too many walkers now, lumbering in from all directions to feed.
In the ensuing chaos, the twins manage to crawl into the car and slam the door.
Her sanity snapping, her eyes filling with white-hot rage, Sarah turns and lets out a garbled cry as she shoves a slow-moving walker out of her way. She finds an opening, pushes her way through it, and flees.
Lilly sees the teenager racing toward the circus tent. “SARAH, DON’T!!”
Sarah gets halfway across the field before an impenetrable pack of zombies closes in on her, blocking her path, latching on to her back and overpowering her. She goes down hard, eating turf, as more of the dead swarm around her. The first bite penetrates her imitation-angora sweater at the midriff, taking a chunk of her torso, sparking an earsplitting shriek. Festering teeth sink into her jugular. The dark tide of blood washes across her.
Twenty-five yards away, near the car, Lilly fights off a growing mass of gnashing teeth and dead flesh. Maybe twenty walkers in all now—most of them exhibiting the grotesque buzzing adrenaline of a feeding frenzy as they surround the Chrysler—their blackened mouths working and smacking voraciously, while behind blood-smeared windows, the faces of three little girls look on in catatonic horror.
Lilly swings the shovel again and again—her efforts futile against the growing horde—as the cogs and gears of her brain seize up, mortified by the grisly sounds of Sarah’s demise on the ground across the property. The teenager’s shrieking deteriorates and sputters into a watery series of caterwauls. At least a half-dozen walkers are on her now, burrowing in, chewing and tearing at her gushing abdomen. Blood fountains from her shuddering form.
Over by the row of cars, Lilly’s midsection goes icy cold as she slams the shovel into another skull, her mind crackling and flickering with terror, ultimately fixing on a single course of action: Get them away from the Chrysler.
The silent dog-whistle urgency of that single imperative—get them away from the children—galvanizes Lilly and sends a jolt of energy down her spine. She turns and swings the shovel at the Chrysler’s front quarter panel.
The Walking Dead Collection Page 36