The Walking Dead: Invasion by Robert Kirkman Read Free Book Online Page A

what?!”
    Jeremiah looks at Father Murphy, and the old Irishman shrugs and then smiles. “Looks like you’re already part of the family.”
    The transaction is seamless. Within minutes, the two groups come together, pool their resources, and Jeremiah and company begin to build goodwill, getting to know the other members of Father Murphy’s traveling caravan. By noon that day, the procession has pulled back onto the road, continuing its endless looping journey across the panhandle as though the preacher and his people had always been part of the group.
    *   *   *
    Nearly a week passes without incident. They travel mostly during daylight hours, resting their bodies and machines at night within the confines of caves and clearings. Jeremiah makes a special point to introduce himself to each and every member of the caravan. There are thirty-three in all, commandeering fifteen vehicles, including six full RVs and three heavy-duty trucks. There are four children under the age of twelve, five married couples, and a few senior citizens. They have an impressive array of weaponry (much of it scavenged from Camp Blanding, a deserted military base outside Jacksonville); and they have enough canned goods to last another six months if rationed carefully.
    The alpha dogs are mostly good old boys from central Florida—blue-collar tradesmen with dirt under their fingernails and sun-reddened faces—and Jeremiah instantly ingratiates himself with these hillbilly types. He speaks their language—God, guns, and whiskey—and he further solidifies his place in the pecking order by pitching in with vehicle maintenance; the preacher once worked as a grease monkey in a service station as a teen, and the skills serve him well here. Reese and Stephen also show their willingness to get their hands dirty by going along on numerous side trips and detours to obtain the raw materials for cooking up more fuel.
    Up until now, the members of the caravan have been able to keep the engines running with a combination of crude biodiesel (which they produce in a modified still in the rear of the lone flatbed truck) and the precious last gallons of standing gasoline in the storage tankers and underground reservoirs of abandoned gas stations and marinas across northern Florida. Jeremiah marvels at the amount of cooking oil still sitting in worm-eaten roadside diners and deserted restaurants along the way. But the pickings are getting slimmer and slimmer, and a grim reality is creeping into the demeanor of the caravan. Nobody is making more oil or canned goods or tires or spare parts or gasoline or any other durable good you can name, and that’s the elephant in the room. The sand is running out the bottom of the hourglass. Everybody senses it, feels it, and ruminates on it without ever really talking about it.
    Each morning, well before dawn, as the caravan fires back up and the vehicles rumble away from the night’s bivouac, Jeremiah ponders this grim reality. Driving the Escalade in the tail position, engulfed in clouds of exhaust and dust as the convoy snakes its way through swampy coastal backwaters and walker-ridden fishing villages, Jeremiah gets a lot of thinking done. These are indeed the end-times, the glorious terrors of the Rapture, and these hapless bedouins are the poor souls who have been left behind. If God wants Jeremiah to remain, to scuttle across festering hellscapes, eking out a meager existence, starving and wasting away until it all turns to dust, so be it. He will take advantage of this tumultuous time. He will be the one-eyed king in the land of the blind. He will prosper.
    Then everything changes one evening at a deserted KOA camp a couple miles east of Panama City.
    *   *   *
    Opportunity presents itself at just past 8:00 that night in the form of a rustling sound off in the adjacent woods, very faint at first but loud enough to register on Jeremiah’s ear as he