“Good.”
“One question, though.”
The Governor fixes his one eye on her. “What the fuck is it now?”
She chews her lip for a moment, measuring her words. One doesn’t rattle the cage of a wounded animal. But she has to say it. “People are climbing the walls not knowing your condition, your whereabouts.” She looks into his one good eye. “You gotta show them you’re okay.”
He lets out a tortured sigh. “I will soon enough, girlfriend. Don’t you worry about that.” The silence hangs in the room for a moment. The Governor looks at her. “Anything else?”
She shrugs. There’s nothing more to say.
Lilly and Gabe walk out, leaving the Governor to his privacy and the ceaseless, muffled clawing noises in the other room.
* * *
Lilly spends the rest of that night gathering her team and supplies for the reconnaissance mission. Austin is dead set against her going on the run and argues with her about it, but Lilly is adamant. She is galvanized by the task at hand—the need to secure the town, the prospects of nipping any potential danger in the bud. She is fighting for two now—three, if you count Austin. And perhaps more importantly, she doesn’t want anybody getting suspicious about her condition. She doesn’t want to give any indication that she is anything other than a hundred percent. This is her little secret. Her body. Her life. Her future baby’s life.
So she prepares for the journey with relentless attention to detail. She considers taking Bob along but decides against it—his services are needed in town a lot more than they’re needed on this trip; and besides, he’d probably just slow them down. She also decides to leave Bruce in Woodbury to run interference for the Governor. Instead, she enlists Gabe and Gus to go along with her, and Austin, not only for the added muscle but also because each man is intimately familiar with Martinez’s methods and behavior patterns and quirks. Gabe is still stinging from his run-in with Martinez in the subterranean tunnels under the racetrack, but Gabe is also a pragmatist. He knows now it was all part of a bigger plan, and he also knows that Martinez is a lynchpin for them. They need to find these people and intervene before something terrible happens. Plus, Gabe owes Lilly Caul his life.
The last person she recruits is David Stern—mostly for his steel-trap mind and innate intelligence—to help with strategy. Lilly is out of her element here. Tracking human beings across hundreds of square miles of biter-infested wetlands is not exactly a specialty of hers—although she is more motivated than ever now to do what has to be done. Other than Lilly, though, only Gabe and Austin know the real mission Martinez was on. Gus and David are operating under the assumption that Martinez was a traitor and they are now simply trying to catch the escapees.
“It’s been pretty soggy out there for a while now,” David Stern tells Lilly as he loads a crate into the back of the military cargo truck parked in the predawn darkness near the town’s north gate. The truck idles softly—the turbocharged diesel engine burbling and rumbling under the hood—masking the sound of their voices. “My guess is their tracks are still fairly evident.”
“Yeah, but how do we know their tracks from the boatload of walker tracks that have surely mingled with them over the last week?” Lilly poses the question with a grunt as she lifts a carton of bottled water into the cargo bay. They’ve packed enough provisions to stay out on the road for twenty-four hours or more—food, blankets, walkie-talkies, the first-aid kit, binoculars, night-vision goggles, extra batteries, extra ammunition, and an arsenal of weaponry from the Guard station—although Lilly wants to get this done as quickly as possible. The walker activity in the woods has picked up this week, and the faster they get answers, the better. “Seems like it’s gonna be needles in a haystack out there,” she says, shoving the carton on board the truck.
“We’ll start where they were last seen,” David says, climbing onto the running panel. “Sun’s gonna be coming up soon—we’ll assume they headed east, at least initially.”
They finish loading the truck, and then everybody climbs on board.
Gus drives, with Gabe in the shotgun seat—heavily armed—manning the two-way. Lilly rides in back with the supplies, also on a walkie-talkie, with David and Austin each perched on the rear running board for easy access on and off the vehicle. The sun is just beginning to lighten the horizon as the men on the barricade open up the gap—engines firing up, vertical stacks chugging, a semitrailer pulling out of their way—revealing the primordial darkness of the neighboring forest stewing in the morning mists.
