The Walking Dead Collection: Rise of the Governor, The Road to Woodbury, The fall of the Governor, Part I, The Fall of the Governor, Part II, Just Another Day at the Office
Author: Robert Kirkman
Date: 2014-11-25 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Zombies; Horror
Description: From the mind of Robert Kirkman, the legendary comic book auteur and creator of The Walking Dead, comes the complete e-book collection of WALKING DEAD novels steeped in the terrifying mythos of the Eisner Award winning comic. The first volume, THE WALKING DEAD: RISE OF THE GOVERNOR, explores the heart-wrenching and horrifying origin of the comic world's most infamous villain: Philip Blake, AKA The Governor. Following Blake and his ragtag band of survivors as they carve out a terrifying path through infested subdivisions and rotting cities, RISE OF THE GOVERNOR is a fever dream of a road trip t
Rights: Copyright &#169; 2014 by Robert Kirkman, LLC

The Walking Dead Collection

Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga

Thomas Dunne Books

St. Martin’s Press

New York

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Notice

The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Part One: The Hollow Men

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two: Atlanta

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Three: Chaos Theory

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Copyright

The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Part I: Red Day Rising

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II. This Is How the World Ends

Epigraph

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Copyright

The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor, Part One

Dedication

Acknowledgments

I. The Gathering

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

II. Showtime

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Copyright

The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor, Part Two

Dedication

Acknowledgments

I. Battlefield

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

II. Doomsday Clock

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

III. The Fall

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Copyright

Just Another Day at the Office

Begin Reading

Copyright

Other Books in the Walking Dead Series

About the Authors

Copyright

To Jeanie-B, Joey, and Bill … the loves of my life.

—Jay

For Sonia, Peter, and Collette … I promise I’ll work less as soon as college is paid for.

—Robert

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Robert Kirkman, Brendan Deneen, Andy Cohen, David Alpert, Stephen Emery, and all the good people at Circle of Confusion.

—Jay

Big ups to Jay Bonansinga, Alpert and the rest at Circle of Confusion, the fine folks at Image Comics, and Charlie Adlard for steering the ship. Much respect for Rosenman, Rosenbaum, Simonian, and Lerner. And, of course … Brendan Deneen.

—Robert

PART 1

The Hollow Men

There’s nothing glorious in dying.

Anyone can do it.

—Johnny Rotten

ONE

It occurs to Brian Blake as he huddles in the musty darkness, the terror constricting his chest, the pain throbbing in his knees: If only he possessed a second pair of hands, he could cover his own ears, and maybe block out the noise of human heads being demolished. Sadly, the only hands Brian currently owns are busy right now, covering the tiny ears of a little girl in the closet next to him.

The seven-year-old keeps shuddering in his arms, jerking at the intermittent THWACK-GAHHHH-THUMP outside the closet. Then comes the silence, broken only by the sticky sound of boot steps on bloody tile, and a flurry of angry whispers out in the vestibule.

Brian starts coughing again. He can’t help it. For days he has been fighting this goddamn cold, a stubborn blight on his joints and sinuses that he cannot shake. It happens to him every fall, when the Georgia days start getting dank and gloomy. The dampness gets into his bones, saps his energy, and steals his breath. And now he feels the pounding stab of a fever with each cough.

Doubling over in another hacking, wheezing fit, he keeps his hands pressed down on little Penny’s ears as he coughs. He knows the sound of his rasping is attracting all kinds of attention outside the closet door, out in the convolutions of the house, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He sees tracings of light with each cough—like tiny filigrees of fireworks across his blind pupils.

The closet—barely four feet wide, and maybe three feet deep—is as dark as an inkwell, and it reeks of mothballs, mouse droppings, and old cedar. Plastic coat bags hang down in the darkness, brushing the sides of Brian’s face. Brian’s younger brother Philip told him it was okay to cough in the closet. In fact, Brian was free to cough his fucking head off—it would draw out the monsters—but Brian better not give his goddamn cold to Philip’s little girl. If he did, Philip would crack Brian’s head open.

The coughing fit passes.

Moments later, another pair of lumbering footsteps disturbs the silence outside the closet—another dead thing entering the kill zone. Brian squeezes his hands tighter against Penny’s ears, and the child flinches at another rendition of Skull Splitting in D minor.

If asked to describe the racket outside the closet, Brian Blake would probably revert to his days as a failed music store entrepreneur and tell you that the head-cracking sounds are like a percussive symphony they might play in hell—like some trippy outtake from Edgard Varèse or a druggy drum solo from John Bonham—with repeating verses and choruses: the heavy breathing of humans … the shambling footsteps of another moving corpse … the whistle of an axe … the thunk of steel sinking into flesh …

… and finally, the big finale, the splat of moist, dead weight on the slimy parquet.

Another break in the action sends fever chills down Brian’s spine. The silence closes in again. Eyes now adjusted to the darkness, Brian sees the first shimmer of thick arterial blood seeping under the bottom of the door. It looks like motor oil. He gently yanks his niece away from the spreading puddle, pulling her back against the boots and umbrellas along the back wall.

The hem of Penny Blake’s little denim dress touches the blood. She quickly pulls the fabric away, and frantically rubs at the stain, as if the very absorption of the blood will infect her somehow.

Another convulsive coughing fit doubles Brian over. He fights it. He swallows the broken glass of a sore throat and pulls the little girl into a full-on embrace. He doesn’t know what to do or say. He wants to help his niece. He wants to whisper something reassuring to her but cannot think of a single reassuring thing to whisper.

The girl’s father would know what to say. Philip would know. He always knows what to say. Philip Blake is the guy who says the things that everybody else wishes they had said. He says what needs to be said, and he does what needs to be done. Like right now. He’s out there with Bobby and Nick, doing what needs to be done … while Brian hunkers here in the dark like a scared rabbit, wishing he knew what to say to his niece.

Considering the fact that Brian Blake is the oldest of the two siblings, it’s odd how Brian has always been the runt. Barely five feet seven in his boot heels, Brian Blake is a raw-boned scarecrow of a man scarcely able to fill out his black peg-leg jeans and torn Weezer T-shirt. A mousey goatee, macramé bracelets, and a thatch of dark Ichabod Crane hair complete the picture of a thirty-five-year-old Bohemian waif stuck in Peter Pan limbo, now kneeling in the mothball-scented gloom.

Brian sucks in a hoarse breath and looks down at the doe-eyed Penny, her mute, horrified face ghostly in the darkness of the closet. The child has always been a quiet little girl, with an almost porcelain complexion, like that of a china doll, which has given her face a rather ethereal cast. But since her mother’s death she has turned even further inward, becoming more wan and stoic, to the point of appearing almost translucent, with tendrils of raven-black hair obscuring her huge eyes.

For the last three days, she has hardly said a word. Of course, they have been three extraordinary days—and trauma works differently on children than it does on adults—but Brian is worried that Penny is perhaps slipping into some kind of shock.

“It’s gonna be okay, kiddo,” Brian whispers to her with a lame little cough as punctuation.

She says something without looking up at him. She mumbles it, staring down at the floor, a tear pearling on her dirty cheek.

“What was that, Pen?” Brian cradles her against him and wipes her tear.

She says something again, and again, and again, but not exactly to Brian. She says it more like a mantra, or a prayer, or an incantation: “It’s never-ever going to be okay, never-ever-ever-ever-ever.”

“Sshhhhh.” He holds her head, pressing it gently against the folds of his T-shirt. He feels the damp heat of her face against his ribs. He covers her ears again as he hears the THWACK of another axe blade outside the closet, smashing through the membrane of a scalp, into the hard shell of a skull, through the layers of dura, and into the pulpy gray gelatin of an occipital lobe.

It makes a smacking noise like a baseball bat hitting a wet softball—the ejaculate of blood like a mop head slapping the floor—followed by a ghastly, wet thud. Oddly, that’s the worst part for Brian: that hollow, moist thump of a body landing on expensive ceramic tile. The tile is custom made for the house, with elaborate inlay and Aztec designs. It’s a lovely house … or at least, it once was.

Again the noises cease.

Again the horrible dripping silence follows. Brian stifles a cough, holding it in like a firecracker that’s about to pop, so he can better hear the minute changes in breathing outside the closet, the greasy footsteps shuffling through gore. But the place is dead silent now.

Brian feels the child seize up next to him—little Penny girding herself for another salvo of axe blows—but the silence stretches.

Inches away, the sound of a bolt clicking, and the closet doorknob turning, rashes Brian’s body with gooseflesh. The door swings open.

“Okay, we’re good.” The baritone voice, whiskey-cured and smoky, comes from a man peering down into the recesses of the closet. Eyes blinking at the darkness, face shimmering with sweat, flush with the exertion of zombie disposal, Philip Blake holds a grue-slick axe in his workman’s hand.

“You sure?” Brian utters.

Ignoring his brother, Philip gazes down at his daughter. “Everything’s okay, punkin, Daddy’s okay.”

“Are you sure?” Brian says with a cough.

Philip looks at his brother. “You mind covering your mouth, sport?”

Brian wheezes, “You sure it’s clear?”

“Punkin?” Philip Blake addresses his daughter tenderly, his faint Southern drawl belying the bright, feral embers of violence just now fading in his eyes. “I’m gonna need y’all to stay right there for a minute. Awright? You stay right there until Daddy says it’s okay to come out. You understand?”

With a slight nod, the pale little girl gives him a feeble gesture of understanding.

“C’mon, sport,” Philip urges his older brother out of the shadows. “Gonna need your help with the cleanup.”

Brian struggles to his feet, pushing his way through the hanging overcoats.

He emerges from the closet and blinks at the harsh light of the vestibule. He stares and coughs and stares some more. For a brief moment, it looks as though the lavish entryway of the two-story Colonial, brightly lit by fancy copper chandeliers, is in the throes of being redecorated by a work crew afflicted by palsy. Great swaths of eggplant-purple spatters stain the teal green plaster walls. Rorschach patterns of black and crimson adorn the baseboards and moldings. Then the shapes on the floor register.

Six bodies lie akimbo in bloody heaps. Ages and genders are obscured by the wet carnage, the mottled, livid skin tones, and the misshapen skulls. The largest lies in a spreading pool of bile at the foot of the great circular staircase. Another one, perhaps the lady of the house, perhaps once a convivial hostess offering peach cobbler and Southern hospitality, is now splayed across the lovely white parquet floor in a contorted mess, a stringer of wormy gray matter flagging from her breached cranium.

Brian Blake feels his gorge rising, his throat involuntarily dilating.

“Okay, gentlemen, we got our work cut out for us,” Philip is saying, addressing his two cronies, Nick and Bobby, as well as his brother, but Brian can barely hear over the sick thump of his own heartbeat.

He sees the other remains—over the last two days, Philip has started calling the ones they destroy “twice-cooked pork”—strewn along the dark, burnished baseboards at the threshold of the living room. Maybe the teenage children who once lived here, maybe visitors who suffered the Southern inhospitality of an infected bite, these bodies lie in sunbursts of arterial spray. One of them, his or her dented head lying facedown like a spilled soup pan, still pumps its scarlet fluids across the floor with the profusion of a breached fire hydrant. A couple of others still have small hatchet blades embedded in their crania, sunk down to the hilt, like the flags of explorers triumphantly stuck into once unattainable summits.

Brian’s hand flies up to his mouth, as if he might stem the tide rising up his esophagus. He feels a tapping sensation on the top of his skull, as though a moth is ticking against his scalp. He looks up.

Blood drips from the overhead chandelier, a droplet landing on Brian’s nose.

“Nick, why don’t you go grab some of them tarps we saw earlier in the—”

Brian falls to his knees, hunches forward, and roars vomit across the parquet. The steaming flood of khaki-colored bile sluices across the tiles, mingling with the spoor of the fallen dead.

Tears burn Brian’s eyes as he heaves four days of soul-sickness onto the floor.

*   *   *

Philip Blake lets out a tense sigh, the buzz of adrenaline still coursing through him. For a moment he makes no effort to go to his brother’s side, but simply stands there, setting down his bloody axe, rolling his eyes. It’s a miracle Philip doesn’t have a groove worn into the tops of his eye sockets from all the eye rolling he’s done over the years on his brother’s account. But what else is Philip supposed to do? The poor son of bitch is family, and family is family … especially in off-the-scale times such as these.

The resemblance is sure there—nothing Philip can do about that. A tall, rangy, sinewy man with the ropy muscles of a tradesman, Philip Blake shares the same dark features as his brother, the same dark almond eyes and coal-black hair of their Mexican-American mother. Mama Rose’s maiden name was Garcia, and her features had dominated the lineage over those of the boys’ father, a big, coarse alcoholic of Scots-Irish descent named Ed Blake. But Philip, three years younger than Brian, had gotten all the muscle.

He now stands over six feet tall in his faded jeans, work boots, and chambray shirt, with the Fu Manchu mustache and jailhouse tats of a biker; and he is about to move his imposing figure over to his retching brother, and maybe say something harsh, when he stops himself. He hears something he doesn’t like coming from across the vestibule.

Bobby Marsh, an old high school pal of Philip’s, stands near the base of the staircase, wiping an axe blade on his size XXL jeans. A portly thirty-two-year-old junior college dropout, his long greasy brown hair pulled back in a rattail, Bobby Marsh is not exactly obese, but definitely overweight, definitely the type of guy his Burke County High classmates would call a butterball. He now giggles with nervous, edgy, belly-shivering laughter as he watches Brian Blake vomit. The giggling is colorless and hollow—a sort of tic that Bobby cannot seem to control.

The anxious giggling had started three days ago when one of the first of the undead had lumbered out of a service bay at a gas station near the Augusta airport. Clad in blood-soaked overalls, the grease monkey shuffled out of hiding with a trail of toilet paper on his heel, and the thing had tried to make a meal out of Bobby’s fat neck before Philip had stepped in and clobbered the thing with a crowbar.

The discovery that day—that a major blow to the head does the job quite nicely—had led to more nervous chortling on Bobby’s part—definitely a defense mechanism—with a lot of anxious chatter about it being “something in the water, man, like the black-fucking-plague.” But Philip didn’t want to hear about reasons for this shit storm then, and he sure doesn’t want to hear about them now.

“Hey!” Philip addresses the heavyset man. “You still think this is funny?”

Bobby’s laughter dies.

On the other side of the room, near a window overlooking the dark expanse of a backyard, which is currently shrouded in night, a fourth figure watches uneasily. Nick Parsons, another friend from Philip’s wayward childhood, is a compact, lean thirty-something with the kind of prep-school grooming and marine-cut hair of an eternal jock. The religious one of the bunch, Nick has taken the longest to get used to the idea of destroying things that were once human. Now his khakis and sneakers are stippled with blood, and his eyes burn with trauma, as he watches Philip approach Bobby.

“Sorry, man,” Bobby mutters.

“My daughter’s in there,” Philip says, coming nose to nose with Marsh. The volatile chemicals of rage and panic and pain can instantly ignite in Philip Blake.

Bobby looks at the blood-slicked floor. “Sorry, sorry.”

“Go get the tarps, Bobby.”

Six feet away, Brian Blake, still on his hands and knees, expels the last of his stomach contents, and continues to dry-heave.

Philip goes over to his older brother, kneels by him. “Let it out.”

“I’m—uh—” Brian croaks, sniffing, trying to form a complete thought.

Philip gently lays a big, grimy, callused hand on his brother’s hunched shoulders. “It’s okay, bro … just let it all out.”

“I’m—s-sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

Brian gets himself under control, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Y-you think you got all of them?”

“I do.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

“You searched … everywhere? In the basement and stuff?”

“Yes, sir, we did. All the bedrooms … even the attic. Last one came out of hiding at the sound of that fucking cough, loud enough to wake the fucking dead. Teenage girl, tried to have one of Bobby’s chins for lunch.”

Brian gulps down a raw, painful swallow. “These people … they … lived here.”

Philip sighs. “Not anymore.”

Brian manages to look around the room, then gazes up at his brother. Brian’s face is wet with tears. “But they were like … a family.”

Philip nods, and he doesn’t say anything. He feels like giving his brother a shrug—so fucking what—but all he does is keep nodding. He’s not thinking about the zombified family he just dispatched, or the implications of all the mind-numbing butchery he’s already wreaked over the last three days—slaughtering individuals who were recently soccer moms and mailmen and gas station attendants. Yesterday, Brian had gone off on some bullshit intellectual tangent about the difference between morals and ethics in this situation: Morally, one should never kill, ever, but ethically, which is subtly different, one should maintain the policy of killing only if it’s in self-defense. But Philip doesn’t see what they’re doing as killing. You can’t kill a thing that’s already been killed. What you do is squash it like a bug, and move on, and stop thinking so much.

The fact is, right now, Philip isn’t even thinking about the next move his little ragtag group will make—which is probably going to be entirely up to him (he has become the de facto leader of this bunch, and he might as well face it). Right now, Philip Blake is focused on a single objective: Since the nightmare started less than seventy-two hours ago, and folks started turning—for reasons nobody has yet been able to figure out—all that Philip Blake has been able to think about is protecting Penny. It is why he got the hell out of his hometown, Waynesboro, two days ago.

A small farming community on the eastern edge of central Georgia, the place had gone to hell quickly when folks had started dying and coming back. But it was Penny’s safety that had ultimately convinced Philip to fly the coop. It was because of Penny he had enlisted the help of his old high school buddies; and it was because of Penny he had set out for Atlanta, where, according to the news, refugee centers were being set up. It was all because of Penny. Penny is all that Philip Blake has left. She is the only thing keeping him going—the only salve on his wounded soul.

Long before this inexplicable epidemic had broken out, the void in Philip’s heart would pang at 3 A.M on sleepless nights. That’s the exact hour he had lost his wife—hard to believe it’s been nearly four years now—on a rain-slick highway south of Athens. Sarah had been visiting a friend at the University of Georgia, and she’d been drinking, and she lost control of her car on a winding road in Wilkes County.

From the moment he had identified the body, Philip knew he would never be the same. He had no qualms about doing the right thing—taking on two jobs to keep Penny fed and clothed and cared for—but he would never be the same. Maybe that’s why all this was happening. God’s little gag. When the locusts come, and the river runs red with blood, the guy with the most to lose gets to lead the pack.

“Doesn’t matter who they were,” Philip finally says to his brother. “Or what they were.”

“Yeah … I guess you’re right.” By this point, Brian has managed to sit up, cross-legged now, taking deep wheezing breaths. He watches Bobby and Nick across the room, unrolling large canvas tarps and shaking open garbage bags. They begin rolling corpses, still dripping, into the tarps.

“Only thing that matters is we got this place cleaned out now,” Philip says. “We can stay here tonight, and if we can score some gas in the morning, we can make it to Atlanta tomorrow.”

“Doesn’t make any sense, though,” Brian mutters now, glancing from corpse to corpse.

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at them.”

“What?” Philip glances over his shoulder at the gruesome remains of the matriarch being rolled up in a tarp. “What about ’em?”

“It’s just the family.”

“So?”

Brian coughs into his sleeve, then wipes his mouth. “What I’m saying is … you got the mother, the father, four teenage kids … and that’s like it.”

“Yeah, so what?”

Brian looks up at Philip. “So, how the hell does something like this happen? They all … turned together? Did one of them get bitten and bring it back inside?”

Philip thinks about it for a moment—after all, he’s still trying to figure out just exactly what is going on, too, how this madness works—but finally Philip gets tired of thinking about it and says, “C’mon, get off your lazy ass and help us.”

*   *   *

It takes them about an hour to get the place cleaned up. Penny stays in the closet for the duration of the process. Philip brings her a stuffed animal from one of the kid’s rooms, and tells her it won’t be long before she can come out. Brian mops the blood, coughing fitfully, while the other three men drag the canvas-covered corpses—two large and four smaller ones—out the back sliding doors and across the large cedar deck.

The late-September night sky above them is as clear and cold as a black ocean, a riot of stars shining down, taunting them with their impassive, cheerful twinkling. The breaths of the three men show in the darkness as they drag the bundles across dew-frosted planks. They carry pickaxes on their belts. Philip has a gun stuffed down the back of his belt. It’s an old .22 Ruger that he bought at a flea market years ago, but nobody wants to rouse the dead with the bark of gunfire right now. They can hear the telltale drone of walking dead on the wind—garbled moaning sounds, shuffling footsteps—coming from somewhere in the darkness of the neighboring yards.

It’s been an unusually nippy early autumn in Georgia, and tonight the mercury is supposed to dip into the lower forties, perhaps even the upper thirties. Or at least that’s what the local AM radio station claimed before it petered out in a gust of static. Up to this point in their journey, Philip and his crew have been monitoring TV, radio, and the Internet on Brian’s BlackBerry.

Amid the general chaos, the news reports have been assuring people that everything is just peachy-keen—your trusty government is in control of the situation—and this little bump in the road will be smoothed out in a matter of hours. Regular warnings chime in on civil defense frequencies, admonishing folks to stay indoors, and keep out of sparsely populated areas, and wash their hands frequently, and drink bottled water, and blah, blah, blah.

Of course, nobody has any answers. And maybe the most ominous sign of all is the increasing number of station failures. Thankfully, gas stations still have gas, grocery stores are still stocked, and electrical grids and stoplights and police stations and all the infrastructural paraphernalia of civilization seem to be hanging on.

But Philip worries that a loss of power will raise the stakes in unimaginable ways.

“Let’s put ’em in the Dumpsters behind the garage,” Philip says so softly he’s almost whispering, dragging two canvas bundles up to the wooden fence adjacent to the three-car garage. He wants to do this swiftly and silently. He doesn’t want to attract any zombies. No fires, no sharp noises, no gunshots if he can help it.

There’s a narrow gravel alley behind the seven-foot cedar fence, serving the rank and file of spacious garages lining the backyards. Nick drags his load over to the fence gate, a solid slab of cedar planks with a wrought-iron handle. He drops the bundle and opens the gate.

An upright corpse is waiting for him on the other side of the gate.

“LOOK OUT, Y’ALL!” Bobby Marsh cries out.

“Shut the fuck up!” Philip hisses, reaching for the pickaxe on his belt, already halfway to the gate.

Nick recoils.

The zombie lurches at him, chomping, missing his left pectoral by millimeters, the sound of yellow dentures snapping impotently like the clicking of castanets—and in the moonlight, Nick can see that it’s an elderly adult male in a tattered Izod sweater, golf slacks, and expensive cleats, the lunar gleam shining in its milky, cataract-filmed eyes: somebody’s grandfather.

Nick gets one good glimpse at the thing before stumbling backward over his own feet and falling onto his ass on the lush carpet of Kentucky bluegrass. The dead golfer lumbers through the gap and onto the lawn just as a flash of rusty steel arcs through the air.

The business end of Philip’s pickaxe lands squarely in the monster’s head, cracking the coconutlike shell of the old man’s skull, piercing the dense, fibrous membrane of the dura mater and sinking into the gelatinous parietal lobe. It makes a sound like celery snapping and sends a clot of dark brackish fluid into the air. The insectile verve on the grandfather’s face instantly dims, like a cartoon whose projection system has just jammed.

The zombie folds to the ground with the inelegant deflation of an empty laundry sack.

The pickaxe, still deeply embedded, pulls Philip forward and down. He yanks at it. The point is stuck. “Shut the motherfucking gate now, shut the gate, and do it quietly, goddamnit,” Philip says, still affecting a frenzied stage whisper, slamming his left Chippewa steel-toed logger boot down on the breached skull of the cadaver.

The other two men move as if in some synchronized dance, Bobby quickly dropping his load and rushing over to the gate. Nick struggles to his feet and backs away in a horrified stupor. Bobby quickly latches the wrought-iron lever. It makes a hollow metallic rattle that is so noisy it echoes across the dark lawns.

At last, Philip wrenches the pick from the stubborn crag of the zombie’s skull—it comes out with a soft smooch sound—and he is turning toward the remains of the family, his mind swimming with panic, when he hears something odd, something unexpected, coming from the house.

He looks up and sees the rear of the Colonial, the window glass lit brilliantly from within.

Brian is silhouetted behind the sliding glass door, tapping on the pane, motioning for Philip and the others to hurry back, right now. Urgency burns in Brian’s expression. It has nothing to do with the dead golfer—Philip can tell—something is wrong.

Oh God, please let it not have to do with Penny.

Philip drops the pickaxe and crosses the lawn in seconds flat.

“What about the stiffs?” Bobby Marsh is calling after Philip.

“Leave ’em!” Philip yells, vaulting up the deck steps and rushing to the sliding doors.

Brian is waiting with the slider ajar. “I gotta show you something, man,” he says.

“What is it? Is it Penny? Is she okay?” Philip is out of breath as he slips back into the house. Bobby and Nick are coming across the deck, and they too slip into the warmth of the Colonial.

“Penny’s fine,” Brian says. He’s holding a framed photograph. “She’s fine. Says she doesn’t mind staying in the closet a little while longer.”

“Judas Priest, Brian, what the fuck!” Philip catches his breath, his hands balled into fists.

“I gotta show you something. You want to stay here tonight?” Brian turns toward the sliding glass door. “Look. The family died together in here, right? All six of them? Six?”

Philip wipes his face. “Spit it out, man.”

“Look. Somehow they all turned together. As a family, right?” Brian coughs, then points at the six pale bundles lying near the garage. “There’s six of them out there on the grass. Look. Mom and dad and four kids.”

“So fucking what?”

Brian holds up a portrait in a frame, the family from a happier time, all smiling awkwardly, dressed in their starchy Sunday best. “I found this on the piano,” he says.

“And…?”

Brian points at the youngest child in the photo, a boy of eleven or twelve years old, little navy blue suit, blond bangs, stiff smile.

Brian looks at his brother and says very gravely, “There’s seven of them in the picture.”

TWO

The graceful two-story Colonial that Philip selected for their extended pit stop sits on a manicured side street deep in the tree-lined labyrinth of a gated enclave known as Wiltshire Estates.

Situated off Highway 278, about twenty miles east of Atlanta, the six-thousand-acre community is carved out of a forest preserve of dense longleaf pine and massive, old live oaks. The southern boundary fronts the vast, rolling hills of a thirty-six-hole golf course designed by Fuzzy Zoeller.

In the free brochure, which Brian Blake found on the floor of an abandoned guard shack earlier that evening, a flowery sales pitch makes the place sound like a Martha Stewart wet dream: Wiltshire Estates provides an award-winning lifestyle with world-class amenities … named the “Best of the Best” by GOLF Magazine Living … also home to the Triple-A Five Diamond Shady Oaks Plantation Resort and Spa … full-time security patrols … homes from $475,000 to 1 million-plus.

The Blake party happened upon the fancy outer gates at sunset that day—on their way to the refugee centers in Atlanta—all of them crammed into Philip’s rust-pocked Chevy Suburban. In the spill of the headlights, they saw the fancy cast-iron finials and great arched legend with the Wiltshire name hammered in metal across the spires, and they stopped to investigate.

At first, Philip thought the place might serve as a quick pit stop, a place to rest and maybe forage for supplies before completing the last leg of the journey into the city. Perhaps they would find others like them, other living souls, maybe a few good Samaritans who would help them out. But as the five tired, hungry, wired, and dazed travelers made an initial circle of the winding roads of Wiltshire, with the darkness quickly closing in, they realized that the place was, for the most part, dead.

No lights burned in any of the windows. Very few cars remained in the driveways or at the curbs. A fire hydrant gushed at one corner, unattended, sending a foamy spray across a lawn. At another corner, an abandoned BMW sat with its shattered front end wrapped around a telephone pole, its twisted passenger door gaping open. People had apparently left in a hurry.

The reason they left, for the most part, could be seen in the distant shadows of the golf course, in the gullies behind the resort, and even here and there on the well-lighted streets. Zombies shambled aimlessly like ghostly remnants of their original selves, their slack, yawning mouths letting out a rusty groan that Philip could hear well enough, even through the sealed windows of the Suburban, as he circumnavigated the maze of wide, newly paved roads.

The pandemic or the act of God—or whatever the hell started it all up—must have hit Wiltshire Estates hard and fast. Most of the undead seemed to be off in the berms and pathways of the golf course. Something must have happened there to speed the process. Maybe golfers are mostly old and slow. Maybe they taste good to the undead. Who the hell knows? But it is apparent, even from hundreds of yards away—glimpsed through trees or over the tops of privacy fences—that scores, maybe hundreds, of undead are congregated in the vast complex of clubhouses, fairways, footbridges, and sand traps.

In the dark of night, they resemble insects lazily swarming a hive.

It’s disconcerting to look at, but somehow the phenomenon has left the adjacent community, with its endless circuit of cul-de-sacs and curving lanes, relatively deserted. And the more Philip and his wide-eyed passengers circled the neighborhood, the more they began to long for a small chunk of that award-winning lifestyle, just a taste, for just long enough to replenish themselves and recharge.

They thought that they could maybe spend the night here, get a fresh start in the morning.

They chose the big Colonial at the bottom of Green Briar Lane because it seemed far enough away from the golf course to avoid the attentions of the swarm. It had a big yard with good sight lines, and a high, sturdy privacy fence. It also seemed empty. But when they carefully backed the Suburban across the lawn and up to a side door—leaving the vehicle unlocked, the keys in the ignition—and they sneaked in a window, one by one, the house almost immediately started working on them. The first creaking noises came from the second floor, and that’s when Philip had sent Nick back to the Suburban for the assortment of axes stored in the back well.

*   *   *

“I’m telling you, we got ’em all,” Philip is saying now, trying to calm his brother down, who sits across the kitchen in the breakfast nook.

Brian doesn’t say anything, just stares at his bowl of soggy cereal. A bottle of cough medicine sits nearby, a quarter of which Brian has already chugged down.

Penny sits next to him, also with a bowl of Cap’n Crunch in front her. A little stuffed penguin the size of a pear sits next to her bowl, and every now and then Penny moves her spoon to the toy’s mouth, pretending to share her cereal with the thing.

“We checked every inch of this place,” Philip goes on as he throws open cabinet after cabinet. The kitchen is a cornucopia, brimming with upper-class provisions and luxuries: gourmet coffees, immersion blenders, crystal goblets, wine racks, handmade pastas, fancy jams and jellies, condiments of every variety, expensive liqueurs, and cooking gadgets of every description. The giant Viking range is spotless, and the massive Sub-Zero refrigerator is packed with expensive meats and fruits and spreads and dairy products and little white Chinese carryout boxes full of still-fresh leftovers. “He might have been visiting a relative or something,” Philip adds, making note of a nice single-malt Scotch sitting on a shelf. “Might’ve been with his grandparents, staying over at a friend’s house, whatever.”

“Holy freaking Jesus, look at this!” Bobby Marsh exclaims across the room. He stands in front of the pantry, and he’s lustily inspecting the goodies inside it. “Looks like Willy-damn-Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in here … cookies, lady fingers, and the bread’s still fresh.”

“The place is safe, Brian,” Philip says, pulling the bottle of Scotch down.

“Safe?” Brian Blake stares at the tabletop. He lets out a cough and cringes.

“That’s what I said. Matter of fact, I’m thinking—”

“Just lost another one!” a voice pipes in from the other side of the kitchen.

It’s Nick. For the past ten minutes, he’s been nervously surfing through the TV channels on a little plasma screen mounted under a cabinet to the left of the sink, checking the local stations for updates, and now, at a quarter to twelve Central Standard Time, Fox 5 News out of Atlanta has just crumbled into snow. All that leaves on the cable box—other than national networks showing reruns of nature programs and old movies—is Atlanta’s stalwart, CNN, and all they’re showing at the moment are emergency robo-announcements, the same warning screens with the same bullet points that have been airing for days. Even Brian’s BlackBerry is giving up the ghost, the signal very spotty in this area. When it does work, the device is full of blind e-mails and Facebook tags and anonymous tweets with cryptic messages such as:

… AND THE KINGDOM WILL BE IN DARKNESS …

… IT’S THE BIRDS FALLING FROM THE SKY, THAT’S WHAT STARTED IT …

… BURN IT ALL DOWN BURN IT ALL …

… BLASPHEMIES AGAINST GOD …

… U SUCK U DIE …

… THE HOUSE OF THE LORD HAS BECOME A DWELLING PLACE OF DEMONS …

… DON’T BLAME ME FOR THIS I’M A LIBERTARIAN …

… EAT ME …

“Turn it off, Nick,” Philip says gloomily, plopping down on a chair in the breakfast nook with his bottle. He frowns and reaches around to the back of his belt, where his pistol is digging into the small of his back. He lays the Ruger on the table and thumbs the cap off the Scotch, then takes a healthy swig.

Brian and Penny both stare at the gun.

Philip puts the cap back on the bottle, then tosses the Scotch across the kitchen to Nick, who catches it with the aplomb of an all-state second basemen (which he once was). “Tune in to the all-booze channel for a while … you need to get some sleep, stop watching screens.”

Nick takes a taste. He takes another one, then caps the bottle and tosses it to Bobby.

Bobby nearly drops it. Still standing at the pantry, he is busily wolfing down an entire package of Oreos, the black crust already forming in the corners of his mouth. He washes the cookies down with a big pull of single-malt, and lets out a grateful belch.

Drinking is something Philip and his two friends are accustomed to doing together, and they need to do it tonight more than ever. It started in their freshman year at Burke County, with crème de menthe and watermelon wine in pup tents in each others’ backyards. Later, they graduated to boilermakers after football games. Nobody can hold his liquor like Philip Blake, but the other two men are close rivals in the juicer sweepstakes.

Early in his married life, Philip would go out carousing with his two high school buddies on a regular basis, mostly to remind himself what it was like to be young and single and irresponsible. But after Sarah’s death, the three men drifted apart. The stress of being a single parent, and working days at the muffler shop, and nights driving the freightliner with Penny in the sleeper compartment, had consumed him. The boys’ nights out became less and less frequent. Once in a while, though—in fact, as recently as last month—Philip still finds time to meet Bobby and Nick down at the Tally Ho or the Wagon Wheel Inn or some other Waynesboro dive for an evening of good-natured debauchery (while Mama Rose watches Penny).

In recent years, Philip had started wondering if he was just going through the motions with Bobby and Nick to remind himself that he was alive. Maybe that was why, this past Sunday—when the feces hit the fan in Waynesboro, and he decided to take Penny and shuffle off to a safer place—he rounded up Nick and Bobby for the journey. They felt like a piece of his past, and that helped somehow.

He had never intended to take Brian along, though. Bumping into Brian had been an accident. That first day on the road, about forty miles west of Waynesboro, Philip had taken a quick detour into Deering, to check on his mom and dad. The elderly couple lived in a retirement community near the Fort Gordon military base. When Philip arrived at his folks’ little town house, he found that the entire population of Deering had been moved to the base for safekeeping.

That was the good news. The bad news was that Brian was there. He was holed up in the deserted town house, huddling in the basement crawl space, petrified by the growing number of walking dead in the backcountry. Philip had almost forgotten about his brother’s current status: Brian had moved back home after his marriage to that crazy Jamaican girl from Gainesville had gone south—literally. The girl had pulled up stakes and had gone back to Jamaica. This, coupled with the fact that every single one of Brian’s harebrained business schemes had all crashed and burned—most of them financed with their parents’ money (like his latest brilliant idea of opening a music store in Athens, when there was already one on every corner)—made Philip cringe at the thought of having to watch over his brother for any length of time. But what was done was done.

“Hey, Philly,” Bobby says from across the room, polishing off the last of the cookies, “you think those refugee centers in the city are still up and running?”

“Who the hell knows?” Philip looks at his daughter. “How you doing, punkin?”

The little girl shrugs. “Okay.” Her voice is barely audible, like a broken wind chime in the breeze. She stares at the stuffed penguin. “I guess.”

“What do you think of this house? You like it?”

Penny shrugs again. “I don’t know.”

“What would you say if we stayed here a while?”

This gets everyone’s attention. Brian looks up at his brother. All eyes are on Philip now. Nick finally speaks up: “Whattya mean ‘a while’?”

“Gimme that hooch,” Philip says, motioning at Bobby for the bottle. The bottle comes over and Philip takes a long pull, letting it burn nicely. “Look at this place,” he says after wiping his mouth.

Brian is confused. “You said just for the night, right?”

Philip takes a deep breath. “Yeah, but I’m sorta getting over that idea right now.”

Bobby starts to say, “Yeah, but—”

“Look. I’m just saying. Might be best for us to lay low for a spell.”

“Yeah, but Philly, what about—”

“We could just stay put, Bobby, see what happens.”

Nick has been listening intently to this. “Philip, come on, man, they’ve been saying on the news that the big cities are the safest—”

“The news? Jesus Christ, Nick, blow the wax outta your head. The news is going down the tubes with the rest of the population. Look at this place. You think some government halfway house is gonna have these kinds of goodies, beds for everyone, enough food for weeks, twenty-year-old Scotch? Showers, hot water, washing machines?”

“We’re so close, though,” Bobby says after a moment’s thought.

Philip sighs. “Yeah, well … close is a relative term.”

“It’s twenty miles, tops.”

“Might as well be twenty thousand miles, all them wrecks on the interstate, 278 crawling with those things.”

“That ain’t gonna stop us,” Bobby says. His eyes light up. He snaps his fingers. “We’ll build a—whattya call it?—on the front end of the Chevy—a scoop—like in fucking Road Warrior—”

“Watch your language, Bobby,” Philip says, nodding at the little girl.

Nick speaks up. “Dude, we stay here, and it’s only a matter of time until those things out at the—” He stops himself, glancing at the child. Everybody knows what he’s talking about.

Penny studies her soggy cereal as though she’s not listening.

“These places are solid, Nicky,” Philip counters, setting down the bottle, crossing his muscular arms across his chest. Philip has been giving a lot of thought to the problem of those wandering hoards out on the golf course. The key would be keeping quiet, masking out the light at night, not sending up any signals, or smells, or undo commotion. “As long as we got power, and we keep our wits about us, we’re golden.”

“With one gun?” Nick says. “I mean, we can’t even use it without drawing their attention.”

“We’ll check out the other houses, look for weapons. These rich bastards are big on deer huntin’, maybe we can even find a silencer for the Ruger … hell, we can make one. You see that workshop downstairs?”

“C’mon, Philip. What are we, gunsmiths now? I mean … all we got to defend ourselves right now is a few—”

“Philip’s right.”

Brian’s voice startles everybody—the way it comes out on a hoarse, wheezing tone of certainty. He pushes his cereal away and looks up at his brother. “You’re right.”

Philip is probably the one who is the most taken aback by the conviction in Brian’s nasally voice.

Brian stands up, comes around the table, and stands in the doorway leading into the spacious, well-furnished living room. The lights are off in there, and all the shades are drawn. Brian points toward the front wall. “Basically, the front of the house is the problem. The sides and the back are pretty well protected by that tall fence. The dead don’t seem to be able to, like, penetrate barriers and stuff … and every house on this block has a fenced-in backyard.” For a moment, it looks as if Brian’s going to cough but he holds it in, puts his hand to his mouth for a moment. His hand is shaking. He goes on: “If we can, like, borrow materials from the other yards, other houses, maybe we can secure a wall across the front of the house, maybe across the neighbors’ houses, too.”

Bobby and Nick are looking at each other now, nobody reacting, until Philip finally says with a faint smile, “Leave it to the college boy.”

It’s been a while since the Blake boys have smiled at each other, but now Philip sees that at least his ne’er-do-well brother wants to be useful, wants to do something for the cause, wants to man up. And Brian seems to be absorbing confidence from Philip’s approval.

Nick is unconvinced. “For how long, though? I feel like a sitting duck in this place.”

“We don’t know what’s gonna happen,” Brian says, his voice raw and yet somehow manic. “We don’t know what caused this thing, how long it’s gonna last … they could, like, figure this thing out, come up with an antidote or something … they could drop chemicals from crop dusters, the CDC could contain it … you never know. I think Philip’s totally right. We should cool our jets here for a while.”

“Damn straight,” Philip Blake says with a grin, still sitting with his ropy arms crossed. He gives his brother a wink.

Brian returns the wink with a satisfied little nod, wiping a strand of hair as thick as straw from his eyes. He takes a shallow breath into wheezing lungs and then triumphantly walks over to the bottle of Scotch, which sits on the table next to Philip. Grabbing the bottle with a gusto that he hasn’t shown in years, Brian lifts it to his lips and takes a massive gulp with the victorious swagger of a Viking celebrating a successful hunt.

Instantly, he flinches, doubles over, and lets out a fusillade of coughs. Half the liquor in his mouth goes spraying across the kitchen, and he coughs and coughs and coughs and wheezes furiously, and for a moment, the others just stare. Little Penny is thunderstruck, gawking with her huge eyes, wiping droplets of liquor from her cheek.

Philip looks at his pathetic excuse for a brother and then looks at his buddies. Across the room, Bobby Marsh struggles to stifle a laugh. Nick tries to repress his own twitching grin. Philip tries to say something but can’t help but start laughing, and the laughter is contagious. The others start chortling.

Soon, everybody is laughing hysterically—even Brian—and for the first time since this whole nightmare kicked in, the laughter is genuine: a release of something dark and brittle lurking in all of them.

*   *   *

That night, they try to sleep in shifts. Each one of them gets their own room on the second floor—the remnants of former inhabitants like eerie artifacts in a museum: a bedside table with a half-full glass of water, a John Grisham novel open to a page that will never be finished, a pair of pompoms hanging off a teenage girl’s four-poster bed.

For most of the night, Philip sits watch downstairs, out in the living room, with his gun on a coffee table next to him and Penny tucked under blankets on a sectional sofa beside his chair. The child tries unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and around three in the morning, as Philip finds his mind casting back to those tormented thoughts of Sarah’s accident, he notices out of the corner of his eye that Penny is tossing and turning restlessly.

Philip leans over to her and strokes her dark hair and whispers, “Can’t sleep?”

The little girl has the covers pulled up to her chin, and she looks up at him. She shakes her head. Her ashen face is almost angelic in the orange light of a space heater, which Philip has rigged next to the couch. Outside, in the distant wind, barely audible over the soft drone of the heater, the dissonant chorus of groaning is relentless, like an infernal series of waves lapping a shore.

“Daddy’s here, punkin, don’t worry,” Philip says softly, touching her cheek. “I’ll always be here.”

She nods.

Philip gives her a tender smile. He leans down and plants a kiss on her left eyebrow. “Ain’t gonna let nothin’ happen to you.”

She nods again. She has the little penguin lodged snugly in the crook of her neck. She looks at the stuffed animal and frowns. She moves the penguin to her ear, and she acts as though she’s listening to the animal whisper a secret. She looks up at her father. “Daddy?”

“Yeah, punkin?”

“Penguin wants to know somethin’.”

“What’s that?”

“Penguin wants to know if them people are sick.”

Philip takes a deep breath. “You tell Penguin … yeah, they’re sick all right. They’re more than sick. That’s why we’ve been … puttin’ them outta their misery.”

“Daddy?”

“Yeah?”

“Penguin wants to know if we’re gonna get sick, too.”

Philip strokes the girl’s cheek. “No, ma’am. You tell Penguin we’re gonna stay healthy as mules.”

This seems to satisfy the girl enough for her to look away and stare into the void some more.

*   *   *

By four o’clock that morning, another sleepless soul in another part of the house is asking imponderable questions of his own. Lying in a tangle of blankets, his skinny form clad only in T-shirt and briefs, his fever breaking in a film of sweat, Brian Blake stares at the stucco plaster of a dead teenage girl’s ceiling and wonders if this is how the world ends. Was it Rudyard Kipling who said it ends “not with a bang but a whimper.” No, wait a minute … it was Eliot. T. S. Eliot. Brian remembers studying the poem—was it ‘The Hollow Men’?—in his twentieth century comparative literature class at the U of G. A lot of good that degree had done him.

He lies there and broods about his failures—as he does every night—but tonight the ruminations are intercut with carnage, like frames of a snuff film inserted into his stream of consciousness.

The old demons stir, mingling with the fresh fears, wearing a groove into his thoughts: Was there something he could have done or said to keep his ex-wife, Jocelyn, from drifting away, from lawyering up like she did, from saying all those hurtful things before she went back to Montego Bay? And can you kill the monsters with a simple blow to the skull or do you have to destroy the brain tissue? Was there something Brian could have done or begged for or borrowed to keep his music shop open in Athens—the only one of its kind in the South, his brilliant fucking idea of a store that catered to hip-hop artists with refurbished turntables and used bass cabinets and gaudy microphones festooned with Snoop Dogg bling? How fast are the unlucky victims out there multiplying? Is it like an airborne plague, or is it passed in the water like Ebola?

The circular ruminations of his mind keep going back to more immediate matters: the nagging feeling that the seventh member of the family that once lived here is still somewhere in the house.

Now that Brian has closed the deal among his compatriots that they should indeed stay here indefinitely, he can’t stop worrying about it. He hears every creak, every faint ticking of the foundation settling, every hushed whirr of the furnace coming on. For some reason that he cannot explain, he is absolutely certain that the blond-haired kid is still here, in the house, waiting, biding his time for … what? Maybe the kid is the only one in the family who didn’t turn. Maybe he’s terrified and hiding.

Before turning in that night, Brian had insisted they check the nooks and crannies of the house one last time. Philip had accompanied him with a pickaxe and a flashlight, and they had checked every corner of the basement, every cabinet, every closet and storage locker. They looked inside the meat freezer in the cellar, and even checked the washer and dryer for unlikely stowaways. Nick and Bobby looked up in the attic, behind trunks, in boxes, in wardrobes. Philip looked under all the beds and behind all the dressers. Coming up empty, they still made some interesting discoveries along the way.

They found a dog’s food bowl in the basement, but no sign of the animal. They also found an array of very useful power tools in the workshop: jigsaws, drills, routers, and even a nail gun. The nail gun would be especially handy for building barricades since it is somewhat quieter than a pounding hammer.

In fact, Brian is thinking about other uses for that nail gun when, all at once, he hears a noise that instantly frosts his scantily clothed body in goose bumps.

The sound is coming from above him, on the other side of the ceiling.

It’s coming from the attic.

THREE

Upon hearing the noise—almost subconsciously identifying it as something other than the house settling, or the wind in the dormers, or the furnace rattling—Brian sits up on the edge of the bed.

He cocks his head and listens more carefully. It sounds like somebody scratching at something, or the faint sound of fabric tearing in fits and jerks. At first, Brian feels compelled to go get his brother. Philip would be the best one to deal with this. It could be the kid, for God’s sake … or something worse.

But then, almost as an afterthought, Brian stops himself. Is he going to puss out again … as usual? Is he going to run, like always, to his brother—his younger brother, for God’s sake—the same individual whose hand Brian had once held at the crosswalk every morning when the two of them were grade school kids at Burke County Elementary? No, goddamnit. Not this time. This time, Brian is going to grow a pair.

He takes a deep breath, turns, and searches for the flashlight he had left on the bedside table. He finds it and switches it on.

The narrow beam shoots across the dark bedroom, spreading a silver pool of light on the opposite wall. Just you and me, Justin, Brian thinks as he rises to his feet. His head is clear. His senses are crackling.

The truth is, Brian had felt incredibly good earlier that night when he had concurred with his brother’s plans, when he had seen the look in Philip’s eyes, like maybe Brian is not a hopeless loser after all. Now it’s time to show Philip that the moment in the kitchen was not a fluke. Brian can get the job done just as well as Philip.

He moves quietly toward the door.

Before leaving the room, he grabs the metal baseball bat that he found in one of the boys’ bedrooms.

*   *   *

The papery rustling noises can be heard more clearly in the hallway, as Brian pauses under the attic hatchway, which is a glorified trapdoor embedded in the ceiling above the second-floor landing. The other bedrooms along the hallway—filled with the deep snores of Bobby Marsh and Nick Parsons—are situated on the other side of the landing, on the east side of the house, out of earshot. That’s why Brian is the only one hearing this right now.

A leather strap hangs down, low enough for Brian to jump up and grasp. He pulls the spring-levered hatch open, and the accordionlike stairs unfold with a pinging noise. Brian shines the flashlight up into the dark passage. Dust motes drift in the beam. The darkness is impenetrable, opaque. Brian’s heart chugs.

You fucking pussy, he thinks to himself. Get your pussy ass up there.

He climbs the steps with the baseball bat under one arm, the flashlight in his free hand, and he pauses when he reaches the top of the ladder. He shines the light on a huge steamer trunk with Magnolia Springs State Park stickers on it.

Now Brian smells the cold putrid odors of must and mothballs. The autumn chill has already seeped into the attic through the seams of the roof. The air is cool on his face. And after a moment, he hears the rustling again.

It’s coming from a deeper place in the shadows of the attic. Brian’s throat is as dry as bone meal as he climbs to his feet on the threshold. The ceiling is low enough to force him to hunch. Shivering in his underwear, Brian wants to cough but doesn’t dare.

The scratching noises stop, and then start again, vigorous and angry sounding.

Brian raises the bat. He gets very still. He’s learning the mechanics of fear all over again: When you’re really, really scared, you don’t shake like in the movies. You grow still, like an animal bristling.

It’s only afterward you start shaking.

The beam of the flashlight slowly scans across the dark niches of the attic, the detritus of the well-to-do: an exercise bike laced with cobwebs, a rowing machine, more trunks, barbells, tricycles, wardrobe boxes, water skis, a pinball machine furry with dust. The scratching noises cease again.

The light reveals a coffin.

Brian practically turns to stone.

A coffin?

*   *   *

Philip is already halfway up the staircase when he notices, up on the second-floor landing, the attic stepladder hanging down, unfolded.

He pads up to the landing in his stocking feet. He carries an axe in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The .22 pistol is shoved down the back of his jeans. He is shirtless, his ropy musculature shimmering in moonbeams filtering down through a skylight.

It takes him mere seconds to cross the landing and scale the accordion steps, and when he emerges into the darkness of the attic, he sees the silhouette of a figure across the narrow space.

Before Philip even has a chance to shine his flashlight on his brother, the situation becomes clear.

*   *   *

“It’s a tanning bed,” the voice says, making Brian jump. For the past few seconds, Brian Blake has been paralyzed with terror, standing ten feet away from the dusty, oblong enclosure shoved up against one wall of the attic. The top of the thing is latched shut like a giant clamshell, and something scratches to get out of it.

Brian jerks around and finds in the beam of his flashlight his brother’s gaunt, sullen face. Philip stands on the threshold of the attic with the axe in his right hand. “Move away from it, Brian.”

“You think it’s—”

“The missing kid?” Philip whispers, cautiously moving toward the object. “Let’s find out.”

The scratching noise, as if stimulated by the sound of voices, surges and rises.

Brian turns toward the tanning bed, braces himself, and raises the baseball bat. “He might have been hiding up here when he turned.”

Philip approaches with the axe. “Get outta the way, sport.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Brian says bitterly, moving toward the latch, his baseball bat poised.

Philip gently steps in between his brother and the tanning bed. “You don’t have to prove nothing to me, man. Just move outta the way.”

“No, goddamnit, I got this,” Brian hisses, reaching for the dusty latch.

Philip studies his brother. “Okay, whatever. Go for it, but do it quick. Whatever it is—don’t think about it too much.”

“I know,” Brian says, grasping the latch with his free hand.

Philip stands inches behind his brother.

Brian unlatches the enclosure.

The scuttling noises cease.

Philip raises the axe as Brian throws open the lid.

*   *   *

Two quick movements—a pair of blurs in the darkness—shoot across Philip’s sight line: a rustling of fur and the arc of Brian’s bat.

It takes a second or two for the animal to register in Philip’s heightened senses—the mouse darting out of the glare of the flashlight and scurrying across the fiberglass trough toward a hole gnawed in one corner.

The baseball bat comes down hard, missing the fat, oily-gray rodent by a mile.

Pieces of the bed’s switch panel and old toys shatter at the impact. Brian lets out a gasp and recoils at the sight of the mouse vanishing down the hole, slithering back into the inner workings of the bed’s base.

Philip lets out a sigh of relief and lowers the axe. He starts to say something when he hears a little metallic tune playing in the shadows next to him. Brian looks down, breathing hard.

A little jack-in-the-box, thrown by the impact of the bat, lies on the floor.

Triggered by the fall, the tinny music plays a few more notes of a circus lullaby.

Then the toy clown pops out—sideways—from the fallen metal container.

“Boo,” Philip says wearily, with very little humor in his voice.

*   *   *

Their moods improve slightly the next morning after a huge breakfast of scrambled eggs and slab bacon and grits and ham and griddlecakes and fresh peaches and sweet tea. The fragrant mélange fills with entire house with the welcoming odors of coffee and cinnamon and smoked meats sizzling. Nick even makes his special redeye gravy for the group, which sends Bobby into ecstasy.

Brian finds cold remedies in the master bedroom medicine cabinet and starts feeling a little better after he downs a few DayQuil capsules.

After breakfast, they explore the immediate vicinity—the single square block known as Green Briar Lane—and they get more good news. They find a treasure trove of supplies and building materials: woodpiles for fireplaces, extra planking under decks, more food in the neighbors’ refrigerators, cans of gas in the garages, winter coats and boots, boxes of nails, liquor, blowtorches, bottled water, a shortwave radio, a laptop, a generator, stacks of DVDs, and a gun rack in one of the basements with several hunting rifles and boxes of shells.

No silencer; but beggars can’t be choosers.

They also get lucky in the undead department. The houses on either side of the Colonial are empty; their residents evidently got the hell out of Dodge before the shit had gone too far down. Two houses away from the Colonial, on the west side, Philip and Nick encounter an elderly couple who have turned, but the oldsters are easily, quickly, and most importantly, quietly dispatched with some well-placed hatchet blows.

That afternoon, Philip and company cautiously begin work on the barricade across the front parkway of the Colonial and its two neighbors—a total span of a hundred and fifty feet for the three lots, and sixty down either side—which sounds to Nick and Bobby like a daunting amount of territory to cover, but with the ten-foot-long prefab sections they find under a neighbor’s deck, combined with fencing cannibalized off the place across the street, the work goes surprisingly fast.

By dusk that evening, Philip and Nick are connecting the last sections on the northern edge of the property line.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on ’em all day,” Philip is saying, pressing the forked tip of the nail gun against the bracing of a corner section. He’s referring to the swarms out near the golf club. Nick nods as he butts the two support beams against each other.

Philip pulls the trigger, and the nail gun makes a muffled snapping noise—like the crack of a metal whip—sending a six-inch galvanized nail into the boards. The nail gun is baffled with a small piece of packing blanket, secured with duct tape, to dampen the noise.

“I ain’t seen a single one of them wander closer,” Philip says, wiping the sweat from his brow, moving to the next section of support beams. Nick holds the boards steady, and the tip presses down.

FFFFFUMP!

“I don’t know,” Nick says skeptically, moving to the next section, the sweat making his satin roadie jacket cling to his back. “I still say it’s not if … but when.”

FFFFFFFUMP!

“You worry too much, son,” Philip says, moving to the next section of planking, tugging on the gun’s cord. The extension cable snakes off toward an outlet on the corner of the neighbor’s house. Philip had to connect a grand total of six twenty-eight-foot cords to get the thing to reach. He pauses and glances over his shoulder.

About fifty yards away, in the backyard of the Colonial, Brian pushes Penny in a swing. It’s taken a little getting used to for Philip, putting his hapless brother in charge of his precious little girl, but right now Brian is the best nanny he’s got.

The play set—of course—is deluxe. Rich folks love to spoil their kids with shit like this. This one—more than likely a haunt of the missing kid—has got all the bells and whistles: slide, clubhouse, four swings, climbing wall, jungle gym, and sandbox.

“We got it made here,” Philip goes on, turning back to his work. “Long as we keep our heads screwed on straight, we’re gonna be fine.”

As they position the next section, the rustling sounds of their movements and the creak of the planks mask the telltale noise of shuffling footsteps.

The footsteps are coming from across the street. Philip doesn’t hear them until the errant zombie is close enough for its odor to register.

Nick is the first one to smell it: that black, oily, mildewy combination of rotting protein and decay—like human waste cooking in bacon grease. It immediately puts Nick’s guard up. “Wait a minute,” he says, holding a section of planking. “You smell—”

“Yeah, smells like—”

A fish-belly arm bursts through a gap in the fencing, grabbing a hank of Philip’s denim shirt.

*   *   *

The assailant was once a middle-aged woman in a designer running suit, now an emaciated wraith with torn sleeves, blackened, exposed teeth, and the button eyes of a prehistoric fish, her hooked hand clutching Philip’s shirttail with the vise grip of frozen dead fingers. She lets out a low groan like a broken pipe organ as Philip spins toward his axe, which lies canted against a wheelbarrow twenty feet away.

Too damn far.

The dead lady goes for Philip’s neck with the autonomic hunger of a giant snapping turtle, and across the yard, Nick fumbles for a weapon, but it’s all happening too fast. Philip rears backward with a grunt, just now realizing that he still holds the nail gun. He dodges the snapping teeth, and then instinctively raises the muzzle of the nail gun.

In one quick movement, he touches the tip to the thing’s brow.

FFFFFFFFFFFUMP!

The lady zombie stiffens.

Icy fingers release their grip on Philip.

He pulls himself free, huffing and puffing, gaping at the thing.

The vertical cadaver teeters for a moment, wobbling as if drunk, shuddering in its soiled velveteen Pierre Cardin warm-up, but it will not go down. The head of the six-inch galvanized nail is visible above the ridge of the lady’s nose like a tiny coin stuck there.

The thing remains upright for endless moments, its sharklike eyes turned upward, until it begins to slowly stagger backward across the parkway, its ruined face taking on a strange, almost dreamy expression.

For a moment, it looks as though the thing is remembering something, or hearing some high-pitched whistle. Then it collapses in the grass.

*   *   *

“I think the nail does just enough damage to take ’em out,” Philip is saying after dinner, pacing back and forth across the shuttered windows of the lavish dining room, the nail gun in his hand like a visual aid.

The others are sitting at the long burnished oak table, the remnants of dinner lying strewn in front of them. Brian cooked for the group that night, defrosting a roast in the microwave and making gravy with a vintage cabernet and a splash of cream. Penny is in the adjacent family room watching a DVD of Dora the Explorer.

“Yeah, but did you see the way that thing went down?” Nick points out, pushing an uneaten gob of meat across his plate. “After you zapped it … looked like the damn thing was stoned for a second.”

Philip keeps pacing, clicking the trigger of the nail gun and thinking. “Yeah but it did go down.”

“It’s quieter than a gun, I’ll give you that.”

“And it’s a hell of a lot easier than splitting their skulls open with an axe.”

Bobby has just started in on his second helping of pot roast and gravy. “Too bad you don’t have a six-mile extension cord,” he says with his mouth full.

Philip clicks the trigger a few more times. “Maybe we could hook this puppy up to a battery.”

Nick looks up. “Like a car battery?”

“No, like something you could carry more easily, something like one of them big lantern batteries or something outta one of them electric mowers.”

Nick shrugs.

Bobby eats.

Philip paces and thinks.

Brian stares at the wall, mumbling, “Something to do with their brains.”

“Say what?” Philip looks at his brother. “What was that, Bri?”

Brian looks at him. “Those things … the sickness. It’s basically in the brain, right? It’s gotta be.” He pauses. He looks at his plate. “I still say we don’t even know they’re dead.”

Nick looks at Brian. “You mean after we take ’em out? After we … destroy ’em?”

“No, I mean before,” Brian says. “I mean, like, the condition they’re in.”

Philip stops pacing. “Shit, man … on Monday, I saw one of ’em get squashed by an eighteen-wheeler and ten minutes later, it’s dragging itself along the street with its guts hanging out. They’ve been saying it on all the news reports. They’re dead, sport. They’re way dead.”

“I’m just saying, the central nervous system, man, it’s complicated. All the shit in the environment right now, new strains of shit.”

“Hey, you want to take one of them things to a doctor for a checkup, be my guest.”

Brian sighs. “All I’m saying is, we don’t know enough yet. We don’t know shit.”

“We know all we need to know,” Philip says, giving his brother a look. “We know there’s more of them fucking things every day, and all they seem to want to do is have us for lunch. Which is why we’re gonna hang here for a while, let things play out a little.”

Brian breathes out a painful, weary sigh. The others are silent.

In the lull, they can hear the faint noises that they’ve been hearing all night, coming from the darkness outside: the muffled, intermittent thudding of insensate figures bumping up against the makeshift barricade.

Despite Philip’s efforts to erect the rampart quickly and quietly, the commotion of the day’s construction project has drawn more of the walking corpses.

“How long do you think we’re gonna be able to stay here?” Brian asks softly.

Philip sits down, lays the nail gun on the table and takes another sip of his bourbon. He nods toward the family room, where the whimsical voices of children’s programming drift incongruously. “She needs a break,” Philip says. “She’s exhausted.”

“She loves that play set out back,” Brian says with a weak smile.

Philip nods. “She can live a normal life here for a while.”

Everybody looks at him. Everybody silently chews on the concept.

“Here’s to all the rich motherfuckers of the world,” Philip says, raising his glass.

The others toast without really knowing just exactly what they’re toasting … or how long it will last.

FOUR

The next day, in the clean autumn sun, Penny plays in the backyard under the watchful gaze of Brian. She plays throughout the morning while the others take inventory and sort through their supplies. In the afternoon, Philip and Nick secure the window wells in the basement with extra planking, and try unsuccessfully to rig the nail gun to DC power, while Bobby, Brian, and Penny play cards in the family room.

The proximity of the undead is a constant factor, swimming sharklike under the surface of every decision, every activity. But for the moment, there’s just an occasional stray, an errant wanderer bumping up against the privacy fence, then shambling away. For the most part, the activity behind the seven-foot cedar bulwark on Green Briar Lane has, so far, gone unnoticed by the swarm.

That night, after dinner, with the shades drawn, they all watch a Jim Carrey movie in the family room, and they almost feel normal again. They’re all starting to get used to this place. The occasional muffled thump out in the darkness barely registers now. Brian has practically forgotten the missing twelve-year-old, and after Penny goes to bed, the men make long-term plans.

They discuss the implications of staying in the Colonial as long as supplies hold out. They’ve got enough provisions for weeks. Nick wonders if they should send out a scout, maybe gauge the situation on the roads into Atlanta, but Philip is adamant about staying put. “Let whoever’s out there duke it out among themselves,” Philip advises.

Nick is still keeping tabs on the radio, TV, and Internet … and like the failing bodily functions of a terminal patient, the media seem to be sparking out one organ at a time. By this point, most radio stations are playing either recorded programming or useless emergency information. TV networks—the ones on basic cable that are still up and running—are now resorting to either twenty-four-hour automated civil defense announcements or inexplicable, incongruous reruns of banal late-night infomercials.

By the third day, Nick realizes that most of the radio dial is static, most of basic cable is snow, and the Wi-Fi in the house is gone. No dial-up connections are working, and the regular phone calls Nick has been making to emergency numbers—which, up to this point, have all played back recordings—are now sending back the classic “fuck you” from the phone company: The number you have dialed is not available at this time, please try again later.

By late morning that day, the sky clouds over.

In the afternoon, a dismal, chill mist falls on the community, and everybody huddles indoors, trying to ignore the fact that there’s a fine line between being safe and being a prisoner. Other than Nick, most of them are tired of talking about Atlanta. Atlanta seems farther away now—as if the more they ponder the twenty-some miles between Wiltshire and the city, the more impassable they seem.

That night, after everybody drifts off to sleep, Philip sits his lonely vigil in the living room next to a slumbering Penny.

The mist has deteriorated into full-blown thunder and lightning.

Philip pokes a finger between two shutter slats, and he peers out into the darkness. Through the gap, he can see—over the top of the barricade—the winding side streets and massive shadows of live oaks, their branches bending in the wind.

Lightning flickers.

Two hundred yards away, a dozen or so humanoid shapes materialize in the strobe light, moving aimlessly through the rain.

It’s hard to tell for sure from Philip’s vantage point, but it looks as though the things might be moving—in their leaden, retarded fashion, like stroke victims—this way. Do they smell fresh meat? Did the noises of human activity draw them out? Or are they simply lumbering around randomly like ghastly goldfish in a bowl?

Right then, for the first time since they arrived at Wiltshire Estates, Philip Blake begins to wonder if their days in this womb of wall-to-wall carpet and overstuffed sofas are numbered.

*   *   *

The fourth day dawns cold and overcast. The pewter-colored sky hangs low over the wet lawns and abandoned homes. Although the occasion goes unspoken, the new day marks a milestone of sorts: the beginning of the plague’s second week.

Now Philip stands with his coffee in the living room, peering out through the shutters at the jury-rigged barricade. In the pale morning light, he can see the northeast corner of the fence shuddering and trembling. “Son of a buck,” he mutters under his breath.

“What’s the matter?” Brian’s voice snaps Philip out of his stupor.

“There’s more of ’em.”

“Shit. How many?”

“Can’t tell.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Bobby!”

The big man trundles into the living room in his sweatpants and bare feet, eating a banana. Philip turns to his portly pal and says, “Get dressed.”

Bobby swallows a mouthful of banana. “What’s going on?”

Philip ignores the question, looks at Brian. “Keep Penny in the family room.”

“Will do,” Brian says, and hurries off.

Philip starts toward the stairs, calling out as he goes: “Get the nail gun and as many extension cords as you can carry … hatchets, too!”

*   *   *

FFFFFFFOOOMP! Number five goes down like a giant rag doll in tattered suit pants, the dead, milky eyes rolling back in its head as it slides down the other side of the fence, its putrid body collapsing to the parkway. Philip steps back, breathing hard from the exertion, damp with sweat in his denim jacket and jeans.

Numbers one through four had been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel—one female and three males—all of whom Philip had sneaked up on with the nail gun as they bumped and clawed against the weak spot at the fence’s corner. At that point, all Philip had to do was stand on the bottom strut with a good angle on the tops of their heads. He put them down quickly, one after another: FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP!

Number five had been slippery. Inadvertently jerking out of the line of fire at the last moment, it did a little intoxicated shuffle, then craned its neck upward at Philip, jaws snapping. Philip had to waste two nails—both of which ricocheted off the sidewalk—before he finally sent one home into the suit-wearing asshole’s cerebral cortex.

Now Philip catches his breath, doubled over with exhaustion, the nail gun still in his right hand, still plugged into the house with four twenty-five-foot cords. He straightens up and listens. The front parkway is silent now. The fence is still.

Glancing over his shoulder, Philip sees Bobby Marsh in the backyard, about a hundred feet away. The big man is sitting on his fat ass, trying to catch his breath, leaning against a small abandoned doghouse. The doghouse has a little shingle roof and the word LADDIE BOY mounted above the opening at one end.

These rich people and their fucking dogs, Philip thinks ruefully, still a little manic and wired. Probably fed that thing better than most kids.

Over the back fence, about twenty feet away from Bobby, the limp remains of a dead woman are draped over the crest, a hatchet still buried in her skull where Bobby Marsh put out her lights.

Philip gives Bobby a wave and a hard, questioning look: Everything cool?

Bobby returns the gesture with a thumbs-up.

Then … almost without warning … things begin happening very quickly.

*   *   *

The first indication that something is decidedly not cool occurs within a split second of Bobby signaling the thumbs-up sign to his friend and leader and mentor. Drenched in sweat, his heart still pumping with the burden of his huge girth as he sits leaning against the doghouse, Bobby manages to accompany the thumbs-up signal with a smile … completely oblivious to the muffled noise coming from inside the doghouse.

For years now, Bobby Marsh has secretly yearned to please Philip Blake, and the prospects of giving Philip the thumbs-up after a messy job well done fills Bobby with a weird kind of satisfaction.

An only child, barely able to make it out of high school, Bobby clung to Philip in the years before Sarah Blake had died, and after that—after Philip had drifted away from his drinking buddies—Bobby had desperately tried to reconnect. Bobby called Philip too many times; Bobby talked too much when they were together; and Bobby often made a fool of himself trying to keep up with the wiry, alpha dog of a ringleader. But now, in a strange way, Bobby feels as though this bizarre epidemic has—among other things—given Bobby a way to bond again with Philip.

All of which is probably why, at first, Bobby doesn’t hear the noise inside the doghouse.

When the thump comes—as if a giant heart were beating inside the little miniature shack—Bobby’s smile freezes on his face, and his upturned thumb falls to his side. And by the time the realization that there’s something inside the doghouse—something moving—manages to travel the synapses of Bobby’s brain and register plainly enough for him to move, it’s already too late.

Something small and low to the ground bursts out of the doghouse’s arched opening.

*   *   *

Philip is already halfway across the yard, running at a full sprint, when it becomes clear that the thing that has just thrust its way out of the doghouse is a tiny human being—or at least a rotting, bluish, contorted facsimile of a tiny human being—with leaves and dog shit in its filthy, matted blond bangs, and chains tangled around its waist and legs.

“F-FUH-FFUHHHHK!” Bobby yelps and jerks back away from the twelve-year-old corpse as the thing that was once a boy now pounces on Bobby’s ham-hock-sized leg.

Bobby tumbles sideways, ripping his leg free in the nick of time, just as the little contorted face—like a sunken gourd with hollow cavities for eyes—gobbles the grass where Bobby’s leg had been one millisecond earlier.

Philip is now fifty feet away, charging toward the doghouse at top speed, raising the nail gun like a divining rod aimed at the miniature monster. Bobby crawls crablike through the damp grass, his ass crack showing pathetically, his gasps high and shrill like those of a little girl.

The pint-sized fiend moves with the graceless energy of a tarantula, scuttling across the grass toward Bobby. The fat man tries to struggle to his feet and run, but his legs get tangled and he tumbles again, backward this time.

Philip is twenty feet away when Bobby starts shrieking in a higher register. The zombie child has hooked a clawlike hand around Bobby’s ankle, and before Bobby can wrest his leg away from the thing, it sinks a mouthful of putrefying teeth into Bobby’s leg.

“GODDAMNIT!” Philip booms as he approaches with the nail gun.

A hundred feet behind him, the extension cord pulls free of the outlet.

Philip slams the tip of the nail gun down on the back of the thing’s skull as the monster latches on to Bobby’s quivering, fat body.

The nail gun trigger clicks. Nothing happens. The zombie burrows down into Bobby’s flaccid thigh, piranhalike, breaching his femoral artery and taking half his scrotum with it. Bobby’s scream deteriorates into a ululating howl as Philip instinctively tosses the gun aside, then lurches at the beast. He tears the thing off his friend as though removing a giant leech and heaves it—head over heels—across the lawn before it has a chance to take another bite.

The dead child flops and rolls twenty feet across the muddy grass.

Nick and Brian burst out of the house, Brian grabbing for the extension cord, Nick roaring across the lawn with a pickaxe. Philip grabs Bobby and tries to stop him from squirming and screaming, because the extra exertion is making the big man hemorrhage faster, the ragged wound already sending up geysers of blood in rhythm with Bobby’s quickening pulse. Philip slams his hand down on Bobby’s leg, stanching the flow slightly, the blood oozing between Philip’s greasy fingers, as other figures move across Philip’s peripheral vision. The dead thing is crawling back across the moist ground toward Philip and Bobby, and Nick does not hesitate, approaching at a sprint, raising the axe, eyes wide with panic and rage. The axe sings through the air, the rusty point coming down on the back of the zombie-child’s skull, sinking three inches into the cranial cavity. The monster deflates. Philip screams up at Nick something about a belt, a BELT, and now Nick is hovering, fumbling for his belt. Philip has no formal training in first aid but he knows enough to try and stop the bleeding with some kind of tourniquet. He wraps Nick’s belt around the shivering fat man’s leg, and Bobby is trying to talk again but he looks like a man experiencing extreme cold, his lips moving, quivering silently. Meantime—as all this is going on—Brian is a hundred feet away, plugging the extension cord back in the outlet, probably because it’s all he can think of doing. The nail gun lies in the grass fifteen feet behind Philip. At this point, Philip is shouting at Nick to GO GET SOME FUCKING BANDAGES AND ALCOHOL AND WHATEVER!!! Nick hurries off, still carrying the pickaxe, while Brian approaches, staring at the dead thing lying facedown in the grass, its skull stoved in. Brian gives it a wide berth. He picks up the nail gun—just in case—and he scans the hill behind the back fence as Philip now holds Bobby in his arms like a giant baby. Bobby is crying, breathing quick, shallow, rattling breaths. Philip comforts his friend, murmuring encouragement and assuring him that it’s all going to be okay … but it’s clear, as Brian cautiously approaches, that things are definitely not going to be okay.

*   *   *

Moments later, Nick returns with an armful of large sterile cotton bandages from inside, as well as a plastic bottle of alcohol in one back pocket and a roll of cotton tape in the other. But something has changed. The emergency has transformed into something darker—a deathwatch.

“We gotta get him inside,” Philip announces, now soaked in his friend’s blood. But Philip makes no effort to lift the fat man. Bobby Marsh is going to die. That much is clear to all of them.

It’s especially clear to Bobby Marsh, who now lies in a state of shock, staring up at the gunmetal sky, struggling to speak.

Brian stands nearby, holding the nail gun at his side, staring down at Bobby. Nick drops the bandages. He lets out an anguished breath. He looks as though he might start to cry, but instead he simply drops to his knees on the other side of Bobby and hangs his head.

“I—I—n-n-nn—” Bobby Marsh tries desperately to get Philip to understand something.

“Sssshhhhh…” Philip strokes the man’s shoulder. Philip cannot think straight. He turns, grabs a roll of bandages, and starts dressing the wound.

“Nnn-n-NO!” Bobby pushes the bandage away.

“Bobby, goddamnit.”

“NN-NO!”

Philip stops, swallows hard, looks into the watery eyes of the dying man. “It’s gonna be okay,” Philip says, his voice changing.

“N-no—it ain’t,” Bobby manages. Somewhere way up in the sky, a crow yammers. Bobby knows what’s going to happen. They saw a man in a ditch back in Covington come back in less than ten minutes. “S-ss-stop saying that, Philly.”

“Bobby—”

“It’s over,” Bobby manages in a feeble whisper, and his eyes roll back for a moment. Then he sees the nail gun in Brian’s hand. With his big bloody sausage fingers, Bobby reaches for the muzzle.

Brian drops the gun with a start.

“Goddamnit, we gotta get him inside!” Philip’s voice is laced with hopelessness as Bobby Marsh blindly reaches for the nail gun. He gets his fat hand around the pointed barrel and tries to lift it to his temple.

“Jesus Christ,” Nick utters.

“Get that thing away from him!” Philip waves Brian away from the victim.

Bobby’s tears track down the sides of his huge head, cleansing the blood in streaks. “P-please, Philly,” Bobby murmurs. “J-just … do it.”

Philip stands up. “Nick!—C’mere!” Philip turns and walks a few paces toward the house.

Nick rises to his feet and joins Philip. The two men stand fifteen feet away from Bobby, out of earshot, their backs turned, their voices low and strained.

“We gotta cut him,” Philip says quickly.

“We gotta what?”

“Amputate his leg.”

“What!”

“Before the sickness spreads.”

“But how do you—”

“We don’t know how fast it spreads, we gotta try, we owe the man at least that.”

“But—”

“I’m gonna need ya to go get the hacksaw from the shed and also bring—”

A voice rings out behind them, interrupting Philip’s tense litany: “Guys?”

It’s Brian, and from the grim sound of his nasally call, the news is most likely bad.

Philip and Nick turn.

Bobby Marsh is stone-still.

Brian’s eyes well up as he kneels next to the fat man. “It’s too late.”

Philip and Nick come over to where Bobby lies in the grass, his eyes closed. His big, flabby chest does not move. His mouth is slack.

“Oh no … Sweet Jesus Christ no,” Nick says, staring at his dead pal.

Philip doesn’t say anything for quite a long time. No one does.

The immense corpse lies still, there on the wet ground, for endless minutes … until something stirs in the man’s extremities, in the tendons of his massive legs, and in the tips of his plump fingers.

At first, the phenomenon looks like the typical residual nerve twitches that morticians might see now and again, the dieseling engine of a cadaver’s central nervous system. But as Nick and Brian gape, their eyes widening—both of them slowly rising, then slowly beginning to back away—Philip comes closer still, kneeling down, a sullen businesslike expression on his face.

Bobby Marsh’s eyes open.

The pupils have turned as white as pus.

Philip grabs the nail gun and presses it to the big man’s forehead just above the left eyebrow.

FFFFFFFFUMP!

*   *   *

Hours later. Inside the house. After dark. Penny asleep. Nick in the kitchen, drowning his grief in whiskey … Brian nowhere to be found … Bobby’s cooling corpse in the backyard, covered in a tarp next to the other bodies … and Philip now standing at the living room window, gazing out through the slatted shutters at the growing number of dark figures on the street. They shuffle like sleepwalkers, moving back and forth behind the barricade. There are more of them now. Thirty, maybe. Forty even.

Streetlights shine through the cracks in the fence, the moving shadows breaking the beams at irregular intervals, making the light strobe, making Philip crazy. He hears the silent voice in his head—the same voice that first made itself known after Sarah had died: Burn the place down, burn the whole fucking world down.

For a moment earlier that day, after Bobby had died, the voice had wanted to mutilate the twelve-year-old’s body. The voice had wanted to take that dead thing apart. But Philip tamped it down, and now he’s fighting it again: The fuse is lit, brother, the clock is ticking …

Philip looks away from the window, and he rubs his tired eyes.

“It’s okay to let it out,” a different voice says now, coming from across the darkness.

Philip whirls and sees the silhouette of his brother across the living room, standing in the archway of the kitchen.

Turning back to the window, Philip offers no response. Brian comes over. He’s holding a bottle of cough syrup in his trembling hands. In the darkness his feverish eyes shimmer with tears. He stands there for a moment.

Then he says in low, soft voice, careful not to awaken Penny on the couch next to them, “There’s no shame in letting it out.”

“Letting what out?”

“Look,” Brian says, “I know you’re hurting.” He sniffs, wipes his mouth on his sleeve, his voice hoarse and congested. “All I wanted to say is, I’m really sorry about Bobby, I know you guys were—”

“It’s done.”

“Philip, c’mon—”

“This place is done, it’s cooked.”

Brian looks at him. “What do you mean?”

“We’re getting out of here.”

“But I thought—”

“Take a look.” Philip indicates the growing number of shadows out on Green Briar Lane. “We’re drawing ’em like flies on shit.”

“Yeah, but the barricade is still—”

“The longer we stay here, Brian, the more it’s gonna get like a prison.” Philip stares out the window. “Gotta keep moving forward.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Like tomorrow?”

“We’ll start packin’ in the morning, get as many supplies in the Suburban as we can.”

Silence.

Brian looks at his brother. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” Philip keeps staring. “Go to sleep.”

*   *   *

At breakfast, Philip decides to tell his daughter that Bobby had to up and go home—“to go take care of his folks”—and the explanation seems to satisfy the little girl.

Later that morning, Nick and Philip dig the grave out back, choosing a soft spot at the end of the garden, while Brian keeps Penny occupied in the house. Brian thinks they should tell Penny some version of what happened, but Philip tells Brian to stay the hell out of it and keep his mouth shut.

Now, in front of the rose trellis in the backyard, Philip and Nick lift the massive tarp-wrapped body and lower it into the hollowed-out earth.

It takes them quite a while to get the hole filled back up, each man tossing spade after spade of rich, black Georgia topsoil on their friend. While they work, the atonal moaning of the undead drifts on the wind.

It’s another blustery, overcast day, and the sounds of the zombie horde carry up across the sky and over the tops of houses. It drives Philip nuts as he sweats in his denims, heaving dirt on the grave. The oily, black, rotten-meat odor is as strong as ever. It makes Philip’s stomach clench as he puts the last few shovelfuls of earth on the grave.

Now Philip and Nick pause on opposite sides of the huge mound, leaning on their shovels, the sweat cooling on their necks. Neither says a word for a long moment, each man lost in his thoughts. Finally, Nick looks up, and very softly, very wearily, and with great deference, says, “You want to say something?”

Philip looks across the grave at his buddy. The moaning noises are coming from all directions like the roar of locusts, so loud Philip can barely think straight.

Right then, for some strange reason, Philip Blake remembers the night that the three friends got drunk and sneaked into the Starliter Drive-In Theater out on Waverly Road and broke into the projection booth. Waving his fat little fingers in front of the projector, Bobby had made shadow puppets appear on the distant screen. Philip had laughed so hard that night he thought he was going to puke, watching the silhouettes of rabbits and ducks cavorting across the flickering images of Chuck Norris spin-kicking Nazis.

“Some folks thought Bobby Marsh was a simpleton,” Philip says with his head lowered, his gaze down-turned, “but they didn’t know the man. He was loyal and he was funny, and he was a goddamn good friend … and he died like a man.”

Nick is looking down, his shoulders trembling slightly, his voice breaking, his words barely audible over the rising clamor around them: “Almighty God, in your mercy turn the darkness of death into the dawn of new life, and the sorrow of parting into the joy of heaven.”

Philip feels tears welling up and he grits his teeth so hard his jaw throbs.

“Through our Savior, Jesus Christ,” Nick says in a shaky voice, “who died, rose again, and lives for evermore. Amen.”

“Amen,” Philip manages in a faint croak that sounds almost alien to his own ears.

The relentless din of the undead swells and surges louder and louder.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Philip Blake bellows at the zombies, the noises coming from all directions now. “YOU DEAD MOTHERFUCKERS!” Philip turns away from the grave, slowly pivoting: “I WILL SKULL-FUCK EVERY ONE OF YOU CANNIBAL-COCKSUCKERS!!! I WILL RIP EVERY STINKING HEAD OFF EVERY FUCKING ONE OF YOU AND SHIT DOWN YOUR ROTTEN FUCKING NECKS!!!”

Hearing this, Nick starts sobbing as Philip runs out of gas and falls to his knees.

While Nick cries, Philip just stares down at the fresh dirt as though some answer lies there.

*   *   *

If there was ever any doubt about who was in charge—not that there ever was—it is now made abundantly clear that Philip is the alpha and omega.

They spend the rest of that day packing, Philip issuing orders in monosyllables, his voice low and gravelly with stress. “Take the toolbox,” he grunts. “Batteries for the flashlights,” he mumbles. “And that box of shells,” he mutters. “Extra blankets, too.”

Nick thinks that maybe they should consider taking two cars.

Although most of the abandoned vehicles in the community are ripe for the picking—many of them late-model luxury jobs, many with the keys still in them—Brian worries about splitting the ragged little group into two. Or maybe he’s just clinging to his brother now. Maybe Brian just needs to stay close to the center of gravity.

They decide to stick with the Chevy Suburban. The thing is a tank.

Which is exactly what they’ll need to get into Atlanta.

*   *   *

His stubborn cold now settling into his lungs, causing a perpetual wheeze that may or may not be early-stage pneumonia, Brian Blake focuses on the task at hand. He packs three large coolers with food stamped with the furthest expiration dates: smoked lunch meats, hard cheeses, sealed containers of juice and yogurt and soda and mayonnaise. He fills a cardboard box with bread and beef jerky and instant coffee and bottled water and protein bars and vitamins and paper plates and plastic utensils. He decides to throw in an array of chef’s knives: cleavers, serrated knives, and boning knives—for whatever close encounters they might stumble into.

Brian fills another box with toilet paper and soap and towels and rags. He rifles through the medicine cabinets and takes cold remedies and sleeping pills and pain relievers, and while he’s doing this, he gets an idea: something he should do before they depart.

In the basement, Brian finds a small can half full of Benjamin Moore Apple Peel Red and a two-inch horsehair paintbrush. He finds an old three-by-three-foot-square piece of plywood, and quickly but carefully, he writes a message: five simple words in big capital letters, large enough to be seen from a passing vehicle. He nails a couple of short legs on the bottom edge of the sign.

Then he takes the sign upstairs and shows it to his brother. “I think we should leave this outside the gate,” Brian says to Philip.

Philip just shrugs and tells Brian it’s up to him, whatever he wants to do.

*   *   *

They wait until after dark to make their exit. At the stroke of 7 P.M.—with the cold, metallic sun drooping behind the rooftops—they hurriedly pack the Suburban. Working quickly in the lengthening shadows, while monsters swarm against the barricade, they form a sort of bucket brigade, quickly passing suitcases and containers from the side door of the house to the open hatch of the SUV.

They take their original axes with an assortment of additional picks and shovels and hatchets and saws and cutting blades from the toolshed out back. They bring rope and wire and road flares and extra coats and snow boots and fire-starter blocks. They also pack a siphoning tube and as many extra plastic tanks of gasoline as they can fit into the rear storage well.

The Suburban’s tank is currently full—Philip managed to siphon fifteen gallons’ worth earlier in the day from an abandoned sedan in a neighbor’s garage—as they have no clue about the status of local gas stations.

Over the last four days, Philip had discovered a variety of sporting guns in neighboring homes. Rich folks love their duck season in these parts. They love picking off green heads from the luxury of their heated blinds with their high-powered rifles and purebred hounds.

Philip’s old man used to do it the hard way, with nothing but waders, moonshine, and a mean disposition.

Now Philip chooses three guns to stow in vinyl zip-up bags in the rear compartment—one is a .22-caliber Winchester rimfire, and the other two are Marlin Model 55 shotguns. The Marlins are especially useful. They’re known as “goose guns.” Fast and accurate and powerful, the 55s are designed for killing migratory fowl at high altitudes … or, in this case, the bull’s-eye of a skull at a hundred-plus yards.

*   *   *

It’s almost eight o’clock by the time they get the Suburban packed, and get Penny situated in the middle seat. Bundled in a down coat with her stuffed penguin at her side, she seems oddly sanguine, her pale face drawn and languid, as though she were about to visit the pediatrician.

Doors click open and shut. Philip climbs behind the wheel. Nick takes the front passenger seat, and Brian settles in next to Penny in the middle. The sign sits on the floor, pressed against Brian’s knees.

The ignition fires. The growl of the engine carries across the still darkness, making the undead stir on the other side of the barricade.

“Let’s do this quick, y’all,” Philip says under his breath, slamming it into reverse. “Hold on.”

Philip puts the pedal to the floor, and the four-wheel drive digs in.

The gravitational force throws everyone forward as the Suburban roars backward.

In the rearview mirror, the weak spot in the makeshift barricade looms closer and closer until … BANG! The vehicle bursts through the cedar planking and into the dim streetlight of Green Briar Lane.

Immediately, the left rear quarter panel collides with a walking corpse as Philip stands on the brakes and jacks it into drive. The zombie launches twenty feet into the air behind them, doing a limp pirouette in a mist of blood, a piece of its moldering arm detaching and pinwheeling in the opposite direction.

The Suburban blasts off toward the main conduit, smashing through three more zombies, sending them flinging off into oblivion. With each impact, the dull thumping sensations traveling through the chassis—as well as the yellowish buglike smears left on the windshield—make Penny cringe and close her eyes.

At the end of the street, Philip yanks the wheel and screeches around the corner, then pushes north toward the entrance.

A few minutes later Philip barks another order: “Okay, do it quick—and I mean QUICK!”

He slams down on the brakes, making everybody lurch forward in their seats again. They’ve just reached the great entrance gate, visible in a cone of streetlight across a short expanse of shrub-lined gravel.

“This’ll just take a second,” Brian says, grabbing the sign, clicking his door handle. “Leave it running.”

“Just get it done.”

Brian slips out of the car, carrying the big three-by-three sign.

In the cold night air, he hastens across the gravel threshold, his ears hyperalert and sensitive to the distant thrum of groaning noises: They’re coming this way.

Brian chooses a spot just to the right of the entrance gate, a section of brick wall unobstructed by shrubbery, and he positions the sign against the wall.

He sinks the wooden legs into the soft earth to stabilize the board, and then hurries back to the car, satisfied he’s done his part for humanity, or whatever is left of it.

As they drive off, each and every one of them—even Penny—glances back through the rear window at the little square sign receding into the distance behind them:

ALL DEAD

DO NOT

ENTER

FIVE

They head west, slowly, through the rural darkness, keeping their speed down around thirty miles per hour. The four lanes of Interstate 20 are littered with abandoned cars, as the macadam snakes toward the sickly pink glow of the western horizon, where the city awaits like a bruise of light on the night sky. They are forced to weave through the obstacle course of wrecks with agonizing slowness, but they manage to put nearly five miles behind them before things start going wrong.

For most of these five miles, Philip keeps thinking of Bobby and all the things they could have done to save him. The pain and regret are burrowing deep down in the pit of Philip’s gut, a cancer metastasizing into something darker and more poisonous than grief. In order to fight the emotions he keeps thinking of that old trucker’s adage: Scan don’t stare. Gripping the wheel with the practiced clench of a longtime hauler, he sits forward in his seat, his gaze alert and fixed on the margins of the highway.

For five miles only a handful of dead brush the ghostly edges of their headlights.

Just outside of Conyers they pass a couple stragglers shuffling along the shoulder of the road like blood-spattered AWOL soldiers. Passing the Stonecrest Mall they see a cluster of dark figures hunkered down in a ditch, apparently feasting on some sort of roadkill, either animal or human, impossible to tell in the flickering darkness. But that has been the extent of it—for five miles, at least—and Philip keeps his speed at a steady (but safe) thirty miles per hour. Any slower and they risk hooking a stray monster; any faster and they risk sideswiping the growing number of wrecks and abandoned vehicles cluttering the lanes.

The radio is dead, and the others ride in silence, their gazes glued to the passing landscape.

The outer rings of metro Atlanta roll past them in slow motion, a series of pine forests broken by an occasional bedroom community or strip mall. They pass car dealerships as dark as morgues, the endless ocean of new models like coffins reflecting the milky moonlight. They pass deserted Waffle Houses, their windows busted out like open sores, and office parks as barren as war zones. They pass Shoney’s, and trailer parks, and Kmarts, and RV Centers, each one more desolate and ruined than the last. Small fires burn here and there. Parking lots look like the dark playrooms of mad children, the abandoned cars strewn across the pavement like toys thrown in anger. Broken glass glitters everywhere.

In less than a week and a half, the plague has apparently savaged the outer exurbs of Atlanta. Here, in the rural nature preserves and office campuses, where middle-class families have emigrated over the years to escape the arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, and high-stress urban life, the epidemic has laid waste to the social order in a matter of days. And for some reason, it’s the sight of all the devastated churches that bothers Philip the most.

