Martinez breaks the spell. “Okay … let’s get a move on, people! Before we draw more of ’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.