Lilly’s stomach tightens as the cargo truck shudders noisily through the opening.
Peering through the rear canvas flap, now beginning to buffet in the breeze, Lilly can see the east side of town passing in the gloomy predawn light as Gus circles around the village. The place looks like Beirut—the territory outside the razor-wire-lined walls littered with wreckage, sinkholes, and mounds of carnage from past skirmishes with walkers. Some of the bodies are headless, scorched, and burned to husks … others lying in open graves of brackish water. As the day dawns, the Durand Street alley comes into view—the wall over which Martinez helped the escapees flee nearly two weeks earlier clearly visible now.
Gus grinds the air brakes, and the truck hisses to a stop on a gravel road thirty feet from the outer wall. David and Austin hop off the board and quickly sweep their flashlights across the ground, illuminating the tracks in the mud—now filled with tiny pockets of filthy rainwater—telling the story of Dr. Stevens’s attack and the subsequent flight toward Highway 85. Over crackling two-way radios, terse observations are sent back to the truck, and Lilly orders the two men back on board.
Now they proceed down a gravel dogleg toward the highway and then pick up the tracks on the other side of the asphalt two-lane. David Stern reminds them to ignore all the footprints that mark themselves with long slash marks—the telltale sign of a walker’s lumbering shuffle—and keep their eyes peeled for well-defined impressions. Once they get used to the differences, it becomes easier to spot evidence of the fleeing humans. Even two weeks old, the prints—at many junctures along the escape route—have dried into the mire in little perfect boot-shaped puddles.
By midmorning they lose the prints about a mile west of Greenville, and Gus pulls the truck over. Up to this point the escapees have apparently fled in a north-by-northwesterly direction from Woodbury, but now it’s anybody’s guess as to if and when they changed direction. Luckily, the walker sightings this morning have been few and far between, and as the sun beats down on the cargo truck, turning the interior into a sauna, they sit there for a moment, sweating through their clothes and discussing their next move. Gabe suggests striking out on foot, but Lilly doesn’t like the idea of splitting up or leaving the truck unattended.
Then Lilly remembers the crash site—the downed news chopper that sent them on a tangent on their last supply run several weeks ago—and she realizes that they’re only about a half a mile south of the wreckage. She asks Gus to drive north a little farther, and he does, and within minutes they’ve reached the same muddy washout over which they trod three and a half weeks ago.
Gus pulls over and brings the truck to a stop. They all look at Lilly, the realization dawning on everybody all at once: They can’t avoid it any longer.
They have to strike out on foot … into the walker-infested woods.
SIX
“Okay, David, check this out.” She leads him across the muddy gravel shoulder and pauses on the edge of the embankment, gesturing down at the constellation of footprints indelibly stamped in the clay. A cloud of gnats writhes around her head for a moment, and she bats them away as her comrades gather around her. Hundreds of footprints—all shapes and sizes and degrees of freshness—crisscross the mossy ground, many of them belonging to Lilly and her cohorts from earlier that month. But some of them look fresher. “What do you make of those?” Lilly says, pointing at a diagonal row of prints cutting a swath from the road to the woods—a file of people
moving fairly quickly—toward the deeper woods.
David stares at the prints. “Looks like somebody knew where they were going.”
Gus chimes in. “Crash site?”
“You better believe it,” David says. “Maybe Martinez thought they could find something else out there. We didn’t get a chance to completely search the aircraft last time. Who knows what we missed.”
Lilly gazes out at the tree line in the distance, the dense netting of foliage billowing in the wind like dirty green drapes.
About five hundred yards away, in the cleavage of a thickly forested hollow, they first encountered the wreckage of the helicopter—its pilot dead, its lone passenger clinging to life. Now the smoke has long cleared, but chances are the chopper still lies on its side in the dry riverbed where they found it weeks ago. Lilly makes an instant decision. “Okay … everybody knows the drill. Gus stays with the truck. Bring extra ammo and water. We’ll stay in touch with the walkies. Let’s go.”