Each sanctuary they pass is in a progressively worse state: The New Birth Missionary Baptist Center outside of Harmon is still smoldering from a recent fire, its charred ruin of a cross rising against the heavens. A mile and a half down the road the Luther Rice Seminary features hastily hand-scrawled signs over its portals warning passers-by that the end is nigh and the rapture is here and all you sinners can kiss your asses good-bye. The Unity Faith Christian Cathedral looks as though it’s been ransacked and scoured clean and then pissed upon. The parking lot at the St. John the Revelator Pentecostal Palace resembles a battlefield littered with bodies, many of the corpses still moving with the telltale, somnambulant hunger of the undead. What kind of God would let this happen? And while we’re on the subject: What kind of God would let a simple, innocent good old boy like Bobby Marsh die in such a way? What kind of—

“Oh shit!”

The voice comes from the backseat, and it shakes Philip out of his dark musings. “What?”

“Look,” Brian says, his voice weak from either his cold or the fear, or maybe a little of both. Philip glances at the rearview mirror, and he sees his brother’s anxious expression in the green glow of the dash. Brian is pointing toward the western horizon.

Philip gazes back through the windshield, instinctively pumping the brakes. “What? I don’t see anything.”

“Holy crap,” Nick says from the passenger seat. He is staring through a break in the piney woods off to the right, where light shines through the trees.

About five hundred yards ahead of them, the highway banks off in a northwesterly direction, cutting through a stand of pines. Beyond the trees, through clearings in the foliage, flames are visible.

The interstate is on fire.

“Goddamnit,” Philip says on a tense sigh. He slows the vehicle to a crawl as they make the turn.

Within moments the overturned tanker truck comes into view, lying jackknifed in a cocoon of flames, like an upended dinosaur. The truck’s carcass blocks the two westbound lanes, its cab detached and lying in pieces, tangled with three other cars across the median and both of the eastbound lanes. The scorched shells of other cars lie overturned behind the burning wreckage.

Beyond the wreck the lanes look like a parking lot, with scores of cars, some burning, most of them tangled in the chain reaction.

Philip pulls the Suburban over and brings it to a stop on the shoulder fifty yards from the dwindling flames. “That’s just fantastic,” he says to no one in particular, wanting to launch a barrage of profanity, but barely containing himself (on account of Penny’s ears being inches away).

From this distance—even in the flickering darkness—several things are clear. First, and foremost, it is obvious they are either going to have to find a team of firefighters and heavy-duty towing equipment in order to continue on course or they’re going to have to figure out a fucking detour. Second, it looks as though whatever happened here took place in the very recent past, perhaps earlier today, perhaps only hours ago. The pavement around the wreck is blackened and scarred, as though a meteor had punched a hole in it, and even the trees lining the highway are charred from the shock waves. Even through the closed windows of the Suburban, Philip can smell the acrid stench of burning diesel and melted rubber.

“What now?” Brian finally says.

“Gotta turn around,” Nick says, looking over his shoulder.

“Just lemme think for a second,” Philip says, staring at the overturned truck cab, the roof sheared off it like the lid of a tin can. In the darkness, charred bodies lie sprawled across the muddy median. Some of them are twitching with the lazy undulations of snakes waking up.

“C’mon, Philip, we can’t get around it,” Nick says.

Brian speaks up. “Maybe we can cut across to 278.”

“GODDAMNIT, SHUT UP AND LET ME THINK!”

The sudden flare of rage makes Philip’s skull throb with the force of a splitting migraine, and he grits his teeth, clenching his fists and stuffing the voice back down inside himself: Crack it open, do it, tear it open now, tear the heart out …

“Sorry,” Philip says, wiping his mouth, glancing over his shoulder at the frightened little girl huddling in the darkness of the backseat. “I’m real sorry, punkin, Daddy lost it there for a second.”

The little girl stares at the floor.

“What do you want to do?” Brian asks softly, and from the forlorn tone of his voice it sounds as though he would follow his brother into the flames of hell if Philip thought that was the best option right now.

“Last exit was—what?—maybe a mile or so back there?” Philip glances over his shoulder. “I’m thinking that maybe we should—”

The slapping noise comes out of nowhere, cutting Philip off mid-thought.

Penny shrieks.

“SHIT!”

Nick jerks away from the passenger window, where a charred corpse has materialized out of the darkness.

“Get down, Nick. Now.” Philip’s voice is flat and unaffected, like a radio dispatcher, as he quickly leans over to the glove box, pops the tiny door, and fishes for something. The thing outside the window presses up against the glass, barely recognizable as human, its flesh blistered to a crisp. “Brian, cover Penny’s eyes.”

“SHIT! SHIT!” Nick ducks down and covers his head, as though in an air raid. “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!”

Philip finds the Ruger .22 pistol where he left it, already with a round in the chamber.

In one fluid motion Philip raises the weapon with his right hand, while simultaneously jacking down the power window with his left. The burned zombie reaches through the opening with its scorched, emaciated arm, letting out a guttural moan, but before it can grab hold of Nick’s shirt, Philip squeezes off a single shot—point-blank, into the thing’s skull.

The bark of the Ruger is enormously loud inside the Subrban’s interior, and it makes everybody jump, as the charred corpse whiplashes—a direct hit above its left temple sending brain matter spitting across the inside of the windshield.

The thing slides down the outside of the passenger door, the muffled sound of its body hitting the pavement barely audible over the ringing in Philip’s ears.

*   *   *

Twenty-two-caliber semiautos like the Ruger have a unique bark. The blast sounds like a hard flat slap—a two-by-four smacking concrete—and the gun invariably jumps in the shooter’s hand.

That night, despite the muffling effect of the interior of the Suburban, that single boom echoed out across the dark landscape, reverberating over treetops and office parks, carrying on the wind.

The slapback could be heard a mile away, piercing the silence of the deep woods, penetrating the mortified auditory canals of shadowy creatures, awakening dead central nervous systems.

*   *   *

“Everybody awright?” Philip looks around the dark interior, setting the hot gun down on the carpeted hump next to him. “Everybody cool?”

Nick is just now rising back up, his eyes wide and hot, taking in all the residue on the inside of the glass. Penny, curled up in Brian’s arms, keeps her eyes shut, as Brian frantically looks around, peering through all the windows, looking for any other intruders.

Philip slams the Suburban into reverse, kicking the accelerator as he quickly rolls the window back up. Everybody jerks forward as the vehicle screeches backward—a hundred feet, a hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet—away from the smoking tanker truck.

Then the Suburban skids to a stop, and they sit there in stunned silence for a moment.

Nothing moves outside in the flickering shadows. Nobody says anything for the longest time, but Philip is convinced he’s not the only one, at this moment, wondering if this twenty-mile trek into the city is going to be a lot harder than they originally thought.

*   *   *

They sit there in the idling Suburban for quite some time, debating their best course of action, and this makes Philip very antsy. He doesn’t like sitting in one place for very long, especially with the engine running, burning gas and time, with those moving shadows behind the burning trees, but the group cannot seem to come to a consensus, and Philip is trying his hardest to be a benevolent dictator in this little banana republic.

“Look, I still say we try to drive around it.” Philip gives a nod toward the darkness to the south.

The far shoulder of the oncoming lanes is littered with smoldering vehicles, but there’s a narrow gap—maybe the width of the Suburban, with a few inches to spare—between the gravel shoulder and the thicket of pines along the highway. The recent rains combined with the oil spill from the overturned tanker have turned the land to slop. But the Suburban is a big, heavy vehicle with wide tires, and Philip has driven the thing through far worse conditions.

“It’s too steep, Philly,” Nick says, wiping the gray matter from the inside of the windshield with a grimy towel.

“Yeah, man, I have to agree,” Brian says from the shadows of the backseat, his arm around Penny, the anguished features of his face visible in the flicker of firelight. “I vote for heading back to the last exit.”

“We don’t know what we’ll find on 278, though, it could be worse.”

“We don’t know that,” Nick says.

“We gotta keep moving forward.”

“But what if it’s worse in the city? Seems like it’s getting worse the closer we get.”

“We’re still fifteen, twenty miles away—we don’t know shit about what it’s like in Atlanta.”

“I don’t know, Philly.”

“Tell you what,” Philip says. “Let me take a look.”

“What do you mean?”

He reaches for the gun. “I’ll just take a quick look.”

“Wait!” Brian speaks up. “Philip, come on. We gotta stick together.”

“I’m just gonna see what the ground is like, see if we can make it through.”

“Daddy—” Penny starts to say something, and then thinks better of it.

“It’s okay, punkin, I’ll be right back.”

Brian looks out the window, unconvinced. “We agreed we’d stick together. No matter what. C’mon, man.”

“It’ll take two minutes.” Philip opens his door, shoving the Ruger into his belt.

The cool air and the sound of crackling flames and the smell of ozone and burning rubber waft into the Suburban like uninvited guests. “You guys sit tight, I’ll be right back.”

Philip climbs out of the car.

The door slams.

*   *   *

Brian sits in the silent Suburban for a moment, listening to his heart thudding in his chest. Nick is looking through each and every window, scanning the immediate vicinity, which is alive with flickering shadows. Penny gets very still. Brian looks at the little girl. The child looks like she’s shrinking into herself, like a little night bloom, contracting into itself, pulling its petals shut.

“He’ll be right back, kiddo,” Brian says to the kid. He aches for her. This is not right, a child going through this, but on some level Brian knows how she feels. “He’s a tough old boy, Philip. He can beat the crap outta any monster comes along, believe me.”

From the front seat Nick turns and says, “Listen to your uncle, sweetie. He’s right. Your daddy can take care of himself and then some.”

“I saw your daddy catch a rabid dog once,” Brian says. “He was maybe nineteen, and there was this German shepherd terrorizing the neighbor kids.”

“I remember that,” Nick says.

“Your daddy chased that thing—foaming mouth and all—down to the dry creek bed, and he wrestled the damn thing into a trash barrel.”

“I totally remember that,” Nick says. “Grabbed it with his bare hands, threw it halfway across the gully before slamming the trash can down on it like he was catching a fly.”

Brian reaches down and tenderly brushes a strand of hair from the little girl’s face. “He’ll be okay, honey … trust me. He’s a mean muchacho.”

Outside the vehicle, a piece of burning wreckage falls to the ground. The clatter makes everybody jump. Nick looks at Brian. “Hey, man … you mind reaching back into that zipper bag by the wheel well?”

Brian looks at Nick. “What do you need?”

“One of them goose guns.”

Brian stares at him a moment, then turns and leans over the back headrest. He roots out the long, canvas hunting bag wedged between a cooler and a backpack. He unzips it and finds one of the Marlin 55s.

Handing the shotgun across the backseat to Nick in the front, Brian says, “You need the shells, too?”

“I think it’s already loaded,” Nick says, hinging open the barrel and peering down into the breech.

Brian can tell Nick is handy with the thing, has probably hunted before, although Brian never witnessed it. Brian had never been the type to participate in the manly pursuits of his younger brother and his cronies, although he secretly yearned to do just that. “Two shells in the breech,” Nick says, snapping the barrel shut.

“Just be careful with that thing,” Brian says.

“Used to hunt feral hogs with one of these babies,” Nick says, cocking and locking it.

“Hogs?”

“Yep … wild hogs … up to Chattahoochee reservation. Used to go on night hunts with my dad and my uncle Verne.”

“Pigs you’re talking about,” Brian says incredulously.

“Yeah, basically. A hog is just a big ol’ pig. Maybe they’re older, too, I’m not—”

Another loud metallic crash comes from outside Nick’s window.

Nick jerks the barrel toward the noise, finger on the trigger, his teeth gnashing with nervous tension. Nothing moves outside the passenger window. Muscles uncoil inside the Suburban, a long sigh of relief from Nick. Brian starts to say, “We gotta get our butts in gear before—”

Another noise.

This time it comes from the driver’s side, a shuffling of feet—

—and before Nick can even register the identity of the shadowy figure approaching the Suburban’s driver-side window, he swings the Marlin’s muzzle up at the window, takes aim, and is about to squeeze off a couple of twenty-gauge greetings, when a familiar voice booms outside the car.

“JESUS CHRIST!”

Philip is visible outside the window just for an instant, before ducking out of the line of fire.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Nick says, instantly recognizing his mistake.

Philip’s voice outside the window is lower now, more controlled, but still seething with anger. “You want to point that thing away from the goddamn window?”

Nick lowers the barrel. “I’m sorry, Philly, my bad, I’m sorry.”

The door clicks and Philip slips back into the car, breathing hard, his face shiny with sweat. He shuts his door and lets out a long breath. “Nick—”

“Philly, I’m sorry … I’m a little jumpy.”

For a moment Philip looks like he’s going to take the other man’s head off, then the anger fades. “We’re all a little jumpy … I get that.”

“I’m totally sorry.”

“Just pay attention.”

“I will, I will.”

Brian speaks up. “What did you find out there?”

Philip reaches up to the stick shift. “A way around this damn mess.” He flips it into four-wheel drive and slams the lever down. “Everybody hold on.”

*   *   *

He turns the wheel, and they slowly roll across a spray of broken glass. The shards crunch under the Suburban’s massive wheels, and nobody says anything, but Brian’s thinking about the potential for flat tires.

Philip steers the vehicle down across the center median—which is a shallow culvert overgrown with switchgrass, weeds, and cattails—and the rear wheels dig into the rutted earth. As they approach the other side, Philip gives it a little more juice, and the Suburban lurches upward and across the eastbound lanes.

Philip keeps his hands glued to the steering wheel as they approach the far shoulder. “Hold on!” he calls out, as they suddenly plunge down a slope of muddy weeds.

The Suburban pitches sideways like a sinking ship. Brian holds on to Penny, and Nick holds on to the center armrest. Yanking the wheel, Philip kicks the accelerator.

The vehicle fishtails toward a narrow gap in the wreckage. Tree branches scrape the side of the SUV. The rear wheels slide sideways, then chew into the mud. Philip wrestles the wheel. Everybody else holds their respective breaths, as the Suburban scrapes through the opening.

When the car emerges out the other side, a spontaneous cheer rings out. Nick slaps Philip on the back, and Brian whoops and hollers triumphantly. Even Penny seems to lighten up a little, the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her tulip-shaped lips.

Through the windshield they can see the tangle of vehicles in the darkness ahead of them—at least twenty cars, SUVs, and light trucks in the westbound lanes—most of them damaged in the pileup. All of them abandoned, many of them burned-out shells. The empty vehicles stretch back at least a hundred yards.

Philip puts the pedal to the metal, muscling the SUV back toward the road. He jerks the wheel. The rear of the SUV wags and churns.

Something is wrong. Brian feels the loss of traction beneath them like a buzzing in his spine, the engine revving suddenly.

The cheering dies.

The car is stuck.

*   *   *

For a moment Philip keeps the pedal to the floor, urging the thing forward with his ass cheeks, as if his sheer force of will and white-hot rage—and the tightening of his sphincter muscles—can get the blasted thing to move. But the Suburban keeps drifting sideways. Soon the thing is simply spinning all four wheels, kicking up twin gushers of mud out the back into the moonlit darkness behind them.

“FUCK!—FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Philip slams a fist down on the steering wheel, hard enough to make the thing crack and send a splinter of pain up his arm. He practically shoves the foot feed through the floor, the engine screaming.

“Let up on it, man!” Nick hollers over the noise. “It’s just digging us in deeper!”

“FUCK!”

Philip lets up on the gas.

The engine winds down, the Suburban leaning to one side, a foundering boat in brackish waters.

“We gotta push it out,” Brian says after a moment of tense silence.

“Take the wheel,” Philip says to Nick, opening his door and slipping outside. “Give it gas when I tell ya to. Come on, Brian.”

Brian opens the rear door, slips outside, and joins his brother in the glow of the taillights.

The rear tires have sunk at least six inches into the greasy muck, each rear quarter panel spattered with mud. The front wheels are no better. Philip places his big, gnarled hands on the wood grain of the tailgate, and Brian moves to the other side, assuming a wide stance in order to get a better purchase in the mud.

Neither of them notices the dark figures lumbering out of the trees on the other side of the highway.

“Okay, Nick, now!” Philip calls out and shoves with all his might.

The engine growls.

The wheels churn, spewing fountains of mud, as the Blake brothers push and push. They push with everything they have, all to no avail, as the slow-moving figures behind them shamble closer.

“Again!” Philip shouts, putting all his weight behind the shoving.

The rear wheels spin, sinking deeper into the mire, as Brian gets sprayed with an aerosol of mud.

Behind him, moving through a fog bank of smoke and shadows, the uninvited close the distance to about fifty yards, crunching through broken glass with the slow, lazy, awkward movements of injured lizards.

“Get back in the car, Brian.” Philip’s voice has abruptly changed, becoming low and even. “Right now.”

“What is it?”

“Just do it.” Philip is opening the rear hatch. Hinges squeak as he reaches in and fishes for something. “Don’t ask any questions.”

“But what about—” Brian’s words stick in his throat as he catches a glimpse in his peripheral vision of at least a dozen dark figures—maybe more—closing in on them from several directions.

SIX

The figures approach from across the median, and from behind the flaming debris of the wreck, and from the adjacent woods—all shapes and sizes, faces the color of spackling compound, eyes gleaming like marbles in the firelight. Some are burned. Some are in tatters. Some are so well dressed and groomed they look as though they just came from church. Most have that curled-lip, exposed-incisor look of insatiable hunger.

“Shit.” Brian looks at his brother. “What are you gonna do? What are you thinking?”

“Get your ass in the car, Brian.”

“Shit—shit!” Brian hurries around to the side door, throws it open, and climbs in next to Penny, who is looking around with a bewildered expression. Brian slams the door, and smashes down the lock. “Lock the doors, Nick.”

“I’m gonna help him—” Nick goes for his goose gun and opens his door, but he stops abruptly when he hears the strange sound of Philip’s flat, cold, metallic tone through the open rear hatch.

“I got this. Do what he says, Nick. Lock the doors and stay down.”

“There’s too many of them!” Nick is thumbing the hammers on the Marlin, already with his right leg out the door, his work boot on the pavement.

“Stay in the car, Nick.” Philip is digging out a pair of matched log splitters. A few days ago he found the small axes in a garden shed of a mansion at Wiltshire Estates—two matched, balanced implements of razor-sharp carbon steel—and at the time he wondered what in the world some fat rich guy (who probably paid a yard service to split his firewood) would want a pair of small bad-axes for.

In the front seat, Nick pulls his leg back inside the SUV, slams his door, and bangs the lock down. He twists around with his eyes blazing and the gun cradled in his arms. “What the hell? What are you doing, Philly?”

The rear hatch slams.

The silence crashes down on the interior.

Brian looks down at the child. “I’m thinking maybe you ought to get down on the floor, kiddo.”

Penny says nothing as she slides down the front of the seat, and then curls into a fetal position. Something in her expression, some glint of knowing in her big soft eyes, reaches out to Brian and puts the squeeze on his heart. He pats her shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”

Brian turns and peers over the backseat, over the cargo and out through the rear window.

Philip has a bad-axe in either hand, and is calmly walking toward the converging crowd of zombies. “Jesus,” Brian utters under his breath.

“What’s he doing, Brian?” Nick’s voice is high and taut, his hands fingering the Marlin’s bolt.

Brian cannot muster a response because he is now held rapt by the terrible sight through the window.

*   *   *

It’s not pretty. It’s not graceful or cool or heroic or manly or even well executed … but it feels good. “I got this,” Philip says to himself, under his breath, as he lashes out at the closest one, a heavyset man in farmer’s dungarees.

The bad-axe sheers off a grapefruit-sized lobe of the fat one’s skull, sending a geyser of pink matter into the night air. The zombie falls. But Philip doesn’t stop. Before the next closest one can reach him, Philip goes to work on the big flaccid body on the ground, windmilling the cold steel in each hand down on the dead flesh. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Blood and tissue fountain. Sparks kick off the pavement with each blow.

“I got this, I got this, I got this,” Philip murmurs to no one in particular, letting all the pent-up rage and sorrow come out in a flurry of glancing blows. “I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this—”

By this point others have closed in—a skinny young man with black fluid dripping off his lips, a fat woman with a bloated, dead face, a guy in a bloody suit—and Philip spins away from the mangled corpse on the ground to go to work on the others. He grunts with each blow—I GOT THIS!—cleaving skulls—I GOT THIS!—severing carotid arteries—I GOT THIS!—letting his anger drive the cold steel through cartilage and bone and nasal cavities—I GOT THIS!—the blood and brain matter misting up across his face as he remembers the foaming mouth of rabid fangs coming for him when he was a kid, and God taking his wife Sarah, and the monsters taking his best friend Bobby Marsh—I GOT THIS!—I GOT THIS!—I GOT THIS!!

*   *   *

Inside the Suburban, Brian turns away from the scene outside the back window, coughs, and feels his gut rising at the nauseating sounds penetrating the sealed interior of the Suburban. He stifles the urge to vomit. He reaches down and gently puts his hands around Penny’s ears, a gesture which, sadly, is becoming a routine.

In the front seat Nick cannot tear his eyes from the carnage behind them. On Nick’s face Brian can see a weird mixture of repulsion and admiration—a kind of thank-God-he’s-on-our-side type of awe—but it only serves to tighten Brian’s gut. He will not throw up, goddamnit, he will be strong for Penny.

Brian slips down on the floor and holds the girl close to him. The child is limp and damp. Brian’s brain swims with confusion.

His brother is everything to him. His brother is the key. But something is happening to Philip, something horrible, and it’s beginning to gnaw at Brian. What are the rules? These walking abominations deserve every fucking thing Philip is dishing out … but what are the rules of engagement?

Brian is trying to put these thoughts out of his mind when he realizes the killing noises have ceased. Then he hears the heavy boot steps of a person outside the driver’s side door. The door clicks.

Philip Blake slips back inside the Suburban, dropping the bloody hand-axes on the floor in front of Nick. “There’ll be more of ’em,” he says, still winded, his face beaded with perspiration. “The gunshot woke ’em up.”

Nick peers out the back window at the battlefield of bodies visible in the firelight on the slope, his voice coming out in a monotone, a combination of awe and disgust: “Home run, man … grand slam home run.”

“We gotta get outta here,” Philip says, wiping a pearl of sweat from his nose, catching his breath, and glancing up at the rearview mirror, searching for Penny in the shadows of the backseat as if he doesn’t even hear Nick.

Brian speaks up. “What’s the plan, Philip?”

“We gotta find a safe place to stay for the night.”

Nick looks at Philip. “What do you mean exactly? You mean other than the Suburban?”

“It’s too dangerous out here in the dark.”

“Yeah, but—”

“We’ll push it out of the mud in the morning.”

“Yeah, but what about—”

“Grab whatever you need for the night,” Philip says, reaching for the Ruger.

“Wait!” Nick grabs Philip’s arm. “You’re talking about leaving the car! Leaving all our shit out here?”

“Just for the night, come on,” Philip says, opening his door and climbing out.

Brian lets out a sigh and looks up at Nick. “Shut up and help me with the backpacks.”

*   *   *

They camp that night about a quarter of a mile west of the overturned tanker, inside an abandoned yellow school bus, which sits on the shoulder, well illuminated by the cold glow of a sodium vapor light.

The bus is still fairly warm and dry, and it’s high enough off the pavement to give them good sight lines on the woods on either side of the interstate. It has two doors—one in the front and one off the rear—for easy escape. Plus the bench seats are padded and long enough for each of them to stretch out for some semblance of rest. The keys are still in the ignition, and the battery still has juice.

Inside the bus it smells like the inside of a stale lunchbox, the ghosts of sweaty, rambunctious kids with their wet mittens and body odors lingering in the fusty air.

They eat some Spam and some sardines and some expensive pita crackers that were probably meant to adorn party trays at golf outings. They use flashlights, careful not to shine them off the windows, and eventually they spread their sleeping bags on the bench seats for some shut-eye, or at least some facsimile of sleep.

They each take turns sitting watch in the cab with one of the Marlins, using the huge side mirrors for unobstructed views of the bus’s rear end. Nick takes the first shift and tries unsuccessfully for nearly an hour to raise a station on his portable weather radio. The world has shut down, but at least this section of Interstate 20 is equally still. The edges of the woods remain quiet.

When it’s Brian’s turn to sit watch—up to this point he has only managed a few minutes of fitful dozing on a squeaky bench seat in back—he gladly takes his place in the cab with all the levers and the dangling pine tree air fresheners and the laminated photograph of some long-lost driver’s baby son. Not that Brian is very comfortable with the prospects of being the only one awake, or for that matter, having to fire the goose gun. Still, he needs some time to think.

At some point just before dawn, Brian hears Penny’s breathing—just barely audible over the faint whistle of the wind through the ranks of sliding windows—becoming erratic and hyperventilated. The child has been dozing a few seats away from the cab, next to her father.

Now the little girl sits up with a silent gasp. “Oh … I got it … I mean…” Her voice is barely a whisper. “I got it, I think.”

“Ssshhh,” Brian says, rising from his seat, creeping back down the cabin to the little girl, whispering, “It’s okay, kiddo … Uncle Brian’s here.”

“Um.”

“It’s okay … ssshhhh … let’s not wake your dad.” Brian glances over at Philip, who is tangled in a blanket, his face contorted with troubling dreams. He took half a pint of brandy before bed to knock himself out.

“I’m okay,” Penny utters in her mousey little voice, looking down at the stuffed penguin in her small hands, squeezing it like a talisman. The thing is soiled and threadbare, and it breaks Brian’s heart.

“Bad dreams?”

Penny nods.

Brian looks at her and thinks it over. “Got an idea,” he whispers. “Why don’t you come up and keep me company for a while.”

The little girl nods.

He helps her up, and then, draping a blanket around her and taking her hand, he silently leads her back up to the cab. He flips down a little jump seat next to the driver’s perch, and says, “There ya go.” He pats the worn upholstery. “You can be my copilot.”

Penny settles into the seat with her blanket pulled tightly around her and the penguin.

“See that?” Brian points to a filthy little video monitor above the dash, about the size of a paperback book, on which a grainy black-and-white image reveals the highway behind them. The wind rustles through the trees, the sodium lights gleaming off the roofs of wrecked cars. “That’s a security camera, for backing up, see?”

The girl sees it.

“We’re safe here, kiddo,” Brian says as convincingly as possible. Earlier in his shift he had figured out a way to turn the ignition key to the accessory position, lighting up the dash like an old pinball machine coming to life. “Everything’s under control.”

The girl nods.

“You want to tell me about it?” Brian says softly a moment later.

Penny looks confused. “Tell you about what?”

“The bad dream. Sometimes it helps to like … tell someone … you know? Makes it go away … poof.”

Penny gives him a feeble little shrug. “I dreamed I got sick.”

“Sick like … those people out there?”

“Yes.”

Brian takes a long, anguished, deep breath. “Listen to me, kiddo. Whatever these people have, you are not going to catch it. Do you understand? Your daddy will not let that happen, never in a million years. I will not let that happen.”

She nods.

“You are very important to your daddy. You are very important to me.” Brian feels an unexpected hitch in his chest, a catching of his words, a burning sensation in his eyes. For the first time since he departed his parents’ place over a week and half ago, he realizes how deeply his feelings go for this little girl.

“I got an idea,” he says after getting his emotions in check. “Do you know what a code word is?”

Penny looks at him. “Like a secret code?”

“Exactly.” Brian licks his finger, and then wipes a stain of dirt from her cheek. “You and I are going to have this secret code word.”

“Okay.”

“This is a very special code. Okay? From now on, whenever I say this secret word, I want you to do something for me. Can you do that? Can you, like, always remember to do something for me whenever I give you the secret code word?”

“Sure … I guess.”

“Whenever I say the code word, I want you to hide your eyes.”

“Hide my eyes?”

“Yeah. And cover your ears. Until I tell you it’s okay to look. All right? And there’s one more thing.”

“Okay.”

“Whenever I give you the secret code … I want you to remember something.”

“What?”

“I want you to remember that there’s gonna come a day when you won’t have to hide your eyes anymore. There’s gonna come a day when everything’s all better, and there won’t be any more sick people. Got that?”

She nods. “Got it.”

“Now what’s the word gonna be?”

“You want me to pick it?”

“You bet … it’s your secret code … you should pick it.”

The little girl wrinkles up her nose as she ponders a suitable word. The sight of her contemplating—so intently that she looks as though she’s calculating the Pythagorean theorem—presses down on Brian’s heart.

Finally the child looks up at Brian, and for the first time since the plague had begun, a glimmer of hope kindles in her enormous eyes. “I got it.” She whispers the word to her stuffed animal, then looks up. “Penguin likes it.”

“Great … don’t keep me in suspense.”

“Away,” she says. “The secret code word’s gonna be away.”

*   *   *

The gray dawn comes in stages. First, an eerie calm settles around the interstate, the wind dying in the trees, and then a luminous pale glow around the edges of the forest wakes everybody up and gets them going.

The sense of urgency is almost immediate. They feel naked and exposed without their vehicle, so everybody concentrates on the task at hand: packing up, getting back to the Suburban, and getting the damn thing unstuck.

They make the quarter-mile hike back to the SUV in fifteen minutes, carrying their bedrolls and excess food in backpacks. They encounter a single zombie on the way, a wandering teenage girl, and Philip easily puts out her lights by quickly and quietly chopping a furrow into her skull, while Brian whispers the secret word to Penny.

When they reach the Suburban, they work in silence, ever mindful of the shadows of adjacent woods. First they try to apply weight to the rear end by putting Nick and Philip on the tailgate, and having Brian give it gas from the driver’s seat, pushing with one leg outside the door. It doesn’t work. Then they search the immediate area for something to build traction under the wheels. It takes them an hour but they eventually unearth a couple of broken pallets scattered along a drainage ditch, and they bring them back, and wedge them under the wheels.

This also fails.

Somehow the mud beneath the SUV is so saturated with moisture and runoff and oil and God knows what else that it just keeps sucking the vehicle deeper, the leaning Suburban slipping progressively backward down the slope. But they refuse to give up. Driven by a relentless anxiety over unexplained noises in the adjacent pine forest—twigs snapping, low concussive booms in the distance—as well as the constant unspoken dread of having all their worldly possessions and supplies lost with the foundering Suburban, nobody is willing to face the encroaching hopelessness of the situation.

By mid-afternoon, after working for hours, and breaking for lunch, and then going back at it for a couple more hours, all they have succeeded in doing is causing the SUV to drift nearly six feet farther down the muddy incline, while Penny sits inside the vehicle, alternately playing with Penguin and pressing her morose face to the window.

At that point, Philip steps back from the mud pit and gazes at the western horizon.

The overcast sky has begun its fade toward dusk, and the prospect of nightfall suddenly puts a pinch on Philip’s gut. Covered with sludge, soaked in sweat, he pulls a bandana and wipes his neck.

He starts to say something, when another series of noises from the neighboring trees yank his attention to the south. For hours now the crackling, snapping noises—maybe footsteps, maybe not—have been getting closer.

Nick and Brian—both wiping their hands with rags—join Philip. None of them says anything for a moment. Each of their expressions reflects the hard reality, and when another snap from the trees crackles—as loud as a pistol shot—Nick speaks up: “Writing’s on the wall, ain’t it.”

Philip shoves his handkerchief back in his pocket. “Night’s gonna fall soon.”

“Whattya think, Philly?”

“Time for plan B.”

Brian swallows hard, looking at his brother. “I wasn’t aware there was a plan B.”

Philip gazes at his brother, and for a moment, Philip feels a bizarre mixture of anger, pity, impatience, and affection. Then Philip looks at the old, rust-pocked Suburban, and feels a twinge of melancholy, as though he’s about to say good-bye to another old friend. “There is now.”

*   *   *

They siphon gas from the Suburban into plastic tanks they brought from Wiltshire. Then they get lucky enough to find a big, late-model Buick LeSabre, the keys still in it, left for dead on the side of the road, about an eighth of a mile west of there. They commandeer the Buick and roar back to the foundered SUV. They fill the Buick with gas and transfer as many supplies as they can squeeze into the car’s huge trunk.

Then they take off toward the setting sun, each of them glancing back at the swamped SUV, receding into the distance like a shipwreck sinking into oblivion.

*   *   *

Indications of the looming apocalypse appear on either side of the interstate with alarming frequency now. As they draw nearer and nearer to the city, weaving with increasing difficulty through abandoned wreckage—the trees thinning and giving way to a growing number of residential enclaves, shopping plazas, and office parks—the telltale signs of doom are everywhere. They pass a dark, deserted Walmart, the windows broken, a sea of clothes and merchandise strewn across the parking lot. They notice more and more power outages, entire communities as dark and silent as tombs. They pass strip malls ravaged by looting, biblical warnings scrawled on exhaust chimneys. They even see a small single-engine plane, tangled in a giant electrical tower, still smoking.

Somewhere between Lithonia and Panthersville, the Buick’s rear end starts vibrating like a son of bitch, and Philip realizes the thing has two blown tires. Maybe they were already flat when they acquired the car. Who knows? But there is no time to try and fix the infernal things, and no time to debate the matter.

Night is pressing in again, and the closer they get to the outskirts of metro Atlanta, the more the roads are knotted with the carcasses of mangled wrecks and abandoned cars. Nobody says it out loud, but they are all beginning to wonder whether they could get into the city faster on foot. Even the neighboring two-lanes like Hillandale and Fairington are blocked with empty cars, lined up like fallen dominoes in the middle of the road. At this rate, it will take them a week to get into town.

Which is why Philip makes the executive decision at that point to leave the Buick where it sits, pack up every last thing they can possibly carry, and set out on foot. Nobody’s crazy about the idea, but they go along with it. The alternative of searching the frozen traffic jam in the pitch-darkness for spare tires or a suitable replacement vehicle doesn’t seem viable right now.

They quickly dig their necessities out of the Buick’s trunk, stuffing duffel bags and backpacks with supplies, blankets, food, weapons, and water. They are getting better at communicating with whispers, hand gestures, and nods—hyperaware now of the distant drone of dead people, the sounds waxing and waning in the darkness beyond the highway, percolating in the trees and behind buildings. Philip has the strongest back, so he takes the largest canvas duffel. Nick and Brian each strap on an overloaded backpack. Even Penny agrees to carry a knapsack filled with bedding.

Philip takes the Ruger pistol, the two bad-axes—one shoved down each side of his belt—and a long machetelike tool for cutting underbrush, which he shoves down the length of his spine between the duffel and his stained chambray shirt. Brian and Nick each cradle a Marlin 55 shotgun in their arms, as well as a pickaxe strapped to the sides of their respective backpacks.

They start walking west, and this time, not a single one of them looks back.

*   *   *

A quarter of a mile down the road, they encounter an overpass clogged with a battered Airstream mobile home. Its cab is wrapped around a telephone pole. All the streetlights have flickered out, and in the full dark, a muffled banging noise is heard inside the walls of the ruined trailer.

This makes everybody pause suddenly on the shoulder beneath the viaduct.

“Jesus, it could be somebody—” Brian stops himself when he sees his brother’s hand shoot up.

“Sssshhhhh!”

“But what if it’s—”

“Quiet!” Philip cocks his head and listens. His expression is that of a cold stone monument. “This way, come on!”

Philip leads the group down a rocky slope on the north edge of the interchange, each of them descending the hill gingerly, careful not to slip on the wet pea gravel. Brian brings up the rear, wondering again about the rules, wondering if they just deserted one of their fellow human beings.

His thoughts are quickly subsumed by the plunge into the darker territory of countryside.

*   *   *

They follow a narrow blacktop two-lane called Miller Road northward through the darkness. For about a mile, they encounter nothing more than a sparsely commercialized area of desolate industrial parks and foundries, their signs as dark as hieroglyphs on cave walls: Barloworld Handling, Atlas Tool and Die, Hughes Supply, Simcast Electronics, Peachtree Steel. The rhythmic shuffle of their footsteps on the cold asphalt mingles with the thrumming of their breaths. The silence starts working on their nerves. Penny is getting tired. They hear rustling noises in the woods off to their immediate right.

At last Philip raises his hand and points toward a sprawling, low-slung plant stretching back into the distance. “This place will do,” he says in a low flat whisper.

“Do for what?” Nick says, pausing next to Philip, breathing hard.

“For the night,” Philip says. There is no emotion in his voice.

He leads the group past a low, unlighted sign that says GEORGIA PACIFIC CORPORATION.

*   *   *

Philip gets in through the office window. He has everybody huddle in the shadows outside the entrance while he makes his way through empty, littered corridors toward the warehouse in the center of the building.

The place is as dark as a crypt. Philip’s heart beats in his ears as he strides along with the bad-axes at his side. He tries one of the light switches to no avail. He barely notices the pungent aroma of wood pulp permeating the air—a gluey, sappy odor—and when he reaches the safety doors, he slowly shoves them open with the toe of his boot.

The warehouse is the size of an airplane hanger, with giant gantries hanging overhead, the rows of huge scoop lights dark, the odor of paper must as thick as talc. Thin moonlight shines down through gargantuan sky windows. The floor is sectioned off into rows of enormous paper rolls—as big around as redwood trunks—so white they seem to glow in the darkness.

Something moves in the middle distance.

Philip shoves the bad-axes down either side of his belt, then grasps the hilt of the Ruger. He draws out the gun, snaps back the slide, and raises the muzzle at a dark figure staggering out from behind a stack of pallets. The factory rat comes through the shadows toward Philip slowly, hungrily, the front of his dungarees dark with dried blood and bile, his long, slack face full of teeth gleaming in the moonbeams coming through the skylight.

One shot puts the dead thing down—the blast bouncing back like a kettledrum in the cavernous warehouse.

Philip makes a sweep of the remaining length of the warehouse. He finds a couple more of them—an older fat man, a former night watchman from the looks of his soiled uniform, and a younger one—each dragging his dead ass out from behind shelving units.

Philip feels nothing as he pops each one in the skull at point-black range.

On his way back toward the front entrance he discovers a fourth one in the shadows, caught between two massive paper rolls. The bottom half of the former forklift operator is wedged between the blinding white cylinders, crushed beyond recognition, all his fluids pooled and dried on the cement floor beneath him. The top half of the creature convulses and flails, its milk-stone eyes stupidly awake.

“What’s up, bubba?” Philip says as he approaches with the gun at his hip. “Another day, another dollar … huh?”

The zombie chomps impotently at the air between its face and Philip.

“Lunch break overdue?”

Chomp.

“Eat this.”

The .22-caliber blast echoes as the slug smashes through the forklift operator’s orbital bone, turning the milky eye black, and sending a chunk of the parietal hemisphere flying. The spray—a mixture of blood, tissue, and cerebrospinal fluid—spatters the rows of pristine white paper, as the top half of the dead thing wilts like a noodle.

Philip admires his work of art—the scarlet tendrils on that field of heavenly white—for quite a long time before going to get the others.

SEVEN

They spend the night in a glass-encased foreman’s office, high above the main floor of the Georgia Pacific warehouse. They use their battery-powered lanterns and they move the desks and chairs aside, and they spread their bedrolls on the linoleum tiles.

The previous occupant must have practically lived in the little two-hundred-square-foot crow’s nest, because there are CDs, a stereo, a microwave, a small refrigerator (the food inside it mostly spoiled), drawers full of candy bars, work orders, half-full liquor bottles, office supplies, fresh shirts, cigarettes, check stubs, and porn.

Philip hardly says a word the whole night. He just sits near the window overlooking the warehouse floor, occasionally taking a swig of whiskey from the pint bottle he found in the desk, while Nick sits on the floor in the opposite corner, silently reading a small Concordance Bible by the light of a lantern. Nick claims he carries the little dog-eared leather-bound book wherever he goes; but the others have rarely seen him reading it … until now.

Brian forces down some tuna fish and saltine crackers, and he tries to get Penny to eat something but she won’t. She seems to be drawing further into herself, her eyes now displaying a permanent glaze that looks vaguely catatonic to Brian. Later, Brian sleeps next to her, while Philip dozes in the swivel chair by the greasy wire-mesh window, through which past foremen have kept their eyes peeled for loafers. This is the first time Brian has seen his brother too consumed by his own thoughts to sleep next to his daughter, and it does not bode well.

The next morning, they awaken to the sounds of dogs barking somewhere outside.

The dull, pale light floods in through the high windows, and they pack quickly. Nobody has any appetite for breakfast so they use the bathroom, tape their feet to ward against blisters, and put on extra socks. Brian’s heels are already sore from the few miles they’ve trekked, and there’s no telling how far they will go today. They each have one change of clothes, but nobody has the energy to put on anything clean.

On their way out, each one of them—except Philip—studiously avoids looking at the bodies lying in pools of gore in the warehouse.

Philip seems galvanized by the sight of corpses illuminated by daylight.

*   *   *

Outside, they discover the source of the barking. About a hundred yards west of the warehouse a pack of strays—mostly mutts—are fighting over something pink and ragged on the ground. As Philip and the others approach, the dogs scatter, leaving the object of their attentions in the mud. Brian identifies the object as they pass, and softly gives Penny the code word: away.

The thing is a severed human arm, chewed so badly it looks like it belongs to a wet rag doll.

“Don’t look, punkin,” Philip mutters to his daughter, and Brian pulls Penny next to him, covering the girl’s eyes.

They trudge westward, moving silently, their footsteps furtive and careful like thieves creeping through the morning sun.

*   *   *

They follow a road called Snapfinger Drive, which runs parallel to the interstate. The blacktop ribbon winds through barren forest preserves, abandoned residential villages, and ransacked strip malls. As they move through increasingly populated areas, the side of the road holds horrors that no little girl should ever see.

A high school football field is strewn with headless torsos. A mortuary has been hastily boarded and nailed shut from the outside—the horrible muffled sounds of the recently risen scratching and clawing to get out. Philip fervidly searches for a suitable vehicle to highjack, but most of the cars along Snapfinger lie in ditches like burned husks or sit on the gravel shoulder with two or three tires blown. Traffic lights, most of them either blinking yellow or completely black, hang over clogged intersections.

The highway—visible up along a ridge a hundred yards to their left—crawls with the dead. Every so often the tattered remains of a person will cross through the distant pale rays of the rising sun, causing Philip to motion for everybody to get the hell down and stay quiet. But despite the arduous process of ducking behind trees or wreckage every time they sense another presence looming nearby, they cover quite a bit of ground that day.

They encounter no other survivors.

*   *   *

Late that afternoon, the weather turns clear and sunny—ironically, a fine early autumn afternoon in any other context—the temperature in the low sixties. By five o’clock, the men are sweating, and Penny has tied her sweatshirt around her waist. Philip calculates their progress, subtracting a thirty-minute rest for lunch, and he figures that they’ve averaged about a mile an hour—crossing nearly eight miles of suburban wilderness.

Still, none of them realizes how close they are to the city until they come upon a muddy hillock rising out of the pines just west of Glenwood, where a Baptist church sits on a ridge, smoldering from a recent conflagration, its steeple a smoking ruin.

Exhausted, drained, and hungry, they follow the winding road up the grade to the top of the hill; and when they reach the church parking lot, they all stand there for a moment, gazing out at the western horizon, frozen with a sort of unexpected awe.

The skyline, only three miles away, looks almost radiant in the fading light.

*   *   *

For boys growing up within a couple hundred miles of the great capital of the New South, Philip and Brian Blake have spent precious little time in Atlanta. For the two and half years that he drove trucks for Harlo Electric, Philip occasionally made deliveries there. And Brian has seen his share of concerts at the Civic Center, the Earl, the Georgia Dome, and the Fox Theater. But neither man knows the town well.

As they stand on the edge of that church parking lot, with the acrid smell of the apocalypse in their sinuses, the skyline in the hazy distance reflects back at them a sort of unattainable grandeur. In the dreamy light they can see the capitol spire with its golden-clad dome, the mirrored monoliths of the Concourse Complex, the massive Peachtree Plaza towers, and the pinnacle of the Atlantic building, but it all seems to give off an air of mirage—a sort of Lost-City-of-Atlantis feeling.

Brian is about to say something about the place being so close and yet so far—or perhaps make a comment about the unknowable condition of the streets down below—when he sees a blur out of the corner of his eye.

“Look!”

Penny has darted away, unexpectedly and quickly, her voice shrill with excitement.

“PENNY!”

Brian starts after the little girl, who is scurrying across the western edge of the church parking lot.

“GRAB HER!” Philip calls out, chasing after Brian, who is charging after the girl.

“Lookit! Lookit!” Penny’s little legs are churning frantically as she darts toward a side street, which winds along the far side of the hill. “It’s a policeman!” She points as she runs. “He’ll save us!”

“PENNY, STOP!”

The little girl scurries around an exit gate and down the side road. “He’ll save us!”

Brian clears the end of the fence at a dead run, and he sees a squad car about fifty yards away, parked on the side of the road under a massive live oak. Penny is approaching the royal blue Crown Victoria—the Atlanta Police decal on the door, the trademark red swoosh, and the light bar mounted on the roof—a silhouette hunched behind the wheel.

“Stop, honey!”

Brian sees Penny pausing suddenly outside the driver’s door, panting with exertion, staring in at the man behind the wheel.

By this point, Philip and Nick have caught up with Brian, and Philip zooms past his brother. He charges up to his little girl and scoops her off the ground as though pulling her out of a fire.

Brian reaches the squad car and looks in the half-open driver’s side window.

The patrolman was once a heavyset white man with long sideburns.

Nobody says anything.

From her father’s arms, Penny gapes through the car window at the dead man in uniform straining against his shoulder strap. From the looks of his badge and his garb, as well as the word TRAFFIC emblazoned on the front quarter panel of the vehicle, he was once a low-level officer, probably assigned to the outer regions of the city, feeding stray cars to the impound lots along Fayetteville Road.

Now the man twists in his seat, imprisoned by a seat belt he cannot fathom, openmouthed and drooling at the fresh meat outside his window. His facial features are deformed and bloated, the color of mildew, his eyes like tarnished coins. He snarls at the humans, snapping his blackened teeth with feral appetite.

“Now that’s just plain pathetic,” Philip says to no one in particular.

“I’ll take her,” Brian says, stepping closer and reaching for Penny.

The dead cop, catching the smell of food, snaps his jaws toward Brian, straining the belt, making the canvas harness creak.

Brian jerks back with a start.

“He can’t hurt ya,” Philip says in a low, alarmingly casual tone. “He can’t even figure out the goddamn seat belt.”

“You’re kidding me,” Nick says, looking over Philip’s shoulder.

“Poor dumb son of a bitch.”

The dead cop growls.

Penny climbs into Brian’s arms, and Brian steps back, holding the child tightly. “C’mon, Philip, let’s go.”

“Wait a minute, hold your horses.” Philip pulls the .22 from the back of his belt.

“C’mon, man,” Nick pipes in, “the noise is gonna draw more of ’em … let’s get outta here.”

Philip points the gun at the cop, who grows still at the sight of the muzzle. But Philip doesn’t pull the trigger. He simply smiles and makes a childlike shooting noise: psssh-psssh-pssssh.

“Philip, come on,” Brian says, shifting Penny’s weight in his arms. “That thing doesn’t even—”

Brian stops and stares.

The dead cop is transfixed by the sight of that Ruger in his face. Brian wonders if his rudimentary central nervous system is somehow sending a signal to some far-off muscle memory buried deep in his dead brain cells. His expression changes. The monstrous abomination of a face falls like a rotten soufflé, and the thing almost looks sad. Or maybe even scared. It’s hard to tell behind that beastly snarling mouth and mask of necrotic tissue, but something in those Buffalo-nickel eyes flickers then: a trace of dread?

An unexpected tide of emotion rises in Brian Blake, and it takes him by surprise. It’s hard to put a name to it—it’s partly repulsion, partly pity, partly disgust, partly sorrow, and partly rage. He suddenly puts Penny down, and he gently turns her around so that she’s facing the church.

“This is an away moment, kiddo,” Brian says softly, and then turns to face his brother.

Philip is taunting the zombie. “Just relax and follow the bouncing ball,” he says to the drooling creature, waving the barrel slowly back and forth.

“I’ll do it,” Brian says.

Philip freezes. He turns and gives his brother a look. “Say what?”

“Give me the gun, I’ll finish it off.”

Philip looks at Nick, and Nick looks at Brian. “Hey, man, you don’t want to—”

“Give me the gun!”

The smile that twitches at the corners of Philip’s lips is complex, and humorless. “Be my guest, sport.”

Brian takes the gun and without hesitation steps forward, pokes it in the car, presses the muzzle against the dead cop’s head, and starts to squeeze off a single shot … but his finger will not respond. His trigger finger will not obey the command his brain is giving it.

In the awkward pause the zombie drools as though waiting for something.

“Gimme the gun back, sport.” Philip’s voice sounds far away to Brian.

“No … I got this one.” Brian grits his teeth and tries to pull the trigger. His finger is a block of ice. His eyes burn. His stomach clenches.

The dead cop snarls.

Brian begins to tremble as Philip steps forward.

“Gimme the gun back.”

“No.”

“Come on, sport, give it back.”

“I got it!” Brian wipes his eyes with his sleeve. “Damnit, I got it!”

“Come on.” Philip reaches for the gun. “Enough.”

“Goddamnit,” Brian says, lowering the gun, the tears welling in his eyes. He can’t do it. He might as well face it. He gives the gun to his brother, and steps back with his head lowered.

Philip puts the policeman out of his misery with a single pop that sends a spray of blood mist across the inside of the prowler’s windshield. The bark echoes up and out over the ruined landscape.

The dead cop slumps over the wheel.

A long moment passes as Brian fights his tears and tries to hide his trembling. He gazes through the car window at the cop’s remains. He feels like saying he’s sorry to the dead officer but decides against it. He just keeps staring at the limp body still held in place by the shoulder strap.

The faint sound of a child’s voice, like the flutter of broken wings, comes from behind them. “Dad … Uncle Brian … Uncle Nick? Um … something bad is happening.”

The three men whirl around almost simultaneously. Their gazes rise across the church parking lot, to the place toward which Penny is staring and pointing. “Son of a bitch,” Philip says, seeing the worst-case scenario unfolding before his very eyes.

“Oh my God,” Nick says.

“Shit, shit—shit!” Brian feels his spine go cold as he sees the front of the church.

“Come on, punkin, this way.” Philip goes over to the child and tugs her gently back toward the cruiser. “We’re gonna borrow this nice policeman’s car.” He reaches inside the driver’s door, unlatches it, kicks it open, unsnaps the seat belt, and yanks the limp body from the vehicle—the zombie sprawling to the pavement with the ceremonial splat of an overripe gourd.

“Everybody in—quick! Throw your shit in the back! And get in!”

Brian and Nick circle around to the other side, throw open the doors, toss in their backpacks, and get in.

Philip slides Penny over the center hump, setting her on the passenger seat and climbing behind the wheel. The keys are in the ignition.

Philip turns the key.

The engine ticks.

The dashboard barely lights, just a dull ember of power left.

“Damnit to hell! DAMNIT!” Philip glances out the window at the church. “Okay. Wait a minute. Wait … wait.” He shoots a quick glance through the windshield, and he sees that the road ahead banks into a steep downgrade, which leads under a train trestle. He looks at Brian and Nick. “You two. Get out. Now!”

Brian and Nick look at each other, stunned. What they see emerging from the church—most likely aroused by the commotion of voices and the pistol shot—would most likely burn itself into their memories for some time to come. Unfortunately it would also linger in Penny’s imagination, probably more vividly: dead things materializing behind gaping holes in stained-glass portals and half-open doorways, some of them still clad in ragged, blood-soaked clerical vestments, some of them in Sunday-go-to-meeting suits and crepe dresses drenched with gore. Some of them are gnawing on severed human appendages, while others carry body parts at their sides, the organs still dripping from the gruesome orgy inside the chapel. There are at least fifty, maybe more, and they move side by side with a lurching purpose toward the police car.

For a single instant, before throwing open his door and joining Nick outside the car, Brian finds his mind flashing on a strange thought: They are moving as one—even in death, still a tightly knit congregation—like puppets of some great overmind. But the notion quickly flies from his thoughts as he hears the call of his brother from behind the wheel of the cop car.

“PUSH THE SON OF THE BITCH WITH EVERYTHING YOU GOT AND THEN HOP ON!”

Now Brian joins Nick behind the car and then, without really even thinking about it, begins to push. By this point Philip has jammed the thing into neutral, and has his door open, and his leg outside the car, and is shoving the thing with his boot with all his might.

It takes them a few moments to build up steam—the churchgoing hoard behind them approaching steadily, dropping their ghastly treasures amid the promise of fresh meat—but soon the cruiser is coasting rapidly down the hill, faster and faster, to the point where Brian and Nick have to hop on board. Nick grasps the whip antenna for purchase. Brian gets halfway inside the flapping rear door, but can’t get himself the rest of the way inside without falling, so he holds tightly to the door’s frame.

By this point the car is halfway down the hill, putting distance between them and the scores of undead shambling after them. The weight of the vehicle is building inertia. The Crown Victoria now feels as though it’s a runaway train, bumping down the cracked pavement toward the intersection at the bottom of the hill. The wind whips Brian’s dark hair as he holds on for dear life.

Nick hollers something, but the noise of the wind and the thumping wheels drown out his voice. At the bottom of the hill lies a defunct Conrail switchyard, its maze of ancient rails fossilized into the Georgia earth, its ramshackle sheds and office buildings as black and decayed as prehistoric ruins. Philip is yelling something that Brian cannot hear.

They reach the bottom of the hill and the steering wheel locks up.

The squad car bangs over the track and careens into the switchyard. Philip cannot turn the wheel. The car skids. The wheels cut into the cinders, the undercarriage sparking off the iron.

Brian and Nick hold on tight as the cruiser skuds to a halt in a cloud of black dust.

“Grab your shit! Everybody! Now!” Philip already has his door open and he’s already pulling Penny out. Brian and Nick hop off the rear end and join Philip, who hefts his duffel onto one shoulder and lifts his daughter onto the other. “This way!” He nods toward a narrow street to the west.

They hurry out of the switchyard.

*   *   *

A row of boarded storefronts and burned-out buildings stretches down a perpendicular cobblestone road.

They move quickly along, staying tight under a row of awnings on the south side of the street, their shoulders brushing graffiti-stained doors and Rust-Oleum-flecked windows. The dusk is closing in and shadows are lengthening, burying them in gloom.

The sense of being surrounded is overwhelming, although at the moment they don’t see any creatures, just a long corridor of shitty, obsolete businesses once serving this corroded, forsaken part of Atlanta’s outskirts: pawnshops, currency exchanges, bail bondsmen, auto parts places, taverns, and junk shops.

As they move along the scarred storefronts, huffing and puffing with the weight of their loads, not daring to speak or make any unnecessary noise, the urgency of getting inside somewhere begins to work on them. Night is falling again, and this place will be the dark side of the moon in less than an hour. They have no map, no GPS, no compass, no sense of where they are other than the misty landmark of the skyline miles to the west.

Brian feels the anxiety on the back of his neck like a cold finger.

They turn a corner.

Brian sees the mechanic’s shop first, but Philip sees it a split second later and motions toward it with a nod. “Up there on the corner, see it?”

Nick sees it now. “Yeah, yeah … looks good.”

It does indeed look good: On the southwest corner of a deserted intersection one block away, Donlevy’s Autobody and Repair appears to be the only business in this godforsaken area that has any life still in it—although it currently appears closed for the season.

They hasten toward the building.

As they approach, they see that the half-acre lot is recently repaved. The two islands of gas pumps out front, clean and apparently operational, sit under a giant Chevron sign. The building itself—lined with columns of new tires, fronted on one side by a pair of massive double garage doors—is a gleaming slab of silver metal siding and reinforced glass. There’s even a second floor, housing either an office or more retail space.

Philip leads them around back. The rear of the place is tidy, with newly painted garbage Dumpsters shoved up against the cinder-block back wall. They search for a door or window but find neither.

“What about the front door?” Brian says in a breathless whisper as they pause next to the Dumpsters. They can hear the congregation coming down the street, the shuffling, groaning chorus of fifty-plus zombies.

“I’m sure it’s locked,” Philip says, his gaunt, hard face shiny from the labors of carrying his daughter and his duffel. Penny is compulsively, nervously sucking her thumb against his shoulder.

“How do you know?”

Philip shrugs. “Guess it’s worth a try.”

They creep around the far side of the building, and they stay in the shadows under the Chevron awning, as Philip sets Penny and duffel down and hurries up to the entrance door. He yanks the handle.

It’s open.

EIGHT

They huddle for some time inside the repair center’s front office, under the cashier’s counter, next to a spinner rack of candy bars and potato chips.

Philip locks the door and crouches next to the others in the shadows, watching the parade of undead out on the street, passing by the shop, oblivious to the whereabouts of their prey, stupidly scanning with their button eyes like dogs hearing high-pitched whistles.

From this vantage point, gazing through the meshed, reinforced windows, Brian gets a chance to scrutinize the dead clergy and ragged parishioners as they awkwardly promenade past the service station. How did this church full of true believers turn en masse? Did they gather as frightened Christians after the plague had broken out, cleaving to each other for succor and comfort? Did they hear fire-and-brimstone sermons from the preachers about the Revelation to John? Did the pastors furiously cant warning parables: “‘And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit!’”

And how did the first one turn? Was it somebody in a back pew having a heart attack? Was it a ritual suicide? Brian imagines one of those old black ladies—her system clogged with cholesterol, her plump, gloved hands waving with the spirit—suddenly clutching her massive bosom at the first twinge of a coronary. And minutes later—maybe in an hour or so—the woman rises, her porcine face full of a new religion, a singular, savage faith.

“Fucking Holy Rollers,” Philip grumbles from across the cashier’s counter. Then he turns to Penny and swallows contritely. “Sorry for the language, punkin.”

*   *   *

They explore the repair center. The place is spotless and secure, cold but clean, the floors swept, the shelves well ordered, the cool air redolent with the odors of new rubber and the vaguely pleasant chemical fragrance of fuels and fluids. They realize they can stay here for the night, but it is not until they investigate the large repair garage that they make their most fortuitous discovery.

“Holy crap, it’s a tank,” Brian says, standing on the cold cement, shining a flashlight at the black beauty parked under canvas tarps in one corner.

The others gather around the sole vehicle standing in the darkness. Philip whips off the tarp. It’s a late-model Cadillac Escalade in cherry condition, its onyx finish gleaming in the yellow light.

“Probably belonged to the owner,” Nick ventures.

“Christmas comes early,” Philip says, kicking one of the massive tires with his muddy work boot. The luxury SUV is enormous, with huge molded bumpers, giant vertical headlights, and big, shiny chrome wheels. It looks like the kind of vehicle a secret government agency would have in its fleet, the sinister tinted windows reflecting the bloom of the flashlight back at them.

“There’s nobody inside it, right?” Brian shines the beam off the opaque glass.

Philip pulls the .22 from his belt, clicks a door open, and points the muzzle in at the empty, showroom-clean interior, with its wood trim, leather seats, and console that looks like a control center for an airliner.

Philip says, “Bet you a dollar to a doughnut there’s keys in a drawer somewhere.”

*   *   *

The whole incident with the cop and the church seems to have pushed Penny into a deeper stupor. She sleeps that night curled into a fetal ball on the floor of the repair area, covered in blankets, her thumb in her mouth.

“Haven’t seen her do that in a coon’s age,” Philip remarks nearby, sitting on his bedroll with the last of the whiskey. He wears a sleeveless T-shirt and filthy jeans, his boots sitting next to him. He takes a sip and wipes his mouth.

“Do what?” Brian is sitting cross-legged, bundled in his blood-spattered coat, on the other side of the little girl, careful not to speak too loudly. Nick dozes over by a workbench, zipped in a sleeping bag. The temperature has plunged into the forties.

“Suck her thumb like that,” Philip says.

“She’s dealing with a lot.”

“We all are.”

“Yeah.” Brian stares into his lap. “We’ll make it, though.”

“Make it where?”

Brian looks up. “The refugee center. Wherever it is … we’ll find it.”

“Yeah, sure.” Philip kills the rest of the bottle and sets it down. “We’ll find the place and the sun’ll come out tomorrow and all the orphans will find good homes and the Braves will win the fucking pennant.”

“Something bothering you?”

Philip shakes his head. “Jesus Christ, Brian, open your eyes.”

“Are you mad at me?”

Philip stands and stretches his sore neck. “Now why the fuck would I be mad at you, sport? It’s business as usual. No big deal.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing … just get some sleep.” Philip walks over to the Escalade, kneels down, and looks under the chassis for something.

Brian climbs to his feet, his heart racing. He feels dizzy. His sore throat is better, and he stopped coughing after a few days of rest and rejuvenation in the Wiltshire house, but he still does not feel a hundred percent. Who does? He goes over and stands behind his brother. “What do you mean by ‘business as usual’?”

“It is what it is,” Philip mutters, checking the SUV’s underbelly.

“You’re mad about the cop,” Brian says.

Philip stands up slowly, turns, and comes face-to-face with his brother. “I said go to sleep.”

“Maybe I have a harder time shooting something that was once human—so sue me.”

Philip grabs Brian by the nape of the T-shirt, spins him around, and slams him back against the side of the Escalade. The impact nearly knocks the breath out of Brian, and the noise wakes up Nick, and it even makes Penny stir. “You listen to me,” Philip growls in a threatening, husky voice that’s both sober and drunk at the same time. “Next time you take a gun from me, you make sure you’re ready to put it to good use. That cop was harmless, but who knows about next time, and I ain’t gonna be the one babysitting you with nothin’ but my gonads in my hand, you understand? You read me?”

Brian is nodding, his throat dry with terror. “Yes.”

Philip increases the pressure on Brian’s shirt. “You better get past your namby-pamby bullshit sheltered life and start carrying your weight around here and stoving some heads in because it sure as hell is gonna get worse before it gets better!”

“I understand,” Brian says.

Philip doesn’t let go, his eyes glinting with rage. “We’re gonna survive this thing, and we’re gonna do it by being bigger monsters than they are! You understand? There ain’t no rules anymore! There ain’t no philosophy, there ain’t no grace, there ain’t no mercy, there’s only us and them, and all they wanna do is eat our ass! So we’re gonna fucking eat them! We’re gonna chew ’em up and spit ’em out, and we’re gonna survive this thing or I will blow a hole through this whole fucked-up world! You follow me? You FOLLOW ME!”

Brian nods like crazy.

Philip lets him go and walks away.

By this point Nick is awake and sitting up, and staring agape.

Penny’s eyes are wide and she furiously sucks her thumb, watching her father storm across the repair floor. He walks over to the massive reinforced garage doors, pauses, and stares out at the night though the slatted burglar bars, his big gnarly fists clenched.

Across the floor, still pinned against the side of the Escalade, Brian Blake wages a silent battle to keep from crying like a namby-pamby-bullshit-sheltered-baby.

*   *   *

The next morning, in the lambent daylight filtering into the shop, they hurry through a breakfast of cereal bars and bottled water, and then pour the contents of three five-gallon jugs of gas into the Escalade’s tank. They find the keys in a drawer in the office, and they pack all their belongings in the SUV’s cargo area. The tinted windows are fogged with condensation from the cold. Brian and Penny settle into the backseat while Nick stands at the garage door awaiting Philip’s signal. Since the power is down—seemingly everywhere now—they are forced to spring the manual latch on the automated door opener.

Now Philip climbs behind the wheel of the Escalade and fires it up. The huge six-point-two-liter V-8 hums. The console lights up. Philip jacks it into gear and edges forward, giving Nick the signal.

Nick yanks the closest garage door, and the casters squeak, as the thing rises on its tracks. The light and air of the day explode through the windshield, as Nick hustles around to the passenger side door and climbs into the shotgun seat. The door slams.

Philip pauses for a moment, looking down at the dash.

“What’s the matter?” Nick says in a shaky voice, still a little nervous about questioning anything Philip does. “Shouldn’t we maybe get moving?”

“One second,” Philip says, reaching down to a pull-out drawer.

Inside a spring-loaded map case he finds about two dozen CDs, neatly organized by the former owner—Calvin R. Donlevy of 601 Greencove Lane S.E. (according to the registration in the glove box). “Here we go,” Philip says, rifling through the discs. Calvin R. Donlevy of Greencove Lane is apparently a lover of classic rock, judging by all the Zeppelin, Sabbath, and Hendrix in his collection. “A little somethin’ to help with the concentration.”

All at once a Cheap Trick disc goes in and Philip puts the hammer down.

The gravitational thrust of four hundred fifty horses pushes them against the seats, as the wide-body Escalade blasts off through the opening, barely making it through the gap without sideswiping the metal trusses. Daylight floods the interior. The buzz-saw guitar intro of the party anthem “Hello There” leaps out of the Bose 5.1 surround sound system, as they boom across the lot and into the street.

Cheap Trick’s lead singer asks if all the ladies and gentlemen are ready to rock.

Philip roars around the corner and heads north on Maynard Terrace. The street widens. Lower-income homes blur by on either side of the vehicle. A wandering zombie in a torn raincoat looms off to the right, and Philip veers toward the thing.

The sickening thump is barely audible above the roar of the engine (and the thunderous drumbeats of Cheap Trick). In back Brian sinks down lower in his seat, feeling sick to his stomach and worrying about Penny. She slumps in her seat next to him, staring straight ahead.

Brian reaches over and buckles her in and tries to give her a smile.

“Gotta be an entrance ramp north of here,” Philip is saying over the noise, but the sound of his voice is almost completely drowned by the growl of the engine and the music. Two more walking dead loom off to their left, a man and woman in tatters, maybe homeless people, scuttling along the curb, and Philip happily swerves and takes them both down like soggy bowling pins.

A severed ear sticks to the windshield, and Philip puts the wipers on.

*   *   *

They reach the north end of Maynard Terrace, the entrance ramp straight ahead. Philip slams the brakes. The Escalade screams to a stop in front of a six-car pileup at the foot of the ramp, a cluster of upright corpses circling the wreckage like lazy buzzards.

Philip snaps the lever into reverse. The pedal goes down, the rock music thundering. The gravitational force sucks everybody forward. Brian braces Penny against her seat.

A yank of the wheel, and the Escalade does a one-eighty, then charges back down McPherson Avenue—which runs parallel to the interstate.

They cross a mile of real estate in a couple of minutes, with kick drum and bass providing syncopated beats to the horrible thumping of errant dead, too slow to get out of the way, colliding with the massive quarter panels and launching into the air like giant flailing birds. More and more of them are emerging from the shadows and trees, awakened by the bellowing growl of the muscle car.

Philip’s jaws tense with grim determination as they near another entrance ramp.

The brakes lock up at Faith Avenue, where a Burger Win burns out of control, the whole area fogbound with greasy smoke. This ramp is blocked worse than the last. Philip yells a garbled curse, and then slams the thing into reverse, rocketing backward.

The Escalade swerves over to an adjacent side street. Another yank of the steering wheel. Another kick of the pedal. Now they’re burning rubber again, moving westward, weaving around roadblocks, heading toward the skyscrapers in the distance, which loom larger and larger like apparitions in the haze.

The increasing number of blocked streets, debris, ruined cars, and wandering dead seem insurmountable, but Philip Blake will not be denied. He sits hunched over the wheel, breathing thickly, eyes fixed on the horizon. He passes a Publix grocery store that looks as though it’s been bombed in a blitzkrieg, its lot infested with dead.

Philip increases his speed in order to plow through a file of zombies in the street.

The tide of gore splashing up across the SUV’s huge hood is spectacular—a lurid display of morbid tissue spraying up and blossoming across the windshield. Wipers swish and streak the gruesome remains.

In the backseat Brian turns to his niece. “Kiddo?” No answer. “Penny?”

The child’s vacant stare is fixed on the Technicolor display across the windshield. She doesn’t seem to hear Brian over the din of rock and roll and the rumble of the car, or perhaps she chooses not to hear him, or perhaps she’s too far gone to hear anything.

Brian gently taps her shoulder, and she snaps her gaze at him.

Then Brian reaches across her, and carefully writes a single word on the inside of her fogged window:

AWAY

Brian remembers reading somewhere that the Atlanta metro area was up to almost six million people. He remembers being surprised at the number. Atlanta always seemed to Brian to be a sort of miniature metropolis, a mere token of Southern Progress, isolated in a sea of sleepy little redneck burgs. The few visits he had taken to the city at ground level gave him the impression that the town was one giant suburb. Sure, it had its midtown canyon of tall buildings—it had Turner and Coke and Delta and the Falcons and all the rest—but mostly it seemed like a little sister to the great northern cities. Brian had been to New York once, visiting his ex-wife’s family, and that vast, grimy, claustrophobic antfarm had seemed like a real city to Brian. Atlanta seemed like a simulacrum of a city. Maybe part of it was the town’s history, which Brian remembers learning about in a college survey course: During Reconstruction, after Sherman had torched the place, the planners decided to let the old historic landmarks go the way of the dodo bird; and over the next century and a half Atlanta got tarted up in steel and glass. Unlike other Southern towns like Savannah and New Orleans—where the flavor of the Old South still proudly permeates—Atlanta turned to the bland surfaces of modern expressionism. Look, Ma, they seemed to say, we’re progressive, we’re cosmopolitan, we’re cool, not like those bumpkins in Birmingham. But to Brian it always seemed like the Lady Atlanta “doth protested too much.” To Brian, Atlanta had always been a pretend city.

Until now.

Over the course of those next horrible twenty-five minutes, as Philip relentlessly zigzags down desolate side streets and across leprous vacant lots running parallel to the interstate, carving their way closer and closer to the heart of town, Brian sees the real Atlanta like a flickering slide show of forensic crime scene photos outside the tinted windows of the hermetically sealed SUV. He sees blind alleys choked with wreckage, flaming trash heaps, housing projects plundered and abandoned, windows blown out everywhere, stained sheets hanging out of buildings scrawled with desperate pleas for help. This is indeed a city—a primeval necropolis—overcrowded and malodorous with death. And the worst part of it is, they are not yet to the border of the downtown area.

At approximately 10:22 A.M. Central Standard Time, Philip Blake manages to find Capital Avenue, a wide six-lane thoroughfare that wends past Turner Field and then downtown. He turns the stereo off. The silence booms in their ears as they turn onto Capital and then slowly proceed north.

The road is cluttered with abandoned cars, but they’re spaced far enough apart for the Escalade to weave in between them. The spires of skyscrapers—off to the left—are so close now they seem to glow in the haze like the mainsails of rescue ships.

Nobody says a thing as they roll past oceans of cement on either side of the street. The stadium parking lots are mostly empty. A few golf carts overturned here and there. Vending trucks sit in the corners, all closed up and defaced with graffiti. Scattered dead, way in the distance, wander the gray barrens in the cold autumn daylight.

They look like stray dogs about to fall over from malnutrition.

Philip rolls down his window and listens. The wind whistles. It has an odd smell to it—a mélange of burning rubber, melted circuits, and something oily and hard to identify like rotting tallow—and something chugs in the distance, vibrating the air like a vast engine.

A realization twists in Brian’s gut. If the refugee centers are open somewhere to the west—somewhere in the ventricles of the city—wouldn’t there be emergency vehicles out here? Signs? Checkpoints? Armed marshals somewhere? Police helicopters? Wouldn’t there be some indication—this close to the downtown area—that relief is in sight? Up to this point, over the course of their journey into the city, they have seen only a few potential signs of life. Back on Glenwood Avenue they thought they saw someone on a motorcycle flash by but they couldn’t be sure. Later, on Sydney Street, Nick said he saw someone darting across a doorway but he wouldn’t swear to it.

Brian pushes the thoughts out of his mind when he sees the vast tangle of highways forming a cloverleaf about a quarter of a mile away.

This sprawling interchange of major arteries marks the eastern border of Atlanta’s urban area—the place where Interstate 20 meets up with 85, 75, and 403—and now it sits baking in the cold sun like a forgotten battlefield, clogged with wrecks and overturned semis. Brian feels the Escalade beginning to ascend a steep upgrade.

Capital Avenue rises on massive pilings over the interchange. Philip takes the incline slowly, snaking through an obstacle course of deserted wrecks at about fifteen miles an hour.

Brian feels a tapping on his left shoulder, and he realizes that Penny is trying to get his attention. He turns and looks at her.

She leans over and whispers something to him. It sounds like, “I can’t see.”

Brian looks at her. “You can’t see?”

She shakes her head and whispers it again.

This time, Brian understands. “Can you hold it for a minute, kiddo?”

Philip hears this, and he glances in the rearview. “What’s the matter?”

“She has to pee.”

“Oh boy,” Philip says. “Sorry, punkin, you’re gonna have to cross your legs for a few minutes.”

Penny whispers to Brian that she really, really, really has to go.

“She’s gotta go, Philip,” Brian informs his brother. “Really bad.”

“Just hold it for a little bit, punkin.”

They are approaching the zenith of the hill. At night, the view from this part of the city, as a motorist crosses Capital Avenue, must be gorgeous. There’s a moment coming, about a hundred yards in the distance now, when the Escalade will clear the shadow of a tall building to the west. At night, the luminous constellations of city lights come into view at this point, providing a breathtaking panorama of the capitol dome in the foreground, and the sparkling cathedral of skyscrapers behind it.

They clear the shadow of the building, and they see the city spread out before them in all its glory. Philip slams on the brakes.

The Escalade lurches to a stop.

They sit there for an endless moment, all of them stricken speechless.

The street to the left runs along the front of the venerable old marble edifice of the capitol building. It is one-way going the wrong way, completely choked with abandoned cars. But that is not why everyone in the SUV is suddenly thunderstruck. The reason why nobody can muster a word—the silence lasting only a second, but seeming to go on for an eternity—is because of what they see coming at them down Capital Avenue from the north.

Penny wets herself.

*   *   *

The greeting party, as copious as a Roman army and as slapdash as a swarm of giant arachnids, comes from Martin Luther King Drive, a little over a block away. They come from the cool shadows where government buildings block out the sun, and there are so many of them that it takes a moment for the human eye to simply register what it is seeing. All shapes and sizes and stages of deterioration, they emerge from doorways and windows and alleys and wooded squares and nooks and crannies, and they fill the street with the profusion of a disordered marching band, drawn to the noise and smell and advent of a fresh automobile filled with fresh meat.

Old and young, black and white, men and women, former businessmen, housewives, civil servants, hustlers, children, thugs, teachers, lawyers, nurses, cops, garbage men, and prostitutes, each and every one of their faces uniformly pale and decomposed, like an endless orchard of shriveled fruit rotting in the sun—a thousand pairs of lifeless gunmetal-gray eyes locking in unison onto the Escalade, a thousand feral, primordial tracking devices fixing themselves hungrily on the newcomers in their midst.

Over the course of that single instant of horror-stricken silence, Philip makes a number of realizations with the speed of a synapse firing.

He realizes he can smell the telltale odor of the horde coming through the open window, and possibly even the air vents in the dash: that sickening, rancid bacon-and-shit stench. But more than that, he realizes that the strange drone he heard earlier, when he rolled down his window—that vibrating hum in the air like the twanging of a million high-tension wires—is the sound of a city full of the dead.

Their collective groaning, as they now labor as one giant multifaceted organism toward the Escalade, makes Philip’s skin crawl.

All of which leads to one final realization that strikes Philip Blake between the eyes with the force of a ball-peen hammer. It occurs to him—considering the sight unfolding in almost dreamy slow motion in front of him—that the quest to find a refugee center in this town, not to mention anyone still alive, is fast becoming about as prudent as the boy looking for a pony in a pile of horseshit.

In that microsecond of dread—that minuscule soupçon of frozen stillness—Philip realizes that the sun will probably not be coming out tomorrow, and the orphans will stay orphans, and the Braves will never again win the fucking pennant.

Before jerking the shift lever he turns to the others and in a voice laced with bitterness says, “Show of hands, how many y’all still hot to find that refugee center?”

PART 2

Atlanta

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.

—Nietzsche

NINE

Very few production cars on the road—in the U.S., at least—are capable of attaining any kind of speed in reverse. First of all, there’s the gear problem. Most cars, vans, pickups, and sport-utility vehicles that come off the line have five or six forward gears but only one for reverse. Second of all, most vehicles have front suspensions designed to go forward not backward. This prevents drivers from getting up a head of steam in reverse. Third of all, in reverse you’re usually steering by looking over your shoulder, and pushing cars to top speeds in this fashion usually terminates in spectacular spinouts.

On the other hand, the vehicle that Philip Blake is currently commandeering is a 2011 Platinum Cadillac Escalade with all-wheel drive and tricked-out torsion bars for any off-road applications that ace mechanic Calvin R. Donlevy of Greencove Lane might have endeavored to undertake in the backwaters of Central Georgia (in happier times). The vehicle weighs in at nearly four tons, and is close to seventeen feet long, with a StabiliTrak electronic stability control system (standard on all Platinum models). Best of all, it’s equipped with a rearview camera that displays on a generous seven-inch navigation screen built into the dash.

Without hesitation, his nervous system wired to his right hand, Philip slams the lever into reverse, and keeps his gaze riveted to that flickering yellow image materializing on the navigation screen. The image shows the partly cloudy sky over the horizon line of pavement behind them: the top of the overpass.

Before the oncoming regiment of zombies have a chance to get within fifty yards, the Escalade rockets backward.

The g-forces suck everybody forward—Brian and Nick each twisting around to gaze out the tinted rear window at the overpass rushing toward them—as the tail end of the Escalade shimmies slightly, the vehicle building speed. Philip pushes it hard. The engine screams. Philip doesn’t turn around. He keeps his gaze locked onto that screen, the little glowing yellow picture showing the top of the overpass growing larger and larger.

One slight miscalculation—a single foot-pound of pressure on the steering wheel in either direction—and the Escalade goes into a spin. But Philip keeps the wheel steady, and his foot on the gas, and his eyes on the screen, as the vehicle tears backward faster and faster—the engine now singing high opera, somewhere in the vicinity of C sharp. On the monitor Philip sees something change.

“Aw shit … look!”

Brian’s voice pierces the noise of the engine but Philip doesn’t have to look. In the little yellow square of video he sees a series of dark figures appearing a couple hundred feet away, directly in their path, at the top of the overpass, like the pickets of a fence. They’re moving slowly, in a haphazard formation, their arms opening to receive the vehicle now hurtling directly at them. Philip lets out an angry grunt.

He slams both work boots down on the brake pad, and the Escalade skids and smokes to a sudden stop on the sloping pavement.

At this point Philip realizes—along with everybody else—that they have one chance, and the window of that opportunity is going to close very quickly. The dead things coming at them from the front are still a hundred yards off, but the hordes behind them, shambling over the crest of the viaduct from the projects and vacant lots around Turner Field, are closing in with alarming speed, considering their ponderous, leaden movements. Philip can see in a side mirror that an adjoining street called Memorial Drive is accessible between two overturned trailers, but the army of zombies that are looming close and closer in his rearview will be reaching that cross street very soon themselves.

He makes an instantaneous decision, and bangs down on the accelerator.

The Escalade roars backward. Everybody holds on. Philip backs it straight toward the crowd of shuffling corpses. On the video monitor the image shows the columns of zombies excitedly reaching out, mouths gaping, as they grow larger and larger on the screen.

Memorial Drive comes into view on the camera, and Philip stomps on the brake.

The rear of the Escalade bowls over a row of the undead with a nauseating, muffled drumming noise, as Philip rips the shift lever back into drive, his logger boot already pushing the pedal to the floor. They all sink into the upholstery as the SUV lunges forward, Philip taking a sharp left, threading the needle between two ruined trailers.

Sparks jump in the air as the SUV swipes a side rail, and then it’s through the gap and fleeing down the relatively clear and blessedly zombie-free lanes of Memorial Drive.

Hardly a minute goes by before Brian hears the scraping noise. It’s a coarse, wet, keening sound coming from under the chassis. The others hear it, too. Nick looks over his shoulder. “What the hell is that noise?”

“Something’s caught under the wheels,” Brian says, trying to see the side of the car out his window. He can’t see anything.

Philip is silent, his hands welded to the steering wheel, his jaw set and tense.

Nick is looking out at the side mirror. “One of those things is stuck under the wheel!”

“Oh great,” Brian says, twisting in his seat. He notices a tiny fan of blood droplets across the back window. “What are we gonna—”

“Let it ride along,” Philip says flatly, not taking his eyes off the street. “It’ll be pulp in a few minutes.”

*   *   *

They get about six blocks, bumping across a set of railroad tracks—getting deeper into the city—before encountering much more than a few isolated wrecks and roaming dead. The grid of streets threading between the buildings is choked with debris, the remnants of explosions, burned cars filled with charred skeletons, windows blown out, and piles of trash and detritus drifted up against storefronts. Somewhere along the way, the scraping noises cease, although nobody sees what has happened to the hanger-on.

Philip decides to take a north-south street into the heart of the city, but when he turns right—swerving around a mangled delivery truck on its side in the center of the intersection—he hits the brakes. The Escalade jerks to a stop.

They sit there for a moment, the engine idling. Philip doesn’t move, his hands still white-knuckling the wheel, his eyes squinting as he gazes into the distant shadows of tall buildings straight ahead.

At first, Brian can’t see what the problem is. He cranes his neck to glimpse the litter-strewn city street stretching many blocks before them. Through the tinted glass, he sees high-rises on either side of the four-lane avenue. Trash swirls in the September wind.

Nick is also puzzled by the sudden stop. “What’s wrong, Philip?”

Philip doesn’t respond. He keeps staring straight ahead with that uneasy stillness, his teeth clenching, his jaws working.

“Philip?”

No response.

Nick turns back to the windshield and stares out at the street. His expression tightens. He sees now what Philip sees. He gets very still.

“Will somebody tell me what’s going on?” Brian says, leaning forward to see better. For a moment, all he can make out is the distant canyon of high-rises, and many blocks of debris-littered pavement. But he realizes soon enough that he’s seeing a still life of a desolate city beginning to rapidly change like a giant organism reacting to the intrusion of foreign bacteria. What Brian sees through that shaded window glass is so horrible that he begins moving his mouth without saying anything.

*   *   *

In that single instant of brain-numbing awe, Brian Blake flashes back to a ridiculous memory from his childhood, the madness of the moment gripping his mind. One time, his mom took him and Philip to the Barnum and Bailey Circus in Athens. The boys were maybe thirteen and ten respectively, and they reveled in the high-wire acts, the tigers jumping through flaming rings, the men shooting out of cannons, the acrobats, the cotton candy, the elephants, the sideshows, the sword swallower, the human dart board, the fire-eaters, the bearded ladies, and the snake charmer. But the memory that sticks with Brian the most—and what he thinks of right at this moment—is the clown car. That day in Athens, at the height of the show, a little goofy car pulled out across the center ring. It was a cartoonish sedan with painted windows, about the size of a station wagon, built low to the ground and painted in a patchwork of Day-Glo colors. Brian remembers it so vividly—how he laughed his head off at the clowns piling out of the car, one after another, and how at first it was just funny, and then it became kind of amazing, and finally it was just downright bizarre, because the clowns kept coming: six, eight, ten, twenty—big ones, little ones—they kept climbing out of that car as though it was a magic container of freeze-dried clowns. Even as a thirteen-year-old, Brian was transfixed by the gag, knowing full well there had to be a trick to it, maybe a trapdoor embedded in the sawdust beneath the car, but it didn’t matter because the very sight of it was mesmerizing.

That exact phenomenon—or at least a perverted facsimile of it—is now unfolding right before Brian’s eyes along an urban thoroughfare in the lower bowels of midtown Atlanta. He gapes silently at it for a moment, trying to put the gruesome spectacle into words.

“Turn around, Philip.” Brian’s voice sounds hollow and reedy in his own ears as he stares at the countless throngs of undead awakening in every corner of the city before them. If the horde they encountered only moments ago on their way into town was a regiment of a Roman army, this—this—is the whole empire.

As far as the eye can see, down the narrow channel of the four-lane street, the undead emerge from buildings, from behind cars, from within wreckage, from the shadows of alleys, from busted-out display windows, from the marble porticos of government buildings, from the spindly planters of decorative trees, and from the tattered remains of sidewalk cafés. They are even visible in the far distance, where the vanishing point of the street blurs into the shadows of skyscrapers, their ragged silhouettes appearing like a myriad of slow-moving bugs roused from the darkness of an overturned rock. Their number defies logic.

“We gotta get outta here,” Nick says in a rusty squeak of a voice.

Philip, still stoic and silent, works his clenched fingers on the steering wheel.

Nick nervously shoots a glance over his shoulder. “We gotta go back.”

“He’s right, Philip,” Brian says, putting a hand gently on Penny’s shoulder.

“What’s the matter, what are you doing?” Nick looks at Philip. “Why aren’t you turning around?”

Brian looks at the back of his brother’s head. “There’s too many of them, Philip. There’s too many of them. There’s too many.”

“Oh my God, we’re fucked … we’re fucked,” Nick says, transfixed by the ghastly miracle building across their path. The closest ones are maybe half a block away, like the leading edge of a tsunami—they look like office dwellers of both genders, still clad in corporate attire that appears shredded and chewed up and dipped in axle grease—and they stagger this way like snarling sleepwalkers.

Behind them, for blocks and blocks, countless others stumble along the sidewalks and down the center of the street. If there is a “rush hour” in hell, it most certainly can’t hold a candle to this. Through the Escalade’s air vents and windows, the tuneless symphony of a hundred thousand moans raises the hackles on the back of Brian’s neck, and he reaches over and taps his brother on the shoulder. “The city’s gone, Philip.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s right, the place is toast, we gotta turn around,” Nick babbles.

“One second.” Philip’s voice is ice cold. “Hold on.”

“Philip, come on,” Brian says. “This place belongs to them now.”

“I said hold on.”

Brian stares at the back of his brother’s head and a cold sensation trickles down Brian’s spine. He realizes that what Philip means by the phrase hold on is not “hold on a second while I think this over” or “hold on for a minute while I figure this thing out.”

What Philip Blake means by hold on is—

“Y’all got your seat belts on?” he asks rhetorically, making Brian’s skin turn cold.

“Philip, don’t—”

Philip kicks the foot feed. The Escalade erupts into motion. He steers the vehicle straight into the teeming mob, cutting off Brian’s thoughts and pressing everybody into their seats.

“PHILLY, NO!”

Nick’s warning cry dissolves into a salvo of muffled thumps, like the beating of a giant tom-tom drum, as the Escalade jumps the sidewalk and mows down at least three dozen zombies.

Tissue and fluids rain across the car.

Brian is so unnerved that he ducks down against the floor and joins Penny in that place called away.

*   *   *

The smaller ones go down like ducks in a shooting gallery, bursting apart under the wheels and leaving a trail of rotting innards. The larger ones bounce off the quarter panels and hurtle through the air, smacking the sides of buildings and coming apart like overripe fruit.

The dead seem to have no capacity to learn. Even a moth will flitter away once it flies too close to a flame. But this vast society of walking corpses in Atlanta apparently have no clue as to why they can’t eat the shiny black thing roaring at them—the same thundering piece of metal that just an instant ago turned their fellow zombies into blood pudding—so they just keep coming.

Hunched over the wheel, teeth gnashing, knuckles white, Philip uses the wipers, with periodic sprays of cleaning solution, to keep the windshield clean enough to see through as he chews his way north, plowing the 8,300 pounds of Detroit iron through the moving sea of zombies. Varying his speed between thirty and fifty miles an hour, he carves a path toward the center of town.

At times, he is literally cutting a swath through a crowd so dense that it’s like blazing a trail through a thick forest of blood fruit, the flailing arms and curled fingers like tree limbs, clawing at the side windows as the Escalade digs through the walking excrement. At other times, the SUV crosses short sections of clear street, with only a few zombies trundling along on a sidewalk or at the edges of the pavement, and this gives Philip a chance to get his speed up, and to swerve to the right to a pick a few off, and then to the left for a few more, and then he’ll hit another wall-to-wall mob, and that’s probably the most fun, because that’s when the shit really flies.

It’s almost as though the viscera is raining down from above, from the sky, rather than from under the wheels or along the frame or over the top of the big front grill as the Escalade shears through the bodies. The wet matter streaks across the glass, again and again, with the rhythm of a giant pinwheel, a kaleidoscope of color, the palette like a rainbow of human tissue—oxblood red, pond-scum green, burnt-ocher yellow, and pine-tar black—and it’s almost kind of beautiful to Philip.

He roars around a corner and plunges into another mass of zombies coming down the street.

The strangest part is the continual repetitive flashes of similar tissues and organs—some of them recognizable, some of them not so recognizable. Entrails fly in all directions, splashing the windshield and sliding across the hood. Little kernels of teeth periodically gather in the wiper blades, and something else, something pink, like little pearls of fish roe, keeps collecting in the seams of the hood.

Philip glimpses dead face after dead face, each one flashing in his window—visible one moment, gone the next—and he’s in a zone now, he’s somewhere else, not in the SUV, not behind the wheel, but inside the mob, inside the city of undead, chewing through their ranks, devouring the motherfuckers. Philip is the baddest monster of them all, and he’s going to make it through this ocean of shit if he has to tear down the entire universe.

*   *   *

Brian realizes what is happening before he even looks. Ten excruciating minutes after they started mowing through the sea of zombies—after making it across nearly twenty-three city blocks—the Escalade goes into a spin.

The centripetal force tugs Brian against the floor, and he pops his head up—peering over the seat—as the SUV slides sideways on the grease of fifty thousand corpses. He has no time to yell or do anything about what is happening. He can only brace himself and Penny against the seat backs for the inevitable impact.

Wheels slick with gore, the SUV does a three-sixty, the rear end windmilling through the last few stray cadavers. The city blurs outside the windows, and Philip fights the wheel, tries to straighten it, but the tires are hydroplaning on a sheet of intestines and blood and spoor.

Brian lets out a strangled yelp—part warning and part inarticulate cry—as the vehicle spins toward a row of storefronts.

In the frenzied moments before the crash, Brian glimpses a row of derelict shop windows: hatless busts of bald mannequins, empty jewelry displays, frayed wires growing out of vacant floorboards, all of it blurred behind the wire-meshed display windows. But it’s just a vague impression of these things, Brian’s vision distorted by the violent spinning of the SUV.

And that’s when the right side of the Escalade collides with the display window.

*   *   *

The crash has that suspension-of-time feeling for Brian, the store window turning to stardust, the noise of shattering glass like a wave slamming a breakwater as the Escalade punctures the burglar bars and plunges sideways into the dark shadows of the Goldberg Fine Jewelry Center of Atlanta.

Counters and display cases explode in all directions, a sparkling, silver sleet of debris as the gravitational forces yank all passengers to the right. The Escalade’s airbags deploy in tiny explosions—great heaving balloons of white nylon filling the interior before it has a chance to collapse—and Nick is thrown sideways into the white fabric. Philip is flung sideways into Nick, and Penny is thrown across the rear floor into Brian.

The SUV skids sideways for an eternity through the empty store.

