The Walking Dead: Invasion Read Online Free PDF Page B

mutters after Norma flinches.
    The woman takes deep breaths, smooths her dress across her wide belly, and tries to avoid looking at the splatter outside her window: flecks of bone chips, a long smudge of black bile. “I ain’t sure a person could ever get used to this crazy-ass shit,” she comments.
    *   *   *
    Night falls, and the darkness deepens behind the trees on either side of the road. Most of the streetlights in this part of the country have gone the way of the Internet and broadcast television, so the road gets darker and darker as they head south toward the steaming thickets and festering swamps of the coastal lowlands.
    The going is slow. Most of the two-lane is crowded with rusted-out wreckage and the carcasses of cars and trucks so old now that the weeds and switch grass have begun to grow up through the metal endoskeletons. The two young men in the backseat breathe heavily, thickly, half asleep, while the preacher drives and softly hums gospel hymns. They had passed around the beef jerky and grape Kool-Aid a few minutes ago—their standard supper fare while on the run—and now their bellies growl and their eyelids droop with exhaustion.
    Sitting in the shotgun seat, her plump, tawny hands folded nervously in her lap, Norma is still trying to wrap her brain around this good old boy preacher who calls himself Brother Jeremiah. On one hand, he seems trustworthy enough—friendly, a good listener, courteous, and capable of single-handedly taking out an entire chapelful of reanimated corpses—but on the other, he seems like a walking time bomb, a human hair trigger that could go off at any moment.
    The sad fact is, Norma Sutters doesn’t have a large array of options. Staying hunkered down in that claustrophobic rectory for the rest of her life, listening to the drooling groans of the dead in the next room while she drained the last of her Mad Dog supply, was quickly beginning to lose its charm. Watching the preacher clean house back there with that big hunting knife had given Norma a strange sort of charge—a cathartic release—but now it’s starting to worry her a little bit. If this dude is capable of such violence, God only knows what he’s capable of doing to a plump little sister-girl from Macon with flat feet and no living relatives. But Norma also knows that she would never be able to find the caravan on her own. She really has no choice but to go along with these scruffy-ass men and hope for the best.
    Fortunately, Norma has grown accustomed to taking risks. Born poor and fatherless in the Pleasant Hill area of South Macon, the youngest in a family of six kids, she quit school her sophomore year in order to support her family after her mama passed. She played organ in bars and taverns, sang the blues in horrible places, and took a lot of shit from men who thought they were better than her. Maybe that’s why she never hooked up with anybody. She saw men at their worst—drunk, abusive, arrogant, getting thrown out of clubs, throwing their weight around, acting like babies. Her faith got her through those years, and led her to a job as assistant choir director at Calvary Baptist in Jasper, Florida. This was where she had hoped to find men at their best: God-fearing men, decent men, faithful men. No such luck. Here the men were just as bad, but now the shenanigans were coated with a slimy veneer of hypocrisy.
    Miles Littleton was the exception. Who would have thought a twenty-three year old former meth-head from Atlanta—a convicted car thief who had gotten clean in rehab and gotten right with the Lord at Calvary Baptist—would restore Norma’s faith in men? Miles was the little brother whom Norma Sutters had always wished for, and their relationship had blossomed in those quiet months before the Turn, a friendship both platonic and healing.
    Unfortunately, after the outbreak had taken everything to hell on a horse, Miles had