EIGHTEEN
A large, putrefied biter in a shredded medical smock goes for Lilly, and it nearly gets its rotten teeth into her neck, when Martinez manages to get off a burst that takes off the top of the thing’s skull.
Rancid, black blood fountains up across the ceiling, spitting across Lilly’s face, as she backs away from the open doorway. More biters scuttle in through the gaping hatch. Lilly’s ears go deaf—ringing from the noise—as she backs toward the front wall.
The Governor, still shackled, scoots backward, away from the onslaught, as Gabe gets a loaded carbine rifle up and barking, the barrage punching through dead tissue and rotting skulls. Brain matter blossoms like black chrysanthemums, as the interior of the van smokes and teeters and floods with death stench. More and more biters swarm the opening, despite the blazing gunfire.
“BRUCE, CUT ME LOOSE!”
The Governor’s voice—nearly drowned by the din, barely audible to Lilly’s ringing eardrums—gets Bruce moving with the knife. Meanwhile Martinez and Lilly unleash a salvo of gunfire, muzzles flashing, the noise enormous, entire clips being emptied, the successive blasts hitting eye sockets and mandibles and slimy bald pates and putrid foreheads, sending black tissue and blood and fluids spurting and flinging across the open hatch.
Bruce’s knife slices down on the Governor’s shackles, and within seconds the Governor is free and has a carbine in his hands.
The air blazes with gunfire, and soon the five surviving human occupants of the van are clustered together against the cab’s firewall, each of them blasting away at will, spraying a hell storm across the rear hatch. The sound is gargantuan, ear-piercing, amplified by the metal fuselage of the van. Some of the rounds miss their targets, ricocheting off the door frame in daisy chains of sparks.
Mangled zombies drop to the floor of the van, dominoes falling, some of them slipping off the slimy back edge of the hatch, others caught in the pile. The barrage continues another ten seconds, during which time the back spray of blood and bodily matter cover the humans in layers of gore. A splinter of steel strikes Lilly’s thigh, embedding itself, a wasp sting of pain waking her up.
Over the course of a single minute—an interminable sixty seconds of elapsed time that feels to Lilly like a lifetime—each and every last ammo magazine is emptied into dead flesh, and every last zombie crowding the doorway drops and slides to the pavement outside the van, leaving leech trails of blood on the corrugated ledge.
The last remaining bodies get stuck in the hatchway, and in the horrible, ear-ringing silence that ensues, as Gabe and Martinez and the Governor reload, Bruce lunges toward the hatch. He kicks the stragglers off the rear parapet, the bodies falling to the asphalt with a splat. Lilly thumbs her spent magazine out of her Ruger, the clip clattering to the floor, the metallic clunk unheard by her deafened ears. Her face and arms and clothing are covered in blood and bile. She reloads, her pulse throbbing in her traumatized ears.
In the meantime Bruce wrenches the double doors shut, the damaged hinges making a loud squeak that barely penetrates the ringing in Lilly’s ears.
The latch clicks, sealing them back inside the blood-drenched death chamber, but the worst part, the part that has everybody’s attention now, is the half-glimpsed landscape beyond the van, the forest on either side of the road, and the switchback way up on the plateau in the distance, draped in darkness and crawling with moving shadows.
* * *
What they glimpse before the doors bang shut challenges comprehension. They’ve all seen herds before, some of them huge, but this one defies description—a mass of dead the likes of which no one has seen since the plague broke out months ago. Nearly a thousand moving corpses in every imaginable state of decomposition stretch as far as the eye can see. Throngs of snarling zombies, so thick one could walk across their shoulders, line the edges of the hill on either side of Highway 85. Moving slowly and lethargically, their sheer number threatening mass destruction, they bring to mind a black glacier aimlessly cutting through the trees and slicing across the fields and roads. Some of them barely have flesh left on their bones, their ragged burial clothing hanging mosslike in the darkness. Others snap at the air with the involuntary twitching of snakes stirred from their nests. The length and breadth of the multitude, each face as pale white as mother-of-pearl, gives the impression of a vast, moving flood tide of infected pus.
Inside the van, the primordial terror touched off by this sight stiffens the spines of everyone present. Gabe raises his carbine at Martinez. “You stupid f*cking son of a bitch! Look at what you’ve done! Look at what you’ve gotten us into!!”
Before anybody can react Lilly swings her Ruger up and trains it on Gabe. Ears ringing, she cannot hear exactly what he says in reply but she knows he means business. “I will f*cking blow you away if you don’t back off, a*shole!”
Bruce pounces on Lilly with his buck knife, putting it around her neck. “Bitch, you got about three seconds to drop that motherf*cking—”
“BRUCE!” The Governor aims his carbine at Bruce. “Back off!”