The vehicle finally comes to rest after slamming hard into a weight-bearing pillar in the center of the store, shoving everybody hard against the padded lining of the airbags, and for a moment, nobody moves.

*   *   *

White, feathery debris snows down through the dark, dusty air of the jewelry store, and the sounds of something collapsing behind them creaks in the sudden silence. Brian glances through the cracked rear window and sees the front of the store, a pile of fallen girders blocking the hole in the window, a cloud of dust obscuring the street.

Philip is twisting around in his seat, his face ashen and wild with panic. “Punkin? Punkin? You okay? Talk to me, little girl! You all right?”

Brian turns to the child, who is still on the floor, looking woozy and maybe in some kind of shock, but otherwise unharmed. “She’s good, Philip, she’s good,” Brian says, feeling the back of the child’s head for any blood, any sign of injury. She seems fine.

“Everybody else okay?” Philip looks around the dust motes of the dark interior. A thin ray of daylight filtering across the store is the only illumination. In the gloom, Brian can see the other men’s faces: sweaty, stone-still with terror, eyes glinting.

Nick raises a thumb. “I’m good.”

Brian says he is, too.

Philip already has his door open, and is struggling out from behind the airbag. “Get everything you can carry,” he tells them, “but make sure you get the shotguns and all the shells. You hear me?”

Yes, they hear him, and now Brian and Nick are climbing out of the SUV. Over the course of a mere minute, Brian makes a series of observations—most of them, apparently, already calculated by Philip—beginning with the front of the store.

From the chorus of moaning noises and thousands of shuffling feet, it is clear to Brian that the zombie horde is closing in on the accident scene. The Escalade is finished, its front end nearly totaled, its tires blown, its entire length shellacked with gore.

The rear of the store leads toward a hallway. Dark, narrow, lined with drywall, the corridor may or may not lead to an exit. There’s no time to investigate. All they have time to do is grab their packs, their duffels, and their weapons. Dazed from the collision, dizzy with panic, bruised and battered, ears ringing, Brian and Nick each grab a goose gun, and Philip takes as many bladed tools as he can stow on his body, a bad-axe in each side of his belt, the Ruger and three extra magazines.

“Come on, kiddo, we gotta skeedaddle,” Brian says to Penny, but the child looks lethargic and confused. He tries to pull her from the mangled interior, but she hangs on to the back of the seat.

“Carry her,” Philip says, coming around the front of the SUV.

“Come on, sweetie, you can ride piggyback,” Brian tells the girl.

Penny reluctantly climbs out, and Brian lifts her onto his back.

The four of them quickly creep through the jewelry store’s back hall.

*   *   *

They get lucky. Just past the glass doorway of a back office, they find an unmarked metal door. Philip throws the bolt, and he cracks the door open a few inches, peering out. The smell is incredible—a black, greasy stench that reminds Brian of the time his sixth-grade class took a field trip to the Turner stockyards outside Ashburn. The smell on the abattoir floor was like this. Philip raises a hand, motioning for everybody to stop.

Over Philip’s shoulder, Brian can see a long, narrow, dark alley lined with overflowing garbage Dumpsters. But it’s the actual content of the receptacles that registers most sharply in Brian’s brain: pale human arms dangling over the sides, ragged, ulcerated legs, matted hair hanging down, and pools of old blackened blood dried beneath them.

Philip motions to the others. “Y’all follow me, and do exactly what I say,” he says, snapping the cocking mechanism on the Ruger—eight rounds of .22-caliber bullets ready to rock—and then he’s moving.

They follow him out.

*   *   *

As quietly and quickly as possible, they make their way through the stench and shadows of the deserted slaughterhouse of an alley toward a side street visible at one end. Weighed down by the duffel bag over one shoulder, and the child clinging to his back, Brian limps along in between Philip and Nick—Penny’s sixty-five pounds never feeling as heavy as they do now. Nick, who is bringing up the rear, walks with his Marlin 20-gauge cradled in his arms. Brian has his own shotgun wedged underneath his backpack—not that he has any idea how to use the damn thing.

They reach the end of the alley, and they are about to slip out and make their way down the deserted side street, when Philip accidentally steps on a human hand protruding from under a garbage Dumpster.

The hand—connected to a zombie with some fight still in it—instantly recoils under the container. Philip jerks backward with a start.

“DUDE!” Nick cries out, and the hand shoots back out and grabs Philip’s ankle.

Philip sprawls to the ground, his Ruger spinning off across the pavement.

The dead man—an ashy-skinned, bearded homeless person in bloodstained rags—crabs toward Philip with the speed of a giant spider.

Philip claws for his gun. The others fumble for their weapons, Brian going for his shotgun while trying to balance the child on his back. Nick thumbs back the hammers on his Marlin.

The dead thing clutches Philip’s leg and opens its jaws with the rigor-mortis creak of rusty hinges as Philip fumbles for his axe.

The zombie is about to take a chunk out of Philip’s lower calf when the barrel of Nick’s goose gun presses down on the back of the thing’s skull.

The blast rips through the zombie’s brain, sending half its face through the air on a geyser of blood and matter, the booming echo of the shotgun reverberating through the canyons of steel and glass.

“Now we’re screwed,” Philip says, struggling to his feet, scooping up the Ruger.

“What’s the matter?” Brian says, adjusting the weight of the little girl on his back.

“Listen,” Philip says.

In the brittle silence, they hear the ocean-wave sound of moaning suddenly change, altering its course as though on a shifting wind, the masses of undead drawn by the boom of the shotgun.

“So, we’ll go back inside,” Nick says in a strident, tense voice. “Back inside the jewelry store—there’s gotta be a second floor.”

“Too late,” Philip says, checking the Ruger, looking down into its breech. He’s got four rounds of hollow tips left in the hilt, and three mags of eight each in his back pockets. “I’m bettin’ they’re already flooding in the front of the place.”

“What do you suggest?”

Philip looks at Nick, and then at his brother. “How fast you think you can run with all that weight?”

*   *   *

They take off at a moderate clip, Philip in the lead, Brian hobbling along after him, Nick bringing up the rear, past caved-in storefronts and petrified, charred funeral pyres of bodies burned by enterprising survivors.

Brian can’t tell for sure but it seems like Philip is madly looking for a safe exit off the streets—a clean doorway, a fire escape ladder, something—but he’s distracted now by an increasing number of moving corpses appearing around every corner.

Philip blasts the first one at fifty paces, sending a slug through its forehead, dropping it like a bad habit. The second one surprises him at closer range, lurching out of a shadowy doorway, and Philip puts it down with his second shot. More of them are materializing from porches and gaping store windows. Nick puts the goose gun and two decades of boar hunting to good use, taking down at least a dozen of them in the space of two blocks.

The blasts echo up over the skyline like sonic booms in the stratosphere.

*   *   *

They turn a corner and hurry down a narrower side road of herringbone brick, perhaps a landmark antebellum street that once rang with buckboards and horses, now bordered on either side by boarded condominiums and office buildings. The good news is that they seem to be moving away from the congested area, encountering fewer and fewer walking dead with each passing block.

The bad news is that they feel trapped now. They sense the city closing in around them, swallowing them whole in its glass-and-steel gullet. By this point, the sun has begun its afternoon descent, and the shadows thrown by the massive skyline have begun to lengthen.

Philip sees something in the distance—maybe a block and a half away—and instinctively ducks under the canopy of a torn awning.

The others hunker down with him against the boarded window of a former dry cleaner, and they crouch in the shadows to catch their breaths.

Brian is panting with exertion, little Penny still clinging soporifically to his back, like some kind of sleepy, traumatized monkey. “What is it, what’s the matter?” Brian asks, realizing that Philip is craning his neck to see something in the distance.

“Tell me I’m seeing things,” Philip says.

“What is it?”

“Gray building up there on the right,” Philip says, nodding to the north. “See it? ’Bout two blocks away? See the doorway?”

In the distance, a three-story apartment building rises out of a row of dilapidated two-story condominiums. A massive postwar pile of chalk-colored brick and jutting balconies, it’s the largest building on the block, the top of it reaching out of the shadows and reflecting the cold, pale sunlight off its array of antennas and exhaust stacks.

“Oh my God, I see it,” Brian utters, still balancing Penny on his sore back as he kneels. The child clutches at his shoulders with a desperate grip.

“That ain’t no mirage, Philly,” Nick comments, a trace of awe coloring his voice.

They all stare at the human figure in the distance, too far away to identify as a man or a woman, adult or child, but there it is … waving at them.

TEN

Philip approaches cautiously from the opposite side of the street, the .22 at his side, cocked and ready, but not exactly raised. The others follow along behind him in a single file, all of their hackles up, their eyes wide open and prepared for anything.

The young woman across the street calls to them in a low, hissing whisper: “Hurry up already!”

She appears to be in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, with long dishwater-blond hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She wears jeans and a loose-fitting cable-knit sweater that’s severely stained, the red smudges and spatters visible even from this distance as she waves them over with a small-caliber revolver, maybe a police .38, swinging it like it’s an air traffic control baton.

Philip wipes his mouth, thinking, catching his breath, trying to get a bead on the woman.

“C’mon!” she yells. “Before they smell us!” She’s obviously anxious for them to follow her inside, and it’s very likely she means them no harm; the way she’s swinging the gun, it would not surprise Philip if it wasn’t even loaded. She calls out: “And don’t let any of those Biters see you come inside!”

Philip is wary, guarded, and he pauses on the curb before crossing the street. “How many of you are there?” he calls out to her.

Across the street, the blond woman lets out an exasperated sigh. “For God’s sake, we’re offering you food and shelter, come on!”

“How many?”

“Jesus, do you want help or not?”

Philip tightens his grip on the Ruger. “You’re gonna answer my question first.”

Another nervous sigh. “Three! Okay? There’s three of us. You happy now? This is your last opportunity because if y’all don’t come now, I’m going to go back inside, and then you’re gonna be shit outta luck.” She speaks with the faint drawl of a native Georgian, but has some big city in her voice, too. Maybe even a little bit of the North.

Philip and Nick exchange glances. The distant choir of rusty moaning drifts closer on the wind like a coming storm. Brian nervously readjusts Penny’s weight on his back, and then shoots a jittery glance over his shoulder at the end of the block. He looks at Philip. “What other options do we have, Philip?”

“I agree, Philly,” Nick whispers under his breath, swallowing his fear.

Philip looks at the young lady across the street. “How many men, how many women?”

She hollers back at him, “You want me to fill out a questionnaire? I’m going back inside. Good luck with everything—you’re gonna need it!”

“Wait!”

Philip nods at the others, and then cautiously leads them across the street.

*   *   *

“You got any cigarettes?” the young woman asks, leading the group into the building’s outer vestibule, securing the door behind her with a makeshift cross-brace. “We’re down to our last bent butts.”

She’s a little beat-up, with scars on her chin, bruises on the side of her face, and one eye that’s so bloodshot it looks like a mild hemorrhage. Beyond those rough edges, though, she strikes Philip as a fine-looking woman, with cornflower-blue eyes, and the kind of sun-kissed skin you might see on a farm girl—a sort of easy, low-maintenance beauty. But from the defiant tilt of her head, and the zaftig curves hidden under her bulky clothes, she gives off the air of an earth mother, and one does not fuck with earth mothers.

“Sorry, no smokers,” Philip says, holding the door for Brian.

“Y’all look like you got banged up out there,” the woman says, leading them across a reeking, littered chamber lined on one side with eighteen pairs of mailboxes and buzzers. Brian gently puts Penny down. The little girl staggers for a moment, getting her bearings. The air smells of must and zombie. The building does not feel safe.

The young woman kneels down by Penny. “Aren’t you a sweet one.”

Penny doesn’t say anything, just looks down.

The woman looks up at Brian. “She yours?”

“She’s mine,” Philip says.

The woman brushes a strand of matted black hair from Penny’s face. “My name’s April, honey, what’s yours?”

“Penny.”

The voice that comes out of the child is so meek and nerve-racked it sounds like the mewl of a kitten. The woman named April smiles and strokes the girl’s shoulder, then rises and looks at the men. “Let’s get inside before we draw more of those things.” She goes over to one of the intercoms and thumbs the button. “Dad, let us in.”

Through a burst of static, a voice replies, “Not so fast, little girl.”

Philip grabs her arm. “You got power in there? You got electricity?”

She shakes her head. “Afraid not … intercom’s on a battery.” She pokes the button. “Dad, come on.”

Through the crackling static: “How do we know we can trust these yahoos?”

Click: “You gonna let us in or what?”

Crackle: “You tell ’em to give up their guns.”

She lets out another anguished sigh and turns to Philip, who is shaking his head, giving her a no-way-in-hell kind of look.

Click: “They got a little girl, for chrissake. I’ll vouch for ’em.”

Crackle: “And Hitler painted roses … we don’t know these folks from Adam.”

Click: “Dad, open the damn lock!”

Crackle: “You saw what happened up to Druid Hills.”

April slams her hand down on the intercom: “This ain’t Druid Hills! Now let us in, goddamnit, before we grow moss on our asses!”

A harsh, metallic buzz is followed by a loud clunk as the autolatch on the inner security door springs open. April leads them through the doorway, and then down a shopworn, sour-smelling hallway with three apartment doors on either side. At the far end of the corridor stands a metal door marked STAIRS, with criss-crossing boards nailed over it.

April knocks on the last door on the right—Apartment 1C—and within moments, a heavier, older, coarser version of April opens the door. “Oh my God, what an adorable little girl,” the big gal says, seeing Penny, who is now holding Brian’s hand. “Come on in, folks … can’t tell ya how good it is to finally see people who can keep their drool in their mouths.”

April’s sister, who introduces herself as Tara, is plump and rough around the edges. She smells of smoke and cheap shampoo, and is dressed in a faded floral-print muumuu to hide her excess flesh. Her cleavage rises like bread dough out of the top of her dress, a little Woody Woodpecker tattoo on the crest of one bosom. She has the same striking blue eyes as her younger sister, but keeps them heavily lined and decorated with steel-blue eye shadow. Her long Lee press-on nails look like they could open a tin can.

Philip enters the apartment first, the Ruger still in his hand at his side.

The others follow.

At first, Philip barely notices the cluttered living room, the chairs draped with clothing, the battered luggage along one wall, and the oddly shaped musical instrument cases leaning against the boarded sliding door. He hardly notices the small kitchenette off to the left, the peach crates of provisions and the sink full of dirty dishes. The smell of cigarette smoke and stale fabric and dried sweat hanging in the air barely registers in Philip’s nostrils.

Right now, all he can focus on is the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun pointed directly at him from a rocking chair across the room.

*   *   *

“That’s far enough,” says the old man with the shotgun. A lanky, weathered old duffer, he has the farmer-tanned face of a cigar-store Indian, with an iron-gray flattop haircut and ice-chip blue eyes. The slender tube of an oxygen rig is clipped under his buzzard’s beak of a nose, the tank sitting next to him like a faithful pet. He barely fits into his stovepipe jeans and flannel shirt, his white, hairy ankles showing above the tops of his shit-kickers.

Philip instinctively raises the .22, instantly going into Mexican showdown mode. He aims it at the old man and says, “Sir, we got enough trouble out there, we don’t need any in here.”

The others freeze.

April pushes her way past the men. “For God’s sake, Dad, put that thing down.”

The old man waves the girl aside with the barrel. “You hush now, little girl.”

April stands there with her hands on her hips, a disgusted look on her face.

Across the room, Tara says, “Can we all just dial it down a little bit?”

“Where’d you folks come from?” the old man asks Philip, the shotgun still raised and ready.

“Waynesboro, Georgia.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s in Burke County.”

“Hell, that’s almost South Carolina.”

“Yessir.”

“You on drugs? Speed, crack … something like that?”

“No, sir. Why the hell would you think that?”

“Something going on behind them eyes, they look all jacked up on speed.”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“How’d you end up on our doorstep?”

“Heard there was some kinda refugee center set up here, but it ain’t lookin’ too good.”

“You got that right,” says the old man.

April chimes in, “Sounds like we all got something in common.”

Philip keeps his eyes on the old man, but says to the girl, “How’s that?”

“That’s the same reason we ended up in this godforsaken place,” she says. “Looking for that damned refugee center everybody was talking about.”

Philip stares at the shotgun. “‘Best laid plans,’ I guess.”

“Damn straight,” says the old man, the faint whistle of oxygen seeping from the tank. “I don’t suppose you realize what you done to us.”

“I’m listening.”

“You got them Biters all stirred up. By sundown, there’s gonna be a goddamn convention of them things outside our door.”

Philip sniffs. “I’m sorry about that but it ain’t like we had a choice.”

The old man sighs. “Well now … I suppose that’s true.”

“Your daughter’s the one pulled us off the street … we had no bad intentions. Hell, we had no intentions at all … other than keepin’ from getting bit.”

“Yeah, well … I can see your point there.”

A long beat of silence follows. Everybody waits. The two firearms begin to lower.

“What are them cases for?” Philip finally asks, nodding toward the row of tattered instrument cases across the rear of the living room. His gun is still raised but the fight-or-flight juice has drained from him. “You got tommy guns in them things?”

The old man finally lets out a flinty laugh. He lays his gun on his lap, crosswise, letting up on the hammers, all the tension draining out of his gaunt face. The oxygen tank pings. “My friend, you’re lookin’ at what’s left of the World Famous Chalmers Family Band, stars of stage, screen, and state fairs across the South.” The old man sets the gun down on the floor with a grunt. He looks up at Philip. “I apologize for the ornery reception.” He struggles to his feet, rising to his full height until he looks like a withered Abe Lincoln. “Name’s David Chalmers, mandolin, vocals, and father of these two ragamuffins.”

Philip shoves his gun back behind his belt. “Philip Blake. This is my brother Brian. And that wallflower over there is Nick Parsons … and I thank you kindly for saving our asses out there.”

The two patriarchs shake hands, and the tension goes out of the room with the suddenness of an off switch being thrown.

*   *   *

It turns out there was a fourth member of the Chalmers Family Band—Mrs. Chalmers—a portly little matron from Chattanooga who sang high soprano on the group’s bluegrass and old-timey numbers. According to April, it was a blessing in disguise that the matriarch of the family succumbed to pneumonia five years earlier. If she had lived to see this horrible shit inflicting the human race, she would have been crushed, would have seen it as the end-time, and probably would have walked right off the pier at Clark’s Hill Lake.

So it was that the Chalmers Family Band became a trio, and went on with the act, playing the carny circuit across the tristate area, with Tara on bass, April on guitar, and Daddy on mandolin. As a single father, the sixty-six-year-old David had his hands full. Tara was a pothead, and April had her mother’s temper and single-mindedness.

When the plague broke out, they were in Tennessee at a bluegrass festival, and they made their way back home in the band’s camper. They got as far as the Georgia border before the camper broke down. From there, they got lucky enough to find an Amtrak train that was still running between Dalton and Atlanta. Unfortunately, the train deposited them smack-dab in the middle of the southeast side, at King Memorial Station, which was now lousy with the dead. Somehow, they managed to work their way north without getting attacked, traveling at night in stolen cars, searching for the mythical refugee center.

“And that’s how we ended up here in our little low-rent paradise,” April tells Philip in a soft voice late that night. She sits on the end of a tattered sofa, while Penny dozes restlessly next to her in a wad of blankets. Philip sits nearby.

Candles are lit on the coffee table. Nick and Brian are asleep on the floor across the room, while David and Tara are each snoring in a different musical key in their respective rooms.

“We’re too petrified to go upstairs, though,” April adds with a trace of regret in her voice. “Even though we could use whatever supplies are still up there. Batteries, canned goods, whatever. Jesus, I’d give my left tit for some toilet paper.”

“Never give that up for a little toilet paper,” Philip says with a grin, sitting barefoot in his stained T-shirt and jeans at the other end of the sofa, his belly full of rice and beans. The Chalmerses’ supplies are running low, but they still had half of the ten-pound bag of rice that they pilfered from a broken shop window a week ago, and enough beans to make dinner for everyone. April cooked. The grub wasn’t bad, either. After dinner, Tara rolled cigarettes with the last of her Red Man tobacco and a few buds of skunkweed. Philip partook in a few puffs, even though he had sworn off pot years ago—it usually made him hear things in his head that he didn’t want to hear. Now his brain feels woolly and thick in the strange afterglow.

April manages a sad smile. “Yeah, well … so close and yet so far.”

“What do you mean?” Philip looks at her, and then slowly looks up at the ceiling. “Oh … right.” He remembers hearing the noise earlier, and making note of it. They’ve quieted down now, but the shuffling, creaking noises from the higher floors have intermittently been crossing the ceiling all evening, moving with the insidious, invisible presence of termites. The fact that Philip almost forgot about these noises is a testament to how desensitized he’s becoming to the prospects of such proximity to the dead. “What about the other ground-floor apartments?” he asks her.

“We picked them clean, got every last bit of usable stuff out of them.”

“What happened in Druid Hills?” he asks after a moment of silence.

April lets out a sigh. “Folks told us there was a refugee center up there. There wasn’t.”

Philip looks at her. “And?”

April shrugs. “We got there and found a whole bunch of people hiding out behind the gates of this big scrap-metal place. People just like us. Scared, confused. We tried to talk some of them into leaving with us. Strength in numbers, all that gung-ho shit.”

“So, what happened?”

“I guess they were too scared to leave and too scared to stay.” April looks down, her face reflecting the candlelight. “Tara and Dad and I found a car that would run, and we gathered up some supplies and took off. But we heard the motorcycles coming when we were pulling away.”

“Motorcycles?”

She nods, rubs her eyes. “We got about a quarter of a mile down the road—maybe not even that far—and we round this hill and all of a sudden we hear, way in the distance behind us, these screams. And we look back across the valley, where this dusty old salvage yard is, and it’s like … I don’t know. Fucking Road Warrior or something.”

“It’s what?”

“This motorcycle gang is tearing the place apart, running people down, entire families, God knows what else. It was pretty damn ugly. And the weird thing is, it wasn’t the near-miss that got to us. It wasn’t the bullet we dodged. I think it was the guilt. We all wanted to go back and help, and be good upstanding citizens and all that, but we didn’t.” She looks at him. “Because we ain’t good upstanding citizens; there ain’t any of those left.”

Philip looks at Penny. “I can see why your daddy wasn’t crazy about the idea of taking in boarders.”

“Ever since that scrap-yard fiasco, he’s been real paranoid about running across any survivors—maybe more paranoid than he is about the Biters.”

“Biters … I heard you say that before. Who came up with that one?”

“That’s my dad’s term; it kinda stuck.”

“I like it.” Philip smiles at her again. “And I like your daddy. He takes care of business, and I don’t blame him for not trusting us. He seems like a tough old nut, and I respect that. We need more like him.”

She sighs. “He’s not as tough as he used to be, I’ll tell you that.”

“What’s he got? Lung cancer?”

“Emphysema.”

“That’s not good,” Philip says, and then he sees something that stops him cold.

April Chalmers has her hand on Penny’s shoulder and is almost absently stroking the little girl as she sleeps. It’s such a tender, unexpected gesture—so natural—that it reaches down into Philip and awakens something inside him that’s long been dormant. He can’t understand the feeling at first, and his confusion must be showing on his face because April looks up at him.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m … I’m good.” He touches the Band-Aid on his temple where he smacked himself in the collision earlier that day. The Chalmerses dug out their first-aid kit and patched everybody up before dinner. “Tell you what,” Philip says. “You go get some sleep, and in the morning, the boys and I will clear out the upstairs.”

She looks at him for a moment like she’s wondering whether or not to trust him.

*   *   *

The next morning, after breakfast, Philip shows April that his word is good. He enlists Nick, and he grabs extra magazines for the Ruger and a box of shells for one of the Marlins. He shoves the bad-axes down either side of his belt, and gives a small pickaxe to Nick for close encounters.

Pausing by the door, Philip crouches down to tighten the laces of his logger boots, which are so spattered with mud and gore that they look like they’re embroidered with black and purple thread.

“Y’all be careful up there,” old David Chalmers says, standing in the doorway of the kitchenette. He looks gray and washed out in the morning light, leaning on the metal caddy in which his oxygen tank is mounted. The tube under his nose softly whistles with each breath. “Y’all don’t know what you’re gonna find.”

“Always,” Philip says, tucking his denim shirt inside his jeans, checking the axes for quick and easy access. Nick stands over him, waiting with the goose gun on his shoulder. There’s a taut expression on Nick’s face, a combination of grim determination and excitement.

“Most of ’em will be on the second floor,” the old man adds.

“We’ll clear ’em on out.”

“Just watch yer backs.”

“Will do,” Philip says, rising to his feet and checking the axes.

“I’m coming.”

Philip whirls around to see Brian standing there with a clean T-shirt on—an REM logo on the front, the pride of Athens—and a dour, purposeful expression on his face. He’s cradling one of the shotguns in his arms like it’s a living thing.

“You sure?”

“Hell yeah.”

“What about Penny?”

“The gals will watch her.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on,” Brian says. “You need an extra pair of eyes up there. I’m up for it.”

Philip thinks it over. He glances across the living room and sees his daughter sitting Indian-style on the floor between the two Chalmers women. The ladies are playing crazy eights with a tattered deck of cards, making Penny periodically smile and slap down a card. It’s been a long time since the little girl has smiled. Philip turns to his brother and offers a grin. “That’s the spirit.”

*   *   *

They get up there via the stairs at the end of the first-floor corridor—the elevators at the other end as dead as the zombies—but first they have to tear the wooden bracings off the door. The noise of axe blows and nails squeaking out seems to stimulate movement above them, in the dark chambers behind apartment doors. At one point, Philip passes gas with all the exertion, a reminder of April’s bean dinner from the night before.

“That fart’s gonna wipe out more zombies than any twenty-gauge shell,” Nick comments.

“Hardy-har-har,” Philip says and tears off the last of the bracing planks

On their way up the dark stairwell, Philip says, “Remember, y’all—be quick. They are slippery motherfuckers but they’re slow as shit, and dumber than Nick here.”

“Hardy-har, back atcha,” Nick says, expertly injecting a pair of .20-gauge shells into his goose gun.

They reach the top landing, and find the fire door to the second floor shut tightly. They pause. Brian is shaking.

“Calm down, sport,” Philip tells his brother, noticing the barrel of the shotgun is wavering, trembling slightly. Philip gently pushes the muzzle away from the general vicinity of his ribs. “And try not to accidentally send a ball of that bird shot into one of us.”

“I got it under control,” Brian retorts in a shaky, tense voice, revealing that he obviously has nothing under control.

“Here we go,” Philip says. “And remember, go at them hard and quick.”

A single, fierce kick with the shank of his boot heel sends the door lurching open.

ELEVEN

For a millisecond, they stand there with hearts beating like trip-hammers. Other than a few scattered candy wrappers and empty, broken pop bottles, and one hell of a lot of dust, the second-floor hall—identical to the ground-floor corridor—is empty. Dim daylight shines through the far windows and laces through streaks of dust motes, which cant down across the closed doors: 2A, 2C, and 2E along one side, 2B, 2D, and 2F along the other.

Nick whispers, “They’re all locked inside their places.”

Philip nods. “Gonna be like shooting fish in a damn barrel.”

“Come on, let’s do it,” Brian says unconvincingly. “Let’s get it done.”

Philip glances at his brother, then glances at Nick. “John Rambo here.”

They go over to the first door on the right—2F—and raise the business ends of their guns. Philip snaps the slide on the Ruger.

Then he kicks the door in.

A giant ball of stink punches them in their faces. It is the first thing that registers: a hideous stew of human degradation, urine and feces—and zombie stench—vying for dominance over the sharper odors of rancid food and moldy bathrooms and mildewed clothes. It is so overwhelming and unbearable that it literally drives the men back a half step each.

“Jesus wept,” Nick says in a choked utterance, involuntarily averting his face, as if the stench is a wind blowing at him.

“Still think my fart stinks?” Philip says as he takes a careful step into the reeking shadows of the apartment. He raises the .22.

Nick and Brian follow with shotguns at the ready, eyes wide and shiny with tension.

A moment later, they find four of them in repose, on the floor of a ransacked living room, each one slumped in a corner, slack jawed and catatonic, growling languidly at the sight of intruders, but too stupid or sick or demented to move, as though they have grown weary of their hellish fate and now have forgotten how to use furniture. It’s hard to tell in the gloomy light, especially with their faces all bloated and blackened with mortified flesh, but it looks as though it’s another family: mom and dad and two grown kids. The walls have weird patches of scratch marks, like a giant abstract painting, showing evidence that the things were following some flickering instinct to claw their way out.

Philip goes over to the first one, its shark eyes glimmering as the Ruger looms. The blast sends its brains across the Jackson Pollock of scratch marks behind it. The thing sinks to the floor. Meanwhile, Nick is across the room putting another one out of its misery, the boom of the Marlin like a great dry paper sack popping. Brain matter paints the walls. Philip takes the third one down as it is slowly rising, Nick moving toward the fourth—BOOM!—and the sounds of fluids spattering surfaces are buffered by the ringing in their ears.

Brian is standing ten paces behind them, his gun poised, his spirit drowning inside him on a rising tide of repulsion and nausea. “This is—this is not—” he starts to say, but a flash of movement to his left cuts off his words.

*   *   *

The errant zombie comes at Brian from the depths of a side hallway, plunging out of the shadows like a monstrous clown with a black fright wig and candy eyes. Before Brian even has a chance to identify it as a daughter or girlfriend, dressed in a torn robe with one shriveled breast exposed like a flap of chewed meat, the thing pounces on him with the force of a defensive back making a tackle.

Brian sprawls backward to the floor, and it all happens so fast that Philip and Nick have no time to intercede. They are too far away.

The moving cadaver lands on top of Brian, the thing snarling with black, slimy teeth and—in that split instant before Brian realizes that he is still holding the shotgun—the zombie opens its jaws so wide it looks as though its skull is about to unhinge.

Brian gets one horrible glimpse down the recesses of the thing’s throat—an endless black well straight down into hell—before he instinctively jerks the shotgun up. Almost by accident, the muzzle lodges itself in the gaping hole of the thing’s mouth, and Brian screams out a garbled cry as he squeezes off a single blast.

The back of the thing’s skull explodes, sending up a cloud of blood mist and tissue. The backwash hits the ceiling in deep purple arterial matter, and Brian is thunderstruck for a moment, his back pinned to the floor. The thing’s head is still skewered on the shaft of the shotgun. He blinks. The silver eyes of the girlfriend or daughter, or whoever she was, are frozen now and fixed on Brian.

He coughs and turns away as the girl’s head slowly slides down the length of the barrel, a giant shish kebob, the dead eyes still locked on Brian. He feels the moist slime of her face on his hands. He closes his eyes. He can’t move. His right hand still glued to the trigger, his left still welded to the stock, he grimaces with horror.

Cold laughter brings him back around. “Look who just scored his first touchdown,” Philip Blake says, standing over his brother in a cloud of cordite smoke, grinning from ear to ear with mirthless delight.

*   *   *

Nick is the one who finds the egress to the roof, and Philip is the one who gets the idea to deposit all the rotting carcasses up there so they don’t stink up the place any further (or make the scavenger hunt through the upper floors any more unpleasant than it has to be).

It takes them a little over an hour to drag all the inhuman remains up the stairwell to the third floor, and then up through a narrow stairwell to the fire door. They have to shoot the lock off, and have to work in a sort of modified bucket brigade, dragging the smelly flesh sacks down the hallways and up two flights of stairs to the roof, leaving leech trails of gore on the cabbage-rose carpet runners.

They manage to get every last one of them—they terminated fourteen of them altogether, going through two entire clips of .22-caliber rounds, as well as half a box of shells—up the passageway and onto the roof.

“Look at this place,” Nick marvels as he puts the last carcass down on the tarpaper warning track along the east side of the roof, the wind whipping his pant legs and tossing his hair. The corpses lie in a row like cordwood lined up for the winter. Brian stands at the opposite end of the file, gazing down at the dead things with a strange, implacable expression on his face.

“Pretty cool,” Philip says, walking over to the edge of the roof.

At this height, he can see the distant buildings of the exclusive Buckhead area, Peachtree Plaza, and the glass cathedral of skyscrapers to the west. The frozen spires of the city rise in pristine summits, impassive, stoic in the sunlight, untouched by the apocalypse. Down below, Philip sees the scattered wandering dead moving in and out of shadows like broken toy soldiers come to life.

“Cool place to hang out,” Philip says, turning and surveying the rest of the roof. Around a giant conglomeration of antennae, rent stracks, and heating and air-conditioning machinery, now cold and powerless, an apron of pea gravel offers enough space to play a touch football game. A forgotten tangle of lawn furniture leans against an air duct. “Grab a chair and take a load off.”

They drag tattered chaise lounges over to the edge of the roof.

“I could get used to this place,” Nick says, settling down on a lounger facing the skyline.

Philip sits down next to him. “You mean the roof or this place in general?”

“All of it.”

“Copy that.”

“How do you do it?” Brian says, standing behind them, fidgeting with nerves. He refuses to sit down, refuses to relax. He’s still wired from his encounter with the impaled head.

“Do what?” Philip says.

“I don’t know, like, the killing and stuff, and then the next minute you’re—”

Brian stops himself, unable to put it into words, and Philip turns and looks at his brother. He sees the man’s hands shaking. “Sit down, Bri, you did good down there.”

Brian pulls a chair over, sits down, wrings his hands, ruminating. “I’m just saying—”

Again, he can’t articulate what he’s “just saying” and he falters.

“It ain’t killing, sport,” Philip says. “Soon as you get that straight, you’re gonna be fine.”

“What is it then?”

Philip shrugs. “Nicky, what would you call it?”

Nick is staring out at the skyline. “God’s work?”

Philip has a big laugh at that one, and then says, “I got an idea.”

He gets up and goes over to the closest corpse, one of the smaller ones.

“Check this out,” he says, and drags the thing over to the edge of the roof.

The other two join Philip at the ledge. The rancid wind tosses their hair as they gaze over the ledge at the street thirty-five feet below them.

Philip shoves the cadaver with the toe of his boot until it slips over the side.

The thing seems to fall in slow motion, its limp appendages flopping like broken wings. It strikes the cement parkway down below, in front of the building, and comes apart with the sound, color, and texture of a very ripe watermelon erupting in a starburst of pink tissue.

*   *   *

In the master bedroom of the first-floor apartment, David Chalmers is sitting in his wifebeater T-shirt and boxer shorts, sucking on an inhaler, trying to get enough Atrovent into his lungs to quell the wheezing, when he hears the commotion outside the boarded sliding-glass doors of the rear portion of the apartment.

The sound instantly raises the hairs on his neck, and he quickly fumbles himself into his clothes, including the breathing tube, which he gets halfway on, one side dangling under a hairy nostril.

He storms across the room on creaking knees, yanking the oxygen tank along on its castors like a stubborn child being pulled by an impatient nanny.

Crossing the living room, he catches a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of three figures standing rapt and terrified at the threshold of the kitchen. April and Tara had been making cookies with the little girl—using up the last of their flour and sugar—and now the three females stand there, gaping in the direction of the noise.

David hobbles over to the boarded, meshed, burglar-barred sliding doors.

Through a narrow gap in the plywood planks, in between the branches of skeletal trees, he can just barely see the far end of the courtyard, and beyond that a slice of the street running parallel to the front of the apartment building.

Another body rains down as if dropped by God himself, hitting the pavement, making a wet, lurid, smacking sound not unlike a giant water balloon popping. But that’s not the noise that’s getting to David Chalmers right now. That’s not the noise that’s penetrating the apartment, coming in waves, a vast, distant, tuneless symphony.

“Sweet jumpin’ Jesus,” he mutters in a breathy wheeze, whirling around so fast he nearly tips over the tank in its caddy.

He drags the thing toward the door.

*   *   *

On the roof, Philip and Nick pause after heaving the fifth body off the ledge.

Panting from the effort and a sort of morbid giddiness, Philip comments: “They blow up good, don’t they?”

Nick is trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. “This is ten kinds of wrong but I gotta admit it feels good.”

“You got that right.”

“What’s the point, guys?” Brian wants to know, standing behind them.

“The point is, there is no point,” Philip says without looking at his brother.

“What is that, like a Zen saying?”

“It is what it is.”

“Okay, now you lost me. I mean, I don’t see how throwing these things off the roof is accomplishing anything.”

Philip turns and gives his brother a look. “Lighten up, sport. You bagged your first trophy today. It wasn’t pretty but it got the job done. We’re just blowing off a little steam.”

Nick sees something in the distance that he hadn’t noticed until now. “Hey, check out—”

“I’m just saying,” Brian interrupts. “We gotta keep our wits about us and shit.” He has his hands in his pockets, nervously kneading the change and the penknife that he has stashed in there. “April and her family are good people, Philip, we gotta behave ourselves.”

“Yes, Mom,” Philip says with a cold smile.

“Hey, you guys, check out that building down there on the corner.”

Nick is pointing at a squat, ugly brick edifice on the northeast corner of the closest intersection. Blackened around the edges with the fumes of the city, the faded letters painted above the first-floor display windows say DILLARD’S HOME FURNISHINGS.

Philip sees it. “What about it?”

“Look at the front corner of the building, there’s a pedestrian thing.”

“A what?”

“A walkway or a breezeway or whatever you call it. See it?”

Sure enough, Philip sees a grimy glass bridge spanning the adjacent street, connecting the office building catty-corner to them to Dillard’s second floor. The glass-encased footbridge is empty and sealed at either end. “What are you thinking, Nicky?”

“I don’t know.” Nick stares at the pedestrian bridge, pondering. “Could be—”

“Gentlemen!” The husky boom of the old man’s voice interrupts.

Brian turns and sees David Chalmers trundling toward them from the open stairwell door. Urgency burns in the old man’s eyes, and he drags his oxygen tank along with a practiced limp. Brian takes a step toward him. “Mr. Chalmers, did you get all the way up here by yourself?”

The old man is breathing hard as he approaches. Through his wheezing, rattling breaths, he says, “I may be old and sick, but I ain’t helpless … and call me David. I see y’all cleaned out them floors real nice and tidy, and for that I thank you, I truly do.”

Philip and Nick turn and face the man. “Is there a problem?” Philip asks.

“Hell yeah, there’s a problem,” the old man says, eyes flashing with anger. “What you been doin’ up here, pitchin’ them bodies off the roof like that? You’re just cutting off your own feet!”

“What do you mean?”

The old man lets out a grunt. “Y’all deaf or somethin’? You can’t hear that?”

“Hear what?”

The old man shuffles out to the edge of the roof. “Take a gander.” He points a gnarled finger at two buildings in the distance. “You see what you done?”

Philip gazes off to the north, and all at once he realizes why he’s been hearing that infernal noise of a thousand and one moans for the past fifteen minutes. Legions of zombies are migrating toward their building, most likely drawn to the noise and spectacle of bodies hitting the pavement.

Maybe ten or twelve blocks away now, they move with the undulating slither of blood clots traveling down arteries. For a moment, Philip can’t tear his eyes away from the hideous migration.

They’re coming from all directions. Percolating through the shadows, oozing out of alleys, choking the main drags, they meet up and multiply at intersections like a great amoeba growing in size and strength, inexorably drawn to the catalyst of humans in their midst. Philip looks away finally and pats the old man on the shoulder. “Our bad, David … our bad.”

*   *   *

That night, they try to eat dinner and pretend that it’s just an ordinary meal among friends, but the persistent clawing noises outside the building keep killing the conversation. The sounds are a constant reminder of their exile, of the mortal threat just outside their door, of their isolation. They tell each other their life stories, and they try to make the best of it, but the menacing noises keep everybody on edge.

Considering there are seventeen other apartments in the building, they had expected to harvest a bounty of provisions from the upper floors that day. But all they found was a few dry goods in the pantries, some cereal and hard pasta, maybe half a dozen cans of soup, a bunch of stale crackers, and a few bottles of cheap grocery store wine.

It had been weeks now since the building lay abandoned, without power, infested with the dead, and all the food had rotted. Maggots crawled in most refrigerators, and even the bedding and the clothes and the furniture had mildewed and soured with the stink of zombies. Maybe folks took their essentials with them when they fled. Maybe they took all the bottled water and batteries and flashlights and wooden matches and weapons.

They left their medicine cabinets untouched, though, and Tara manages to collect a shoe box full of pills: tranquilizers like Xanax and Valium, stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, blood pressure meds, diet pills, beta-blockers, antidepressants, and cholesterol medications. She also finds a couple of bottles of bronchodilators that will serve the old man well. Philip gets a kick out of Tara’s flimsy pretense of being concerned for everybody’s health when he knows full well she is mostly interested in anything that will provide her with a recreational buzz. And who the hell can blame her? Pharmaceutical relief in this situation is as good an escape as any.

The truth is, by that second night, despite the constant din of the undead outside their windows, the Chalmers family has begun to grow on Philip. He likes them. He likes their Bohemian-country style, he likes their pluck, and he just plain likes being with other survivors. Nick also seems reenergized by the union of the two families, and Penny is actually talking again, her eyes clear for the first time in weeks. The presence of other females, in Philip’s estimation, is just what the doctor ordered for his daughter.

Even Brian, his chest cold almost completely gone now, seems stronger, more confident. He still has a long way to go, in Philip’s humble opinion, but he seems galvanized by the possibility of some kind of community, no matter how small and ragged.

*   *   *

The next day, they begin settling into a routine. From the roof Philip and Nick keep track of the zombie quotient on the streets, while Brian checks the weak spots around the first floor—the windows, the fire escapes, the courtyard, the front foyer. Penny is getting to know the Chalmers sisters, and David mostly keeps to himself. The old man is battling his lung disease as best he can. He naps and takes his inhaler and visits with the newcomers as much as possible.

In the afternoon, Nick starts working on a makeshift catwalk, which he plans to run between the roof of the apartment building and the roof of the neighboring structure. He’s got it in his head that he can make it to the pedestrian bridge at the corner without ever having to set foot on ground level. Philip thinks he’s crazy but tells him to go ahead and waste his time if he wants to.

Nick believes this maneuver is actually the key to their survival, especially since they are all secretly concerned—you can see it on the face of anyone who goes into the kitchen—that they will soon run out of supplies. The water is turned off in the building, and carrying bucketfuls of human waste from the bathroom to the back window overlooking the courtyard (for dumping) is the least of their problems. They have a limited supply of water, and that has everybody very worried.

After dinner that night, at a little after about eight o’clock, when an awkward silence in the conversation reminds everybody of the unrelenting noises coming from the dark outside, Philip gets an idea. “Why don’t y’all play something for us,” he says. “Drown those bastards out.”

“Hey,” Brian says, his eyes lighting up. “That’s a great idea.”

“We’re a little rusty,” the old man says from his rocker. He looks tired and drawn tonight, the sickness working on him. “If you want to know the truth, we haven’t strummed a note since this all started up.”

“Chicken,” Tara remarks from the couch, rolling a number with the flecks of tobacco, seeds, and stems at the bottom of her little Band-Aid canister. The others sit around the living room, ears perking up at the prospect of hearing the World Famous Chalmers Family Band.

“Come on, Daddy,” April chimes in. “We can play ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ for ’em.”

“Naw, they don’t want to hear no religious claptrap, occasion such as this.”

Tara is already maneuvering her portly self across the room toward her gigantic bass fiddle case, her makeshift cigarette dangling from her lip. “You name it, Daddy, I’ll slap a bass line to it.”

“Aw, what could it hurt?” David Chalmers relents as he levers his creaking body out of the rocker.

The Chalmers dig their instruments out of their cases, and then tune up. When they’re ready, they seem to position themselves in a tight formation before they begin, as synchronized as a marine drill team, with April in front, on guitar, and David and Tara on the flanks in back, on mandolin and bass respectively. Philip can just imagine them on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, and he can see Brian soaking it all in across the room. One thing about Brian Blake, he knows his music. Philip has always marveled at his brother’s depth of knowledge on the subject, and now, with this unexpected boon, Philip figures that Brian must be delighted.

They start playing.

Philip gets very still.

It feels as though his heart is suddenly being inflated with helium.

*   *   *

It’s not just the stark and unexpected beauty of their music—that first number a lovely old Irish jig, with a sad, thumping bass line and a rolling guitar pattern that sounds like a hundred-year-old hurdy-gurdy. Nor is it the fact that sweet little Penny seems suddenly transported by the melody as she sits on the floor, her eyes going all dreamy. Nor is it the fact that a simple, delicate tune in the face of all this ugliness practically breaks Philip’s heart. It’s the moment when April begins to sing that floods Philip’s soul with electric honey:

There’s a shadow on my wall, but it don’t scare me at all

I’m happy all night long in my dreams

As clean and crisp as a glass bell, with perfect pitch, April’s spectacular, velvety alto voice rings in the room. It caresses the notes, and even has a hint of the church in it, a slight soulful sauciness that reminds Philip of a choir singer in a country chapel:

In my dreams, in my dreams

I’m happy all night long in my dreams

I’m safe here in my bed, happy thoughts are in my head

And I’m happy all night long in my dreams

The voice awakens an aching desire in Philip—something he hasn’t felt since Sarah died. He has X-ray vision all of a sudden. He can see little things about April Chalmers as she strums her six-string and warbles joyously that he hadn’t noticed before. He sees a tiny anklet chain around her ankle, and a small tattoo of a rose inside the crook of her arm, and the pale half-moons of her breasts—as white as mother-of-pearl—between the bunched buttons of her blouse.

The song comes to an end and everybody applauds—Philip’s clapping the most vigorous of all.

*   *   *

The next day, after a meager breakfast of stale cereal and powdered milk, Philip notices April, off to herself, near the front door, putting on her hiking boots, and wrapping the sleeves of her sweatshirt with duct tape.

“Thought you might like a second cup,” Philip says to her innocently, coming up to her with a cup of coffee in each hand. “It’s instant but it ain’t half bad.” He notices her wrapping her ankles with tape. “What the hell are you doing?”

She looks at the coffee. “You use the rest of that gallon jug for that?”

“I guess so.”

“We got one more gallon to last the seven of us until the twelfth of never.”

“What do you got in that head of yours?”

“Don’t make a big deal out of it.” She zips up her sweatshirt, and tightens the rubber band on her ponytail, tucking it into the hood. “I’ve been planning this for a while, and I want to do it by myself.”

“Planning what?”

She reaches into the front coat closet and pulls out a metal baseball bat. “We found this thing in one of the apartments, knew it’d be useful one day.”

“What are you doing, April?”

“You know that fire escape ladder on the south side of the building?”

“You’re not going out there by yourself.”

“I can slip out 3F, climb down the ladder, and draw the Biters away from the building.”

“No … no.”

“Draw them away long enough to go get supplies and slip back in.”

Philip sees his own filthy logger boots by the door, where he left them the night before. “Mind handing me those boots?” he says. “If your mind’s made up, you sure as shit ain’t doing this alone.”

TWELVE

Once again, it’s the smell that first jabs him sharply in the face as he leans out the south window of apartment 3F—a coppery gumbo of human waste slow cooked in bacon fat—an odor that is so horrendous it makes Philip flinch. His eyes start watering as he shimmies through the opening. He doesn’t think he will ever get used to that smell.

He climbs out onto a rusty, ramshackle cast-iron landing. The platform, which is connected to a ladder that zigzags down three floors to a side street, wobbles under Philip’s weight. His stomach lurches with the sudden shift in gravity, and he braces himself against the rails.

The weather has turned dreary and damp, the sky the color of asphalt, with a northeast wind curling through the distant concrete canyons. Luckily, down below, a minimum number of Biters are roaming the narrow side street running along the south side of the apartment building. Philip glances at his watch.

In roughly one minute and forty-five seconds, April is going to be risking her life in front of the building, and this urgency gets Philip going. He quickly climbs down the first flight, the rickety ladder groaning with his weight, trembling with each step.

As he descends, he senses the silver eyes of dead things noticing him, drawn by the metallic rattle of the ladder, their primitive senses tracking him, smelling him, sensing his vibrations like spiders sensing a fly in their web. Dark silhouettes, glimpsed in his peripheral vision, start lazily shuffling toward him, more and more of them coming around the front of the building to investigate.

They ain’t seen nothing yet, he thinks as he drops to the ground and then runs across the street. Sixty-five seconds. The plan is to get in and get out quickly, and Philip moves along the boarded storefronts with the stealth of a Delta Force marine. He reaches the east end of the block and finds an abandoned Chevy Malibu with out-of-state plates.

Thirty-five seconds.

Philip can hear the shuffling footsteps closing in on him as he crouches behind the Malibu and quickly slips his backpack off. His hands do not shake as he digs out the sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke filled with gasoline (April had found a spare plastic tank of gas in the apartment building’s basement maintenance room).

Twenty-five seconds.

He twists the cap, stuffs in the gas-soaked rag, and shoves the pointed end in the Malibu’s tailpipe, letting a twelve-inch length of rag dangle. Twenty seconds. He digs out a Bic lighter, sparks it, and sets the rag alight. Fifteen seconds. He runs away.

Ten seconds.

He makes it across the street, brushing past a cluster of Biters, and into a dark alcove, diving behind a row of garbage cans, before he hears the WHOOMP of that first eruption—the bottle catching in the tailpipe—followed by a much bigger explosion.

Philip ducks and covers as a sonic boom shakes the street and sends up a fireball that turns the shadows into well-lighted places.

*   *   *

Right on time, April thinks as she crouches down in the shadows of the foyer, the concussion blast rattling the glass door. The light popping overhead is like an unseen photographer’s strobe. She peers out through the bottom half of the barred door and glimpses the sea change in the ocean of dead.

Like a moving tide of ragged, livid faces, shifting with the gravitational tug of the moon, they start following the noise and light, heading in a disorganized mass toward the south side of the building.

Tinsel shimmering in the sun couldn’t attract a flock of sparrows better than this explosion works on these Biters. Within a minute or so, the street in front of the building is practically deserted.

April girds herself. She takes a deep breath. She secures the straps of her duffel bags. She closes her eyes. She says a quick, silent prayer … and then she springs up, yanks the cross-brace, and shoves the door open.

She creeps outside. The wind tosses her hair, and the stench strangles her. She stays low as she darts across the street.

The sensory overload threatens to distract her—the smells, the proximity of the horde half a block away, the thunderous beating of her heart—as she frantically moves from dark storefront to dark storefront. Thankfully, she is familiar enough with the neighborhood to know where the convenience store is located.

*   *   *

If measured by the clock, it only takes April Chalmers eleven minutes and thirty-three seconds to slip through the jagged maw of broken glass and visit the ransacked interior of the convenience store. Only eleven and half minutes to fill one and a half canvas bags with enough food and water and miscellaneous stuff to keep them going for quite a while.

But to April Chalmers, those eleven and half minutes feel suspended in time.

She grabs nearly twenty pounds of groceries from the convenience store—including a small canned ham with enough preservatives to keep until Christmas, two gallons of filtered water, three cartons of Marlboro reds, lighters, beef jerky, vitamins, cold remedies, antibacterial ointment, and six extra large rolls of blessed, blessed toilet paper—throwing it all in her duffel bag with lightning speed.

The back of her neck prickles as she works with constant awareness of the ticking clock. The street will fill up again soon and the army of Biters will block her path if she doesn’t get back within minutes.

*   *   *

Philip goes through another half a clip of .22-caliber rounds, working his way back around the rear of the apartment building. The majority of the Biters are now clustered around the flaming debris of the Malibu, a riot of moving corpses like June bugs drawn to the light. Philip clears a path around the back of the courtyard by squeezing off two shots. One of them cracks open the cranium of a lumbering cadaver dressed in a running suit, the zombie dropping like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Another blast opens a trough in the top of a skull belonging to what looks like a former homeless woman, her geode eyes flickering out as she falls.

Before the other Biters have a chance to close in on him, he vaults over the rear fence of the courtyard and charges across the leprous brown grass.

He climbs up the back wall of the building, using an awning as a foothold. A second fire escape ladder is folded halfway up the stucco wall of the first story, and Philip gets a grip on it and starts to pull himself the rest of the way up.

But all at once, he pauses, and has second thoughts about the plan.

*   *   *

April reaches the critical point in her mission—twelve minutes have elapsed since she emerged—but she risks visiting one more merchant.

Half a block south, an Ace Hardware store sits empty, its display windows broken, its burglar gates loose enough for a smallish woman to negotiate. She slips through the gap and enters the dark store.

She fills the remainder of the second canvas bag with water filters (for making the standing water in toilets drinkable), a box of nails (to replenish their supply, which they used securing the barricades), markers and rolls of large-format paper (for making signs to alert any other survivors), light bulbs, batteries, a few cans of Sterno, and three small flashlights.

On her way back toward the front of the store, now lugging nearly forty pounds of merchandise in two bulging duffels, she passes a figure slumped at the end of a side aisle stacked with fiberglass insulation.

April pauses. The dead girl on the floor, slumped and leaning against the far wall, is missing one leg. From the snail-trail of gore leading across the floor, it’s clear that the thing dragged itself here. The dead girl is not much older than Penny. April gapes for a moment.

She knows she has to get out of there but she can’t tear her gaze from the pathetic, ragged corpse sitting in its own juices, which have obviously leaked out of the blackened stump where its right leg used to be.

“Oh God, I can’t,” April says under her breath, to herself, uncertain what it is she can’t do: Put the thing out of its misery, or leave it to suffer for eternity in this deserted hardware store.

April pulls the metal bat from her belt and sets down her packs. She approaches cautiously. The dead thing on the floor hardly moves, just slowly gazes up with the trembling stupor of a fish dying on the deck of a boat.

“I’m sorry,” April whispers, and buries the end of the bat in the girl’s skull. The blow makes the wet, snapping noise of green wood breaking.

The zombie folds silently to the floor. But April stands there, closing her eyes for a moment, trying to will the image from her mind, an image that will probably haunt her for the rest of her life.

Seeing the shank of the bat cleave open a skull is bad enough, but what April just saw in the horrible brief instant before she brought the bat down, as she was drawing it back, winding up, was this: Either through some meaningless flicker of deadened nerves, or through some deeper understanding, the dead girl turned her face away in that moment before the bat arced down.

A noise near the front of the store gets her attention and she hurries back to her duffel bags, throws the straps over her shoulders, and starts toward the exit. But she doesn’t get far. She slams on the brakes when she sees a second young girl blocking her path.

It stands fifteen feet away, just inside the mangled burglar screens, in the identical soiled dress as that of the girl April just dispatched.

At first, April thinks her eyes are playing tricks. Or maybe it’s the ghost of the girl she just put down. Or maybe April is losing her mind. But as the second dead girl starts shuffling down the aisle toward April with black drool falling off its cracked lips—this one has both its legs—April realizes that it’s a twin.

It’s the other girl’s identical twin.

“Here we go,” April says, drawing back the bat, dropping her load, preparing to fight her way out.

She takes one step toward the pint-sized monster, raising the bat, when a dry popping blast rings out behind the twin, and April blinks.

The bullet shatters a corner of the front window and takes off the top of the twin’s head. April flinches back at the kick of blood mist, as the girl collapses in a heap. April lets out a pained sigh of relief.

Philip Blake stands outside the store, out in the middle of the empty street, clicking a new magazine into his .22-caliber Ruger.

“You in there?” he calls.

“I’m here! I’m okay!”

“I know it ain’t polite to rush a lady but they’re comin’ back!”

April grabs her treasures, and then leaps over the bloody remains blocking the aisle and slips through the burglar gate and out into the street. Instantly, she sees the problem: The throng of zombies is returning, coming around the corner with the collective fervor of a demented chorus line moving in haphazard formation.

Philip grabs one of the bags and they both make a run for the apartment building.

They cross the street in seconds flat, with at least fifty Biters on either flank.

*   *   *

Brian and Nick are peering out the reinforced glass of the outer vestibule door when they see the situation in the street rapidly changing.

They see wolf packs of zombies coming down the street from both directions, returning from wherever the hell they had just gone. In the midst of all this, two human beings, one male and one female, like ball carriers in some obscure, surreal, twisted sport, come charging toward the apartment building with duffel bags slung and bouncing against their backs. Nick perks up.

“There they are!”

“Thank God,” Brian says, lowering the Marlin shotgun until the butt rests on the floor. He’s shaking. He shoves his left hand in his pocket, and he tries to get a grip on himself. He does not want his brother to see him shaking.

“Let’s get the door open,” Nick says, leaning his shotgun in the corner.

He gets the door open just as Philip and April are roaring up the walk, a multitude of Biters on their heels. April roars through the doorway first, shaking and hyperventilating with adrenaline.

Philip follows her in, his dark eyes aglow with testosterone-fueled mania. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!”

Nick slams the door just in time. Three Biters crash into the outer glass, rattling the steel-impregnated door, their drooling mouths leaving streaks. Several pairs of milky-white eyes gaze in through the greasy glass at the people in the foyer. Dead fingers claw at the door. Other Biters are staggering up the walk.

Brian has his shotgun raised at the figures outside the door. He backs away. “What the hell is going on, man! Where were you guys?”

Nick ushers them through the inner door and into the foyer. April drops her bulging duffel. “That was—that was—Jesus, that was close!”

Philip sets down his pack. “Girl, you got some cojones, I’ll give you that.”

Nick steps up. “What’s the idea, Philly! You guys just disappear without telling anybody?”

“Talk to her,” Philip says with a grin, shoving his Ruger inside his belt.

“We were totally freaking out!” Nick rants. “We were about one second away from going outside to look for you!”

“Calm down, Nicky.”

“Calm down? Calm down! We were turning the place upside down looking for you! Tara was about to have a shit fit!”

“It’s my fault,” April says, wiping the grime from her neck.

“Look at our take, man!” Philip indicates the loot stuffed into the bags.

Nick has his fists clenched. “Then we hear a fucking explosion? What are we supposed to think? Was that you guys? Did you have something to do with that?”

Philip and April exchange a glance, and Philip says, “That idea was kinda both of ours.”

April cannot stifle her victorious grin as Philip takes a step toward her, raising his hand. “How about a high five, darlin’?”

They high-five each other, with Nick and Brian staring in disbelief. Nick is about to say something else when a figure appears on the other side of the foyer, pushing through the inner door.

“Oh my God!” Tara storms into the room and goes to her sister. She pulls April into a bear hug. “Oh my God, I was so freaked! Thank God you’re okay! Thank God! Thank God!”

April pats her sister. “I’m sorry, Tara, it was something I had to do.”

Tara lets go, her face flashing with anger. “I ought to beat the shit outta you. Seriously! I’m telling that little girl you’re just upstairs, but she’s getting as freaked as I am! What am I supposed to do? That was a goddamn stupid, irresponsible thing to do! Which is so goddamn typical of you, April!”

“What the hell does that mean?” April gets into her sister’s face. “Why don’t you say what you mean for once?”

“You fucking bitch.” Tara winds up like she’s going to slap the younger woman when Philip suddenly steps in between them.

“Whoa there, Tonto!” Philip gives Tara a reassuring pat. “Hold on a second. Take a deep breath, sis.” Philip nods toward the duffel bags. “I want to show you something. Okay? Just cool your pits for a second.”

He kneels down and unzips the bags, displaying the contents.

The others stare silently at the supplies. Philip straightens back up and looks Tara in the eyes. “That ‘fucking bitch’ there saved our asses today—there’s food and water in there. That ‘fucking bitch’ risked her ass, not knowing if she’d be able to pull it off and not wanting anybody else to get hurt. You ought to be kissing that ‘fucking bitch’s’ feet.”

Tara looks away from the duffel bags and looks down at the floor. “We were worried, that’s all,” she says in a feeble, low voice.

Nick and Brian are now both kneeling by the duffel bags, looking through the treasures. “Philly,” Nick says, “I have to admit: You guys kicked ass.”

“You guys rock,” Brian mutters almost under his breath with awe as he rifles through the toilet paper and the beef jerky and the water filters. The emotional atmosphere in the room begins to shift with the slow certainty of clouds parting. Smiles appear on all their faces.

Soon, even Tara is throwing grudging glances over their shoulders at the contents of the duffel bags. “Any cigarettes in there?”

“Here’s three cartons of Reds,” April says, leaning down and digging out the cigarettes. “Enjoy them, you fucking bitch.”

With a good-natured smile, she hurls the cartons at her sister.

Everybody laughs.

Nobody sees the small figure standing across the room, in the inner doorway, until Brian glances up. “Penny? You okay, kiddo?”

The little girl pushes the door open and walks into the foyer. She is still dressed in her pajamas, and her little peaches-and-cream face is chiseled with seriousness. “That man in there? Mr. Chah-merz? He just fell down.”

*   *   *

They find David Chalmers on the floor of the master bedroom, amid a litter of tissues and medications. Granules of broken glass from a fallen aftershave bottle sparkle like a halo around his trembling head.

“Jesus!—Daddy!” Tara kneels by the fallen man, pulling his oxygen tube free. David’s grizzled face is the color of nicotine as he involuntarily gasps for air, a fish out of water trying to breathe the poisonous atmosphere.

“He’s choking!” April hurries around to the other side of the bed, checking the oxygen tank, which lies on the floor on its side near the window, tangled in its tubing. The old man must have pulled it off the bedside table when he fell.

“Daddy? Can you hear me?” Tara gives the man’s ashen face a series of quick, light slaps.

“Check his tongue!”

“Daddy? Daddy?”

“Check his tongue, Tara!” April rushes back around the bed, the oxygen tank and a coil of tubing in her hands. While she does this, the others—Philip, Nick, Brian, and Penny—watch from the doorway. Philip feels helpless. He doesn’t know whether to jump in or just watch. The girls seem to know what they’re doing.

Tara gently levers open the old man’s mouth, looking down his gullet. “It’s clear.”

“Dad?” April kneels on the other side of him, positioning the tiny breathing apparatus under his hooked nose. “Daddy, can you hear me?”

David Chalmers keeps silently gasping, the back of his throat clucking painfully like a record skipping. His eyelids—as ancient and translucent as a mayfly’s wings—begin fluttering. Tara frantically feels under the back of his skull for signs of injury. “I don’t see any bleeding,” she says. “Daddy?”

April feels his forehead. “He’s ice-cold.”

“Is the oxygen running?”

“Full blast.”

“Daddy?” April gently repositions the old man so he’s lying supine with the oxygen tube across his upper lip. Again they give him little slaps. “Daddy? Daddy? Daddy, can you hear us? Daddy?”

The old man coughs, eyes fluttering. He blinks. He tries to get a good lungful of air, but his shallow breaths keep hitching in his throat. His eyes are rolled back in his head, and he appears to be only semiconscious.

“Daddy, look at me,” April says, her hand gently turning his face toward hers. “Can you see me?”

“Let’s get him on the bed,” Tara suggests. “Fellas, you mind giving us a hand?”

Philip, Nick, and Brian step into the room. Philip and Nick take one side of the old man, and Tara and Brian the other, and on the count of three, they carefully lift the old man off the floor and lay him on the bed, making the springs squeak and tangling the tube on one side.

Moments later, they have the tube clear and the old man covered in blankets. Only his pale, sunken face is visible above the linens, his eyes shut, his mouth lolled open, and his breathing coming in fits and starts. He sounds like a combustion engine that refuses to turn over. Every few moments, his eyelids flutter and something flickers behind them—lips stretched into a grimace—but then his face goes slack. He is still breathing … barely.

Tara and April sit on either side of the bed, stroking the lanky form under the blankets. For a long while, nobody says anything. But chances are, they’re all thinking the same thing.

*   *   *

“You think it’s a stroke?” Brian asks softly, minutes later, sitting out by the sliding glass doors.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” April paces the living room, chewing her fingernails, while the others sit around the room, watching her. Tara is in the bedroom, at her father’s bedside. “Without medical attention, what chance does he have?”

“Has anything like this ever happened before?”

“He’s had trouble breathing before but nothin’ like this.” April stops pacing. “God, I knew this day was gonna come.” She wipes her eyes, which are moist with tears. “We’re on the last tank of oxygen.”

Philip asks about medication.

“We got his medicine, sure, but that ain’t gonna do him much good now. He needs a doctor. Stubborn old coot blew off his last appointment a month ago.”

“What do we have in the way of medical supplies?” Philip asks her.

“I don’t know, we got some shit from upstairs, antihistamines and shit.” April paces some more. “We got first-aid kits. Big deal. This is serious. I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

“Let’s stay calm and think this thing through.” Philip wipes his mouth. “He’s resting peacefully now, right? His airways are clear. You never know, something like this … he could bounce back.”

“But what if he doesn’t?” She stops moving and looks at him. “What if he doesn’t bounce back?”

Philip gets up and goes over to her. “Listen. We gotta keep our heads clear.” He pats her shoulder. “We’ll keep a close watch on him, we’ll figure something out. He’s a tough old bird.”

“He’s a tough old bird who’s dying,” April says, a single tear tracking down her face.

“You don’t know that,” Philip says, wiping the tear from her cheek.

She looks at him. “Good try, Philip.”

“Come on.”

“Good try.” She looks away, her crestfallen expression as desolate as a death mask. “Good try.”

*   *   *

That night, the Chalmers girls sit watch at their father’s bedside, their chairs drawn up on either side of the bed, a battery-powered lantern painting the old man’s pallid face in pale light. The apartment is as cold as a meat locker. April can see Tara’s breath across the room.

The old man lies there for most of the night in stony repose, his hollow cheeks contracting periodically with his labored breathing. The grizzled whiskers of his chin look like metal filings, shifting in a magnetic field, moving occasionally with the tics of his stricken nervous system. Every once in a while his dry, cracked lips will begin to work impotently, trying to form a word. But other than little dry puffs of air, nothing comes out.

At some point in the wee hours, April notices that Tara has dozed off, her head down on the edge of the bed. April grabs a spare blanket and carefully drapes it over her sister. She hears a voice.

“Lil?”

It’s coming from the old man. His eyes are still closed, but his mouth is working furiously, his expression furrowed with anger. Lil is short for Lillian, David’s late wife. April hasn’t heard the nickname in years.

“Daddy, it’s April,” she whispers, touching his cheek. He recoils, his eyes still closed. His mouth is contorted, his voice slurred and drunken with nerve damage on one side of his face.

“Lil, get the dogs in! There’s a storm comin’—a big one—a nor’easter!”

“Daddy, wake up,” April whispers softly. Emotion wells up inside her.

“Lil, where are you?”

“Daddy?”

Silence.

“Daddy?”

At this point, Tara is sitting up, blinking, startled at the sound of her father’s strangled voice. “What’s going on?” she says, rubbing her eyes.

“Daddy?”

The silence continues, the old man’s breaths coming hard and fast now.

“Da—”

The word sticks in April’s throat as she sees something horrible crossing the old man’s face. His eyelids flick open to half-mast, the whites of his eyes showing, and he begins to speak in an alarmingly clear voice: “The devil has plans for us.”

In the gloomy half-light of the lantern, the two sisters exchange mortified glances.

The voice that comes out of David Chalmers is low and gravelly, an engine dieseling: “The day of reckoning is drawing near … the Deceiver walks among us.”

He falls silent, his head lolling to one side of the pillow as if the wires to his brain have been abruptly cut.

Tara checks his pulse.

She looks at her sister.

April looks at her father’s face, his expression now slackened and relaxed into a sanguine, tranquil mask of deep and endless sleep.

*   *   *

With the morning’s light, Philip stirs in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. He sits up and rubs his sore neck, his joints stiff from the cold. For a moment, he lets his eyes adjust to the gloomy light, and he orients himself to his surroundings. He sees Penny on the sofa, cocooned in blankets, sound asleep. He sees Nick and Brian across the room, also encased in blankets, also asleep. The memory of the previous evening’s deathwatch returns to Philip in stages, the agonizing, hopeless struggle to help the old man and to assuage April’s fears.

He glances across the room. In the shadows of the adjacent hallway, the door to the master bedroom is visible in the gloom, still closed.

Climbing out of his sleeping bag, Philip hurriedly and silently gets dressed. He pulls on his pants and pushes on his boots. He runs fingers through his hair and goes into the kitchen to rinse his mouth out. He hears the murmur of voices behind the walls. He goes over to the bedroom door and listens. He hears Tara’s voice.

She’s praying.

Philip knocks softly.

A moment later, the door clicks open and April is standing there, looking as though someone threw acid in her eyes. They are so bloodshot and wet that they look scourged. “’Morning,” she says in a low whisper.

“How’s he doing?”

Her lips tremble. “He ain’t.”

“What?”

“He’s gone, Philip.”

Philip stares at her. “Aw God…” He swallows hard. “I’m real sorry, April.”

“Yeah, well.”

She starts to cry. After an awkward moment—a wave of contrary emotions punching through Philip’s gut—he pulls her into an embrace. He holds her, and he strokes the back of her head. She trembles in his arms like a lost child. Philip doesn’t know what to say. Over April’s shoulder, he can see into the room.

Tara Chalmers is kneeling by the deathbed, praying silently, her head down on the tangled linen. One of her hands is lying on the cold, gnarled hand of her late father. For some reason that Philip can’t figure out, he finds it difficult to take his eyes off the sight of the girl’s hand caressing the bloodless fingers of the dead.

*   *   *

“I can’t get her to come out of there.” April is sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of weak, tepid tea brewed on a Sterno can. Her eyes are clear for the first time since she came out of the death room that morning. “Poor thing … I think she’s trying to pray him back to life.”

“No shame in that,” Philip says. He sits across the table from her, a half-eaten bowl of rice in front of him. He has no appetite.

“Have you thought about what you want to do?” Brian asks from across the kitchen. He stands at the sink where he’s pouring water, which was collected from some of the toilets upstairs, into filter canisters.

The sounds of Nick and Penny playing cards in the other room drift in.

April looks up at Brian. “Do about what?”

“Your father … you know … like, burialwise?”

April sighs. “You’ve been through this before, haven’t you?” she says to Philip.

Philip looks at his uneaten rice. He has no idea if she’s talking about Bobby Marsh or Sarah Blake, both of whose deaths Philip recounted to April the other night. “Yes, ma’am, that’s true.” He looks at her. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll help you do it.”

“Of course we’ll bury him.” Her voice breaks a little bit. She looks down. “I just never pictured myself doing it in a place like this.”

“We’ll do it together,” Philip says. “We’ll do it right and proper.”

April looks down, a tear falling into her tea. “I hate this.”

“We gotta stick together,” Philip says without much conviction. He says it because he doesn’t know what else to say.

April wipes her eyes. “There’s a patch of ground out back under the—”

A sharp noise from the hallway interrupts, and all heads turn.

A muffled thump is followed by a crash, the sound of furniture overturning.

Philip is out of his chair before the others even realize that the noise is coming from behind the closed door of the master bedroom.

THIRTEEN

Philip kicks the door open. Advent candles on the floor. The carpet burning in places. The smoky air vibrating with screams. A blur of movement smears across the darkness and it takes breathless nanoseconds for Philip to realize what he’s looking at in the flickering shadows.

The overturned dresser—the source of the crashing noise—has landed inches away from Tara, who’s on the floor, crawling with animal instinct, trying desperately to pull herself free of the vise grip of dead fingers on her legs.

Dead fingers?

At first, just for an instant, Philip figures something got in through a window, but then he sees the withered form of David Chalmers—completely turned now—on the floor, on top of Tara’s legs, digging yellowed fingernails into her flesh. The old man’s sunken face is livid now, the color of mold, his eyes frosted with glassy-white cataracts. He snarls with a ravenous guttural groan.

Tara manages to extricate herself and struggles to her feet, and then slams sideways into the wall.

Right then, many things happen at once: Philip realizes what’s going on, and that he left his gun in the kitchen, and that he has a limited amount of time to eradicate this threat.

That is the key—the fact that the kindly old mandolin player is long gone—and what this is, this hulking mass of dead tissue rising up and growling a garbled, drooling cry, is a threat. More than the flames licking across the carpet, more than the smoke—already forming a nightmarish haze in the room—this thing that has materialized inside their sanctuary is the biggest threat.

A threat to all of them.

At this same moment, before Philip has a chance to even move, the others arrive, filling the open doorway. April lets out an anguished yelp—not really a scream, more like a shriek of pain, like an animal getting gut shot. She pushes her way into the room, but Brian grabs her and holds her back. April writhes in his arms.

All this happens in the space of an instant as Philip sees the bat.

In all the excitement on the previous night, April had left her Hank Aaron autographed metal baseball bat in the corner by the barred window. Now it sits gleaming in the flickering flames, maybe fifteen feet away from Philip. There is no time to consider the distance or even map out a maneuver in his mind. All he has time to do is make a lunge across the room.

By this point, Nick has whirled around and is racing across the apartment for his gun. Brian tries to pull April out of the room, but she’s strong and she’s frantic and she’s screaming now.

It takes Philip mere seconds to cover the distance between the door and the bat. But in that brief span of time, the thing that was once David Chalmers goes for Tara. Before the large woman can get her bearings and flee the room, the dead man is upon her.

Cold, gray fingers ply themselves awkwardly toward her throat. She slams back against the wall, flailing at it, trying to push it away. Rotting jaws part, rancid breath wafting up in her face. Blackened teeth gape open. The thing goes for the pale, fleshy curve of her jugular.

Tara shrieks, but before the teeth have a chance to make contact, the bat comes down.

*   *   *

Up until this moment—especially for Philip—the act of vanquishing a moving corpse had become an almost perfunctory deed, as mechanical and obligatory as stunning a pig for the slaughter. But this feels different. It takes only three sharp blows.

The first one—a hard crack to the back temporal region of David Chalmers’s skull—stiffens the zombie and arrests its progress toward Tara’s neck. She slips to the floor in a paroxysm of tears and snot.

The second blow strikes the side of the skull as the thing is involuntarily turning toward its attacker, the tempered steel of the bat caving in the parietal bone and part of the nasal cavity, sending threads of pink matter into the air.

The third and final whack totals the entire left hemisphere of its skull as the thing is falling—the sound like a head of cabbage smashed in a drill press. The monster that was David Chalmers lands in a wet heap on one of the spilled candles, the ribbons of drool, blood, and gluey gray tissue hitting the flames and sizzling across the floor.

Philip stands over the body, out of breath, his hands still welded to the bat. Almost as punctuation to the horror, a high-pitched beeping noise begins to shrill. Battery-operated fire alarms across the first floor are loudly chirping, and it takes Philip a second to identify the sounds in his ringing ears. He drops the bloody bat.

And that is when he notices the difference. This time, after this extermination, nobody moves. April stares from the doorway. Brian releases his grip on her, and he too gapes. Even Tara, sitting up against the wall across the room, gripped in tears of revulsion and agony, settles into an almost catatonic stare.

The strangest thing is, rather than staring at the bloody heap on the floor, they are all staring at Philip.

*   *   *

In due course, they put out all the fires, and they clean the place up. They wrap the body and move it out into the corridor where it will be safe until burial.

Luckily, Penny witnessed very little of the debacle in the room. She heard enough of it, though, to make her withdraw back into her mute, invisible shell.

In fact, for quite a long time, nobody else has much to say, either, and the edgy silence continues throughout the rest of that day.

The sisters seem to be in some kind of shocked stupor, just going through the motions of the cleanup, not even talking to each other. They have each cried their eyes dry. But they keep staring at Philip; he can feel it like cold fingers on the back of his neck. What the hell did they expect? What did they want him to do? Let the monster feed on Tara? Did they want Philip to try and negotiate with the thing?

*   *   *

At noon the following day, they hold a makeshift memorial service in a section of the courtyard surrounded by a security fence. Philip insists on digging the grave himself, refusing assistance from even Nick. It takes hours. The Georgia clay is stubborn in this portion of the state. But by mid-afternoon, Philip is drenched in sweat and ready.

The sisters sing David’s favorite song—“Will the Circle Be Unbroken”—at his graveside. This reduces both Nick and Brian to tears. The sound of it is heartrending, especially as it carries up into the high blue sky and mingles with the omnipresent choir of groaning noises coming from outside the fence.

Later, they all sit around the living room, sharing the liquor that they had recovered from one of the apartments (and were saving for God knows what). The Chalmers sisters tell stories of their old man, his childhood, his early days in the Barstow Bluegrass Boys Band, and his time as a deejay on WBLR out of Macon. They speak of his temper, and his generosity, and his womanizing, and his devotion to Jesus.

Philip lets them talk and just listens. It’s good to finally hear their voices again, and the tension of the past day seems to be easing a little bit. Maybe it’s all part of their process of letting go, or maybe they just need to let it set in.

Later that night, Philip is in the kitchen, alone, refilling his glass with the last couple of fingers of sour mash whiskey, when April comes in.

“Look … I wanted to talk to you … about what happened and stuff.”

“Forget it,” Philip says, looking down into the caramel liquid in his glass.

“No, I should have … I should have said something sooner, I guess I was in shock.”

He looks at her. “I’m sorry it went down like it did, I truly am. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“You did what you had to do.”

“And I thank you for saying that.” Philip pats her shoulder. “I took an instant liking to your daddy, he was a great piece of work. Lived a long good life.”

She chews the inside of her cheek, and Philip can tell she’s fighting the urge to cry. “I thought I was prepared for losing him.”

“Nobody’s ever prepared.”

“Yeah, but like this … I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it.”

Philip nods. “Hell of a thing.”

“I mean … a person doesn’t … you just don’t have any reference point for this kinda shit.”

“I know what you mean.”

She looks at her hands, which are shaking. Maybe the memory of Philip bashing her father’s skull in is still lingering. “I guess all I wanted to say is … I ain’t blaming you for what you done.”

“Appreciate that.”

She looks at his drink. “We got any more of that cheap wine left?”

He finds a little bit left in one of the bottles and pours it for her. They drink in silence for a long while. Philip finally says, “What about your sis?”

“What about her?”

“She doesn’t seem to be…” His voice trails off, the proper words escaping him.

April nods. “In a forgiving kind of mood?”

“Something like that.”

April gives him a bitter smile. “She still blames me for stealing her lunch money back at Clark’s Hill Elementary.”

*   *   *

Over the next few days, the new blended family solidifies as the Chalmers sisters go through their grieving process, sometimes arguing over nothing, sometimes giving everybody else the silent treatment, sometimes holing up in their rooms for extended periods of crying or brooding.

April seems to be handling the transition better than her sister. She clears out her father’s things and moves into the master bedroom, giving Philip the room she originally occupied. Philip sets up a nice area for Penny with shelves and some coloring books he found upstairs.

The child is becoming attached to April. They spend hours together, exploring the upper floors, playing games, and experimenting with ways to stretch their meager provisions into nominal yet creative dinners cooked on Sterno flames, such as crumbled jerky stir-fry, peach and raisin casserole, and canned vegetable surprise (the surprise, sadly, turning out to be more shredded pieces of beef jerky).

*   *   *

Gradually, the hordes of undead drift away from the immediate area, leaving behind only a few stragglers, giving the Blakes and Nick a chance to test the limits of their reconnaissance missions to neighboring buildings. Philip notices that Brian is getting bolder, willing to venture out of the building now and again on quick trips. But it’s Nick Parsons who truly seems to be taking to this place.

Nick sets up a room for himself in a studio apartment on the second floor—number 2F—at the east end of the corridor. He finds books and magazines in other apartments, and drags spare furniture into the studio. He spends time hanging out on the balcony, sketching pictures of the neighboring streets, mapping out the immediate area, reading his Bible, starting a garden for winter vegetables, and thinking a lot about what has happened to the human race.

He also completes his ramshackle catwalk between the two adjacent buildings.

The narrow walkway is hewn out of plywood and paint ladders lashed together with rope and duct tape (and more than a little praying). The footbridge extends off the back of the roof, spanning a twenty-five-foot gap over an alley, and connecting up with the top rail of a fire escape on the adjacent roof.

The completion of the catwalk marks a turning point for Nick. Getting up his courage one day, he shimmies across the rickety structure and—just as he had predicted—he makes it all the way to the southeast corner of the block without walking outside. From there, he figures out how to get into the pedestrian bridge to the department store. When he comes back that night with armfuls of goodies from Dillard’s, he is greeted like a returning war hero.

He brings them fancy gourmet candy and nuts; warm clothing; new shoes and embossed stationery; expensive pens; a collapsible camp stove; satin sheets and luxurious three-hundred-thread-count linens; and even stuffed animals for Penny. Even Tara lightens up at the sight of the European cigarettes with the pastel wrappers. And Nick is doing something else on these solo runs, something that he keeps to himself at first.

*   *   *

On the one-week anniversary of David Chalmers’s death, Nick talks Philip into tagging along on a little reconnaissance mission so Nick can reveal what he’s been doing. Philip is not crazy about crossing the ladder-bridge—he claims he’s worried about it breaking under his weight, but the thing that truly bothers Philip is his secret fear of heights. Nick persuades him by piquing his curiosity. “You gotta see this, Philly,” Nick enthuses on the roof. “This whole area is a goldmine, man. I’m tellin’ you it’s perfect.”

With great reluctance, Philip goes ahead and drags himself across the catwalk, on his hands and knees behind Nick, grumbling all the way (and secretly petrified). Philip doesn’t dare look down.

They reach the other side, hop down, descend a fire escape ladder, and then slip into the adjacent building through an open window.

Nick leads Philip through the deserted hallways of an accounting firm, the floors littered with forgotten forms and documents like so many fallen leaves. “Not much farther now,” Nick says, ushering Philip down a staircase and across a desolate lobby strewn with overturned furniture.

Philip is hyperaware of their echoing footsteps, crunching over cinders of debris. He feels the blind spots and empty spaces in his solar plexus, he hears every snap and every tick as though something might lumber out at them at any moment. He keeps his hand on the stock of the .22 thrust into his jeans. “Over here, right off the parking garage,” Nick says, pointing to an alcove at the end of the lobby.

Around a corner. Past an overturned vending machine. Up a short flight of steps. Through an unmarked metal door, and suddenly, almost without warning, the entire world opens up for Philip.

“Holy mother-of-pearl,” Philip marvels as he follows Nick across the pedestrian bridge. The enclosed walkway is filthy, scattered with trash and reeking of urine, the thick, reinforced Plexiglas walls so filmed with grime they distort the surrounding cityscape. But the view is spectacular. The passageway is flooded with light, and it feels like you can see for miles.

Nick pauses. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty fucking outstanding.” Thirty feet above the street, the wind buffeting the structure, Philip can look down and see scattered zombies wandering underneath them like exotic fish drifting below a glass-bottom boat. “If it wasn’t for those ugly motherfuckers, I’d show this to Penny.”

“That’s what I wanted to show you.” Nick walks over to the south side of the walkway. “You see that bus? About half a block down there?”

Philip sees it—a hulking silver MARTA bus sitting at the curb.

Nick says, “Look above the bus’s front door, by the mirror, on the right side, you see the mark?”

Sure enough, Philip sees a hand-drawn symbol above the passenger entrance—a hastily scrawled five-point star—done in red spray paint. “What am I looking at?”

“It’s a safe zone.”

“A what?”

“Been working my way down that street and up this one back here,” Nick tells him with the innocent pride of a kid showing a soapbox derby model to his dad. “There’s a barber shop over there, clean as a whistle, secure as a bank, the door unlocked.” He points farther up the street. “There’s an empty semitrailer up there a ways, in good shape, just sitting there, with a good, strong—whattya call ’em—accordion door? On the back end.”

“What’s the point here, Nicky?”

“Safe zones. Places you can duck into. If you’re on a supply run and you get in trouble or whatever. I’m finding them farther and farther down the street. Putting marks on ’em so we don’t miss ’em. There’s all sorts of cubbyholes out there, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Philip looks at him. “You’ve been going all the way down to the end of that street by yourself?”

“Yeah, you know—”

“Goddamnit, Nick. You shouldn’t be goin’ all the way out there without any backup.”

“Philly—”

“No, no … don’t just ‘Philly’ me on this, man. I’m serious. I want you to be more careful. You understand? I’m serious about this.”

“Okay, okay. You’re right.” Nick gives Philip a good-natured punch in the arm. “I hear you.”

“Good.”

“You gotta admit, though, this place rocks. Considering the situation we’re in?”

Philip shrugs, looking down through the grimy glass at the cannibal fish circling. “Yeah, I guess.”

“It could be a lot worse, Philly. We’re not in the tall buildings, it’s flat enough around here for you to see your way around. We got plenty of room to spread out at the apartment building, we got stores with supplies within walking distance. I’m even thinking we could find a generator somewhere, maybe hot-wire a car to get it back. I could see us staying here, Philly … I don’t know … for a long time.” He thinks about it some more. “Indefinitely … you know?”

Philip gazes through the filthy glass at the necropolis of empty buildings, and the ragged monsters meandering in and out of view. “Everything’s indefinite nowadays, Nicky.”

*   *   *

That night, Brian’s cough returns. The weather is getting colder and damper by the day, and it is taking a toll on Brian’s immune system. After dark, the apartment is freezing. By morning, it’s an icebox, the floor like a skating rink on the soles of Brian’s stocking feet. He’s taken to wearing three layers of sweaters and a knit scarf that Nick procured from Dillard’s. With his fingerless gloves and his thatch of unruly black hair and his hollow Edgar Allan Poe eyes, Brian is starting to look like a waif from a Charles Dickens novel.

“I think this place is really good for Penny,” Brian says to Philip that night on a second-floor balcony. The Blake brothers are having an after-dinner drink—more of the cheap wine—and gazing out at the desolate skyline. The cool evening air rustles their hair, and the zombie stink wafts just under the smell of rain.

Brian stares out at the distant silhouettes of dark buildings as if in a trance. For a person in twenty-first-century America, it is almost incomprehensible to see a great metropolis completely dark. But that’s exactly what the Blakes are looking at: a skyline so dead and black it looks like a mountain range on a moonless night. Every few moments, Brian thinks he sees the faint glint of a fire or a light twinkling in the black void. But it could very easily be his imagination.

“I think that gal April is the thing that’s doin’ the most good for Penny,” Philip says.

“Yeah, she’s really good with her.” Brian is also growing fond of April, and he’s been noticing that Philip may very well have a bit of a crush on her as well. Nothing would make Brian happier than to have Philip find a little peace right now, a little stability with a girlfriend.

“That other one’s a slice, though, ain’t she?” Philip says.

“Tara? Yeah. Not a happy camper.”

For the past few days, Brian has been generally avoiding Tara Chalmers—she is a walking ulcer, always irritable, paranoid, still in the throes of grief over her dad. But Brian figures she’ll eventually work her way through it. She seems like a decent person.

“The girl does not realize I saved her fucking life,” Philip says.

Brian lets out a series of dry coughs. Then he says, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”

Philip looks at him. “What.”

“The old man turning like that?” Brian measures his words. He knows he’s not the only one worrying about this. Ever since David Chalmers came back from the dead and tried to devour his oldest daughter, Brian has been ruminating about the phenomenon, and the implications of what happened, and the rules of this savage new world, and maybe even the prognosis for the entire human race. “Think about it, Philip. He didn’t get bit. Right?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“So, why did he turn?”

For a moment, Philip just stares at Brian, and the darkness seems to expand around them. The city seems to stretch into infinity like the landscape of a dream. Brian feels gooseflesh on his arms as though the very act of putting it into words—saying it out loud—has unleashed a malevolent genie from a bottle. And they will never, ever be able to put that genie back.

Philip sips his wine. In the darkness, his face is grim and set. “Hell of lot we don’t know. Maybe he got infected with something earlier, maybe came into contact with just enough of it to start working on his system. The old man was on his way out anyway.”

“If that’s true, then we all—”

“Hey, professor. Give it a rest. We’re all healthy and we’re gonna stay that way.”

“I know. I’m just saying … maybe we ought to think about taking more precautions.”

“What precautions? I got your precautions right here.” He touches the stock of his .22-caliber Ruger stuffed behind his belt.

“I’m talking about washing up better, sterilizing stuff.”

“With what?”

Brian lets out a sigh and looks up at the overcast night sky, a low canopy of haze as dark as black wool. Autumn rains are brewing. “We got the water upstairs in the toilets,” he says. “We got the filters and the propane, and we got access to cleaning products down the street, soaps and cleansers and shit.”

“We’re already filtering the water, sport.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And we’re washing up with that contraption Nicky found.” The so-called contraption is an outdoor camp shower that Nick found in Dillard’s sporting goods department. About the size of a small cooler, it has a collapsible five-gallon tank and a shower hose that operates off a battery-powered pump. For five days now, they’ve each been enjoying the periodic luxury of a brief shower, recycling the water as much as possible.

“I know, I know … I’m just saying, maybe it’s like, better to go overboard right now with the cleanliness. That’s all. Until we know more.”

Philip gives him a hard look. “And what if there ain’t nothing more to learn?”

Brian has no answer for that one.

The only response comes from the city, humming darkly back at them, with a blast of foul-smelling wind and a big, silent fuck you.

*   *   *

Maybe it’s the alarming conglomeration of unappetizing ingredients concocted that night by April and Penny for dinner—a mixture of canned asparagus, Spam, and crumbled potato chips cooked over a propane flame—sitting like a dropped anchor in the pit of Philip’s stomach. Or perhaps it’s the cumulative effect of all the stress and rage and sleeplessness that does it. Or maybe it’s the conversation he had on the balcony with his brother. But regardless of the cause, after he turns in for the night, and drifts off into an uneasy sleep, Philip Blake experiences an elaborate and lurid dream.

He has the dream in his newly established private quarters (April’s former bedroom was apparently once somebody’s home office—while clearing out the owner’s things, Philip and April found stacks of Mary Kay Cosmetics order forms and makeup samples). But now, lying on the queen-sized bed shoved against the wall, Philip writhes in semiconsciousness, drifting in and out of a feverish horror show. It’s the kind of dream that has no shape. It has no beginning, middle, or end. It just keeps spinning in its rut of circular terror.

He finds himself back in his childhood home in Waynesboro—the shabby little bungalow on Farrel Street—in the back bedroom he used to share with Brian. Philip is not a child in the dream, he is an adult, and somehow the plague has time-traveled back to the 1970s. The dream is almost three-dimensionally vivid. There’s the lily of the valley wallpaper, and the Iron Maiden posters, and the scarred school desk, and Brian is somewhere in the house, unseen, screaming, and Penny is also there, in some adjacent room, crying for her daddy. Philip runs through the hallways, which form an endless labyrinth. Plaster is cracking. The zombie horde is outside, clamoring to get in. The boarded windows are trembling. Philip has a hammer and tries to secure the windows with nails, but the head of the hammer falls off. Crashing noises. Philip sees a door cracking open and he rushes over to it, and the doorknob comes off in his hand. He searches drawers and cabinets for weapons, and the facings fall off the cabinets, and plaster sifts down from the ceiling, and his boot breaks through a hole in the floor. The walls are collapsing, and the linoleum is buckling, and the windows are falling from their frames, and Philip keeps hearing Penny’s desperate, shrieking voice calling for him: “DADDY!”

