“Stay behind me, hold the torch up,” Lilly whispers, thumbing the hammers on both her Rugers, creeping toward the last door on the left.
“Walker?” Austin grabs his Glock and moves in close behind her.
“Just shut up and hold the torch up.”
Lilly moves past the jiggling door, pauses, stands with her back against the freezer. “On three,” she whispers. “You ready?”
“Ready.”
Lilly grabs the latch. “One, two, three!”
She rips the freezer door open, and both barrels go up, and her heart skips a beat. There’s nothing there. Nothing but darkness and a reeking stench.
The odor engulfs Lilly, making her eyes water as she steps back, lowering the pistols. The black, oily death-rot clings to the inside of the dark freezer. She hears a noise, and looks down at something small and furry scuttling past her feet. She lets out a pained breath as she realizes it was just a rat making all the noise.
“Fuck me,” Austin comments breathlessly, lowering the Glock and letting out a sigh of relief.
“C’mon,” Lilly says, shoving her guns back in her belt. “We got enough. Let’s head back, get the truck loaded, and get the fuck outta here.”
“Sounds good to me,” Austin says, yanking the dolly back with a smile, then pushing it back down the aisle, following Lilly toward the front of the warehouse. Behind him, a large figure lurches out of the freezer.
Austin hears it first, and only has time to turn around and see the massive male in dungarees and mangled face barreling toward him. Mandibles clenching and unclenching, eyes the color of sour milk, the biter stands well over six feet tall and is covered with a film of white mold from being shut in the freezer for so long.
Jerking away from it, reaching for his Glock, Austin trips over the corner of the dolly.
He falls down, his gun slipping out of his hand, the torch rolling across the cement. The huge biter looms over him, drooling black bile, the torchlight now shining up at a surreal angle. Flames flicker and reflect off the corpse’s shimmering, milky eyes.
Austin tries to roll away but the biter gets its gigantic dead fingers around Austin’s pant legs. He lets out an angry howl, kicking at the walker, cursing it. The thing opens its mouth, and Austin slams the heel of his boot into the maw of black, sharklike teeth.
The crunch of the lower jawbone hardly slows the thing down.
The creature goes for the flesh of Austin’s thigh. The weight of the thing is unbearable, like a house pressing down on him, and just as the thing is about to bite down on Austin’s femoral artery—the blackened teeth only centimeters away—the snapping of two silenced .22 caliber rounds rings out.
Only a few seconds have transpired from the moment the biter first appeared, but that’s the exact amount of time it has taken Lilly to hear the commotion, stop in her tracks, spin around, jack the hammers, raise the guns, take careful aim, and intercede. She hits the biter dead center between the eyes, just above the bridge of the nose.
The huge corpse whiplashes backward in a cloud of blood mist that looks like smoke in the darkness, the top of its skull splitting open and gushing.
It lands in a wet heap at Austin’s feet as the young man squirms away from it and gasps for breath and edges backward on his ass on the cold cement for several frenzied moments. “Fuck!—Jesus!—FUCK!”
“You okay?” Lilly comes over, kneels, and inspects Austin’s legs. “You all right?”
“I’m—yeah—I’m—fine, fine,” he sputters and stammers, catching his breath. He stares at the massive lump of corpse lying at his feet.
“C’mon, let’s—”
“YO!”
The sound of Martinez’s voice coming from the front of the warehouse penetrates Lilly’s ringing ears. “Lilly! Austin! You two okay?!”
Lilly hollers over her shoulder, “We’re good!”
“Get your shit and come on!” Martinez sounds nervous. “The noise is drawing more of them out of the woodwork! Let’s go!”
“C’mon, pretty boy,” Lilly mutters to Austin, helping him up.
They get up, and Austin retrieves the torch before it has a chance to set anything on fire, and they get the hand dolly moving. The thing weighs a ton now, and it takes both of them, huffing and puffing, to roll it down the aisle.