They load up their packs and strike out across the muddy wetlands.
* * *
By midday they reach the crash site. The chopper lies where they left it—crumpled on the banks of the muddy creek bed like a petrifying dinosaur, its rotors torn asunder, its fuselage battered, windows shattered—the riveted hull already beginning to oxidize in the unforgiving sun. Thousands of footprints circle the wreckage in the mud—many, many more than they remember leaving there—and David Stern begins to study them. He doesn’t hear the faint crackle of twigs in the middle distance, the collective shuffling of insensate feet churning through the undergrowth toward them from practically every direction. He’s too busy extrapolating the narrative of Martinez’s journey.
From the profusion of prints, as well as the rearrangement of certain pieces of wreckage, David concludes that Martinez’s group not only passed this way but also probably spent the night. The cabin door lies in a patch of weeds and nettle to the left of the nose, a wet blanket draped off one end. Inside the cabin, he finds signs of a bivouac—empty water bottles, wadded wrappers, an empty carton of ammunition. David is shining a flashlight into the shadows of the cockpit when a voice tugs at his attention. “David, take a look at this … over here.”
He turns and sees Lilly standing on the other side of the riverbed, kneeling, taking a closer look at the leaf-matted ground.
David goes over and sees the footprints embedded in the mud. “Those are fresher, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.” She points out the deeper tracks that have fanned out from a circle of newer prints near the crash. “Looks like they spent some time here, maybe met up with somebody, and then headed off in that direction.” She points to the deepening shadows to the west, where the trees thicken along the creek bed. “I say we head that way.”
By this point, Gabe and Austin have joined them, and they have their guns out and ready to rock. Gabe has been hearing noises he doesn’t like in the high trees above the stream, and he’s jumpy. Lilly checks her .22s and then takes the lead. She follows the dry gulley into the thickets, keeping an eye on both the prints and the adjacent barrier of trees on either side of her. The others follow. Conversation comes to a screeching halt.
The silence blankets them. It’s a sticky, droning, heavy silence, full of the implacable vibrations of nature—insects humming in their ears, a distant trickle of water—and it makes their footsteps sound like explosions. Gabe gets exceedingly edgy. Something doesn’t feel right. Lilly’s heart quickens. After a while, she draws both pistols and then plods along the riverbed holding the guns at her side.
They cross another quarter mile of wooded hollow—the dry creek bed snaking through endless palisades of pines and white birch—before they begin to feel as though the prints are leading them into a trap. The troubling noises have returned. Lilly hears twigs snapping and dry leaves crackling rhythmically from somewhere in the middle distance, but it’s impossible to parse which direction they’re coming from. They can smell the stench of walkers drifting on the breeze.
Their guns come up, thumbs on the safeties, poised, knife sheaths unsnapping, eyes peeled, hearts racing, muscles coiled, ears pricked, flesh crawling. The woods are alive now with noises and moving shadows and rotten odors rising and it’s driving everybody crazy. But from what direction are the dead coming? Lilly slows down and peers into the distant foliage and suddenly raises her hand. “Hold on!” she hisses in a loud whisper, making everybody freeze in their tracks. “Everybody down—GET DOWN!—right now!”
They move as one, each of them ducking down behind a row of mossy boulders embedded in the humus. Guns raised, eyes wide and alert, they all look at Lilly, who gazes over the top of the crags.
In the distance, about fifty yards away, she sees a break in the trees, revealing another clearing—this one a vast, overgrown meadow—crawling with ragged, dark figures. Lilly’s pulse quickens. She glances to her right and notices a narrow footpath snaking up an embankment into the higher trees. She looks at the others and points to the path, and then silently gestures at a ridge of deadfall logs higher up.