Skeletal arms thrust through crumbling window casements, blackened, curled fingers groping.

“DADDY?”

Bone-white skulls burst up through the floor like gruesome periscopes.

“DADDY!”

Philip lets out a silent scream as the dream shatters apart like spun glass.

FOURTEEN

Philip gasps awake with a start. He jerks forward on the bed, blinking and squinting at the pale morning light. Someone stands at the foot of his bed. No. Two people. He sees them now—one tall and one short.

“Good morning, sunshine,” April says with her hand around Penny’s shoulder.

“Jesus.” Philip sits up against the headboard in his wifebeater and sweatpants. “What the hell time is it?”

“It’s like almost noon.”

“Holy Christ,” Philip utters, getting his bearings. His entire sinewy form is filmed with cold sweat. His neck aches and his mouth tastes like a litter box. “I can’t believe it.”

“We gotta show you something, Daddy,” the little girl tells him, her big eyes ablaze with excitement. The sight of his daughter looking so happy sends a soothing wave of relief through Philip, driving the last remnants of the dream from his feverish brain.

He gets up and gets dressed, telling the two ladies to calm down. “Gimme a second to put my face on,” he says in a hoarse, whiskey-cured grunt, running fingers through his greasy hair.

*   *   *

They take him up to the roof. When they emerge from the fire door and plunge into the cool air and light, Philip balks at the glare. Despite the fact that the day is overcast and dark, Philip is hungover and the light makes his eyeballs throb. He squints up at the sky and sees the foreboding storm clouds churning and roiling into the area from the north. “Looks like rain,” he says.

“That’s good,” April says, giving Penny a wink. “Show him why, honey.”

The little girl grasps her father’s hand and drags him across the roof. “Look, Daddy, me and April made a garden to grow stuff in.”

She shows him a small makeshift planter in the center of the roof. It takes a moment for Philip to realize that the garden is constructed out of four wheelbarrows, their wheels removed, their housings taped together. A six-inch layer of soil fills each of the four cavities, a few unidentified shoots of green already transplanted into each barrow. “This is pretty damn fine,” he says, giving the child a squeeze. He looks at April. “Pretty damn fine.”

“It was Penny’s idea,” April says with a little gleam of pride in her eyes. She points at a row of buckets. “We’re gonna collect the rain, too.”

Philip drinks in April Chalmers’s beautiful, slightly bruised face, her sea-foam blue eyes, her ashy blond hair undone and hanging over the collar of her scroungy cable-knit sweater. He can’t take his eyes off her. And even as Penny starts jabbering happily about all the things she wants to grow—cotton candy plants, bubblegum bushes—Philip cannot help but extrapolate: The way April kneels down next to the child, listening intently with her hand on Penny’s back, the look of affection on the woman’s face, the easy rapport between the two, the sense of connection—all of it suggests something deeper than mere survival.

Philip can barely allow himself to think the word, and yet it comes to him right then, on that windy precipice, in a rush: family.

“Excuse me!”

The gruff voice comes from the fire door behind them, on the other side of the roof. Philip whirls. He sees Tara in one of her stained muumuus and one of her patented moods in the open doorway. She holds a bucket. Her heavily jowled face and Maybelline eyes look even more lined and surly than usual. “Would it be too much to ask for a little help?”

April rises and turns. “I told you I’d help you in a minute.”

Philip can see that Tara has been collecting water from toilet basins. He considers getting in the middle of this but decides against it.

“That was half an hour ago,” Tara says. “Meantime, I been lugging water while you’ve been lollygaggin’ up here in Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood.”

“Tara, just … calm down.” April sighs. “Gimme a second, I’ll be right there.”

“Fine—whatever!” Tara turns in a huff and swishes angrily back down the inner stairs, leaving the sour vibration of contempt in her slipstream.

April looks down. “I’m sorry about that, she’s still dealing with … you know … stuff.”

By the downtrodden expression on April’s face, it’s clear that it would take too much energy for her to run down the litany of what’s needling at her sister. Philip’s no dummy. He knows it’s complicated and it has something to do with jealousy and sibling rivalry, and maybe even the fact that April seems to be going through her grieving period with someone other than Tara.

“No need to apologize,” Philip tells her. “There is somethin’ I want you to know, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Just want you to know how grateful I am, the way you been treatin’ my daughter.”

April smiles. “She’s a great kid.”

“Yes, ma’am … she is … and you ain’t so bad yourself.”

“Why, thank you.” She leans over and gives Philip a peck on the cheek. Nothing fancy, just a quick little kiss. But it makes an impression. “Now I gotta get back before my sister shoots me.”

April walks off, leaving Philip thunderstruck and reeling in the wind.

*   *   *

As kisses go, it wasn’t anything special. Philip’s late wife, Sarah, had been a blue ribbon kisser. Hell, Philip had encountered prostitutes over the years since Sarah’s death who had given up more in the kissing department. Even hookers have feelings, and Philip would usually ask at the beginning of a session if they would mind terribly if he slipped in a few kisses, just for good measure, just to pretend there was love involved. But this little smooch of April’s is more like hors d’oeuvres, a hint of things to come. Philip wouldn’t call it a tease. Nor would he call it the platonic kind of kiss a sister might give a brother. It exists in that irresistible limbo between two extremes. It is—from Philip’s perspective—a knock on the door, an attempt to see if anyone’s home.

*   *   *

That afternoon, Philip expects the rain to come but it doesn’t. It’s already mid-October—he has no idea what day it is—and everybody keeps expecting the gulley-washers that traditionally sweep through central Georgia this time of year to roll in, but something keeps them at bay. The temperature is dropping, and the air buzzes with latent moisture, but still the rain doesn’t come. Maybe the drought has something to do with the plague. But for whatever reason, the unsettled sky, with its dark underbelly of storm clouds, seems to reflect the strange, inexplicable tension building in Philip.

Late in the day, he asks April to go with him on a quick trip down the street.

It takes some convincing—despite the fact that the zombie quotient has thinned dramatically since the last time they went out. Philip tells April he needs help scouting the vicinity for a Home Depot or a Lowe’s that might have generators lying around. It’s getting colder and colder, especially at night, and they’re going to need power soon in order to survive. He says he needs somebody who knows the area.

He also tells her that he wants to show her the safe routes Nick has been carving out. Nick offers to go along but Philip says it would be better if he stuck around and kept watch on the place with Brian.

April is up to the task, and is willing to go, but she’s a little dubious about the rickety, homemade catwalk. What if it starts raining when they’re on the ladders? Philip assures her it’s a piece of cake, especially for a little drink of water her size.

They get their coats on and get their weapons ready—April brings along one of the Marlins this time—and they prepare to embark. Tara is seething with anger at them, disgusted by what she calls “a stupid, dangerous, immature, retarded waste of time.” Philip and April politely ignore her.

*   *   *

“Don’t look down!”

Philip is halfway across the makeshift ladder-bridge over the back alley. April is ten feet behind him, holding on for dear life. Gazing over his shoulder at her, he smiles to himself. Major cojones on this girl.

“I’m cool,” she says, crabbing along with white knuckles and clenched jaw. The wind tousles her hair. Thirty feet beneath her, a pair of moving cadavers dumbly gaze around the air for the source of the voices.

“Almost home free,” Philip urges as he reaches the other side.

She crabs the remaining twenty feet. He helps her down onto the fire-escape landing. The cast-iron grating squeaks under their weight.

They find the open window and slip inside the former home of Stevenson and Sons Accounting and Estate Planning. The office corridors are darker and colder than they were the last time Philip traversed their length. The storm front has brought dusk to the area earlier than usual tonight.

They cross the empty hallways. “Don’t worry,” Philip assures her as they crunch across debris and crumpled tax returns, “This place is as safe as you can get, this day and age.”

“That’s not very reassuring,” she says, cradling the shotgun, thumbing the hammer nervously.

Dressed in tattered fleece and jeans, April has her arms and lower legs wrapped with gaffer’s tape. Nobody else does this. Philip asked her about it once and she told him she saw an animal trainer do it on TV—a last-resort defense against a bite breaking the skin.

They cross the lobby and find the access stairs just past the ruined vending machines.

“Get a load of this,” Philip says as he leads her up the single flight to the unmarked door. He pauses before opening the door. “You remember Captain Nemo?”

“Who?”

“That old flick Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? That old loony captain, playing his organ in that submarine, while the giant squids swim across them big picture windows?”

“Never saw it.”

Philip smiles at her. “Well, you’re about to.”

*   *   *

The last thing April Chalmers expects is for something other than horrific violence to take her breath away, but that’s pretty much what happens when she follows Philip through the unmarked door and onto the pedestrian bridge. She pauses on the threshold and just stares.

She’s been in these urban breezeways before—maybe even this very bridge—but somehow, tonight, the gauzy light and space of the thing, as it stretches across the intersection, thirty feet above the streets, connecting up with the second floor of Dillard’s, seems almost miraculous. Through the glass roof, veins of lightning flicker and thread across the storm clouds. Through the transparent walls, the darkening shadows of the city teem with wandering zombies. Atlanta looks like a vast game board in chaotic disarray.

“I see what you mean,” she says. Her voice comes out in a murmur, as she takes it all in, feeling a weird mixture of emotions—giddiness, fear, excitement.

Philip strolls down the center of the bridge, pausing by one wall and shrugging off the straps of his duffel bag. He nods to the south. “Want you to see something,” he says. “C’mere.”

She joins him, putting down her shotgun and backpack against the glass wall.

Philip points out the marks on the abandoned vehicles and doorways left by Nick Parsons. Philip explains the theory of “safe zones” and he talks about how cunning Nick has become. “I think he’s got something really good going here,” Philip concludes.

April agrees. “We could use those hiding places when we find that generator everybody’s talking about.”

“You got that right, sister.”

“Nick’s a good guy.”

“That he is.”

The encroaching darkness is drawing down over the city, and in the bluish shadows of the bridgeway, Philip’s rugged face looks even craggier to April than usual. With his inky black Fu Manchu whiskers and dark eyes nested in laugh lines, he reminds April of a cross between a young Clint Eastwood and … who? Her dad as a young man? Is that why she’s feeling these twinges of attraction toward the big, lanky redneck? Is April so retarded that she’s attracted to a man just because he’s the doppelgänger of her father? Or does this pathetic puppy love have something to do with the stress of fighting to survive in a world suddenly doomed with extinction? This is the guy who cracked open her daddy’s skull, for God’s sake. But maybe that’s unfair. That was not David Chalmers back there. Her daddy’s spirit, as the song goes, had flown away. His soul had departed long before he climbed out of his bed and tried to make a meal out of his eldest daughter.

“I gotta tell you,” Philip is saying, gazing out at the ragged figures, like stray dogs, roaming the streets for scraps. “We get a few things in place, and we could stay for a long time in that apartment building.”

“I think you’re right. All we gotta do is figure out a way to slip some Valium into Tara’s oatmeal.”

Philip laughs—a good, clean laugh—which shows a side of him that April has not yet seen. He looks at her. “We got an opportunity here, we can make this work. We can do more than just survive. And I’m not just talking about getting a generator.”

April looks up into his eyes. “Whaddaya mean?”

He turns toward her. “Met a lotta girls in my day, ain’t never run across one quite like you. Tough as nails … but the tenderness you show toward my kid? Never seen Penny take to somebody like she’s taken to you. Hell, you saved our asses, pulling us off the streets. You’re a very special lady, you know that?”

All at once April feels her skin flush hot with chills, and her midsection weaken, and she realizes Philip is looking at her in a new way. His eyes shimmer with emotion. She knows now that he’s been thinking the same thing that she has. She looks down, embarrassed. “Your standards must be low,” she mutters.

He reaches out and gently puts one of his big, callused workman’s hands on the curve of her jaw. “I got the highest standards of anybody I know.”

A clap of thunder booms outside the glass, rattling the bridge and making April jump.

Philip kisses her on the lips.

She pulls back. “I don’t know, Philip … I mean … I don’t know if this is … you know.”

Second thoughts and third thoughts and fourth thoughts flow through April in the space of an instant. If she takes this to the next level, what will happen with Tara? How will it fuck up the dynamics at the apartment? How will it complicate things? How will it affect their safety, their chances of survival, their future (if they even have one)?

Philip’s expression brings her back—the way he’s looking at her, his gaze almost glassy with emotion, his mouth slack with desire.

He leans in and kisses her again, and this time she finds herself putting her arms around him and returning the kiss, and she doesn’t even notice the droplets of rain beginning to ping off the glass over her head.

She feels her body go limp in Philip’s forceful embrace. Their lips part, and electricity flows through April as they explore each other with their tongues, the taste of coffee and spearmint gum and Philip’s musky odor filling her senses. Her nipples harden under her sweater.

A flash of blue lightning turns the dusk to brilliant silver daylight.

April loses track of herself. She loses track of everything. Her head is spinning. She doesn’t notice the rain slapping against the glass roof. She doesn’t even notice the fact that Philip is gently lowering both of them to the floor of the walkway. Their lips locked and working sensually, Philip’s big hands caressing April’s breasts, he carefully lays her back against the glass wall, and before April knows what is happening, he is on top of her.

The storm unleashes its fury. The rain comes down now in sheets against the roof. Thunder rolls and lightning crackles and sparks like static electricity in the anxious air as Philip fumbles April’s sweater up across her bare midriff, exposing her bra in the blue light.

Gnarled fingers wrestle open belt buckles. Thunder booms. April feels the urgent nudge of Philip’s loins burrowing between her legs. Lightning flickers. Her jeans are halfway down her legs, her breasts free now.

The edge of a fingernail brushes her belly, and all at once, like a switch flipping inside her—accompanied by a single volley of thunder—she thinks, WAIT.

BOOOOOOOM!

WAIT!

*   *   *

A tidal wave of desire carries Philip Blake off on its roaring currents.

He can barely hear April’s voice coming from somewhere far away, telling him to Stop, wait, hold on, listen, listen, this is too much, I’m not ready for this, please, please, stop right now, stop. None of it registers in Philip’s brain as it swims with lust and passion and pain and loneliness and a desperate need to feel something, because now his entire being is wired to his groin, all his pent-up emotion coursing through him.

“God, I’m begging you to stop!” the faraway voice pleads, April’s body stiffening.

Philip rides the writhing woman beneath him as if surfing a pipeline of white noise, knowing that she secretly wants him, loves him, despite what she’s saying. So, he keeps shoving himself into her, again and again, in great magnesium-bright flashes of lightning and raw energy, filling her, taking her, nourishing her, transforming her, until she goes limp beneath him, limp and silent now.

The soft white explosion of pleasure erupts like a skyrocket launching inside Philip.

He slides off her, landing on the floor next to her, staring straight up at the rain—momentarily oblivious to the shadowy, desecrated souls thirty feet below them, captured in the flicker-show of lightning like monstrous figures in a silent movie.

*   *   *

Philip takes April’s silence as a sign that maybe, just maybe, everything’s going to be okay. As the storm settles into a steady deluge, its muffled jet-engine roar filling the walkway, the two of them pull their clothes back on and lie there side by side for a long time, not saying a word, staring up at the strafing sheets of rain crashing off the glass roof.

Philip is in a state of shock, his heart racing, his skin clammy and cold. He feels like a broken mirror, as if a shard of his own soul has fractured off and reflected back the face of a monster. What did he just do? He knows he did something wrong. But it almost feels like somebody else did it.

“Got a little carried away there,” he says at last, after many minutes of terrible silence.

She doesn’t say a word. He glances over at her, and sees her face in the darkness, reflecting the liquid shadows of rain streaming down the sides of the glass walkway. She looks semiconscious. Like she’s having a waking dream.

“Sorry about that,” he says, the words sounding tinny and hollow in his own ears. He shoots another glance at her, trying to gauge her mood. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Her voice has a mechanical quality to it, completely colorless, barely audible above the noise of the rain. Philip is about to say something else when a volley of thunder interrupts his thought. The rumbling reverberates through the iron framework of the walkway, a teeth-rattling vibration that makes Philip cringe.

“April?”

“Yes.”

“We ought to get back.”

*   *   *

The return trip is shrouded in silence. Philip walks a few paces behind April through the deserted lobby, up a staircase, and down the empty, litter-strewn corridors. Every now and then, Philip considers saying something, but he doesn’t. He figures it’s probably best to let it ride right now. Let her work through it. Anything Philip says might make it worse. April walks ahead of him with the shotgun on her shoulder, looking like a tired soldier returning from a rough patrol. They reach the top floor of the accounting firm and find the gaping window, the rain blowing in past jagged, broken glass. Only a few words are spoken—“You go first” and “Watch your step”—as Philip helps her climb out and cross the rain-swept fire escape. The pounding wind and rain that lashes down on them as they shimmy across the treacherous makeshift catwalk almost feels good to Philip. It braces him and wakes him up and gives him hope that maybe he can repair whatever damage has been done here tonight with this woman.

By the time they get back to the apartment—both of them soaked to the bone, exhausted, and dazed—Philip is confident he can fix this.

Brian is in the office bedroom with Penny, putting her to sleep on her cot. Nick is in the living room, working on his map of safe zones. “Hey, how’d it go?” he asks, looking up from his papers. “You guys look like drowned rats; you find any Home Depots out there?”

“Not this time,” Philip replies, heading for the bedroom, not even pausing to take off his shoes.

April says nothing, doesn’t even meet Nick’s gaze as she heads toward the hallway.

“Look at you two,” Tara says, coming out of the kitchen with a surly expression and a lit cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth. “Just like I thought—a wild fucking goose chase!”

She stands there with her hands on her hips as her sister vanishes without a word into her room at the end of the hall. Tara gives Philip a look, and then storms away, following her sister.

“I’m going to bed,” Philip says flatly to Nick and then adjourns to his room.

*   *   *

The next morning, Philip stirs awake just before dawn. The rain still pounds the streets outside. He can hear it drumming off the window. The room is dark and cold and dank, and smells of mold. He sits on the edge of the bed for the longest time, looking at Penny, who slumbers across the room on her cot, her tiny body all balled up in a fetal position. The half-formed memories of a dream cling to Philip’s woozy brain, as well as the sickening sensation that he doesn’t know where the nightmares end and the episode with April the previous evening begins.

If only he had dreamed those events in the pedestrian walkway instead of actually acting them out. But the hard, sharp edge of reality comes back to him in that dark room in a series of flash frames in his mind, as though he’s watching someone else perpetrate the crime. Philip hangs his head, trying to push the feelings of dread and guilt from his mind.

Running fingers through his hair, he talks himself into being hopeful. He can work through this with April, figure out a way to move forward, put it behind them, apologize to her, make it up to her.

He watches Penny sleep.

In the two and a half weeks since Philip’s little cadre joined up with the Chalmers, Philip has noticed his daughter coming out of her shell. At first, he detected little things: the way Penny had begun to look forward to concocting their god-awful dinners, and the way she lit up every time April walked into a room. With each passing day, though, the child has become more and more talkative, remembering things from before the “turn,” commenting on the strange weather patterns, asking questions about the “sickness.” Can animals get the disease? Does it wear off? Is God mad at them?

Philip’s chest hitches with emotion as he gazes at the slumbering child. There has to be a way to make a life for his daughter, make a family, make a home—even in the midst of this waking nightmare—there has to be a way.

For a brief instant, Philip imagines a desert island and a little cottage nestled in a grove of coconut trees. The plague is a million light-years away. He imagines April and Penny on a swing set, playing together out by a vegetable garden. He imagines himself sitting on a back porch, healthy, brown from the sun, happily watching the two ladies in his life sharing contented moments. He imagines all this while he watches his daughter sleep.

He gets up and pads over to her, kneeling and lightly putting a hand on the downy softness of her hair. She needs to bathe. Her hair is matted and greasy, and she has a faint body odor. That smell somehow reaches out to Philip and pinches his gut. His eyes well up. He has never loved anyone other than this child. Even Sarah—whom he adored—came in second. His love for Sarah was—like that of all married people—complicated, conditional, and fluid. But when he first laid eyes on his baby girl as a blotchy little newborn, seven and half years ago, he learned what it means to love.

It means to be afraid, to be vulnerable for the rest of your life.

Something catches Philip’s attention across the room. The door is half ajar. He remembers shutting it before turning in. He remembers that very clearly. Now it’s cracked open about six inches.

At first, this doesn’t really make much of an impression or worry him all that much. Maybe he accidentally neglected to latch the door, and the thing drifted open on its own. Or maybe he got up to piss in the middle of the night and forgot to close it. Or maybe Penny had to pee and left it open. Hell, maybe he’s a sleepwalker and doesn’t even know it. But then, just as he’s turning back to continue gazing down at his daughter, he notices something else.

Things are missing from the room.

Philip’s heart starts thumping. He left his backpack—the one he was wearing when he arrived here over two weeks ago—leaning against the wall in the corner, but now it’s gone. His gun is missing as well. He left the .22 pistol on top of the dresser with the last magazine of bullets beside it. The ammo is gone, too.

Philip springs to his feet.

He looks around. The gloomy dawn is just beginning to lighten the room, the window shade projecting tears of rain, the ghostly reflections of water sluicing down the glass outside it. His boots are not where he left them. He left them on the floor by the window, but now they’re gone. Who the hell would take his boots? He tells himself to calm down. There has to be a simple explanation. No reason to get all jacked up. But the absence of the gun is what troubles him the most. He decides to take this one step at a time.

Silently, careful not to awaken Penny, he crosses the room and slips out the open door.

The apartment is silent and still. Brian dozes in the living room on the pull-out bed. Philip pads into the kitchen, lights up the propane stove, and makes himself a cup of instant coffee with some rainwater left in a bucket. He splashes some of the cold water on his face. He tells himself to stay calm, take some deep breaths.

When the coffee is hot, he takes the cup and walks down the hallway to April’s room.

Her door is also ajar.

He looks in and sees that the room is empty. His pulse quickens.

A voice says, “She ain’t here.”

He whirls and comes face-to-face with Tara Chalmers, who holds the Ruger pistol, the muzzle raised and aimed directly at Philip.

FIFTEEN

“All right … go easy, sis.” Philip makes no move. He just stands there, frozen in the hallway, with his free hand raised, and the coffee in his other hand, jutting out to the side like he’s interested in offering it to her. “Whatever it is, we can work it out.”

“Really…?” Tara Chalmers glowers at him with her painted eyes flaring. “Ya think?”

“Look … I don’t know what’s going on—”

“What’s going on,” she says without a trace of nerves or fear, “is that we’re changing the lineup around here.”

“Tara, whatever you’re thinking—”

“Let’s get something straight.” Her voice is steady and flatlined of emotion. “I need you to shut the fuck up and do what I say, or I will blow you the fuck away and don’t think I won’t.”

“This ain’t—”

“Put the cup down.”

Philip obliges, slowly setting the cup on the floor. “Okay, sis. Whatever you say.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now we’re gonna go get your brother, your friend, and your kid.”

Philip buzzes with adrenaline. He doesn’t think Tara has the balls to do any real harm, and he considers making a move for the weapon—a distance of six to eight feet lies between him and the barrel of the Ruger—but he resists the temptation. Better to comply at this point and try and get her talking.

“May I say somethin’?”

“MOVE!”

Her sudden cry shatters the stillness, loud enough to not only awaken Penny and Brian, but probably be heard up on the second floor where Nick—an early riser—is likely already up and about. Philip takes a step toward her. “If you’d just give me a chance to—”

The Ruger barks.

The blast goes wide—maybe on purpose, maybe not—chewing a divot in the wall eighteen inches from Philip’s left shoulder. The roar of the gun is enormous in the enclosed space of the hallway, and Philip’s ears are ringing as he realizes a particle of the plaster wall has stuck to his cheek.

He can barely see Tara through the blue smoke of cordite. She is either grinning or grimacing, it’s hard to tell at this point.

“The next one goes in your face,” she tells him. “Now, you gonna be a good boy or what?”

*   *   *

Nick Parsons hears the gunfire just after opening his Concordance Bible for his morning read. Sitting in bed, with his back against the headboard, he jumps at the noise, the Bible flying out of his hands. It was open to the Revelation to John, Chapter 1 Verse 9, the part where John says to the church, “I am John your brother who shares with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and patient endurance.”

Leaping out of bed, he goes to the closet where his Marlin shotgun is supposed to be resting against the wall in the corner, except it’s not there. Panic vibrates down through Nick’s spine, and he spins, and he looks around his room at all the missing gear. His knapsack—gone. His boxes of shotgun shells—gone. His tools, his pickaxe, his boots, his maps—all gone.

At least his jeans are still there, neatly folded over the back of a chair. He yanks them on and charges out of the room. Through the studio apartment. Out the door. Down the corridor. Down a flight of steps and out onto the first floor. He thinks he hears the sound of a voice raised in anger but he’s not sure. He rushes toward the Chalmers’s apartment. The door is unlocked and he pushes his way inside.

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” Nick keeps repeating as he slams to a stop in the living room. He sees something that doesn’t make any sense. He sees Tara Chalmers with the Ruger pointed at Philip, and Philip with this weird look on his face, and Brian standing a few feet away with Penny drawn close to him, his arms around the little girl in a protective posture. And weirder still: Nick sees their belongings piled on the floor in front of the sofa.

“Move over there,” Tara says, brandishing the gun, and directing Nick toward Philip, Brian, and Penny.

“What’s wrong?”

“Never mind, just do what I say.”

Nick slowly complies but his mind is swimming with confusion. What in God’s name happened here? Almost involuntarily, Nick looks at Philip, looks into the big man’s eyes for answers, but for the first time since Nick has known Philip Blake, the big guy looks almost sheepish, almost blank with indecision and frustration. Nick looks at Tara. “Where’s April? What happened?”

“Never mind.”

“What are you doing? What’s the idea putting of all our stuff in a—”

“Nicky,” Philip chimes in. “Let it go. Tara’s gonna tell us what she wants us to do. And we’re gonna do it, and everything’s gonna be okay.”

Philip says this to Nick but as he’s saying it, he’s looking at Tara.

“Listen to your pal here, Nick,” Tara says, and she too says this to Nick but doesn’t take her gaze off Philip. Her eyes practically glow with contempt and anger and vengeance and something else—something incomprehensible to Nick, something that feels disturbingly intimate.

Now it’s Brian’s turn to pipe in: “What is it you want us to do exactly?”

Tara still doesn’t take her eyes off Philip as she says, “Get out.”

At first, this simple imperative sentence sounds to Nick Parsons like a rhetorical statement. To his stunned ears, it sounds as though she’s not exactly telling them to do something as much as she’s making some kind of a point. But this initial reaction—and maybe hopeful thinking—is immediately short-circuited by the look on Tara Chalmers’s face.

“Hit the road.”

Philip keeps staring at her. “Where I come from, that’s called murder.”

“Call it whatever you want. Just take your shit and go.”

“You’re gonna send us out there without weapons.”

“I’m gonna do more than that,” she says. “I’m gonna climb up on that roof with one of them high-powered pigeon guns and I’m gonna make sure you leave.”

After a long, horrible moment of silence, Nick looks at Philip.

And finally, Philip tears his gaze away from the stout, buxom girl with the pistol. “Get your stuff,” he says to Nick, and then to Brian he says, “There’s a rain poncho in my pack, put it on Penny.”

*   *   *

The amount of time it takes them to get dressed and ready to leave is nominal—mere minutes, with Tara Chalmers standing guard like a stone sentry—but it gives Brian Blake plenty of time to wildly ruminate to himself about what could have happened. Tying his boots, and putting the slicker on Penny, he realizes that all indications point to some kind of sick triangle going on. April’s absence speaks volumes. As does Tara’s unmitigated, righteous anger. But what caused it? It couldn’t be something Philip said or did. What could offend the girls this deeply?

For a crazy instant, Brian’s mind casts back to his insane ex-wife. Compulsive, volatile, flaky Jocelyn had done stuff like this. She would vanish without a trace for weeks. One time, while Brian was at night school, she actually put all his shit out on the stairs of their tenement building, as though she were removing a stain from her life. But this. This is different. The Chalmers girls have shown no previous signs of being irrational or nuts.

The thing that bothers Brian the most is the way his brother is behaving. Beneath the surface of his simmering anger and frustration, Philip Blake almost seems resolved, maybe even hopeless. This is a clue. This is important. But the problem is, there’s no time to figure it out.

“Come on, let’s roll,” Philip says, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He has his denim jacket on now—the black, oily grime and gore from their earlier journey still visible all over it—and he’s heading toward the door.

“Wait!” Brian says. He turns to Tara. “At least let us take some food. For Penny’s sake.”

She just levels her gaze at him and says, “I’m letting you walk outta here alive.”

“Come on, Brian.” Philip pauses in the doorway. “It’s over.”

Brian looks at his brother. Something about that deeply lined, weathered face is galvanizing to Brian. Philip is family, he’s blood. And they’ve come a long way. They’ve survived too many jams to die now like homeless pets abandoned on the side of the road. Brian feels a strange sensation building in the base of his spine, filling him with an unexpected strength. “Fine,” he says. “If this is the way it has to be…”

He doesn’t finish the sentence—there is nothing more to say—he simply puts an arm around Penny and ushers her out behind her father.

*   *   *

The rain is both a blessing and a curse. It bullwhips across their faces as they emerge from the building’s front entrance, but as they crouch under spindly trees along the parkway to get their bearings, they see that the storm has apparently driven the Biters off the streets. The sewers are flooding, the roads streaming with overflow, and the gray sky hangs low.

Nick squints into the distance to the south, the streets relatively clear. “That way’s best! Most of the safe zones are down there!”

“Okay, we’ll head south,” Philip says and turns to Brian. “Can you piggyback her again? I’m countin’ on you, sport. Watch her back.”

Brian wipes moisture from his face and gives his brother a thumbs-up.

Turning to the child, Brian starts to go about the business of gently lifting her onto his back, but he abruptly stops. For the briefest instant, he just stares in amazement at the little girl. She is also giving a thumbs-up sign. Brian glances at his brother, and the two men acknowledge something beyond words.

Penny Blake just stands there, waiting, chin jutting defiantly. Her soft little eyes are blinking away the rain, and the look on her face is reminiscent of the expression her late mother would often display when impatient with male nonsense. Finally, the child says, “I’m not a baby … can we go now?”

*   *   *

They make their way to the corner, staying low, slipping on the slimy walk, the rain a constant drag on their progress. It gets in their faces and in their clothes and into their joints almost immediately. It’s an icy, needling autumn rain with no signs of slowing down.

Up ahead, a few shabby, cadaverous zombies cluster near an abandoned bus stop, their greasy heads of hair like moss matted across their dead faces. They look like they’re waiting for a bus that will never come.

Philip leads his group across the corner and under an awning. Nick points the way to the first safe zone—the city bus sitting in mothballs half a block south of the pedestrian bridge. A quick hand gesture from Philip, and now they hurry along the storefronts toward the bus.

*   *   *

“I say we go back,” Nick Parsons is grumbling as he crouches down on the floor of the bus and fishes through his backpack. The rain makes a muffled tommy-gun noise on the bus’s roof. Nick finds a T-shirt, pulls it out, and wipes the moisture from his face. “We’re talking about a single girl here—we can take the place back from her—I say we go back and kick her the hell out.”

“Think we can take it from her, huh?” Philip is up in the pilot area, searching the compartments for things left behind by the driver. “You got a bulletproof vest in that backpack of yours?”

The bus—a thirty-foot fuselage of molded seats facing inward along either side—reeks with the ghostly secretions of former passengers, a sort of wet dog-fur smell. In the rear of the bus, resting on the second-to-last seat, with Penny in the seat next to him, Brian shivers in his wet sweatshirt and jeans. He has a bad feeling, and it’s not only because of their exposure to the stormy, urban wilderness of Atlanta.

Brian’s sense of doom has more to do with the mystery of what happened back at the apartment building last night. He can’t stop wondering just exactly what transpired between the hours of 5 P.M. (when Philip and April embarked on their mission) and 5 A.M. the following morning (when everything suddenly blew up in their faces). From the gravelly tension in his brother’s voice and the cold determination on his face, it’s becoming clear to Brian that it may already be a moot point. Their immediate priority is now survival. But Brian can’t stop thinking about it. The mystery speaks to something deeper, something gnawing at Brian to which he can’t quite put words.

Lightning flashes outside the bus, as brilliant as a photographer’s strobe.

“We had a good thing going at that place,” Nick goes on, his voice whiny and unsteady. He stands up, grabbing a hand strap for purchase. “Those are our guns, man. All the work we did? That’s our stuff as much as theirs!”

“Stay down, Nick,” Philip says flatly. “I don’t want any of them pus bags seeing us in here.”

Nick ducks down.

Philip sits down in the driver’s seat, the springs squeaking. He checks a map case on the dash and finds nothing useful. The keys are in the ignition. Philip turns it over and gets nothing but a clicking noise. “I’m not going to say it again. That place is over for us.”

“Why, though? Why can’t we take it back, Philly? We can take that fat bitch. The three of us?”

“Let it go, Nick,” Philip says, and even Brian, all the way in the back of the bus, hears the icy warning tone in Philip’s voice.

“I just don’t get it,” Nick complains under his breath. “How something like this could happen—”

“Bingo!” At last, Philip has found something useful. The four-foot-long steel rod—about the width and heft of a short length of iron rebar—is attached to clips under the driver’s side window. Hooked on one end, the tool is likely used to reach across the cab to the accordion door (in order to manually pull it shut). Now, as Philip wields the thing in the gloomy light, it looks like an excellent makeshift weapon. “This’ll do,” he murmurs.

“How did this happen, Philly?” Nick persists, crouching down in the flickering stutter of lightning.

“GODDAMNIT!”

Philip suddenly slams the iron rod against the dash, sending shards of plastic flying and making everybody jump. He smacks it again, cracking the two-way radio. He strikes it again and again with all his might, caving in the controls and shattering the fare box, sending coins flying. He keeps striking the console until the dashboard is totaled.

Finally, with the veins in his neck bulging, his face livid with rage, he turns and burns his gaze into Nick Parsons. “Would you please shut the fuck up!”

Nick stares.

In the rear of the bus, sitting next to Brian, Penny Blake turns away and gazes out the window, the dirty rain tracking down in rivulets. Her expression hardens as though she’s working out a complicated mathematical problem that’s far too complex for her grade level.

Meanwhile, up front, Nick is frozen with shock. “Take it easy, Philly … I’m just … babbling. You know? Didn’t mean anything. The place just kinda grew on me.”

Philip licks his lips. The fire in his eyes dwindles. He takes a deep breath and lets out a pained exhalation. He puts the rod down on the driver’s seat. “Look … I’m sorry … I understand how you feel. But it’s better this way. Without electricity, that place is going to be a walk-in freezer by mid-November.”

Nick keeps looking down. “Yeah … I guess I see your point.”

“It’s better this way, Nicky.”

“Sure.”

At this point, Brian tells Penny he’ll be right back, and he pushes himself off his seat.

He moves up the aisle, staying low, moving just beneath the level of the sliding windows, until he joins Nick and his brother. “What’s the plan, Philip?”

“We’ll find someplace we can build fires. Can’t build fires in an apartment building.”

“Nick, how many more of these ‘safe zones’ have you got mapped out?”

“Enough to get outta this part of town, if we catch a break or two.”

“Sooner or later, we’re gonna have to find a car, though,” Brian says.

Philip grunts. “No shit.”

“You think there’s gas in this bus?”

“Deisel, probably.”

“Guess it doesn’t matter what it is. We got no way to siphon it.”

“And no way to store it,” Philip reminds him.

“And no way to move it,” Nick adds.

“That metal thing over there?” Brian points at the metal reacher on the driver’s seat. “You think that thing’s sharp enough to puncture the gas tank?”

“On the bus?” Philip glances at the steel rod. “I suppose. What good’s that gonna do?”

Brian swallows hard. He has an idea.

*   *   *

One by one, they each quickly slip through the accordion door and into the rain, which has now settled into a low, cold drizzle. The daylight is muddy. Philip carries the steel rod, Nick the three brown Miller Light bottles that Brian found wedged under the rear seats. Brian keeps Penny close—there are dark figures visible in all directions, the closest ones maybe a block away—and the clock is ticking.

Every few moments, the lightning turns the city magnesium bright—illuminating the dead coming from either end of the street. Some of the Biters have noticed humans scurrying around the back of the bus, and those zombies approach now with a more defined purpose in their lumbering gait.

Philip knows the location of the gas tank from his days as a truck driver.

He crouches down near the massive front tire, and he quickly feels under the chassis for the bottom edge of the tank as the rain drips off his chin. This bus has two separate reservoirs, each one containing a hundred gallons of fuel.

“Hurry, man, they’re coming!” Nick kneels behind Philip with the bottles.

Philip slams the pointed end of the steel rod into the bottom of the forward tank, but it only dents the iron enclosure. He cries out a garbled howl of white-hot anger and drives the point again into the reservoir.

This time, the point punctures the skin of the tank and a thin stream of yellow, oily liquid suddenly shoots out all over Philip’s arms and hands. Nick leans in and quickly fills the first twelve-ounce bottle.

Thunder pounds the sky, followed by another salvo of lightning. Brian glances over his shoulder and sees an entire regiment of walking corpses—closer now in the flash of heavenly daylight, only twenty-five yards away—many of their faces clearly discernible in the photostrobe radiance.

One of them is missing a jaw, another one walking along with a streamer of intestines lolling out of a gaping hole in its stomach.

“Hurry, Nick! Hurry!” Brian has pieces of a torn shirt ready to go in one hand, the lighter in the other. He fidgets restlessly next to Penny, who is trying her best to be brave, clenching her little fists, chewing her lip as she keeps tabs on the advancing army of upright cadavers.

“There’s one—go, GO!” Nick hands the first bottle of fuel to Brian.

Brian stuffs the rag into it, then quickly turns the bottle upside down until the cloth is soaked. This procedure only encompasses a few seconds, but Brian can feel the time running out, the presence of hundreds of Biters closing in. A flick of the lighter produces a flame that is instantly extinguished by the wind.

“C’mon, sport … c’mon, c’mon!” Philip is turning to the oncoming horde, raising his steel implement. Behind him, Brian cups his hands around the wick and finally gets it lit. The rag flares, the flames curling down the side of the bottle, feeding off the fumes and spill.

Brian hurls the Molotov cocktail at the leading edge of the crowd.

The bottle shatters five feet away from the closest zombies and blooms in a yellow sunburst of fire, making a crackling sound in the mist. Several corpses stagger backward at the unexpected light and heat, some of them bumping into their counterparts, knocking them over like dominoes. The sight of these monsters tumbling would ordinarily be almost funny, but not now.

Now Philip grabs the second full bottle, and stuffs the rag in. “Gimme the lighter!” Brian hands over the Bic. “Now get moving!” Philip commands, lighting the rag and hurling the flaming bottle at the army of monsters coming from the opposite direction.

This time, the bottle lands in their midst, erupting in their ranks, setting ablaze at least a dozen Biters with the ferocity of napalm.

Brian doesn’t look back as he scoops Penny off the ground and follows Nick in a desperate run for the barbershop.

*   *   *

Brian, Penny, and Nick get halfway to the next safe zone when they realize that Philip is lagging behind them.

“What the hell’s he doing!” Nick’s voice is shrill and frantic as he ducks into the doorway of another boarded storefront.

“Hell if I know!” Brian says, ducking into the doorway with Penny, gazing back at his brother.

A hundred yards away, Philip is yelling something obscene and inarticulate at the monsters, swinging his iron weapon at an attacker. The flaming zombie comes at him in a wreath of smoke and sparks.

“Oh my God!” Brian shields Penny’s face. “Get down—GET DOWN!”

In the distance, Philip Blake is backing away from the mob with the lighter raised in one hand and the bloody iron raised in the other, some kind of Viking brazenness taking over now, all his pent-up rage coming out in a series of big, portentous gestures.

He pauses and lights a spreading pool of fuel seeping out from underneath the bus, and then turns and flees the scene with the full-tilt abandon of a ball carrier charging toward open field.

Behind him, the puddle of fuel catches and spreads, the blue flames billowing toward the massive steel girth of the bus. Philip traverses about fifty yards of wet pavement, cracking the skulls of half a dozen Biters along the way, while the fire crawls up the side of the bus.

A low, subsonic thump rises above the rain and moaning noises. Philip can’t see Brian and the others in the mist ahead of him.

“PHILIP! IN HERE!”

Brian’s howl is a beacon, and Philip dives toward the sound of it as the explosion rocks the ground and turns a dark, gray afternoon into the surface of the sun.

*   *   *

None of them gets a good look at it. They are all slammed against a door inside the boarded alcove, shielding their faces from the flaming shrapnel—pieces of the bus, jagged shards of metal bulwark, and fountains of glass—flying past the doorway. Brian manages to glimpse a reflection off the glass of a store window across the street: The explosion, half a block away, has launched twenty tons of bus straight up, a mushroom cloud of dazzling, horrifying fire, the force of the blast bursting open the cabin, the molten hot shock wave punching through multitudes of dead with the violent brilliance of a supernova—countless bodies swept away on the wave, incinerated in the furnace, some of them torn to pieces by the flying debris, the mortified body parts flying up into the storm-lashed sky like a flock of birds attempting to escape.

A flaming piece of fender lands fifteen feet from the doorway.

Everybody jumps at the clanging noise, their eyes wide with shock. “Fuck! FUCK!” Nick exclaims, hands shielding his face. Brian holds Penny in a locked embrace, speechless, momentarily paralyzed.

Philip wipes his face with the back of his hand and gazes around the doorway with the stupor of a sleepwalker just coming awake. “Awright then.” He glances over his shoulder, and then back at Nick. “Where’s this barber shop?”

SIXTEEN

Half a block south—in the darkness of a festering, airless tile room, among scattered remnants of True Detective magazines, plastic combs, dust bunnies of human hair, and tubes of Brylcreem—they dry their faces with towels and barber smocks, and then find more ingredients for homemade Molotov cocktails.

Bottles of hair tonic get emptied, and then filled with alcohol and plugged with wads of cotton. They also find an old, scarred Louisville Slugger hidden under the cash register. The baseball bat probably once warded off unruly customers or neighborhood punks looking to boost the day’s receipts. Now Philip gives the nascent weapon to Nick and tells him to use it wisely.

They scavenge for any other supplies they might be able to use. An old vending machine in back yields a handful of candy bars, a couple of Twinkies, and an ancient sausage stick. As they stuff their knapsacks, Philip tells them not to get too comfortable. He can hear noises outside—more dead encroaching on the area, drawn to the explosion. The rain is slowing down. Noises are carrying. They have to keep moving if they’re going to get out of the city before dark. “C’mon, c’mon,” Philip says. “Let’s get our asses in gear and get to that next zone—Nicky, you take the lead.”

Reluctantly, Nick leads them out of the barbershop, into the drizzle, and down another row of storefronts. Philip brings up the rear with the iron bar ready to rock, keeping a watchful eye on Penny, who clings with simian instinct to Brian’s back.

*   *   *

Halfway to the next safe zone, a stray corpse lurches out from behind a wreck, shuffling menacingly toward Brian and Penny. Philip lashes out at the back of its head with the hooked end of the iron prod—hitting it just above the six cervical vertebrae—so hard that the cranium detaches and hangs down across its chest as it collapses to the wet paving stones. Penny averts her gaze.

More cadavers are materializing in the mouths of alleys and the shadows of doorways.

Nick finds the next painted symbol, near the corner of two cross streets.

The star is scrawled above the glass door of a small shop of some sort. The store’s façade is draped in iron burglar screens, and other than a few frayed wires, broken neon tubes, and wads of gaffer’s tape, the display windows are empty. The door is shut but unlocked ( just as Nick had left it three days earlier).

Yanking the door open, Nick waves everybody inside, and they enter in a hurry.

In fact, they slip inside so quickly that nobody notices the shop’s sign over the door’s lintel, the letters formed by dark, cold neon script: TOM THUMB’S TINY TOY SHOPPE.

*   *   *

The front of the store, barely five hundred square feet, is littered with brightly colored debris. Overturned shelves have spilled their inventory of dolls and race cars and trains across the soiled tiles. A tornado of destruction has swirled through the shop. Wires dangle where mobiles once hung, the shattered plastic remains of LEGO sets and planes piled here and there. The feathery stuffing of ripped plush toys stirs like dead leaves in the slipstream of the visitors slamming the door behind them.

For a moment, they stand in the vestibule, dripping, catching their collective breaths, gaping at the startling ruins strewn before them. Nobody moves for the longest time. Something about the wreckage mesmerizes them, and keeps them glued to the threshold.

“Everybody stay put,” Philip finally says, pulling a handkerchief and wiping moisture from his neck. He sidesteps a mangled stuffed bear, and then he cautiously moves deeper into the shop. He sees an unmarked rear exit, maybe a stockroom, maybe a way out. Brian gently puts Penny down, and checks her for any signs of injury.

Penny stares at the sad rubble of decapitated Barbies and disemboweled stuffed animals.

“When I ran across this place,” Nick is saying from across the room, looking for something, “I was thinking they might have stuff we could use, gadgets, walkie-talkies, flashlights … something.” He moves around the end of the cashier’s counter, up a few steps, and over to a perch behind the register. “Place like this, in this part of town … hell, they might even have a gun.”

“What’s back there, Nicky?” Philip shoots a thumb at a curtained doorway in the rear of the store. The black privacy drape hangs down to the floor. “You get a chance to check it out?”

“Stockroom is my guess. Be careful, Philly. It’s dark back there.”

Philip pauses by the curtain, shrugs off his backpack and fishes in it for the small penlight he keeps in the side pocket. He flips it on, and he pushes his way through the drape … vanishing into the gloom.

Across the store, Penny is transfixed by the broken dolls and eviscerated teddy bears. Brian watches her closely. He aches to help her, aches to get everybody back on track, but all he can do right now is kneel next to the child and try to keep her distracted. “You want one of those candy bars?”

“Nope.” It comes out of her like the crackle of a pull-string doll, her eyes fixed on all the busted toys.

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

“We got Twinkies,” Brian tells her, trying to fill the silence, trying to keep her talking, trying to keep her occupied. But right now, all Brian can think about is the look on Philip’s face, and the violence in his eyes, and the whole world—their world—falling apart.

“No, I’m okay,” Penny says. She sees a little Hello Kitty backpack lying in a pile of trash, and she goes over to it. She picks it up, inspects it. “You think anybody would get mad if I took some of these things?”

“What things, kiddo?” Brian looks at her. “You mean the toys?”

She nods.

A stab of sorrow and shame cleaves Brian’s midsection. “Go for it,” he says.

She starts gathering up pieces of trampled dolls and tattered stuffed animals. It looks almost like a ritual to Brian, like a rite of passage for the little girl, as she selects Barbies with missing limbs and teddy bears with torn seams. She slips the injured toys into the knapsack with the care of someone performing triage at a clinic. Brian lets out a sigh.

Right then, Philip’s voice calls out from somewhere deep in the guts of the back hallway, cutting off Brian’s thoughts—he was about to fecklessly offer Penny the sausage stick—and now Brian springs to his feet. “What did he say?”

Across the shop, behind the cash register, Nick perks up. “I don’t know—I didn’t hear.”

“Philip!” Brian starts toward the back curtain, his flesh crawling with nervous tension. “You okay?”

Hasty footsteps shuffle inside the draped doorway, and all at once, the curtain flaps open and Philip is peering out at them with a wild expression contorting his face, somewhere between excitement and mania. “Grab your shit, we just won the Irish fucking sweepstakes!”

*   *   *

Philip takes them down a narrow, dark corridor, past shelves of unopened toys and games, around a corner, and through a security door apparently left unlocked amid the previous occupants’ hurried exodus. Down another narrow hallway, guided by the thin beam of Philip’s penlight, and they come to a fire escape. The metal door is slightly ajar, the shadows of a passageway visible on the other side.

“Get a load of what’s on the other side of our little toy store.” Philip pushes the fire door open with his boot. “Our ticket out of this hellhole.”

The metal door swings wide, and Brian finds himself staring across another narrow hallway at the mirror image of the first fire door.

The metal door across the hall is also ajar, and through the gap Brian sees, cloaked in shadows, rows of gleaming spoked wheels. “Oh my God,” he utters. “Is that what I think it is?”

*   *   *

The space is huge—encompassing the entire corner of the adjacent building’s first floor—lined with reinforced window glass on three sides. Visible through the windows is the street corner outside, where shadowy forms wander aimlessly, drifting through the rain like doomed souls, but inside—in the shiny, happy world of Champion Cycle Center, Atlanta’s premier motorcycle dealership—all is warm and tidy and polished to a high sheen.

The showroom appears to be untouched by the plague. In the wan, overcast light filtering in through the massive display windows, motorcycles of all makes and models are lined up in four neat rows extending from one end of the dealership to the other. The air smells of new rubber and oiled leather and finely honed steel. The edges of the showroom are carpeted with logo-embroidered pile as lush and new as a fancy hotel lobby. Powerless neon signs hang down at junctures with product legends: Kawasaki, Ducati, Yamaha, Honda, Triumph, Harley-Davidson, and Suzuki.

“You think any of them have gas in them?” Brian turns in a slow three-sixty, taking in the whole of the showroom.

“We got our pick of the litter, sport.” Philip nods toward the rear of the room, past the sales counter and desks and shelves brimming with parts. “They got a workspace back there with a garage out back … we can siphon fuel into any one of them things easy enough.”

Penny stares emotionlessly at the banquet of chrome and rubber. She has the Hello Kitty pack strapped securely to her tiny shoulders.

Brian’s head is swimming. Contrary emotions crash up against each other like whitecaps—excitement, anxiety, hope, fear. “Only one problem,” he utters under his breath, the weight of his anguish and uncertainty pressing down on his shoulders.

Philip looks at his brother. “What the hell’s the problem now?”

Brian wipes his mouth. “I have no idea how to work one of those things.”

*   *   *

They all have a much-needed laugh—nervous, brittle laughter, perhaps, but laughter nonetheless—at the expense of Brian. Philip assures his brother that it doesn’t make one lick of difference that Brian has never ridden a motorcycle—a “retard” could learn it in two minutes. More importantly, both Philip and Nick have owned hogs over the years, and the last time Philip checked, there was only four of them, so the two nonoperators can ride along on the saddles.

“Faster we get outta A-T-L, the better chances we got with no guns,” Philip says minutes later, rifling through a rack of leathers in the rear corner of the store—jackets, trousers, vests, and accessories. He chooses a bomber-brown Harley jacket and a pair of heavy-duty black boots. “I want everybody changed outta their wet clothes and ready to go in five minutes—Brian, you help Penny.”

They get changed as the rain eases up outside the big windows. The street corner crawls with shambling figures now—scores of frayed, tattered souls, some of them scorched from the explosion, others in advanced stages of decomposition. Faces are starting to cave in, some of them dripping with parasites and blackening into moldy masks of putrefied flesh. None of them, however, notices the movement inside the dark showroom.

“You see them Biters gathering out there?” Nick says to Philip under his breath. Nick already has dry clothes on, and is zipping up a black leather jacket. He gives a little nod toward the gray light of the storefront. “Some of them things are pretty ripe.”

“So?”

“Some of them got—what?—three, four weeks on ’em?”

“At least.” Philip thinks about it for a moment, changing out of his wet denims. His underwear is stuck to him and he has to practically peel it off. He turns away so that Penny doesn’t see his package. “Whole thing broke out over a month ago … so what?”

“They’re rotting.”

“Huh?”

Nick lowers his voice so that he doesn’t catch Penny’s ear; the little girl is busying herself across the showroom with a size small winter coat, which Brian is trying to figure out how to snap. “Think about it, Philly. The normal course of affairs, a dead body is dust in a year or so.” He lowers his voice further. “Especially one that’s exposed to the elements.”

“What are you saying, Nick? All we gotta do is wait out the clock? Let the maggots do the work?”

Nick shrugs. “Well, yeah, I guess I just thought—”

“Listen to me.” Philip jabs a finger in Nick’s face. “Keep your theories to yourself.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“They ain’t going away, Nicky. Get that through your thick fucking skull. I don’t want my daughter hearing any of this shit. They eat the living, and they reproduce, and when they rot away, there’s gonna be more of them to take their place, and judging from the fact that old man Chalmers turned without even getting bit, the whole goddamn world’s days are numbered, so drink up, bubba, it’s later than y’all think.”

Nick looks down. “All right, man, I get it … cool down, Philly.”

At this point, Brian has Penny bundled up, and the two of them come over. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

“What time you got?” Philip asks Brian, who looks semiridiculous in a Harley leather jacket that’s a size and half too big for him.

He looks at his watch. “Almost noon.”

“Good … gives us a good six, seven hours of daylight to get the hell outta Dodge.”

“You guys pick out your bikes?” Brian asks.

Philip gives him a cold smile.

*   *   *

They choose two of the biggest metal masterpieces in the place—a couple of Harley-Davidson Electra Glides, one in pearl blue and the other in midnight black. They choose them for the size of the engines, the roominess of the seats, the cubic inches of storage space, and also because—hey—they’re fucking Harleys. Philip decides that Penny will ride with him, and Brian will ride with Nick. The gas tanks are empty but several bikes in the repair garage in the rear have fuel in them so they siphon as much as they can into the Harleys.

Over the course of the fifteen minutes it takes them to get the bikes ready and find helmets that fit and transfer all their belongings into the luggage carriers, the street outside the front of the place grows hectic with dead. Hundreds of Biters crowd the intersection now, wandering aimlessly in the gray drizzle, brushing against the glass, groaning their rusty groans, drooling their black bile, fixing their pewter-colored eyes on the moving shadows inside the windows of Champion Cycle Center.

“It’s busy out there,” Nick mumbles to no one in particular as he rolls the massive two-wheeler toward the side exit, where a small vertical garage door faces the parking lot along the side of the dealership. He straps on his helmet.

“Element of surprise,” Philip says, pushing his black Harley over to the door. His stomach growls with hunger and nerves as he puts on his helmet. He hasn’t eaten in nearly twenty-four hours. None of them has. He shoves the iron rod from the bus into a seam between the handlebars and windscreen (for quick and easy access). “C’mon, punkin, hop on,” he says to Penny, who stands sheepishly nearby with a kiddie helmet on. “Gonna take a little spin, get outta this place.”

Brian helps the child climb up onto the rear seat, a padded perch above the black lacquer luggage compartment. There’s a safety belt in one of the side compartments, and Brian snaps it around the little girl’s waist. “Don’t worry, kiddo,” he says softly to her.

“Gonna head south and then west, y’all,” Philip says as he mounts the iron beast. “Nicky, you follow me.”

“Copy that.”

“Everybody ready?”

Brian goes over to the door and gives a nervous nod. “Ready.”

Philip kicks the Harley to life, the engine howling and filling the dark showroom with noise and fumes. Nick kicks his bike on. The second engine sings a noisy aria in dissonant unison with the first. Philip revs the throttle and gives Brian the high sign.

Brian jacks the manual lock on the door and then throws it open, letting in the wet wind. Philip kicks the gear and takes off.

Brian leaps onto the back of Nick’s bike and they blast off after Philip.

*   *   *

“OH SHIT! OH GOD! PHILIP! PHILIP! LOOK DOWN! LOOK DOWN, MAN! PHILIP, LOOK DOWN!”

Brian’s frantic wail is muffled by his helmet and drowned by the noise of the cycles.

It happens mere moments after they slam through a mass of Biters choking the intersection, the ragged bodies bouncing off their fenders. After making a hard left turn and zooming south on Water Street, leaving the throngs in their dust and fumes, Brian sees the mangled corpse dragging along the pavement behind Philip’s bike.

The bottom half of the thing is torn away, its intestines like electrical wiring flagging in the wind, but the torso still has fight left in it, its moldering head still intact. With its two dead arms, it clings to the rear fenders, and it starts pulling itself up the side of the Harley.

The worst part is, neither Philip nor Penny seem to be aware of it.

“PULL ALONGSIDE HIM! NICK, PULL UP!” Brian screams, his arms clutched around Nick’s midsection.

“I’M TRYING!”

At this point, roaring down the deserted, wet side street, the bike hydroplaning on slick pavement, Penny notices the creature stuck to the bike, clawing its way toward her, and she starts screaming. From Brian’s vantage point, thirty feet behind her, the child’s scream is inaudible—like an exaggerated gesture of a silent-movie actress.

Nick opens up the throttle. His Harley closes the distance.

“GRAB THE BAT!” he screams over the din, and Brian tries to root the baseball bat out from beneath the luggage carrier behind him.

Up ahead, almost without warning, Philip Blake notices the thing attached to the back of his bike. Philip’s helmet cocks around quickly as he gropes for his weapon.

By this point, Nick is within five or six feet of the black Harley’s taillights, but before Brian can intercede with the bat, he sees Philip drawing the iron rod from its makeshift scabbard on the front of his bike.

With a quick and violent motion, which causes the black Harley to veer slightly off course, Philip twists around in his seat—one-handing the handlebars—and thrusts the hooked end of the metal rod into the zombie’s mouth.

The skewered head of the monster gets stuck inches below Penny, the rod wedged between the gleaming exhaust pipes. Philip draws his right leg up and—with the force of a battering ram—he kicks the corpse (rod and all) off the bike. The thing tumbles and rolls, and Nick has to swerve suddenly to avoid it.

Philip increases his speed, staying on course, heading south, not even bothering to look back.

*   *   *

They continue on, zigzagging through the south side of town, avoiding the congested areas. A mile down the road, Philip manages to find another main artery that’s relatively clear of wreckage and roaming dead, and he leads them down it. They are now three miles from the Atlanta city limits.

The horizon line is clear, the sky lightening slightly to the west.

They have enough gas to get four hundred miles without refueling.

Whatever awaits them out there in the gray rural countryside has to be better than what they suffered through in Atlanta.

It has to be.

PART 3

Chaos Theory

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

—Mary Wollstonecraft

SEVENTEEN

Around Hartsfield airport, the rain lets up, leaving behind a scoured, metallic sky of low clouds and dismal cold. It feels terrific, however, to get this far in less than an hour. Highway 85 has far less wreckage blocking its lanes than Interstate 20, and the population of dead has thinned considerably. Most roadside buildings are still intact, their windows and doors battened and secured. The stray dead walking about here and there almost seem like part of the landscape now—blending into the skeletal trees like a ghastly fungus infecting the woods. The land itself seems to have turned. The towns themselves are dead. Riding through this area leaves one with more of an impression of desolation than the end of the world.

The only immediate problem is the fact that every abandoned filling station or truck stop is infested with Biters, and Brian is getting very concerned about Penny. At every pit stop—either to take a leak or to forage for food or water—her face seems more drawn, her tiny little tulip lips more cracked. Brian is worried she’s getting dehydrated. Hell, he’s worried they’re all getting dehydrated.

Empty stomachs are one thing (they can go without food for extended lengths of time), but the lack of water is becoming a serious issue.

Ten miles southwest of Hartsfield, as the landscape begins to transition into patchworks of pine forests and soy bean farms, Brian is wondering if they could drink the water from the motorcycles’ radiators, when he sees a green directional sign looming up ahead with a blessed message: REST AREA—1 MI. Philip gives them a signal to pull off, and they take the next exit ramp.

As they roar uphill and into the lot, which is bordered by a small wood-framed tourist center, the relief spreads through Brian like a salve: The place is mercifully deserted, free of any signs of the living or the dead.

*   *   *

“What really happened back there, Philip?” Brian sits on a picnic table situated on a small promontory of grass behind the rest area shack. Philip paces, sucking down a bottle of Evian that he wrested from a broken vending machine. Nick and Penny are fifty yards away, still within view. Nick is gently spinning Penny on a ramshackle old merry-go-round under a diseased live oak. The girl just sits on the thing, joylessly, like a gargoyle, staring straight out as she turns and turns and turns.

“I told you once already to give that a rest,” Philip grumbles.

“I think you like owe me an answer.”

“I don’t owe you shit.”

“Something happened that night,” Brian persists. He isn’t afraid of his brother anymore. He knows Philip could beat the shit out of him at any moment—the potential for violence between the Blakes seems more imminent now than ever—but Brian doesn’t care anymore. Something deep within Brian Blake has shifted like a seismic plate changing with the landscape. If Philip wants to wring Brian’s throat, so be it. “Something between you and April?”

Philip gets very still and looks down. “What the fuck difference does it make?”

“It makes a big difference—it does to me. Our lives are on the line here. We had a pretty fair chance of surviving back there at that place, and then, just like that … poof?”

Philip looks up. His eyes fix themselves on his brother, and something very dark passes between the two men. “Drop it, Brian.”

“Just tell me one thing. You seemed so hell-bent to get outta there—do you have a plan?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Do you have, like, a strategy? Any idea where the hell we’re headed?”

“What are you, a fuckin’ tour guide?”

“What if the Biters get thick again? We basically got a piece of wood to fight ’em with.”

“We’ll find something else.”

“Where are we going, Philip?”

Philip turns away and lifts the collar of his leather bomber, staring out at the ribbon of pavement snaking off into the western horizon. “Another month or so, winter’s gonna set in. I’m thinking we stay moving, heading southwest … toward the Mississippi.”

“Where’s that gonna get us?”

“It’s the easiest way to go south.”

“And?”

Philip turns and looks at Brian, a mixture of purpose and anguish crossing Philip’s deeply lined face, as though he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying. “We’ll find a place to live—long-term—in the sun. Someplace like Mobile or Biloxi. New Orleans, maybe … I don’t know. Someplace warm. And we’ll live there.”

Brian lets out an exhausted sigh. “Sounds so easy. Just head south.”

“You got a better plan, I’m all ears.”

“Long-term plans are like a luxury I haven’t even thought about.”

“We’ll make it.”

“We gotta find some food, Philip. I’m really worried about Penny getting some nourishment.”

“You let me do the worrying about my daughter.”

“She won’t even eat a Twinkie. You believe that? A kid who doesn’t want a Twinkie.”

“Cockroach food.” Philip grunts. “Can’t say I blame her. We’ll find something. She’s gonna be okay. She’s a tough little thing … like her mother.”

Brian can’t argue with that. Lately, the little girl has shown miraculous spirit. In fact, Brian has started wondering whether Penny might actually be the glue that’s holding them all together, keeping them from self-destructing.

He glances across the rest area and sees Penny Blake dreamily spinning on that rusty merry-go-round in the little scabrous playground area. Nick has lost his enthusiasm for turning it and now just gives it little incremental nudges with his boot.

Beyond the playground, the land rises up to an overgrown wooded knoll, where a small windswept cemetery sits in the pale sun.

Brian notices that Penny is talking to Nick, grilling him about something. Brian wonders what the two of them are talking about that has the girl looking so worried.

*   *   *

“Uncle Nick?” Penny’s little face is tight with concern as she slowly turns on the merry-go-round. She has called Nick “Uncle” for years, even though she knows very well he is not her real uncle. The affectation has always given Nick a secret twinge of longing—the desire to be somebody’s real uncle.

“Yes, honey?” A leaden feeling of doom presses down on Nick Parsons as he absently pushes Penny on the merry-go-round. He can see the Blake brothers in his peripheral vision, arguing about something.

“Is my dad mad at me?” the little girl asks.

Nick does a double take. Penny looks down as she slowly spins. Nick measures his words. “Of course not. He’s not mad at you. Whaddaya mean? Why would you even think that?”

“He don’t talk to me as much as he used to.”

Nick gently pulls the merry-go-round to a stop. The little girl jerks slightly back against the bar. Nick tenderly pats her on the shoulder. “Listen. I promise you. Your daddy loves you more than anything else in the world.”

“I know.”

“He’s under a lot of pressure. That’s all.”

“You don’t think he’s mad at me?”

“No way. He loves you something fierce, Penny. Believe me. He’s just … under a lot of pressure.”

“Yeah … I guess so.”

“We all are.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sure none of us have been talking all that much lately.”

“Uncle Nick?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Do you think Uncle Brian’s mad at me?”

“God, no. Why would Uncle Brian be mad at you?”

“Maybe ’cause he’s gotta carry me all the time?”

Nick smiles sadly. He studies the look on the girl’s face, her little brow all furrowed with seriousness. He strokes her cheek. “Listen to me. You are the bravest little girl I ever met. I mean that. You are a Blake girl … and that’s something to be proud of.”

She thinks about this and smiles. “You know what I’m gonna do?”

“No, honey. Tell me.”

“I’m gonna fix all them broken dolls. You’ll see. I’m gonna fix ’em.”

Nick grins at her. “That sounds like a plan.”

The little girl’s smile is something that Nick Parson’s wondered if he would ever see again.

*   *   *

A moment later, on the other side of the rest area, among the picnic tables, Brian Blake sees something out of the corner of his eye. A hundred yards away, beyond the playground, amid the crumbling headstones, long-faded markers, and tattered plastic flowers, something moves.

Brian locks his gaze on three distant figures emerging from the shadows of the trees. Shuffling along in haphazard formation, they approach like lazy bloodhounds smelling the kill. It’s hard to tell at this distance but they look as though their clothes have been fed through a reaper, their mouths hanging open in perpetual torment.

“Time to get our asses in gear,” Philip says with very little urgency, and he starts toward the playground with a kind of heavy, mechanical stride.

As he hurries after him, it occurs to Brian, just for an instant, that the way his brother is walking, his muscular arms limp at his sides, the weight of the world on his shoulders, he could very easily—from a distance—be mistaken for a zombie himself.

*   *   *

They put more miles behind them. They skirt small towns as empty and still as dioramas in a vast museum. The blue light of dusk starts pulling its shade down on the overcast sky, the wind turning bitter against their visors as they weave around wrecks and deserted trailers, working their way west on 85. Brian starts thinking that they need to find a place to spend the night.

Perched on the saddle behind Nick, his eyes watering, his ears deafened by the wind and the roar of the Harley’s twin-cam engine, Brian has plenty of time to imagine the perfect place for the weary traveler in the land of the dead. He imagines an enormous, sprawling fortress with gardens and walks and impenetrable moats and security fences and guard towers. He would give his left nut for a steak and French fries. Or a bottle of Coke. Or even some of the Chalmerses’ mystery meat—

A reflection off the inside of his helmet visor interrupts the flow of his thoughts.

He glances over his shoulder.

Strange. For the briefest instant there, at the precise same moment he saw a dark blot blur across the inside of his visor, he thought he felt something on the back of his neck, a faint sensation, like the kiss of cold lips. It might just be his imagination, but he also thought he saw something flicker across the side mirror. Just for an instant. Right before they began banking to the south.

He gazes over his shoulder and sees nothing behind them but empty lanes tumbling away, receding into the distance and then vanishing around the curve. He shrugs and turns back to his rambling, chaotic thoughts.

They venture deeper into the rural hinterlands, until they see nothing but miles and miles of broken-down farms and unincorporated boonies. The rolling hills of bean fields plunge down steep moraines on either side of the highway. This is old land—prehistoric, tired, worked to death by generations. Carcasses of old machinery lie dormant everywhere, buried in kudzu and mud.

Dusk starts settling into night, the sky fading from pale gray to a deep indigo. It’s after seven o’clock now and Brian has completely forgotten about the peculiar flash of movement reflecting off the inside of his visor. They need to find cover. Philip’s headlamp comes on, flinging a shaft of silver light into the gathering shadows.

Brian is about to shout something about finding a hideout when he sees Philip signaling up ahead—a stiff wave, and then a gloved finger jabbing to the right. Brian glances off to the north and sees what his brother is pointing at.

Way off in the distant rolling farmland, rising above a prominence of trees, the silhouette of a house is visible—so far away, it looks like a delicate cutout of black construction paper. If Philip had not pointed it out, Brian never would have noticed it. But now he sees why it has sunk a hook into Philip: It looks like a grand old relic of the nineteenth century, maybe even the eighteenth century, probably once a plantation house.

Brian sees another flicker of dark movement out of the corner of his eye, flashing across the side mirror, something behind them, passing just for a fraction of a second through the outer edges of his vision.

Then it’s gone, vanishing as Brian twists around in his seat to gaze over his shoulder.

*   *   *

They take the next exit and boom down a dusty dirt road. As they close in on the house—which sits all by its lonesome at the crest of a vast foothill at least half a mile off the highway—Brian shivers in the cold. He has a terrible feeling all of sudden, despite the fact that the closer they get to the farmhouse, the more inviting it looks. This area of Georgia is known for its orchards—peaches, figs, and plums—and as they roar up a winding drive that leads to the house, they see that it’s an aging beauty.

Surrounded by peach trees, which spread off into the distance like the spokes of a wheel, the central building is a massive two-story brick pile with ornate garrets and dormers rising off the roof. It has the flavor of an old, decrepit Italian villa. The porch is a fifty-foot-long portico with columns, balustrades, and mullioned windows choked with vines of brown ivy and bougainvillea. In the fading light, it looks almost like a ghost ship from some pre–Civil War armada.

The noise and fumes of the Harleys swirl in the dusty air as Philip leads them across the front lot, which is bordered by a massive, decorative fountain made of marble and masonry. Apparently fallen into disrepair, the fountain has a film of scum across its basin. Several outbuildings—stables, perhaps—lie off to the right. A tractor lies half-buried in crabgrass. To the left of the front façade sits a massive carriage house, big enough for six cars.

None of this antique opulence registers with Brian as they cautiously pull up to a side door between the garage and the main house.

Philip brings his Harley to a stop in a thunderhead of dust, revving the motor for a moment. He kills the engine and sits there, staring up at the salmon-colored brick monstrosity. Nick pulls next to him and snaps down his kickstand. They don’t say a word for the longest time. Finally, Philip lowers his stand, dismounts, and says to Penny, “Stay here for a second, punkin.”

Nick and Brian dismount.

“You got that baseball bat handy?” Philip says without even looking at them.

“You think there’s anybody in there?” Nick asks.

“Only one way to find out.”

Philip waits for Nick to go around the back of his Electra Glide and fetch the bat, which is sheathed down one side of his luggage carrier. He brings it back and hands it over.

“You two stay with Penny,” Philip says, and starts toward the portico.

Brian stops him, grabbing his arm.

“Philip—” Brian is about to say something about dark shapes flashing across his side mirror back on the highway, but he stops himself. He’s not sure he wants Penny to hear this.

“The hell’s the matter with you?” Philip says.

Brian swallows air. “I think there’s somebody following us.”

*   *   *

The former occupants of the villa are long gone. In fact, the inside of the place looks as though it’s been sitting empty since long before the plague broke out. Yellowed sheets cover the antique furniture. The many rooms are empty, dusty chambers frozen in time. A grandfather clock still ticks stubbornly in a parlor. Niceties of a bygone era festoon the house: ornate moldings and French doors and circular staircases and two separate and massive fireplaces with hearths the size of walk-in closets. Under one sheet sits a grand piano, under another a Victrola, under another a wood-burning stove.

Philip and Nick sweep the upper floors for Biters and find nothing other than more dusty relics of the Old South: a library, a corridor of oil paintings of Confederate generals in gilded frames, a nursery with a dusty old cradle dating back to Colonial times. The kitchen is surprisingly small—another holdover from the nineteenth century when only servants dirtied their hands with cooking—but the enormous pantry has shelves brimming with dusty canned goods. The dry grains and cereals are all mealy and crawling with worms, but the array of fruits and vegetables is staggering.

*   *   *

“You’re seeing things, sport,” Philip says under his breath that night in front of a crackling fire in the front parlor. They found piles of cordwood in the backyard by the barn and now they’ve managed to warm their bones for the first time since leaving Atlanta. The warmth and shelter of the villa—as well as the nourishment of canned peaches and okra—caused Penny to instantly doze off. She now slumbers on a luxurious down comforter in the nursery on the second floor. Nick sleeps in the room next to her. But the two brothers have insomnia. “Who the hell would bother following us anyway?” Philip adds, taking another sip of the expensive cooking sherry he found in the pantry.

“I’m telling you, I saw what I saw,” Brian says, nervously rocking on a bentwood chair on the other side of the fire. He’s got a dry shirt on and a pair of sweatpants, and he feels almost human again. He looks over at his brother, and sees that Philip is staring intensely at the fire as though it holds a secret coded message.

For some reason, the sight of Philip’s gaunt, troubled face, reflecting the flicker of firelight, breaks Brian’s heart. He flashes back to epic childhood journeys into the woods, overnight stays in pup tents and cabins. He remembers having his first beer with his brother, back when Philip was only ten and Brian was thirteen, and he remembers Philip being able to drink him under the table even then.

“It might have been a car,” Brian goes on. “Or maybe a van, I’m not sure. But I swear to God, I saw it back there just for a second … and it sure as hell seemed like it was tailing us.”

“So what if there is somebody following us, who gives a rat’s ass?”

Brian thinks about it for a second. “The only thing is … if they were friendly … wouldn’t they, like, catch up with us? Signal to us?”

“Who knows…” Philip stares at the fire, his thoughts elsewhere. “Whoever they are … if they’re out there, chances are, they’re as fucked up as us.”

“That’s true, I guess.” Brian thinks about it some more. “Maybe they’re just … scared. Maybe they’re like … checking us out.”

“Ain’t nobody gonna be able to sneak up on us up here, I’ll tell you that.”

“Yeah … I guess.”

Brian knows exactly what his brother is talking about. The location and position of the villa is ideal. Situated on a rise that overlooks miles of thinning trees, the house has sight lines that would give them plenty of warning. Even on a moonless night, the orchards are so still and quiet that nobody would be able to creep up on them without being heard or seen. And Philip is already talking about setting booby-trap wires around the periphery to alert them to intruders.

On top of that, the place offers them all sorts of benefits that could sustain them for quite a while, maybe even into the winter. There is a well out back, gas in the tractor, a place to hide the Harleys, miles of fruit trees still bearing edible albeit frost-shriveled fruit, and enough wood to keep the stoves and fireplaces going for months. The only problem is their lack of weapons. They scoured the villa and only found a few implements in the barn—a rusty old scythe, a pitchfork—but no firearms.

“You okay?” Brian says after a long stretch of silence.

“Fit as a fucking fiddle.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Grandma.” Philip stares into the fire. “We’re all gonna be fit as fucking fiddles after a few days in this place.”

“Philip?”

“What is it now?”

“Can I say something?”

“Here it comes.” Philip doesn’t take his eyes off the fire. He wears his wifebeater and a dry pair of jeans. His socks have holes in them, his big toe showing through one of them. The sight of this in the firelight—Philip’s gnarled toenail sticking out—is heartrending for Brian. It makes his brother seem, maybe for the first time ever, almost vulnerable. It is highly unlikely that any of them would be alive right now if it weren’t for Philip. Brian swallows back his emotion.

“I’m your brother, Philip.”

“I’m aware of that, Brian.”

“No, what I’m saying is … I don’t judge you, I never will.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is … I appreciate what you’ve been doing … risking your ass protecting us. I want you to know this. I appreciate it.”

Philip doesn’t say anything, but the way he’s staring at that fire begins to change a little bit. He starts gazing beyond it, the flames making his eyes glimmer with emotion.

“I know you’re a good person,” Brian goes on. “I know this.” A brief pause here. “I can tell something is eating at you.”

“Brian—”

“Wait a minute, just hear me out.” The conversation has crossed a Rubicon, now beyond the point of no return. “If you don’t want to tell me what happened back there with you and April, that’s fine. I’ll never ask you again.” There’s a long pause. “But you can tell me, Philip. You can tell me because I’m your brother.”

Philip turns and looks at Brian. A single tear tracks down Philip’s chiseled, leathery face. It makes Brian’s stomach clench. He can’t remember ever having seen his brother cry, even as a child. One time, their daddy whipped a twelve-year-old Philip unmercifully with a hickory switch, raising so many welts on Philip’s backside that he had to spend nights sleeping on his stomach, but he never cried. Almost out of spite, he refused to cry. But now, as he meets Brian’s gaze in the flickering shadows, Philip’s voice is drained as he says, “I fucked up, sport.”

Brian nods, says nothing, just waits. The fire crackles and sizzles.

Philip looks down. “I think I sorta fell for her.” The tear drips on him. But his voice never breaks, it just remains flat and weak: “Ain’t gonna say it was love but what the fuck is love anyway? Love is a fucking disease.” He cringes at some demon twisting in him. “I fucked up, Brian. Could’ve had something with her. Could’ve had something solid for Penny, something good.” He grimaces as though holding off a tide of sorrow, tears welling up in his eyes until every time he blinks, they run down his face. “I couldn’t stop myself. She said stop but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stop. See … the thing is … it felt so goddamn good.” Tears dripping. “Even when she was pushing me away, it felt good.” Silence. “What the fuck is wrong with me?” More silence. “I know there ain’t no excuse for it.” Pause. “I’m not stupid … I just didn’t think I would ever … I didn’t think I could … I didn’t think…”

His voice crumbles until there’s nothing but the crackle of the fire and the huge dark silence outside the villa. At length, after an interminable period of time, Philip looks up at his brother.

In the dancing light, Brian sees that the tears are spent. Nothing but barren anguish remains on Philip Blake’s face. Brian doesn’t say a word. He simply nods.

*   *   *

The next few days take them into November, and they decide to stay put and see what the weather does.

A freezing sleet sweeps across the orchards one morning. On another day, a killer frost grips the fields and takes down much of the fruit. But for all the signs of winter rolling in, they feel no compulsion to leave just yet. The villa might be their best bet to wait out the harsh days on the horizon. They’ve got enough canned goods and fruit—if they’re careful—to keep them going for months. And enough wood to keep them warm. And the orchards seem relatively free of Biters, at least in the immediate vicinity.

In some ways, Philip seems to be doing better now that the burden of his guilt has been off-loaded. Brian keeps the secret to himself, thinking about it often, but never broaching the subject again. The two brothers are less edgy with each other, and even Penny seems to be settling in nicely to this new routine that they are carving out for themselves.

She finds an antique dollhouse in an upper parlor, and stakes out a little place for herself (and all her broken, misfit toys) at the end of the second-floor hallway. Brian comes up there one day and finds all the dolls lying in neat little rows on the floor, all the severed appendages lying next to their corresponding bodies. He stares for quite a long while at the strange miniature morgue before Penny snaps him out of his daze. “C’mon, Uncle Brian,” she says. “You can be a doctor … help me put them back together.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” he says with a nod. “Let’s put them back together.”

On another occasion, early in the morning, Brian hears a sound coming from the first floor. He goes down into the kitchen and finds Penny standing on a chair, covered in flour and gunk, fiddling with pots and pans, her hair matted with makeshift pancake batter. The kitchen is a disaster area. The others arrive, and the three men just stand there, in the doorway of the kitchen, staring. “Don’t be mad,” Penny says, glancing over her shoulder. “I promise I’ll clean up the mess.”

The men look at each other. Philip, grinning now for the first time in weeks, says, “Who’s mad? We ain’t mad. We’re just hungry. When’s breakfast gonna be ready?”

*   *   *

As the days pass, they take precautions. They decide to burn firewood only at night, when the smoke cannot be seen from the highway. Philip and Nick construct a perimeter of baling wire stretched between small wooden stakes at each corner of the property, placing tin cans at key junctures, to alarm them of possible intruders—Biters and human alike. They even find an old antique double-barrel 12-gauge in the villa’s attic.

The shotgun is filmed in dust and engraved with cherubs, and looks as if it might blow up in their faces if they tried to fire the thing. They don’t even have any shells for it—the gun looks like the kind of thing somebody would hang in their study on the wall next to old photographs of Ernest Hemingway—but Philip sees some value in having it around. It looks threatening enough—on a galloping horse, as his dad used to say.

“You never know,” Philip says one night, leaning the shotgun against the hearth and settling back to numb himself with more cooking sherry.

*   *   *

The days continue to slip away with shapeless regularity. They catch up on their sleep, and they explore the orchards, and they harvest fruit. They set box traps for stray critters and one day they even catch a scrawny jackrabbit. Nick volunteers to clean the thing, and he ends up making a fairly decent braised rabbit on the woodstove that night.

They have only a few encounters with Biters during this time. One day, Nick is halfway up a tree, reaching for some withered plums, when he sees a walking corpse in farmer’s overalls way off in the shadows of a neighboring grove. He calmly climbs down and sneaks up on the thing with his pitchfork, skewering the back of its head as though popping a balloon. On another occasion, Philip is siphoning gas from a tractor when he notices a mangled corpse in a nearby drainage ditch. Legs smashed and contorted underneath it, the woman-thing looks like it dragged itself miles to get here. Philip chops off its head with the scythe, and burns the remains with a squirt of gas and a spark of a Bic.

Piece of cake.

All the while, the villa seems to be adopting them as much as they are adopting it. With all the sheets removed from the opulent old furniture, it seems almost like a place they could call home. They each have their own room now. And although they’re each still plagued by nightmares, there’s nothing more soothing than coming down to an old elegant kitchen with the November sun streaming through French windows, and the fragrance of a coffeepot that’s been simmering all night.

In fact, if it weren’t for the periodic feelings of being watched, things would be pretty close to perfect.

*   *   *

The feelings began to intensify for Brian as early as the second night they were there. Brian had just moved into his own bedroom on the second floor—an austere sewing parlor with a quaint little four-poster bed and an eighteenth-century armoire—when he sprang awake in the middle of the night.

He had been dreaming that he was a castaway, adrift on a makeshift raft on a sea of blood, when he saw a flash of light. In the dream, he thought it might be a distant lighthouse on some distant shore, summoning him, rescuing him from this endless plague of blood, but when he awakened, he realized he had just seen actual light in the waking world—just for a second—a rectangular slice of light, sliding across the ceiling.

In a blink, it was gone.

He wasn’t even sure he had actually seen it, but every fiber of his being told him to get up and go to the window. He did, and gazing out at the black void of the night, he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of a car, a quarter mile away, turning around at the point where the highway met the farm road. Then the thing vanished, sliding into nothingness.

Brian found it exceedingly difficult to get any more sleep that night.

When he told Philip and Nick about it the next morning, they simply wrote it off as a dream. Who the hell would pull off the highway, and then turn around and take off?

But the suspicion grew in Brian over that next week and a half. At night, he kept catching glimpses of slowly moving lights out on the highway or on the far side of the orchard. Some nights, in the wee hours, he could swear that he was hearing the crunch of tires on gravel. The furtive, fleeting quality of these sounds was the worst part. It gave Brian the feeling that somehow the villa was being cased. But he got so tired of having his paranoid suspicion dismissed by the others that he simply stopped reporting it. Maybe he was imagining all of it.

He didn’t say another word on the matter until the two-week anniversary of their stay in the villa, when, at a point just before dawn, the sound of tin cans rattling stirred him from a deep sleep.

EIGHTEEN

“What the hell?” Brian snaps awake in the darkness of his room. He fumbles for one of the kerosene lanterns on his bedside table, knocking over the hurricane glass and spilling fluid. He gets up and goes to the window, the floor icy on the soles of his bare feet.

Moonlight shines down from a crystalline cold autumn night sky, lining every shape outside with a luminous halo of silver. Brian can still hear the tin cans on the trip wires rattling out there somewhere. He can also hear the others stirring in their bedrooms behind him, down the hall. Everybody is up now, awakened by the jangling cans.

The strangest part is—and Brian wonders if he’s imagining this—the rattling sounds are coming from all directions. Tin cans are clattering in the groves behind the villa as well as in front of it. Brian is craning his neck to see better when his bedroom door bursts open.

“Sport! You up?” Philip is shirtless, wearing jeans and logger boots that he hasn’t had a chance to tie yet. He holds the old shotgun with one hand, his eyes wide open with alarm. “I’m gonna need you to go get that pitchfork in the back hallway—pronto!”

“Is it Biters?”

“Just get moving!”

Brian gives a nod and hurries out of the room, his brain swimming with panic. He wears only his sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt. As he pads through the darkness of the house—down the stairs, across the parlor, and into the back hall—he senses movement outside the windows, the presence of others closing in on them from outside.

Grabbing the pitchfork, which leans against the back door, Brian whirls and heads back to the front room.

By this point, Philip, Nick, and even Penny have reached the bottom of the steps. They go to the front bay window, which offers a wide-angle view of the surrounding yards, the sloping drive down to the adjacent road, and even the edge of the closest orchard. Immediately they see dark shapes—low to the ground—sliding across the property from three different directions.

“Are those cars?” Nick utters in barely a whisper.

As their eyes adjust to the moonlit night, they each realize that yes, indeed, those are cars moving slowly across the property toward the villa. One comes up the winding drive, another one from the north end of the orchard, a third just visible to the south, crunching slowly over the gravel path leading out of the trees.

Almost with perfect synchronous timing, each vehicle suddenly stops at an equidistant point from the house. They sit there for a second, each one maybe fifty feet away, their windows too dark to reveal their occupants. “This ain’t no welcome wagon,” Philip murmurs, the understatement of the evening.

Again, almost in perfect concurrence, each pair of headlights suddenly snaps on. The effect is fairly dramatic—almost theatrical, in fact—as the beams strike the windows of the villa, filling the dark interior with cold chromium light. Philip is about to go outside and make a stand with the defunct shotgun when the sound of a crash is heard, coming from the rear of the villa.

“Punkin, you stay with Brian,” Philip says to Penny. Then he shoots a glance at Nick. “Nicky, I want you to see if you can slip out a side window, take the machete, double back on ’em if you can. You follow me?”

Nick understands exactly what he’s saying, and he takes off down the side hallway.

“Stay behind me, but stay close.” Philip raises the shotgun, the butt against his shoulder. Carefully and focused with cobralike calm, Philip shuffles commando-style toward the sound of footsteps on broken glass now coming from the kitchen.

*   *   *

“Nice and easy does it, hoss,” the home invader says in a cheerful Tennessee twang, raising the barrel of a nine-millimeter Glock as Philip enters the kitchen with the shotgun also raised.

Before being so rudely interrupted, the intruder had been calmly looking around the kitchen as though he had just climbed out of bed for a midnight snack. Headlamps, coming from outside, pierce the room with harsh radiance. The pane of glass above the doorknob behind the man is busted in, and the faint light of dawn is just beginning to glow.

Well over six feet tall, dressed in shopworn camo-pants, muddy jackboots, and a blood-soaked Kevlar flak vest, the home invader is completely bald, with a scarred, missile-shaped head and eyes like craters cut by tiny meteors. On closer scrutiny, he looks sick, like he’s been exposed to radiation, his jaundiced skin mottled with sores.

Philip points the worthless antique shotgun at the bald man’s cranium—about eight feet between the two men—and Philip concentrates on pretending—maybe even believing—that the shotgun is loaded. “I’ll give y’all the benefit of the doubt,” Philip says. “I’ll assume you thought the place was empty.”

“That’s exactly right, hoss,” the bald man says, his voice calm, maybe medicated, like that of a dreamy disc jockey. His teeth are capped in gold, and they shimmer dully as he smiles a reptilian smile.

“So, we’ll thank y’all to just leave us be—no harm, no foul.”

The man with the Glock apes a hurt frown. “Now, that ain’t too neighborly of you.” The man has a slight tremor, a tic, percolating with latent violence. “I see y’all got a cute little thang back there.”

“Never mind that.” Philip stands his ground. He can hear the front door squeak, footsteps crossing the parlor. His brain crashes with panic and warring impulses. He knows the next few seconds are critical, maybe even mortally so. But all he can think of doing is to stall. “We don’t want any bloodshed, and brother, I guarantee you, no matter what happens, yours and mine’s gonna be the first blood that’s shed.”

“Smooth talker.” The bald man calls out suddenly to one of his comrades in the dark. “Shorty?”

A voice answers from outside the back door. “Got him, Tommy!”

Almost on cue, Nick appears outside the jagged window of the back door, a large Bowie knife held against his windpipe. His captor, a skinny kid with pimples and a marine jarhead haircut, pushes open the door and shoves Nick into the kitchen.

“I’m sorry, Philly,” Nick says as he is shoved against the cabinets—hard enough to steal his breath. The slender young man with the crew cut holds the knife against Nick’s Adam’s apple, a machete thrust down the young man’s belt. A jittery, bony specimen with fingerless Carnaby gloves on his hands, the skinny kid looks like an escapee from a marine brig. His fatigue jacket has the sleeves torn off, and his long bare arms are riddled with jailhouse hieroglyph.

“Hold on, now,” Philip says to the bald man. “There’s no reason to—”

“Sonny!” The bald man calls out to another accomplice at the precise same moment Philip hears the footsteps creaking across the hundred-year-old hardwood floor out in the front parlor. Philip keeps the shotgun raised and aimed, but shoots a quick side glance back over his shoulder. Brian and Penny huddle in the shadows directly behind Philip, maybe five feet off his heels.

Two more figures have suddenly appeared behind Brian and Penny, making the little girl jump.

“Got it covered, Tommy!” says one of the figures as the steel-plated barrel of a large-caliber revolver—maybe a .357 Magnum, maybe an Army .45—becomes visible for all to see, pressing against the back of Brian Blake’s skull. Brian stiffens like a cornered animal.

“Hold on now,” Philip says.

In his peripheral vision, he can see that the two figures holding guns on Brian and Penny are a man and a woman … although he would use the word woman loosely in this case. The gal clutching a piece of Penny’s collar is an androgynous marionette of skin and bones, clad in leather pants and layers of mesh, with lampblack eyeliner, spikey hair, and the slightly greenish pallor of a junkie. She nervously taps the barrel of a .38 police special against the shank of her beanpole thigh.

The man next to her—the one apparently named Sonny—also looks as though he’s no stranger to the needle. His sunken eyes stare out from a pockmarked mask of ignorance and meanness, his emaciated form clad in army-surplus rags.

“I want to thank you, brother,” the bald man says, shoving his nine-millimeter back into its belt sheath, acting like the showdown has now officially ended. “You dug up quite a spot here. I’ll give you that.” He goes over to the sink and calmly helps himself to the jug of well water sitting on the counter, quaffing down an entire glassful. “This’ll do nicely as a home base.”

“That’s all well and good,” Philip says, not making any move to lower his faux weapon. “Only problem is, we can’t take on any more people.”

“That’s okay, brother.”

“Then what exactly are you planning to…? What are your intentions?”

“Our intentions?” The bald man enunciates the word with mock profundity. “Our intentions are to take this place from y’all.”

Somebody that Philip can’t see snickers with great amusement.

Philip’s brain is a fractured chessboard, pieces moving now in herky-jerky motion. He knows that it’s likely that these hardened road rats mean to kill him and everybody else in the house. He knows they’re parasites, and they’ve most likely been circling the place like buzzards for weeks—Brian wasn’t hearing things, it turns out.