* * *
They all meet at the loading dock. The Sterns and Martinez have filled the duffels as well as half a dozen large cardboard boxes with a plethora of packaged goods, including cartons of Ramen noodles, gourmet instant coffee, two-liter bottles of juice, packages of flour, boxes of Rice-A-Roni, several pounds of sugar, gallon jars of pickled vegetables, and shrink-wrapped cartons of Crisco, Hamburger Helper, macaroni and cheese, and cigarettes. Martinez radios Gus, and tells him to back the truck up as close to the loading dock as possible, and be ready to roll when the garage door comes up. Austin, still breathless and shaky from the attack, pushes the pallet up to the corrugated metal hatch.
“Gimme that hammer you found back there,” Martinez says to David.
The older man steps up and hands the hammer over to Martinez. The others crowd around, waiting nervously, as Martinez slams the business end of the hammer against the padlock at the bottom of the garage door. The lock is stubborn, and the pounding noises echo. Lilly glances over her shoulder, half aware of shuffling sounds coming from the deeper shadows behind her.
The lock finally snaps, and Martinez yanks the door. The thing rolls up with a rusty shriek. The wind and light rush into the warehouse, smelling of tar and burning rubber, making everybody blink. The floor swirls with stray packing straps and litter stirred up by the breeze.
At first, as they take their initial steps outside, nobody sees the pile of wet rubbish and moldy cardboard boxes across the loading dock, next to a garbage Dumpster, which is moving slightly, palpating with something underneath. They’re all too busy following Martinez out across the grimy deck with armfuls of supplies.
Gus has the truck revving, the tarp thrown open, the exhaust stack chugging and puffing in the spring winds. They start loading up the back.
In through the gap go the heavy duffel bags. In go the boxes. In go the contents of the pallet, the canned goods, the water jugs, the garden supplies, the tools, and the propane. Nobody even notices the moving cadaver across the loading dock, pushing its way out of the trash pile, then rising to its feet with the creaky, inebriated uncertainty of an overgrown baby. Lilly glimpses movement out of the corner of her eye, and turns toward the biter.
A wiry African American corpse in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, with short cornrows crowning his skull, shuffles clumsily toward them like a drunken mime walking against imaginary wind, clawing at the air. He wears a tattered orange jumpsuit that has a familiar look to Lilly, but she can’t place it.
“I got this,” Lilly says to no one in particular as she pulls one of her Rugers.
The others notice the commotion and pause in their efforts, drawing their weapons, watching Lilly stand stone-still, steady as a milepost, aiming her front sight at the approaching corpse. A moment passes. Lilly stands as still as a statue. The others stare as Lilly finally, calmly, almost languidly, decides to pull the trigger, again and again, emptying the remaining six rounds in the magazine.
The gun claps and flashes, and the young black corpse does a jitterbug on the dock for a moment, exit wounds spewing atomized blood. The rounds chew through the hard shell of its cranium, shredding its cornrows and sending chunks of its prefrontal lobe and gray cerebrospinal fluid skyward. Lilly finishes and stares emotionlessly.
The biter doubles over and collapses to the dock in a blood-sodden heap.
Standing in a blue haze of her own gun smoke and cordite, Lilly mumbles something to herself. Nobody hears what she says. The others stare at her for a long moment until Austin finally comes over and says, “Good job, Annie Oakley.”
Martinez breaks the spell. “Okay … let’s get a move on, people! Before we draw more o
f ’em!”
They pile into the back of the truck. Lilly is the last one to climb in and find a spot amid the overloaded cargo bay. She sits on one of the propane tanks, and holds on to a side rail in order to brace herself against the g-forces, as the cab doors slam, and the engine grinds, and the truck suddenly roars away from the loading dock.
Lilly remembers right then—for some reason, the realization popping into her head as the truck pulls away—where she’s seen an orange jumpsuit like the one Cornrow was wearing. It’s a prison suit.
They get all the way across the lot, out the exit, and halfway down the access road before Barbara Stern breaks the silence. “Not a bad day’s work for a bunch of emotional cripples.”
The giggling starts with David Stern, then spreads among every passenger, until finally even Lilly is giggling with crazy, giddy relief and satisfaction.
