The Walking Dead: Invasion by Robert Kirkman

conserving their bullets. They carry secondary weapons—the younger man a machete stuffed down his belt, the older man a twelve-inch hunting knife in a sheath on his hip—each using his auxiliary weapon for both slashing thickets of foliage and impaling the skulls of errant walkers. They’ve been lucky these last few hours, running into very few roamers. The herd seems to have coalesced north of here, with only a few stragglers dragging along the back roads of southern Meriwether County.
    â€œLook!” Reese Lee Hawthorne, his face shimmering with sweat, his clothes soaked through, speaks in a loud whisper, cautious about drawing too much attention. “Straight ahead—the other side of that clearing—see it?!”
    The two young men come to a halt under a canopy of thick pine boughs. The late afternoon light undulates above them with bugs, the air smelling of wood-rot and forest musk. Stephen Pembry catches his breath and nods slowly. “Thank the Lord, thank the Good Lord.”
    Through the brambles he can see the temporary barricade of logs and chicken wire, and the dull silver gleam of Chester Gleason’s Airstream trailer. The circle of vehicles stretches at least a hundred yards in both directions—pickups, SUVs, stake trucks, and all manner of RVs—their battered exteriors camouflaged by the shadows of the deep woods. The two scouts give each other one last fleeting nod of excitement, and then lurch single file through the remaining grove of trees between them and the caravan.
    They burst out of the forest and practically leap over the fence.
    Reese runs with a limp, his hip panging with agony where he fell earlier that morning trying to cross a dry, rocky riverbed. Stephen wheezes furiously as he runs, his injured rib cage and punctured lung on fire. Their packs feel as though they weigh a thousand tons on their backs, and their eyes bug out with thirst and hunger as they stumble awkwardly toward the huge plastic water jug on the tailgate of the Thorndyke family camper. The noise of their arrival brings dozens of survivors out of their RVs or out from behind temporary latrines to see what all the commotion is about.
    Stephen reaches the water jug first and drops to his knees, putting his parched mouth under the tap.
    â€œCareful, Brother,” Reese says, kneeling beside him, cupping his hands to catch the runoff dripping from the tap and Stephen’s chin. “You don’t want to puke it all up before it hits your gut!”
    Stephen Pembry gulps the water and then has a coughing attack, dropping to his hands and knees, keeling over, hacking and wheezing into the grass. “Sweet Jesus,” he gasps between coughing fits, his face livid with exertion. “Water has never tasted so good!”
    The two men had run completely out of drinking water twelve hours earlier, and figured it was no big deal. They had all the evidence they needed to return to camp, and the caravan wasn’t that far away, and besides, they were driving the Escalade, and as long as the main road was passable, they could be back home before suppertime. But as Stephen’s father, Pastor Evan Pembry of the First Baptist Church of Murfreesboro, Kentucky, was fond of saying when he got in his cups or was trying to make a point about the capriciousness of life, “ Man plans and God has a big old laugh. ”
    â€œYou boys all right?” a voice intones cautiously behind Reese.
    Stephen looks up, wiping his mouth and blinking, and sees Rory Thorndyke standing over him. The former bricklayer from Augusta, garbed in a stained wifebeater T-shirt, his tree-trunk arms emblazoned with naval tattoos and hard gristly muscles, holds his cherubic little three-year-old daughter in his arms while he gums a wad of Copenhagen. “Y’all look like you been hit by a truck.”
    â€œWe’ll live,” Stephen mutters as he sits back in the grass and tries to catch his