Even now, Philip can hear others outside—low voices, twigs snapping—and he does the quick mental arithmetic: There are at least six of them, maybe more, and at least four vehicles, and each one seems to be heavily armed, with plenty of ammo—Philip can see mags and speed-loaders clipped to some of the belts—but the one thing they seem to lack that maybe, just maybe, Philip can work with, is the appearance of intelligence. Even the big bald guy—who seems to be the honcho—has the look of a dull stoner in his eyes. There won’t be any appeals to mercy, no appeals to the better angels here. Philip has only one chance at survival.

“You mind if I say something?” he asks. “Before y’all do anything rash.”

The bald man raises his glass as though giving a toast. “You got the floor, friend.”

“We got two ways this can go down, is all I’m trying to say.”

This seems to pique the bald man’s curiosity. He sets down his glass and turns to Philip. “Only two ways?”

“One way is, we start blazing and I can tell you how that’s gonna play out.”

“Do tell.”

“Your folks will overpower us and that’ll be that, but the only thing is, I promise you one thing and—I’ll be honest with you—I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

“And what’s that?”

“No matter what, I know that I’ll be able to get off a single shot, and I say this with no disrespect, but I will make damn sure that the overwhelmin’ majority of these steel beads go into the top half of your body. Now, sir, do you want to hear option two?”

The bald man has lost his sense of humor. “Keep talkin’.”

“Option two is you let us walk outta here alive, and you take our place with our compliments, and nobody has to clean up no messes and you get to keep the top half of your body.”

*   *   *

For quite a while, things proceed in a very orderly fashion (on the bald man’s orders). The junkie couple—in his stricken brain, Philip is coming to think of them as Sonny and Cher—simply back away slowly from Brian and Penny, allowing Brian to lift the child off the floor and carry her across the front parlor to the door.

The agreement—if you can call it that—is for Philip and his group to simply walk away from the villa, leaving all their things, and that’s that. Brian watches Philip backing out of the house with the shotgun still raised. Thank God for that piece of shit antique. Nick follows. The two of them join Brian and Penny in the doorway, and Brian nudges the door open with Penny in his arms.

They shuffle outside, the shotgun still aimed at the intruders inside.

A number of things flood Brian’s senses—the cool wind, the pale light of dawn rising behind the orchards, the silhouettes of two additional gunmen on either flank of the house, the cars angled with their high beams still on like theatrical spotlights heralding the next act of a nightmarish play.

The bald man’s voice calls out from inside: “Boys! Let ’em pass!”

The two accomplices outside, dressed in ragged military fatigues and wielding heavy artillery—each man cradles a sawed-off pistol-grip shotgun—watch with the baleful interest of predatory birds as Brian carefully transfers Penny onto his shoulders, piggyback style. Philip whispers low, “Stay close, and follow me. They still mean to kill us. Just do what I say.”

Brian follows Philip—who is still bare-chested and still has that ridiculous gun raised commando-style—across the yard, past one of the watchful gunmen, and toward the neighboring grove of peach trees.

*   *   *

It takes an excruciating amount of time for Philip to get everybody across the property and into the shadows of the closest orchard—mere seconds by the clock, but an eternity for Brian Blake—because now the methodical transfer of ownership has begun to fall apart.

Brian can hear troubling things behind him as he hurriedly carries Penny toward the tree line. Brian is still barefoot, and the soles of his feet sting from the brambles and stones. Voices raised in anger drift out of the villa, footsteps, movement across the front porch.

The first shot rings out just as Philip and his group are plunging into the trees. The blast shatters the air, and chews through a branch six inches from Brian’s right shoulder, spitting bark at the side of his face and making Penny yelp. Philip shoves Brian—still with Penny on his back—forward into the deeper shadows. “RUN!” he orders them. “RUN, BRIAN! NOW!”

*   *   *

For Brian Blake, the next five minutes pass with the chaotic blur of a dream. He hears more gunfire behind him, bullets sizzling through the foliage as he hurtles through the woods, the watery light of dawn not yet driving away the deeper shadows of the orchards. Brian’s bare feet—getting more and more chewed up by the second—dig into the soft undercarpet of leaves and fruit slime, his brain sparking with roman candles of panic. Penny bounces along on his back, hyperventilating with terror. Brian has no idea how far to go, where to go, or when he can stop. He just keeps churning deeper into the shadows of the orchard.

He crosses about two hundred yards of wooded shadows before reaching a huge deadfall of rotting timber, and he ducks behind it.

Gasping to get air into his lungs, his breath visible in the chilled atmosphere, his heart thumping in his ears, he gently shrugs Penny off his back. He sits her down next to him in the weeds.

“Stay down low, kiddo,” he whispers. “And be very, very, very quiet—quiet as a mouse.”

The orchard vibrates with movement in all directions—the gunfire momentarily ceasing—and Brian risks peering over the top of the deadfall to get a better view. Through thick columns of peach trees, Brian can see a figure about a hundred yards away, coming toward him.

Brian’s eyes have adjusted to the wan shadows well enough to see that it’s one of the dudes from outside the house, the pistol-grip shotgun jutting up and ready to rock. Others are threading through the trees behind him, a shadowy figure coming toward the dude at a right angle.

Ducking back behind the rotted timbers, Brian frantically weighs his options. If he runs, they’ll hear him. If he stays put, they’ll stumble upon him for sure. Where the hell is Philip? Where is Nick?

Right then, Brian hears the rhythmic snapping of twigs in another part of the grove speeding up, somebody moving quickly toward the gunman.

Peering over the top of the deadfall, Brian sees the silhouette of his brother—fifty yards away—creeping low through the undergrowth, coming at a right angle toward the shooter. Brian’s spine goes cold with dread, his stomach clenching.

Nick Parsons appears in the shadows on the other side of the gunman with a rock in his hand. He pauses and then hurls the stone—which is the size of a grapefruit—a hundred feet across the orchard.

It bangs off a tree, making an enormous clapping sound, which startles the gunman.

The dude whirls and squeezes off a wild shot at the noise, the sonic boom waking up the orchard and making Penny jump. Brian ducks down, but not before witnessing, almost simultaneously, a blur of movement streaking toward the gunman before the dude even has a chance to pump another shell into the breech.

Philip Blake bursts out of the foliage with the old double-barrel already in midswing. The petrified wooden stock strikes the gunman square on the back of his skull, hitting him so hard that he nearly flies out of his jackboots. The pistol-grip shotgun flies. The gunman lurches and sprawls to the mossy earth.

Brian looks away, covering Penny’s eyes, as Philip quickly—savagely—finishes the job with four more tremendous blows to the fallen gunman’s skull.

*   *   *

Now the balance of power subtly shifts. Philip finds a throw-down pistol—a snub-nose .38—behind the fallen gunman’s belt. A pocketful of shells and a speed-loader give Philip and Nick another boost. Brian watches all this from the deadfall fifty yards away.

A surge of relief courses through Brian, a glimmer of hope. They can get away now. They can start over. They can survive another day.

But when Brian signals to his brother from behind the deadfall, and Philip and Nick come over to the hiding place, the look on Philip’s face in the pale light sends a sharp dagger of panic through Brian’s gut. “We’re gonna take these motherfuckers out,” he says. “Each and every last one of them.”

“But Philip, what if we just—”

“We’re gonna get this place back, it’s ours, and they’re going down.”

“But—”

“Listen to me.” Something about the way Philip locks his eyes on to Brian’s makes Brian’s skin crawl. “I need you to keep my daughter out of harm’s way, no matter what. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, but—”

“That’s all I need you to do.”

“Okay.”

“Just keep her safe. Look at me. Can you do that for me?”

Brian nods. “Yeah. Absolutely, Philip. I will. Just don’t go and get yourself killed.”

Philip doesn’t say anything, doesn’t react, just stares as he pumps a shell into the pistol-grip 20-gauge, then gives Nick a look.

*   *   *

In a matter of moments, the two men have sprung back into action, vanishing into the grove of trees, leaving Brian to sit in the weeds, weaponless, petrified with fear, frantic with indecision, his bare feet bleeding. Did Philip want him to stay put? Was that the plan?

A gunshot thunders. Brian jumps. Another one answers, the echo boomeranging across the cold heavens above the treetops. Brian clenches his fists hard enough to draw blood. Is he supposed to sit here?

He pulls Penny close as another gunshot rings out, closer, the muffled, strangled sound of a watery death gasp reverberating after it. Brian’s thoughts begin to race again, the tremors rocking through him.

Footsteps crunch toward the hiding place. Brian ventures another quick peek over the top of the timbers, and he sees the creepy bald dude with the nine-millimeter Glock weaving quickly through the trees, coming this way, his scarred face burning with killing rage. The crumpled body of the skinny kid named Shorty lies in the mud a hundred feet to the north, half his head blown away.

Another blast makes Brian duck down, his heart in his throat. He’s not sure if the bald man is down or if the blast just came from the bald man’s weapon.

“Come on, kiddo,” Brian says to a nearly catatonic Penny, who is curled up in the undergrowth, covering her head. “We gotta get outta here.”

He pries her out of the weeds and takes her hand—it’s too dangerous to carry her anymore—and he drags her away from the firefight.

*   *   *

They creep along behind the shadows of peach trees, staying under the cover of thickets, avoiding the footpaths radiating through the orchards. The bottoms of his feet almost numbed now by the pain and the cold, Brian can still hear voices behind him, scattered gunfire, and then nothing.

For a long time, Brian hears nothing but wind in the branches, and maybe a series of frantic footsteps now and again, he’s not sure, his heart is beating too loudly in his ears. But he keeps going.

He gets another hundred yards or so before ducking down behind an old broken-down hay wagon. Catching his breath, he holds Penny close. “You okay, kiddo?”

Penny manages to give him a thumbs-up, but her expression is crumbling with terror.

He inspects her clothes, her face, her body, and she seems physically unharmed. He pats her and tries to comfort her but the adrenaline and fatigue are making Brian shake so badly, he can barely function.

He hears a sound and freezes. He hunches down and peers through the slats of the rotted wagon. About fifty yards away, a figure skulks through the shadows of a gulley. The figure is tall and rangy, and is carrying a pistol-grip shotgun, but is too far away to identify.

“Daddy—?”

Penny’s voice startles Brian, coming out of her barely on a whisper, but loud enough to give them away. Brian grabs the child. He puts his hand over her mouth. Then Brian cranes his neck to see over the wagon. He catches a glimpse of the figure coming up the slope of the gulley.

Unfortunately, the figure coming toward them is not the little girl’s daddy.

*   *   *

The blast practically vaporizes half the wagon, as Brian is thrown to the ground in a whirlwind of dust and debris. He eats dirt, and he claws for Penny, and he gets a hold of a piece of her shirt, and he drags her toward the deeper woods. He crawls several yards, yanking Penny along, and then he manages to finally struggle to his feet, and now he’s dragging Penny toward the deeper shadows, but something’s wrong.

The little girl has gone limp in his grasp, as though she has passed out.

Brian can hear the crunch of boot steps behind him, the clang of the pump, as the gunman closes in on them for the kill shot. Frantically lifting Penny onto his shoulder, Brian hobbles as quickly as possible toward the cover of trees, but he doesn’t get far before he realizes he is covered in blood. The blood is streaming down the front of his shirt, soaking him, pulsing in rivulets.

“Oh God no, God no, God no no no—” Brian lowers Penny to the soft earth, laying her on her back. Her bloodless face is the color of a bed sheet. Her eyes are glassy and fixed on the sky as she makes hiccup noises, a tiny rivulet of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.

Brian hardly hears the gunman now, pounding toward him, the snap of the pump injecting another shell. Penny’s little shirt, a cotton T-shirt, is soaked with deep scarlet, the ragged exit tear at least six inches in diameter. Grains of deer shot propelled by a 20-gauge shell are powerful enough to penetrate steel, and it looks like the child took at least half the expanding cloud of shot through her back and out the side of her tummy.

The gunman closes in.

Brian lifts the child’s shirt and lets out an almost primal moan of anguish. His hand can’t stanch the profuse bleeding, the gaping wound a crescent-shaped mess. Brian presses his hand down on the wound. The blood bubbles. He rips a piece of his shirttail and tries to plug the jagged hole in her midsection, but the blood is everywhere now. Brian stammers and cries and tries to talk to her as the oily blood seeps through his fingers, and the gunman draws near: “It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay, we’re gonna get you fixed up, it’s gonna be fine, you’re gonna be all better…”

Brian’s arms and waist are baptized in the warmth of her life force draining out of her. Penny utters a single feeble whisper: “… away…”

“No, Penny, no, no, don’t do that … don’t go away yet, not now … don’t go away…!”

At this point, Brian hears the twig snap directly behind him.

A shadow falls across Penny.

*   *   *

“Goddamn shame,” a gravelly voice murmurs behind Brian, the cold end of a shotgun muzzle pressing down on the back of Brian’s neck. “Take a good look at her.”

Brian twists around and glances up at the gunman, a tattooed, bearded man with a beer belly, aiming the shotgun directly at Brian’s face. Almost as an afterthought, the man growls, “Look at her … she’s the last thing you’re gonna ever see.”

Brian never takes his hand off Penny’s wound, but he knows it’s too late.

She’s not going to make it.

Brian is ready now … ready to die.

*   *   *

The boom has a dreamlike quality, as though Brian has suddenly flown out of his body and is now high above the orchard, witnessing things from the perspective of a disembodied spirit. But almost instantly, Brian—who instinctively jerked forward at the boom—jerks back in shock. Blood mists across his arms and across Penny. Was the impact of the point-blank blast so catastrophic that it was painless? Is Brian already dead and not even aware of it?

The shadow of the gunman begins falling, almost in slow motion, like an old redwood giving up the ghost.

Brian whirls around in time to see that the bearded man has been shot from behind, the top of his skull a mass of red pulp, his beard matted in blood. Eyes rolling back in his head, he collapses. Brian stares. Like a curtain dropping, the falling man reveals two figures behind him, charging toward Brian and Penny.

“GODDAMNIT NO!” Philip throws the pistol-grip shotgun—still smoking hot—to the ground and races through the trees. Nick follows on his heels. Philip roars up to Brian and shoves him aside. “NO! NO!”

Philip drops to his knees by the dying child, who is now asphyxiating, drowning in her own blood. He scoops her up and tenderly touches the gaping wound as though it’s just a boo-boo, just a scrape, just a little bump. He draws her into an embrace, her blood soaking him.

Brian lies on the ground a few feet away, breathing the musty earth, a curtain of shock pulling down over his eyes. Nick stands nearby. “We can stop the bleeding, right? We can fix her up? Right?”

Philip cradles the bloody child.

Penny expires in his arms in a breathy little death rattle, which leaves her face as white and cold as porcelain. Philip shakes her. “C’mon, punkin … stay with us … stay with us now. Come on … stay with us … please stay with us … Punkin? Punkin? Punkin?”

The terrible silence hangs in the air.

“Sweet Jesus,” Nick utters to himself, his gaze going down to the ground.

*   *   *

For the longest time, Philip holds the child while Nick stares into the dirt, silently praying. For most of that time, Brian lies prone on the ground, five feet away, crying into the moist earth, babbling softly, more to himself than to anyone else: “I tried … happened so fast … I couldn’t … it was … I can’t believe it … I can’t … Penny was—”

All at once, a big, gnarled hand wrenches down on the back of Brian’s shirt.

“What did I say?” Philip snarls, a guttural growl, as he yanks his brother off the ground, and then slams Brian against the trunk of a nearby tree. Brian goes limp. He sees stars.

“Philly, no!” Nick tries to step in between the two brothers, but Philip shoves Nick away hard enough to send the smaller man sprawling to the ground. Philip still has his right hand locked around his brother’s throat.

“What did I say?” Philip slams Brian against the trunk. The back of Brian’s skull bounces off the bark, sending veins of light and pain through his field of vision, but he makes no effort to fight back or escape. He wants to die. He wants to die at the hands of his brother.

“WHAT DID I SAY?” Philip heaves Brian away from the tree. The ground flies up at Brian like a battering ram, smashing one shoulder and the side of his face, and then a fusillade of kicks descends upon Brian as he rolls involuntarily across the ground. One kick from the steel-toed logger boot strikes him in the jaw hard enough to crack his mandible. Another one fractures three ribs, sending white-hot pain up his side. Yet another strikes the small of his back, dislocating vertebra and nearly puncturing his kidney. Shiny, bright pain splinters his tailbone. And after a while, Brian can hardly feel the pain anymore, he can only watch it all unfold from way up above his mangled body, as he surrenders to the beating as a supplicant surrenders to a high priest.

NINETEEN

The next day, Philip spends an hour in the toolshed out behind the villa, going through the collection of weapons taken from the intruders, as well as all the bladed tools and farm implements left by the former inhabitants. He knows what he has to do, but choosing the mode of execution is agonizing for him. At first, he decides on the nine-millimeter semiauto. It’ll be the fastest and the cleanest. But then he has second thoughts about using a gun. It just seems unfair somehow. Too cold and impersonal. Nor can he bring himself to use an axe or a machete. Too messy and uncertain. What if his aim is off by half an inch and he botches the job?

At last he decides on the nine-millimeter Glock, shoving a fresh mag of rounds into the hilt and snapping back the cocking slide.

He takes a deep breath, and then goes over to the shed’s door. He pauses and braces himself. Scratching noises sporadically travel across the exterior walls of the shed. The villa’s property buzzes with Biter activity, scores of the things drawn to the commotion of the previous day’s firefight. Philip kicks the door open.

The door bangs into a middle-aged female zombie in a stained pinafore dress who was sniffing around the shed. The force of the impact sends her skeletal form stumbling backward, arms pinwheeling, a ghastly moan rising out of her decomposed face. Philip walks past her, casually raising the Glock, hardly even breaking his stride as he quickly squeezes off a single shot into the side of her skull.

The roar of the Glock echoes as the female corpse whiplashes sideways in a cloud of scarlet mist, then folds to the ground.

Philip marches across the rear of the villa, raising the Glock and taking out another pair of errant Biters. One of them is an old man dressed only in yellowed underwear—maybe an escapee from a nursing home. Another one is most likely a former fruit grower, his bloated, blackened body still clad in its original sappy dungarees. Philip puts them down with a minimum of fuss—a single shot each—and he makes a mental note to clear the remains later that day with one of the snow-shovel attachments on the riding mower.

Almost a full day has passed since Penny died in his arms, and now the new dawn is rising clear and blue, the crisp autumn sky high and clean over the acres of peach trees. It’s taken Philip nearly twenty-four hours to work up the nerve to do what he has to do. Now he grips the gun with a sweaty palm as he enters the orchard.

He has five rounds left in the magazine.

*   *   *

In the shadows of the woods, a figure writhes and moans against an ancient tree trunk. Bound with rope and duct tape, the prisoner strains with futile desperation to escape. Philip approaches and raises the gun. He points the barrel between the figure’s eyes, and for just an instant, Philip tells himself to get it over with quickly: Lance the wound, remove the tumor, get it done.

The muzzle wavers, Philip’s finger freezing up on the trigger pad, and he lets out a tormented sigh. “I can’t do it,” he utters under his breath.

He lowers the gun and stares at his daughter. Six feet from him, tied to the tree, Penny growls with the feral hunger of a rabid dog. Her china doll face has narrowed and sunken into a rotted white gourd, her soft eyes hardened into tiny silver coins. Her once innocent tulip-shaped lips are now blackened and curled away from slimy teeth. She doesn’t recognize her father.

This is the part that tears the biggest chunk out of Philip’s soul. He can’t stop remembering the look in Penny’s eyes each time he would pick her up at the day care center or at her aunt Nina’s house at the end of a long, hard work day. The spark of recognition and excitement—and hell yes, unadulterated love—in those big, brown doelike eyes each time Philip returned was enough to keep Philip going no matter what. Now that spark is gone forever—cemented over with the gray film of the undead.

Philip knows what he has to do.

Penny snarls.

Philip’s eyes burn with agony.

“I can’t do it,” he murmurs again, looking down, not really addressing Penny or even himself. Seeing her like this sends a bolt of electric rage down through his system, arcing like the pilot of a welding torch, touching off a secret flame deep within him. He hears the voice: Tear the world open, tear it apart, rip open its fucking heart … do it now.

He backs away from the horror in the orchard, his brain roiling with fury.

*   *   *

The villa’s property—now basking in a mild autumn morning—is a half-moon-shaped plot of land, the main house at its center. Several outbuildings rise along the gentle curve behind the house: the carriage house, a small storage shed for the riding mower and tractor, a second shed for tools, a coach house on elevated pilings for guests, and a large wood-sided barn with a huge weather vane and cupola on top. This last structure, the worm-eaten wood siding faded to a sun-bleached pink, is where Philip now heads.

He needs to drain off this poisonous current coursing through him; he needs to vent.

The main entrance of the barn is a double door at one end, latched with a giant timber across its center. Philip walks up and throws open the plank, the doors squeaking apart, revealing the dust motes floating in shadows inside. Philip enters, closing the double doors behind him. The air smells of horse piss and moldy hay.

Two more figures wriggle and squirm in the corner, gripped in their own brand of hellish torment, bound and gagged with duct tape: Sonny and Cher.

The twosome tremble against each other on the floor of the barn, their mouths taped, their backs pressed against the door of an empty horse stall, their bodies in the throes of some kind of withdrawal. Either heroin or crack or something else, it doesn’t really matter to Philip. The only thing that matters now is that these two have no idea how much worse life is about to get for them.

Philip walks over to the dynamic duo. The skinny gal is trembling with spasms, her painted eyes caked with dried tears. The man is breathing hard through his nostrils.

Standing in a narrow beam of sunlight teeming with dust and hay dander, Philip stares down at them like an angry god. “You,” he says to Sonny. “Gonna ask you a question … and I know it’s hard to nod with your head taped up and shit, so just blink once for yes, twice for no.”

The man looks up through raw, watery, sunken eyes. He blinks once.

Philip looks at him. “You like to watch?”

Two blinks.

Philip reaches down to his belt buckle and starts to unfasten it. “That’s a shame, because I’m gonna give one hell of a show.”

Two blinks.

Again … two blinks.

Two blinks, two blinks, two blinks.

*   *   *

“Easy, Brian, not so fast,” Nick says to Brian the next night, up in the second-floor sewing room. In the light of kerosene lanterns, Nick is helping Brian drink water through a straw. Brian’s mouth is still swollen and clumsy, and he dribbles on himself. Nick has been doing everything he can to help Brian recover, and keeping food down him is paramount. “Try some more of the vegetable soup,” Nick suggests.

Brian has a few spoonfuls. “Thanks, Nick.” Brian’s voice is choked, thick with pain. “Thanks for everything.” His words are slightly slurred, his soft palate still inflamed. He speaks tentatively, haltingly. Lying in bed, he has rags wrapped snugly around his broken ribs, Band-Aids on his face and neck, his left eye puffy with a purplish bruise. Something might be wrong with his hip; neither of them can tell for sure.

“You’re gonna be fine, man,” Nick says. “Your brother is another story.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s lost it, man.”

“He’s been through a lot, Nick.”

“How can you say that?” Nick sits back, lets out a pained sigh. “Look what he did to you. And don’t say it’s because he lost Penny—we’ve all lost people we love. He came very close to taking you out.”

Brian looks at his own mangled feet sticking out of the bottom of the blankets. With great effort, he says, “I deserve everything I got.”

“Don’t say that! It wasn’t your fault, what happened. Your brother’s turned a corner with this thing. I’m really worried about him.”

“He’ll be okay.” Brian looks at Nick. “What’s wrong? Something else is bothering you.”

Nick takes a deep breath and wonders whether he should confide in Brian. The Blake brothers have always had a complex relationship, and over the years, Nick Parsons has often felt that he was more of a brother to Philip Blake than his biological sibling. But there’s always been an X factor with the Blakes, a bond of blood that runs deep within the two men.

Nick finally says, “I know you aren’t exactly the religious type. I know you think I’m a Holy Roller.”

“That’s not true, Nick.”

Nick waves it off. “Doesn’t matter … my faith is strong, and I don’t judge a man by his religion.”

“Where you going with this?”

Nick looks at Brian. “He’s keeping her alive, Brian … or maybe alive is not the right word.”

“Penny?”

“He’s out there with her now.”

“Where?”

Nick explains what’s been going on over these last two days since the firefight. While Brian has been recovering from the beating, Philip’s been busy. He’s keeping two of the intruders—the only ones who survived the firefight—locked up in the barn. Philip claims he’s questioning them about possible human settlements. Nick is worried he’s torturing them. But that’s the least of their worries. The fate of Penny Blake is what’s eating at Nick. “He’s got her chained to a tree like a pet,” Nick says.

Brian frowns. “Where?”

“Out in the orchard. He goes out there at night. Spends time with her.”

“Oh God.”

“Listen, I know you think this is bullshit, but the way I was brought up, there’s a force in the universe called Good and a force called Evil.”

“Nick, I don’t think this is—”

“Wait. Let me finish. I believe that all this—the plague or whatever you want to call it—is the work of what you would call the Devil or Satan.”

“Nick—”

“Just let me say my piece. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“What’s the thing Satan hates the most? The power of love? Maybe. Somebody being born again. Yeah, probably. But I kinda think it’s when a person passes, and their spirit flies up to Paradise.”

“I’m not following you.”

Nick looks into Brian’s hollow gaze. “That’s what’s going on here, Brian. The Devil’s figured out a way to keep people’s souls trapped here on earth.”

A moment passes as Brian absorbs this. Nick doesn’t expect Brian to believe any of this, but maybe, just maybe, Nick can get him to understand.

In that brief silence, the north wind whistles in the shutters. The weather is turning. The villa creaks and moans. Nick lifts the collar of his mothball-scented sweater—days ago, they found some warm clothes in the villa’s attic—and now he shivers in the frigid air of the second floor. “What your brother’s doing is wrong, it’s against God,” Nick says then, and the statement hangs in the gloom.

*   *   *

At that moment, out in the darkness of the orchard, a small campfire crackles and flickers on the ground. Philip sits on the cold earth in front of the fire, his shotgun next to him, a musty little book he found in the villa’s nursery open on his lap. “‘Let me in, Let me in, Little Pig,’” Philip reads aloud in a stiff, labored singsong voice. “‘Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and blow your house in!’”

Three feet away, tied to the tree trunk, Penny Blake snarls and drools at every word, her tiny jaws snapping impotently.

“‘Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin,’” Philip recites, turning a delicate page of onionskin. He pauses and glances up at the thing that used to be his daughter.

In the flicker of firelight, Penny’s small face contorts with unyielding hunger, as wrinkled and bloated as a jack-o’-lantern. Her midsection, wound with baling wire, strains against the tree. She reaches out with curled, clawlike fingers and clutches at the air—yearning to break free and make a meal of her father.

“‘But of course,’” Philip continues, his voice breaking, “‘the wolf did blow the house in.’” An agonizing pause before Philip says in a shattered voice, filled with equal parts sorrow and madness, “‘And he ate the pig.’”

*   *   *

Over the remainder of that week, sleep does not come easily for Philip Blake. He tries to get a few hours each night but the nervous energy keeps him tossing and turning until he has to get up and do something. Most nights, he goes out to the barn and works off some of his rage on Sonny and Cher. They are the ostensible reasons Penny has turned, and it is up to Philip to make sure they suffer like no man or woman has ever suffered. The delicate process of keeping them just this side of death is not easy. Every once in a while, Philip has to give them water to make sure they don’t die on him. He also has to be careful they don’t kill themselves in order to escape their torments. Like a good jailer, Philip keeps the ropes tight, and all sharp objects out of their grasp.

On this night—Philip thinks it’s a Friday—he waits until Nick and Brian are asleep before he slips out of his room, pulls on his denim jacket and boots, and makes his way out the back door and across the moonlit grounds to the weather-beaten barn on the northeast corner of the property. He likes to announce himself as he arrives.

“Daddy’s home,” he murmurs in a convivial tone, his breath showing in puffs of vapor as he pulls the padlock and pushes open the double doors.

He flips on a battery-powered lantern.

Sonny and Cher are slumped in the shadows where he left them, two ragged creatures trussed up like suckling pigs, side by side, sitting in a spreading pool of their own blood, piss, and shit. Sonny is barely awake, his head lolled to one side, his heavy-lidded junkie eyes rimmed in red. Cher is unconscious. She lies next to him, her leather pants still down around her ankles.

Each of them bear the festering marks of Philip’s tools of punishment—needle-nosed pliers, barbed wire, two-by-fours with exposed rusty nails, and various blunt objects that occur to Philip in the heat of the moment.

“Wake up, sis!” Philip reaches down and flips the woman onto her back, the restraints cutting into her wrists, the rope around her neck keeping her from squirming too much. He slaps her. Her eyes flutter. Philip slaps her again. She comes awake now, the muffled cries dampened by the hank of duct tape over her mouth.

At some point in the night, she managed to pull her bloody panties back up and over her privates.

“Let me once again remind you,” Philip says, yanking her panties back down to her knees. He stands over her, wrenching her legs apart with his boots as though clearing a path for himself. She writhes and wriggles below him as if she might be able to squirm out of her own skin. “Y’all are the ones took my daughter from me—so we’re all gonna go to hell together.”

Philip unbuckles his belt, and drops his pants, and it doesn’t require much imagination for him to instantly produce an erection—his rage and hate burn so warmly in his solar plexus, it feels like a battering ram. He drops to his knees between the woman’s trembling legs.

The first thrust is always the trigger—the voice in his brain abruptly chiming out, taunting him, urging him on with fragments of old biblical nonsense that his daddy used to mumble while drunk: Vengeance is mine, vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord!

But tonight, after the third or fourth thrust into the limp woman, Philip stops.

A combination of things steals his focus, hooks his attention. He hears footsteps outside, crunching across the rear of the property, and he even sees, through the slatted siding, the shadow of a figure blurring past the barn. But what gets Philip to draw back and stand up, and hurriedly pull his pants back on, is the fact that this figure is moving toward the orchard.

Toward the place where Penny resides.

*   *   *

Philip exits the barn and instantly sees a figure plunging into the shadows of the orchard. The figure is a compact, trim man in his thirties clad in a sweater and jeans, carrying a huge rusty spade over his shoulder.

“Nick!”

Philip’s warning cry goes unheeded. Nick has already vanished into the trees.

Drawing the nine-millimeter from behind his belt, Philip charges toward the orchard. He snaps a round into the chamber as he plunges into the woods. Darkness gives way to the beam of a flashlight.

Fifty feet away, Nick Parsons is shining a light on the livid face of the Penny-thing.

“NICK!”

Nick whirls suddenly with the shovel raised, and the flashlight tumbles out of his hand. “It’s gone too far, Philly, it’s gone too far.”

“Put the shovel down,” Philip says as he approaches with the gun raised. The flashlight beam shines up into the leaves, casting an eerie, pale glow over everything, like a grainy black-and-white film.

“You can’t do this to your daughter, you don’t realize what you’re doing.”

“Put it down.”

“You’re keeping her soul from entering heaven, Philly.”

“Shut up!”

Twenty feet away, the Penny-thing yanks on its bonds in the shadows. The cockeyed beam of the flashlight highlights her monstrous features from below. Her eyes reflect the dry silver light.

“Philly, listen to me.” Nick lowers the shovel, his voice unsteady with emotion. “You have to let her die … she’s one of God’s children. Please … I’m begging you as a Christian … please let her go.”

Philip aims the Glock directly at Nick’s forehead. “If she dies … you die next.”

For a moment, Nick Parsons looks crestfallen, absolutely beaten.

Then he drops the shovel, hangs his head, and walks back toward the villa.

Throughout all this, the Penny-thing keeps its sharklike gaze on the man it once called father.

*   *   *

Brian continues to heal. Six days after the beating, he feels strong enough to get out of bed and limp around the house. His hip twinges with every step, and the dizziness comes in waves whenever he goes up and down the stairs, but on the whole, he’s doing pretty well. His bruises have faded and the swelling has gone down, and he feels his appetite returning. He also has a good talk with Philip.

“I miss her something fierce,” Brian says to his brother late one night in the kitchen, each man suffering from severe insomnia. “I’d trade places with her in a heartbeat if it meant bringing her back.”

Philip looks down. He has developed a series of very subtle tics, which emerge when he’s under pressure—sniffing, pursing his lips, clearing his throat. “I know, sport. It ain’t your fault … what happened out there. I never should have done that to you.”

Brian’s eyes moisten. “I probably would have done the same thing.”

“Let’s put it behind us.”

“Sure.” Brian wipes his eyes. He looks at Philip. “So, what’s the deal with the people in the barn?”

Philip looks up. “What about ’em?”

“The whole thing has Nick on edge … and you can hear things out there … at night, I’m talking about. Nick thinks you’re, like … pulling their fingernails off.”

A cold smile twitches at the corner of Philip’s mouth. “That’s sick.”

Brian isn’t smiling. “Philip, whatever you’re doing out there, it’s not going to bring Penny back.”

Philip looks down again. “I know that … don’t you think I know that?”

“Then I’m begging you to stop. Whatever it is you’re doing … stop.” Brian looks at his brother. “It’s not serving any purpose.”

Philip looks up with embers of emotion in his eyes. “That trash out there in the barn stole everything that mattered to me … that bald motherfucker and his crew … them two junkies … they destroyed the life of a beautiful innocent little girl and they did it outta sheer meanness and greed. Ain’t nothing I could do to them would suffice.”

Brian sighs. Further protest seems futile, so he simply stares at his coffee.

“And you’re wrong about it not serving any purpose,” Philip concludes, after a moment of thought. “It serves the purpose of making me feel better.”

*   *   *

The next night, after the lanterns go out, and the fires in the three separate fireplaces dwindle down to coals, and the northeasterly wind begins toying with the dormers and loose shingles, Brian is lying in bed in the sewing room, trying to lull himself into a troubled sleep, when he hears the door latch click and sees the silhouette of Nick Parsons slipping into his room. Brian sits up. “What’s going on?”

“Sssshhh,” Nick whispers, coming across the room and kneeling by the bed. Nick has his coat on, his gloves, and a bulge on his hip that looks like the grip of a handgun. “Keep it down.”

“What is it?”

“Your brother’s asleep … finally.”

“So what?”

“So we gotta do a—whaddaya callit—an intervention.”

“What are you talking about? Penny? You’re talking about trying to take Penny out again?”

“No! The barn, man! The barn!”

Brian moves to the edge of the bed and rubs his eyes, stretches his sore limbs, shakes the cobwebs off. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

*   *   *

They slip out the back, each one of them armed with a handgun. Nick has the bald man’s .357 steel-plated revolver, Brian has a snub-nose that belonged to one of the thug gunmen. They steal across the property to the barn, and Brian shines a flashlight on the padlock. They find a piece of timber in a woodpile, and they use it to pry open the rotted doors, making as little noise as possible.

Brian’s heart hammers in his chest as they slip inside the dark barn.

The stench of mold and urine fills their senses as they work their way back through the fetid shadows to the rear of the barn, where two dark heaps lie on the floor in puddles of blood as black as oil. At first, the shapes don’t even look human, but when the beam of Brian’s flashlight falls on a pale face, Brian lets out a gasp.

“Holy fucking shit.”

The man and woman are still alive, barely, their faces disfigured and swollen, their midsections exposed like raw meat. A thin tendril of steam rises from festering, sucking wounds. Both captives are semiconscious, their parboiled eyes fixed on the rafters. The woman is brutalized, a broken doll with legs akimbo and blood patterns covering her pasty, tattooed flesh.

Brian begins to tremble. “Holy shit … what have we…? Holy fucking shit…”

Nick kneels by the woman. “Brian, get some water.”

“What about—”

“Get it from the well! Hurry!”

Brian hands over his flashlight, spins, and hustles back the way he came.

Nick shines the light on the constellation of wounds and sores—some old and infected, some fresh—across a hundred percent of their twisted bodies. The man’s chest rises and falls quickly, convulsively, with shallow breaths. The woman struggles to fix her rheumy gaze on Nick. She is blinking wildly.

Her lips move beneath the duct tape. Nick starts to carefully peel the gag away from her mouth.

“P-p-pleeee … kuhhh…” She’s trying to say something urgent but Nick can’t understand her.

“It’s okay, we’re gonna get you outta here, it’s okay, you’re gonna make it.”

“K-khhh…”

“Cold?” Nick tries to pull her pants back on her. “Try to breathe, try to—”

“K-khhlll.”

“What? I can’t—”

The woman tries to swallow, and again she says, “K-kill uss … p-please…”

Nick stares. His guts go cold. He feels something softly nudging his hip and he looks down and sees the woman’s scabby hand fumbling at the pistol grip sticking out of his belt. Nick feels all the fight go out of him. His heart sinks down through the floor.

He pulls the .357 from his belt and stands up and gazes down at the abominations on the floor of the barn for a long time.

He says a prayer: the Twenty-third Psalm.

*   *   *

Brian is on his way back to the barn with a plastic pail of well water when he hears the two muffled pops from inside the barn. Like firecrackers bursting inside tin cans, the blasts are short and sharp. The sound of them makes Brian freeze in his tracks, the water sloshing over the rim of the bucket. He sucks in a startled breath.

Then he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a faint light flickering on in one of the villa’s second-floor windows: Philip’s room. A flashlight up there plays across the window, then vanishes. This is followed by a series of muffled footsteps banging down the stairs and through the house, hard and fast, and this gets Brian moving again.

He drops the pail. He charges back across the property to the barn. He slams through the doorway, plunging into the dark. Then he hurtles through the shadows, toward the silver beam of light on the floor in the rear. He sees Nick standing over the captives.

A ribbon of cordite smoke rises from the muzzle of the .357 in Nick’s right hand, now hanging at his side as he stares down at the bodies.

Brian joins Nick and starts to say something when all at once Brian looks down and sees the head wounds: blossoms of gore bloom up the stall door—shimmering in the horizontal light beam.

The man and the woman are stone-cold dead, each one of them now lying supine in their drying fluids, their faces at peace, released from their contortions of misery. Again, Brian tries to say something.

He can’t get out any words.

*   *   *

A moment later, in the darkness across the barn, the double doors burst open and Philip storms in. Fists clenched at his sides, face chiseled with rage, eyes flashing with white-hot madness, he marches toward the light. He looks as though he’s going to devour somebody. He has a pistol shoved down the side of his belt and a machete banging on one hip.

He gets about halfway across the barn before he starts to slow down.

Nick has turned away from the bodies and is now standing his ground, staring at Philip as he approaches. Brian steps back, a tidal wave of shame crashing down over him. He feels like his soul is being ripped in half. He stares at the floor as his brother approaches slowly now, warily, glancing nervously from the dead bodies to Nick, and then to Brian, and then back at the dead bodies.

For the longest time, nobody can think of anything to say. Philip keeps looking at Brian, and Brian keeps trying to conceal the paralyzing shame spreading through him, but the more he tries to conceal it, the more it drags him down.

If Brian only had the guts for it, he would put the barrel of the snub-nose in his mouth right now and put himself out of his misery. In some strange way, he feels responsible for this—for all of it—but he’s too much of a coward to kill himself like a man.

He can only stand there and look away in abject shame and humiliation.

And like an invisible chain reaction, the pathetic, gruesome tableau of desecrated bodies—combined with the unyielding silence of his brother and his friend—begins to break Philip down.

He fights the tears pooling in his eyes and juts his quivering chin out in a mixture of defiance and self-loathing. He works his mouth like he’s got something important to impart, and it takes a huge effort to speak, but he finally manages to say in a choked mutter, “Whatever.”

Nick looks mortified, staring at Philip in disbelief. “‘Whatever’?”

Philip turns and walks away, pulling the Glock from his belt as he goes. He snaps the slide and fires into the wall of the barn—BOOOOMMMMMM!—the recoil kicking in his hand, the loud bark making Brian jump. BOOOOOMMMM! Another blast flashes in the darkness, taking a chunk of the door. BOOOOOMMMM! The third shot puts a chink in the rafter and rains debris down on the floor.

Philip angrily kicks the doors open and storms out of the barn.

The silence left behind seems to ripple for a moment with afterimages of Philip’s fiery wrath. Brian hasn’t taken his eyes off the floor throughout all this, and he continues to hang his head and stare miserably at the moldy matted hay. Nick takes one last look at the bodies, and then lets out a long, pained, unsteady breath. He looks at Brian, and he shakes his head. “There you have it,” he says.

But something behind his words—the subtle tone of dread in his voice—tells Brian that things have now irrevocably changed in their little dysfunctional family.

TWENTY

“What the fuck is he doing?” Nick stands at the villa’s front window, staring out at the overcast morning.

Across the front of the property, at the top of the driveway, Philip has Penny on a modified dog leash, assembled from spare parts found in the toolshed—a long length of copper pipe with a spiked collar threaded through one end. He drags her toward a Ford S-10 pickup parked on the grass. The truck is one of the vehicles owned by the bald man’s crew, and Philip has now loaded its cargo bed with canned goods, guns, provisions, and bedding.

Penny sputters and growls as she is yanked along, grabbing at the pipe leashed to her neck, biting at the air. In the diffuse, watery light, her dead face looks like a living Halloween mask, sculpted out of wormy-gray modeling clay.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Brian says, standing next to Nick, gazing out at the bizarre scene unfolding in the front yard. “He got up this morning convinced we can’t stay here anymore.”

“And why’s that?”

Brian shrugs. “I don’t know … after all that’s happened … I guess the place is like poison for him, full of ghosts … I don’t know.”

Brian and Nick have been up all night, guzzling coffee and discussing their situation. Nick has been dancing around the fact that he thinks Philip has gone off his spindle, succumbing to the stress of losing Penny, and to the cumulative pressure of protecting them. Although Nick has stopped short of verbalizing it, he has alluded to the possibility that the Devil has gotten his hooks into Philip. Brian is too exhausted to argue metaphysics with Nick, but there is no denying the fact that things have become dire.

“Let him go,” Nick says finally, turning away from the window.

Brian looks at him. “What do you mean? You mean you’re staying?”

“Yeah, I’m staying, and you should, too.”

“Nick, come on.”

“How can we keep following him … after all this shit … the stuff that’s gone down?”

Brian wipes his mouth and thinks about it. “Look. I’ll say it again. What he did to those people is, like, beyond awful. He lost his way. And I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at him the same way again … but this is about survival now. We can’t split up. Our best shot is sticking together no matter what.”

Nick glances back out the window. “You really think we’re gonna make it to the Gulf Coast? That’s like four hundred miles and change.”

“Our best shot is doing it together.”

Nick fixes his gaze on Brian. “He’s got his dead daughter on a fucking leash. He pretty near beat you to death. He’s a loose cannon, Brian, and he’s gonna blow up in our faces.”

“That loose cannon got us all the way across Georgia from Waynesboro in one piece,” Brian says, a flare of anger burning in his gut. “So, he’s nuts, he’s volatile, he’s possessed by demons, he’s the prince of fucking darkness … he’s still my brother and he’s our best chance of survival.”

Nick looks at him. “Is that what we’re calling it now? Survival?”

“You want to stay here, be my guest.”

“Thanks, I’ll do that.”

Nick walks away, leaving Brian to turn back to the window and nervously watch his brother.

*   *   *

Utilizing a radiator hose as a siphon, they consolidate all the fuel on the property—from tractors, from vehicles, even from the Harleys—into the Ford S-10. All told, they’re able to top off the seventeen-gallon tank and then some. Philip arranges a place for Penny in the rear cargo bay by moving the boxes of supplies around into a semicircle and laying blankets down on the deck. He chains her to a U-bolt so she can’t get herself into any mischief or fall over the side.

Nick watches all this from his second-floor window, pacing the room like a caged animal. The reality of the situation starts to set in. He’ll be alone in this big old drafty villa. He’ll spend nights alone. He’ll spend the whole winter alone. He’ll hear the north winds shrieking through the gutters and the distant moaning of Biters wandering the orchards … all while biding his time alone. He’ll wake up alone and eat alone and forage for food alone and dream of better days alone and pray to God for deliverance … all by himself. As he watches Philip and Brian finish up the last of the preparations for departure, a twinge of regret tightens Nick’s midsection—seller’s remorse. He crosses the room to his closet.

It takes him a matter of seconds to stuff his essentials into a duffel bag.

He rushes out of the room and takes the stairs two at a time.

*   *   *

Brian is just settling into the passenger seat, and Philip is just putting the truck in gear, just beginning to pull away from the villa, when the sound of the front door ripping open reaches their ears.

Brian glances over his shoulder and sees Nick with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, running across the front parkway, waving them back.

*   *   *

It’s hard to believe that Philip would neglect to check under the pickup’s hood. Had he taken three minutes to make sure everything was in working order, he would have found the perforated hose. But Philip Blake is not exactly a hundred percent these days. His mind is a shortwave radio tuned to different stations now.

But regardless of whether it was a deliberate cut made by the home invaders after the firefight broke out (to ensure that nobody escaped), or it was a piece of flak that had pierced the truck’s grill, or it was simply a coincidental failure, the pickup begins to smoke and sputter less than five miles from the villa.

At a point approximately fifty miles southwest of Atlanta, in a place most folks around these parts call the Middle of Nowhere, the pickup hobbles off the highway and onto the gravel shoulder, where it stutters to a stop, all the warning lights across the dash flickering on. White vapor seeps out from under the hood, and the ignition won’t turn over. Philip lets out an alarming barrage of profanity, nearly kicking his logger boot through the floor. The other two men look down, silently waiting for the squall to pass. Brian wonders if this is what a battered wife feels like: too afraid to escape, too afraid to stay.

At length, Philip’s tantrum passes. He gets out and opens the hood.

Brian joins him. “What’s the verdict?”

“Screwed and tattooed.”

“No hope of fixing it?”

“You got a radiator hose on you?”

Brian glances over his shoulder. The side of the road slopes down to a ravine filled with old tires, weeds, and rubbish. Movement draws his gaze to the far end of the ravine—about a quarter of a mile away—where a cluster of Biters mill about in the garbage. They stumble around and root for flesh in the rocks like truffle-nuzzling pigs. They haven’t yet noticed the disabled vehicle now smoking on the side of the road three hundred yards away.

In the rear of the pickup, Penny yanks at her chain. The chain is threaded through her dog collar and bolted to the corrugated deck. The proximity of other upright corpses seems to be tweaking her, exciting her, disturbing her.

“What do you think?” Brian finally asks his brother, who has carefully lowered the hood and clicked it shut with a minimum of noise.

Nick is climbing out of the cab. He joins them. “What’s the plan?”

Brian looks at him. “The plan is … we’re fucked.”

Nick chews his fingernail, glancing back over his shoulder at the zombie conclave slowly working its way down the ravine, getting closer every minute. “Philip, we can’t sit here. Maybe we can find another car.”

Philip exhales a pained sigh. “All right, you fellas know the drill … grab your shit, I’ll get Penny.”

*   *   *

They light out with Penny on the leash, their backs laden with supplies. They hug the shoulder, following the highway. Brian limps along without complaint, despite the stabbing pain in his hip. Around Greenville, they have to take a detour due to an inexplicable pileup of wrecked vehicles, the scorched tangle of metal spanning across both northbound and southbound lanes, the area crawling with zombies. From a distance, it looks as though the earth itself has split open and vomited up hundreds of walking corpses.

They decide to take a two-lane—Rural Route 100—which wends its way southward, through Greenville, and around the congestion. And they get maybe a mile or two before Philip puts his hand up and stops.

“Hold on a second,” he says, frowning. He cocks his head. “What is that?”

“What is what?”

“That noise.”

“What noise?”

Philip listens. They all listen. Philip turns in a slow circle, trying to pinpoint the direction from which the sound is coming. “Is that an engine?”

Brian hears it now. “Sounds like a fucking tank.”

“Or maybe a bulldozer,” Nick ventures.

“What the fuck.” Philip narrows his eyes as he listens. “That can’t be too far away.”

They continue on. Less than a mile down the road, they come upon a dented sign:

WOODBURY—1 MI.

*   *   *

They continue on down the road, all eyes on the smoke-clogged western sky.

“Whoever they are, they got fuel,” Nick says.

Brian sees a cloud of dust on the horizon. “You think they’re friendly?”

“I ain’t taking any chances,” Philip says. “C’mon … we’ll find a back way in, take it one step at a time.”

Philip leads them across the shoulder, then down a weedy slope.

They scuttle across an adjacent farm field, a vast and fallow valley of soft earth. Their boots sink into the mire as they go. The chill wind lashes at them, and it takes them an interminable amount of time to circumnavigate the outskirts before the remnants of an abandoned town begin to materialize ahead of them.

A Walmart sign rises above a stand of ancient live oaks. The golden arches of a McDonald’s are visible not far beyond the Walmart. Litter tumbles down empty streets, past postwar brick buildings and cookie-cutter condos. But on the north side of the town, within a maze of cyclone fences, the sounds of engines and hammering and the occasional voice reveal the presence of humans.

“Looks like they’re building a wall or somethin’,” Nick says as they pause under the cover of trees. In the distance, about two hundred yards away, a handful of figures labor over a tall wooden rampart closing off the north edge of town. The barricade already stretches nearly two blocks.

“Rest of the place looks dead,” Philip comments. “Can’t be many survivors.”

“What the hell is that?” Brian is pointing at a semicircle of high stanchions a few blocks west of the barricade. Clusters of arc lights point down at a large open space, obscured behind buildings and fences.

“Football field for the high school maybe?” Philip is reaching for his Glock. He pulls it out and checks the remaining rounds in the magazine. He’s got six hollow-points left.

“What are you thinking, Philip?” Nick looks anxious, jittery.

Brian wonders if Nick is worried about walking into another trap. Or maybe he’s just edgy around Philip. The truth is, Brian isn’t too keen on waltzing uninvited into this little ragtag community, especially considering the fact that they have a moldering zombie in tow, and a father of said zombie so tightly wound he seems capable of almost anything at any moment. But what choice do they have? Dark clouds are gathering on the western horizon again, and the temperature is plummeting.

“What do you got there, sport?” Philip nods toward the gun bulging out the side of Brian’s belt. “The .38?”

“Yeah.”

“And you got the .357?” Philip says to Nick, who nods nervously. “Okay … here’s what we’re gonna do.”

*   *   *

They enter from the northeast corner of town, from the trees along the railroad tracks. They come slowly, with their hands raised in a nonthreatening gesture. At first, they’re surprised by how far they get—in plain sight of at least a dozen humans—before anyone even notices strangers strolling into town.

“Hey!” A hefty, middle-aged man in a black turtleneck sweater hops off a bulldozer, pointing at the newcomers. “Bruce! Look! We got company!”

Another worker—a tall black man in a peacoat with a glistening shaved head—pauses his hammering. He looks up and his eyes widen. He goes for a shotgun leaning against a nearby cooler.

“Take it easy, fellas!” Philip approaches slowly across a dusty truck lot, his hands raised. His expression is an approximation of calm, as mild and friendly as he can muster. “Just passin’ through … not lookin’ for any drama.”

Brian and Nick follow closely on Philip’s heels, each with their hands up.

The two men come over with shotguns. “You boys packin’ heat?” the black man wants to know.

“The safety’s on,” Philip says, pausing to carefully reach for his Glock. “I’m gonna show you the piece, nice and easy like.”

He shows them the nine-millimeter.

“What about you two?” The man in the turtleneck addresses Brian and Nick.

They each show their guns.

“Is it just the three of ya?” The man wearing the turtleneck has a Northern accent. His close-cropped blond hair is peppered with gray, and he has a wrestler’s neck and a stevedore’s barrel chest. His big porcine belly hangs over his belt.

“Just us three,” Philip says, and it’s essentially the truth. He left Penny tied to a tree in the shadows of the hickory grove a hundred yards outside the barricade. Philip secured her with extra rope and put a bandana around her mouth so she wouldn’t make any noise. It killed him to gag her like that, but until he knows what he’s dealing with here, he figures it’s best to keep her out of sight.

“What happened to you?” the turtleneck guy says to Brian, nodding at his wounds.

“He had a bad time fightin’ off some Biters,” Philip explains.

The man in the turtleneck lowers his shotgun. “You boys from Atlanta?”

“No, sir. Little hole-in-the-wall called Waynesboro.”

“You seen any National Guard out there?”

“No, sir.”

“You been traveling on your own?”

“Pretty much.” Philip puts his gun back. “We just need to rest up and we’ll be on our way.”

“You got food?”

“Nope.”

“Any cigarettes?”

“No, sir.” Philip indicates his companions. “If we could just get a roof over our head for a short spell, we won’t bother anybody. You fellas okay with that?”

For a moment, the two workmen give each other a glance like they’re sharing a private joke. Then the black man bursts out laughing. “Boys, this is the wild fucking west … nobody gives two pieces of a rat’s ass what you do.”

*   *   *

It turns out that the black man was understating the situation in Woodbury.

Over the remaining hours of that day, Philip, Brian, and Nick get the lay of the land and it’s not exactly Mayberry RFD. There are about sixty inhabitants clinging to the secure sector on the north side of town, keeping to themselves mostly, eking out an existence on scraps, most of them so paranoid and mistrustful of each other that they rarely even come out of their private hovels. They live in deserted condos and empty stores, and they have no organized leadership whatsoever. It’s amazing that any of them had the initiative to begin building a wall. In Woodbury, it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves.

All of which suits Philip, Brian, and Nick just fine. After scouting the edges of town, they decide to hole up in an abandoned two-unit apartment building on the southern border of the safe zone, near the uninhabited commercial district. Somebody has moved school buses and empty semitrailers into rows around the periphery of town, forming a makeshift bastion to keep out the Biters.

For now, the place seems relatively safe.

*   *   *

That night, Brian can’t sleep, so he decides to sneak out and explore the town. Walking isn’t easy—his ribs are still bothering him, and his breathing is labored and wheezy—but it feels good to get out and clear his head.

In the diamond-chip moonlight, the sidewalks lie desolate and barren, threading through what was once a typical little blue-collar burg. Trash blows willy-nilly across deserted playgrounds and squares. Storefronts housing the requisite small-town merchants—the local dentist, DeForest’s Feed and Seed, a Dairy Queen, the Piggly Wiggly—are all dark and boarded. Evidence of the “turn” lies everywhere—in the lime pits at Kirney’s Salvage Yard, where bodies have been recently deposited and torched, and in the community gazebo at Robert E. Lee Square, where bloodstains from some gruesome battle still glisten like black tar in the moonlight.

Brian isn’t surprised to learn that the open field in the center of town—which he first glimpsed from the neighboring farm field—is an old dirt racetrack. Apparently, the residents have enough fuel to keep generators going around the clock; and as Brian soon discovers, every so often, in the dark of night, the huge arc lights over the racetrack flare on for no good reason. On the far side of the track, Brian passes a semitrailer pulsing like a great steel heart with the muffled vibrations of combustion engines—the cables snaking out the back and tying into neighboring buildings.

By the time dawn starts to glow on the eastern horizon, Brian decides he better head back to the two-flat. He crosses a deserted parking lot, and then takes a shortcut down a litter-strewn alley. He reaches the adjacent street and passes a group of old men huddled around a flaming trash barrel, warming their hands against the chill and passing around a bottle of Thunderbird.

“Watch your back, sonny,” one of the men says to Brian as he passes, and the two other men chuckle humorlessly. The three men are ancient, grizzled, spavined codgers in moth-eaten Salvation Army coats. They look like they’ve been hunkered around this barrel for eternity.

Brian pauses. He has the snub-nosed .38 pistol wedged behind his belt, under his jacket, but he feels no compulsion to brandish it. “Got Biters in the area?”

“Biters?” one of the other men says. This one has a long white beard and his wrinkled eyes narrow with confusion.

“He means them dead things,” says the third old derelict, the fattest of the three.

“Yeah, Charlie,” says the first old man. “You remember … them walkin’ pus bags that ate Yellow Mike … the reason we’re stuck in this shitheel town?”

“I know what he’s talkin’ about!” snaps the bearded codger. “Just never heard ’em called such a thing before.”

“You new in town, son?” The fat one is giving Brian the once-over.

“As a matter of fact, yeah … I am.”

The fat old man shows a grin full of rotten, green teeth. “Welcome to hell’s waiting room.”

“Don’t listen to him, son,” the first old man says, putting a bony, arthritic arm around Brian’s shoulder. Then, in a low, mucousy voice, the old guy says confidentially: “It ain’t the dead things you gotta be mindful of around here … it’s the living.”

*   *   *

The next day, Philip tells Brian and Nick to keep their mouths shut while they’re in Woodbury, stay under the radar, avoid any contact with other residents, refrain from even telling people their names. Thankfully, the apartment serves them well as a temporary refuge. Built in the 1950s, with furnishings at least that old—chipped mirror tile on one wall, a moth-eaten sleeper sofa in the living room, a huge rectangular fish tank next to the TV, brimming with scum and the tiny floating corpses of neglected goldfish—the place has three bedrooms and running water. It smells like rancid cat shit and rotting fish, but as Brian’s dad used to say, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” They find canned goods in the pantries of both apartments, and they decide to stay for a while.

Much to Brian’s amazement, the townspeople leave them alone, as though they are ghosts. Brian can tell that word has spread among the inhabitants of newcomers in their midst, but still, it’s as though the Blakes and Nick are apparitions haunting the broken-down apartment. Which is not too far from the truth. Nick keeps to himself and reads his Bible and doesn’t say much. Philip and Brian, still edgy around each other, also go about their business with minimal conversation. It doesn’t even occur to them to find a vehicle and continue on their southward journey. It feels to Brian like they’ve given up … on getting to the coast, on the future, maybe on each other.

Brian continues to heal, and Philip tends to his own obsession with Penny, stealing away to the hickory grove every chance he gets.

*   *   *

Late one night, Brian hears the apartment door clicking open and shut.

He lies there in bed, listening for nearly an hour, when finally he hears Philip returning in a flurry of shuffling steps and gurgling noises. This is the third night in a row Philip has silently slipped out of the apartment—presumably to check on Penny while the townspeople are asleep—but up until tonight, his return has been as quiet and discreet as his departure. But now Brian can hear Philip breathing heavily out in the living room, murmuring something that is drowned out by watery groaning sounds and the clank of a chain.

Brian climbs out of bed and goes into the living room. He freezes when he sees Philip dragging Penny on her leash, yanking her across the floor like a whipped dog.

For a brief instant, Brian is speechless. All he can do is stare at the little moving corpse in her pigtails and muddy pinafore dress, her feet tracking filth across the apartment floor, and hope that she’s a temporary visitor and not—God forbid—a new roommate.

TWENTY-ONE

“What the hell are you doing?” Brian asks his brother as the dead girl claws at the air with stupid hunger. She fixes her milky eyes on Brian.

“It’ll be okay,” Philip says, yanking his dead daughter toward the back hall.

“You’re not—”

“Mind your own goddamn business.”

“But what if somebody—”

“Nobody saw me,” he says, kicking open the door to the laundry room.

It’s a small, claustrophic chamber of linoleum tile and corkboard walls with a broken-down washer and dryer, and ancient cat litter ground into the seams of the floor. Philip drags the drooling, snarling thing into the corner and attaches her leash to the exposed water pipes. He does this with the firm yet gentle hand of an animal trainer.

Brian watches from the hall, appalled at what he’s seeing. Philip has blankets spread out on the floor and duct-taped to the sharp edges of the washing machine to prevent the Penny-thing from making noise or hurting herself. It’s obvious he’s been preparing for this for a while now. He’s been thinking about it a lot. He rigs a makeshift leather halter—fashioned from a belt and pieces of the leash—around her head, attaching it to the pipes.

Philip goes about his business with the gentle rigor of a caretaker securing a wheelchair for a handicapped child. With the steel separator, he holds the tiny monster at arm’s length and carefully secures the restraints to the wall. All through this, the thing that was once a child snarls and slavers and yanks at her restraints.

Brian stares. He can’t decide whether to turn away, cry, or scream. He gets the feeling that he’s stumbled upon something disturbingly intimate here, and for a brief instant, his racing thoughts cast back to the time he was eighteen years old and visiting the nursing home in Waynesboro to say good-bye to his dying grandmother. He’ll never forget the look on her caretaker’s face. On an almost hourly basis, that male nurse had to clean the shit from the old lady’s backside, and the expression on his face while he did so, with relatives in the room, was horrible: a mixture of disgust, stoic professionalism, pity, and contempt.

That same weird expression is now contorting Philip Blake’s features as he buckles straps around the monster’s little head, carefully avoiding the danger zone around her snapping jaws. He sings softly to her as he works on her shackles—some sort of off-key lullaby that Brian can’t identify.

Eventually, Philip is satisfied with the restraints. He tenderly strokes the top of the Penny-thing’s head, and then kisses her forehead. The girl’s jaws snap at him, missing his jugular by centimeters.

“I’ll leave the light on, punkin,” Philip says to her, speaking loudly, as though addressing a foreigner, before calmly turning and walking out of the laundry room, shutting the door securely behind him.

Brian stands there in the hall, his veins running cold. “You want to talk about this?”

“It’ll be okay,” Philip reiterates, avoiding eye contact as he walks away, heading toward his room.

*   *   *

The worst part is that the laundry room is next door to Brian’s bedroom, and from that moment on, he hears the Penny-thing every night, clawing, moaning, straining against her bonds. She’s a constant reminder of … what? Armageddon? Madness? Brian doesn’t even have the vocabulary for what she represents. The smell is a thousand times worse than cat urine. And Philip spends a lot of time locked inside that laundry room with the dead girl, doing God-knows-what, and it drives the wedge deeper between the three men. Still in the throes of grief and shock, Brian is torn between pity and repulsion. He still loves his brother, but this is too much. Nick has no comment on the matter, but Brian can tell that Nick’s spirit is broken. The silences grow longer between the men, and Brian and Nick begin spending more time outside the apartment, wandering the safe zone, getting to know the dynamics of the inhabitants better.

Keeping a low profile, roaming the periphery of the little frontier enclave, Brian learns that the town is basically broken into two social castes. The first group—the one with the most power—includes anyone with a useful trade or vocation. Brian discovers that this first group features two bricklayers, a machinist, a doctor, a gun-store owner, a veterinarian, a plumber, a barber, an auto mechanic, a farmer, a fry cook, and an electrician. The second group—Brian thinks of them as the Dependents—features the sick, the young, and all the white-collar workers with obscure administrative backgrounds. These are the former middle managers and office drones, the paper pushers and corporate executives who once pulled down six-figure incomes running divisions of huge multinationals—now just taking up space, as obsolete as cassette tapes. With echoes of old sociology courses banging around the back of his mind, Brian wonders if this tenuous, rickety assemblage of desperate souls can ever develop into anything like a community.

The sand in the works appears to be three members of the National Guard, who wandered into Woodbury from a nearby Guard Station a couple of weeks ago and started pushing people around. This little rogue clique—which Brian thinks of as the Bullies—is led by a gung-ho former marine with a flattop haircut and icy blue eyes who goes by the name of Gavin (or “the Major,” as his underlings call him). It only takes a couple of days for Brian to peg Gavin as a sociopath with designs on power and plunder. Maybe the plague made Gavin flip his wig, but over the course of that first week in Woodbury, Brian observes Gavin and his weekend warriors snatching provisions out of the hands of helpless families and taking advantage of several women at gunpoint out behind the racetrack at night.

Brian keeps his distance, and keeps his head down, and as he makes these silent observations about Woodbury’s pecking order, he keeps hearing the name Stevens.

From what Brian can glean from scattered conversations with townspeople, this Stevens gentleman was once an ear, nose, and throat man with his own practice in a suburb of Atlanta. After the turn, Stevens set out for safer pastures—apparently alone, some believe due to a divorce. The good doctor quickly stumbled upon the motley group of survivors in Woodbury. Seeing the ragged inhabitants gripped by sickness, malnourished, and many of them nursing injuries, Stevens decided to offer his services. He’s been busy ever since, operating out of the former Meriwether County Medical Center three blocks from the racetrack.

On the afternoon of his seventh day in Woodbury, still wheezing, every breath a stab of pain in his side, Brian finally gets up the nerve to visit the squat, gray-brick building on the south end of the safe zone.

*   *   *

“You’re lucky,” Stevens says, snapping an X-ray into its clip at the top of a light panel. He points at a milky image of Brian’s ribs. “No serious breaks … just three minor fractures to the second, fourth, and fifth pectorals.”

“Lucky, huh?” Brian mutters, sitting shirtless on the padded gurney. The room is a depressing tile crypt in the basement of the medical center—once the pathology lab—now serving as Stevens’s examination room. The air reeks of disinfectant and mold.

“Not a word I’ve used that often in recent days, I will admit,” Stevens says, turning toward a stainless steel cabinet next to the light panel. He’s a tall, trim, smartly groomed man in his late forties with designer steel-frame eyeglasses riding low on the bridge of his nose. He wears a lab coat over his wrinkled oxford shirt and has a sort of weary, professorial intelligence in his eyes.

“And the wheezing?” Brian asks.

The doctor fishes through a shelf of plastic vials. “Early stage pleurisy due to the damage to the ribs,” he mumbles as he searches the medication. “I would encourage you to cough as much as possible … it’s going to hurt, but it’ll prevent secretions from pooling in the lungs.”

“And my eye?” The stabbing pain in Brian’s left eye, radiating up from his bruised jaw, has worsened over the last few days. Every time he looks in the mirror, his eye seems more bloodshot.

“Looks fine to me,” the doctor says, pulling a pill bottle from the shelf. “Your mandible on that side has a nasty contusion, but that should heal up in time. I’m gonna give you some naproxen for the pain.”

Stevens hands the vial over and then stands there with arms crossed against his chest.

Brian almost involuntarily reaches for his wallet. “I’m not sure if I have—”

“There’s no payment for services rendered here,” the doctor says with a raised brow, somewhat bemused by Brian’s innate gesture. “There’s no staff, there’s no infrastructure, there’s no follow-up, and for that matter, there isn’t a decent cup of espresso or a half-assed daily newspaper to read.”

“Oh … right.” Brian puts the pills in his pocket. “What about the hip?”

“Bruised but intact,” he says, flipping off the light panel and closing the cabinet. “I wouldn’t worry. You can put your shirt back on now.”

“Good … thanks.”

“Not a big talker, are you?” The doctor washes his hands at a wall sink, dries them on a dirty towel.

“I guess not.”

“Probably better that way,” the doctor says, wadding the towel and tossing it into the sink. “You probably don’t even want to tell me your name.”

“Well…”

“It’s okay. Forget it. You’ll be known in the records as the Bohemian Fellow with the Cracked Ribs. You want to tell me how it happened?”

Brian shrugs as he buttons his shirt. “Took a fall.”

“Fighting off the specimens?”

Brian looks at him. “Specimens?”

“Sorry … clinical-speak. Biters, zombies, pus bags, whatever they’re calling them nowadays. That how you got injured?”

“Yeah … something like that.”

“You want a professional opinion? A prognosis?”

“Sure.”

“Get the hell outta here while you still can.”

“Why’s that?”

“Chaos theory.”

“Excuse me?”

“Entropy … empires fall, stars wink out … the ice cubes in your drink melt.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

The doctor pushes his glasses up his nose. “There’s a crematorium in the sublevel of this building … we destroyed two more men today, one of them the father of two children. They were attacked on the north side yesterday morning. They reanimated last night. More Biters are getting through … the barricade’s a sieve. Chaos theory is the impossibility of a closed system remaining stable. This town is doomed. There’s nobody at the controls … Gavin and his cronies are getting bolder … and you, my friend, are simply another piece of fodder.”

For the longest time, Brian doesn’t say anything, he just stares past the doctor.

At last, Brian pushes himself off the table and extends his hand. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

*   *   *

That night, woozy from the painkillers, Brian Blake hears a knock at his bedroom door. Before he even has a chance to get his bearings and turn on a light, the door clicks open and Nick sticks his head in. “Brian, you awake?”

“Always.” Brian grunts as he climbs out of the blankets and sits up on the side of the bed. Only a few of the apartment’s wall outlets are live with generated power. Brian’s room is a dead circuit. He switches on a battery-operated lantern and sees Nick pushing into the room, fully dressed, his expression tight with alarm.

“You gotta see something,” Nick says, going to the window, peering through the blinds. “I saw him last night, same deal, didn’t think much of it.”

Still groggy, Brian joins Nick at the window. “What are we looking at?”

Through the slat, out in the darkness of a vacant lot, Philip’s silhouette can be seen emerging from the far trees. He looks like a stick figure in the darkness. Since Penny’s death, he’s been losing weight, going without sleep, hardly eating a thing. He looks sick, broken, like his faded denims are the only things holding his long, lanky limbs together. He carries a bucket, and he walks with a strange, wooden kind of purpose, like a sleepwalker or an automaton.

“What’s with the bucket?” Brian asks under his breath, almost rhetorically.

“Exactly.” Nick nervously scratches himself. “He had it last night, too.”

“Just take it easy, Nick. Stay in here.” Brian turns the lantern out. “Let’s just see what happens.”

*   *   *

A few moments later, the sound of the front door clicking open reverberates through the dark apartment. Philip’s shuffling footsteps can be heard crossing the living room and making their way down the hall.

The click of the laundry room door is followed by the sound of Penny becoming agitated, the chain clanking, the garbled sounds of groaning—noises to which Brian and Nick have almost grown accustomed. Then something reaches their ears that they haven’t heard before: the wet slosh of something hitting the tiles … followed by the strange, animalistic, gooey noises of a zombie feeding.

“What the fuck is he doing?” In the half-light, Nick’s face is a pale gibbous moon of terror.

“Holy Christ,” Brian whispers. “He can’t be—”

Brian doesn’t even get a chance to finish the thought, because Nick is on his way to the door with a full head of steam, heading for the hallway.

Brian chases after him. “Nick, don’t—”

“This isn’t happening.” Nick barrels down the hallway, moving toward the laundry room. He knocks hard on the door. “Philip, what’s going on?”

“Go away!”

The sound of Philip’s muffled voice is clogged with emotion.

“Nick—” Brian tries to get in between Nick and the door but it’s too late.

Nick turns the knob. The door is unlocked. Nick enters the laundry room.

“Oh God.”

Nick’s mortified reaction reaches Brian’s ears a split second before Brian can get a good look at what’s going on in the laundry room.

Brian pushes his way into the narrow enclosure and sees the dead girl eating a human hand.

*   *   *

Brian’s initial reaction is not one of repulsion or disgust or outrage (which, as it happens, is exactly the combination of emotions currently twisting Nick’s features as he gapes at the feeding in progress). Instead, Brian is overcome by a wave of sadness. He says nothing at first, simply looks on as his brother crouches down in front of the tiny upright corpse.

Ignoring the presence of the other men, Philip calmly pulls a severed human ear from the bucket, and waits patiently for the Penny-thing to finish consuming the hand. She gobbles the middle-aged male fingers with unbridled gusto, chewing the bloodless hairy knuckles as though they were delicacies, the stringers of pink, foamy saliva dangling from her lips.

She hardly pauses long enough to swallow before Philip places the human ear within range of her blackened teeth, offering the morsel to the child with the care and concern of a priest proffering a wafer to a communicant. The Penny-thing devours the cartilage and gristly rolls of human skin with mindless abandon.

“I’m outta here,” Nick Parsons finally manages to blurt, pivoting and storming out of the room.

Brian enters and crouches down next to his brother. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t accuse Philip of anything. Brian is drowning in sorrow right now and all he can think of saying is, “What’s going on, man?”

Philip hangs his head. “He was already dead … they were gonna burn him … found his body in a bag out behind the clinic … he died of something else … I just took a few pieces … nobody’ll notice…”

The Penny-thing finishes the ear, and starts groaning for more.

Philip feeds her a dripping, severed foot, the jagged bone exposed at the ankle like a slimy tusk of ivory.

“You think this is…?” Brian searches for words. “You think this is a good idea?”

Philip looks down at the floor as the sticky, wet noises of the feeding frenzy fill the laundry room. The girl-thing gnaws at the bone as Philip’s voice drops an octave, beginning to crack with emotion. “Think of him as an organ donor…”

“Philip—”

“I can’t let go of her, Brian … I can’t … she’s all I got.”

Brian takes a deep breath and fights his own tears. “The thing of it is … she’s not Penny anymore.”

“I know that.”

“Then why—”

“I see her and I try to remember … but I can’t … I can’t remember … I can’t remember anything but this shit storm we’re living in … and them road rats that shot her … and she’s all I got…” The pain and grief choking his voice start to thicken, hardening into something darker. “They took her from me … my whole universe … new rules now … new rules…”

Brian can’t breathe. He watches the Penny-thing gnawing on that pasty severed foot. He looks away. He can’t take it anymore. His stomach is clenched with nausea, his mouth watering. He can feel the heat rising in his gorge, and he struggles to his feet. “I have to … I can’t stay in here, Philip … I have to go.”

Whirling around, Brian stumbles out of the laundry room and gets halfway down the hall when he drops to his knees and roars vomit.

His stomach is relatively empty. What comes out of him is mostly bile. But it comes on spasms of agony. He retches and retches, the acids spattering a six-foot length of carpet between the hallway and the living room. He upchucks his guts, which instantly makes a cold sweat break out all over his body and sends him into a paroxysm of coughing. The fit goes on for endless minutes, each cough throbbing painfully in his ribs. He coughs and coughs until he finally collapses into a heap on the floor.

Fifteen feet away, in the light of a battery-powered lantern, Nick Parsons packs his knapsack. He shoves in a change of clothes, a couple of cans of beans, blankets, a flashlight, some bottled water. He searches the cluttered coffee table for something.

Brian manages to sit up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You can’t leave, man … not now.”

“Hell I can’t,” Nick says, finding his Bible under a pile of candy wrappers. He puts the Bible in the backpack. The muffled feeding noises drift down the hallway, fueling Nick’s anxiety.

“I’m begging you, Nick.”

Nick zips the knapsack shut. He doesn’t look at Brian as he says, “You don’t need me…”

“That’s not true.” Brian swallows the bitter taste of bile. “I need you now more than ever … I need your help … to keep things together.”

“Together?” Nick looks up. He slings the backpack over his shoulder, and then he walks over to where Brian is slumped on the floor. “Things haven’t been together around here for a long time.”

“Nick. Listen to me—”

“He’s too far gone, Brian.”

“Listen. I understand what you’re saying. Give him one more chance. Maybe this is like a one-time thing. Maybe … I don’t know … it’s grief. One more chance, Nick. We got a much better shot at survival if we stay together.”

For a long, agonizing moment, Nick considers all this. Then, on a weary, exasperated sigh, which seems to deflate his very spirit, he drops the knapsack.

*   *   *

The next day, Philip vanishes. Brian and Nick don’t even bother looking for him. They stay inside for most of the day, hardly speaking to each other, feeling like zombies themselves, moving silently from bathroom to kitchen to living room, where they sit staring out the barred window at the blustery sky, trying to come up with an answer, a way out of this downward spiral.

Around five o’clock that afternoon, they hear a strange buzzing noise coming from outside—like a cross between a chain saw and a boat motor. Worried that it might have something to do with Philip, Brian goes to the back door, listens, then pushes his way outside and takes a few steps across the cracked cement of the back porch.

The noise is louder now. In the distance, on the north side of town, a thundercloud of dust rises into the steel-gray sky. The howl of engines sputters and waxes and wanes on the breeze, and with a surge of relief, Brian realizes that it’s merely somebody maneuvering race cars around the dirt track arena. Every so often, the sound of cheers warbles and echoes on the wind.

For a moment, Brian panics. Don’t these idiots realize all this noise is going to draw every Biter within a fifty-mile radius? At the same time, though, Brian is transfixed by that buzz-saw sound drifting on the breeze. Like a wandering radio signal, it touches something sore inside him, an ache for preplague times, a series of painful memories of lazy Sunday afternoons, a good night’s sleep, walking into a goddamn grocery store and buying a fucking gallon of milk.

He goes back inside, puts his jacket on, and tells Nick he’s going for a walk.

*   *   *

The entrance to the racetrack borders the main drag, a high cyclone fence stretched between two brick piles. As Brian approaches, he sees drifts of trash and old tires scattered across the meager box office, which is boarded by graffiti-stained planks.

The noise rises to ear-piercing levels—the winding scream of motors and caterwauling crowds—tainted by the odors of gasoline and burning rubber. The sky is choked with a haze of dust and smoke.

Brian finds a gap in the fence, and he heads for it, when he hears a voice.

“Hey!”

He pauses, turns, and sees three men in ratty camo-fatigues coming toward him. Two of the men are in their twenties, with greasy long hair and assault rifles pinned up high against their shoulders patrol-style. The oldest of the three—a crew-cut hard-ass, his olive drab jacket buttoned up with a bullet bandolier across his chest—walks out front, obviously in command.

“Admission is forty bucks or the equivalent in trade,” says the commander.

“Admission?” Brian says, taken aback. He sees a name patch on the older man’s breast pocket: maj. gavin. Up to this point, Brian has only stolen glimpses of the vicious National Guardsman, but now, at this proximity, Brian can see a glint of crazy in the man’s frosty blue eyes. His breath smells of Jim Beam.

“Forty bucks for an adult, son—you an adult?” The other men chuckle. “Kids get in free, of course, but you look over eighteen to me. Just barely.”

“You’re taking money from people?” Brian is confused. “Times like these?”

“You’re free to trade, friend. You got a chicken? Some Penthouse magazines you been jackin’ off to?”

More snickers.

Brian’s gut goes cold with anger. “I don’t have forty bucks.”

The smile disappears from the Major’s face like a switch has been thrown. “Then have a nice day.”

“Who gets the money?”

This gets the attention of the other two Guardsmen. They move in closer. Gavin comes nose to nose with Brian, and says in a soft, threatening grunt, “It’s for the Commons.”

“The what?”

“The Commons … the collective … community improvements and what-not.”

Brian feels a surge of rage twisting inside him. “You sure it’s not for the collective of you three?”

“I’m sorry,” the Major says in a flat, icy tone, “I must have missed the memo that says you’re the new city clerk. You boys get the memo stating that this peckerwood is the new Woodbury city clerk?”

“No, sir,” says one of the greasy-haired minions. “Didn’t get that memo.”

Gavin pulls a .45 semiauto from his belt holster, thumbs off the safety, and presses the barrel against Brian’s temple. “You need to study up on group dynamics, son. You flunk civics class in high school?”

Brian says nothing. He stares into the Major’s eyes, and a red lens draws down over Brian’s vision. Everything goes red. Brian’s hands tingle, his head spins.

“Say ahh,” the Major says.

“What?”

“I SAID OPEN YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH!” Gavin bellows, and the other two Guardsmen swing their assault rifles into ready positions, the muzzles trained on Brian’s skull. Brian opens his mouth, and Gavin inserts the cold barrel of the .45 between Brian’s teeth like a dentist checking for cavities.

Something breaks inside Brian. The steel muzzle tastes like old coins and bitter oil. The entire world turns the deepest shade of scarlet.

“Go back to where you came from,” the Major says. “Before you get yourself hurt.”

Brian manages a nod.

The muzzle slips out of his mouth.

Moving as if in a dream, Brian slowly backs away from the Guardsmen, turns, and walks stiffly back the way he came, now traveling through an invisible mist of crimson.

*   *   *

Around seven o’clock that evening, Brian is back at the apartment, alone, still bundled in his jacket, standing at the barred window in the rear of the living room, gazing out at the dwindling daylight, his racing thoughts like contrary waves crashing against a breakwater. He covers his ears. The muffled thumping noises of the miniature zombie in the next room fuel his stupor—a phonograph needle skipping on a record—driving Brian further and further inward.

At first, he barely registers the sound of Nick returning from who-knows-where, the shuffling footsteps, the click of the closet door. But when he hears the muted mutterings drifting down the hallway, he snaps out of his trance and goes to investigate.

Nick is digging in the closet for something. His tattered nylon coat is damp, his sneakers muddy, and he’s murmuring under his breath, “‘I will lift my eyes up to the hills … And from whence comes my help?… My help comes from the Lord … Who made heaven and earth.’”

Brian sees Nick pull the pistol-grip shotgun from the closet.

“Nick, what are you doing?”

Nick doesn’t answer. He snaps open the gun’s pump mechanism, and checks the breech. It’s empty. He madly searches the floor of the closet, and he finds the single box of shells, which they managed to spirit all the way from the villa to Woodbury. He keeps muttering, “‘The Lord shall preserve us from all evil … He shall preserve our souls…’”

Brian takes a step closer. “Nick, what the hell is going on?”

Still no answer. Nick tries to load the shells with shaky hands and he drops one. It rolls across the floor. Nick fumbles another one into the breech, and then pumps it home with a clang. “‘Behold he who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep…’”

“Nick!” Brian grabs the man’s shoulder and spins him around. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

For a moment, it almost looks like Nick is about to swing the shotgun up and blow Brian’s head off—the look of unadulterated fury contorts Nick’s face. Then he gets himself under control, and swallows, and looks at Brian and says, “This can’t go on.”

Then, without another word, Nick turns and marches across the room and out the front door.

Brian grabs his .38, shoves it down the back of his belt, and hurries after Nick.

TWENTY-TWO

The purple light of dusk settles over the landscape. Icy winds toss the trees along the edges of the woods bordering Woodbury. The air swirls with the odors of wood smoke and carbon monoxide, as well as the unceasing whine of dirt racers emanating from the center of town. The back streets are fairly deserted, most of the inhabitants at the track … but still, it’s a miracle nobody sees Brian and Nick stumbling across the vacant lot bordering the safe zone.

Nick prays furiously as he heads for the woods, carrying the pistol-grip shotgun on his shoulder like some kind of holy bludgeon. Brian keeps grabbing at Nick, trying to slow him down, trying to get him to stop his goddamn praying for one second and talk like a normal person, but Nick is driven by some feverish objective.

At last, as they approach the tree line, Brian yanks at Nick’s coat so hard, he nearly knocks him over. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Nick spins and gives Brian a hard look. “I saw him dragging a girl out here.” Nick’s voice is brittle and on the verge of tears.

“Philip?”

“It can’t go on, Brian—”

“What girl?”

“Someone from town, he took her by force. Whatever he’s doing, it has to stop.”

Brian studies Nick’s quivering chin. Nick’s eyes fill up with tears. Brian takes a deep breath. “Okay, calm down for a second, just calm down.”

“He’s got the darkness in him, Brian. Let go of me. It’s gotta stop.”

“You saw him take a girl but you didn’t—”

“Let go of me, Brian.”

For a moment, Brian just stands there, clutching at Nick’s sleeve. Gooseflesh ripples down Brian’s back, his midsection going cold. He refuses to accept this. There has to be a way to get things back on track, get things under control.

Finally, after an agonizing pause, Brian looks at Nick and says, “Show me.”

*   *   *

Nick takes Brian down a narrow, untrimmed footpath that snakes through a copse of pecan trees. Overgrown with hemlock and ironweed, the path is already lousy with shadows. Magic hour is closing in, the temperature nose-diving.

Brambles and thorns tear at their jackets as they hasten toward a break in the foliage.

To their right, through a latticework of leaves, they can see the southernmost edge of the construction site, where a new section of the wooden barricade is going up. Piles of timber lie nearby. The bulldozer sits in the gloom. Nick indicates a clearing up ahead.

“There he is,” Nick whispers as they approach a deadfall on the threshold of the clearing. He drops down behind the logs, looking almost like a hysterical little boy playing army. Brian joins him, crouching down and peering over the top of the rotting timber.

About twenty yards in the distance, in a natural basin of mossy earth, shrouded by a canopy of ancient live oaks and longleaf pine, Philip Blake is visible. The ground is carpeted in matted pine needles, fungus, and weeds, and a low faint glow of methane clings to the forest floor, a ghostly magenta haze that gives the clearing an almost mystical cast. Nick raises the shotgun. “‘Dear Lord,’” he mumbles under his breath, “‘please cleanse us of all this unrighteousness—’”

“Nick, stop it,” Brian whispers.

“‘I renounce all sins,’” Nick drones on, gaping at the horror in the clearing. “‘They offend thee, O Lord—’”

“Shut up, just shut up!” Brian is trying to make sense of it all. In the shadows, it’s hard to make out exactly what they’re looking at. At first glance, it looks like Philip is out there, kneeling down in the weeds, hog-tying a pig. His denim jacket soaked in sweat, covered in cockleburs, he winds rope around the wrists and ankles of a writhing figure beneath him.

A frigid blast of horror swirls through Brian when he realizes it is indeed a young woman on the ground, her blouse torn, her mouth gagged with nylon rope. “Jesus Christ, what the hell is he—”

Nick keeps babbling under his breath: “‘Forgive me, Lord, for what I’m about to do, and with the help of Thy grace I serve Thy will—’”

“Shut the fuck up!” Brian’s brain is chugging, seizing up with panic, racing with frantic assumptions: Philip is either going to rape this poor woman or kill her and feed her to Penny. Something has to be done, and it has to be done quickly. Nick is right. He was right all along. There has to be a way to stop this before—

A blur of movement next to Brian.

Nick is vaulting over the deadfall, pushing his way through the briars and into the clearing.

*   *   *

“Nick, wait!” Brian gets halfway through the brambles when he sees the deadly tableau taking shape in the shadowy clearing like an arrangement of players on a surreal chessboard, coming together in dreamy slow motion.

Nick stumbles out into the open with his shotgun raised at Philip, and Philip, startled by the sudden sound of Brian’s warning cry, springs to his feet. Weaponless, glancing nervously from the wriggling women to the duffel bag lying in the toadstools next to her, Philip raises his hands. “Put that goddamn thing down, Nicky.”

Nick raises the bead of the muzzle until it’s trained directly on Philip. “Devil’s got his hooks in you, Philip. You’ve sinned against God … desecrated His name. It’s in the hands of the Lord now.”

Brian is staggering into the clearing, fumbling for his .38, hyperventilating with adrenaline. “Nick, don’t!—DON’T DO IT!” Brian’s mind races as he comes to a halt ten feet behind Nick.

By this point, the girl on the ground has managed to roll over—still bound and gagged—and she’s crying into the moist earth, as if wishing it would open up and let her climb in and die. Meanwhile, Nick and Philip are standing six feet away from each other, their gazes locked.

“What are you, the avenging angel?” Philip asks his longtime friend.

“Maybe I am.”

“This doesn’t concern you, Nicky.”

Nick is trembling with emotion, his eyes blinking away tears. “There’s a better place for you and your daughter, Philly.”

Philip stands as still as a stone monument, his narrow, weathered face looking positively grotesque in the gloomy light. “And I suppose you’re the one who’s gonna send me and Penny to Glory?”

“Somebody’s gotta stop this, Philly. Might as well be me.” Nick raises the sight to his eye and mutters, “‘Lord, please forgive—’”

“Nick, wait!—Please, please! Listen to me!” Brian circles around with the .38 pointed up in the air like he’s a referee. He comes within inches of Nick, who still has his sight fixed on Philip. Brian babbles: “All the years of bumming around Waynesboro, all the laughs you shared, all the miles we put behind us—doesn’t that count for something? Philip saved our lives! Things have gotten out of hand, yeah. But things can be put back together. Put the gun down, Nick. I’m begging you.”

Nick shakes. He keeps the sight fixed. Sweat beads on his forehead.

Philip takes a step closer. “Don’t worry about it, Brian. Nicky’s always been a talker. He ain’t got the stones to shoot somebody who’s still alive.”

Nick trembles furiously.

Brian watches, frozen with indecision.

Philip calmly reaches down to the girl, grabs her by the scruff of her collar, and yanks her up like a stray piece of luggage. He turns and starts dragging the squirming girl toward the far side of the clearing.

Nick’s voice drops into a lower register. “Have mercy on us all.”

The shotgun ratchets suddenly.

And the muzzle roars.

*   *   *

A 12-gauge shotgun is a blunt instrument. The lethal .33-caliber pellets can spread as wide as a foot or more in a short distance, tearing through its target with enough force to penetrate a cinder block.

The buckshot that hits Philip in the back punches through the meat of his shoulder blades and the cords of his neck, sending half his brain stem out through the front of his throat. The grains also take the side of the girl’s scalp off, killing her instantly. The two bodies are launched in a cloud of pink mist.

The pair tumble forward in a tangled clench before sprawling side by side on the forest floor, their arms and legs akimbo. The girl is already stone-still dead but Philip twitches in his death throes for several agonizing seconds. His face is upturned, frozen in a mask of utter surprise. He tries to breathe but the damage to his brain is shutting everything down.

The shock of what has just happened drives Nick Parsons to his knees, his finger still frozen on the trigger pad, the shotgun sizzling hot.

His vision tunnels as he gapes at the damage inflicted on the two human bodies in the path of the blast. He drops the shotgun in the weeds and moves his mouth but makes no sound. What has he done? He feels himself contracting inward like a seed pod, cold and desolate, the clanging noise of Armageddon ringing in his ears, the scalding tears of shame coming now in rivulets down his face: What has he done? What has he done? What has he done?

*   *   *

Brian Blake turns to ice. His pupils dilate. The sight of his brother lying in a bloody heap on the ground next to the dead girl stamps itself forever on his brain. All other thoughts drain out of his mind.

Only the noise of Nick’s keening wails penetrate Brian’s stupor.

Howling with sobs now, Nick is still on his knees next to Brian. All reason and sanity have drained out of Nick Parsons’s face, and he caterwauls at the sight of the carnage. Bursts of gibberish come out of him in stringers of snot—part prayer, part insane pleading—his breath showing in the chill twilight. He looks up at the heavens.

Brian raises the .38 without thinking—a jolt of psychotic rage driving him—and he squeezes off a single shot, point-blank, into the side of Nick Parsons’s skull.

The battering ram drives Nick over in a jet of red fluid, the slug ripping through his brain, coming out the other side and chewing through a tree. Nick folds, eyes rolling back, brain already dead.

He lands with the profound surrender of a child going to sleep.

*   *   *

The passage of time loses all meaning. Brian doesn’t see the dark silhouettes of figures approaching through the distant trees, drawn to the noise. Nor does he have any awareness of moving across the clearing to the mangled pair of bodies. But somehow, without even being conscious of it, Brian Blake ends up on the ground next to Philip, cradling his younger brother’s bloody form in his lap.

He gazes down at Philip’s grizzled face, now as pale as alabaster, stippled with blood.

A flicker of life still glints in Philip’s eyes, as the two brothers meet each other’s gaze. For a brief instant, Brian flinches at the glacier of sorrow cutting through him, the connection between the two siblings as thick as blood, as deep as the earth, now fracturing Brian’s soul with the power of shifting tectonic plates. The weight of their common history—the endless tedium of grammar school, the blessed summer vacations, the passing of late-night whispers from one bunk bed to the other, their first beers on that ill-fated Appalachian camping trip, their secrets, their fights, their small-town dreams foiled by life’s cruel equations—all of it slices through his soul.

