The Walking Dead: Invasion Read Online Free PDF Page A

from her moist cleavage and dabs her face. “I played organ for them sometimes.… Other times I would read the Bible through the PA system.” She snorts and blows her nose. “Like it was doing any good. I didn’t have the heart to put them outta their misery.” She sniffs, dabs her bloodshot eyes. “I don’t know what the Good Lord wants anymore.”
    Jeremiah smiles. “Look at me, Sister. What’s your name, if I may ask.”
    â€œNorma.” She swallows hard and looks up through her tears at him. “Norma Sutters, sir.”
    â€œYou know what the Good Lord wants from you, Norma?”
    â€œNo sir.”
    â€œHe wants you to survive.”
    She swallows and nods, and then gives him a heartbreaking look. “Yessir.”
    â€œC’mere, Sister.”
    Jeremiah leans in and puts his big arms around her, and she hugs him back, and they stay like that for quite some time, the woman clinging to the preacher like a child waiting for a bad dream to fade.
    *   *   *
    â€œWe lost our pastor early on,” the woman says, taking another sip of Mad Dog from an unlabeled bottle and wincing at the burn. “Brother Maywell shot him in the head and buried him out behind the sacristy.” She sits in the back room at her desk, a tattered woolen blanket wrapped around her significant girth. Her face glistens with agony. The pale morning light seeps through the seams of the boarded windows. “Lord, Lord, Lord … what a time we in right now.”
    â€œHow did all them folks down there die?” Jeremiah sits back pensively in a desk chair, the bones of the chair creaking with his weight. His head throbs. The bandage the woman applied to his scalp a few minutes ago is too tight. Behind him, Stephen sits on the edge of the windowsill, listening intently, gauze wrapped around his fractured ribs. He wheezes slightly. On the other side of the room, Reese shivers in a folding chair, his forehead crisscrossed with Band-Aids. The woman has already proven to be a gold mine of resources. In addition to medical supplies and first aid kits, she has stashes of canned goods, batteries, candles, dry clothes, bedding, liquor, cigarettes, tools, reading material, an extra box of .38 caliber rounds for the police special, and three sealed boxes of newly printed hymnals that will never be opened, and never be sung.
    The woman hangs her head. “It only takes one,” she says softly.
    â€œPardon?”
    She looks up at the preacher. “Before this whole tribulation started up, I was a damn teetotaler. Drinking had gotten the better of me so I quit. ‘It only takes one drink,’ they used to say at them meetings.” She shakes her head slowly and looks down, the immensity of her grief making her shoulders slump and her lower lip tremble again. “Even after the outbreak, we kept on with the services. Even after Reverend Helms passed. We kept on. We just figured … that’s what you do.”
    She pauses.
    Jeremiah leans forward on his swivel chair. “Go on, Sister.”
    She breathes in a pained breath. “One day, one of our regulars, a family, they brought in a kid with them to our Sunday service. Kid had been bit.” She pauses, swallows the urge to weep. “Guess they thought the Lord would take care of things. It only takes one … know what I’m sayin’? It took less than a week for it to spread. The screaming—y’all should have heard it. I locked them all in the chapel; it was all that I could think of doing. Before long, I was the last one … holed up in this dirty-ass office, all by my lonesome, listening to the scratching and clawing.” Pause. “I guess you get so you don’t hear it no more.”
    Reese speaks up from across the room. “Why didn’t you just get on outta here, pack up and leave?”
    She chuckles ruefully. “I don’t know if