Miraculously, they both make it to the small clearing east of town, at approximately the same time—Lilly circumnavigating the herd by taking the long way around the switchyard, avoiding the thickest pockets of dead, Miles getting there by exiting the safe zone along Flat Shoals Road and then circling around the northeast corner of town. Once they get there, things start moving very quickly, far too quickly for them to notice any signs of tampering, such as fluid dripping from the convolutions of the Challenger’s undercarriage.
By the time they reach the car, they are each far too winded and pumped up with adrenaline to see the broken boughs and branches on the west edge of the clearing or the freshly formed tire tracks angling across the ground. Sheltered by the shaggy boughs of willow trees, surrounded by thickets of ironweed, the area is bordered on one side by the Flint River and barely large enough to accommodate a full-sized sedan. The neon purple Dodge Challenger sits in the center of the clearing, gleaming in the pale daylight filtering down through the skeletal branches of black oaks.
They don’t say much to each other at first, communicating mostly through gestures and nods and quick hand signals. They’re in a big hurry. Lilly figures the preacher has a ten-minute head start. If they’re lucky, they can locate him by the wake of dust and exhaust kicked up by the massive tow truck. But luck will also have to play a part. The preacher could easily take an unexpected turn and be off the grid in the blink of an eye.
Miles fires up the 426 cubic inches as Lilly climbs in through the passenger door. The gargantuan V8 gargles to life, emitting a belch of black exhaust and the roar of a mint-condition hemi cold block with zero catalytic converters to slow things down. Neither of them notice the recently formed imprint of a body in the dirt beneath the car, nor do they see the oily puddle of crimson brake fluid just beginning to form beneath the front end.
The car lurches backward.
Miles yanks the wheel, then rams the shift lever forward and steps on it, sending the Challenger into a fishtailing rush across greasy weeds, then blasting out through the south end of the clearing, where a dirt road wends along the Flint for about a mile and a half before giving way to the Crest Highway. If Miles had been less engaged with the mission and paying closer attention to the function of the brake pedal, he might have noticed the squishiness in the brakes when he brought the car to a stop in order to throw it into drive. But things are too chaotic now to detect such nuances, and besides, the line was only partially cut minutes earlier, and is still functioning. The intention of the saboteur, apparently, is for it to blow out under pressure.
Lilly glances over her shoulder at the walker-riddled landscape around the little town as it recedes into the distance behind them. She can see the gore shooting into the air a mile away, the vertical stack of Tommy’s harvester spewing like a Texas gusher. The sight of the combine mowing down rows of walking dead while the beleaguered town sits in a miasma of smoke puts a crimp in her heart.
She shakes it off and turns back to gaze out the steeply angled windshield at the overcast sunlight beating down on the weathered pavement of the two-lane rushing under their car. Miles has already hit sixty miles an hour, a lot faster than the state police would recommend on an access road such as this, and now the kid has his hoodie up and over his head. Lilly can see only the front of his narrow nose, a few strands of his dreadlocks, and his boyish chin with its little peach-fuzz goatee jutting out as he concentrates with practiced intensity, scanning and not staring, steering with his left hand, his right on the shift knob. Lilly figures the hood is an affectation, an obsessive-compulsive habit donned whenever the young man is on the job, and that’s fine with her. She needs this kid at the peak of his game if they’re going to catch up with the preacher’s tow truck—a vehicle that can’t hope to match the Challenger for speed, agility, and handling. In fact, the preacher is about the only thing Lilly can think about right now.
The need for closure—for the termination of this madman’s reign—burns as bright as magnesium behind Lilly’s eyes. This bloodlust so preoccupies her thoughts that she’s completely oblivious to the fact that the car is starting to exhibit obvious signs of tampering.
Of course, Lilly has no idea that Jeremiah Garlitz was once employed as a service station attendant when he was in his teens, and that he knows all the tricks, especially the ones employed to quickly and discreetly sabotage cars. Mechanics talk about this kind of stuff all the time. They have chat lines on the Internet and they share inside information about how this kind of thing is not like it’s shown in the movies. How would Lilly ever know this? How would she ever guess in a million years that Jeremiah would try such a thing in order to ensure that nobody pursued him? How would she ever know that his scouts had found the Challenger’s secret parking place?