Brian weeps.

His cries—as shrill and keen as that of an animal in a trap—rise up into the darkening sky, blending with the distant whining of race cars. He sobs so hard he doesn’t even notice Philip’s passing.

When Brian looks back down at his brother, Philip’s face has hardened into a marble-white sculpture.

*   *   *

The foliage trembles twenty feet away. At least a dozen Biters of all shapes and sizes are forcing their way through the thicket.

The first one, an adult male in tattered work clothes, pops through the branches with arms reaching at the nothingness, shoe-button eyes scanning the clearing. The thing fixes its gaze on the closest meal: Philip’s cooling corpse.

Brian Blake rises to his feet and turns away. He can’t watch. He knows this is the best option. The only option. Let the zombies clean up the mess.

He shoves the .38 back behind his belt and heads for the construction site.

*   *   *

Brian finds a perch on top of a truck cab to wait out the feeding frenzy.

His brain is a television tuned to many stations all at once. He draws his pistol and clutches it like a security blanket.

The cacophony of voices, the fragments of half-formed images, all crackle and flicker inside Brian’s skull. The twilight has passed into full-bore darkness, the closest vapor light hundreds of yards off. But Brian sees the world around him in photo-negative brilliance now, his fear as keen as a knife edge. He is alone now … as alone as he has ever been … and it eats at him deeper than any zombie.

The wet, gurgling, sucking noises coming from the clearing are barely audible above the constant buzzing of dirt track racers. Somewhere in the back of Brian’s hectic thoughts, he knows that the din of the racetrack is drowning the commotion in the clearing—probably part of Philip’s plan, his abduction of the girl going unheard, unseen.

Through the lacing of brambles and foliage, Brian can see the silhouettes of monsters tearing into the human remains left in the clearing. Clusters of zombies hunch over their quarry, apelike, gorging on hunks of flesh, detached bones dripping with gore, flaps of skin, torn scalps, unidentified appendages, and sopping organs still warm and steaming in the chill air. More of them crowd in, clumsily shoving each other aside, grunting for a morsel.

Brian closes his eyes.

For a moment, he wonders if he should pray. He wonders if he should offer a silent eulogy for his brother, for Nick and the woman, for Penny, for Bobby Marsh, for David Chalmers, for the dead, for the living, and for this whole fucked-up, broken, godforsaken world. But he doesn’t. He simply sits there as the zombies feed.

Some time later—God only knows when—the Biters drift away from the flensed, excoriated remains now lying strewn across the clearing.

Brian slips off the roof of the truck cab and makes his way back through the darkness to the apartment.

*   *   *

That night, Brian sits in the empty apartment, in the living room, in front of the empty, scummy fish tank. It’s the end of the programming day in Brian’s brain. The national anthem has been sung, the broadcast has signed off, and now only a blizzard of white noise blankets his thoughts.

Still clad in his filthy jacket, he sits staring through the fish tank’s rectangular glass side—which is filmed in green mold, and mottled with specks of chum—as though watching some monotonous still life being broadcast from hell. He sits this way, staring trancelike into the vacuous heart of that fish tank, for endless minutes. The minutes turn into hours. His mind-screen is a blank cathode-ray tube boiling with electronic snow. The coming of daylight barely registers. He doesn’t hear the commotion outside the apartment, the troubled voices, the sounds of vehicles.

The day drags on—time now meaningless—until the next evening draws its curtain of darkness down over the apartment. Brian sits in the dark, oblivious to the passage of time, continuing to stare with catatonic interest at the invisible broadcast originating from the empty shell of the fish tank. The next morning comes and goes.

At some point that next day, Brian blinks. The flicker of a message sparks and sputters across the blank screen of his mind. At first, it’s faint and garbled, like a poorly transmitted signal, but with each passing second, it grows stronger, clearer, louder: GOOD-BYE.

Like a depth charge in the center of his soul, the word implodes in a convulsion of white-hot energy, jerking him forward in the shopworn armchair, sitting him bolt upright, forcing open his eyes.

—GOOD-BYE—

*   *   *

He’s dehydrated and stiff, his stomach empty, his pants soaked through with his own urine. For nearly thirty-six hours, he sat in that chair, comatose, as still as a divining rod, and moving isn’t easy at first, but he feels cleansed, scourged, as clearheaded as he’s ever been. He limps into the kitchen and finds little in the cupboard other than a couple of cans of peaches. He tears one open and wolfs the whole thing down, the juice running across his chin. Peaches have never tasted so good. In fact, it occurs to him that perhaps he has never tasted peaches before. He goes into the bedroom and changes out of his disgusting clothes … puts on his only other pair of jeans and his only other shirt (an AC/DC silk-screened tee). He finds his spare Dr. Martens boots and slips them on.

Mounted on the back of the door is a cracked, floor-length mirror.

A wiry, disheveled, compact ferret of a man stares back at him. The crack in the looking glass bisects his narrow visage and his thatch of long, unruly black hair. His face is fringed with straggly whiskers, his eyes sunken and rimmed in dark circles. He hardly recognizes himself.

“Whatever,” he says to the mirror, and walks out of the room.

He finds his .38 in the living room, along with one last speed-loader—the last six rounds in his possession—and he shoves the gun down the back of his belt, the speed-loader into his pocket.

Then he visits Penny.

“Hey there, kiddo,” he says with great tenderness as he enters the laundry room. The narrow chamber of linoleum reeks of the dead. Brian barely notices the smell. He goes over to the little creature, who growls and sputters at his presence, straining against her chains. She’s the color of cement, her eyes like smooth stones.

Brian crouches down in front of her, looks in her bucket. It’s empty.

He looks up at her. “You know I love you, right?”

The Penny-thing snarls.

Brian strokes the side of her delicate little ankle. “I’m going to go get some supplies, sweetheart. I’ll be back before you know it, don’t worry.”

The little dead thing cocks its head and lets out a groan that sounds like air running through rusty pipes. Brian pats her on the leg—out of the range of her rotting incisors—and then rises to his feet.

“See ya soon, sweetie.”

*   *   *

The moment that Brian slips unnoticed from the side door of the apartment, and starts north, striding through the raw winds of the afternoon, his head down, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he can tell something is going on. The racetrack is silent. A couple of townspeople run past him, their eyes aglow with alarm. The air reeks of the dead. Off to the left, behind the barricade of buses and semis, scores of walking corpses wander along the barrier, sniffing for a way in. Up ahead, black smoke pours out of the clinic’s incinerator. Brian quickens his pace.

As he closes in on the town square, he can see, way in the distance, at the north end of the safe zone, where the fence is under construction, men standing on wooden parapets with rifles and binoculars. They don’t look happy. Brian hurries along. All his pain—the stiffness in his joints, the throb in his ribs, all of it—vanishes amid the high-voltage current of his adrenaline.

Woodbury keeps its food rations in a brick warehouse across from the old courthouse. Brian pauses in front of the warehouse when he sees the old derelict juicers loitering across the street in front of the flagstone government building with its chipped Romanesque columns. Other folks stand on the stone steps, nervously smoking cigarettes, while others crowd the entranceway. Brian crosses the intersection and approaches the gathering.

“What’s going on?” he asks the fat old man in the Salvation Army coat.

“Trouble in River City, son,” the old codger says, jerking a greasy thumb at the courthouse. “Half the town’s in there havin’ a powwow.”

“What happened?”

“Found three more residents out in the woods yesterday, picked clean as chicken bones … place is crawlin’ with roamers now, drawn by the racetrack most likely. Damn fools makin’ all that noise.”

For a moment, Brian considers his options. He could very easily avoid this mess, pack up, and move on. He could boost one of the four-wheelers and take Penny in the back and be gone in a flash.

He doesn’t owe these people anything. The safest bet is to not get involved, just get the fuck out of Dodge. That’s the smartest way to play it. But something deep inside Brian makes him reconsider. What would Philip do?

Brian stares at the crowd of townspeople milling about the entrance to the courthouse.

TWENTY-THREE

“Does anybody even know what their names were?” A woman in her late sixties with a halo of fright-wig gray hair stands up in the back of the community room on the first floor of the courthouse building, the veins in her neck wattle pulsing with tension.

The thirty or so beleaguered residents of Woodbury gathered around her—town elders, heads of small families, former merchants, and passers-through who landed here almost by mistake—fidget on folding chairs in tattered coats and muddy boots, facing the front of the narrow conference room. The space has an end-of-world feel to it, with crumbling plaster, overturned coffee urns, exposed wiring, and litter strewn across the parquet floor.

“What the fuck difference does it make?” barks Major Gene Gavin from the front of the room, his minions behind him with their M4 assault rifles on their hips like faux gangbangers. It feels right and proper to the Major to be standing at the head of this little town hall meeting right now, near the flagpoles displaying the American and Georgia State flags. Like MacArthur taking over Japan, or Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run, the Major relishes the opportunity to finally make his stand as the leader pro tem of this miserable town full of chickenshits and rejects. Ramrod tough in his green fatigues and jarhead brush cut, the Major has been waiting for this moment, biding his time for weeks.

No stranger to whipping pussies into shape, Gavin knows he needs respect in order to lead, and in order to be respected, he needs to be feared. Which is exactly how he used to deal with the weekend warriors under his command at Camp Ellenwood. Gavin was a survival instructor with the 221st Military Intelligence Battalion, and he used to torment those lily-livered weaklings on overnight bivouacs up to Scull Shoals by shitting in their duffels and giving them the rubber hose treatment for the smallest infractions. But that might as well have been a million years ago. This situation is Code Fucked, and Gavin is going to take every advantage to stay on top of things.

“It was just a couple of them new guys,” Gavin adds as an afterthought. “And some slut from Atlanta.”

An elderly gentlemen in the front stands up, his bony knees trembling: “All due respect … that was Jim Bridges’s daughter, and she weren’t no slut. Now, I think I speak for everybody when I say we need protection, maybe a curfew … keep people in after dark. Maybe we could take a vote.”

“Sit down, old man … before you hurt yourself.” Gavin gives the old geezer his best menacing look. “We got bigger problems to deal with now—there’s a goddamn convention of them Biters closing in on us.”

The old man takes his seat, grumbling to himself. “All that noise from the damn dirt races … that’s the reason them Biters is surroundin’ us.”

Gavin unsnaps the holster on his hip, exposing the grip of his .45, and takes a threatening step toward the old man. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall opening the floor to comments from the nursing home.” Gavin jabs a finger at the old man. “My advice is for you to shut the fuck up before you get yourself in trouble.”

A younger man springs to his feet two chairs away from the old man. “Take it easy, Gavin,” the younger man says. Tall, olive-skinned, his hair tucked under a bandana, he wears a sleeveless shirt that reveals heavily muscled arms. His dark eyes gleam with street-level smarts. “This ain’t some John Wayne movie, take it down a notch.”

Gavin turns to the man in the bandana, brandishing the .45 with menace. “Shut your mouth, Martinez, and put your spic ass back in your chair.”

Behind Gavin, the two Guardsmen tense up, swinging the muzzles of their M4s up and into ready positions, their eyes scanning the room.

The man named Martinez just shakes his head, and sits back down.

Gavin lets out a frustrated sigh.

“You people don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of this situation,” he says, holstering the .45 as he moves back to the front of the room, speaking with the cadence of a drill instructor. “We’re sittin’ ducks here, we don’t do somethin’ about them barricades. Got a bunch of freeloaders takin’ up space. Expecting everybody else to carry the weight. No discipline! I got news for ya, your little vacation is over. Gonna be some new rules, and you’re all gonna pitch in, and you’re gonna do what you’re told, and you’re gonna keep your fucking mouths shut! Am I making myself clear?”

Gavin pauses, daring somebody to object.

The townspeople sit in silence, looking like children who’ve been sent to the principal’s office. In one corner, Stevens, the physician, sits next to a young woman in her twenties. Dressed in a stained smock, the girl has a stethoscope draped around her neck. Stevens looks like a man smelling something that’s been rotting for a long time. He raises his hand.

The Major rolls his eyes and lets out an exasperated sigh. “What is it now, Stevens?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the doctor says, “but we’re stretched thin already. We’re doing our best.”

“What’s your point?”

The doctor gives him a shrug. “What is it you want from us?”

“I WANT YOUR GODDAMN OBEDIENCE!”

The booming response barely registers on Stevens’s thin, cunning features. Gavin takes long, even breaths, getting himself back under control. Stevens pushes his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose and looks away, shaking his head. Gavin gives his men a look.

The Guardsmen nod in unison at the Major, trigger fingers on trigger pads.

This isn’t going to be as easy as Gavin thought.

*   *   *

Brian Blake stands in the back of the room, in the shadow of a dusty, bankrupt vending machine, his hands in his pockets, listening, taking it all in. His heart thumps. And he hates himself for it. He feels like a laboratory rat in a maze. The crippling fear—an old nemesis—is back with a vengeance. He can feel the speed-loader like a tumor in his pocket, the bulge cold against his thigh. His throat is tight and dry, his tongue two sizes too big for his mouth. What the fuck is wrong with him?

At the front of the room, Gavin keeps pacing in front of the gallery of town founders displayed in shopworn frames across the room’s front wall. “Now, I don’t care what you call this cluster fuck we find ourselves in, I call it war … and right now, this little shit-heel town is officially under marshal-fucking-law.”

Tense murmurings spread through the group. The old man is the only one brazen enough to speak up. “What does that mean, exactly?”

Gavin walks over to the old man. “That means y’all are going to follow orders, be good little boys and girls.” He pats the top of the codger’s bald pate like he’s petting a rabbit. “Y’all behave yourselves, do what you’re told, and we just might survive this shit storm.”

The old man swallows hard. Most of his fellow townspeople look down at the floor. It’s clear to Brian, observing from the back of the room, that the inhabitants of Woodbury are trapped in more ways than one. The hatred in the room is thick enough to paint the walls. But the fear is thicker. It exudes from the very pores of everybody present, including Brian, who is hard at work fighting it. He shoves his terror back down his throat.

Somebody murmurs something near the front of the room, over by the window. Brian is too far away to make out the words, and he gazes over the tops of heads to see who it is.

“You got something you want to say, Detroit?”

Near the window, a middle-aged black man in greasy dungarees and gray beard is sulking in his seat, looking gloomily out the window. His long, tawny fingers are caked with axle grease. The town mechanic, a transplant from up North, he mumbles something to himself, not looking at the Major.

“Speak up, homeboy.” The Major approaches the black man. Towering over him, Gavin says, “What’s your beef? You don’t like the program?”

Almost inaudibly, the black man says, “I’m outta here.”

He gets up to make his exit, when suddenly the Major reaches for his gun.

With almost involuntary instinct, the black man reaches a big, callused hand down to the revolver shoved into his belt. But before he can draw the weapon or even give it a second thought, Gavin draws on him. “Please go for it, Detroit,” Gavin snarls, pointing the .45 at the man. “So I can blow the back of your nappy fuckin’ head off.”

The other soldiers move in behind the Major, raising their assault rifles, fixing their eyes on the black man.

Hand still on the hilt of his pistol, eyes locked with Gavin, the black man named Detroit murmurs, “It’s bad enough we gotta fight off them dead things … now we gotta deal with you pushin’ us around?”

“Sit. The fuck. Down. Now.” Gavin puts the barrel on Detroit’s forehead. “Or I will take you down. And that is a promise.”

With an exasperated sigh, Detroit flops back down.

“That goes for the rest of you!” The Major turns to the others. “You think I’m doin’ this for my health? You think I’m runnin’ for dog catcher? This ain’t no democracy. This is life and fucking death!” He begins pacing across the front of the room. “You want to keep from being dog food, you’ll do what you’re told. Let the professionals mind the store, and keep your fuckin’ pie holes shut!”

Silence hangs in the room like a poisonous gas. In back, Brian feels the skin on the back of his neck prickle. His heart is going to break through his sternum, it’s hammering so hard in his chest. He can’t breathe. He wants to rip this tin soldier’s head off but his body is going into some kind of fight-or-flight paralysis. His brain crackles with flickering fragments of memory, sights and sounds from a lifetime driven by fear, avoiding bullies on the playground at Burke County Elementary, skirting the parking lot of the Stop-and-Go to avoid a group of leather thugs, running away from a gang of toughs at a Kid Rock concert, wondering where Philip is … where the hell is Philip when you need him …

A noise from the front of the room shakes Brian out of his rumination.

The man named Detroit is getting up. He’s had enough. His chair squeaks as he rises to his full height—well over six feet—and turns to walk away.

“Where the hell are you going?” Gavin watches the black man move down the aisle toward the front exit. “HEY! I ASKED YOU A QUESTION, DETROIT! WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING!”

Detroit doesn’t even look back, he just waves dismissively, mumbling, “I’m outta here … good luck, y’all … you’re gonna need it with these motherfuckers.”

“YOU SIT YOUR BLACK ASS BACK DOWN RIGHT NOW OR I WILL BLOW YOU AWAY!”

Detroit keeps walking.

Gavin pulls his sidearm.

There is an audible intake of air among the townspeople as Gavin draws a bead on the back of Detroit’s head.

The blast sucks the air out of the room—so loud, it rattles the walls, accompanied by a scream from one of the older women—as a single round goes into the back of the black man’s skull. Detroit is thrown forward into the vending machine next to Brian. Brian jerks. The black man bounces off the steel panel and then folds to the floor, his blood spray-painting the Coke display, the wall above the machine, and even part of the ceiling.

*   *   *

Many things happen in the aftermath of that blast, even before the ringing echoes of screams have had a chance to fade away. Almost immediately, three separate townspeople—two middle-aged men, and a woman in her thirties—dart toward the exit, and Brian watches as if in a dream, his ears ringing, his eyes flash-blind. He can barely hear the strangely calm voice of Major Gavin—void of regret, void of any feeling whatsoever—ordering his two Guardsmen—Barker and Manning—to go get the fleeing townspeople, and while they’re at it, round up anyone else who’s “still out there hiding like goddamn cockroaches,” because Gavin wants every soul who’s still got a pulse to hear what he has to say. The two Guardsmen hurry out of the room, leaving behind the stunned, petrified group of twenty-five residents, the Major … and Brian.

The room seems to turn on its axis for Brian as Gavin holsters his gun, looking down at the body of the black man sprawled on the floor as though it was a hunting trophy. Gavin turns and saunters back toward the front. He’s got everybody’s attention now like never before, and he seems to be enjoying every minute of it. Brian can barely hear the Major droning on now about making an example out of any cocksucker who thinks they can endanger the lives of Woodbury’s residents by being a lone wolf, by bucking the system, by being a smart-ass know-it-all who thinks they can go it alone and keep their shit to themselves. These times, according to Gavin, are special times. Foretold in the Bible. Prophesied. Matter of fact, these times are maybe, just maybe, the end-time. And from now on, every last son of a bitch in this town needs to get used to the fact that this may very well be the last battle between man and Satan, and as far as the fine folks of Woodbury, Georgia, are concerned, Gavin has been hereby appointed, by default, the goddamn Messiah.

This maniacal lecture lasts for perhaps a minute—maybe two minutes at the most—but in that brief span of time, Brian Blake goes through a metamorphosis.

Frozen against the side of the vending machine, the fallen man’s blood seeping under the soles of his shoes, Brian realizes he will have no chance in this world if he lets his natural inclinations drag him down. Brian’s instincts—to shrink away from violence, to skirt dangers, to avoid confrontation—fill him with shame, and he finds himself casting his racing thoughts back to the very first encounter he had with the walking dead, back in Deering, at his parents’ place, a million light-years away. They came out of the toolshed in back, and Brian was trying to talk to them, reason with them, warning them to stay away, throwing stones at them, running back into the house, boarding up windows, pissing his pants, behaving like the weakling he always was and always will be. And in the space of that single terrible instant—as Gavin pontificates to the townspeople—Brian is gripped with a flickering flash-frame series of visions of his cowardice and indecision along the road to western Georgia, as if he’d learned nothing along the way: huddling in the closet at Wiltshire Estates, bagging his first zombie almost by accident in the Chalmerses’ building, bellyaching to his brother about this and that, always weak and scared and useless. Brian realizes suddenly—with the convulsive pain of an embolism exploding in his heart—that there is no way he can survive on his own. No way in hell. And now, as Major Gavin starts barking orders at the traumatized residents from the front of the council room, assigning arduous duties and rules and procedures, Brian feels his consciousness disconnecting, detaching from his body like a butterfly leaving its cocoon. It starts with Brian wishing that Philip were there to protect him, as he’d done since the beginning of the ordeal. How would Philip handle Gavin? What would Philip do? Soon, this simple longing transforms into agonizing pain and loss over Philip’s death—the torture like an open wound—the sharp edge of grief slicing through Brian and tearing him in two. Bracing himself against that blood-spattered vending machine, Brian feels his center of gravity rising, his spirit breaking away from his body, like a primordial chunk of the earth tearing away to form the moon. Dizziness threatens to drive him to the floor but he fights it, and before he can even register what is going on, Brian has risen out of his body. His consciousness now floats above his body, a ghostly onlooker, gazing down at himself in that airless, reeking, crowded community room in the old Woodbury courthouse.

Brian sees himself grow still.

Brian sees the target at the front of the room, twenty-five feet away.

Brian sees himself take a single step away from the vending machine, reaching behind his belt, grasping hold of the beavertail grip of the .38-caliber pistol, while Gavin continues hollering orders up front, oblivious, pacing across stoic portraits of Woodbury’s forefathers.

Brian sees himself taking three more tactical steps, moving down the center aisle, while simultaneously drawing the .38 from his belt in one smooth instinctual movement. He holds the gun at his side as he completes the fourth additional stride—coming within fifteen feet of Gavin, finally getting Gavin’s attention, causing the Major to pause and look up—and that’s when Brian raises the muzzle and empties the entire cylinder of lethal, hollow-point Glaser Safety Slugs into the general vicinity of Gavin’s face.

This time, the townspeople jerk in their seats at the noise but, oddly, nobody screams.

*   *   *

No one is more shocked by Brian’s actions than Brian, and he stands frozen for one excruciating moment in the center aisle, the .38 still raised and empty, his arm locked in the shooting position, the spectacle of Major Gavin’s remains slumped on the floor against the front wall. Gavin’s upper body is riddled, his face and neck pumping deep red arterial blood in oily bubbles.

The spell is broken by the sound of squeaking chairs, the shuffle of people rising. Brian lowers the gun to his side. He looks around. Some of the townspeople are moving to the front of the room. Others are staring at Brian. One of the men kneels by Gavin’s body, but he doesn’t bother feeling for a pulse or looking too closely. The one named Martinez comes over to Brian.

“Don’t take this personally, brother,” Martinez says, his voice a low, grave murmur. “But you better get your ass outta here.”

“No.” Brian feels as though his center of gravity has returned, his very soul rebooting like a computer powering back up.

Martinez stares. “Gonna be hell to pay when those goons get back.”

“It’ll be okay,” Brian says, reaching into his pocket for the speed-loader. He dumps the empty shells, then fumbles the fresh round into the pistol. He’s unskilled at the maneuver but his hands are rock steady. He has stopped shaking. “We outnumber them ten to one.”

Some of the townspeople are gathered by the vending machine, clustered around the body of the one named Detroit. Dr. Stevens is feeling for a pulse as the sound of someone softly crying reaches Brian’s ears. He turns toward the group gathered there.

“Who’s armed in here?” he asks.

A few hands go up.

“Stay close,” Brian says, then weaves his way through the stunned, milling townspeople to the exit. He stands inside the door, gazing out through the panes of safety glass at the blustery, overcast autumn day.

Even through the door’s window glass, the unmistakable drone of zombies can be heard way off in the distance, under the wind. They now sound different somehow to Brian’s ears. Segregated behind makeshift barricades, sectioned off from the stubborn little enclave of survivors by thin membranes of wood and metal, the low, ubiquitous symphony of moaning noises—as ugly and dissonant as wind chimes fashioned from human bones—no longer whisper of doom. They now speak of opportunity. They sound to Brian like an invitation to a new way of life, a new paradigm that is just now forming within Brian like the birth of a new religion.

A voice next to Brian snaps him out of his trance. He turns and sees Martinez, giving him an inquisitive look. “I’m sorry,” Brian says. “What did you say?”

“Your name … I didn’t catch it before.”

“My name?”

Martinez nods. “I’m Martinez … and you are…?”

Brian pauses for the slimmest of moments before replying, “Philip … Philip Blake.”

Martinez reaches out to shake Brian’s hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Philip.”

With a firm grip, the two men clasp hands, and in that single gesture a new order begins to take shape.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

THE WALKING DEAD: RISE OF THE GOVERNOR. Copyright © 2011 by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

“In My Dreams” by Jeanie B! copyright © 2004 by Jeanne Bonansinga. Used by permission.

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e-ISBN 9781429995788

First Edition: October 2011

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The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury

Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga

Thomas Dunne Books

St. Martin’s Press

New York

Dedicated to Jilly (L’amore della mia vita)

—Jay Bonansinga

For all the people who have made me look far more talented than I actually am over the years: Charlie Adlard, Cory Walker, Ryan Ottley, Jason Howard, and of course … mister Jay Bonansinga

—Robert Kirkman

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Robert Kirkman, David Alpert, Brendan Deneen, Nicole Sohl, Circle of Confusion, Andy Cohen, Kemper Donovan, and Tom Leavens.

—Jay Bonansinga

For my father, Carl Kirkman, who taught me the value of working for yourself and showed me what someone can accomplish if they work hard and focus on what they want to achieve. And for my father-in-law, John Hicks, who gave me the confidence to take the plunge and quit my day job and strike out on my own. I owe a lot to both of you.

—Robert Kirkman

PART 1

Red Day Rising

Life hurts a lot more than death.

—Jim Morrison

ONE

No one in the clearing hears the biters coming through the high trees.

The metallic ringing noises of tent stakes going into the cold, stubborn Georgia clay drown the distant footsteps—the intruders still a good five hundred yards off in the shadows of neighboring pines. No one hears the twigs snapping under the north wind, or the telltale guttural moaning noises, as faint as loons behind the treetops. No one detects the trace odors of putrid meat and black mold marinating in feces. The tang of autumn wood smoke and rotting fruit on the midafternoon breeze masks the smell of the walking dead.

In fact, for quite a while, not a single one of the settlers in the burgeoning encampment registers any imminent danger whatsoever—most of the survivors now busily heaving up support beams hewn from found objects such as railroad ties, telephone poles, and rusty lengths of rebar.

“Pathetic … look at me,” the slender young woman in the ponytail comments with an exasperated groan, crouching awkwardly by a square of paint-spattered tent canvas folded on the ground over by the northwest corner of the lot. She shivers in her bulky Georgia Tech sweatshirt, antique jewelry, and ripped jeans. Ruddy and freckled, with long, deep-brown hair that dangles in tendrils wound with delicate little feathers, Lilly Caul is a bundle of nervous tics, from the constant yanking of stray wisps of hair back behind her ears to the compulsive gnawing of fingernails. Now, with her small hand she clutches the hammer tighter and repeatedly whacks at the metal stake, grazing the head as if the thing is greased.

“It’s okay, Lilly, just relax,” the big man says, looking on from behind her.

“A two-year-old could do this.”

“Stop beating yourself up.”

“It’s not me I want to beat up.” She pounds some more, two-handing the hammer. The stake goes nowhere. “It’s this stupid stake.”

“You’re choked up too high on the hammer.”

“I’m what?”

“Move your hand more toward the end of the handle, let the tool do the work.”

More pounding.

The stake jumps off hard ground, goes flying, and lands ten feet away.

“Damn it! Damn it!” Lilly hits the ground with the hammer, looks down and exhales.

“You’re doing fine, babygirl, lemme show you.”

The big man moves in next to her, kneels, and starts to gently take the hammer from her. Lilly recoils, refusing to hand over the implement. “Give me a second, okay? I can handle this, I can,” she insists, her narrow shoulders tensing under the sweatshirt.

She grabs another stake and starts again, tapping the metal crown tentatively. The ground resists, as tough as cement. It’s been a cold October so far, and the fallow fields south of Atlanta have hardened. Not that this is a bad thing. The tough clay is also porous and dry—for the moment at least—hence the decision to pitch camp here. Winter’s coming, and this contingent has been regrouping here for over a week, settling in, recharging, rethinking their futures—if indeed they have any futures.

“You kinda just let the head fall on it,” the burly African-American demonstrates next to her, making swinging motions with his enormous arm. His huge hands look as though they could cover her entire head. “Use gravity and the weight of the hammer.”

It takes a great deal of conscious effort for Lilly not to stare at the black man’s arm as it pistons up and down. Even crouching in his sleeveless denim shirt and ratty down vest, Josh Lee Hamilton cuts an imposing figure. Built like an NFL tackle, with monolithic shoulders, enormous tree-trunk thighs, and thick neck, he still manages to carry himself quite gently. His sad, long-lashed eyes and his deferential brow, which perpetually creases the front of his balding pate, give off an air of unexpected tenderness. “No big deal … see?” He shows her again and his tattooed bicep—as big as a pig’s belly—jumps as he wields the imaginary hammer. “See what I’m sayin’?”

Lilly discreetly looks away from Josh’s rippling arm. She feels a faint frisson of guilt every time she notices his muscles, his tapered back, his broad shoulders. Despite the amount of time they have been spending together in this hell-on-earth some Georgians are calling “the Turn,” Lilly has scrupulously avoided crossing any intimate boundaries with Josh. Best to keep it platonic, brother-and-sister, best buds, nothing more. Best to keep it strictly business … especially in the midst of this plague.

But that has not stopped Lilly from giving the big man coy little sidelong grins when he calls her “girlfriend” or “babydoll” … or making sure he gets a glimpse of the Chinese character tattooed above Lilly’s tailbone at night when she’s settling into her sleeping bag. Is she leading him on? Is she manipulating him for protection? The rhetorical questions remain unanswered.

For Lilly the embers of fear constantly smoldering in her gut have cauterized all ethical issues and nuances of social behavior. In fact, fear has dogged her off and on for most her life—she developed an ulcer in high school, and had to be on antianxiety meds during her aborted tenure at Georgia Tech—but now it simmers constantly inside her. The fear poisons her sleep, clouds her thoughts, presses in on her heart. The fear makes her do things.

She seizes the hammer so tightly now it makes the veins twitch in her wrist.

“It’s not rocket science ferchrissake!” she barks, and finally gets control of the hammer and drives a stake into the ground through sheer rage. She grabs another stake. She moves to the opposite corner of the canvas, and then wills the metal bit straight through the fabric and into the ground by pounding madly, wildly, missing as many blows as she connects. Sweat breaks out on her neck and brow. She pounds and pounds. She loses herself for a moment.

At last she pauses, exhausted, breathing hard, greasy with perspiration.

“Okay … that’s one way to do it,” Josh says softly, rising to his feet, a smirk on his chiseled brown face as he regards the half-dozen stakes pinning the canvas to the ground. Lilly says nothing.

The zombies, coming undetected through the trees to the north, are now less than five minutes away.

*   *   *

Not a single one of Lilly Caul’s fellow survivors—numbering close to a hundred now, all grudgingly banding together to try and build a ragtag community here—realizes the one fatal drawback to this vacant rural lot in which they’ve erected their makeshift tents.

At first glance, the property appears to be ideal. Situated in a verdant area fifty miles south of the city—an area that normally produces millions of bushels of peaches, pears, and apples annually—the clearing sits in a natural basin of seared crabgrass and hard-packed earth. Abandoned by its onetime landlords—probably the owners of the neighboring orchards—the lot is the size of a soccer field. Gravel drives flank the property. Along these winding roads stand dense, overgrown walls of white pine and live oak that stretch up into the hills.

At the north end of the pasture stands the scorched, decimated remains of a large manor home, its blackened dormers silhouetted against the sky like petrified skeletons, its windows blown out by a recent maelstrom. Over the last couple of months, fires have taken out large chunks of the suburbs and farmhouses south of Atlanta.

Back in August, after the first human encounters with walking corpses, the panic that swept across the South played havoc with the emergency infrastructure. Hospitals got overloaded and then closed down, firehouses went dark, and Interstate 85 clogged up with wrecks. People gave up finding stations on their battery-operated radios, and then started looking for supplies to scavenge, places to loot, alliances to strike, and areas in which to hunker.

The people gathered here on this abandoned homestead found each other on the dusty back roads weaving through the patchwork tobacco farms and deserted strip malls of Pike, Lamar, and Meriwether counties. Comprising all ages, including over a dozen families with small children, their convoy of sputtering, dying vehicles grew … until the need to find shelter and breathing room became paramount.

Now they sprawl across this two-square-acre parcel of vacant land like a throwback to some depression-era Hooverville, some of them living in their cars, others carving out niches on the softer grass, a few of them already ensconced in small pup tents around the periphery. They have very few firearms, and very little ammunition. Garden implements, sporting goods, kitchen equipment—all the niceties of civilized life—now serve as weapons. Dozens of these survivors are still pounding stakes into the cold, scabrous ground, working diligently, racing some unspoken, invisible clock, struggling to erect their jury-rigged sanctuaries—each one of them oblivious to the peril that approaches through the pines to the north.

One of the settlers, a lanky man in his midthirties in a John Deere cap and leather jacket, stands under the edge of a gigantic field of canvas in the center of the pasture, his chiseled features shaded by the gargantuan tent fabric. He supervises a group of sullen teenagers gathered under the canvas. “C’mon, ladies, put your backs into it!” he barks, hollering over the din of clanging metal filling the chilled air.

The teens grapple with a massive wooden beam, which serves as the center mast of what is essentially a large circus tent. They found the tent back on I-85, strewn in a ditch next to an overturned flatbed truck, a faded insignia of a giant paint-chipped clown on the vehicle’s bulwark. Measuring over a hundred meters in circumference, the stained, tattered canvas big top—which smells of mildew and animal dung—struck the man in the John Deere hat as a perfect canopy for a common area, a place to keep supplies, a place to keep order, a place to keep some semblance of civilization.

“Dude … this ain’t gonna hold the weight of it,” complains one of the teens, a slacker kid in an army fatigue coat named Scott Moon. His long blond hair hangs in his face and his breath shows as he huffs and struggles with the other tattooed, pierced goth kids from his high school.

“Stop your pissin’ and moanin’—it’ll hold the thing,” the man in the cap retorts with a grunt. Chad Bingham is his name—one of the family men of the settlement—the father of four girls: a seven-year-old, nine-year-old-twins, and a teenager. Unhappily married to a meek little gal from Valdosta, Chad fancies himself a strict disciplinarian, just like his daddy. But his daddy had boys and never had to deal with the nonsense perpetrated by females. For that matter, Chad’s daddy never had to deal with rotting pus pockets of dead flesh coming after the living. So now Chad Bingham is taking charge, taking on the role of alpha male … because, just as his daddy used to say, Somebody’s gotta do it. He glares at the kids. “Hold it steady!”

“That’s as high as it’s gonna go,” one of the goth boys groans through clenched teeth.

“You’re high,” Scott Moon quips through a stifled little giggle.

“Keep it steady!” Chad orders.

“What?”

“I said, hold the dad-blamed thing STEADY!” Chad snaps a metal cotter pin through a slot in the timber. The outer walls of the massive canvas pavilion shudder in the autumn wind, making a rumbling noise, as other teens scurry toward the far corners with smaller support beams.

As the big top takes shape, and the panorama of the clearing becomes visible to Chad through the tent’s wide opening at one end, he gazes out across the flattened brown weeds of the pasture, past the cars with their hoods up, past the clusters of mothers and children on the ground counting their meager caches of berries and vending-machine detritus, past the half-dozen or so pickups brimming with worldly possessions.

For a moment, Chad locks gazes with the big colored dude thirty yards away, near the north corner of the property, standing guard over Lilly Caul like a gigantic bouncer at some outdoor social club. Chad knows Lilly by name, but that’s about it. He doesn’t know much else about the girl—other than the fact that she’s “some chick friend of Megan’s”—and he knows less about the big man. Chad has been in proximity with the giant for weeks and can’t even remember his name. Jim? John? Jack? As a matter of fact, Chad doesn’t know anything about any of these people, other than the fact that they’re all pretty goddamn desperate and scared and crying out for discipline.

But for a while now, Chad and the big black dude have been sharing loaded glances. Sizing each other up. Taking the measure of each other. Not a single word has been exchanged but Chad feels challenges being issued. The big man could probably take Chad in a hand-to-hand situation but Chad would never let it come to that. Size doesn’t matter to a .38 caliber bullet, which is conveniently chambered in the steel-plated Smith & Wesson Model 52 tucked down the back of Chad’s wide Sam Browne belt.

Right now, though, an unexpected current of recognition arcs across the fifty yards between the two men like a lightning bolt. Lilly continues to kneel in front of the black man, angrily beating the crap out of tent stakes, but something dark and troubling glints in the black dude’s gaze suddenly as he stares at Chad. The realization comes quickly, in stages, like an electrical circuit firing.

Later, the two men will conclude, independently, that they—along with everybody else—missed two very important phenomena occurring at this moment. First, the noise of the tent construction in the clearing has been drawing walkers for the last hour. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the property is hampered by a single critical shortcoming.

In the aftermath, the two men will realize, privately, with much chagrin, that due to the natural barrier provided by the adjacent forest, which reaches up to the crest of a neighboring hill, any natural sound behind the trees is dampened, muffled, nearly deadened by the topography.

In fact, a college marching band could come over the top of that plateau, and a settler would not hear it until the cymbals crashed right in front of his face.

*   *   *

Lilly Caul remains blissfully unaware of the attack for several minutes—despite the fact that things begin unfolding at a rapid rate all around her—the noise of the clanging hammers and voices are replaced by the scattered screams of children. Lilly continues angrily driving stakes into the ground—mistaking the yelps of the younger ones for play—right up until the moment Josh grabs the nape of her sweatshirt.

“What—” Lilly jerks with a start, twisting around toward the big man with eyes blinking.

“Lilly, we gotta—”

Josh barely gets the first part of a sentence out when a dark figure stumbles out of the trees fifteen feet away. Josh has no time to run, no time to save Lilly, no time to do anything other than snatch the hammer out of the girl’s hand and shove her out of harm’s way.

Lilly tumbles and rolls almost instinctively before getting her bearings and rising back to her feet, a scream stuck in the back of her throat.

The trouble is, the first corpse that comes staggering into the clearing—a tall, pasty-colored walker in a filthy hospital smock with half his shoulder missing, the cords of his tendons pulsing like worms—is followed by two other creatures. One female and one male, each one with a gaping divot for a mouth, their bloodless lips oozing black bile, their shoe-button eyes fixed and glazed.

The three of them trundle with their trademark spasmodic gait, jaws snapping, lips peeling away from blackened teeth like piranhas.

In the twenty seconds it takes the three walkers to surround Josh, the tent city undergoes a rapid and dramatic shift. The men go for their homemade weapons, those with iron reaching down to their improvised holsters. Some of the more brazen women scramble for two-by-fours and hay hooks and pitchforks and rusty axes. Caretakers sweep their small children into cars and truck cabs. Clenched fists slam down on door locks. Rear loading gates clang upward.

Oddly, the few screams that ring out—from the children, mostly, and a couple of elderly women who may or may not be in early-stage senility—dwindle quickly, replaced by the eerie calm of a drill team or a provisional militia. Within the space of that twenty seconds, the noise of surprise quickly transitions into the business of defense, of repulsion and rage channeled into controlled violence. These people have done this before. There’s a learning curve at work here. Some of the armed men spread outward toward the edges of the camp, calmly snapping hammers, pumping shells into shotgun breeches, raising the muzzles of stolen gun-show pistols or rusty family revolvers. The first shot that rings out is the dry pop of a .22 caliber Ruger—not the most powerful weapon by any means, but accurate and easy to shoot—the blast taking off the top of a dead woman’s skull thirty yards away.

The female barely gets out of the trees before folding to the ground in a baptism of oily cranial fluid, which pours down over her in thick rivulets. This takedown occurs seventeen seconds into the attack. By the twentieth second, things begin happening at a faster clip.

On the north corner of the lot Lilly Caul finds herself moving, rising up on the balls of her feet, moving with the slow, coiled stiffness of a sleepwalker. Instinct takes over, and she finds herself almost involuntarily backing away from Josh, who is quickly surrounded by three corpses. He has one hammer. No gun. And three rotting mouths full of black teeth closing in.

He pivots toward the closest zombie while the rest of the camp scatters. Josh drives the sharp end of the hammer through Hospital Smock’s temple. The cracking noise brings to mind the rending of an ice-cube tray. Brain matter fountains, the puff of pressurized decay released in an audible gasp, as the former inpatient collapses.

The hammer gets stuck, wrenched out of Josh’s big hand as the walker folds.

At the same time, other survivors fan out across all corners of the clearing. On the far edge of the trees Chad gets his steel-plated Smith up and roaring, hitting the eye socket of a spindly old man missing half his jaw, the dead geriatric spinning in a mist of rancid fluids, pinwheeling into the weeds. Behind a line of cars a tent pole skewers a growling female through the mouth, pinning her to the trunk of a live oak. On the east edge of the pasture an axe shears open a rotting skull with the ease of a pomegranate being halved. Twenty yards away the blast of a shotgun vaporizes the foliage as well as the top half of a decaying former businessman.

Across the lot, Lilly Caul—still backing away from the ambush engulfing Josh—jerks and quakes at the killing racket. The fear prickles over her flesh like needles, taking her breath away and seizing up her brain. She sees the big black man on his knees now, clawing for the hammer, while the other two walkers scuttle spiderlike across the fallen tent canvas toward his legs. A second hammer lies in the grass just out of his reach.

Lilly turns and runs.

It takes her less than a minute to cover the ground between the row of outer tents and the center of the pasture, where two dozen weaker souls are huddled among the crates and provisions stashed under the partially erected circus tent. Several vehicles have fired up, and are now pulling next to the huddling throng in clouds of carbon monoxide. Armed men on the back of a flatbed guard the women and children as Lilly ducks down behind a battered steamer trunk, her lungs heaving for air, her skin crawling with terror.

She stays like that for the duration of the attack, her hands over her ears. She doesn’t see Josh near the tree line, getting his hand around the hammer embedded in the fallen cadaver, wrenching it free at the last possible instant and swinging it toward the closest attacker. She doesn’t see the blunt end of the hammer striking the male zombie’s mandible, staving in half the rotting skull with the tremendous force of Josh’s blow. And Lilly misses the last part of the struggle; she misses the female nearly getting her black incisors around Josh’s ankle before a shovel comes down on the back of her head. Several men have reached Josh in time to dispatch the final zombie, and Josh rolls away, unharmed and yet trembling with the adrenaline and tremors of a near miss.

The entire attack—now vanquished and fading away in a soft drone of whimpering children, dripping fluids, and the escaping gases of decomposition—has encompassed less than one hundred and eighty seconds.

Later, dragging the remains off into a dry creek bed to the south, Chad and his fellow alpha dogs count twenty-four walkers in all—a totally manageable threat level … for the time being, at least.

*   *   *

“Jesus, Lilly, why don’t you just suck it up and go apologize to the man?” The young woman named Megan sits on a blanket outside the circus tent, staring at the untouched breakfast in front of Lilly.

The sun has just come up, pale and cold in the clear sky—another day in the tent city—and Lilly sits in front of a battered Coleman stove, sipping instant coffee from a paper cup. The congealed remnants of freeze-dried eggs sit in the camp skillet, as Lilly tries to shake the guilt-ridden ruminations of a sleepless night. In this world there is no rest for the weary or the cowardly.

All around the great and tattered circus tent—now fully assembled—the bustle of other survivors drones on, almost as if the previous day’s attack never happened. People carry folding chairs and camp tables into the great tent through the wide opening at one end (probably once the entrance for elephants and clown cars), as the tent’s outer walls palpitate with the shifting breezes and changes in air pressure. In other parts of the encampment more shelters are going up. Fathers are gathering and taking inventory of firewood, bottled water, ammunition, weapons, and canned goods. Mothers are tending to children, blankets, coats, and medicine.

Upon closer scrutiny a keen observer would see a thinly veiled layer of anxiety in every activity. But what is uncertain is which danger poses the greatest threat: the undead or the encroaching winter.

“I haven’t figured out what to say yet,” Lilly mutters finally, sipping her lukewarm coffee. Her hands haven’t stopped shaking. Eighteen hours have passed since the attack, but Lilly still stews with shame, avoiding contact with Josh, keeping to herself, convinced that he hates her for running and leaving him to die. Josh has tried to talk to her a few times but she couldn’t handle it, telling him she was sick.

“What is there to say?” Megan fishes in her denim jacket for her little one-hit pipe. She tamps a tiny bud of weed into the end and sparks it with a Bic, taking a healthy toke. An olive-skinned young woman in her late twenties with loose henna-colored curls falling around her narrow, cunning face, she blows the green smoke out with a cough. “I mean look at this dude, he’s huge.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

Megan grins. “Dude looks like he can take care of himself, is all I’m saying.”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“What?” Lilly looks at her friend. “Are you serious?”

“It’s a simple question.”

Lilly shakes her head, lets out a sigh. “I’m not even going to dignify that with—”

“You’re not … are you? Good-Little-Doobie-Lilly. Good to the last drop.”

“Would you stop?”

“Why, though?” Megan’s grin turns to a smirk. “Why have you not climbed on top of that? What are you waiting for? That body … those guns he’s got—”

“Stop it!” Lilly’s anger flares, a sharp splitting pain behind the bridge of her nose. Her emotions close to the surface, her trembling returning, she surprises even herself with the volume of her voice. “I’m not like you … okay. I’m not a social butterfly. Jesus, Meg. I’ve lost track. Which one of these guys are you with now?”

Megan stares at her for a second, coughs, then loads up another one-hit. “You know what?” Megan offers the pipe. “Why don’t you take it down a little bit? Chill?”

“No, thanks.”

“It’s good for what ails ya. It’ll kill that bug you got up your ass.”

Lilly rubs her eyes, shakes her head. “You are a piece of work, Meg.”

Megan gulps another hit, blows it out. “I’d rather be a piece of work than a piece of shit.”

Lilly says nothing, just keeps shaking her head. The sad truth is, Lilly sometimes wonders if Megan Lafferty is not exactly that—a piece of shit. The two girls have known each other since senior year at Sprayberry High School back in Marietta. They were inseparable back then, sharing everything from homework to drugs to boyfriends. But then Lilly got designs on a career, and spent two years of purgatory at Massey College of Business in Atlanta, and then on to Georgia Tech for an MBA she would never get. She wanted to be a fashionista, maybe run a clothing design business, but she got as far as the reception area of her first interview—a highly coveted internship with Mychael Knight Fashions—before chickening out. Her old companion, fear, put the kibosh on all her plans.

Fear made her flee that lavish lobby and give up and go home to Marietta and resume her slacker lifestyle with Megan, getting high, sitting on couches, and watching reruns of Project Runway.

Something had changed between the two women in recent years, however, something fundamentally chemical—Lilly felt it as strong as a language barrier. Megan had no ambition, no direction, no focus, and was okay with that. But Lilly still harbored dreams—stillborn dreams, perhaps, but dreams nonetheless. She secretly longed to go to New York or start a Web site or go back to that receptionist at Mychael Knight and say, “Oops, sorry, just had to step out for a year and a half…”

Lilly’s dad—a retired math teacher and widower named Everett Ray Caul—always encouraged his daughter. Everett was a kind, deferential man who took it upon himself, after his wife’s slow death from breast cancer back in the midnineties, to raise his only daughter with a tender touch. He knew she wanted more out of life, but he also knew she needed unconditional love, she needed a family, she needed a home. And Everett was all she had. All of which made the events of the last couple of months so hellish for Lilly.

The first outbreak of walkers hit the north side of Cobb County hard. They came from blue-collar areas, the industrial parks north of Kennesaw woods, creeping into the population like malignant cells. Everett decided to pack Lilly up and flee in their beat-up VW wagon, and they got as far as U.S. 41, before the wreckage slowed them down. They found a rogue city bus a mile south of there—careening up and down the back streets, picking survivors up—and they almost made it onboard. To this day, the image of her father pushing her through the bus’s folding door as zombies closed in haunts Lilly’s dreams.

The old man saved her life. He slammed that accordion door behind her at the last possible instant, and slid to the pavement, already in the grip of three cannibals. The old man’s blood washed up across the glass as the bus tore out of there, Lilly screaming until her vocal cords burned out. She went into a kind of catatonic state then, curled into a fetal position on a bench seat, staring at that blood-smeared door all the way to Atlanta.

It was a minor miracle that Lilly found Megan. At that point in the outbreak, cell phones still worked, and she managed to arrange a rendezvous with her friend on the outskirts of Heartsfield Airport. The two women set out together on foot, hitchhiking south, flopping in deserted houses, just concentrating on survival. The tension between them intensified. Each seemed to be compensating for the terror and loss in different ways. Lilly went inward. Megan went the other direction, staying high most of the time, talking constantly, latching on to any other traveler who crossed their path.

They hooked up with a caravan of survivors thirty miles southwest of Atlanta—three families from Lawrenceville, traveling in two minivans. Megan convinced Lilly there was safety in numbers, and Lilly agreed to ride along for a while. She kept to herself for the next few weeks of zigzagging across the fruit belt, but Megan soon had designs on one of the husbands. His name was Chad and he had a bad-ass good-old-boy way about him, with his Copenhagen snuff under his lip and his navy tattoos on his wiry arms. Lilly was appalled to see the flirting going on amid this waking nightmare, and it wasn’t long before Megan and Chad were stealing off into the shadows of rest stop buildings to “relieve themselves.” The wedge between Lilly and Megan burrowed deeper.

It was right around this time that Josh Lee Hamilton came into the picture. Around sunset one evening the caravan had gotten pinned down by a pack of the dead in a Kmart parking lot, when the big African-American behemoth came to the rescue from the shadows of the loading dock. He came like some Moorish gladiator, wielding twin garden hoes with the price tags still flagging in the wind. He easily dispatched the half-dozen zombies, and the members of the caravan thanked him profusely. He showed the group a couple of brand-new shotguns in the back aisles of the store, as well as camping gear.

Josh rode a motorcycle, and after helping load the minivans with provisions, he decided to join the group, following along on his bike as the caravan made their way closer to the abandoned orchards patchworking Meriwether County.

Now Lilly had begun to regret the day she agreed to ride on the back of that big Suzuki. Was her attachment to the big man simply a projection of her grief over the loss of her dad? Was it a desperate act of manipulation in the midst of unending terror? Was it as cheap and transparent as Megan’s promiscuity? Lilly wondered if her act of cowardice—deserting Josh on the battlefield yesterday—was a sick, dark, subconscious act of self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Nobody said you’re a piece of shit, Megan,” Lilly finally says, her voice strained and unconvincing.

“You don’t have to say it.” Megan angrily taps the pipe on the stove. She levers herself to her feet. “You’ve totally said enough.”

Lilly stands. She has grown accustomed to these sudden mood swings in her friend. “What is your problem?”

“You … you’re my problem.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“Forget it, I can’t even handle this anymore,” Megan says. The rueful tone of her voice is filtered by the hoarse buzz of the weed working on her. “I wish you luck, girlie-girl … you’re gonna need it.”

Megan storms off toward the row of cars on the east edge of the property.

Lilly watches her pal vanish behind a tall trailer loaded with cartons. The other survivors take very little notice of the tiff between the two girls. A few heads turn, a few whispers are exchanged, but most of the settlers continue busying themselves with the gathering and accounting of supplies, their somber expressions tight with nervous tension. The wind smells of metal and sleet. There’s a cold front creeping in.

Gazing out across the clearing, Lilly finds herself momentarily transfixed by all the activity. The area looks like a flea market crowded with buyers and sellers, people trading supplies, stacking cordwood, and chatting idly. At least twenty smaller tents now line the periphery of the property, a few clotheslines haphazardly strung between trees, blood-spattered clothing taken from walkers, nothing wasted, the threat of winter a constant motivator now. Lilly sees children playing jump rope near a flatbed truck, a few boys kicking a soccer ball. She sees a fire burning in a barbecue pit, the haze of smoke wafting up over the roofs of parked cars. The air is redolent with bacon grease and hickory smoke, an odor that, in any other context, might suggest the lazy days of summer, tailgate parties, football games, backyard cookouts, family reunions.

A tide of black dread rises in Lilly as she scans the bustling little settlement. She sees the kids frolicking … and the parents laboring to make this place work … all of them zombie fodder … and all at once Lilly feels a twinge of insight … a jolt of reality.

She sees clearly now that these people are doomed. This grand plan to build a tent city in the fields of Georgia is not going to work.

TWO

The next day, under a pewter-colored sky, Lilly is playing with the Bingham girls in front of Chad and Donna Bingham’s tent, when a grinding noise echoes over the trees along the adjacent dirt access road. The sound stiffens half the settlers in the area, faces snapping toward the noise of an approaching engine, which is groaning through its low gears.

It could be anyone. Word has spread across the plagued land of thugs pillaging the living, bands of heavily armed rovers stripping survivors of everything including the shoes on their feet. Several of the settlers’ vehicles are currently out on scavenging reconnaissance but you never know.

Lilly looks up from the girls’ hopscotch court—the squares have been etched in a little bare patch of brick-red clay with a stick—and the Bingham girls all freeze in mid-skip. The oldest girl, Sarah, shoots a glance at the road. A skinny tomboy in a faded denim jumper and down vest with big inquisitive blue eyes, fifteen-year-old Sarah, the whip-smart ringleader of the four sisters, softly utters, “Is that—”

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Lilly says. “Pretty sure it’s one of ours.”

The three younger sisters start craning their necks, looking for their mom.

Donna Bingham is presently out of view, washing clothes in a galvanized tin drum out behind the family’s large camping tent, which Chad Bingham lovingly erected four days ago, equipping it with aluminum cots, racks of coolers, vent stacks, and a battery-operated DVD player with a library of children’s fare such as The Little Mermaid and Toy Story 2. The sound of Donna Bingham’s shuffling footsteps can be heard coming around the tent as Lilly gathers up the children.

“Sarah, get Ruthie,” Lilly says calmly yet firmly as the engine noises close the distance, the vapor of burning oil rising above the tree line. Lilly rises to her feet and quickly moves over to the twins. Nine-year-old Mary and Lydia are identical cherubs in matching peacoats and flaxen pigtails. Lilly herds the little ones toward the tent flap while Sarah scoops up the seven-year-old Ruthie—an adorable little elf with Shirley Temple curls hanging over the collar of her miniature ski jacket.

Donna Bingham appears around the side of the tent just as Lilly is ushering the twins into the enclosure. “What’s going on?” The mousy woman in the canvas jacket looks as though a stiff wind might blow her over. “Who is it? Is it rovers? Is it a stranger?”

“Nothing to worry about,” Lilly tells her, holding the tent flap open as the four girls file into the shadows. In the five days since the contingent of settlers arrived here, Lilly has become the de facto babysitter, watching over various groups of offspring while parents go out scavenging or go on walks or just grab some alone time. She’s happy for the welcome distraction, especially now that the babysitting can provide an excuse to avoid all contact with Josh Lee Hamilton. “Just stay in the tent with the girls until we know who it is.”

Donna Bingham gladly shuts herself inside the enclosure with her daughters.

Lilly whirls toward the road and sees the grill of a familiar fifteen-forward-speed International Harvester truck materializing in a haze of wood smoke at the far end of the road—coming around the bend in gasps of exhaust—sending a wave of relief through Lilly. She smiles in spite of her nerves and starts toward the bare ground on the west edge of the field, which serves as a loading area. The rust-bucket truck clatters across the grass and shudders to a stop, the three teenagers riding in the back with the roped-down crates nearly tumbling forward against the pockmarked cab.

“Lilly Marlene!” the driver calls out the open cab window as Lilly comes around the front of the truck. Bob Stookey has big greasy hands—the hands of a laborer—wrapped around the wheel.

“What’s on the menu today, Bob?” Lilly says with a wan smile. “More Twinkies?”

“Oh, we got a full gourmet spread with all the trimmings today, little sis.” Bob cocks his deeply lined face toward the crew in back. “Found a deserted Target, only a couple of walkers to deal with … made out like bandits.”

“Do tell.”

“Let’s see…” Bob jerks the shift lever into park and kills the rumbling engine. His skin the color of tanned cowhide, his droopy eyes rimmed red, Bob Stookey is one of the last men in the New South still using pomade to grease his dark hair back over his weathered head. “Got lumber, sleeping bags, tools, canned fruit, lanterns, cereal, weather radios, shovels, charcoal—what else? Also got a bunch of pots and pans, some tomato plants—still with a few warty little tomaters on the vines—some tanks of butane, ten gallons of milk that expired only a couple of weeks ago, some hand sanitizer, Sterno, laundry soap, candy bars, toilet paper, a Chia Pet, a book on organic farming, a singing fish for my tent, and a partridge in a pear tree.”

“Bob, Bob, Bob … no AK-47s? No dynamite?”

“Got something better than that, smarty pants.” Bob reaches over to a peach crate sitting on the passenger seat next to him. He hands it through the window to Lilly. “Be a darlin’ and put this in my tent while I help these three stooges in back with the heavy stuff.”

“What is it?” Lilly looks down at the crate full of plastic vials and bottles.

“Medical supplies.” Bob opens his door and climbs out. “Need to keep ’em safe.”

Lilly notices half a dozen pint bottles of liquor wedged in between the antihistamines and codeine. She gazes up at Bob and gives him a look. “Medical supplies?”

He grins. “I’m a very sick man.”

“I’ll say,” Lilly comments. She knows enough about Bob’s background by now to know that aside from being a sweet, genial, somewhat lost soul, as well as being a former army medic—which makes him the only inhabitant of the tent city with any medical training—he is also an inveterate drunk.

In the early stages of their friendship, back when Lilly and Megan were still on the road, and Bob had helped them out of a jam at a rest stop crawling with zombies, Bob had made feckless attempts to hide his alcoholism. But by the time the group had settled here in this deserted pastureland five days ago, Lilly had begun regularly helping Bob stagger safely back to his tent at night, making sure nobody robbed him—which was a real threat in a group this large and varied and filled with so much tension. She liked Bob, and she didn’t mind babysitting him as well as the little ones. But it also added an additional layer of stress that Lilly needed as much as she needed a high colonic.

Right now, in fact, she can tell he needs something else from her. She can tell by the way he’s wiping his mouth thoughtfully with his dirty hand.

“Lilly, there’s something else I wanted to—” He stops and swallows awkwardly.

She lets out a sigh. “Spit it out, Bob.”

“It’s none of my business … all right. I just wanted to say … aw, hell.” He takes a deep breath. “Josh Lee, he’s a good man. I visit with him now and again.”

“Yeah … and?”

“And I’m just saying.”

“Go on.”

“I’m just … look … he ain’t doing too good right about now, all right? He thinks you’re sore at him.”

“He thinks I’m what?”

“He thinks you’re mad at him for some reason, and he ain’t sure why.”

“What did he say?”

Bob gives her a shrug. “It’s none of my beeswax. I ain’t exactly privy to … I don’t know, Lilly. He just wishes you wasn’t ignoring him.”

“I’m not.”

Bob looks at her. “You sure?”

“Bob, I’m telling you—”

“All right, look.” Bob waves his hand nervously. “I ain’t telling you what to do. I just think two people like y’all, good folks, it’s a shame something like this, you know, in these times…” His voice trails off.

Lilly softens. “I appreciate what you’re saying, Bob, I do.”

She looks down.

Bob purses his lips, thinks it over. “I saw him earlier today, over by the log pile, chopping wood like it was going outta style.”

*   *   *

The distance between the loading area and the stack of cordwood measures less than a hundred yards, but crossing it feels like the Bataan Death March to Lilly.

She walks slowly, with her head down, and her hands thrust in the pockets of her jeans to conceal the trembling. She has to weave through a group of women sorting clothes in suitcases, circle around the end of the circus tent, sidestep a group of boys repairing a broken skateboard, and give wide berth to a cluster of men inspecting a row of weapons spread out on a blanket on the ground.

As she passes the men—Chad Bingham included in their number, holding court like a redneck despot—Lilly glances down at the tarnished pistols, eleven of them, different calibers, makes, and models, neatly arrayed like silverware in a drawer. The pair of 12-gauge shotguns from Kmart lie nearby. Only eleven pistols and the shotguns, and a limited number of rounds—the sum total of the settlers’ armory—now standing as a thin tissue of defense between the campers and calamity.

Lilly’s neck crawls with gooseflesh as she passes, the fear burning a hole in her guts. The trembling increases. She feels as though she’s running a fever. The shaking has always been an issue for Lilly Caul. She remembers the time she had to deliver a presentation to the admission committee at Georgia Tech. She had her notes on index cards and had rehearsed for weeks. But when she got up in front of those tenured professors in that stuffy meeting room on North Avenue, she shook so much she dropped the stack of cards all over the floor and completely choked.

She feels that same kind of nervous tension right now—amplified by a factor of a thousand—as she approaches the split-rail fence along the western edge of the property. She feels the trembling in her facial features, and in her hands inside her pockets, so intense now it feels like the tremors are about to seize up her joints and freeze her in place. “Chronic anxiety disorder,” the doctor back in Marietta called it.

In recent weeks, she has experienced this kind of spontaneous palsy in the immediate aftermath of a walker attack—a spell of shuddering that lasts for hours afterward—but now she feels a deeper sense of dread flooding through her that comes from some inchoate, primal place. She is turning inward, facing her own wounded soul, twisted by grief and the loss of her father.

She jumps at the crack of an axe striking timber, her attention yanked toward the fence.

A group of men stand in a cluster around a long row of dry logs. Dead leaves and cottonwood swirl on the wind above the tree line. The air smells of wet earth and matted pine needles. Shadows dance behind the foliage, tweaking Lilly’s fear like a tuning fork in her brain. She remembers nearly getting bitten back in Macon three weeks ago when a zombie lurched out at her from behind a garbage Dumpster. To Lilly, right now, those shadows behind the trees look just like the passageway behind that Dumpster, rotten with menace and the smell of decay and horrible miracles—the dead coming back to life.

Another axe blow makes her start, and she turns toward the far end of the woodpile.

Josh stands with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his back to her. An oblong sweat stain runs down his chambray shirt between his massive shoulder blades. His muscles rippling, the skin folds in his brown nape pulsing, he works with a steady rhythm, swinging, striking, yanking back, bracing, swinging again with a thwack!

Lilly walks up to him and clears her throat. “You’re doing it all wrong,” she says in a shaky voice, trying to keep things light and casual.

Josh freezes with axe blade in midair. He turns and looks at her, his sculpted ebony face pearled with sweat. For a moment, he looks shell-shocked, his twinkling eyes belying his surprise. “You know, I figured somethin’ wasn’t working right,” he says finally. “I’ve only been able to split about a hundred logs in fifteen minutes.”

“You’re choked down way too low on the handle.”

Josh grins. “I knew it was somethin’ like that.”

“You have to let the logs do the work for ya.”

“Good idea.”

“You want me to demonstrate?”

Josh steps aside, hands her the axe.

“Like this,” Lilly says, trying her best to appear charming and witty and brave. Her trembling is so bad the axe head quivers as she makes a feeble attempt to split a log. She swings and the blade sideswipes the wood, then sticks into the ground. She struggles to pull it free.

“Now I get it,” Josh says with an amused nod. He notices her shaking, and his grin fades. He moves next to her. He puts his huge hand over hers, which is white-knuckling the axe handle as she struggles to pull it out of the clay. His touch is tender and soothing. “Everything’s gonna be okay, Lilly,” he says softly.

She lets go of the axe and turns to face him. Her heart races as she looks into his eyes. Her flesh goes cold, and she tries to put her feelings into words, but all she can do is look away in shame. Finally she manages to find her voice. “Is there someplace we can go and talk?”

*   *   *

“How do you do it?”

Lilly sits with her legs crossed Indian-style, on the ground under the massive branches of a live oak, which dapple the carpet of matted leaves around her with a skein of shadows. She reclines against the gigantic tree trunk as she speaks. Her eyes remain fixed on the swaying treetops in the middle distance.

She has a faraway look that Josh Lee Hamilton has seen now and again on the faces of war veterans and emergency room nurses—the gaze of perpetual exhaustion, the haggard look of the shell-shocked, the thousand-yard stare. Josh feels the urge to take her delicate, slender body into his arms and hold her and stroke her hair and make everything all better. But he senses somehow—he knows—now is not the time. Now is the time to listen.

“Do what?” he asks her. Josh sits across from her, also cross-legged, wiping the back of his neck with a damp bandanna. A box of cigars sits on the ground in front of him—the last of his dwindling supply. He is almost hesitant to go through the last of them—a superstitious twinge that he’ll be sealing his fate.

Lilly looks up at him. “When the walkers attack … how do you deal with it without being … scared shitless?”

Josh lets out a weary chuckle. “If you figure that out, you’re gonna have to teach me.”

She stares at him for a moment. “Come on.”

“What?”

“You’re telling me you’re scared shitless when they attack?”

“Damn straight.”

“Oh, please.” She tilts her head incredulously. “You?”

“Let me tell you something, Lilly.” Josh picks up the package of cigars, shakes one loose, and sparks it with his Zippo. He takes a thoughtful puff. “Only the stupid or the crazy ain’t scared these days. You ain’t scared, you ain’t paying attention.”

She looks out beyond the rows of tents lined along the split-rail fence. She lets out a pained sigh. Her narrow face is drawn, ashen. She looks as though she’s trying to articulate thoughts that just stubbornly refuse to cooperate with her vocabulary. At last she says, “I’ve been dealing with this for a while. I’m not … proud of it. I think it’s messed up a lot of things for me.”

Josh looks at her. “What has?”

“The wimp factor.”

“Lilly—”

“No. Listen. I need to say this.” She refuses to look at him, her eyes burning with shame. “Before this … outbreak happened … it was just sort of … inconvenient. I missed out on a few things. I screwed some things up because I’m a chickenshit … but now the stakes are … I don’t know. I could get somebody killed.” She finally manages to look up into the big man’s eyes. “I could totally ruin things for somebody I care about.”

Josh knows what she’s talking about, and it puts the squeeze on his heart. From the moment he laid eyes on Lilly Caul he had felt feelings that he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager back in Greenville—that kind of rapturous fascination a boy can fix upon the curve of a girl’s neck, the smell of her hair, the spray of freckles along the bridge of her nose. Yes, indeed, Josh Lee Hamilton is smitten. But he is not going to screw this relationship up, as he had screwed up so many before Lilly, before the plague, before the world had gotten so goddamn bleak.

Back in Greenville, Josh developed crushes on girls with embarrassing frequency, but he always seemed to muck things up by rushing it. He would behave like a big old puppy licking at their heels. Not this time. This time, Josh was going to play it smart … smart and cautious and one step at a time. He may be a big old dumb-ass hick from South Carolina but he’s not stupid. He’s willing to learn from his past mistakes.

A natural loner, Josh grew up in the 1970s, when South Carolina was still clinging to the ghostly days of Jim Crow, still making futile attempts to integrate their schools and join the twentieth century. Shuffled from one ramshackle housing project to another with his single mom and four sisters, Josh put his God-given size and strength to good use on the gridiron, playing varsity ball for Mallard Creek High School with visions of scholarships in his eyes. But he lacked the one thing that sent players up the academic and socioeconomic ladders: raw aggression.

Josh Lee Hamilton had always been a gentle soul … to a fault. He let far weaker boys pick on him. He deferred to all adults with a “yessim” or “yessir.” He simply had no fight in him. All of which is why his football career eventually petered out in the mid-eighties. That was right around the time his mother, Raylene, got sick. The doctors said it was called “lupus erythematosus,” and it wasn’t terminal, but for Raylene it was a death sentence, a life of chronic pain and skin lesions and near paralysis. Josh took it upon himself to be his mom’s caretaker (while his sisters drifted away to bad marriages and dead-end jobs out of state). Josh cooked and cleaned and took good care of his mama, and within a few years he got good enough at cooking to actually get a job in a restaurant.

He had a natural flair for the culinary, especially cooking meat, and he moved up the ranks at steakhouse kitchens across South Carolina and Georgia. By the 2000s, he had become one of the most sought-after executive chefs in the Southeast, supervising large teams of sous-chefs, catering upscale social events, and getting his picture in Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles. And all the while he managed to run his kitchens with kindness—a rarity in the restaurant world.

Now, amid these daily horrors, beset with all this unrequited love, Josh longed to cook something special for Lilly.

Up until now, they had subsisted on things like canned peas and Spam and dry cereal and powdered milk—none of which would provide the proper backdrop for a romantic dinner or a declaration of love. All the meat and fresh produce in the area had gone the way of the maggots weeks ago. But Josh had designs on a rabbit, or a wild boar that might be roaming the neighboring woods. He would make a ragout, or a nice braise with wild onions and rosemary and some of that Pinot Noir that Bob Stookey had scavenged from that derelict liquor store, and Josh would serve the meat with some herbed polenta, and he would add extra special touches. Some of the ladies in the tent city had been making candles from the suet they found in a bird feeder. That would be nice. Candles, wine, maybe a poached pear from the orchard for dessert, and Josh would be ready. The orchards were still lousy with overripe fruit. Maybe an apple chutney with the pork. Yes. Absolutely. Then Josh would be ready to serve Lilly dinner and tell her how he feels about her, how he wants to be with her and protect her and be her man.

“I know where you’re going with this, Lilly,” Josh finally says to her, tamping his cigar’s ash on a stone. “And I want you to know two things. Number one, there’s no shame in what you did.”

She looks down. “You mean running away like a whipped dog when you were under attack?”

“Listen to me. If the shoe was on the other foot, I would’ve done the same damn thing.”

“That’s bullshit, Josh, I didn’t even—”

“Let me finish.” He snubs out the cigar. “Number two, I wanted you to run. You didn’t hear me. I hollered for you to get the Sam Hell outta there. Makes no sense—only one of them hammers within grasp, both of us trying to mix it up with them things. You understand what I’m saying? You don’t need to feel any shame for what you done.”

Lilly takes a breath. She keeps looking down. A tear forms and rolls down the bridge of her nose. “Josh, I appreciate what you’re trying to—”

“We’re a team, right?” He leans down so he can see her beautiful face. “Right?”

She nods.

“The dynamic duo, right?”

Another nod. “Right.”

“A well-oiled machine.”

“Yeah.” She wipes her face with the back of her hand. “Yeah, okay.”

“So let’s keep it that way.” He throws her his damp bandanna. “Deal?”

She looks at the do-rag in her lap, picks it up, looks at him and manages a grin. “Jesus Christ, Josh, this thing is totally gross.”

*   *   *

Three days pass in the tent city without an attack of any note. Only a few minor incidents sully the calm. One morning, a group of kids stumble upon a quivering torso in a culvert ditch along the road. Its gray, wormy face cocked toward the treetops in perpetual, groaning agony, the thing looks as though it recently tangled with a mechanical reaper, and has ragged stumps where its arms and legs once were. Nobody can figure out how the limbless thing got there. Chad puts the creature down with a single hatchet blow through its rotting nasal bone. On another occasion, out by the communal toilets, an elderly camper realizes, with heart-skipping dismay, that during his afternoon bowel movement, he is unwittingly shitting on a zombie. Somehow the roamer got itself stuck down in the sewage trough. The thing is easily dispatched by one of the younger men with a single thrust of a post-hole digger.

These prove to be isolated encounters, though, and the middle of the week progresses uneventfully.

The respite gives the inhabitants time to organize, finish erecting the last of their shelters, stow supplies, explore the immediate area, settle into a routine, and form coalitions and cliques and hierarchies. The families—ten of them in all—seem to carry more weight in the decision-making process than do single people. Something about the gravitas of having more at risk, the imperative of protecting children, maybe even the symbolism of carrying the genetic seeds of the future—all of it adding up to a kind of unspoken seniority.

Among the patriarchs of the families, Chad Bingham emerges as the de facto leader. Each morning, he leads the communal powwows inside the circus tent, assigning duties with the casual authority of a Mafia capo. Each day, he struts along the edges of the camp with his snuff defiantly bulging under his cheek, his pistol in full view. With winter in the offing, and troubling noises behind the trees at night, Lilly worries about this ersatz figurehead. Chad has been keeping his eye on Megan, who has been shacking up with one of the other fathers, in plain view of everybody including the man’s pregnant wife. Lilly worries that the whole semblance of order here rests on top of a tinderbox.

Lilly’s tent and Josh’s tent sit a mere ten yards away from each other. Each morning, Lilly awakens and sits facing the zippered end of her tent, gazing out at Josh’s tent, drinking her instant Sanka and trying to sort out her feelings for the big man. Her cowardly act still gnaws at her, haunts her, festers in her dreams. She has nightmares of the bloody folding door on that rogue bus back in Atlanta, but now, instead of her father being devoured, sliding down that smeared glass, Lilly sees Josh.

His accusing eyes always wake her up with a start, the cold sweat soaked through her nightclothes.

On these dream-racked nights, lying sleepless in her moldy sleeping bag, staring at the mildewed roof of her tiny tent—she acquired the used pup tent on a raid of a deserted KOA camp, and it reeks of smoke, dried semen, and stale beer—she inevitably hears the noises. Faint, off in the distant darkness beyond the rise, behind the trees, the sounds mingle with the wind and crickets and rustling foliage: unnatural snapping noises, jerky shuffling sounds, which remind Lilly of old shoes tumbling and banging inside a dryer.

In her mind’s eye, mutated by terror, the distant noises conjure images of terrible black-and-white forensic photos, mutilated bodies blackened by rigor mortis and yet still moving, dead faces turning and leering at her, silent snuff films of dancing cadavers jitterbugging like frogs on a hot skillet. Lying wide awake each night, Lilly ruminates about what the noises might actually mean, what is going on out there, and when the next attack will come.

Some of the more thoughtful campers have been developing theories.

One young man from Athens named Harlan Steagal, a nerdy grad student with thick horn-rims, begins holding nightly philosophy salons around the campfire. Jacked up on pseudoephedrine, instant coffee, and bad weed, the half a dozen or so social misfits grope for answers to the imponderable questions tormenting everybody: the origins of the plague, the future of mankind, and perhaps the timeliest issue of them all, the walkers’ patterns of behavior.

The consensus among the think tank is that there are only two possibilities: (a) zombies have no instinct, purpose, or behavioral pattern other than involuntary feeding. They are merely sputtering nerve endings with teeth, bouncing off each other like deadly machines that simply need to be “turned off.” Or (b) there is a complex pattern of behavior going on here that no survivor has figured out yet. The latter begs the question of how the plague is transmitted from the dead to the living—is it only through the bite of a walker?—as well as questions of horde behavior, and of possible Pavlovian learning curves, and even larger-scale genetic imperatives.

In other words—to put it in the patois of Harlan Steagal: “Are the dead things like playing out some weird, fucked-up, trippy evolutionary thing?”

Lilly overhears much of this rambling discourse over those three days and pays it little heed. She has no time for conjecture or analysis. The longer the tent city goes on without being assailed by the dead, the more Lilly feels vulnerable, despite the safety precautions. With most of the tents now erected and a barricade of vehicles parked around the periphery of the clearing, things have quieted down. People are settled in, keeping to themselves, and the few campfires or cooking stoves that are employed for meals are quickly extinguished for fear of errant smoke or odors attracting unwanted intruders.

Still, Lilly becomes exceedingly nervous each night. It feels as though a cold front is moving in. The night sky gets crystalline and cloudless, a new frost forming each morning on the matted ground and fencing and tent canvases. The gathering cold reflects Lilly’s dark intuition. Something terrible seems imminent.

One night, before turning in, Lilly Caul pulls a small leather-bound paper calendar from her backpack. In the weeks since the advent of the plague, most personal devices have failed. The electrical grid has gone down, fancy batteries have run their course, service providers have vanished, and the world has reverted to the fundamentals: bricks, mortar, paper, fire, flesh, blood, sweat, and whenever possible, internal combustion. Lilly has always been an analog girl—her place back in Marietta brims with vinyl records, transistor radios, windup clocks, and first editions crammed into every corner—so she naturally starts keeping track of the plague days in her little black binder with the faded American Family Insurance logo embossed in gold on the cover.

On this night, she puts a big X on the square marked Thursday, November 1.

The next day is November 2—the day her fate, as well as that of many others, will irrevocably change.

*   *   *

Friday dawns clear and bitingly cold. Lilly stirs just after sunrise, shivering in her sleeping bag, her nose so cold it feels numb. Her joints ache as she hurriedly piles on the layers. She pushes herself out of her tent, zipping her coat and glancing at Josh’s tent.

The big man is already up, standing beside his tent, stretching his massive girth. Bundled in his fisherman’s sweater and tattered down vest, he whirls, sees Lilly, and says, “Cold enough for ya?”

“Next stupid question,” she says, coming over to his tent, reaching for the thermos of steaming instant coffee gripped in his huge, gloved hand.

“Weather’s got people panicked,” he says softly, handing the thermos over. With a nod, he indicates the three trucks idling along the road across the clearing. His breath shows in puffs of vapor as he talks. “Bunch of us heading up into the woods, gathering as much firewood as we can load.”

“I’ll come with.”

Josh shakes his head. “Talked to Chad a minute ago, I guess he needs you to watch his kids.”

“Okay. Sure. Whatever.”

“You keep that,” Josh says, gesturing toward the thermos. He grabs the axe that sits canted against his tent and gives her a grin. “Should be back by lunchtime.”

“Josh,” she says, grabbing his sleeve before he can turn away. “Just be careful in the woods.”

His grin widens. “Always, babydoll … always.”

He turns and marches off toward the clouds of visible exhaust along the gravel road.

Lilly watches the contingent hopping into cabs, jumping up onto running boards, climbing into cargo bays. She doesn’t realize at this point the amount of noise they’re making, the commotion caused by three large trucks embarking all at once, the voices calling to each other, doors slamming, the fog bank of carbon monoxide.

In all the excitement, neither Lilly, nor anyone else for that matter, realizes how far the racket of their departure is carrying out over the treetops.

*   *   *

Lilly senses danger first.

The Binghams have left her inside the circus tent, in charge of the four girls, who now frolic across the floor of matted grass, scampering amid the folding tables, stacks of peach crates, and tanks of butane. The interior of the circus tent is illuminated by makeshift skylights—flaps in the ceiling pulled back to let in the daylight—and the air in there smells of must and decades of moldy hay impregnated into the canvas walls. The girls are playing musical chairs with three broken-down lawn chairs scattered across the cold earthen floor.

Lilly is supposed to be the music.

“Duh-do-do-do … duh-da-da-da,” Lilly croons halfheartedly, murmuring an old Top 40 hit by the Police, her voice thin and weak, as the girls giggle and circle the chairs. Lilly is distracted. She keeps glancing through the loading entrance at one end of the pavilion, a large swath of the tent city visible in the gray daylight. The grounds are mostly deserted, those who are not away scavenging now hiding in their tents.

Lilly swallows her terror, the cold sun slanting down through the far trees, the wind whispering through the big-top tent. Up on the rise, shadows dance in the pale light. Lilly thinks she hears shuffling sounds up there somewhere, behind the trees maybe; she’s not sure. It might be her imagination. Sounds inside the fluttering, empty tent play tricks on the ears.

She turns away from the opening and scans the pavilion for weapons. She sees a shovel leaning against a wheelbarrow filled with potting soil. She sees a few garden implements in a dirty bucket. She sees the remains of the breakfast dishes in a plastic garbage can—paper plates crusted with beans and Egg Beaters, wadded burrito wrappers, empty juice boxes—and next to it a plastic storage container with dirty silverware. The silverware came from one of the retrofitted camper/pickups, and Lilly makes note of a few sharp knives in the container but mostly she sees plastic “sporks” sticky with food gunk. She wonders how effective a spork would be against a monstrous drooling cannibal.

She silently curses the camp leaders for not leaving firearms.

Those who remain on the property include the older settlers—Mr. Rhimes, a couple of spinsters from Stockbridge, an eighty-year-old retired teacher named O’Toole, a pair of geriatric brothers from an abandoned nursing home in Macon—as well as a couple dozen adult women, a good portion of them too busy now with laundry duty and philosophical chatter along the back fence to notice anything amiss.

The only other souls currently present in the tent city are children—ten sets of them—some still huddling against the cold in their private tents, others kicking a soccer ball around in front of the derelict farmhouse. Each gaggle of kids has an adult woman in charge of them.

Lilly looks back out the exit and sees Megan Lafferty, way in the distance, sitting perched on the porch of the burned-out house, pretending to be babysitting and not smoking pot. Lilly shakes her head. Megan is supposed to be watching the Hennessey kids. Jerry Hennessey, an insurance salesman from Augusta, has been carrying on with Megan for days now in a not-too-discreet fashion. The Hennessey kids are the second-youngest kids in the encampment—at ages eight, nine, and ten respectively. The youngest children in the settlement are the Bingham twins and Ruthie, who at this moment pause in their play to stare impatiently at their nervous babysitter.

“C’mon, Lilly,” Sarah Bingham calls out with her hands on her hips, catching her breath near a stack of fruit crates. The teenager wears an adorable, stylish imitation-angora sweater that breaks Lilly’s heart. “Keep singing.”

Lilly turns back to the children. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I just—”

Lilly stops herself. She hears a noise coming from outside the tent, from up in the trees. It sounds like the creaking bulwark of a listing ship … or the slow squeak of a door in a haunted house … or, more likely, the weight of a zombie’s foot on a deadfall log.

“Girls, I’m—”

Another noise cuts off Lilly’s words. She spins toward the tent’s opening at a loud rustling sound, which rings out from the east, shattering the stillness a hundred yards away, coming from a thicket of wild rose and dogwood.

A flock of rock pigeons suddenly takes flight, the swarm bursting out of the foliage with the inertia of a fireworks display. Lilly stares, transfixed for a single instant, as the flock fills the sky with a virtual constellation of gray-black blots.

Like controlled explosions, along the far edge of the camp, another two flocks of pigeons erupt. Cones of fluttering specks punch up into the light, scattering and re-forming like ink clouds undulating in a clear pool.

The rock pigeons are plentiful in this area—“sky rats” they’re called by the locals, who claim the pigeons are actually quite delicious if boned and grilled—but their sudden appearance in recent weeks has come to signify something darker and more troubling than a possible food source.

Something has stirred the birds from their resting place and is now making its way toward the tent city.

THREE

“Girls, listen to me.” Lilly quickly shuffles over to the youngest Bingham girl and scoops her up in her arms. “I’m gonna need you to come with me.”

“Why?” Sarah gives Lilly that patented teenage sulk. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t argue with me, sweetie, please,” Lilly says softly, and the look in Lilly’s eyes straightens the teenager with the power of a cattle prod. Sarah hastily turns and takes the twins by their hands, then starts shepherding them toward the exit.

Lilly stops in her tracks in the middle of the tent’s opening when she sees the first zombie burst out of the trees forty yards away—a big male with a hairless scalp the color of a bruise and eyes like milk glass—and all at once Lilly is shoving the kids back into the pavilion, clutching Ruthie in her arms and uttering under her breath, “Change in plans, girls, change in plans.”

Lilly quickly urges the kids back into the dim light and moldy air of the empty circus tent. She sets the seven-year-old down on the matted weeds by a steamer trunk. “Everybody be very quiet,” Lilly whispers.

Sarah stands with a twin on either side of her, the teenager’s face aghast, wide-eyed with terror. “What’s going on?”

“Just stay there and be quiet.” Lilly hurries back to the tent opening and wrestles with the massive flap, which is cinched ten feet up with rope ties. She yanks at the ropes, until the tent flap falls across the gap.

The original plan—which flickered instantaneously across Lilly’s mind—was to hide the kids in a vehicle, preferably one with its keys still in its ignition, in case Lilly had to make a quick escape. But now, all Lilly can think of doing is huddling silently in the empty pavilion and hoping that the other campers fend off the assault.

“Let’s all play a different game now,” Lilly says when she returns to the huddling girls. A scream rings out from somewhere across the property. Lilly tries to stanch her trembling, a voice resonating in her head, Goddammit, you stupid bitch, you gotta grow some balls for once in your life, for these kids.

“A different game, right, right, a different game,” Sarah says, her eyes glittering with fear. She knows now what’s going on. She clutches the small hands of her twin sisters and follows Lilly between two high stacks of fruit crates.

“Gonna play hide-and-seek,” Lilly says to little Ruthie, who is mute with horror. Lilly gets the four girls situated in the shadows behind the crates, each child crouched down low now and breathing hard. “Have to stay very still—and very, very, very quiet. Okay?”

Lilly’s voice seems to comfort them temporarily, although even the youngest knows now this is no game, this is not make-believe.

“I’ll be right back,” Lilly whispers to Sarah.

“No! Wait! NO, DON’T!” Sarah clutches at Lilly’s down jacket, holding on to her for dear life, the teenager’s eyes pleading.

“I’m just going to grab something across the tent, I’m not leaving.”

Lilly extricates herself and scuttles on her hands and knees across the carpet of pressed grass to the pile of buckets near the long central table. She grabs the shovel that leans against the wheelbarrow, then crawls back to the hiding place.

All the while, terrible sounds layer and build outside the windblown walls of the pavilion. Another scream pierces the air, followed by frantic footsteps, and then the sound of an axe sinking into a skull. Lydia whimpers, Sarah shushes her, and Lilly crouches down in front of the girls, her vision blurring with terror.

The frigid wind tosses the skirt of the tent’s walls, and for a brief moment, under the momentary gap, Lilly glimpses the onslaught in progress. At least two dozen walkers—only their shuffling, muddy feet visible like a brigade of upright stroke victims—converge on the tent-strewn field. The running feet of survivors, mostly women and elderly, are fleeing in all directions.

The spectacle of the attack temporarily distracts Lilly from the noise behind the girls.

A bloody arm lurches under the tent flap only inches away from Sarah’s legs.

Sarah shrieks as a dead hand clamps down on her ankle, its blackened fingernails digging in like talons. The arm is gouged and tattered, clad in the ripped sleeve of a burial suit, and the girl convulses in shock. Moving on instinct, the teenager crawls away—the force of her movement yanking the rest of the zombie inside the tent.

A dissonant chorus of squeals and shrieks rings out from the sisters as Lilly springs to her feet with the shovel clutched tightly in sweaty palms. Instinct kicks in, Lilly spinning and cocking the shovel high. The dead man bites at the air with snapping-turtle fury, as the teenager writhes and crawls across the cold ground, crying out garbled yelps of terror, dragging the zombie with her.

Before the rotting teeth get a chance to penetrate, Lilly brings the shovel down hard on the zombie’s skull, the impact making a flat clanging noise like the chime of a broken gong. The crack of the cranium vibrates up Lilly’s wrists and makes her cringe.

Sarah breaks free of the cold fingers and struggles to her feet.

Lilly brings the shovel down again … and again … as the iron scoop rings its flat church-bell clang and the dead thing deflates in a rhythmic black gush of arterial blood and rotting gray matter. By the fourth blow, the skull caves in, making a wet cracking noise, the black spume bubbling across the matted grass.

By this point, Sarah has joined her sisters, each girl clinging to the other, each bug-eyed and whimpering with horror as they back toward the exit, the great canvas flap billowing noisily in the wind behind them.

Lilly turns away from the mangled corpse in the tattered pin-striped suit and starts toward the opening twenty-five feet away, when all at once she freezes in place, grabbing Sarah’s sleeve. “Wait, Sarah, wait—WAIT!”

At the other end of the circus tent, the giant tarpaulin flap furls upward in the wind, revealing at least half a dozen walkers crowding in on the exit. They shuffle spastically into the tent—all adults, both male and female, clad in torn, blood-spattered street clothes, bunched together in an awkward grouping—their wormy cataract-filmed eyes fixing on the girls.

“This way!” Lilly yanks Sarah toward the opposite end of the circus tent—maybe a hundred and fifty feet away—and Sarah scoops the tike up into her arms. The twins scurry after them, slipping on the wet, matted grass. Lilly points at the bottom of the canvas wall—now a hundred feet away—and whispers breathlessly, “Gonna sneak under the tent.”

They get halfway to the opposite wall when another walker appears in their path.

Apparently this slimy, mutilated corpse in faded denim dungarees—with half its face torn away on one side in a ragged starburst of red pulp and teeth—got in under the tarp and now comes straight for Sarah. Lilly steps between the zombie and the girl and swings the shovel as hard as she can, making contact with the mangled cranium and sending the thing staggering sideways.

The zombie slams into the center pillar, and the raw inertia and deadweight knocks the timber out of its mooring. Guidelines snap. There’s a cracking noise like a ship breaking through ice and three of the four Bingham girls let out ululating shrieks as the massive big top collapses into itself, snapping the smaller rigging posts like matchsticks and pulling stakes out of the ground around it. The conical ceiling sinks like a vast soufflé.

The tent falls on the girls and the world goes dark and airless and full of slithering movement.

Lilly flails at the heavy fabric and struggles to get her bearings, still grasping the shovel, the tarpaulin pressing down on her with the sudden weight of an avalanche. She hears the muffled squealing of the children and she sees daylight fifty feet away. She crabs under the tent toward the light with the shovel in one hand.

At last she brushes a foot against Sarah’s shoulder. Lilly cries out: “Sarah! Take my hand! Grab the girls with the other and PULL!”

*   *   *

At this point, for Lilly, the passage of time—as it often does in catastrophes-in-progress—begins to retard, as several things transpire almost simultaneously. Lilly reaches the end of the tent and bursts out from under the deflated canvas, and the wind and cold wake her up, and she yanks Sarah out with all her might, and two of the other girls get dragged out behind Sarah—their voices shrieking like teakettles on the boil.

Lilly springs to her feet and helps Sarah up with the other two little girls.

One girl—Lydia, the youngest of the twins by a “good half an hour,” as Sarah claims—is missing. Lilly pushes the other girls away from the tent and tells them to stay back but stay close. Then Lilly whirls toward the tent and sees something that stops her heart.

Shapes are moving under the fallen circus tent. Lilly drops the shovel. She stares. Her legs and spine seize up into blocks of ice. She can’t breathe. She can only stare at the small lump of fabric undulating madly twenty feet away—little Lydia struggling to escape—the sound of the child’s scream dampened by the tarp.

The worst part—the part that encases Lilly Caul in ice—is the sight of the other lumps tunneling steadily, molelike, toward the little girl.

At that moment, the fear pops a fuse in Lilly’s brain, the cleansing fire of rage traveling through her tendons and down her marrow.