Bruce doesn’t move. The blade stays pressed against Lilly’s throat, and Lilly keeps her gun leveled on Gabe, and Martinez trains his assault rifle on the Governor. “Philip, listen to me,” Martinez says softly, “I promise you I will drop you first before I go down.”
“Everybody just calm the f*ck down!” The Governor’s knuckles are white on the carbine’s hilt. “Only way we’re gonna get outta this mess is together!”
The van shudders again as more zombies close in, making everybody jerk.
“What are you thinking?” Lilly says.
“First of all, get those f*cking guns out of everybody’s face.”
Martinez burns his gaze into Bruce. “Bruce, get away from her.”
“Do what he says, Bruce.” The Governor keeps the muzzle on Bruce. A single pearl of sweat rolls down the bridge of the Governor’s nose. “PUT THE F*ckING KNIFE DOWN OR I WILL PUT YOUR BRAINS ON THAT WALL!”
Reluctantly, the rage blazing in his dark almond eyes, Bruce lowers the knife.
The van trembles again, as the guns slowly tilt down, one at a time, away from their targets.
Martinez is the last to lower his rifle. “If we can get to the cab, we can plough our way outta here.”
“Negative!” The Governor looks at him. “We’ll lead this f*cking stampede back to Woodbury!”
“What do you suggest?” Lilly asks the Governor with cold acid running through her veins. She feels the horrible sensation of giving over to the madman again, her soul shrinking into a tiny black hole inside her. “We can’t just sit here on our thumbs.”
“How far are we from town? Like less than mile?” The Governor asks this almost rhetorically as he gazes around the van’s blood-sodden interior, glancing from carton to carton. He sees the spare parts of gun mounts, shell casings, military-grade ammunition. “Lemme ask you something,” he says, turning to Martinez. “You seem to have thought through this big coup d’état like a real military man. You got any RPGs in this crate? Anything with a little more punch than a simple grenade?”
* * *
It takes them less than five minutes to find the ordnance and load the RPG and lay out the strategy and get into position, and throughout that time the Governor gives most of the orders, keeping everybody moving, as the horde surrounds the van like bees swarming a hive. By the time the survivors are ready to launch their countermeasure, the number of dead pressing in on the vehicle is so high the van nearly tips over.
The muffled sound of the Governor’s voice, coming from inside the van, counting down … “three, two, one” … is incomprehensible to the dead, their putrid ears brushing the outer shell of the vehicle.
The first blast blows the rear doors off the van as if they were on explosive bolts.
The eruption catapults half a dozen walkers into the air, the rocket-propelled grenade punching through the dense crowd of corpses clustered outside the hatch like a hot poker ramming through butter. The projectile goes off ten yards away from the van.
The explosion immolates at least a hundred—maybe more—in the general vicinity of the vehicle. The sound of it rivals a sonic boom from a passing jet, the report shaking the ground, arcing up into the heavens, and echoing out across the tops of trees.
The back draft shoots up and out—a convection of flame the size of a basketball court—turning night to day and transforming the closest zombies into flaming human debris, some of them practically vaporized, others becoming dancing columns of fire. The inferno razes an area of fifty square yards around the van.
Gabe leaps out of the van first, a scarf around his mouth and nose to filter the acrid fumes of dead flesh cooking in the napalmlike maelstrom. He is followed closely by Lilly, who covers her mouth with one hand, and fires off three quick shots with her Ruger in the other hand, taking down a few stray zombies in their path.
They make it to the cab, throw the door open, and climb in—pushing Broyles’s contorted, bloody remains aside—and within seconds the rear wheels are digging in, and the vehicle is launching out of there.
The van bulldozes through files of zombies, turning the upright cadavers into putrefied jelly on the pavement, cutting a swath toward a hairpin turn that looms ahead of them. And when they reach the tight curve, Gabe executes the last phase of the escape.
He yanks the wheel, and the van careens off the road and up the side of a wooded hill.
The rough terrain taxes the tires and suspension, but Gabe keeps the foot feed pinned, and the rear-wheel drive churns through the soft muddy floor of the hill, fishtailing wildly, nearly dumping the other three men out the gaping, jagged opening in the rear.
When they reach the crest of the hill, Gabe slams on the brakes and the van skids to a stop.
It takes a minute to aim the mortar launcher, a squat iron cylinder that Martinez hastily jury-rigged to a machine-gun mount. The muzzle is pointed upward at a forty-five-degree angle. By the time they’re ready to fire, at least two hundred zombies have started shambling up the hill toward the van, drawn to the noise and headlights.
Martinez primes the launcher and touches off the ignition button.