The truth is, even if Lilly had known all these things, she probably would have still gone after the preacher. Rage is pulling her strings now, narrowing her thoughts into a tunnel, crackling in her brain like an overloading circuit. She can taste the man’s death on her tongue.
But all this is about to change as soon as they hit their first big downgrade.
* * *
Tommy Dupree loses his voice after nearly twenty minutes of sustained howling—his triumphant howls accompanied by the collective din of hundreds and hundreds of walkers turned to pulp under the churning devastation of the combine’s massive cutting skid. Over the rumbling of the engine and the clatter of the whirling blades, the wet, garbled, crunching noise of cadavers being ground to pieces is tremendous, addictive, surreal.
Tommy’s voice finally crumbles into a hoarse hissing noise as he cries out for his dead parents, for his lost childhood, for his ruined world.
The black geyser of tissues continues to leap up and wash across his machine, wave after wave, sluicing down the window glass, pulsing and streaking in the wipers, feeding Tommy’s psychotic state. He has turned half of the super-herd into paste, cutting a swath of annihilation from the edge of the safe zone all the way east to Kendricks Road, and he keeps going, and he will keep going until he runs out of gas or dies—whichever comes first—because he was born to do this. All those summer landscaping jobs, commandeering the riding mower until his neck blistered in the sun and his arms seized up with cramps, all to help his parents dig their way out of bankruptcy, and maybe to also thumb his nose at the kids at Rolling Acres grade school who made fun of him because he was poor and he had to wear those Kmart tennis shoes all the time—all of it has led to this: his destiny, his true calling.
He is covered with a fine layer of gore the color of stomach bile, the suction of the wind blowing a mist of the walkers’ tissue through the vents of the pilothouse. Tommy doesn’t care. He also doesn’t notice that the fuel gauge is on “E” and that the engine is starting to sputter.
Fiddling with the gearbox, increasing the speed of the windshield wipers, he steers the machine toward the next wave of walkers coming toward him from the parking lot of the derelict grocery store on Millard Road. Through the slime-coated glass, he sees them reaching for the blades as though deliverance awaits in the rushing metal teeth, and then go down in a chain reaction, faces furrowed and vexed, eyes popping out of their skulls.
The engine dies.
The great revolving shredder in front slowly jangles to a rusty, creaking stop.
Tommy leans forward with a jerk, the silence terrifying. Entrails drip down into the works of the reaper. Tommy looks at the gauge to his right, taps it, sees the needle resting on the pin below “E,” and starts to panic. He unbuckles his safety harness and is climbing out of his bucket seat when the first impact shudders through the cabin, as though the earth itself has buckled under the machine. Something is pushing on the side of the combine. Tommy climbs across the cab to the side window and looks down.
Scores of biters, all shapes and sizes, all whipped into frenzies, push up against the side of the machine. Tommy grabs hold of the seat-back as another shudder passes through the interior. The right side of the machine levitates a few inches and then bangs back down as more and more walkers swarm the combine. Tommy holds on tightly, fingers digging into the upholstery.
The machine begins to list, leaning to the left on its enormous wheels, as the collective pressure of hundreds of the dead press in on the right side.
Tommy lets out a scream—his voice gone, only a hoarse rasp coming out—as the combine begins to tip over.
* * *
“Check that shit out! Down in the northbound fucking lane! There’s that motherfucker!”
As the Challenger roars along the plateau overlooking Elkins Creek, Miles Littleton sees the distant bloom of dust about a quarter mile away on Highway 74. He points down at the valley of tobacco fields spreading off to their right like a vast patchwork quilt in the washed out sunlight. The tow truck roars eastward, burning oil, sending up gouts of black smoke into the atmosphere.
“Take the next turnoff!” Lilly indicates an intersection up ahead, a narrow dirt road snaking down the side of the hill toward the farmland.
“Fuck!—FUCK!” All at once Miles is looking down at the dashboard. “FUCK!!”
“What’s the matter?” Lilly sees the intersection coming up fast, the turnoff on the right marked by reflectors on sticks. “Slow the fuck down!”
“The brakes are fucked!”
“WHAT?!”
“The brakes ain’t working!”
“Turn here, goddamnit—TURN!” Lilly grabs the steering wheel and yanks it at the last possible moment, sending the Challenger into a skid, eliciting an angry cry from Miles as he wrestles the wheel back in line.