* * *
By the time they make it back to the highway, each and every occupant of that dark, malodorous enclosure is buzzing with excitement.
“Can you imagine the look on the DeVries kids’ faces when they see all that grape juice?” Barbara Stern looks positively ebullient in her faded denim and wild gray tresses. “I thought they were gonna storm the castle when we ran out of Kool-Aid last week.”
“What about that Starbucks instant Via?” David chimes in. “I can’t wait to retire those goddamn coffee grounds to the compost pile.”
“We got all the food groups, too, didn’t we?!” Austin enthuses from his perch on a crate across from Lilly. “Sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and Dolly Madison cupcakes. Kids are gonna be on a sugar buzz for a month.”
Lilly smiles at the young man for the first time since they met. Austin returns her gaze with a wink, his long curls tossing around his handsome face from the slipstream currents coming through the flapping tarp.
Lilly glances out through the rear hatch and sees the deserted country road passing in a blur, the afternoon sun strobing pleasantly through the trees receding into the distance behind them. For just an instant, she feels like Woodbury might have a chance after all. With enough people like these folks—people who care about each other—they just might have a shot at building a community.
“You did good today, pretty boy,” Lilly says at last to Austin. She looks at the others. “You all did good. In fact, if we can just—”
A faint noise from outside stops her short. At first it sounds merely like the wind buffeting the tarp. But the more Lilly listens to it, the more it sounds like an almost alien noise from another time, another place, a noise that she hasn’t heard—a noise nobody has heard—since the plague broke out years earlier.
“You hear that?” Lilly looks at the others, all of whom now seem to be listening in awe. The noise rises and falls on the wind. It seems to be coming from the sky, maybe a mile away, vibrating the air like a drum roll. “It sounds like—No. It can’t be.”
“What the fuck?” Austin pushes his way toward the rear of the chamber and sticks his head out, craning his neck to get a glimpse of the sky. “You’re kidding me!”
Lilly moves next to him, holding on to the rear hatch and leaning out.
The wind whips her hair and stings her eyes as she peers upward, and sure enough, she catches a fleeting glimpse of it in the western sky.
Just the tail of the craft is visible above the tree line, the rotor spinning wildly, the body of the chopper listing downward. The thing is in trouble. A thin contrail of black smoke flags behind the helicopter like a dark comet as it plunges out of sight.
The cargo truck slows. Martinez and Gus have obviously seen the thing as well.
“Do you think it’s—?” Lilly starts to pose the question on everybody’s mind when her words are cut off.
The impact of the crash—over half a mile away—rattles the earth.
A mushroom cloud of fire lights up the woods and scrapes the sky.
FIVE
“Here! Right here! Pull off!”
Gus pumps the brakes, the cargo truck groaning as it cobbles off the two-lane. It bumps across a narrow patch of muddy grass along the shoulder, and then rattles to a stop in a cloud of carbon monoxide and dust.
“This is as close as we’re gonna get in the truck,” Martinez says, leaning forward in the shotgun seat. He cranes his neck to see through the grimy windshield, getting a fleeting glimpse of the column of smoke rising over the trees on the western horizon. It looks to be about a quarter mile away. He reaches for his .357. “Gonna have to hoof it the rest of the way.”
“It’s a long way off, boss.” Gus gazes out his side window, scratching his grizzled cheek. “Looks like it went down in the deep woods.”
Martinez thinks about it, chewing the inside of his cheek. In this part of Georgia, many of the roadways cut through shallow, wooded valleys known as hollows. Formed by rivers and surrounded by densely forested hills, these thickets of brushwood, weeds, and muck can be rife with sinkholes, colonies of mosquitoes, and plenty of nooks and crannies in which mud-bound biters frequently lurk.
Gus looks at Martinez. “Whaddaya say we try and drive it?”
“Negative.” Martinez bites down hard on the word, checking the cylinder on his Magnum. He can hear the truck’s rear gate banging down, the others climbing out, their tense voices carrying on the afternoon breeze. “We’ll get stuck in this pea soup, sure as shit.”