She lurches into action, the burst of adrenaline driving her to the edge of the fallen tent, the rocket fuel of anger in her muscles. She yanks the canvas up and over her head, crouching down and reaching for the girl. “LYDIA, SWEETIE, I’M RIGHT HERE!! COME TO ME, SWEETIE!!”

Lilly sees in the pale diffuse darkness under the tarpaulin the little flaxen-haired girl, fifteen feet away, frog-kicking and scrambling to escape the clutches of the canvas. Lilly hollers again and dives under the tarp and reaches out and gets a piece of the little girl’s jumper. Lilly pulls with all her might.

That’s when Lilly sees the ragged arm and bloodless blue face appearing in the dark only inches behind the child, making a drunken grab for the little girl’s Hello Kitty sneaker. The rotting, jagged fingernails claw the sole of the child’s tennis shoe just as Lilly manages to yank the nine-year-old out from under the folds of reeking fabric.

Both Lilly and child tumble backward into the cold light of day.

They roll a few feet, and then Lilly manages to pull the little girl into a bear hug. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay, I got you, you’re safe.”

The child sobs and gasps for breath but there’s no time to comfort her. The din of voices and rustling canvas rises around them as the camp is attacked.

Lilly, still on her knees, waves the other girls over to her. “Okay, girls, listen to me, listen, we have to be quick now, quick, stay close, and do exactly as I say.” Lilly huffs and puffs as she stands. She grabs the shovel, turns, and sees the chaos spreading across the tent city.

More walkers have descended upon the camp. Some of them move in clusters of three and four and five, growling and drooling with rabid, feral hunger.

Amid the screams and pandemonium—settlers fleeing in all directions, car engines firing up, axes swinging, clotheslines collapsing—some of the tents shudder with violent struggles going on inside, the assailants burrowing through gaps, ferreting out the paralyzed inhabitants. One of the smaller tents falls onto its side, legs scissoring out one end. Another enclosure quakes in a feeding frenzy, the translucent nylon walls displaying silhouettes of blood mist like ink blots.

Lilly sees a clear path leading to a row of parked cars fifty yards away and turns to the girls. “I need you all to follow me … okay? Stay very close and don’t make a sound. All right?”

After a series of frantic, silent nods, Lilly yanks the girls across the lot … and into the fray.

*   *   *

The survivors of this inexplicable plague have quickly learned that the biggest advantage a human enjoys over a reanimated corpse is speed. Under the right circumstances, a human can easily outrun even the stoutest walking cadaver. But this physical superiority is overwhelmed in the face of a swarm. The danger increases exponentially with each additional zombie … until the victim is engulfed in a slow-moving tsunami of ragged teeth and blackened claws.

Lilly learns this harsh reality on her way to the closest parked car.

The battered, gore-streaked silver Chrysler 300 with the luggage cap on the roof sits on the gravel shoulder of the access road less than fifty yards from the circus tent, parked at an angle in the shade of a locust tree. The windows are up, but Lilly still has reason to believe they can at least gain access, if not start the car. The odds are about even that the keys are in the ignition. People have been leaving keys in cars for a while now for quick escapes.

Unfortunately, the property now teems with the dead, and Lilly and the girls barely traverse ten yards of weed-whiskered turf before several attackers move in on each flank. “Stay behind me!” Lilly cries out to her charges, and then swings the shovel.

The rusty iron bangs into the mottled cheek of a female in a blood-spattered housecoat, sending the walker careening into a pair of nearby males in greasy dungarees, who tumble like bowling pins to the ground. But the female stays upright, staggering at the blow, flailing for a moment, then coming back for more.

Lilly and the girls get another fifteen yards closer to the Chrysler when another battery of zombies blocks their path. The shovel zings through the air, smashing through the bridge of a younger walker’s nose. Another blow hits the mandible of a dead woman in a filthy mink coat. Yet another blow cracks the skull of an old hunched crone with intestines showing through her hospital smock, but the old dead lady merely staggers and backpedals.

At last, the girls reach the Chrysler. Lilly tries the passenger door and finds it—blessedly—unlocked. She gently but quickly shoves Ruthie into the front seat as the pack of walkers closes in on the sedan. Lilly sees the keys dangling off the slot in the steering column—another stroke of luck. “Stay in the car, honey,” Lilly says to the seven-year-old, and then slams the door.

By this point, Sarah reaches the right rear passenger door with the twins.

“SARAH, LOOK OUT!”

Lilly’s keening scream rises above the primordial din of growling that fills the air, as a dozen or so dead loom behind Sarah. The teenager yanks open the rear door, but has no time to get the twins inside the car. The two smaller girls trip and sprawl to the grass.

Sarah screams a primal wail. Lilly tries to get in between the teen and the attackers with the shovel, and Lilly manages to bash in another skull—the huge cranium of a putrified black man in a hunting jacket—sending the attacker staggering back into the weeds. But there are too many walkers now, lumbering in from all directions to feed.

In the ensuing chaos, the twins manage to crawl into the car and slam the door.

Her sanity snapping, her eyes filling with white-hot rage, Sarah turns and lets out a garbled cry as she shoves a slow-moving walker out of her way. She finds an opening, pushes her way through it, and flees.

Lilly sees the teenager racing toward the circus tent. “SARAH, DON’T!!”

Sarah gets halfway across the field before an impenetrable pack of zombies closes in on her, blocking her path, latching on to her back and overpowering her. She goes down hard, eating turf, as more of the dead swarm around her. The first bite penetrates her imitation-angora sweater at the midriff, taking a chunk of her torso, sparking an earsplitting shriek. Festering teeth sink into her jugular. The dark tide of blood washes across her.

Twenty-five yards away, near the car, Lilly fights off a growing mass of gnashing teeth and dead flesh. Maybe twenty walkers in all now—most of them exhibiting the grotesque buzzing adrenaline of a feeding frenzy as they surround the Chrysler—their blackened mouths working and smacking voraciously, while behind blood-smeared windows, the faces of three little girls look on in catatonic horror.

Lilly swings the shovel again and again—her efforts futile against the growing horde—as the cogs and gears of her brain seize up, mortified by the grisly sounds of Sarah’s demise on the ground across the property. The teenager’s shrieking deteriorates and sputters into a watery series of caterwauls. At least a half-dozen walkers are on her now, burrowing in, chewing and tearing at her gushing abdomen. Blood fountains from her shuddering form.

Over by the row of cars, Lilly’s midsection goes icy cold as she slams the shovel into another skull, her mind crackling and flickering with terror, ultimately fixing on a single course of action: Get them away from the Chrysler.

The silent dog-whistle urgency of that single imperative—get them away from the children—galvanizes Lilly and sends a jolt of energy down her spine. She turns and swings the shovel at the Chrysler’s front quarter panel.

The clang rings out. The children inside the car jerk with a start. The livid blue faces of the dead turn toward the noise.

“C’MON! C’MON!!” Lilly lunges away from the Chrysler, moving toward the nearest car lined up in the haphazard row of vehicles—a beat-up Ford Taurus with one window covered in cardboard—and she strikes the edge of the roof as hard as she can, making another harsh metallic clang that gets the attention of more of the dead.

Lilly darts toward the next car in line. She bangs the scoop against the front left quarter panel, issuing another dull clang.

“C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!!”

Lilly’s voice rises above the clamor like the bark of a sick animal, stretched thin with horror, hoarse with trauma, toneless, a touch of madness in it. She slams the shovel against car after car, not really knowing exactly what she’s doing, not really in control of her actions anymore. More zombies take notice, their lazy, awkward movements drawn to the noise.

It takes Lilly mere seconds to reach the end of the row of vehicles, slamming the shovel into the last vehicle—a rust-pocked Chevy S-10 pickup—but by that point, most of the assailants have latched on to her clarion call, and now slowly, stupidly, clumsily wander toward the sound of her traumatized shouts.

The only walkers that remain are the six that continue to devour Sarah Bingham on the ground in the clearing by the great, billowing circus tent.

*   *   *

“C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MONNNNN!!!!!” Lilly vaults across the gravel road and dashes up the hill toward the tree line.

Pulse racing, vision blurred, lungs heaving for air, she drops the shovel and digs her hiking boots into the mire as she ascends the soft forest floor. She plunges into the trees. Her shoulder bangs against the trunk of an ancient birch, the pain flaring in her skull, stars shooting across her line of vision. She moves instinctively now, a horde of zombies coming up the rise behind her.

Zigzagging through the deeper woods, she loses her sense of direction. Behind her, the pack of walkers has slowed and lost her scent.

Time loses all meaning. As though in a dream, Lilly feels motion slow down, her screams refusing to come out, her legs bogging down in the invisible quicksand of nightmares. The darkness closes in as the forest thickens and deepens.

Lilly thinks of Sarah, poor Sarah, in her sweet little pink angora sweater, now bathed in her own blood, and the tragedy drags Lilly down, yanking her off her feet and throwing her down to the soft floor of matted pine needles and decaying matter and endless cycles of death and regeneration. Lilly lets out a paroxysm of pain on a breathless sob, her tears rolling down her cheeks and moistening the humus.

Her weeping—heard by no one—goes on for quite some time.

*   *   *

The search party finds Lilly late that afternoon. Led by Chad Bingham, the group of five men and three women—all heavily armed—see Lilly’s light blue fleece jacket behind a deadfall log a thousand yards due north of the tent city, in the gelid darkness of the deep woods, in a small clearing under a canopy of loblolly branches. She appears to be unconscious, lying in a patch of brambles. “Careful!” Chad Bingham calls out to his second-in-command, a skinny mechanic from Augusta by the name of Dick Fenster. “If she’s still movin’, she might’ve turned already!”

Nervous breaths showing in the chill air, Fenster cautiously goes over to the clearing with his snub-nosed .38 drawn and ready, hammer back, trigger finger twitching. He kneels down by Lilly, takes a good long look, and then turns back to the group. “She’s all right! She’s alive … ain’t bit or nothing … still conscious!”

“Not for long,” Chad Bingham utters under his breath as he marches toward the clearing. “Chickenshit fucking whore gets my baby killed—”

“Whoa! Whoa!” Megan Lafferty steps between Chad and the deadfall. “Hold on a second, hold on.”

“Get outta my way, Megan.”

“You gotta take a deep breath.”

“Just gonna talk to her.”

An awkward pause seems to weigh down on everybody present. The other members of the search party stand back in the trees, looking down, their drawn, exhausted faces reflecting the day’s horrible work. Some of the men are red-eyed, stricken with loss.

Returning from their firewood-gathering expedition, the noise of their engines and axes still ringing in their ears, they were shocked to find the tent city in ghastly disarray. Both human and zombie alike littered the blood-soaked grounds, sixteen settlers slaughtered, some of them devoured—nine of them children. Josh Lee Hamilton did the dirty work of finishing off the remaining walkers and the unfortunate humans whose remains were left intact. Nobody else had the heart to shoot their friends and loved ones in the head to ensure their eternal rest. The incubation period—strangely—seems to be more and more unpredictable lately. Some victims reanimate within minutes after a bite. Others take hours—even days—to turn. At this moment, in fact, Josh is still back at camp, supervising a disposal crew, preparing the victims for mass burial. It’ll take them another twenty-four hours to get the circus tent back up.

“Dude, listen, seriously,” Megan Lafferty says to Chad, her voice lowering and becoming softly urgent. “I know you’re torn up and all but she saved three of your girls.… I told you I saw it with my own eyes. She drew the walkers away, she fucking risked her life.”

“I just—” Chad looks as though he’s either going to cry or scream. “I just … want to talk.”

“You got a wife back at camp’s gonna lose her mind with grief … she needs you.”

“I just—”

Another awkward beat of silence. One of the other fathers starts to softly weep in the shadows of the trees, his handgun falling to the ground. It’s nearly five o’clock and the cold is squeezing in, the puffs of vapor wafting in front of all of their tortured faces. Across the clearing, Lilly sits up and wipes her mouth, and tries to get her bearings. She looks like a sleepwalker. Fenster helps her to her feet.

Chad looks down. “Fuck it.” He turns and walks away, his voice trailing after him. “Fuck it.”

*   *   *

The next day, under a frigid overcast sky, the tent dwellers have an improvised graveside service for their fallen friends and loved ones.

Nearly seventy-five survivors gather in a large semicircle around the mass burial site on the east edge of the property. Some of the mourners hold candles flickering stubbornly against the October winds. Others clutch at each other in convulsive grief. The searing pain on some of the faces—especially those of grieving parents—reflects the agonizing randomness of this plague world. Their children were taken with the arbitrary suddenness of a lightning bolt, and now the mourners’ faces sag with desolation, their parboiled eyes shimmering in the unrelenting silver sunlight.

The cairns are set into the clay, stretching up the gentle rise of bare ground beyond the split-rail fence. Small piles of stones mark each of the sixteen graves. Some markers have hanks of wildflowers carefully wedged between the rocks. Josh Lee Hamilton made sure Sarah Bingham’s marker got adorned with a lovely bouquet of little white Cherokee roses, which grow in profusion along the edges of the orchards. The big man had grown fond of the feisty, whip-smart teenager … and her death has wrenched his heart in two.

“God, we ask that you take our lost friends and neighbors into your hands,” Josh says now from the edge of the fence, the wind buffeting his olive-drab army coat stretched across his massive shoulders. His deeply etched face glistens with tears.

Josh grew up Baptist, and although he lost most of his religion over the years, he asked his fellow survivors earlier this morning if he might say a few words. Baptists don’t put much stock in prayers for the dead. They believe the righteous instantly go to heaven at the time of death—or, if you’re a nonbeliever, you instantly go to hell—but Josh still felt obliged to say something.

He saw Lilly earlier in the day, and he held her for a moment, whispering words of comfort to her. But he could tell something was wrong. Something was going on inside her beyond mere grief. She felt limp in his enormous arms, her slender form trembling ceaselessly like a wounded bird. She said very little. Only that she needed to be alone. She didn’t show up for the burial service.

“We ask that you take them to a better place,” he goes on, his deep baritone voice cracking. The work of body disposal has taken its toll on the big man. He struggles to hold it together but his emotions are strangling his vocal chords. “We ask that you—you—”

He can’t go on. He turns away, and he bows his head and lets the silent tears come. He can’t breathe. He can’t stay here. Barely aware of what he’s doing, he finds himself moving away from the crowd, away from the soft, horrible sound of weeping and praying.

Among the many things he has missed today in his daze of sadness is the fact that Lilly Caul’s decision to avoid the burial service is not the only conspicuous absence. Chad Bingham is also missing.

*   *   *

“Are you okay?” Lilly keeps her distance for a moment, standing on the edge of the clearing, wringing her hands nervously, about fifteen feet away from Chad Bingham.

The wiry man in the John Deere cap says nothing for the longest time. He just stands on the edge of the tree line, his head bowed, his back to her, his shoulders slumped as though carrying a great weight.

Minutes before the burial service began, Chad Bingham surprised Lilly by showing up at her tent and asking her if they could talk privately. He said he wanted to set things right. He said he didn’t blame her for Sarah’s death, and from the heartbreaking look in his eyes, Lilly believed him.

Which is why she followed him up here to a small clearing in the dense grove of trees lining the northern edge of the property. Barely two hundred square feet of pine-needle-matted ground, bordered by mossy stones, the clearing lies under a canopy of foliage, the gray sunlight filtering down in beams of thick dust motes. The cool air smells of decay and animal droppings.

The clearing is far enough away from the tent city to provide privacy.

“Chad—” Lilly wants to say something, wants to tell him how sorry she is. For the first time since she met the man—initially appalled by his willingness to conduct a dalliance with Megan right under his wife’s nose—Lilly now sees Chad Bingham as simply human … imperfect, scared, emotional, confused, and devastated by the loss of his little girl.

In other words, he’s just some good old boy—no better or worse than any of the other survivors. And now Lilly feels a wave of sympathy washing over her. “You want to talk about it?” she asks him at last.

“Yeah, I guess … maybe not … I don’t know.” His back still turned, his voice comes out like a leaky faucet, in fits and starts, as faint as water dripping. The sorrow knots his shoulder blades, makes him tremble slightly in the shadows of the pines.

“I’m so sorry, Chad.” Lilly ventures closer to him. She has tears in her eyes. “I loved Sarah, she was such a wonderful girl.”

He says something so softly Lilly cannot hear it. She moves closer.

She puts her hand gently on the man’s shoulder. “I know there’s nothing anybody can say … a time like this.” She speaks to the back of his head. The little plastic strap on the back of his cap says SPALDING. He has a small tattoo of a snake between the cords of his neck. “I know it’s no consolation,” Lilly adds then, “but Sarah died a hero—she saved the lives of her sisters.”

“Did she?” His voice rises barely above a whisper. “She was such a good girl.”

“I know she was … she was an amazing girl.”

“You think so?” His back still turned. Head bowed. Softly shuddering shoulders.

“Yes I do, Chad, she was a hero, she was one in a million.”

“Really? You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then why didn’t you do your FUCKING JOB!” Chad turns around and strikes Lilly so hard with the back of his hand that she bites through her tongue. Her head whiplashes, and she sees stars.

Chad hits her again and she stumbles backward, tripping over an exposed root and tumbling to the ground. Chad looms over her, his fists clenching, his eyes blazing. “You stupid, worthless bitch! All you had to do is protect my girls! Fucking chimpanzee could do that!”

Lilly tries to roll away but Chad drives the steel toe of his work boot into her hip, tossing her sideways. Pain stabs her midsection. She gasps for air, her mouth filling with blood. “P-please duh—”

He reaches down and yanks her back to her feet. Holding her up by the front of her sweatshirt, he hisses at her, his sour breath hot on her face, “You and your little slutty friend think this is a party? You smoking dope last night? Huh? HUH?”

Chad smashes a right hook into Lilly’s jaw, cracking her teeth and sending her back to the ground. She lands in a heap of agony, two of her ribs cracked, the blood choking her. She can’t breathe. Icy cold spreads through her and blurs her vision.

She can barely focus on Chad Bingham’s ropy, compact form hovering over her, dropping down on her with tremendous weight, straddling her, the drool of uncontrollable rage leaking out of the corner of his mouth, his spittle flying. “Answer me! You been smoking weed when you’re with my kids?”

Lilly feels Chad’s powerful grip closing around her throat, the back of her head banging off the ground now. “ANSWER ME, YOU FFFUHHHH—”

Without warning, a third figure materializes behind Chad Bingham—pulling him off Lilly—the identity of this rescuer barely visible.

Lilly only sees a blur of a man so enormous he blots out the rays of the sun.

*   *   *

Josh gets two good handfuls of Chad Bingham’s denim jacket and then yanks with all his might.

Either through a sudden spike of adrenaline coursing through the big man, or simply due to Chad’s relatively scrawny girth, the resulting heave-ho makes Chad Bingham look like a human cannonball. He soars across the clearing in a high arc, one of his boots flying off, his cap spinning into the trees. He slams shoulder first into an enormous ancient tree trunk. His breath flies out of him, and he flops to the ground in front of the tree. He gasps for breath, blinking with shock.

Josh kneels by Lilly and gently raises her bloody face. She tries to speak but can’t get her bleeding lips around the words. Josh lets out a pained breath—a sort of gut-shot moan. Something about seeing that lovely face—with its sea-foam eyes and delicately freckled cheeks, now stippled with blood—sends him into a rage that draws a gauzy filter down over his eyes.

The big man rises, turns, and marches across the clearing to where Chad Bingham lies writhing in pain.

Josh can see only the milky-white blur of the man on the ground, the pale sunlight beaming down through the musty air. Chad makes a feeble attempt to crawl away but Josh easily catches the man’s retreating legs, and with a single decisive yank, Chad’s body is wrenched back in front of the tree. Josh stands the wiry man up against the trunk.

Chad stammers with blood in his mouth. “This ain’t—it ain’t none of your—pleeeease—m-my brother—you don’t have to DDUHHH—!”

Josh slams the man’s flailing body against the bark of the hundred-year-old black oak. The impact cracks the man’s skull and dislocates his shoulder blades with the violent abruptness of a battering ram.

Chad lets out a garbled, mucusy cry—more primal and involuntary than conscious—his eyes rolling back in his head. If Chad Bingham were repeatedly hit from behind by a massive battering ram, the series of impacts would not rival the force with which Josh Lee Hamilton now begins slamming the sinewy man in denim against the tree.

“I’m not your brother,” Josh says with eerie calm, a low velvety voice from some hidden, inaccessible place deep within him, as he bangs the rag doll of a man against the tree again and again.

Josh rarely loses control like this. Only a handful of times in his life has it happened: Once, on the gridiron when an opposing offensive tackle—a good old boy from Montgomery—called him a nigger … and on another occasion when a pickpocket in Atlanta grabbed his mother’s purse. But now the quiet storm inside him rages harder than ever before—his actions unmoored and yet somehow controlled—as he repeatedly slams the back of Chad Bingham’s cranium against the tree.

Chad’s head flops with each impact, the sick thud getting more and more watery now as the back of the skull caves. Vomit roars out of Chad—again an involuntary phenomenon—the particles of cereal and yellow bile looping down, unnoticed, across Josh Lee Hamilton’s ham-hock forearms. Josh notices Chad’s left hand groping for the grip of his steel-plated Smith & Wesson tucked inside the back of his belt.

Josh easily tears the pistol out of Chad’s pants and tosses the weapon across the clearing.

With his last scintilla of strength, his brain sputtering from multiple concussions and the hemorrhage leaking out the back of his fractured skull, Chad Bingham makes a futile attempt to drive a knee up into the big man’s groin, but Josh quickly and handily blocks the knee with one forearm, and then delivers an extraordinary blow—a great winding backhand slap, a surreal echo of the slap delivered moments ago to Lilly—which sends Chad Bingham hurling sideways.

Chad sprawls to the ground fifteen feet away from the tree trunk.

Josh can’t hear Lilly stumbling across the clearing. He can’t hear her strangled voice, “Josh, NO! NO! JOSH, STOP, YOU’RE GOING TO KILL HIM!!”

All at once, Josh Lee Hamilton wakes up, and blinks as though discovering that he’s been sleepwalking and has found himself naked and wandering down Peachtree Boulevard during rush hour. He feels Lilly’s hands on his back, clawing at his coat, trying to yank him back and away from the man lying in a heap on the ground.

“You’re gonna kill him!”

Josh whirls. He sees Lilly—bruised and battered, her mouth full of blood, barely able to stand or breathe or speak—directly behind him, her watery gaze locked on to his. He pulls her into an embrace, his eyes welling with tears. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine … please, Josh … you have to stop before you kill him.”

Josh starts to say something else but stops himself. He turns and looks down at the man on the ground. Over the course of that terrible, silent pause—as Josh moves his lips but is unable to make a sound or put a thought into words—he sees the deflated body on the ground, lying in a pool of its own fluids, as still and lifeless as a bundle of rags.

FOUR

“Hold still, honey.” Bob Stookey gently turns Lilly’s head so he can get a better angle on her fat lip. He carefully dabs a pea-sized amount of antibiotic on the split, scabbed flesh. “Almost done.”

Lilly jerks at the pain. Bob kneels next to her, his first-aid kit open on the edge of the cot on which Lilly lies prone, staring up at the canvas ceiling. The tent glows with the pale rays of late-afternoon sun, which shine through the stained fabric walls. The air is cold and smells of disinfectant and stale liquor. Lilly has a blanket draped across her bare midriff and bra.

Bob needs a drink. He needs one badly. His hands are shaking again. Lately, he’s been flashing back to his days in the U.S. Marine Hospital Corps. One tour in Afghanistan eleven years ago, emptying bedpans at Camp Dwyer—it seems like a million light years away—could never have prepared him for this. He was on the sauce back then as well, barely made it out of Medical Education and Training in San Antonio due to the drinking, and now the war has come home for Bob. The shrapnel-riddled bodies he patched in the Middle East were nothing compared to the battlefields left behind in the wake of this war. Bob has dreams of Afghanistan sometimes—the walking dead mingling and infecting the ranks of the Taliban in Grand Guignol fashion—the cold, dead, gray arms sprouting from the walls of mobile surgical suites.

But patching Lilly Caul is an altogether different proposition for Bob—far worse than being a battlefield medic or cleaning up the aftermath of a walker attack. Bingham did a number on her. Best Bob can tell, she has at least three busted ribs, a major contusion to her left eye—which may or may not involve a vitreous hemorrhage or even retinal detachment—as well as a nasty series of bruises and lacerations to her face. Bob feels ill-equipped—both in technique and medical supplies—to even pretend to treat her. But Bob is the only game in town around here, and so he has now jury-rigged a splint of bedsheets, hardback book covers, and elastic bandages around Lilly’s midsection and has applied his dwindling supply of antibiotic cream to her superficial wounds. The eye worries him the most. He needs to watch it, make sure it heals properly.

“There we go,” he says, applying the last daub of the cream to her lip.

“Thanks, Bob.” Lilly’s speech is impeded by the swelling, a slight lisp on the s. “You can send your bill to my insurance company.”

Bob lets out a humorless chuckle and helps her pull her coat back over her bandaged midsection and bruised shoulders. “What the hell happened out there?”

Lilly sighs, sitting up on the cot, gingerly zipping the coat and cringing at the stabbing pains. “Things got a little … carried away.”

Bob finds his dented flask of cheap hooch, sits back on his folding chair, and takes a long medicinal swig. “At the risk of stating the obvious … this ain’t good for anybody.”

Lilly swallows as though trying to digest broken glass. Tendrils of her auburn hair dangle in her face. “You’re telling me.”

“They’re meeting right now in the big top about it.”

“Who is?”

“Simmons, Hennessey, some of the older guys, Alice Burnside … you know … sons and daughters of the revolution. Josh is … well, I’ve never seen him like this. He’s pretty messed up. Just sitting on the ground outside his tent like a sphinx … ain’t saying a word … just staring into space. Says he’ll go along with whatever they decide.”

“What does that mean?”

Bob takes another healthy sip of his medicine. “Lilly, this is all new. Somebody murdered a living person. These people ain’t dealt with anything like this before.”

“‘Murdered’?”

“Lilly—”

“That’s what they’re calling it now?”

“I’m just saying—”

“I gotta go talk to them.” Lilly tries to stand but the pain drives her back to the edge of the cot.

“Whoa there, Kemo sabe. Take it easy.” Bob leans over and gently steadies her. “I just gave you enough codeine to calm a Clydesdale.”

“Goddammit, Bob, they’re not going to lynch Josh for this, I’m not gonna let that happen.”

“Let’s just take it one step at a time. You ain’t goin’ nowhere right now.”

Lilly lowers her head. A single tear wells up and drips from her good eye. “It was an accident, Bob.”

Bob looks at her. “Maybe let’s just focus on healing right now, huh?”

Lilly looks up at him. Her busted lip is swollen to three times its normal size, her left eye shot with red, the socket already blackened and bruised. She pulls the collar of her thrift shop overcoat tighter and shivers against the cold. She wears a number of oddball accessories that catch Bob’s eye: macramé bracelets and beads and tiny feathers woven into the tendrils of amber locks falling across her devastated face. It’s curious to Bob Stookey how a girl can still pay attention to fashion in this world. But that is part of Lilly Caul’s charm, part of the fiber of her being. From the little fleur-de-lis tattoo on the back of her neck to the meticulous rips and patches in her jeans, she is one of those girls who can make ten dollars and an afternoon at a secondhand store stretch into an entire wardrobe. “This is all my fault, Bob,” she says in a hoarse, somnolent voice.

“That’s a load of crap,” Bob Stookey counters after taking another pull off the tarnished flask. Maybe the liquor has begun to loosen Bob’s lips, because he feels a twinge of bitterness. “My guess is, knowin’ that Chad character, he’d been asking for this for a while now.”

“Bob, that’s not—”

Lilly stops herself when she hears the crunch of footsteps outside the tent. The shadow of a leviathan falls across the canvas. The familiar silhouette pauses for a moment, lurking awkwardly outside the zippered front flap of Bob’s tent. Lilly recognizes the figure but says nothing.

A huge hand gently folds back the tent flap and a large, deeply lined brown face peers in. “They said I could—they gave me three minutes,” Josh Lee Hamilton says in a choked, sheepish baritone.

“What are you talking about?” Lilly sits up and stares at her friend. “Three minutes for what?”

Josh kneels in front of the tent flap, looking at the ground, struggling to tamp down his emotions. “Three minutes to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean, ‘good-bye’? What happened?”

Josh lets out a pained sigh. “They took a vote … decided the best way to deal with what happened was to send me packing, kick me outta the group.”

“What!”

“I suppose it’s better than gettin’ hung from the highest tree.”

“You didn’t—I mean—it was completely accidental.”

“Yeah, sure,” Josh says, staring at the ground. “Poor fella accidentally bumped into my fist a whole bunch of times.”

“Under the circumstances, though, these people know what kind of man—”

“Lilly—”

“No, this is wrong. This is just … wrong.”

“It’s over, Lilly.”

She looks at him. “Are they letting you take any supplies? One of the vehicles maybe?”

“I got my bike. It’ll be okay, I’ll be awright…”

“No … no … this is just … ridiculous.”

“Lilly, listen to me.” The big man pushes his way partially into the tent. Bob glances away out of respect. Josh crouches down, reaches out and gently touches Lilly’s wounded face. From the way Josh’s lips are pressed together, the way his eyes are shimmering, the lines deepening around his mouth, it’s clear he’s holding in a tidal wave of emotion. “This is how it’s gotta play out. It’s for the best. I’ll be fine. You and Bob hold the fort down.”

Lilly’s eyes well up. “I’ll go with you, then.”

“Lilly—”

“There’s nothing for me here.”

Josh shakes his head. “Sorry, babydoll … it’s a single ticket.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“Lilly, I’m real sorry but that ain’t in the cards. It’s safer here. With the group.”

“Yeah, it’s real stable here,” she says icily. “It’s a regular love fest.”

“Better here than out there.”

Lilly looks at him through ravaged eyes, tears beginning to track down her battered face. “You can’t stop me, Josh. It’s my decision. I’m coming along and that’s all there is to it. And if you try and stop me, I will hunt you down, I will stalk you, I will find you. I’m coming with you and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t stop me. Okay? So just … deal with it.”

She buttons up her coat, slips her feet into her boots, and starts gathering up her things. Josh watches in dismay. Lilly’s movements are tentative, interrupted by intermittent flinches of pain.

Bob exchanges a glance with Josh, something unspoken yet powerful passing between the two men, as Lilly gets all her stray items of clothing stuffed into a duffel bag and pushes her way out of the tent.

Josh lingers in the mouth of the tent for a moment, looking back in at Bob.

Bob finally shrugs and says with a weary smile: “Women.”

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later, Josh has the saddlebags of his onyx Suzuki street bike brimming with tins of Spam and tuna fish, road flares, blankets, waterproof matches, rope, a rolled-up pup tent, a flashlight, a small camp stove, a collapsible fishing rod, a small .38 caliber Saturday night special, and some paper plates and spices cribbed from the common area. The day has turned blustery, the sky casting over with ashy dark clouds.

The threatening weather adds another layer of anxiety to the proceedings as Josh secures the luggage bags and glances over his shoulder at Lilly, who stands ten feet away on the edge of the road, shrugging on an overstuffed backpack. She cringes at a sharp pain in her ribs as she tightens the straps on the pack.

From across the property, a handful of self-proclaimed community leaders look on. Three men and a middle-aged woman stand stoically watching. Josh wants to holler something sarcastic and withering to them but holds his tongue. Instead, he turns to Lilly and says, “You ready?”

Before Lilly can answer a voice rings out from the east edge of the property.

“Hold on, folks!”

Bob Stookey comes trundling along the fence with a large canvas duffel slung over his back. The clanking rattle of bottles can be heard—Bob’s private stock of “medicine,” no doubt—and there’s a strange look on the old medic’s face, a mixture of anticipation and embarrassment. He approaches cautiously. “Before y’all ride off into the sunset, I got a question for ya.”

Josh gives the man a look. “What’s going on, Bob?”

“Just answer me one thing,” he says. “You got any medical training?”

Lilly comes over, her brow furrowed with confusion. “Bob, what do you need?”

“It’s a simple question. Do either of you yahoos got any legitimate medical credentials?”

Josh and Lilly share a glance. Josh sighs. “Not that I know of, Bob.”

“Then let me ask you something else. Who in the flying fuck’s gonna watch that eye for infection?” He gestures toward Lilly’s hemorrhaged eye. “Or keep tabs on them fractured ribs for that matter?”

Josh looks at the medic. “What are you trying to say, Bob?”

The older man shoots a thumb at the row of vehicles parked along the gravel access road behind him. “As long as y’all are gallivanting off into the wild blue yonder, wouldn’t it make more sense to do it with a certified U.S. Marine Medical Corpsman?”

*   *   *

They put their stuff in Bob’s king cab. The old Dodge Ram pickup is a monster—pocked with rust scars and dents—with a retrofitted camper top on the extended cargo bay. The camper’s windows are long and narrow and as opaque as soap glass. Lilly’s backpack and Josh’s saddlebags go in through the rear hatch, and get wedged between piles of dirty clothes and half-empty bottles of cheap whiskey. There’s a pair of rickety cots back there, a large cooler, three battered first-aid kits, a tattered suitcase, a pair of fuel tanks, an old leather doctor’s bag that looks like it came from a pawnshop, and a phalanx of garden implements shoved against the firewall in front—shovels, a hoe, a few axes, and a nasty-looking pitchfork. The vaulted ceiling rises high enough to accommodate a slouching adult.

As he stows his bags, Josh sees scattered pieces of a disassembled 12-gauge shotgun, but no sign of any shells. Bob carries a .38 snub-nose, which probably couldn’t hit a stationary target at ten paces with no wind—and that’s if and only if Bob is sober, which is rarely the case. Josh knows they will need firearms and ammunition if they want a fighting chance of survival.

Josh slams the hatch and feels somebody else watching them from across the property.

“Hey, Lil!”

The voice sounds familiar, and when Josh turns around, he sees Megan Lafferty, the girl with the ruddy brown curls and unhinged libido, standing a couple of car lengths away, next to the gravel shoulder. She holds hands with the stoner kid—what’s his name?—with the stringy blond hair in his face and the ratty sweater. Steve? Shawn? Josh can’t remember. All Josh remembers is putting up with the girl’s bed-hopping all the way from Peachtree City.

Now the two slacker kids stand there, watching with buzzardlike intensity.

“Hey, Meg,” Lilly says softly, somewhat skeptically, as she comes around the back of the truck and stands next to Josh. The sound of Bob banging around under the truck’s hood can be heard in the awkward silence.

Megan and the stoner kid approach cautiously. Megan measures her words as she addresses Lilly: “Dude, I heard you were like taking off for higher ground.”

Next to Megan the stoner giggles softly. “Always up for getting higher.”

Josh shoots the kid a look. “What can we do for you fine young people?”

Megan doesn’t take her eyes off Lilly. “Lil, I just wanted to say … like … I hope you’re not like pissed at me or anything.”

“Why would I be pissed at you?”

Megan looks down. “I said some things the other day, I wasn’t really thinking straight … I just wanted to … I don’t know. Just wanted to say I was sorry.”

Josh glances over at Lilly, and in that brief moment of silence before she responds, he sees the essence of Lilly Caul in a single instant. Her bruised face softens. Her eyes fill with forgiveness. “You don’t have to be sorry for anything, Meg,” Lilly tells her friend. “We’re all just trying to keep our shit together.”

“He really fucked you up bad,” Megan says, pondering the ravages of Lilly’s face.

“Lilly, we gotta get going,” Josh chimes in. “Gonna be dark soon.”

The stoner kid whispers to Megan, “You gonna ask them or what?”

“Ask us what, Meg?” Lilly says.

Megan licks her lips. She looks up at Josh. “It’s totally fucked up, the way they’re treating you.”

Josh gives her a terse nod. “Appreciate it, Megan, but we really have to be taking off.”

“Take us with you.”

Josh looks at Lilly, and Lilly stares at her friend. Finally Lilly says, “Um, see, the thing is…”

“Safety in fucking numbers, man,” the stoner kid enthuses with his dry little nervous pot giggle. “We’re like totally in warrior mode—”

Megan shoots her hand up. “Scott, would you put a cork in it for two minutes.” She looks up at Josh. “We can’t stay here with these fascist assholes. Not after what happened. It’s a fucking mess here, people don’t trust each other anymore.”

Josh crosses his big arms across his barrel chest, looking at Megan. “You’ve done your share to stir things up.”

“Josh—” Lilly starts to intercede.

Megan suddenly looks down with a crestfallen expression. “No, it’s okay. I deserve that. I guess I just … I just forgot what the rules are.”

In the ensuing silence—the only sounds the wind in the trees and the squeaking noises of Bob futzing under the hood—Josh rolls his eyes. He can’t believe what he’s about to agree to. “Get your stuff,” he says finally, “and be quick about it.”

*   *   *

Megan and Scott ride in back. Bob drives, with Josh on the passenger side and Lilly in the narrow enclosure in the rear of the cab. The truck has a modified sleeping berth behind the front seat with smaller side doors and a flip-down upholstered bench that doubles as a bed. Lilly sits on the tattered bench seat and braces herself on the handrail, every bump and swerve coaxing a stabbing pain in her ribs.

She can see the tree line on either side of the road darkening as they drive down the winding access road that leads out of the orchards, the shadows of late afternoon lengthening, the temperature plummeting. The truck’s noisy heater fights a losing battle against the chill. The air in the cab smells of stale liquor, smoke, and body odors. Through the vents, the scent of tobacco fields and rotting fruit—the musk of a Georgia autumn—is faintly discernible, a warning to Lilly, a harbinger of cutting loose from civilization.

She starts looking for walkers in the trees—every shadow, every dark place a potential menace. The sky is void of planes or birds of any species, the heavens as cold, dead, and silent as a vast gray glacier.

They make their way onto Spur 362—the main conduit that cuts through Meriwether County—as the sun sinks lower on the horizon. Due to the proliferation of wrecks and abandoned cars, Bob takes it nice and easy, keeping the truck down around thirty-five miles an hour. The two-lane turns blue-gray in the encroaching dusk, the twilight spreading across the rolling hills of white pine and soybeans.

“What’s the plan, captain?” Bob asks Josh after they’ve put a mile and a half behind them.

“Plan?” Josh lights a cigar and rolls down the window. “You must be mistaking me for one of them battlefield commanders you used to sew up in Iraq.”

“I was never in Iraq,” Bob says. He has a flask between his legs. He sneaks a sip. “Did a nickel’s worth in Afghanistan, and to be honest with ya, that place is looking better and better to me.”

“All I can tell ya is, they told me to get outta town, and that’s what I’m doin’.”

They pass a crossroads, a sign that says FILBURN ROAD, a dusty, desolate farm path lined with ditches, running between two tobacco fields. Josh makes note of it and starts thinking about the wisdom of being on the open road after dark. He starts to say, “I’m startin’ to think, though, maybe we shouldn’t stray too far from—”

“Josh!” Lilly’s voice pierces the rattling drone of the cab. “Walkers—look!”

Josh realizes that she’s pointing at the distant highway ahead of them, at a point maybe five hundred yards away. Bob slams on the brakes. The truck skids, throwing Lilly against the seat. Sharp pain like a jagged piece of glass slices through her ribs. The muffled thump of Megan and Scott slamming into the firewall in back penetrates the cab.

“Son of a buck!” Bob grips the steering wheel with weathered, wrinkled hands, his knuckles turning white with pressure as the truck idles noisily. “Son of a five-pointed buck!”

Josh sees the cluster of zombies in the distance, at least forty or fifty of them—maybe more, the twilight can play tricks—swarming around an overturned school bus. From this distance, it looks as though the bus has spilled clumps of wet clothing, through which the dead are sorting busily. But it quickly becomes clear the lumps are human remains. And the walkers are feeding.

And the victims are children.

“We could just ram our way through ’em,” Bob ventures.

“No … no,” Lilly says. “You serious?”

“We could go around ’em.”

“I don’t know.” Josh tosses the cigar through the vent, his pulse quickening. “Them ditches on either side are steep, could roll us over.”

“What do you suggest?”

“What do you have in the way of shells for that squirrel gun you got back there?”

Bob lets out a tense breath. “Got one box of pigeon shot, 25-grain, about a million years old. What about that peashooter?”

“Just what’s in the cylinder, I think there’s five rounds left and that’s it.”

Bob glances in the rearview mirror. Lilly sees his deeply lined eyes sparking with panic. Bob is looking at Lilly when he says, “Thoughts?”

Lilly says, “Okay, so even if we take out most of them, the noise is gonna draw a swarm. You ask me, I say we avoid them altogether.”

Right then, a muffled thudding noise makes Lilly jump. Her ribs twinge as she twists around. In the narrow little window on the back wall of the cab, Megan’s pale, anxious face hovers. She pounds her palm on the glass and mouths the words What the fuck?

“Hold on! It’s okay! Just hold on!” Lilly yells through the glass, then turns to Josh. “Whaddaya think?”

Josh looks out his window at the long, rust-dimpled mirror. In the oblong reflection, he sees the lonely crossroads about three hundred yards back, barely visible in the dying light. “Back up,” he says.

Bob looks at him. “Say what?”

“Back up … hurry. We’re gonna take that side road back there.”

Bob jacks the lever into reverse and steps on it. The truck lurches.

The engine whines, the gravitational tug pulling everybody forward.

Bob bites his lower lip as he wrestles the steering wheel, using the side mirror to guide him, the truck careening backward, the front end fishtailing, the gears screaming. The rear end approaches the crossroads.

Bob locks up the brakes and Josh slams into his seat as the truck’s rear end skids off the far shoulder of the two-lane, tangling with a knot of wild dogwood, cattails, and mayapple, sending up a cloud of leaves and debris. No one hears the shuffling sounds of something dead stirring behind the scrub brush.

No one hears the faint scrape of the dead thing lumbering out of the foliage and clamping its dead fingers around the king cab’s rear bumper until it’s too late.

*   *   *

Inside the rear camper compartment, each of them tumbling to the floor in the violent pitching motions of the truck, each of them giggling hysterically, Megan and Scott are oblivious to the zombie now attached to the running board in the rear. As the Dodge Ram slams into drive and blasts down the perpendicular dirt road, they each climb back onto their makeshift seats fashioned out of peach crates, each still giggling furiously.

The air inside the cramped camper is blue from the haze of an entire bowl of sativa weed, which Scott fired up ten minutes ago. He’s been conserving his stash, nursing it, dreading the inevitable day he would run out and would have to figure out how to grow it in the sandy clay.

“You just farted when you fell,” Scott chortles at Megan, his eyes already dreamy and blistered with a major buzz humming behind his eyes.

“I most certainly did not,” she counters in her uncontrollable giggle, trying to balance herself on the crate. “That was my fucking shoe scraping the fucking floor.”

“Bullshit, dude, you so farted.”

“Did not.”

“You did, you so did—you just ripped one, and it was such a girl fart.”

Megan roars with laughter. “What the fucking hell is a girl fart?”

Scott guffaws. “It’s—it’s kinda like—kinda like a cute little toot. Like a little train engine. Toot-toot. The little fart that could…”

They both bend over with an uncontainable spasm of hilarity as a livid, milky-eyed face rises up like a small moon in the dark surface of the window at the rear of the camper. This one is male and middle-aged and nearly bald, its scalp mapped with deep blue veins and wisps of mildew-gray hair.

Neither Megan nor Scott sees it at first. They don’t see the wind blowing its mossy strands of thinning hair, or its greasy lips peeling back to expose blackened teeth, or the fumbling of insensate, rotting fingers as they push through the gap in the partially sprung hatch.

“OH, SHIT!” Scott blurts the words out on a stutter of sputtering laughter when he sees the intruder boarding. “OH, SHIT!!”

Megan now doubles over with convulsive laughter as Scott spins and falls on his face and then scuttles madly across the narrow floor space on his hands and knees toward the garden implements. He’s not laughing anymore. The zombie is already halfway inside the camper. The sound of its buzz-saw snarl and the stench of its decomposed tissues fill the air. Megan finally sees the intruder and she starts to cough and wheeze, her laughter garbling slightly.

Scott reaches for the pitchfork. The truck swerves. The zombie—all the way inside now—stumbles drunkenly sideways and slams into the wall. A stack of crates tumbles. Scott gets the pitchfork up and moving.

Megan scuttles backward, sliding along on her ass, burrowing into the far corner. The terror in her eyes seems incongruous with her high-pitched, hiccupping giggles. Like a motor that won’t stop turning, her garbled, deranged laughter continues as Scott stands up on wobbling knees and lunges with the pitchfork as hard as he can in the general direction of the moving corpse in front of him.

The rusty tines strike the side of the thing’s face as it’s turning.

One of the spikes impales the zombie’s left eye. The other points go into the mandible and jugular. Black blood ejaculates across the camper. Scott lets out a war cry and pulls the implement free. The zombie staggers backward toward the windblown hatch—which is flapping now—and for some reason, the second blow gets a huge, convulsive, crazed laugh out of Megan.

The tines sink into the thing’s skull.

This is so goddamn hilarious to Megan: the funny dead man shuddering as though electrocuted, with the fork sunk in his skull, his arms reaching impotently at the air. Like a silly circus clown in whiteface, with big goofy black teeth, the thing staggers backward for a moment, until the wind pressure pulls it out of the flapping rear hatch.

The pitchfork slips free of Scott’s grasp and the zombie tumbles off the truck. Scott falls on his ass, landing in a pile of clothes.

Both Megan and Scott crack up now at the absurdity of the zombie careening to the road with the pitchfork still planted in its skull. They both scuttle on hands and knees to the rear hatch and gaze out at the human remains receding into the distance behind them—the pitchfork still sticking straight out of its head like a mile marker.

Scott pulls the hatch shut and they both crack up again in spasms of stoned laughter and frenzied coughing.

Still giggling, her eyes wet, Megan turns toward the front of the camper. Through the cab window, she can see the backs of Lilly’s and Josh’s heads. They look preoccupied—oblivious to what just occurred only inches away from them. They appear to be pointing at something in the distance, way up on the crest of an adjacent hill.

Megan can’t believe that nobody in the cab heard the commotion in the rear camper. Was the road noise that loud? Was the struggle drowned out by the sound of giggling? Megan is about to bang on the glass when she finally sees what all the pointing is about.

Bob is turning off the road and heading up a steep dirt path toward a building that may or may not be abandoned.

FIVE

The deserted gas station sits at the top of a hill overlooking the surrounding orchards. Bordered on three sides by weed-whiskered clapboard fencing and scattered garbage Dumpsters, the place has a hand-painted sign over its twin fuel islands—one diesel and three gas pumps—which says FORTNOY’S FUEL AND BAIT. The single-story building features a flyspecked office, a retail store, and a small service garage with a single lift.

When Bob pulls in to the cracked cement lot—his lights off in order to avoid detection—night has fallen into full darkness, and the king cab’s tires crunch on broken glass. Megan and Scott peer out of the rear hatch, taking in the shadows of the abandoned property, as Bob pulls the truck around behind the garage area, out of the line of vision of any nosy passersby.

He parks the truck between the carcass of a wrecked sedan and a pillar of tires. A moment later, the engine cuts off and Megan hears the squeak of the passenger door and the heavy thud of Josh Lee Hamilton stepping out and coming around the back of the camper.

“Y’all stay put for a second,” Josh says softly, evenly, after opening the camper door and seeing Megan and Scott crouched near the hatch like a couple of owls. Josh doesn’t notice the blood spatters on the walls. He checks the cylinder of his .38, the blue steel gleaming in the darkness. “Gonna check this place for walkers.”

“I don’t mean to be rude but what the fuck?” Megan says, her buzz completely gone now, replaced by a kind of jagged adrenaline surge. “Didn’t you guys see what happened back here? Didn’t you hear what was going on?”

Josh looks at her. “All I heard was a couple of potheads partying to beat the band—smells like Mardi Gras in a whorehouse back here.”

Megan tells him what happened.

Josh gives Scott a look. “Surprised you had the wherewithal … your brain scrambled like that.” Josh’s expression softens. He lets out a sigh and smiles at the kid. “Congratulations, junior.”

Scott gives him a cockeyed little grin. “My first kill, boss.”

“Chances are it won’t be your last,” Josh says, snapping the cylinder shut.

“Can I just like ask one more thing?” Megan says then. “What’re we doing here? I thought we had enough gas.”

“It’s too hairy out there for night travel. Best to hunker down till morning. Gonna need you two to stay put until you get the all clear.”

Josh walks off.

Megan shuts the door. In the darkness, she feels Scott’s gaze on her. She turns and looks at him. He has a weird look in his eyes. She grins at him. “Dude, I gotta admit, you are pretty damn handy with the garden tools—pretty goddamn bad-ass with that pitchfork.”

He grins back at her. Something changes in his eyes, as though he sees her for the first time—despite the darkness—and he licks his lips. He wipes a strand of dirty blond hair from his eyes. “It was nothing.”

“Yeah, right.” For a while now, Megan has been marveling at how much Scott Moon resembles Kurt Cobain. The resemblance seems to radiate off him with atavistic magic, his face shimmering in the darkness, his scent—patchouli oil and smoke and sweet-leaf and bubble gum—casting out and swirling in Megan’s brain.

She grabs him and mashes her lips on top of his, and he pulls her hair, and grinds his mouth into hers, and soon their tongues are intertwined and their midsections are gnashing against each other.

“Fuck me,” she whispers.

“Here?” he utters. “Now?”

“Maybe not,” she says, looking around, breathless. Her heart races. “Let’s wait until he’s done inside and we’ll find a place.”

“Cool,” he says, and he reaches out and fondles her through her torn Grateful Dead T-shirt. She jams her tongue in his mouth. Megan needs him now, this instant—she needs relief, badly.

She pulls away. In the darkness, the twosome stare at each other, breathing hard, like wild animals that would kill each other if they weren’t the same species.

*   *   *

Megan and Scott find a place to consummate their lust only moments after Josh issues the all clear.

The two stoners don’t fool anybody, in spite of their perfunctory attempts to be discreet: Megan feigns exhaustion and Scott suggests that he fix her a place to sleep on the floor of the storeroom in the rear of the retail shop. The cramped storage area—two hundred square feet of mildewed tile and exposed plumbing—reeks of dead fish and cheese bait. Josh tells them to be careful and rolls his eyes as he walks away, disgusted, and maybe, just maybe, a little jealous.

The thumping sounds start up almost immediately, even before Josh returns to the office, where Lilly and Bob are unpacking a knapsack full of supplies for the night. “What the hell is that?” Lilly asks the big man when he returns.

Josh shakes his head. The muffled thudding noises of two bodies going at it in the other room reverberate through the tight quarters of the filling station. Every few moments, a gasp or a moan swells above the rhythmic fucking sounds. “Young love,” he says with exasperation.

“You gotta be kidding me.” Lilly stands shivering in the dark front office as Bob Stookey nervously unpacks bottled water and blankets from a crate, pretending not to hear the carnal noises. Lilly holds herself as though she might disintegrate at any moment. “So this is what we have to look forward to?”

The power at Fortnoy’s is down, the fuel reservoirs empty, and the air in the building as cold as a walk-in refrigerator. The retail shop appears to be picked clean. Even the filthy refrigerator is emptied of earthworms and minnows. The front office features a dusty rack of magazines, a single vending machine running low on stale candy bars and bags of chips, rolls of toilet paper, a few overturned plastic contour chairs, a shelf of antifreeze and car deodorizers, and a scarred wooden counter on which sits a cash register that looks like it belongs in the Smithsonian. The register’s drawer is open and empty.

“Maybe they’ll get it out of their systems.” Josh checks his last cigar, which sits partially burned down in his jacket pocket. He glances around the office for a smoke rack. The place looks ransacked. “Looks like the Fortnoy boys left in a hurry.”

Lilly touches her bruised eye. “Yeah, I guess the looters got here before we did.”

“How you holdin’ up?” Josh asks her.

“I’ll live.”

Bob glances up from his crate of supplies. “Have a seat, Lillygirl.” He positions one of the contour chairs against the window. The light of the harvest moon shines in and stripes the floor in silver dusty shadows as Bob cleans his hands with a sterile wipe. “Let’s check them bandages.”

Josh watches as Lilly takes a seat and Bob opens a first-aid kit.

“Hold still now,” Bob admonishes softly as he carefully dabs an alcohol wipe around the crusty edges of Lilly’s injured eye. The skin under her brow has swollen to the size of a hardboiled egg. Lilly keeps flinching, and that bothers Josh. He bites back the urge to go to her, to hold her, to stroke her downy soft hair. The sight of those wavy mahogany tendrils dangling down across her narrow, delicate, bruised face is killing the big man.

“Ouch!” Lilly cringes. “Go easy, Bob.”

“Got a nasty shiner there, but if we can keep it clean, you oughtta be good to go.”

“Go where?”

“That’s a damn good question.” Bob carefully unhooks the Ace bandage around her ribs, gently palpates the bruised areas with his fingertips. Lilly flinches again. “Ribs ought to heal on their own, as long as you don’t get into any wrestling matches or marathon races.”

Bob replaces the elastic bandage around her midriff, then puts a fresh butterfly bandage on her eye. Lilly gazes up at the big man. “What are you thinking, Josh?”

Josh looks around the place. “We’ll spend the night here, take turns keeping watch.”

Bob tears off a piece of surgical tape. “Gonna get colder than a witch’s boob in here.”

Josh sighs. “Saw a generator in the garage, and we got blankets. Place is pretty secure and we’re up high enough on this ridge to see any large numbers of them things forming out there before they get to us.”

Bob finishes up and closes the first-aid kit. The muffled sounds of fornication dwindle in the other room, a momentary break in the action. In that brief stretch of silence, over the sound of the wind rattling the signage out front, Josh hears the distant a cappella of the dead—that faint telltale throb of dead vocal cords—like a broken pipe organ, moaning and gurgling in atonal unison. The noise stiffens the tiny hairs on the back of his neck.

Lilly listens to the distant chorus. “They’re multiplying, aren’t they?”

Josh shrugs. “Who knows.”

Bob reaches into the pocket of his tattered down coat. He roots out his flask, thumbs off the cap, and takes a healthy swig. “You think they smell us?”

Josh goes over to the grimy front window and gazes out at the night. “I think all the activity at Camp Bingham’s been drawing ’em out of the woodwork for weeks now.”

“How far from base camp are we, ya think?”

“Not much more than a mile or so, as the crow flies.” Josh gazes out over the pinnacles of distant pines, their swaying ocean of boughs as dense as black lace. The sky has cleared, and now the heavens are spangled with a riot of icy-cold stars.

Across the needlework of constellations rise wisps of wood smoke from the tent city.

“Been thinking about something…” Josh turns and looks at his companions. “This place ain’t the Ritz but if we can do a little scavenging, maybe find some more ammunition for the guns … we might be better off staying put for a while.”

The notion hangs in the silent office for a moment, sinking in.

*   *   *

The next morning, after a long, restless night sleeping on the cold cement floor of the service bay—making do with threadbare blankets and taking shifts standing guard—they have a group meeting to decide what to do. Over cups of instant coffee prepared on Bob’s Coleman stove, Josh convinces them that the best thing to do is stay holed up there for the time being. Lilly can heal up, and if necessary, they can steal provisions from the nearby tent city.

By this point, nobody puts up much of a fight. Bob has discovered a stash of whiskey under a counter in the bait shop, and Megan and Scott alternate between getting high and “spending quality time” in the back room for hours on end. They work hard that first day to secure the place. Josh decides against running the generator indoors for fear of gassing them to death with the fumes, and worries about running it outdoors for fear of drawing unwanted attention. He finds a wood-burning stove in the storeroom and a pile of lumber scraps out behind one of the Dumpsters.

Their second night at Fortnoy’s Fuel and Bait, they get the temperature up to tolerable levels in the service area by keeping the stove going full blast, and Megan and Scott noisily keep each other warm in the back room under layers of blankets. Bob gets drunk enough not to notice the cold, but he seems disturbed by the muffled bumping sounds coming from the storeroom. Eventually, the older man gets so loaded he can barely move. Lilly helps him into his bedroll as though putting a child down for the night. She even sings a lullaby to him—a Joni Mitchell song, “The Circle Game”—as she tucks the mildewed blanket around his aging, wattled neck. Oddly, she feels responsible for Bob Stookey, even though he’s the one who’s supposed to be nursing her.

*   *   *

Over the next few days, they reinforce the doors and windows, and they wash themselves in the big galvanized sinks in the rear of the garage. They settle into a sort of grudging routine. Bob winterizes his truck, cannibalizing parts off some of the wrecks, and Josh supervises regular reconnaissance missions to the outer edges of the tent city a mile to the west. Under the campers’ noses, Josh and Scott are able to steal firewood, fresh water, a few discarded tent rolls, some canned vegetables, a box of shotgun shells, and a case of Sterno. Josh notices the fabric of civilized behavior straining at the seams in the tent city. He hears more and more arguments. He sees fistfights among some of the men, and heavy drinking going on. The stress is taking its toll on the settlers.

During the darkness of night, Josh keeps a tight lid on Fortnoy’s Fuel and Bait. He and the others stay inside, keeping as quiet as possible, burning a minimum number of emergency candles and lanterns, jumping at the intermittent noises caused by the increasing winds. Lilly Caul finds herself wondering which is the deadlier menace—the zombie hordes, her fellow human beings, or the encroaching winter. The nights are getting longer and the cold is setting in. It’s forming rimes of frost on the windows and getting into people’s joints, and although no one talks about it much, the cold is the silent menace that could actually destroy them far easier and more efficiently than any zombie attack.

In order to fight the boredom and constant undercurrents of fear, some of the inhabitants of Fortnoy’s develop hobbies. Josh begins rolling homemade cigars out of tobacco leaves that he harvests from neighboring fields. Lilly starts a diary, and Bob finds a treasure trove of old fishing lures in an unmarked trunk in the bait shop. He spends hours in the ransacked retail shop, perched at a workbench in back, compulsively winding fly-fishing lures for future use. Bob plans to bag some nice trout, redfish, or walleyes in the shallows of a nearby river. He keeps the bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the bench at all times, tippling from it day and night.

The others notice the rate at which Bob is going through the hooch, but who can blame him? Who can blame anybody for drowning his nerves in this cruel purgatory? Bob is not proud of his drinking. In fact, he’s downright ashamed of it. But that’s why he needs the medicine—to stave off the shame, and the loneliness, and the fear, and the horrible night terrors of blood-spattered bunkers in Kandahar.

On Friday of that week, in the wee hours of the night—Bob notes in his paper calendar that the date is November 9—he finds himself back at the workbench in the rear of the shop, winding flies, getting shit-faced as usual, when he hears the shuffling noises coming from the storeroom. He hadn’t noticed Megan and Scott slipping away earlier that evening, nor had he detected the telltale odors of marijuana residue cooking in a pipe, nor had he heard the muffled giggling coming through the thin walls. But now he notices something else that had eluded his attention that day.

He stops fiddling with the lures and glances across the rear corner of the room. Behind a large, battered propane tank, a gaping hole in the wall is clearly visible in the flickering light of Bob’s lantern. He pushes himself away from the bench and goes over to the tank. He shoves it aside and kneels down in front of a six-inch patch of missing wallboard. The hole looks like it was formed by water damage, or perhaps the buckling of plaster during the humid Georgia summers. Bob glances over his shoulder, making sure he’s alone. The others are fast asleep in the service area.

The groans and gasps of wild sex draw Bob’s attention back to the damaged wall.

He peers through the six-inch gap and into the storeroom, where the dim light of a battery-operated lantern throws moving shadows up and across the low ceiling. The shadows pump and thrust in the darkness. Bob licks his lips. He leans in closer to the hole, nearly falling over in his drunken state, bracing himself against the propane tank. He can see a small portion of Scott Moon’s pimpled ass rising and falling in the yellow light, Megan beneath the young man, legs spread, her toes curling with ecstasy.

Bob Stookey feels his heart pinch in his chest, his breath sticking in his craw.

The thing that mesmerizes him the most is not the naked abandon with which the two lovers are going at each other, nor is it the animalistic grunts and mewls filling the air. The thing that holds Bob Stookey rapt is the sight of Megan Lafferty’s olive skin in the lamplight, her russet curls splayed across the blanket beneath her head, her hair as lustrous and shiny as honey. Bob can’t stop gaping at her, the longing welling up inside him.

He can’t tear his gaze from her, even when a floorboard creaks behind him.

“Oh—Bob—I’m sorry—I didn’t…”

The voice comes from the shadows of the doorway across the retail shop, from the passageway into the front office, and when Bob jerks away from the hole in the wall, whirling around to face his inquisitor, he nearly falls over. He has to hold on to the propane tank. “I wasn’t trying to—this ain’t—I—I ain’t—”

“It’s okay—I was just—I wanted to make sure you were okay.” Lilly stands in the doorway dressed in her sweatshirt, knit scarf, and sweatpants—her sleeping attire—averting her bandaged face, looking away, her eyes filled with an awkward combination of pity and disgust. The bruising around her eyes has gone down quite a bit. She’s moving around a lot better, her ribs healing.

“Lilly, I wasn’t—” Bob staggers toward her, holding his big hands up in a gesture of contrition, when he trips on a loose floorboard. He tumbles, sprawling to the floor and letting out a gasp. Amazingly, the carnal noises continue unabated in the adjacent room—an arrhythmic cadence of huffing and slapping flesh.

“Bob, are you okay?” Lilly rushes over to him, kneels, and tries to help him up.

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” He gently pushes her away. He rises drunkenly to his feet. He can’t look her in the eye. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He glances across the room. “I thought I heard something suspicious coming from outside.”

“Suspicious?” Lilly gazes at the floor, at the wall—anywhere but at Bob. “Oh … okay.”

“Yeah, it was nothing.”

“Oh … that’s good.” Lilly slowly backs away. “Just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m good, I’m good. It’s getting late, I’m thinking I’ll turn in.”

“Good, Bob. You do that.”

Lilly turns and makes a hasty exit, leaving Bob Stookey alone in the lantern light. He stands there for a moment, staring at the floor. Then he moves slowly across the room to the bench. He finds the bottle of Jack, thumbs off the cap, and raises it to his lips.

He downs the remaining fingers of booze in three breathless gulps.

*   *   *

“I’m just wondering what’s gonna happen when he runs out of booze.”

Bundled in her ski jacket and knit beret, Lilly follows Josh down a narrow path winding between columns of pines. Josh makes his way through the foliage, the 12-gauge cradled in his huge arms, moving toward a dry creek bed strewn with boulders and deadfall. He wears his ratty lumberjack coat and stocking cap, his breath showing as he talks. “He’ll find some more … don’t worry about old Bob … juicers always manage to find more juice. To be honest, I’m more worried about us running out of food.”

The woods are as silent as a chapel as they approach the banks of the creek. The first snow of the season filters down through the high boughs above them, swirling on the wind, sticking to their faces.

They’ve been at Fortnoy’s for almost two weeks now, and have gone through over half the supply of drinking water and nearly all the canned goods. Josh has decided it’s probably best to use up their single box of shotgun shells on killing a deer or a rabbit rather than defending themselves against a zombie attack. Besides, the campfires, noise, and activity at the tent city have drawn most of the walker activity away from the gas station in recent days. Josh is now calling upon his childhood memories of hunting with his uncle Vernon up on Briar Mountain in order to get the scent back, get the old skills back. Once upon a time, Josh was an eagle-eyed hunter. But now, with this broken-down squirrel gun and frozen fingers … who knows?

“I worry about him, Josh,” Lilly says. “He’s a good man but he’s got issues.”

“Don’t we all.” Josh glances over his shoulder at Lilly coming down the hill, carefully stepping over a fallen log. She looks strong for the first time since the incident with Chad Bingham. Her face has healed nicely, barely showing any discoloration. The swelling has gone down around her eye, and she’s no longer limping or favoring her right side. “He sure fixed you up nice.”

“Yeah, I’m feeling a lot better.”

Josh pauses on the edge of the creek and waits for her. She joins him. He sees tracks in the hard-packed mud at the bottom of the creek bed. “Looks like we got a deer crossing here. I’m thinkin’ we follow the creek, ought to meet up with a critter or two.”

“Can we take a quick rest first?”

“You bet,” Josh says, motioning for her to have a seat on a log. She sits. He joins her, holding the shotgun across his lap. He lets out a sigh. He feels a tremendous urge to put his arm around her. What is wrong with him? Stricken with puppy love like some stupid teenager in the midst of all these horrors?

Josh looks down. “I like the way you take care of each other, you and old Bob.”

“Yeah, and you take care of all of us.”

Josh lets out a sigh. “Wish I could have taken better care of my mama.”

Lilly looks at him. “You never told me what happened.”

Josh takes a deep breath. “Like I told you, she was pretty sick for quite a few years … thought I was gonna lose her a few times … but she lived long enough to—” He stops, the sorrow ratcheting his insides, swelling up in him, surprising him with its suddenness.

Lilly sees the pain in his eyes. “It’s okay, Josh, if you don’t want to—”

He makes a feeble gesture, a wave of his big brown hand. “I don’t mind telling you what happened. I was still trying to get into work each morning at that point, still trying to get a paycheck in the early days of the Turn, just a few biter sightings back then. I ever tell you what I do? My profession?”

“You told me you were a cook.”

He gives her a nod. “Pretty serious one, if I do say so myself.” He looks at her, his voice softening. “Always wanted to fix you a proper dinner.” His eyes moisten. “My mama taught me the basics, rest her soul, taught me how to make a bread pudding that would bring tears to your eyes and joy to your belly.”

Lilly smiles at him, then her smile fades. “What happened to your mom, Josh?”

He stares at the dusting of snow on the matted leaves for quite some time, marshaling the energy to tell the story. “Muhammad Ali’s got nothing on my mama … she was a fighter, she fought that sickness like a champ, for years. But sweet? She was sweet as the day is long. Shaggy dogs and misfits—she would take anybody in, the raggiest-ass individuals, hardened panhandlers, homeless, it didn’t matter. She would take ’em in and call ’em ‘honey child’ and make them corn bread and sweet tea until they stole from her or got in a fight in her front parlor.”

“Sounds like she was a saint, Josh.”

Another shrug. “Wasn’t the best living conditions for me and my sisters, I’ll be honest with ya. We moved around a lot, different schools, and every day we would come home and find our place filled with strangers, but I loved the old gal.”

“I can see why.”

Josh swallows hard. Here it comes. The bad part, the part that haunts his dreams to this day. He gazes at the snow on the leaves. “It happened on a Sunday. I knew my mama was failing, wasn’t thinking straight. One doctor told us it was Alzheimer’s comin’ on. At this point, the dead was getting into the projects, but they still had the warning sirens comin’ on, announcements and shit. Our street was blocked off that day. When I left for work, Mama was just sittin’ at the window, staring out at them things slipping through the cordons, getting picked off by them SWAT guys. I didn’t think anything of it. I figured she’d be okay.”

He pauses, and Lilly doesn’t say anything. It’s clear to both of them that he has to share this with another human being or it will continue to eat away at him. “I tried to call her later that day. Guess the lines were down. Figured no news was good news. I think it was about five-thirty when I knocked off that day.”

He swallows the lump in his throat. He can feel Lilly’s gaze on him.

“I was rounding the corner at the top of my street. I flash my ID at the guys at the roadblock when I notice a lot of activity down the block. SWAT guys coming and going. Right in front of my building. I pull up. They holler at me to get the hell outta there and I tell them, hey, man, ease on back, I live here. They let me through. I see the front door to our apartment building wide open. Cops coming out and going in. Some of them carrying…”

Josh chokes on the words. He breathes. Braces himself. Wipes moisture from his eyes. “Some of them was carrying—whattyacallem—specimen containers? For human organs and such? I run up the stairs two at a time. I think I knocked over one of them cops. I get to our door on the second floor and there’s these dudes in hazmat suits blocking the entrance and I shove ’em aside and go in and I see…”

Josh feels the sorrow creeping up his gorge, strangling him. He pauses to take a breath. His tears burn and track down his chin.

“Josh, you don’t have to—”

“No, it’s awright, I need to … what I saw in there … I knew right off the bat what had happened. I knew the second I saw that window open and the table set. Mama had her wedding dishes out. You would not believe the blood. I mean, the place was painted in it.” He feels his voice cracking, and he swims against the tide of tears. “There was at least six of them things on the floor. SWAT guys must’ve took ’em out. There was … not much left of Mama.” He chokes. Swallows. Flinches at the searing pain in his chest. “There was … pieces of her on the table. With the good china. I saw … I saw … her fingers … all chewed up next to the gravy boat … what was left of her body … slumped in a chair … her head was all lolled over to one side … neck opened up—”

“Okay … Josh, you don’t need to … I’m sorry … I’m so sorry.”

Josh looks at her as though seeing her face in a new light, hovering there in the diffuse, snowy radiance, her eyes far away, as though in a dream.

*   *   *

Through her tears, Lilly Caul meets the big man’s gaze and her heart clenches. She wants to hold him, she wants to comfort this gentle colossus, stroke his massive shoulders and tell him it’s all going to be all right. She has never felt this close to another human being and it’s killing her. She doesn’t deserve his friendship, his loyalty, his protection, his love. What does she say? Your mama’s in a better place now? She refuses to diminish this terribly profound moment with stupid clichés.

She starts to say something else when Josh speaks up again in a low, drained, defeated voice, not taking his eyes off her. “She invited them things in for corn bread and beans … she took them in … like shaggy dogs … because that’s what she does. Loves all God’s creatures.” The big man slumps and his shoulders tremble as tears drip off his grizzled jaw and onto the front of his Salvation Army lumber jacket. “Probably called them ‘honey-child’ … right up until the moment they ate her.”

Then the big man lowers his head and lets out an alarming sound—half sob, half insane laughter—as the tears stream down his enormous, sculpted brown face.

Lilly moves closer. She puts her hand on his shoulder. She says nothing at first. She touches his gigantic hands, which are clasped around the shotgun across his lap. He looks up at her, his expression a mask of emotional ruin. “Sorry I’m so…” he utters in barely a whisper.

“It’s okay, Josh. It’s okay. I’m here for you always. I’m with you now.”

He cocks his head, wipes his face, and manages a broken smile. “I guess you are.”

She kisses him—quickly, but on the lips—a little more than a friendly smack. The kiss lasts maybe a couple of seconds.

Josh drops the gun, puts his arms around her, and returns the gesture, and the contrary emotions flow through Lilly as the big man lets his lips linger on hers. She feels herself floating on the windswept snow. She can’t sort out the undercurrent of feelings making her dizzy. Does she pity this man? Is she manipulating him again? He tastes like coffee and smoke and Juicy Fruit gum. The cold snow touches Lilly’s eyelashes, the warmth of Josh’s lips melting the chill. He has done so much for her. She owes him her life ten times over. She opens her mouth, presses her chest against his, and then he pulls away.

“What’s wrong?” She looks up at him, searches his big sad brown eyes. Did she do something wrong? Did she step over a line?

“Nothing at all, babydoll.” He smiles and leans down and kisses her cheek. It’s a warm kiss—soft, tender, a promise of more to come. “Timing, you know,” he says then. He picks up the shotgun. “Not safe here … don’t feel right.”

For a moment, Lilly can’t figure out whether he’s referring to the woods not being right, or if he’s talking about the two of them. “I’m sorry if I—”

He gently touches her lips. “I want it to be just right … when the time comes.”

His smile is the most guileless, clean, sweet smile Lilly has ever seen. She returns his smile, her eyes misting over. Who would have thought, in the midst of all this horror—a perfect gentleman?

Lilly starts to say something else when a sharp noise grabs their attention.

*   *   *

Josh hears the faint drumming of hooves first, and gently shoves Lilly back behind him. He raises the squirrel gun’s rusty single barrel. The pounding noises rise. Josh thumbs the hammer back.

At first, he thinks he’s seeing things. Above them, coming down the embankment, throwing leaves and debris in their wake, a pack of animals—impossible to identify at first, just a blur of fur—charge through the foliage directly toward them. “Get down!” Josh yanks Lilly back behind a deadfall log on the edge of the creek bed.

“What is it?” Lilly crouches down behind the worm-eaten wood.

“Dinner!” Josh raises the gun’s back sight to his eyes and aims at the oncoming deer—a small cluster of does with bushy ears pinned, and eyes as wide as billiard balls—but something stops Josh from firing. His heart throbs in his chest, his skin flushing with gooseflesh—the realization exploding in his brain.

“Josh, what’s the matter?”

The deer roar past Josh, snapping twigs and throwing stones as he sidesteps the stampede.

Josh swings the gun up at the darker shadows coming behind the animals. “Run, Lilly!”

“What?—No!” She rises up behind the log, watching the deer vault across the riverbed. “I’m not leaving you!”

“Cross the creek, I’m right behind you!” Josh aims the shotgun up at the shapes coming down the hill, weaving through the undergrowth.

Lilly sees the horde of zombies lumbering toward them, at least twenty, sideswiping trees and bumping into each other. “Oh, shit.”

“GO!”

Lilly scrambles across the gravelly trough and plunges into the shadows of the adjacent forest.

Josh backs away, aiming the front sight at the leading edge of the swarm coming toward him.

All at once, in that single instant before he fires, he sees oddly shaped bodies and garb, strange burned faces and costumes mutilated practically beyond recognition, and Josh realizes what happened to the previous owners of the lost three-ring circus tent—the unfortunate members of the Cole Brothers’ Family Circus.

SIX

Josh squeezes off a shot.

The blast cracks open the sky, the pigeon grain punching a divot through the forehead of the closest midget. Twenty feet away, the little rotting corpse convulses backward, banging into three other dwarfs in bloody clown face and snarling black teeth. The little zombies—as stunted and deformed as sickly gnomes—scatter sideways.

Josh takes one last glance at the surreal intruders closing in on him.

Behind the midgets, stumbling down the embankment, comes a motley assortment of dead performers. A giant strong man with a handlebar mustache and musculature torn open in bloody gouges lumbers alongside a morbidly obese female cadaver, half nude, her fat rolls dangling over her genitals, her milky eyes buried in a face as lumpy as stale dough.

Bringing up the rear, a haphazard assortment of dead carnies, freaks, and contortionists follow stupidly. Encephalitic pinheads, their tiny mouths snapping, stumble along beside ragged trapeze artists in garish sequins and gangrenous faces, followed by multiple amputees trundling along spasmodically. The pack moves in fits and starts, as feral and hungry as a school of piranhas.

Josh lurches away, vaulting across the dry creek bed in a single leap.

He scuttles up the opposite bank and plunges into the neighboring woods with the shotgun over his shoulder. There is no time to reload another shell. He can see Lilly in the distance, sprinting toward the denser trees. He catches up with her in a matter of seconds and directs her to the east.

The two of them vanish into the shadows before what remains of the Cole Brothers’ Family Circus even has a chance to stagger across the creek.

*   *   *

On their way back to the gas station, Josh and Lilly run into a smaller herd of deer. Josh gets lucky and bags one of the juvenile does with a single blast. The booming report echoes up across the sky—far enough from Fortnoy’s to avoid drawing attention, but close enough to lug the trophy back home—and the whitetail goes down gasping and twitching.

Lilly has trouble taking her eyes off the carcass as Josh rigs his belt around its hindquarters and drags the steaming remains nearly half a mile back to Fortnoy’s. In this Plague World, death in any context—human or animal—has taken on new implications.

That night, the mood lightens among the inhabitants of the gas station.

Josh dresses the deer in the back of the service area, in the same galvanized sinks in which they’ve been bathing, and he slaughters enough of the animal to last them weeks. He keeps the excess meat outside, in the deepening cold of the back lot, and he prepares a feast of organ meat, ribs, and belly, slow cooked in the broth of some instant chicken soup that they found in the bottom drawer of Fortnoy’s office desk, along with shavings of wild meadow garlic and nettle stems. They have some canned peaches to accompany the braised deer, and they gorge themselves.

The walkers leave them alone for most of the evening—no sign of the circus dead or any other enclave. Josh notices during dinner that Bob cannot take his eyes off Megan. The older man seems taken with the girl, and for some reason this worries Josh. For days now, Bob has been very cold and brusque toward Scott (not that the kid has noticed anything in his constant state of flakiness). Nevertheless, Josh feels the volatile chemical bonds of their little tribe being tested, stressed, altered.

Later, they sit around the woodstove and smoke Josh’s homemade cigars and share a few ounces of Bob’s whiskey stash. For the first time since leaving the tent city—perhaps since the advent of the plague—they feel almost normal. They talk of escape. They speak of desert islands and antidotes and vaccines and finding happiness and stability again. They reminisce about the things they took for granted before the plague broke out: shopping in grocery stores and playing in parks and going out for dinner and watching TV shows and reading the newspaper on Sunday mornings and going to clubs to hear live music and sitting at Starbucks and shopping at Apple stores and using Wi-Fi and getting mail through that anachronistic thing known as the postal service.

They each have their pet pleasures. Scott bemoans the extinction of good weed, and Megan longs for the days when she could hang out at her favorite bar—Nightlies in Union City—and enjoy the free cucumber shooters and shrimp skewers. Bob pines for ten-year-old bourbon the way a mother might yearn for a lost child. Lilly remembers her guilty pleasures of haunting secondhand stores and thrift shops for the perfect scarf or sweater or blouse—the days when finding cast-off clothing wasn’t a matter of survival. And Josh recalls the number of gourmet food shops he could find in the Little Five Points area of Atlanta—everything from good kimchi to rare pink truffle oil.

Either through some vagary of the wind, or perhaps the combined noise of their laughter—as well as the ticking and rattling of the woodstove—the troubling noises drifting out over the trees from the tent city go unnoticed that night for hours.

At one point—after the little dinner party breaks up and each of them finds their way back to their bedroll on the floor of the service area—Josh thinks he hears something strange echoing under the sound of the breeze tapping against the glass doors. But he simply passes it off as the wind and his imagination.

Josh offers to take the first shift, sitting watch in the front office, so he can make sure the noises are nothing. But hours go by before he hears or sees anything out of the ordinary.

The front office has a large, filthy plate-glass window across its front façade, much of the glass blocked by shelving, racks of maps and travel guides, and little pine deodorizers. The dusty merchandise blocks any sign of trouble rising up and over the distant sea of pines.

The wee hours pass, and eventually Josh dozes off in his chair.

His eyes remain shut until 4:43 A.M., at which point the first faint sound of engines coming up the hill jar him awake with a start.

*   *   *

Lilly stirs awake to the sound of heavy boot steps pounding through the office doorway. Sitting up against the garage wall, her ass freezing, she doesn’t notice that Bob is already awake in his tangled nest of blankets across the garage.

Sitting up and looking around the service bay, Bob Stookey apparently heard the engine noises mere seconds after they had awakened Josh out in the office. “The hell is going on?” he mumbles. “Sounds like the Indy 500 out there.”

“Everybody up,” Josh says, storming into the garage, frantically looking around the greasy floor, searching for something.

“What’s wrong?” Lilly rubs the sleep from her eyes, her heart starting to thump. “What’s going on?”

Josh comes over to her. He kneels and speaks softly yet urgently. “Something’s going down out there, vehicles moving fast, real reckless and shit—I don’t want to get caught unawares.”

She hears the roar of engines, the pinging of gravel flying. The noises are getting closer. Lilly’s mouth goes dry with panic. “Josh, what are you looking for?”

“Get dressed, babydoll, quick.” Josh glances across the room. “Bob—you see that box of .38 caliber slugs we brought back?”

Bob Stookey torques himself up to a standing position, awkwardly pulling his work trousers over his long underwear, a slice of moonlight coming through the skylight and striping his deeplylined features. “I put it over on the workbench,” he says. “What’s the deal, captain?”

Josh hurries over and grabs the box of ammo. He reaches under his lumberjack coat, pulls the .38 snubbie from his belt, flicks open the cylinder, and loads it while he talks. “Lilly, you go get the lovebirds. Bob, I’m gonna need you to get that pigeon gun of yours and meet me out front.”

“What if they’re friendly, Josh?” Lilly pulls her sweater on, steps into her muddy boots.

“Then we got nothing to worry about.” He whirls back toward the doorway. “Get moving, both of you.” He lurches out of the room.

Heart racing, flesh prickling with terror, Lilly hurries across the garage, charges through the archway, and then down the narrow aisle of the retail store. A single hanging lantern lights her way.

“You guys! Wake up!” she says after reaching the storeroom door and pounding loudly.

Shuffling noises, bare feet on cold floorboards, then the door clicks partially ajar. Megan’s drowsy, dazed face peers out on a cloud of skunk-weed smoke. “¿Qué pasa? dude—what the fuck?”

“Get up, Megan, we got trouble.”

The girl’s face goes instantly taut and alarmed. “Walkers?”

Lilly shakes her head emphatically. “I don’t think so, unless they’ve learned how to drive cars.”

*   *   *

Minutes later, Lilly joins Bob and Josh out in front of Fortnoy’s—in the frigid, crystalline, predawn air—while Scott and Megan huddle behind them in the office doorway with blankets wrapped around themselves. “Oh, my God,” Lilly utters, almost to herself.

A little less than a mile away, over the crest of the neighboring trees, a vast miasma of smoke rises up and blots out the stars. The horizon behind it glows a sickly pink, and it looks as though the black ocean of pines is on fire. But Lilly knows it’s not the forest that’s burning.

“What have they done?”

“This ain’t good,” Bob murmurs, the shotgun clutched in his cold hands.

“Get back,” Josh says, thumbing the hammer back on the .38 police special.

The engine noises close in, maybe a few hundred yards away now, coming up the winding farm road—the sources of the noise still obscured behind a veil of night and the trees bordering the property—their headlights creating wildly arcing beams. Tires skid and careen through gravel. Rays of light shoot up into the sky, then across the tops of trees, then back across the road.

One of the headlights flares across the Fortnoy’s sign and Josh mutters, “What the hell is wrong with them?”

Lilly stares at the first vehicle that comes into view—a late-model sedan—swerving up the snaking gravel road, then going into a skid. “What the fuck?”

“They ain’t stoppin’! THEY AIN’T STOPPIN’!!” Bob starts backing away from the twin beams of deadly halogen light.

The car skids into the lot, roaring out of control across the fifty yards of pea gravel bordering Fortnoy’s property, the rear end raising a thunderhead of dust in the indigo predawn chill.

“LOOK OUT!”

Josh springs into action, grabbing Lilly by the sleeve and pulling her out of harm’s way, while Bob spins toward the office and screams at the top of his lungs at the two lovers huddling wide-eyed in the open doorway.

“GET OUTTA THERE!!”

Megan yanks her stoner boyfriend out of the door and across the apron of cracked cement flanking the fuel islands. The sedan—revealing itself, as it looms closer and closer, to be a battered Cadillac DeVille—screeches and fishtails toward the building. Bob lunges toward Megan. Scott lets out a garbled cry.

Another vehicle—a battered SUV with a broken luggage carrier—comes squealing and careening into the lot. Bob grabs Megan and gently shoves her toward the soft weeds beyond the service doors. Scott dives for cover behind a Dumpster. Josh and Lilly duck behind a wreck near the front sign.

The sedan mows down the closest fuel pump and keeps going, its engine whining furiously. The other vehicle goes into a spin. Lilly watches in shock from about fifty feet away, behind the wreck, as the sedan crashes into the front window.

The sickening crunch of glass and metal makes Lilly jerk with a start. Debris and sparks go flying as the sedan penetrates the front of the building.

The car keeps going, rear wheels keening and spinning on the floor, destroying half the building with the force of a giant wrecking ball. Lilly puts her hand to her mouth. The front half of Fortnoy’s roof collapses on the sedan as it comes to rest in the retail store.

The SUV slams sideways into the diesel pump, setting the fumes alight. Fire booms upward in a sheath and licks at the rising vapors. The windows of the SUV flicker a dull yellow from something burning inside it. Lilly silently thanks God that the fuel reserves are empty, or she and her friends would be vaporized by now.

The SUV comes to rest at an angle under the awning, its high beams still shining brightly, illuminating the building like stage lights in a hallucinatory play.

For a moment, the silence crashes down on the property until the crackle of flames and the sizzle of fluids are all that can be heard.

Josh cautiously moves out from behind the wreck, still clutching his .38 revolver. Lilly joins him and is about to say something like, What the hell just happened, when she notices the headlights of the SUV are shining directly into the building, a wide pool of light falling directly on the rear of the sedan.

Inside the car’s rear window—fractured by huge starbursts of broken glass—something moves. Lilly sees the back of someone’s shoulders, slowly turning, pivoting awkwardly, revealing a pale, discolored face.

All at once, Lilly knows exactly what happened.

*   *   *

Moments later, things at Fortnoy’s start unraveling at a rapid rate as Josh calls out to the others in a frantic whisper. “Get away from the building!”

Across the lot, Bob, Megan, and Scott still crouch in the weeds behind the Dumpster. They slowly rise and start to answer.

“SSSSSHHHHHHHHH!!” Josh points at the building, indicating the dangers inside, and whispers loud enough to get them moving. “Hurry up! Get over here!!”

Bob understands instantly, and he takes Megan’s hand and creeps around the flickering flames of the diesel pump. Scott follows.

Lilly stands next to Josh. “What are we gonna do? All our stuff’s in there.”

The front of the station and half its interior are totaled, the sparks still sputtering, the water mains still flooding the cold floors.

In the glare of the SUV’s headlight beams, one of the sedan’s flapping rear doors suddenly creaks open wider, a decomposed leg clad in rags stepping out in fitful, spastic movements.

“The place is gone, babydoll,” Josh says under his breath. “S-O-L … forget it.”

Bob and the others join Josh and Lilly, and for a brief instant they stand there, still in shock, catching their collective breaths. Bob still clutches the shotgun in his sweaty palms. Megan looks sick. “What the fuck happened?” she mutters almost rhetorically.

“Folks must have tried to get away,” Josh speculates. “Must’ve had a passenger that got bit, and they turned in the car.”

Inside the wrecked building, a zombie emerges from the sedan like a deformed fetus being born.

“Bob, you got your keys on ya?”

Bob looks at Josh. “They’re in the truck.”

“In the ignition?”

“Glove box.”

Josh turns to the others. “I want y’all to wait here, keep your eye on that walker, might be more in there. I’m gonna get the truck.”

Josh turns away but Lilly grabs him. “Wait! Wait!! You’re telling me we’re just gonna leave all our stuff in there, all our supplies?”

“No choice.”

He heads around the left side of the smoking pumps while the others stand there stunned and speechless. Twenty-five feet away, the SUV thumps, a half-ajar door creaking open, the firelight blooming. Lilly jerks. Megan gasps as another dead thing pushes its way out of the vehicle.

Bob fiddles a shotgun shell into the breech with shaking hands.

The others back away toward the road, Scott mumbling hysterically, “Shit, man, shit … shit … shit … shit … shit … shit … shit…”

The thing that emerges from the SUV, burned beyond recognition, staggers toward them, its mouth gaping with black drool. The back of its collar and part of its left shoulder still crackle with tiny flames, the smoke around its skull like a halo. Apparently an adult male, half the skin of its face burned off, it barely remains upright as it shuffles slowly toward the smell of humans.

Bob can’t get the shell seated properly, his shakes are so bad now.

No one sees the flare of taillights across the lot behind the row of wrecks, and no one hears the rumble of the king cab’s engine firing up or the squeal of its rear tires digging in as the engine roars.

The burning zombie approaches Megan, who turns to run and trips on a patch of loose gravel. She sprawls to the pavement as Scott cries out and Lilly tries to help her up and Bob struggles with the shotgun.

The walker gets within inches of them when the blur of metal appears.

Josh backs the Ram directly into the zombie, and the impact of the protruding trailer hitch impales the thing, sending the charred corpse flying in a cloud of sparks. The thing breaks apart in the middle, the torso flinging off one way, the lower extremities spinning in the other.

One of the blackened, sizzling organs strikes Megan in the back, splattering her with hot, oily bile and fluids. She lets out a scream.

The pickup skids to a stop next to them, and they pile in, yanking a hysterical Megan in through the back hatch. Josh floors it.

The truck barrels out of the lot and down the winding access road.

All told, a mere three and a half minutes have elapsed since the onslaught … but in that time, the destinies of all five survivors have irrevocably changed.

*   *   *

They decide to head down the hill and turn north, weaving through the forest toward the tent city. They proceed cautiously, with their lights off and eyes wide open. In the rear camper, Scott and Megan peer through the firewall window, while Bob and Lilly, side by side in the cab next to Josh, scan the landscape with feverish concentration. No one says a word. They all harbor the unspoken dread of investigating the extent of the damage to the tent city—the resources of the vast encampment now paramount to their survival.

By this point, dawn has broken, the edges of the horizon—pale blue behind the trees—already beginning to drive the shadows from the gullies and culverts. The air is bitter cold and scented with the char of recent fires. Josh keeps both hands on the wheel as the pickup snakes through the cool shadows rising above the tent city.

“STOP! JOSH! STOP!”

Josh stomps on the brakes at the zenith of a hill overlooking the southern edge of the camp. The pickup scrapes to a halt.

“Oh, my God.”

“Christ Almighty.”

“Let’s turn around.” Lilly chews on her fingernail, gazing through a break in the foliage. She can see what’s left of the tent city in the distance. The air reeks of burned flesh and something worse, something deathly foul, like a mass infection. “There’s nothing we can do here.”

“Hold on a second.”

“Josh—”

“What in God’s name happened down there?” Bob murmurs to nobody in particular, staring through the gap in the trees that opens like a proscenium above the meadow fifty yards below. Early-morning sunbeams shoot down through scrims of smoke, making the devastation look almost unreal, like footage from a silent movie. “Looks like Godzilla attacked the place.”

“You think somebody went crazy?” Lilly keeps staring at the smoking ruins.

“I don’t think so,” Josh says.

“You think walkers caused this?”

“I don’t know, maybe there was a big old swarm of ’em and a fire started.”

Down in the meadow, along the edges of the encampment, flaming cars sit in disarray. Scores of smaller tents still burn, sending up black gouts of smoke into the acrid sky. In the center of the field, the circus tent has been reduced to a smoldering endoskeleton of metal poles and guide wires. Even the hard-packed ground burns in places, as though someone spooned out dollops of liquid flames. Smoking bodies litter the grounds. For a brief, surreal moment, Josh is reminded of the Hindenburg disaster, the flaming debris of the airship in its catastrophic death throes.

“Josh…”

The big man turns and looks at Lilly, whose face is turned away now, scanning the edges of the forest on either side of the king cab. Her voice lowers several registers until she sounds almost groggy with terror. “Josh … um … we have to get out of here.”