They follow her up the path—staying low, moving as silently as they can, their breaths stuck in their throats—and Lilly leads them across the top of the ridge. They duck down next to each other behind the massive timbers. From this vantage point—through the cover of trees—they each get a clear view of the huge meadow below.
“Good God … it’s a fucking convention,” Lilly utters through clenched teeth as she takes in the enormity of the primordial pasture.
* * *
The size of five football fields laid end to end, the rain-sodden ground riotous with windblown wild grasses and daubs of color from yellow dandelions and red columbine, the immense meadow teems with walkers of every description. Some of them circle a festering carcass of a dead deer, hectic with flies, while others wander aimlessly along the periphery like drunken sentinels. Some can barely move due to missing limbs or mangled appendages, while others look as though their tattered garb has been shredded and spray-painted with gore. The sun beats down on the pasture, the far corners wavering in skeins of heat rays and cottonwood floating in the air like ghostly snow. A faint burr of growling thrums on the breeze from the collective vocalization of at least fifty or more walkers.
“Lilly, honey,” David Stern finally murmurs very softly, “would you mind handing me those binoculars?”
Lilly shrugs off her backpack, unzips it, pulls out the small field glasses, and hands them over to David. The older man puts the lenses to his eyes and surveys the breadth and length of the meadow below them. The others gape. Austin huddles next to Lilly, his breathing audible in her ears, his nervousness palpable. Gabe fingers the trigger guard on his MIG, just itching to waste the entire field with a few well-placed bursts.
Lilly starts to whisper something when she hears David mumbling under his breath.
“No … not … oh God no … no.” He fiddles with the focus knob and presses the binoculars to his eyes. “Oh Jesus Christ … don’t tell me.”
“What?!” Lilly swallows her fear and hisses the words at him. “David, what is it?!”
He hands the binoculars over to her. “To the left, by the deer,” he says. “The one wandering off by himself in the corner.”
She gazes through the binoculars and finds the lone walker in the southeast corner of the meadow, and her entire body sags with despair as she identifies the frayed and torn figure shuffling along the cattails and weeds. A twinge of first-trimester cramps clenches her midsection for a moment, and her eyes burn. In the shaky blur of the binoculars’ narrow field of vision, she sees the trademark bandanna still wrapped around the tall male’s head, the sideburns apparent along the side of the once handsome face—now a nightmare of pallid flesh, cadmium eyes, and puckered, lipless mouth. “Fuck,” she utters breathlessly.
Gabe and Austin are both dying to grab the binoculars, so Lilly hands them over.
Each taking their turn, they gaze one at a time through t
he telescopic lenses at the sun-blanched meadow below them. Each man reveals through body language—a sudden anguished slump from Austin, an exhalation of air through gritted teeth from Gabe—that they have identified the lone walker.
Austin speaks first, gazing at Lilly. “Whaddaya think happened?”
Lilly looks through the binoculars, muttering as she carefully scans the meadow. “There’s no way of knowing for sure, but it looks like … I don’t know … see those deep ruts coming across the field from the east?”
“Yeah, I saw them.”
David chimes in. “Yes, I noticed them, too—they look like tire marks from a large vehicle—a truck, a van, a camper, something like that.”
Lilly peers through the lens and surveys the ragged circular divot in the ground where the truck or the RV either skidded out of control or came to an abrupt halt. For some reason, she thinks the tracks have something to do with Martinez’s demise.
She swings the binocs back over to the lone walker in the corner of the meadow. The thing that was once Caesar Ramon Martinez—a former gym teacher from Augusta, Georgia, a loner with natural leadership skills—now trundles awkwardly back and forth through the dust motes of cottonwood and pale rays of sun with no direction, no purpose, no goal other than to feed. His arms and torso—even from this distance, in the blur of the binoculars—appear completely scourged, eviscerated to shreds by many sets of rotting teeth. Cords of bloody gristle and sinew dangle from his gashed midsection. A slimy white bone fragment pokes through his tattered pant leg, giving his shuffling gate a pronounced limp.
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