The car careens around the corner and plunges down the slope.
For a brief instant, Lilly feels the weightless sensation of a roller coaster, as though she might levitate out of her seat. The trees blur by them on either side, the wind whipping across their open windows, whistling above the engine. The car squeals around a series of curves and then the road straightens out.
The Challenger picks up speed.
“We. Got. No. Fucking. Brakes!” Miles restates this fact as though it is an imponderable cosmological formula that only a handful of astrophysicists might truly grasp. He struggles with the wheel, keeping a white-knuckle grip, teeth clenched inside the shadow of his hoodie. The speedometer inches past eighty, past eighty-five. “Motherfucker must have cut our lines, if you believe that shit!”
“Just keep it steady!” On the straightaway Lilly can now get a clear line of sight on the tow truck in the distance, a little over a quarter mile ahead of them, a watery image in the heat rays of the highway.
The Challenger reaches the bottom of the hill, their speed exceeding ninety miles an hour now, and the gravitational forces suck Lilly into her seat. Miles lets out an angry grunt and steers the car onto a forking entrance ramp. The wheels drum and complain on the weathered pavement as they roar onto the highway. The wind buffets them, pounding against the open window.
“AIN’T EVEN GIVING IT ANY GAS!” Miles marvels at this new development above the noise. “ABOUT TO HIT THE CENTURY MARK, AIN’T EVEN TOUCHING THE FOOT-FEED!—MOTHERFUCKER FUCKED WITH THE ENGINE!”
As Lilly checks the two pistols wedged behind her belt, their speed holds at around the 100-mph mark—a surprisingly bumpy ride on the original shocks and pinions. The distance between the two vehicles is closing fast. Apparently, Jeremiah has the tow truck opened up, running at top speed, judging by the way the thing is weaving from lane to lane and smoking profusely. This section of the highway is relatively free of wreckage, but every now and then, Miles is forced to swerve to avoid the carcass of an abandoned car or the fossilized remnants of a camper lying on its side.
“Shit!” Lilly drops the speed-loader, and it rolls under the seat.
Up ahead, the preacher’s truck looms closer and closer. At this distance—a little less than a hundred yards—the human remains hanging off the tow crane are visible, a grisly simulacrum of something that used to be a man, the arms and legs long gone, the object now resembling a side of beef hanging in a meatpacking plant. The strobe, evidently connected to the truck’s battery, still flickers at odd Pavlovian intervals.
Lilly stops looking for the bullets and stares at that blinking strobe.
Something breaks loose inside her—something unseen and deeply buried—triggered by that silver beacon flashing its cryptic signal. Looming closer and closer, the Challenger draws to within a hundred feet of the fishtailing, smoking, gore-draped heap of a truck, and Lilly feels the tide of rage inside her crash up against the wall of something far darker.
A psychologist might call this “hypomania.” Active-duty soldiers call it a “kill frenzy.”
“What the fuck are you doing now?!” Miles demands to know when Lilly tosses the gun into the backseat, her focus still locked on to that flickering signal light. He alternates his gaze from her to the front of the vehicle, which is closing in on the rear of the tow truck, the carnage-festooned crane close enough now to reach out and touch. “Hold on, girlfriend! Gonna ram it!”
The wide grille of the Challenger smashes into the truck’s trailer hitch.
This shoves both Miles and Lilly forward, smashing them into the dash, sending shards of pain up the bridge of Lilly’s nose, galvanizing her, electrifying her as the pale silver light goes on flashing like some out-of-kilter disco ball. In the cab of the tow truck, Jeremiah ducks down for a moment, flinching at the impact.
Miles holds the car steady as a large fragment of the tow truck’s bumper tears away and clatters to the road, bouncing off into an adjacent field.
Lilly pushes herself up and out the open passenger window. The noise of the slipstream drowns out Miles’s bellowing shouts of anger and confusion. All Lilly can hear now are the gusts of wind and the dissonant harmony of the two power plants roaring in unison as she climbs out onto the window frame, grasping the side mirror for purchase. Then she clambers onto the hood.
The car swerves slightly.
She braces herself on the air injector, rises up, coils herself, bending her knees and fixing her gaze on the rear deck of the massive tow truck, and leaps.