The mortar booms, the projectile rocketing skyward, arcing out over the valley, the tracery of its tail like a glowing neon contrail. The explosive shell lands smack-dab in the middle of the sea of walking dead. At least four hundred yards from the van, the mini mushroom cloud of flame is seen a few milliseconds before the FFOOOMP of its impact is heard, and the flash that follows turns the underbelly of the night sky a deep, hot DayGlo orange.
Flaming particles blossom into the heavens, a mixture of dirt, debris, and dead tissue, the shock wave of fire rolling at least a hundred yards in all directions, burning hundreds of biters into ash. A vast autoclave could not cremate the dead faster or more thoroughly.
The remaining walkers, drawn away from the hill by the fiery spectacle, awkwardly turn and drag themselves toward the light.
Away from Woodbury.
* * *
They return to town on hobbling wheels, a cracked rear transaxle, shattered windows, and blown doors. They keep gazing out the back for indications of the phenomenal herd, signs of being followed, but other than a few wayward stragglers stumbling along the edges of the orchards, only the orange glow on the western horizon reflects the aftermath of the swarm.
Nobody sees Gabe silently pass the Governor a pearl-handled .45 semiautomatic behind Martinez’s back until it’s too late. “We got unfinished business, you and me,” the Governor blurts suddenly, pressing the muzzle against the back of Martinez’s neck as the van rumbles around a corner.
Martinez lets out one long, anguished sigh. “Get it over with.”
“You got a short memory, son,” the Governor says. “This is the kind of shit happens outside these walls. I’m not gonna waste you, Martinez … not yet, at least … right now we need each other.”
Martinez says nothing, just looks down at the iron corrugations of the floor and waits for his life to come to an end.
They enter the village from the west, and Gabe pulls around in front of the arena and slides into a parking place reserved for service vehicles. Crowd noises still echo from the stands, although from the sound of the catcalls and whistles, the fights have probably deteriorated into chaos. The show’s eccentric emcee has been missing in action for over an hour … but nobody has had the wherewithal to leave.
Gabe and Lilly get out of the cab and walk around to the rear hatch. Filmed in a layer of gore, her face spackled with blood spray, Lilly feels a skin-prickling sense of unease, and she puts her hand on the grip of her Ruger, which is wedged behind her belt. She’s not thinking straight. She feels as though she’s half asleep, sluggish with shock, groggy and breathless.
When she turns the corner at the rear of the van she sees Martinez standing without a weapon, his arms soot-covered from the mortar blowback, his sad chiseled face stippled with blood, the Governor directly behind him, pressing the muzzle of the .45 against his neck.
Lilly instinctively draws her Ruger, but before she can even aim it, the Governor issues a warning.
“You shoot that thing, your boyfriend’s going down,” the Governor hisses at her. “Gabe, take her little peashooter from her.”
Gabe snatches the gun out of Lilly’s hands, and Lilly just stares at the Governor. A voice rings out in the night air, coming from above them.
“Hey!”
The Governor ducks down. “Martinez, tell your guy on the upper deck everything’s okay.”
Way up on the crest of the arena roof, on one corner of the upper deck, a machine-gun turret is mounted. A long perforated barrel angles down at the dirt parking lot, behind which stands a young cohort of Martinez’s—a tall black kid from Atlanta, name of Hines—a young man who is not privy to the secret overthrow attempt.
“What the hell’s going on?” he yells down at them. “Folks look like y’all been in a war!”
“Everything’s cool, Hines!” Martinez calls up to him. “Had to deal with a few biters is all!”
The Governor keeps his .45 out of sight, the muzzle prodding the small of Martinez’s back. “Hey, kid!” The Governor jerks his head, indicating the dark grove of trees on the other side of the main road. “You want to do me a favor and take out those stragglers we got coming up behind us through the trees!” Then the Governor points at the van. “When you’re done with that, there’s two bodies in the van need shooting in the head, then take ’em to the morgue.”
The machine-gun turret squeaks, and the barrel swings up, and everybody whirls to see movement across the street, a pair of lumbering silhouettes emerging from the trees, the last of the stragglers.
The muzzle roars off the arena roof, the flare of sparks coming one millisecond before the booming report, as the Governor urges Martinez forward toward the building, everybody jerking at the noise.
Armor-piercing rounds strafe the walkers stumbling out of the forest, the zombies dancing upright for a moment like string puppets in an earthquake, blood mist issuing out the backs of their heads—red steam venting. Hines empties an entire bandolier of .762 millimeter cartridges into the walkers for good measure. When they finally go down in pulpy, steaming gut heaps, the kid named Hines lets out a little victory yelp and then looks back across the grounds.
The Governor, Martinez, and the rest of their party have vanished.