“Whatever you say, boss.” Gus rams the shift lever into neutral and cuts the engine. The silence fills with the rush of nature—the jet-engine drone of crickets, the wind in the trees.
“Leave the 12-gauge, take one of the AR-15s, in case it gets hairy, and grab the machete under the seat.” Martinez has a black marine raider bowie knife with a fifteen-inch blade strapped to his leg, and now checks it. He does this compulsively, jaw clenched, all business, as he hears the others coming around the side of the truck. He climbs out of the cab.
They all gather at the front of the cab, in the weeds and buzzing clouds of gnats, their faces drawn and pale with tension. The air smells of rot and burning metal. Austin stands there wringing his hands, gazing off at the crash site. The Sterns huddle together, both their brows furrowed with worry. Lilly has her hands on her hips, her Rugers holstered high on her waist. “What are you thinking?” she says to Martinez.
“Dave and Barb, I want you two to stay with the truck, keep watch.” Martinez shoves his Magnum behind his belt. “If you get swarmed, just drive ’em off … lead ’em away … and then circle back and get us. You got that?”
David just nods and nods, looking like a nervous bobblehead doll. “Yes, absolutely.”
“Keep the walkie with you, keep the frequency open while we’re gone.”
Gus hands the two-way to David, who is still nodding and muttering. “Got it, got it.”
“There’s a box of road flares in the back,” Martinez says to Gus. “Go grab a handful. And get the first-aid kit, too, will ya?”
Gus hurries around the back of the truck while Martinez looks at his watch. “We got a good four hours of daylight left. I want to get out there and back before dark, no fucking around.”
Lilly has one high-capacity magazine left. She slams it into her Ruger, snapping the slide. “The thing is, what if we find survivors?”
“That’s the point,” Martinez says, unsnapping the sheath on his leg, positioning the knife hilt for quick access. “Plus the helo might still be in one piece.”
Lilly looks at him. “We got no stretcher, no medic, no way to get them back.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” Martinez says, adjusting his bandanna, already soaked in sweat, across his forehead.
Gus comes back with an armful of flares, which look like sticks of dynamite.
Martinez gives everybody a flare. “I want everybody to stay together, in tight formation … but if for some reason you get separated, light off one of these and we’ll find you.” He looks at the Sterns. “You run into any trouble back here, you light one off.” He
glances at the bald man. “Gus, I want you on the right flank with the machete. Keep the noise down. Use the AR-15 as a last resort. I’ll take the left flank.” He looks at Lilly. “You and Junior take the middle.”
Austin gazes up at the sky. The midafternoon clouds have rolled in. The day has turned gray and ashy. The wetland ahead of them crawls with swaying shadows. It’s been a wet year and now the ground looks impassable, mired in washouts, deadfalls, and dense groves of white pines standing between them and the crash site.
“There’s a creek, runs through the middle of the woods,” Martinez is saying, taking a deep breath and drawing his Magnum. “We’ll follow it as far as we can, and then navigate by the smoke. Everybody got that?”
They all nod, saying nothing, swallowing back the mounting apprehension that passes between them like a virus.
Martinez nods. “Let’s boogie.”
* * *
It’s tough going for a while, the unforgiving mud sucking at the soles of their boots, making wet smacking noises in the primeval silence of the woods. They follow the serpentine bends of the brackish stream, and the deeper they venture into the hollow, the more the trees swallow the daylight.
“You okay, Huckleberry?” Lilly whispers to Austin, who walks alongside her, his Glock gripped tightly in both of his sweaty hands.
“I’m fantastic,” he lies. His long curls are pulled back from his glistening face with a leather tie. He chews on his lip nervously as he churns through the mud.
“You don’t have to hold your gun like that,” she says with a smirk.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re some kind of Delta Force commando. Just keep it handy.”
“Will do.”
“If you get one in the cross hairs, just take your time. They’re slow, so make your shots count. You don’t have to do the gunslinger routine.”
Austin shoots her a glance. “Just want to be ready … in case I need to come to your rescue.”
Lilly gives him an eye roll. “Yeah, great, I feel totally safe now.”
The Walking Dead Collection Page 66