“What is it?”

“Holy fuckin’ Jesus.” Bob sees what Lilly sees, and the air in the cab crackles with tension. “Get us outta here, captain.”

“What are you—”

Then Josh sees the problem: the countless shadowy figures emerging from the trees—almost in synchronous marching order—like a vast school of fish stirred from the depths. Some of them still smolder with thin wisps of smoke leaching off their tattered rags. Others trundle along with robotic hunger, their curled claws outstretched. Hundreds and hundreds of cataract-white eyes reflect the pale light of dawn as they lock on to the lone vehicle in their midst. The hairs on Josh’s thick neck stiffen.

“JOSH, GO!”

He yanks the steering wheel and slams the pedal down, and the three hundred and sixty cubic inches roar. The truck lurches into a one-eighty, plowing through a dozen zombies and taking down a small pine in the process. The noise is incredible, the wet wrenching of dead limbs and snapping of timbers as the debris and blood kick up across the front quarter panel. The rear end wags violently, smashing into a cluster of walkers and tossing Megan and Scott around the camper. Josh pulls back onto the road and floors it, booming back down the hill in the direction from which they just came.

*   *   *

They barely make it to the adjacent road at the bottom of the hill before they realize at least three zombies have attached themselves, barnaclelike, to the pickup.

“Shit!” Josh sees one in his side mirror, clinging to the vehicle on the driver’s side, near the rear quarter panel, feet on the running board, tangled in strapping ropes, its tattered clothing caught in the camper’s metal trim. “Stay cool, everybody—we got some hangers-on!”

“What!” Lilly turns toward the passenger window and sees a dead face pop up across the glass like a jack-in-the-box. The face twitches and snarls at her, its inky drool flagging in the wind. Lilly lets out a startled gasp.

Josh concentrates on the road, making a wild turn, then heading north at a steady forty-five miles an hour, moving toward the main two-lane, purposely swerving in an attempt to fling the zombies off the pickup.

Two of the walkers have clamped on to the driver’s side, one on the passenger side—and they hold fast—either caught on the truck, or strong enough in their spastic hunger to hold on. “Bob! You got any more of them shells in the cab?”

“They’re in the back!”

“Shit!”

Bob shoots a glance at Lilly. “Darlin,’ I believe there’s a crowbar on the floor behind the passenger seat—”

The truck swerves. One of the walkers tears free, tumbling to the road and pinwheeling down an embankment. Muffled screams come from the back. The sound of glass breaking comes through the wall. Lilly finds the greasy three-foot length of iron with the hooked end on the rear floor. “Found it!”

“Give it to me, honey!”

Josh looks out at the side mirror and sees a second zombie slip free of its mooring and fall to the rushing pavement beneath the wheels. The truck bumps over the corpse and keeps barreling.

Bob hollers in his gravelly wheeze, twisting around toward the sleeper window, raising the crowbar. “Get back, Lilly, cover your face!”

Lilly cowers, shielding herself, as Bob strikes out at the zombie in the window.

The curved end of the crowbar slams against the window but merely chips a divot out of the reinforced safety glass. The zombie snarls, tangled in bungee cords—its toneless growl a Doppler echo on the wind.

Bob lets out a cry and then slams the crowbar into the window again and again, as hard as he can, until the curved tip breaks through the safety glass and plunges into the dead face. Lilly turns away.

The crowbar impales the cadaver through the roof of its mouth and gets stuck. Bob gapes in horror. Behind the mosaic of fractured glass the skewered head hangs suspended in the wind for a moment, the dull glow behind its sharklike button eyes still animated, the mouth still pulsing around the iron as if trying to eat the crowbar.

Lilly can’t look. She presses back against the corner, shaking convulsively.

Josh swerves again, and the zombie finally tears loose in the wind, falling to the pavement and vanishing under the wheels. The rest of the window blows away, a tissue of shattered glass imploding and swirling into the cab. Bob flinches, awash in adrenaline, and Josh keeps barreling forward as Lilly curls into a fetal position in back.

They finally reach the main access road and Josh heads south, picking up speed, calling out loud enough for the folks in the back to hear: “Everybody hold on!”

Without another word, Josh accelerates, hands welded to the steering wheel, weaving and lurching around pockets of wrecked, abandoned vehicles for another couple of miles, keeping an eye on the side mirror, making sure they are clear and safely out of range of the swarm.

*   *   *

They put five miles between them and the cataclysm before Josh applies the brakes and stops on the gravel shoulder of a deserted stretch of rural wasteland. The silence that descends on the truck is unreal. Only the sound of their heartbeats in their ears and the high, lonesome whistle of the wind can be heard.

Josh glances over his shoulder at Lilly. The look on her faintly bruised face, the way she’s curled up in the corner of the floor, hugging her bended knees against her chest, shivering as though suffering from hypothermia—all of it worries him. “You okay, babydoll?”

Lilly manages to swallow the lump of terror in her throat and gives him a look. “Just peachy.”

Josh gives her a nod, then hollers loud enough to be heard back in the camper. “Everybody okay back there?”

Megan’s face in the window says it all. Her ruddy features screwed up with nervous tension, she grudgingly gives them a noncommittal thumbs-up.

Josh turns and gazes through the windshield. He breathes hard, as though recovering from a sprint. “Damn things are definitely multiplying.”

Bob rubs his face, breathing hard, fighting the shakes. “Getting more brazen, too, you ask me.”

After a pause Josh says, “Must’ve happened fast.”

“Yeah.”

“Poor bastards didn’t know what hit ’em.”

“Yeah.” Bob wipes his mouth. “Maybe we oughtta go back, try and draw them things away from the camp.”

“What for?”

Bob chews the inside of his cheek. “I don’t know … could be survivors.”

Another long pause hangs in the cab, until Lilly finally says, “Not likely, Bob.”

“Could be supplies left over we could use.”

“Too risky,” Josh says, scanning the landscape. “Where the hell are we, anyway?”

Bob roots a map out of a cluttered door pocket. He unfolds it with shaking hands and traces his nail across the tiny capillaries of unmarked farm roads. He still labors to catch his breath. “Best I can tell, we’re somewhere south of Oakland—tobacco country.” He tries to hold the map steady in his shaking hands. “Road we’re on ain’t on the map—at least it ain’t on this map.”

Josh stares into the distance. The morning sun hammers down on the narrow two-lane. The unmarked road, which is fringed in weeds and littered with an abandoned wreck every twenty yards or so, snakes along a plateau between two tobacco farms. On either side of the unmarked two-lane, the fields have overgrown with neglect, the weeds and kudzu twining up the slats of weather-beaten guardrails. The shaggy, ramshackle nature of the fields reflects the months that have transpired since the plague broke out.

Bob folds up the map. “What now?”

Josh shrugs. “Ain’t seen a farmhouse for miles, seems like we’re far enough out in the boonies to avoid another swarm of them things.”

Lilly climbs back onto the bench. “What are you thinking, Josh?”

He puts the truck into drive. “I’m thinking we keep heading south.”

“Why south?”

“For one, we’ll be moving away from the population centers.”

“And…?”

“And maybe, if we keep movin’ … we can keep the cold weather in our rearview.”

He gives it some gas and starts to pull back onto the road when Bob grabs his arm.

“Not so fast, captain.”

Josh stops the truck. “What is it now?”

“Don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news.” Bob points at the gas gauge. “But I just put the last drops of my reserves in her last night.”

The needle is riding just below E.

SEVEN

They search the area for tanks to siphon or gas stations to plunder, and they come up empty. Most of the wrecks along this desolate stretch of farm road are burned to crisps or abandoned with bone-dry tanks. They notice only scattered dead roaming the distant farmlands—lone cadavers wandering aimlessly, far enough away to easily elude.

They decide to sleep in the Ram that night, taking shifts sitting watch and rationing their canned goods and fresh water. Being this far out in the boonies proves to be a blessing as well as a curse. The worrisome lack of fuel and provisions is offset by the lack of walker activity.

Josh admonishes everybody to keep their voices down and make as little noise as possible during their exile in this barren hinterland.

As darkness closes in that first night, and the temperature nose-dives, Josh runs the engine as long as possible, then resorts to running the heater off the battery. He knows he can’t keep this up for long. They cover the broken sleeper window with cardboard and duct tape.

They each sleep fitfully that night in the cramped quarters of the truck—Megan, Scott, and Bob in the camper, Lilly in the rear of the cab, and Josh in the front, barely able to stretch his massive body out across the two large bucket seats.

The next day, Josh and Bob get lucky and find an overturned panel van a mile to the west, its rear axle broken but the rest of it intact, its gas tank almost full. They siphon eighteen gallons into three separate containers, and make it back to the Ram before noon. They take off and make their way southeast—crossing another twenty miles of fallow farmland—before stopping for the night under a desolate train trestle, where the wind sings its constant mournful aria through the high-tension wires.

In the darkness of the reeking truck, they argue about whether they should keep moving or find a place to light. They bicker about petty things—sleeping arrangements, rationing, snoring, and stinky feet—and they generally get on each other’s nerves. The floor space inside the camper is less than a hundred square feet, much of it covered with Bob’s cast-off detritus. Scott and Megan sleep like sardines against the back hatch while Bob tosses and turns in his semisober delirium.

They live like this for almost a week, zigzagging in a southwesterly direction, following the tracks of the West Central Georgia Railway, scavenging fuel when they can. Tempers strain to the breaking point. The camper walls close in.

In the dark, the troubling noises behind the trees get closer every night.

*   *   *

One morning, while Scott and Megan slumber in back, Josh and Lilly sit on the Ram’s front bumper, sharing a thermos of instant coffee in the early-morning light. The wind feels colder, the sky lower—the smell of winter in the air. “Feels like more snow’s coming,” Josh softly observes.

“Where’s Bob gone off to?”

“Says he saw a creek off to the west, not far, took his fishing rod.”

“Did he take the shotgun?”

“Hatchet.”

“I’m worried about him, Josh. He’s shaking all the time now.”

“He’ll be okay.”

“Last night I saw him sucking down a bottle of mouthwash.”

Josh looks at her. Lilly’s injuries have almost completely healed, her eyes clear now for the first time since the beating. Her bruises have all but faded, and she removed the bandages around her ribs the previous afternoon to find that she could walk almost normally without them. But the pain of losing Sarah Bingham still gnaws at her—Josh can see sorrow etched on her sleeping face, late at night. From the front seat, Josh has been watching her sleep. It’s the most beautiful thing he has ever seen. He longs to kiss her again but the situation hasn’t warranted such luxuries. “We’ll all be doing a lot better when we find some real food,” Josh says then. “I’m getting mighty tired of cold Chef Boyardee.”

“Water’s getting low, too. And there’s something else I’ve been thinking about that’s not exactly giving me a warm, cozy feeling.”

Josh looks at her. “Which is?”

“What if we run into another swarm? They could push the damn truck over, Josh. You know it as well as I do.”

“All the more reason to keep moving, keep heading south, below the radar.”

“I know, but—”

“More likely to find supplies, we keep moving.”

“I understand that but—”

Lilly stops when she sees the silhouette of a figure way off in the distance, maybe three hundred yards away, up on the train trestle, moving this way, following the tracks. The figure’s long, narrow shadow, outlined in the dust motes of morning sunlight, flickers down through the slatted ties and crossbeams—moving too fast to be a zombie.

“Speak of the devil,” Josh says when he finally recognizes the figure.

The older man approaches, carrying an empty bucket and collapsible fishing rod. He trundles along quickly between the rails, urgency burning on his face. “Hey, y’all!” he calls down breathlessly to them as he reaches the stepladder near the overpass.

“Keep it down, Bob,” Josh cautions him, walking over to the base of the trestle, Lilly at his side.

“Wait’ll you see what I found,” Bob says, descending the ladder.

“Catch a big one, did ya?”

He hops to the ground. He catches his breath, his eyes shimmering with excitement. “No, sir, didn’t even find the goddamn crick.” He manages a gap-toothed grin. “But I did find something better.”

*   *   *

The Walmart sits at the intersection of two rural highways, a mile north of the train tracks, its tall interstate sign with its trademark blue letters and yellow starburst visible from the elevated trestles along the woods. The closest town is miles away, but these isolated big box stores have proven to be lucrative retail outlets for farming communities, especially ones this close to a major interstate like U.S. 85—the Hogansville exit only seven miles to the west.

“All right … here’s what I’m thinking,” Josh says to the others, after pulling up to the lot entrance, which is partially blocked by an abandoned flatbed truck, its front end wrapped around a sign pole. The cargo—mostly lumber—lies strewn across the wide lanes leading into the vast parking lot, which is littered with wrecks and abandoned vehicles. The massive low-slung superstore in the distance looks deserted but looks can be deceiving. “We check out the lots first, make a few circles, just get the lay of the land.”

“Looks pretty empty, Josh,” Lilly comments as she chews on her thumbnail in the rear berth. For the entire fifteen-minute journey across dusty back roads, Lilly has chewed every available fingernail down to the quick. Now she gnaws on a cuticle.

“Hard to tell just by looking,” Bob pipes in.

“Keep your eyes peeled for walkers or any other movement,” Josh says, putting the truck into gear and slowly bumping over the spilled lumber.

They circle the property twice, paying closest attention to the shadows of loading docks and entranceways. The cars in the lot are all empty, some burned to blackened husks. Most of the store’s glass doors are blown out. A carpet of broken shards glistens in the cold afternoon sun across the front entrance. The store inside is as dark as a coal mine. Nothing moves. Inside the vestibule, a few bodies litter the floor. Whatever happened here happened a while ago.

After his second sweep, Josh pulls up to the front of the store, puts the truck in park, leaves the engine idling, and checks the last three rounds nestled in the cylinder of his .38 police special. “Okay, I don’t want to leave the truck untended,” he says and turns to Bob. “You got how many shells left?”

Bob snaps open the squirrel gun with trembling hands. “One in the breech, one in my pocket.”

“Okay, here’s what I’m thinking—”

“I’m going with you,” Lilly says.

“Not without a weapon you aren’t, not until we know it’s safe in there.”

“I’ll grab a shovel from the back,” she says. She glances over her shoulder and sees Megan’s face in the window, owlish and expectant as she cranes her neck to see through the windshield. Lilly looks back at Josh. “You’re gonna need another pair of eyes in there.”

“Never argue with a woman,” Bob mumbles, jacking open the passenger door and stepping out into the windy, raw air of the late-autumn afternoon.

They go around back, open the camper’s rear hatch, and tell Megan and Scott to stay in the cab with the truck idling until the all-clear signal comes; and if they see any trouble, they should blast the horn like crazy. Neither Megan nor Scott puts up much of an argument.

Lilly grabs one of the shovels, and then follows Josh and Bob across the cement threshold of the store’s front façade, the sounds of their footsteps crackling over broken glass drowned by the wind.

Josh forces one of the automatic doors open and they enter the vestibule.

*   *   *

They see the old man without a head lying on the stained parquet near the entrance in a dried pool of blood—now as black as obsidian—the ragged threads of his viscera blossoming out of his neck. Pinned to the little blue greeter’s vest, the name tag, which is askew and partially visible, says WALMART on the top, and ELMER K on the bottom. The big yellow happy face insignia is stippled with blood. Lilly stares at poor headless Elmer K for quite some time as they make their way deeper into the empty store.

The air is almost as cold as outside and smells of coppery mold and decay and rancid proteins like those of a giant compost pile. Constellations of bullet holes crown the lintel above the hair care center to the left, while garish Rorschach patterns of arterial spray mark the doorway of the vision center on the right. Shelves either stand empty—already plundered—or overturned on the floor.

Josh raises one of his huge hands and orders his cohorts to stop for a moment as he listens to the silence. He scans the acres of retail space, much of which is littered with headless bodies, unidentifiable streaks of carnage, overturned shopping carts, and trash. The rows of checkout conveyors on the right stand silent and stained with blood. The pharmacy center, cosmetics counter, and health and beauty on the left are also riddled with bullet holes.

Signaling to the others, Josh cautiously continues on, his gun at the ready, his heavy boot steps crunching over debris as he moves deeper into the reeking shadows.

The farther they get from the entrance doors, the darker the aisles become. The pale daylight barely penetrates the far grocery aisles on the right, with its spills and broken glass mingling with human remains, or the home and office and fashion sections on the left, with their scattered clothing and dismembered mannequins. The departments in the rear of the store—toys, electronics, sporting goods, and shoes—lie in utter darkness.

Only the dry silver beams of battery-powered emergency lights illuminate the shadowy depths of the far aisles.

They find flashlights in the hardware department, and shine the beams into the far reaches of the store, making note of all the useful provisions and tools. The more they investigate, the more excited they become. By the time they’ve circled the entire fifteen thousand square feet of retail space—finding only a few scattered human remains in the early stages of decomposition, innumerable overturned shelves, and rats scurrying from the sounds of their footsteps—they are convinced that the store is safe—picked over, certainly, but safe.

At least for the moment.

“Pretty sure we got the place to ourselves,” Josh says at last as the threesome returns to the diffuse light of the front vestibule.

They lower their weapons and flashlights. “Looks like some shit went down in here,” Bob says.

“I ain’t no detective.” Josh gazes around the walls and floors awash in bloodstains that could pass for Jackson Pollock paintings. “But I’d say some folks turned in here a while back, and then you got layers of people comin’ in and helpin’ themselves to what was left.”

Lilly looks at Josh, her expression still tight with nervous tension. She glances at the headless greeter. “You think we could clean the place up, maybe stay here a while?”

Josh shakes his head. “We’d be sitting ducks, place is way too tempting.”

“It’s also a gold mine,” Bob pipes in. “Plenty of stuff on the high shelves, maybe stockrooms in back with merchandise, could be damn useful to us.” His eyes twinkle, and Josh can tell the older man has taken careful accounting of the top shelves of the liquor department, still brimming with unopened bottles of hooch.

“I saw some wheelbarrows and hand dollies in the garden department,” Josh says. He looks at Bob, then he looks at Lilly and grins. “I think our luck just changed for the better.”

*   *   *

They load up three wheelbarrows with down coats, winter boots, thermal underwear, stocking caps, and gloves from the fashion department. They throw in a pair of walkie-talkies, tire chains, towlines, a socket-wrench kit, road flares, motor oil, and antifreeze. They get Scott to help them, leaving Megan in the truck to watch for intruders.

From the grocery department—where most of the meats, produce, and dairy products are either missing or have long since spoiled—they procure boxes of instant oatmeal, raisins, protein bars, ramen noodles, jars of peanut butter, beef jerky, cans of soup, spaghetti sauce, juice boxes, cartons of dry pasta, canned meats, sardines, coffee, and tea.

Bob raids what is left of the pharmacy. Most of the barbiturates, painkillers, and antianxiety meds are long gone, but he finds enough leftovers to open a private practice. He takes some Lanacane for first aid, amoxicillin for infections, epinephrine for kicking a heart back to life, Adderall for keeping alert, lorazepam for calming the nerves, Celox for stanching blood loss, naproxen for pain, loratadine for opening air passages, and a good assortment of vitamins.

From other departments, they acquire irresistible luxury items—items that aren’t exactly paramount to their survival but might nonetheless bring momentary relief from the grim business of staying alive. Lilly chooses an armful of hardcover books—novels mostly—from the newsstand area. Josh finds a collection of hand-rolled Costa Rican cigars behind the courtesy desk. Scott discovers a battery-operated DVD player and selects a dozen movies. They take a few board games, some playing cards, a telescope, and a small digital voice recorder.

They make a trip out to the truck, stuffing the camper to the gills with the goodies, before returning and starting in on the treasure trove of useful items in the darkness at the rear of the store.

*   *   *

“Shine it over to the left, babydoll,” Josh asks Lilly from the aisle outside the sporting goods department. Josh holds two large heavy-duty duffel bags appropriated from the luggage department.

Scott and Bob stand nearby, watching expectantly, as Lilly sweeps the narrow beam of her flashlight across the disaster area that once trafficked in soccer balls and Little League bats.

The yellow shaft of light crosses mangled displays of tennis rackets and hockey sticks, cannibalized bicycles and heaps of workout clothes and baseball gloves strewn across the blood-spattered floor. “Whoa … right there, Lilly,” Josh says. “Hold it steady.”

“Shit,” Bob says from behind Lilly. “Looks like we’re too late.”

“Somebody beat us to ’em,” Josh grumbles as the flashlight plays across the shattered glass display case to the left of the fishing poles and tackle. The case is empty, but from the look of the indentations and hooks left behind, it’s obvious the enclosure housed a wide variety of hunting rifles, target pistols, and street-legal handguns. The racks on the wall behind the display are also empty. “Shine it on the floor for a second, honey.”

In the dull cone of light, a few stray shells and bullets are visibly scattered across the floor.

They walk over to the gun counter and Josh drops the duffel bags, then squeezes his massive form behind the case. He takes the flashlight and shines it down along the floor. He sees a few stray boxes of ammunition, a bottle of gun oil, a receipt pad, and a blunt silver object peeking out from under the case. “Hold on a second … hold the phone.”

Josh kneels. He reaches under the counter and pulls the blunt steel end of a muzzle out from under the bottom of the case.

“Now we’re talking,” he says, holding the gun up in the light for all to see.

“Is that a Desert Eagle?” Bob steps in closer. “Is that a .44?”

Josh grips the gun like a boy on Christmas morning. “Whatever the hell it is, it’s heavy as shit. Thing must weigh ten pounds.”

“May I?” Bob takes the gun. “Holy Christ … this is the goddamn howitzer of handguns.”

“Now all we need are bullets.”

Bob checks the clip. “Manufactured by bad-ass Hebrews, gas-operated … the only semiauto of its kind.” Bob looks up at the high shelves. “Shine that light up yonder … see if they got any .50 caliber express up there.”

A moment later, Josh finds a stack of cartons marked “50-C-R” on the top shelf. He boosts himself up and grabs half a dozen cartons.

Meanwhile, Bob thumbs the release and the magazine falls into his greasy hand. His voice goes soft and low, as though he’s speaking to a lover. “Nobody designs firearms like the Israelis … not even the Germans. This bad boy can penetrate tank armor.”

“Dude,” Scott says finally, standing behind Bob with a flashlight. “You planning on shooting that thing or fucking it?”

After an awkward moment, they all burst out laughing—even Josh can’t resist chuckling—and despite the fact that their laughter is brittle and fraught with nerves, it serves to break the tension in that silent warehouse of blood and looted shelves. They have had a good day. They’ve hit the jackpot here in this temple of discount consumerism. More importantly, they’ve acquired something here far more valuable than mere provisions: They have found a glimmer of hope that they’ll make it through the winter … that they just may come out the other side of this nightmare.

Lilly hears the noise first. Her laughter instantly dies and she looks around as though waking with a start from a dream. “What was that?”

Josh stops laughing. “What’s the matter?”

“Did you hear that?”

Bob looks at her. “What’s wrong, darlin’?”

“I heard something.” Her voice is low and taut with panic.

Josh turns his flashlight off and looks at Scott. “Turn the flashlight off, Scott.”

Scott extinguishes the light and the rear of the store is plunged into darkness.

*   *   *

Lilly’s heart thumps as they stand there in the shadows for a moment, listening. The store is silent. Then another creaking noise penetrates the stillness.

It comes from the front of the store. A wrenching sound, like rusty metal squeaking, but faint, so faint it’s impossible to identify.

Josh whispers, “Bob, where’s the shotgun?”

“Left it up front, with the wheelbarrows.”

“Great.”

“What if it’s Megan?”

Josh thinks about it. He gazes out at the stillness of the store. “Megan! That you?”

No answer.

Lilly swallows air. Dizziness courses over her. “You think walkers could push the door open?”

“A stiff breeze could blow it open,” Josh says, reaching behind his belt for the .38. “Bob, how handy are you with that bad-ass pistol?”

Bob already has one of the ammo boxes open. He fishes for bullets with trembling, filthy fingers. “Way ahead of you, captain.”

“All right, listen—”

Josh starts to whisper instructions when another noise fills the air—muffled but distinct—clearly the sound of frozen hinges rasping somewhere near the entrance. Someone or some thing is pushing itself into the store.

Bob fiddles bullets into an empty magazine, his hands shaking. He drops the magazine, the clip hitting the floor and spilling rounds.

“Dude,” Scott comments under his breath, nervously watching Bob on his hands and knees retrieving the stray bullets like a little boy madly gathering marbles.

“Listen up,” Josh hisses at them. “Scott, you and Bob take the left flank, head toward the front of the store through the grocery department. Babydoll, you follow me. We’ll grab an axe from home and garden on the way.”

Bob, on the floor, finally manages to get the bullets into the clip, then slams the magazine into the pistol and levers himself back to his feet. “Gotcha. C’mon, junior. Let’s do it.”

They split off and move through the darkness toward the pale light.

Lilly follows Josh through the shadows of the auto care center, past ransacked shelves, past heaps of litter strewn across the tile flooring, past home and office, past crafts. They move as quietly as possible, staying low and close together, Josh communicating with hand gestures. He has the .38 in one hand, the other hand coming up suddenly and signaling for Lilly to stop.

From the front of the store, the sound of shuffling footsteps can now clearly be heard.

Josh points at a fallen display in the do-it-yourself department. Lilly creeps around behind a display of lightbulbs and finds the floor littered with rakes and pruning shears and three-foot-long axes. She grabs one of the axes and comes back around the lightbulbs, her heart hammering, her flesh crawling with terror.

They approach the front entrance. Lilly can see an occasional flash of movement on the other side of the store as Scott and Bob close in along the west wall of the grocery department. By this point, whatever it is that’s slithering into the Walmart seems to have fallen silent and still. Lilly can’t hear a thing other than her chugging heart.

Josh pauses behind the pharmacy counter, crouching down. Lilly joins him. Josh whispers to her, “You stay behind me, and if one of them things gets past me, give it a good whack in the center of the head with that thing.”

“Josh, I know how to kill a zombie,” Lilly retorts in a harsh whisper.

“I know, honey, all I’m saying … just make sure you whack it hard enough the first time.”

Lilly nods.

“On three,” Josh whispers. “You ready?”

“Ready.”

“One, two—”

Josh stops cold. Lilly hears something that doesn’t compute.

Josh grabs her and holds her steady against the bottom of the pharmacy counter. Paralyzed with indecision, they crouch there for a moment, a single incongruous thought screaming in Lilly’s brain.

Zombies don’t talk.

*   *   *

“Hello?” The voice echoes across the empty store. “Anybody home?”

Josh hesitates behind the counter for another brief moment, weighing his options, his brain swimming with panic. The voice sounds friendly … sort of … definitely male, deep, maybe a little bit of an accent.

Josh glances over his shoulder at Lilly. She’s holding the axe like a baseball bat, poised to strike, her lips quivering with terror. Josh holds his huge hand up—making a “give me a second” gesture—and he’s about to make his move, letting up on the pistol’s hammer, when another voice rings out, instantly changing the dynamic.

“LET HER GO, YOU SONS OF BITCHES!”

Josh lunges out from behind the counter with his .38 raised and ready to fire.

Lilly follows with the axe.

A group of six men—all heavily armed—stand in the vestibule.

“Easy … easy, easy, easy … whoa!” The leader, the guy standing out in front of the pack—a high-powered assault rifle in his arms, the muzzle raised menacingly—looks to be in his late twenties, early thirties at the most. Tall, rangy, dark complexioned, he wears a do-rag on his head. The sleeves of his flannel shirt are scissored off. His arms are heavily muscled.

At first, things are happening almost too quickly for Josh to track as he stands his ground with the barrel of his .38 pinned on Bandanna Man.

From behind the checkout lanes, Bob Stookey charges toward the intruders with his Desert Eagle gripped in both hands, commando-style, his red-rimmed eyes wide with drunken heroism. “LET HER GO!” The object of his pique stands behind the bandanna dude, held captive by a younger member of the raiding party. Megan Lafferty squirms angrily in the grip of a wild-eyed black kid, a greasy hand across her mouth, keeping her quiet.

“BOB—DON’T!” Josh bellows at the top of his lungs, and the booming authority of his voice seems to slam the brakes on Bob’s gallantry. The older man falters at the end of the checkout lanes, stuttering to a stop a mere twenty feet from the guy holding Megan prisoner. Breathing hard, the old juicer stares helplessly at Megan. Josh can see the emotions all stirred up in the older man.

“Everybody chill!” Josh orders his people.

Scott Moon appears behind Bob with the old squirrel gun raised.

“Scott, cool it with the shotgun!”

The man in the bandanna doesn’t lower his AK-47. “Let’s dial it down, folks, come on—we’re not looking to get into any O.K. Corral–type situation here.”

Behind the dark-skinned dude stand five other men with heavy-duty weaponry. Mostly in their thirties, some black, some white, some in hip-hop street attire, others in ragged army fatigues and down vests, they look rested and well fed and maybe even a little high. Most importantly to Josh, they look as though they would just as soon start blasting as engage in any kind of diplomacy.

“We’re cool,” Josh says, but he’s fairly certain that the tone of his voice, the set of his jaw, and the fact that he too has refrained from lowering his gun—all of this probably sends a countervailing message to Bandanna Man. “Aren’t we, Bob? Aren’t we cool?”

Bob mumbles something inaudible. The Desert Eagle remains in its upright, locked position, and for a brief and awkward moment, the two groups stand each other off with guns pointed at key pieces of anatomy. Josh doesn’t like the odds—the intruders are packing enough firepower to take down a small garrison—but on the other hand, Josh’s side has three working firearms all pointed, at the moment, directly at the raiding party’s leader, whose loss might put a serious kink in this little posse’s group dynamic.

“Let the girl go, Haynes,” Bandanna Man orders his underling.

“But what about—”

“I said let her go!”

The wild-eyed black kid shoves Megan toward her comrades, and Megan stumbles for a moment, nearly falling, but then manages to stay upright and stagger over to Bob. “What a bunch of fucking dicks!” she grumbles.

“You okay, sweetie?” Bob asks, putting his free arm around her, but not taking his eyes (or the barrel of the magnum) off the intruders.

“Assholes snuck up on me,” she says, rubbing her wrists, glowering back at them.

Bandanna Man lowers his gun and addresses Josh. “Look, we can’t take any chances these days, we didn’t know you from Adam … we’re just looking after our own.”

Unconvinced, Josh keeps the .38 beaded directly on Bandanna Man’s chest. “What does that have to do with snatching that girl outta the truck?”

“Like I said … we didn’t know how many of you we were dealing with … who she was gonna warn … we didn’t know anything.”

“You own this place?”

“No … whaddaya mean? No.”

Josh gives him a cold smile. “Then lemme make a suggestion … as to where we go from here.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s plenty of stuff left in here … why don’t y’all let us pass and you can have the rest.”

Bandanna Man turns to his gang. “Guns down, guys. Come on. Step it on back. Come on.”

Almost reluctantly the rest of the intruders comply and lower their weapons.

Bandanna Man turns back to Josh. “Name’s Martinez … I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot.”

“Name’s Hamilton and it’s nice to meet you and I’d appreciate it if you’d let us pass.”

“No problema, mi amigo … but can I just make a suggestion to you before we conclude our business together?”

“I’m listening.”

“First off, is there any way you could stop pointing those guns at us?”

Josh keeps his eyes on Martinez as he lowers his gun. “Scott, Bob … go ahead … it’s okay.”

Scott puts the shotgun on his shoulder and leans against a checkout belt to listen. Bob reluctantly lowers the muzzle of the Desert Eagle, shoves it behind his belt, and keeps his arm around Megan.

Lilly sets her axe—head down—on the floor, leaning it against the pharmacy counter.

“Thanks, I appreciate it.” Martinez takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh. “What I’m wondering is this. You seem like you got your head screwed on straight. You got the right to take all that merchandise outta here … but can I ask where you’re taking it?”

“Truth is, we ain’t taking it anywhere,” Josh says. “We’re getting it to go.”

“You folks living on the road?”

“What difference does it make?”

Martinez shrugs. “Look, I know you got no reason to trust me, but the way things are, folks like us … we can be mutually beneficial to each other. You know what I’m saying?”

“To be honest, no … I don’t have a fuckin’ clue as to what you’re saying.”

Martinez sighs. “Let me lay my cards on the table. We could part ways right here and now, no harm no foul, wish each other the best…”

“Sounds good to me,” Josh says.

“We got a better option, though,” the man says.

“Which is?”

“A walled-in place, just up the road, people just like you and me, trying to make a place to live.”

“Go on.”

“No more running, is what I’m saying. We secured part of a town. It ain’t much … yet. We got some walls up. Place to grow food. Generators. Heat. We definitely got room for five more.”

Josh doesn’t say anything. He looks at Lilly. He can’t read her face. She looks exhausted, scared, confused. He looks at the others. He sees Bob’s wheels turning. Scott looks at the floor. Megan stares balefully out at the intruders through tendrils of curly hair.

“Think about it, man,” Martinez goes on. “We could split up what’s left in this place and call it a day or we could join forces. We need good strong backs. If I wanted to rob you, fuck with you, mess you up … wouldn’t I have done it already? I got no reason to make trouble. Come with us, Hamilton. Whaddaya say? There’s nothing out there on the road but more shit and winter rolling in. Whaddaya say, man?”

Josh looks at Martinez for a long moment, until finally Josh says, “Give us a second.”

*   *   *

They gather over by the checkout counters.

“Dude, you gotta be fucking kidding me,” Megan says to Josh in a low, tense whisper. The others huddle around the big man in a semicircle. “You’re thinking about going somewhere with these scumbags?”

Josh licks his lips. “I don’t know … the more I look at these dudes, the more they look just as scared and freaked out as we are.”

Lilly chimes in. “Maybe we could just check the place out, see what it’s like.”

Bob looks at Josh. “Compared with livin’ in tents on the ground with a bunch of hotheads? How bad could it be?”

Megan groans. “Is it just me, or have you people lost your fucking minds?”

“Megan, I don’t know,” Scott says. “I’m like thinking what do we have to lose?”

“Shut up, Scott.”

“Okay, look,” Josh says, holding up a huge hand and cutting off the debate. “I don’t see any harm in following them, checking the place out. We’ll keep our guns, keep our eyes open, and we’ll decide when we see the place.” He looks at Bob, then looks at Lilly. “Cool?”

Lilly takes a deep breath. Then gives him a nod. “Yeah … cool.”

“Terrific,” Megan grumbles, following the others back toward the entrance.

*   *   *

It takes another hour and the combined efforts of the two groups to go through the rest of the store for heavy items required by the town. They raid the lawn and garden center and home repair for lumber, fertilizer, potting soil, seeds, hammers, and nails. Lilly senses an edgy quality to the uneasy truce between the two contingents. She keeps tabs on Martinez out of the corner of her eye, and she notices an unspoken hierarchy to the ragtag raiding party. Martinez is definitely the honcho, ruling the others with simple gestures and nods.

By the time they get Bob’s Ram and the two vehicles from the walled-in town—a panel van and flatbed truck—loaded to the gills, twilight is closing in. Martinez gets behind the wheel of the van, and tells Bob to follow along behind the flatbed … and the convoy starts out for the town.

As they wend their way out of the dusty Walmart lot and start up the access road toward the highway, Lilly sits in the back sleeper compartment, gazing through the bug-streaked windshield, as Bob concentrates on keeping up with the exhaust-belching flatbed. They pass tangles of wreckage and dense forests on either side of the farm road, behind which shadows are deepening. A fine mist of sleet rolls in on the north wind.

In the steel-gray twilight, Lilly can barely see the lead vehicle—several car lengths ahead of them—a glimpse of Martinez in the side mirror, his tattooed arm resting on the outer edge of the open window as he drives.

It could be Lilly’s imagination, but she is almost positive she sees the bandanna-clad head of Martinez turning toward his passengers, saying something, sharing some intimate tidbit, and then getting a huge reaction from his comrades.

The men are laughing hysterically.

PART 2

This Is How the World Ends

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is often interred with their bones.

—William Shakespeare

EIGHT

The convoy makes two stops on their way to the walled-in town—the first at the junction of Highways 18 and 109, where an armed sentry consults with Martinez for a moment before waving the vehicles on. A heap of human remains lies in a nearby ditch, still smoldering from a makeshift funeral pyre. They make the second stop at a roadblock near the town sign. By this point the sleet has turned to a wet snow, spitting across the macadam on angular gusts, a very rare phenomenon for Georgia this early in December.

“Looks like they got some serious firepower,” Josh comments from the driver’s seat, as he waits for the two men in olive-drab camo suits and M1 rifles to finish chatting with Martinez three car lengths ahead of the Ram. Shadows thrown by the headlights obscure the distant faces as they talk, the snow swirling, the Ram’s windshield wipers beating out a sullen rhythm. Lilly and Bob remain silent and fidgety as they watch the exchange.

Full darkness has fallen, and the lack of a power grid and the bad weather give the outer rings of the town a medieval quality. Flames burn here and there in oil drums, and the signs of a recent skirmish mar the wooded vales and pine groves circling the town. In the distance the scorched rooftops, bullet-riddled trailers, and torn power lines reflect a series of past upheavals.

Josh notices Lilly studying the rust-pocked green sign up ahead, visible in the wash of headlamp beams, the signpost planted in the white, sandy earth.

WELCOME TO
WOODBURY
POPULATION 1,102

Lilly turns to Josh and says, “How are you feeling about all this?”

“Jury’s still out. But it looks like we’re about to get further orders.”

Up ahead, in luminous motes of snow passing through the headlight beams, Martinez turns away from the confab, lifts his collar, and starts trudging back toward the Ram. He walks with a purpose, but still has that congenial smile plastered over his dark features. He lifts his collar against the cold as he approaches Josh’s window.

Josh rolls down the window. “What’s the deal?”

Martinez smiles. “Gonna need you to hand over your firearms for the time being.”

Josh stares at him. “Sorry, brother, but that ain’t gonna happen.”

The convivial smile lingers. “Town rules … you know how it is.”

Josh slowly shakes his head. “Ain’t gonna happen.”

Martinez purses his lips thoughtfully, then smiles some more. “Can’t say I blame you, walking into something like this. Tell you what. Can you leave the rabbit gun in the truck for now?”

Josh lets out a sigh. “I guess we could do that.”

“And you mind keeping the sidearms tucked away? Out of sight?”

“We could do that.”

“Okay … if you want the nickel tour I could ride along with you folks. You got room for one more?”

Josh turns and gives Bob a nod. With a shrug the older man unsnaps his safety belt and gets out, then turns and squeezes into the rear enclosure next to Lilly.

Martinez comes around the passenger side and climbs into the cab. He smells of smoke and machine oil. “Take it nice and slow, cousin,” he says, wiping the moisture from his face, gesturing toward the panel van ahead of them. “Just follow the dude in the van.”

Josh gives the Ram some gas and they follow the van through the roadblock.

*   *   *

They bump over a series of railroad tracks and enter the town from the southeast. Lilly and Bob remain silent in the rear enclosure, as Josh scans the immediate area. To his right a busted sign reading PIGGLY IGGLY stands over a parking lot littered with dead bodies and broken glass. The grocery store is caved in on one side as though blasted by dynamite. Tall cyclone fencing, gouged and punched out in places, runs along the road known alternately as Woodbury Highway or Main Street. Grisly lumps of human carnage and twisted, scorched metal litter patches of exposed ground—the white, sandy earth practically glowing in the snowy darkness—an eerie sight reminiscent of a desert war zone smack-dab in the middle of Georgia.

“Had a pretty big dustup a few weeks ago with a flock of biters.” Martinez lights a Viceroy and opens his window a few inches. The smoke curls out into the wind-lashed snow, vanishing like ghosts. “Things got outta hand for a while, but luckily cooler heads prevailed. Gonna be taking a hard left up here in a second.”

Josh follows the van around a hairpin and down a narrower section of road.

In the dark middle distance, behind a veil of windswept sleet, the heart of Woodbury comes into view. Four square blocks of turn-of-the-century brick buildings and power lines crowd a central intersection of merchants, wood-frame homes, and apartment buildings. Much of it is laced with cyclone fences and idle construction sites that appear to be recent additions. Josh remembers when they used to call these places “wide spots in the road.”

Woodbury’s width seems to extend about half a dozen blocks in all directions, with larger public areas carved out of the wooded wetlands to the west and north. Some of the rooftop chimneys and vent stacks sprout columns of thick black smoke, either from generator exhaust or woodstoves and fireplaces. Most of the street lamps are dark, but some glow in the darkness, apparently running on emergency juice.

As the convoy approaches the center of town, Josh notices the van pulling up to the edge of a construction site. “Been working on the wall for months,” Martinez explains. “Pretty near got two square blocks completely protected, and we plan on expanding it—moving the wall back farther and farther as we go.”

“Not a bad idea,” Josh mutters, almost under his breath, as he ponders the massive high wall of wooden timbers and planks, cannibalized pieces of cabin logs, siding, and two-by-fours, at least fifteen feet tall, extending along the edge of Jones Mill Road. Portions of the barricade still bare the scars of the recent walker attacks, and even in the snow-swept dark the claw marks and patched areas and ricochet holes and bloodstains, as black as tar, call out to Josh.

The place vibrates with latent violence, like some throwback to the Wild West.

Josh brings the truck to a stop, as the van’s rear doors jack open and one of the Young Turks hops out the back and then goes over to a seam in the fortification. He pulls open a hinged section, swinging the gate wide enough for the two vehicles to pass through. The van rumbles through the gap, and Josh follows.

“Got about fifty people and change,” Martinez continues, taking a deep drag off the Viceroy and blowing it out the window. “Place over there, on the right, that’s kind of a food center. Got all our supplies, bottled water, medicine stashed in that place.”

As they pass, Josh sees the faded old sign—DEFOREST’S FEED AND SEED—its storefront fortified and reinforced with burglar bars and planking, two armed guards standing out front smoking cigarettes. The gate closes behind them as they roll slowly along, venturing deeper into the secure zone. Other denizens stand around, watching them pass—people bundled up on boardwalks, standing in vestibules—shell-shocked expressions behind scarves and mufflers. Nobody looks particularly friendly or happy to see them.

“Got a doctor on board, working medical center and whatnot.” Martinez tosses his cigarette butt out the window. “Hope to expand the walls at least another block by the end of the week.”

“Not a bad setup,” Bob comments from the backseat, his watery eyes taking it all in. “If ya don’t mind my asking, what the hell is that?”

Josh sees the top of the massive edifice a few blocks beyond the walled-in area, toward which Bob is now pointing a greasy finger. In the hazy darkness it looks like a flying saucer has landed in the middle of a field beyond the town square. Dirt roads circle the thing, and dim lights twinkle in the snow above its circular rim.

“Used to be a dirt racetrack.” Martinez grins. In the green glow of the dashboard lights the smirk looks almost lupine, devilish. “Hillbillies love their races.”

“‘Used’ to be?” Josh asks.

“Boss laid down the law last week, no more races, too much noise. Racket was drawing biters.”

“There’s a boss here?”

The smirk on Martinez’s face curdles into something unreadable. “Don’t worry, cousin. You’ll be meeting him soon enough.”

Josh sneaks a glance at Lilly, who is busily gnawing on her fingernails. “Not sure we’re gonna be sticking around very long.”

“It’s up to you.” Martinez gives a noncommittal shrug. He slips on a pair of fingerless, leather Carnaby gloves. “Keep in mind, though, those mutual benefits I was talking about.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Our apartments are all filled up but we still got places you can stay in the center of town.”

“Good to know.”

“I’m telling you, once we get that wall expanded, you’ll have your pick of places to live.”

Josh says nothing.

Martinez stops smirking and all at once, in the dim green light, he looks as though he’s remembering better days, maybe a family, maybe something painful. “I’m talking about places with soft beds, privacy … picket fences and trees.”

A long pause of awkward silence.

“Lemme ask you something, Martinez.”

“Shoot.”

“How did you end up here?”

Martinez lets out a sigh. “God’s honest truth, I don’t really remember.”

“How’s that?”

He gives another shrug. “I was alone, ex-wife got bit, my kid up and disappeared. I guess I didn’t give a shit about much of anything anymore but killing biters. Went on kind of a rampage. Put down a whole slew of those ugly motherfuckers. Some locals found me passed out in a ditch. Took me here. Swear to God that’s about all I remember.” He cocks his head as though reconsidering. “I’m glad they did, though, especially now.”

“What do you mean?”

Martinez looks at him. “This place ain’t perfect but it’s safe, and it’s only gonna get safer. Thanks in no small part to the guy we got in charge now.”

Josh looks at him. “This is the ‘boss’ guy I assume you’re talking about?”

“That’s right.”

“And you say we’re gonna get a chance to meet this guy?”

Martinez holds up a gloved hand as if to say, Just wait. He pulls a small two-way radio from the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He thumbs the switch and speaks into the mouthpiece. “Haynes, take us to the courthouse … they’re waiting for us over there.”

Another loaded glance passes between Josh and Lilly as the lead vehicle pulls off the main road and heads across the town square, a statue of Robert E. Lee guarding a kudzu-covered gazebo. They approach a flagstone government building on the far edge of the park, its stone steps and portico ghostly pale in the snow-veiled darkness.

*   *   *

The community room lies at the rear of the courthouse building, at the end of a long, narrow corridor lined with glass doors leading into private offices.

Josh and company gather in the cluttered meeting room, their boots dripping on the parquet floor. They are exhausted and in no mood to meet the Woodbury Welcome Wagon but Martinez tells them to be patient.

Snow ticks against the high windows as they wait. The room, warmed by space heaters and dimly lit with Coleman lanterns, looks as though it has seen its share of heated exchanges. The crumbling plaster walls bare the scars of violence. The floor is strewn with overturned folding chairs and littered with wadded documents. Josh notices blood streaks on the front wall, near a tattered Georgia state flag. Generators thrum in the bowels of the edifice, vibrating the floor.

They wait a little over five minutes—Josh pacing, Lilly and the others sitting on folding chairs—before the sound of heavy boots echo out in the corridor. Someone is whistling as the footsteps approach.

“Welcome, folks, welcome to Woodbury.” The voice that emanates from the doorway is low and nasally, and filled with faux conviviality.

All heads turn.

Three men stand in the doorway with smiles on their faces that don’t match their cold, lidded stares. The man in the middle radiates a weird kind of energy that makes Lilly think of peacocks and fighting fish. “We can always use more good people around here,” he says, and steps into the room.

Lean and rawboned in his ratty fisherman’s sweater, his cinder-black hair shapeless and shaggy, he sports a five o’clock shadow of whiskers on his face that he’s already trimming and styling into the beginnings of a Fu Manchu mustache. He has a strange nervous tic that is hardly noticeable—he blinks a lot.

“Name’s Philip Blake,” he says, “and this is Bruce over here, and that’s Gabe.”

The other two men—both older—follow on the younger man’s heels like guard dogs. Not much of a greeting from these two—other than a few grunts and nods—as they stand slightly behind the man named Philip.

Gabe, on the left, the Caucasian, is a fireplug of a man with a thick neck and jarhead crew cut. Bruce, on the right, is a dour black man with an onyx shaved head. Each of these men holds an impressive automatic assault rifle across his chest, fingers on the trigger pads. For a moment Lilly cannot take her eyes off the guns.

“Sorry about the heavy artillery,” Philip says, indicating the weaponry behind him. “We had a little dustup in town last month, got kinda hairy for a while. Can’t take any chances now. Too much at stake. Your names are…?”

Josh introduces the group, going around the room and ending on Megan.

“You look like somebody I knew once,” Philip informs Megan, the man’s eyes all over her now. Lilly does not like the way this guy is looking at her friend. It’s very subtle but it bothers her.

“I get that a lot,” Megan says.

“Or maybe it’s somebody famous. Doesn’t she look like somebody famous, guys?”

The “guys” behind him have no opinion. Philip snaps his fingers. “That chick from Titanic!”

“Carrie Winslet?” the one named Gabe speculates.

“You stupid fucking idiot, it’s not Carrie, it’s Kate … Kate … Fucking Kate Winslet.”

Megan gives Philip a cockeyed smile. “I’ve been told Bonnie Raitt.”

“I love Bonnie Raitt,” Philip enthuses. “‘Let’s Give ’Em Something to Talk About.’”

Josh speaks up. “So you’re ‘the boss’ we’ve been hearing about?”

Philip turns to the big man. “Guilty as charged.” Philip smiles and goes over to Josh and extends a hand. “‘Josh’ was it?”

Josh shakes the man’s hand. The expression on Josh’s face remains noncommittal, polite, deferential. “That’s right. We appreciate you taking us in for a while. Not sure how long we’ll be staying.”

Philip smiles at him. “You just got here, friend. Relax. Check the place out. You won’t find a safer place to live. Believe me.”

Josh gives a nod. “Looks like you got the walker problem under control.”

“We get our share, I won’t lie to you. Pack of ’em comes through every few weeks. Had a bad situation a couple of weeks ago but we’re getting the town squared away.”

“Looks like it.”

“Basically we run on the barter system.” Philip Blake looks around the room, regarding each of these newcomers as a coach might size up a new team. “I understand you folks scored big at a Walmart today.”

“We did all right.”

“You’re all welcome to take what you need in trade.”

Josh looks at him. “Trade?”

“Goods, services … whatever you got to contribute. As long as you respect your fellow citizens, keep your noses clean, abide by the rules, pitch in … you can stay as long as you like.” He looks at Josh. “Gentleman of your … physical endowment … we can use around here.”

Josh thinks it over. “So you’re some kind of ‘elected official’?”

Philip glances at his guards, and the other men grin, and Philip bursts out laughing. He wipes his mirthless eyes and shakes his head. “I’m more like—what’s the phrase?—‘pro tem’? President pro tem?”

“I’m sorry?”

Philip waves off the question. “Put it this way, not long ago this place was under the thumb of some power-hungry assholes, got too big for their britches. I saw the need for leadership and I volunteered.”

“Volunteered?”

Philip’s smile fades. “I stepped up, friend. Times like these. Strong leadership is a necessity. We got families here. Women and children. Old people. You got to have somebody watching the door, somebody … decisive. You understand what I’m saying?”

Josh nods. “Sure.”

Behind Philip, Gabe, still smirking, mumbles, “President Pro Tem … I like that.”

From across the room, Scott, perched on a windowsill, chimes in: “Dude, you sure look like a president … with those two Secret Service dudes.”

An awkward moment of silence presses down on the group as Scott’s breathy little weed-giggle fades and Philip turns to glance at the stoner across the room. “What’s your name again, sport?”

“Scott Moon.”

“Well, Scott Moon, I don’t know about president. Never saw myself as the chief executive type.” Another cold smile. “I’d be governor at best.”

*   *   *

They spend that night in the gymnasium of the local high school. The aging brick building, situated outside the walled-in zone, sits on the edge of a vast athletic field riddled with shallow graves. Cyclone fences bear the damage of a recent walker attack. Inside the gym, makeshift cots crowd the varnished basketball court. The air smells of urine and body odors and disinfectant.

The night drags for Lilly. The fetid corridors and breezeways connecting the dark schoolrooms creak and moan in the wind all night, while strangers toss and turn across the dark gymnasium, coughing, wheezing, murmuring feverish ruminations. Every few moments a child cries out.

At one point Lilly glances at the cot next to her, on which Josh slumbers fitfully, and she sees the big man jerking awake from a nightmare.

Lilly reaches over and offers her hand, and the big man takes it.

*   *   *

The next morning, the five newcomers sit in a huddle around Josh’s cot, as the ashen sunlight slants down through dust motes and stripes the sick and wounded as they hunch on their meager, stained bedsheets. Lilly is reminded of Civil War encampments and jury-rigged morgues. “Is it just me,” she says softly, under her breath to her fellow travelers, “or does this place have a weird vibe?”

“That’s putting it lightly,” Josh says.

Megan yawns and stretches. “It sure beats sleeping in Bob’s little dungeon-on-wheels.”

“You got that right,” Scott concurs. “I’ll take a shitty cot in a stinky gym any day of the week.”

Bob looks at Josh. “Gotta admit, captain … you could make an argument for staying here for a while.”

Josh laces his boots, pulls on his lumberjack coat. “Not sure about this place.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking we take this one day at a time.”

“I agree with Josh,” Lilly says. “Something about this place bothers me.”

“What’s not to like?” Megan combs fingers through her hair, scrunching her curls. “It’s safe, they got supplies, they got guns.”

Josh wipes his mouth thoughtfully. “Look. I can’t tell any of you folks what to do. Just be careful. Watch each other’s backs.”

“Duly noted,” Bob says.

“Bob, for the time being, I’m thinking we ought to keep the truck locked up.”

“Copy that.”

“Keep your .44 handy.”

“Gotcha.”

“And we ought to all remember where the truck is at all times, you know, just in case.”

They all agree, and then they agree to split up that morning and investigate the rest of the town—get a feel for the place in the light of day. They will meet back up that afternoon at the high school and they will reassess at that point whether to go or stay.

*   *   *

The harsh light of day shines down on Lilly and Josh as they exit the high school, turning up their collars against the wind. The snow has blown over, and the weather has turned blustery. Lilly’s stomach growls. “You feel like getting some breakfast?” she proffers to Josh.

“Got some of that stuff from Walmart in the truck, if you can stand beef jerky and Chef Boyardee again.”

Lilly shudders. “I don’t think I can look at another can of SpaghettiOs.”

“I got an idea.” Josh feels the breast pocket of his flannel jacket. “Come on … I’m buying.”

They turn west and make their way down the main drag. In the bitter gray daylight the seams of the town reveal themselves. Most of the storefronts sit empty, boarded or barred, the pavement scarred with skid marks and oil spills. Some of the windows and signs show the marks of bullet holes. Passersby keep to themselves. Here and there, bare patches of ground reveal dirty white sand. It seems the whole village is built on sand.

No one offers a greeting as Lilly and Josh pass through the walled area. Most of those who are out at this hour carry building materials or bundles of supplies, and seem to be in a hurry to get where they’re going. There’s a sullen, prisonlike atmosphere in the air. Quadrants of the town are sectioned off with huge, temporary cyclone fences. The growl of bulldozers drifts on the breeze. On the eastern horizon, a man with a high-powered rifle paces along the top edge of the racetrack arena.

“Morning, gentlemen,” Josh says to three old codgers sitting on barrels outside the feed and seed store, watching Lilly and Josh like buzzards.

One of the old men—a wizened, bearded troll in a tattered overcoat and slouch hat—shows a smile full of rotten teeth. “Mornin’, big fella. Y’all are the newbies, ain’t ya?”

“Just got in last night,” Josh tells him.

“Lucky you.”

The three coots share a garbled chuckle as if enjoying a private joke.

Josh smiles and lets the joke pass. “Understand this is the food center?”

“You could call it that.” More mucusy chuckling. “Keep an eye on your woman.”

“I’ll do that,” Josh says, taking Lilly’s hand. They climb the steps and go inside.

In the dim light a long, narrow retail store stretches before them, smelling of turpentine and must, gutted of its shelves, packed with crates up to the ceiling: dry goods, toilet paper, gallon jugs of water, bed linen, and unidentified cartons of merchandise. The single customer present—an older woman bundled in down and scarves—sees Josh and brushes past him, hurrying out the door, averting her eyes. The cool air vibrates with the artificial warmth of space heaters and the crackle of human tension.

In the rear corner of the store, among sacks of seed stacked to the rafters, sits a makeshift counter. A man in a wheelchair is positioned behind the counter, flanked by two armed guards.

Josh walks up to the counter. “How y’all doin’ this morning?”

The man in the wheelchair looks up through lidded eyes. “Holy shit, you’re a big one,” he comments, his long, straggly beard twitching. He wears faded army dungarees, and a headband cinches his greasy, iron-gray ponytail. His face is a map of degradation, from his rheumy red-rimmed eyes to his ulcerated beak of a nose.

Josh ignores the comment. “Just wondering if y’all have any fresh produce? Or maybe some eggs we might take off your hands in trade?”

The man in the wheelchair stares. Josh can feel the suspicious gazes of the armed guards. The gunmen are both young, black, dressed in quasi-gang colors. “Whaddaya have in mind?”

“The thing is, we just brought in a whole slew of items from Walmart with Martinez … so I’m wondering if we can work something out.”

“That’s between you and Martinez. What else you got for me?”

Josh starts to answer when he notices all three men are staring at Lilly, and the way they’re staring at her puts Josh’s hackles up.

“What’ll this buy me?” Josh says finally, shooting his cuff, fiddling with the buckle of his watchband. He snaps it off and lays the sports watch on the counter. It’s not a Rolex but it’s no Timex, either. The chronograph set him back three hundred bucks ten years ago when his catering job was bringing in decent money.

Wheelchair Man looks down his blemished nose at the shiny thing on the counter. “’The tarnation is that?”

“It’s a Movado, worth five hundred easy.”

“Not around here it ain’t.”

“Give us a break, will ya? Been eating outta cans for weeks.”

The man picks up the watch and inspects it with a sour expression as though it’s covered in feces. “I’ll give ya fifty dollars’ worth of rice and beans, slab bacon, and them Egg Beaters.”

“C’mon, man. Fifty dollars?”

“Got some white peaches in back, too, just came in from the road, I’ll throw those in. That’s all I can do.”

“I don’t know.” Josh looks at Lilly, who stares back at him with a shrug. Josh looks at Wheelchair Man. “I don’t know, man.”

“That’ll keep the two of you going for a week.”

Josh sighs. “That’s a Movado, man. That’s a fine piece of craftsmanship.”

“Lookit, I ain’t gonna argue with—”

A baritone voice from behind the guards rings out, interrupting the man in the wheelchair. “What the fuck’s the problem?”

All heads turn toward a figure coming around the corner of the stockroom, wiping his bloody hands in a towel. The tall, gaunt, weathered man wears a horribly stained butcher’s apron, the fabric mottled with blood and marrow. His chiseled, sunburned face, set off by ice-chip blue eyes, glowers at Josh. “There a problem here, Davy?”

“Everything’s hunky-dory, Sam,” the man in the wheelchair says, not taking his eyes off Lilly. “These folks were somewhat dissatisfied with my offer, and they were just leaving.”

“Hold on a second.” Josh raises his hands in a contrite gesture. “I’m sorry if I offended you but I didn’t say I was—”

“All offers are final,” Sam the Butcher announces, throwing his grisly-looking towel on the counter and glaring at Josh. “Unless…” He seems to change his mind. “Forget it, never mind.”

Josh looks at the man. “Unless what?”

The man in the apron looks at the others, then purses his lips thoughtfully. “See … what most folks do around here is work off their debts, pitching in on the wall, patching fences, stacking sandbags and such. You’ll definitely get more bang for your buck offering up them big muscles of yours in trade.” He gives Lilly a look. “’Course there’s all kinds of services a person could provide, all kinds of ways to get more bang.” He grins. “Especially a person of the female persuasion.”

Lilly realizes the men behind the counter are all looking at her now, each of them grinning lasciviously. At first she’s taken by surprise, and she just stands there blinking. Then she feels all the blood rushing out of her face. She gets dizzy. She wants to kick over the table, or storm out of that musty-smelling chamber, knocking over the shelves and suggesting that they all fuck themselves. But the fear, the throat-closing fear—her old nemesis—holds her paralyzed, her feet nailed to the floor. She wonders what the hell is wrong with her. How did she survive this long without getting devoured? All she’s been through and she can’t even deal with a few sexist pigs?

Josh speaks up. “Okay, you know what … this is not necessary.”

Lilly looks at the big black man and sees his huge, square jaw tensing. She wonders whether Josh is talking about the concept of Lilly trading sexual services not being necessary or these thugs making crude, chauvinist comments not being necessary. The store gets very quiet. Sam the Butcher levels his gaze at Josh.

“Don’t be so quick to judge, Big Hoss.” An ember of contempt smolders in the butcher’s humorless blue eyes. He wipes his slimy hands on the apron. “Little lady with a body like that on her, you could be swimming in steak and eggs for a month.”

The smirks on the other men turn to laughter. But the butcher barely smiles. His impassive stare seems to be locked on to Josh with the intensity of an arc welder. Lilly feels her heart racing.

She puts a hand on Josh’s arm, which is pulsing under his lumberjack coat, tendons as coiled as telephone cable. “C’mon, Josh,” she says, almost under her breath. “It’s okay. Get your watch and let’s go.”

Josh smiles respectfully at the laughing men. “Steak and eggs. That’s a good one. Listen. Keep the watch. We’ll take you up on them beans and Egg Beaters and the rest.”

“Go get ’em their food,” the butcher says, still with those pale blue eyes fixed on Josh.

The two guards disappear in the back for a moment, gathering up the items. They return with a crate filled with oil-spotted brown paper sacks. “Appreciate it,” Josh says softly, taking the food. “We’ll let you fellas get back to your business. Have a good day.”

Josh ushers Lilly toward the door, Lilly hyperaware now of the gazes of the men on her backside the whole way out.

*   *   *

That afternoon, a commotion in one of the vacant lots on the northern edge of the village draws the attention of the townspeople.

Outside one of the cyclone fences, behind a wooded grove, a series of nauseating shrieks echoes on the wind. Josh and Lilly hear the screaming, and they race along the edge of the construction zone to see what’s going on.

By the time they reach a high mound of gravel and climb to the top to see into the distance, three gunshots have rung out over the treetops a hundred and fifty yards away.

Josh and Lilly crouch down in the dying sun, the wind in their faces, as they peer around a pile of debris and notice five men in the distance, near a hole in the fence. One of the men—Blake, the self-proclaimed Governor—wears a long coat and holds what appears to be an automatic pistol in his hand. The scene crackles with tension.

On the ground in front of Blake, tangled in the jagged, torn chain-link fence, a teenage boy, bleeding from bite wounds, claws at the dirt, trying frantically to extricate himself from the fence and return home.

In the shadows of the forest, directly behind the boy, three dead walkers lie in heaps, their skulls breached by gunfire, and the narrative of what has just happened coalesces in Lilly’s mind.

The boy apparently lit out by himself to explore the woods, and he was attacked. Now, badly wounded and infected, the boy, trying to return to safety, writhes in pain and terror on the ground, as Blake stands emotionlessly over him, gazing down with the impassive stare of an undertaker.

Lilly jumps when the boom of the 9-millimeter in Philip Blake’s hand echoes. The boy’s head erupts, and the body sags immediately.

*   *   *

“I don’t like this place, Josh, not even a little.” Lilly sits on the Ram’s rear bumper, sipping tepid coffee from a paper cup.

Darkness has fallen on their second evening in Woodbury and already the town has absorbed Megan, Scott, and Bob into its folds like a multicelled organism living off fear and suspicion, acquiring new life-forms on a daily basis. The town leaders have offered the newcomers a place to live—a studio apartment above a boarded-up drugstore at the end of Main Street—well outside the walled-in area but high enough above street level to be safe. Megan and Scott have already moved much of their stuff up there and have even bartered their sleeping bags for a nickel’s worth of locally grown weed.

Bob has stumbled upon a working tavern inside the safe zone, and already has traded half his rations of Walmart products for a few drink tickets and a little drunken camaraderie.

“I’m not crazy about this place myself, babydoll,” Josh concurs as he paces behind Bob’s camper, his breath showing in the cold. His huge hands are oily with bacon grease from the dinner he just prepared on the camper’s Coleman stove, and he wipes them on his lumberjack coat. He and Lilly have been sticking close to the Ram all day, trying to decide what to do. “But we ain’t looking at a lot of options right now. This place is better than the open road.”

“Really?” Lilly shivers in the cold and clutches at the collar of her down coat. “You sure about that?”

“At least it’s safe.”

“Safe from what? It’s not the walls and the fences keeping things out I’m worried about…”

“I know, I know.” Josh lights a stogie and puffs a few swirls of smoke. “It’s wound pretty tight around here. But it’s pretty much like this everywhere you go nowadays.”

“Jesus.” Lilly shivers some more and sips her coffee. “Where’s Bob, anyway?”

“Hanging out with them geezers at the taproom.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Josh goes over to her, puts a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Lil. We’ll rest up, we’ll stockpile some stuff … I’ll do some work in trade … and we’ll get outta here by the end of the week.” He tosses his stogie and sits next to her. “I won’t let anything happen.”

She looks at him. “Promise?”

“Promise.” He kisses her cheek. “I’ll protect you, girlie-girl. Always. Always…”

She kisses him back.

He puts his arms around her and kisses her on the lips. She wraps her arms around his thick neck and things begin to happen. His enormous tender hands find the small of her back, and their kiss turns to something hotter, more desperate. They intertwine, and he urges her back inside the camper, into the private darkness.

They leave the rear hatch open, oblivious to everything but each other, as they begin to make love.

It’s better than either one of them dreamed it would be. Lilly loses herself in the murky dark, the light of an icy harvest moon shining in through the gap, as Josh lets all his lonely desire pour out in a series of heaving gasps. He sheds his coat, gets his undershirt off—his skin looks almost indigo in the moonlight. Lilly peels her bra up and over herself, the soft weight of her breasts splaying across her rib cage. Gooseflesh spreads down her tummy as Josh gently enters her and builds steam.

They make feverish love. Lilly forgets everything, even the savage environment outside the camper.

A minute, an hour—time is meaningless now—all of it passes in a blur.

*   *   *

Later, they lie among the detritus of Bob’s camper, legs intertwined, Lilly’s head against the massive curve of Josh’s bicep, a blanket covering them, staving off the chill. Josh presses his lips against the soft convolutions of Lilly’s ear and whispers, “Gonna be okay.”

“Yeah,” she murmurs.

“We’re gonna make it.”

“Absolutely.”

“Together.”

“You got that right.” She lays her right arm across Josh’s massive chest, and she looks into his sad eyes. She feels strange. Buoyant, woozy. “Been thinking about this moment for a long time.”

“Me, too.”

They let the silence engulf them, carrying them away, and they lie there like that for some time, unaware of the dangers lying in wait … unaware of the brutal outside world tightening its grasp.

Most important, they are unaware of the fact that they are being watched.

NINE

On their third day in town, the winter rains roll in, drawing a dark gray pall of misery down over Woodbury. It’s already early December and Thanksgiving has come and gone without so much as a wishbone being snapped, and now the dampness as well as the cold starts getting into people’s joints. The sandy lots along Main Street turn to wet plaster and the sewers swell and overflow with tainted runoff. A human hand bubbles out of one of the gratings.

That day Josh decides to trade his best chef’s knife—a Japanese Shun—for bed linens and towels and soap, and he convinces Lilly to move her things into the apartment over the dry cleaner, where they can take sponge baths and find temporary refuge from the cramped quarters of the camper. Lilly stays indoors most of the day, fervently writing diary entries on a roll of wrapping paper and planning her escape. Josh keeps a close eye on her. Something feels wrong—more wrong than he can articulate.

Scott and Megan are nowhere to be found. Lilly suspects that Megan, already growing bored with Scott, is prostituting herself for dope.

That afternoon Bob Stookey finds a couple of kindred spirits in the bowels of the racetrack, where a labyrinth of cinder-block storage facilities and service areas has been turned into a makeshift infirmary. While the cold-steel rain pummels the metal beams and stanchions of the arena above them—sending a dull, hissing, incessant drone down through the bones of the building—a middle-aged man and a young woman give Bob the grand tour.

“Alice here has been a quick study as a neophyte nurse, I have to say,” the man in the wire-frame reading glasses and stained lab coat comments, as he leads Bob and the young lady through an open doorway and into a cluttered examination room. The man’s name is Stevens, and he’s a trim, intelligent, wry sort who seems out of place to Bob in this feral town. The ersatz nurse, also in a hand-me-down lab coat, looks younger than her years. Her dishwater-blond hair is braided and pulled back from her girlish face.

“I’m still working at it,” the girl says, following the men into the dimly lit room, the floor humming with the vibrations of a central generator. “I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of second-year nursing school.”

“Both y’all know a lot more than I do,” Bob admits. “I’m just an old battle tech.”

“She had her baptism of fire last month, God knows,” the doctor says, pausing next to a battered X-ray machine. “Business was brisk down here for a while.”

Bob looks around the room, sees the bloodstains and the signs of chaotic triage, and he asks what happened.

The doctor and the nurse share an uneasy glance. “Changeover in power.”

“Excuse me?”

The doctor sighs. “Place like this, you see a kind of natural selection going on. Only the pure sociopaths survive. It’s not pretty.” He takes a breath, and then smiles at Bob. “Still, it’s good to have a medic around.”

Bob wipes his mouth. “Not sure how much help I’d be, but I gotta admit, it sure would be nice to lean on the skills of a real doctor for once.” Bob motions at one of the old, battered machines. “I see y’all got an old Siemens machine there, used to truck one of those around Afghanistan.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not exactly Bellevue but we’ve got the basics, scavenged them from area clinics … got infusion pumps, IV drips, a couple monitors, ECG, EEG … we’re light on the pharmacy, though.”

Bob tells them about the medicine he scavenged from Walmart. “You’re welcome to any or all of it,” he says. “I got a couple of spare doctor’s bags full of the usual. Got extra dressings, you name it. It’s yours, you need it.”

“That’s great, Bob. Where you from?”

“Vicksburg originally, was living in Smyrna when the Turn came. How about you folks?”

“Atlanta,” Stevens replies. “Had a small practice in Brookhaven before everything went to hell.”

“Also from Atlanta,” the girl chimes in. “Was going to school at Georgia State.”

Stevens has a pleasant look on his face. “You been drinking, Bob?”

“Huh?”

Stevens gestures toward the silver flask partially visible in Bob’s hip pocket. “You been drinking today?”

Bob lowers his head, crestfallen, ashamed. “Yessir, I have.”

“You drink every day, Bob?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hard liquor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bob, I don’t mean to put you on the spot.” The doctor pats Bob’s shoulder. “It’s none of my business. I’m not judging you. But can I ask how much you’re putting away every day?”

Bob’s chest tightens with humiliation. Alice gazes elsewhere for a moment, out of respect. Bob swallows his shame. “I have no earthly idea. Sometimes a couple of pints, sometimes a whole fifth when I can get it.” Bob looks up at the slender, bespectacled doctor. “I’ll understand if you don’t want me getting near your—”

“Bob, relax. You don’t understand. I think it’s fantastic.”

“Huh?”

“Keep drinking. Drink as much as possible.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You mind sharing a sip?”

Bob slowly pulls the flask, not taking his eyes off the doctor.

“Appreciate it.” Stevens takes the flask, nods a thank-you, and takes a pull. He wipes his mouth and offers it to Alice.

The girl waves it off. “No, thanks, it’s a little early in the day for me.”

Stevens takes another sip and hands the flask back. “You stay here for any length of time you’re gonna need to drink heavily.”

Bob puts the flask back in his pocket. He doesn’t say anything.

Stevens smiles again, and there’s something heartbreaking behind the smile. “That’s my prescription, Bob. Stay as drunk as possible.”

*   *   *

On the other side of the racetrack complex, beneath the north end of the arena, a wiry, tightly coiled individual emerges from an unmarked metal door and gazes up at the sky. The rain has ceased for the moment, leaving behind a low ceiling of sooty clouds. The wiry gentleman carries a small bundle wrapped in a threadbare woolen blanket the color of dead grass, gathered at the top with rawhide.

The wiry man crosses the street and starts down the sidewalk, his raven-black hair slick with moisture and pulled back in a ponytail today.

As he walks, his preternaturally alert gaze is everywhere, practically all at once, taking in everything that goes on around him. In recent weeks the emotions that have plagued him have subsided, the voice in his head silent now. He feels strong. This town is his raison d’être, the fuel that keeps him keen and sharp.

He is about to turn the corner at the intersection of Canyon and Main when he notices a figure in his peripheral vision. The older guy—the drunk who came in a few days ago with the nigger and the girls—is emerging from the warehouse at the south end of the racetrack. The weathered old dude pauses for a moment to take a gulp from his flask, and the look on his face after swallowing and cringing at the burn is apparent to the wiry man even a block away.

In the distance, the older dude grimaces as the alcohol streams down his gullet, and the grimace is weirdly familiar to the wiry man. The grimace—full of shame and desolation—makes the wiry man feel strange and sentimental, almost tender. The older man puts the flask away and starts trundling toward Main Street with that trademark gait—half limp, half drunken amble—which many homeless people get after years of struggling on the street. The wiry man follows.

Minutes later, the wiry man cannot resist calling out to the juicer. “Hey, sport!”

*   *   *

Bob Stookey hears the voice—gravelly, lightly accented with a trace of Southern small town, echoing on the breeze—but he cannot locate the source.

Bob pauses at the edge of Main Street and looks around. The town is mostly deserted today, the rains driving denizens indoors.

“‘Bob’ is it?” the voice says, closer now, and Bob finally sees a figure approaching from behind.

“Oh, hi … how ya doin’?”

The man saunters up to Bob with a forced smile. “I’m doing great, Bob, thanks.” Wisps of coal-black hair dangling in front of the man’s chiseled face, he carries a bundle that seems to be leaking moisture, dripping on the pavement. People around town have started to call this man “the Governor”—the name has stuck—which is fine and dandy with this guy. “How you settling in to our little hamlet?”

“Real good.”

“You meet Doc Stevens?”

“Yes, sir. Good man.”

“Call me ‘the Governor.’” The smile softens a bit. “Everybody else seems to be calling me that. What the hell? Kinda like the ring of it.”

“The Governor it is,” Bob says, and glances down at the bundle in the man’s grip. The blanket leaks blood. Bob glances away quickly, alarmed by it, but feigning ignorance. “Looks like the rains have blown over.”

The man’s smile remains stamped on his face. “Walk with me, Bob.”

“Sure.”

They start down the cracked sidewalk, moving toward the temporary wall that stands between merchant’s row and the outer streets. The sound of nail guns snapping can be heard above the wind. The wall continues expanding along the southern edge of the business district. “You remind me of somebody,” the Governor says after a long pause.

“It ain’t Kate Winslet, I’m betting.” Bob has had enough alcohol to loosen his tongue. He chuckles to himself as he trundles along. “Or Bonnie Raitt, neither.”

“Touché, Bob.” The Governor glances down at his package, notices the droplets of blood leaving little coin-sized marks on the sidewalk. “What a mess I’m making.”

Bob looks away, scrambles to change the subject. “Ain’t y’all worried about all that pounding racket over there drawing walkers?”

“We got it under control, Bob, don’t you worry about that. Got men posted out on the edge of the woods, and we try and keep the pounding down to a minimum.”

“That’s good to hear … got things figured out pretty good around here.”

“We try, Bob.”

“I told Doc Stevens, he’s welcome to any medical supplies I got in my stash.”

“You a doctor, too?”

Bob tells the man about Afghanistan, patching marines, getting an honorable discharge.

“You got kids, Bob?”

“No, sir … for the longest time it was just me and Brenda, my old lady. Had a little trailer outside of Smyrna, not a bad life.”

“You’re looking at my little bundle, aren’t ya, Bob?”

“No, sir … whatever it is, it’s none of my beeswax. Doesn’t concern me.”

“Where’s your wife?”

Bob slows down a bit, as though the mere subject of Brenda Stookey weighs him down. “Lost her to a walker attack shortly after the Turn.”

“Sorry to hear that.” They approach a gated section of the wall. The Governor pauses, knocks a few times, and the seam opens. Litter swirls as a workman pulls the gate back and nods at the Governor, letting the twosome pass. “My place is just up the road a piece,” the Governor says with a tilt of his head toward the east side of town. “Little two-story apartment building … come on over, I’ll fix you a drink.”

“The Governor’s mansion?” Bob jokes. He can’t help it. The nerves and the booze are working on him. “Ain’t you got laws to pass?”

The Governor pauses, turns and smiles at Bob. “I just figured out who you remind me of.”

*   *   *

In that brief instant, standing in that gray overcast daylight, the wiry man—who from this point on shall think of himself as “the Governor”—experiences a seismic shift within his brain. He stands there staring at a coarse, deeply lined, alcoholic good old boy from Smyrna who is the spitting image of Ed Blake, the Governor’s old man. Ed Blake had that same pug nose, prominent brow, and crow’s-feet around red-rimmed eyes. Ed Blake was a big drinker, too, like this guy, with the same sense of humor. Ed Blake would toss off sarcastic one-liners with the same drunken relish, cutting to the quick with his words when he wasn’t slapping his family around with the back of his big, callused hands.

All at once, another part of the Governor bubbles up to the surface—a deeply buried part of him—on a wave of sentimental longing, which almost makes him dizzy as he remembers big Ed Blake in happier times, a simple hillbilly laborer who tried to fight his demons long enough to be a loving father. “You remind me of somebody I used to know a long time ago,” the Governor says finally, his tone softening as he looks Bob Stookey in the eyes. “C’mon, let’s go get a drink.”

For the rest of their journey across the safe zone, the two men talk quietly, openly, like old friends.

At one point the Governor asks Bob what happened to his wife.

“Place we lived, this mobile home park…” Bob says slowly, heavily, as he hobbles along, remembering dark days. “We got overrun one day with walkers. I was out trying to scrounge up some supplies when it happened … by the time I got back they had gotten into our place.”

He pauses and the Governor says nothing, just walks in silence, waiting.

“They were tearing into her, and I fought ’em off best I could … and … I guess they only ate enough of her that she came back.”

Another agonizing pause. Bob licks his dry lips. The Governor can see that the man needs a drink badly, needs his medicine to stanch the memories.

“I couldn’t bring myself to finish her off.” This comes out of Bob on a choked wheeze. His rheumy eyes well up. “I ain’t proud of the fact that I left her. Pretty sure she got some folks after that. Her arm and her lower body was pretty mangled but she could still get around. Them people she got, their deaths are my fault.”

A pause.

“It’s hard to let go sometimes,” the Governor ventures at last, glancing down at his ghastly little bundle. The dripping has diminished somewhat, the blood thickening to the consistency of blackstrap molasses. Right then the Governor notices Bob pondering the blood droplets, his brow furrowed in thought. He looks almost sober.

Bob gestures at the gruesome bundle. “You got somebody turned on ya, don’t ya?”

“You’re not so dumb … are ya, Bob?”

Bob wipes his mouth pensively. “Never thought about feeding Brenda.”

“C’mon, Bob, I want to show you something.”

They reach the two-story brick edifice at the end of the block, and Bob follows the Governor inside.

*   *   *

“Stand behind me for a second, Bob.” The Governor fiddles a key into a dead bolt, the door at the end of a second-floor hallway. The door clicks, and the sound of a low growl seeps out. “I would appreciate it, Bob, if you kept what you’re about to see to yourself.”

“No problem … lips are sealed.”

Bob follows the Governor into a two-bedroom unit with spartan furnishings that reeks of spoiled meat and disinfectant, the windows painted over with black Rust-Oleum. A floor-length mirror near the front vestibule is covered with newspaper and masking tape. The mirror in the bathroom—visible through an open doorway—is missing, its absence evident in the pale oval outline above the sink. All the mirrors in this place have been removed.

“She’s everything to me,” the Governor says. Bob follows the man across the living room, down a short hallway, and through a doorway into a cramped laundry room, where the upright corpse of a little girl is chained to a U-bolt drilled into the wall.

“Oh, Lord.” Bob keeps his distance. The dead girl—still in pigtails and pinafore dress, as if dressed for church—snarls and spits and flails, her chain straining at its mooring. Bob takes a step back. “Oh, Lord.”

“Calm down, Bob.”

The Governor kneels in front of the pint-sized zombie and lays the bundle on the floor. The girl bites at the air, blackened teeth clacking. The Governor unwraps a human head, its cranial cavity gaping on one side from a close-range gunshot.

“Oh, my.” Bob notices that the human head—its pulpy concavity on one side already hectic with maggots—sports a bristly, jarhead haircut, as if it once belonged to a soldier or marine.

“This here’s Penny … she’s an only child,” the Governor explains as he shoves the dripping severed head within range of the chained cadaver. “We came from a small town called Waynesboro. Penny’s mother—my sweet wife, Sarah—was killed in a car crash before the Turn.”

The child feeds.

Bob watches from the doorway, at once appalled and riveted, as the diminutive zombie slurps and chews the soft matter of the cranial passage as though ferreting out the meat of a lobster.

The Governor watches the feeding. The slurping noises fill the air. “My brother Brian and I—along with a few friends of mine—we set out to find greener pastures with Penny here. Made our way west, crashed in Atlanta for a spell, hooked up with some people, lost some people. Kept moving west.”

The little corpse settles down, leaning against the wall with tiny, greasy, scarlet-stained fingers burrowing deep into the hollowed-out skull for morsels.

The Governor’s voice drops an octave. “Had a run-in with some dirtbags at an orchard not far from here.” His words falter for a moment. No tears but his voice crumbles a little. “Put my brother in charge of Penny while I fended ’em off … and one thing led to another.”

Bob cannot move. He cannot speak in this airless chamber of stained tiles, exposed plumbing, and mold-darkened grout. He watches the tiny abomination, her ghastly face content now, stringers of brain matter hanging from her little tulip lips, her fish-belly eyes rolling back in her head as she leans back.

“My brother fucked up big-time, got my baby killed,” the Governor explains now, his head down, his chin on his chest. His voice gets thick with emotion. “Brian was weak and that’s all there is to it. I could not let it go, though.” He looks at Bob through raw, wet eyes. “I know you can relate, Bob. I could not let go of my baby girl.”

Bob can relate. His chest seizes up with sorrow for Brenda.

“I blame myself for Penny getting killed and comin’ back.” The Governor stares at the floor. “I kept her going with scraps and we kept headin’ west. By the time we got to Woodbury my brother Brian was ape-shit crazy with guilt.”

The thing that was once a little girl drops the skull as though discarding an oyster shell. She gazes around the room through her milky eyes as if awakening from a dream.

“I had to put Brian down like a sick dog,” the Governor utters, almost to himself. He takes a step closer to the little thing that used to be a child. His voice becomes almost toneless. “I still see my Penny in there sometimes … when she’s calm like this.”

Bob swallows hard. Contrary emotions swirl and eddy inside him—repulsion, sadness, fear, bone-deep longing, even sympathy for this deranged individual—and he hangs his head. “You been through a lot.”

“Look at that, Bob.” The Governor nods toward the little zombie. The child-thing cocks its head, staring at the Governor with a vexed expression. The thing blinks its eyes. A faint trace of Penny Blake glimmers behind its eyes. “My baby’s still in there. Aren’t ya, honey?”

The Governor goes over to the chained creature, kneels and strokes its livid cheek.

Bob stiffens, starts to say, “Be careful, you don’t want to be—”

“Here’s my beautiful baby girl.” The Governor strokes the thing’s matted hair. The tiny zombie blinks. The pallid face changes, eyes narrowing, blackened lips peeling away from rotten baby teeth.

Bob steps forward. “Look out—”

The Penny-thing snaps its jaws at the exposed flesh of the Governor’s wrist, but the Governor pulls away just in time. “Whoopsy!”

The little zombie strains at its chain, scuttling to its feet and reaching at the air … as the Governor backs away. He speaks in baby talk. “Wascally Wabbit … almost got Daddy that time!”

Bob gets woozy. He can feel his gorge rising, the bile threatening to come up.

“Bob, do me a favor and reach into that loose bundle the head came out of.”

“Huh?”

“Do me a favor and grab that last little goodie in that bag over there.”

Bob holds his vomit in and turns and finds the bundle on the floor and looks inside. A pale human finger, apparently male, lies at the bottom of the bag in a clot of drying blood. Hair sprouts from the knuckles, and from the ragged end protrudes a small nodule of white bone.

Something loosens inside Bob—as sudden as a rubber band snapping—as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, bends down, and retrieves the finger.

“Why don’t you do the honors, my friend,” the Governor suggests, standing proudly over the snapping zombie-child, his hands on his hips.

Bob feels as though his body has begun to move on its own, with a mind of its own. “Yeah … sure.”

“Go ahead.”

Bob stands within inches of the chain’s limit, as the Penny-thing snarls and sputters noisily at him, clanging against the U-bolt. “Yeah … why not?”

Holding the finger out at arm’s length, Bob feeds it to the creature.

The little corpse gobbles the thing, falling to its knees, two-handing the finger into her ravenous little pit of a mouth. The nauseating wet noises fill the laundry room.

The two men stand side by side, watching now. The Governor puts his arm around his new friend.

*   *   *

By the end of that week the men on the wall have reached the edge of the third block, along Jones Mill Road, where the U.S. Post Office sits boarded and defaced with graffiti. Along the brick wall adjacent to the parking lot some joker with a few years of college lit classes has spray-painted the words THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WALKER, a constant reminder of the end of society and government services as we know them.

On Saturday Josh Lee Hamilton ends up on a work crew, hauling dollies loaded with scrap lumber from one end of the sidewalk to the other, bartering his muscles for food so that he and Lilly can continue to eat. He has run out of valuables to trade, and for the last couple of days Josh has been doing menial tasks such as emptying latrines and cleaning animal carcasses in the smokehouse. But he gladly does the work for Lilly.

Josh has fallen so deeply for the woman that he secretly lets the tears come at night, in the desolate darkness of the walk-up apartment, after Lilly has drifted off in his arms. Josh finds himself beset with the ironies of finding love among the wreckage of this plague. Filled with a kind of reckless hope, as well as the dreamy side effects of the first true intimate relationship of his life, Josh barely notices the absence of the other members of his group.

The little clique seems to have scattered to the winds. Occasionally Josh will get a glimpse of Megan at night, creeping along the balustrades of residential buildings, scantily clad and stoned. Josh has no idea whether she is still with Scott. In fact, Scott has vanished. No one seems to know where he is, and the sad truth is, nobody seems to care. Business seems to be brisk for Megan. Out of the fifty or so residents of Woodbury, less than a dozen are women, and out of those only about four are premenopausal.

Far more troubling is Bob’s apparent ascendancy to town mascot. Evidently the Governor—Josh trusts this sociopath as a leader about as much as he trusts one of the walkers to coach a Little League team—has taken an interest in old Bob, and has been plying the man with good whiskey, barbiturates, and social status.

On Saturday afternoon, however, Josh puts all this out of his mind as he unloads a pallet of siding at the end of the temporary wall. Other workmen move along the flanks of the barricade, nailing planks into place. Some use hammers, others nail guns connected to gas-powered generators. The noise is troublesome if not unmanageable.

“Just stack it over there by the sandbags, cousin,” Martinez says with a neighborly nod, an M1 assault rifle on his hip.

Clad in his trademark do-rag and sleeveless camo shirt, Martinez continues to be the hail-fellow-well-met. Josh cannot quite figure the man out. He seems to be the most even-tempered of the Woodbury bunch, but the bar here is not that high. Charged with supervising the ever-changing shift of guards on the walls, Martinez rarely fraternizes with the Governor, although the two of them seem to be joined at the hip. “Just try and keep the noise down to a minimum, bro,” he adds with a wink, “if at all possible.”

“Gotcha,” Josh says with a nod and starts off-loading the four-by-six sheets of particleboard onto the ground. He sheds his lumberjack coat—the sweat has broken out on his neck and back, the winter sun high in the sky today—and he finishes the stacking in mere minutes.

Martinez comes over. “Why don’t you go ahead and grab one more load before lunch.”

“Roger that,” Josh says, and pulls the empty dolly free of the stack, then turns and heads back down the walk, leaving his jacket—as well as his snub-nosed .38 police special—hanging on a fence post.

Josh sometimes forgets that the gun is tucked into his jacket pocket. He has yet to use the thing since coming to Woodbury; the guards have the place pretty much covered.

Over the last week, in fact, only a few attacks have occurred along the edges of the woods, or on the side roads, which have been easily and promptly quelled by the well-armed band of weekend warriors. According to Martinez, the powers that be in Woodbury have discovered a cache of weapons at a National Guard station within walking distance of the town—an entire arsenal of military-grade weaponry—which the Governor has put to good use.

The truth is, walker attacks are the least of the Governor’s problems. The human population of Woodbury seems to be curdling under the pressure of postplague life. Tempers are stretched thin. People are starting to lash out at each other.

Josh crosses the two-block distance between the construction site and the warehouse in less than five minutes, thinking about Lilly and his future with her. Lost in his thoughts, he does not notice the odor wafting around him as he approaches the wood-frame building on the edge of the railroad tracks.

The warehouse once stood as a storage shed for the southern terminus of the Chattooga and Chickamauga Railway. Throughout the twentieth century tobacco farmers would ship their bundles of raw leaves up north on this line to Fayetteville for processing.

Josh trudges up to the long narrow building and parks the dolly outside the door. The edifice rises up at least thirty-five feet at the highest pitch of its weathered, gabled roof. The siding is ancient, chipped, and scarred with neglect. The single tall window by the door is broken out and boarded. The place looks like a ruined museum, a relic of the old South. Workmen have been using the building to keep the lumber dry and stash building materials.

“Josh!”

Josh pauses at the entrance when he hears the familiar voice drifting on the breeze behind him. He turns just in time to see Lilly scurrying up in her trademark funky attire—floppy hat, multicolored scarves, and a coyote coat she acquired in trade from an older woman in town—a weary smile on her slender face.

“Babygirl, you are a sight for sore eyes,” Josh says, grabbing her and gently pulling her into a bear hug. She hugs him back—not exactly with unbridled abandon, more of a platonic hug—and once again Josh wonders if he has come on too strong with her. Or perhaps their lovemaking has changed some complex dynamic between them. Or maybe he has not lived up to her expectations. She seems to be holding back her affection slightly. Just slightly. But Josh puts it out of his mind. Maybe it’s just the stress.

“Can we talk?” she says, looking up into his eyes with a heavy, somber gaze.

“Sure … you want to give me a hand?”

“After you,” she says, gesturing toward the entrance. Josh turns and pries the door open.

The smell of dead flesh—mingling with the moldy, airless dark inside the storage shed—does not register at first. Nor do they notice the gap between two petrified sections of drywall in the rear of the shed, or the fact that the backside of the building is perilously exposed to a wild section of forest. The building stretches at least a hundred feet back in the darkness, draped in cobwebs and cast-off rail sections so rusted and corroded they are the color of the earth.

“What’s on your mind, babydoll?” Josh crosses the cinder floor to a pile of wooden siding. The four-by-six panels look as though they came from a barn, their grooves of deep red paint chipped and scabrous with mud.

“We gotta move on, Josh, we gotta get outta this town … before something terrible happens.”

“Soon, Lilly.”

“No, Josh. Seriously. Listen to me.” She tugs his arm and pulls him around so they are face-to-face. “I don’t care if Megan and Scott and Bob stay … we gotta ditch this place. It looks all cozy and Mayberry RFD on the surface but it’s rotting underneath.”

“I know … I just have to—”

He stops when a shadow blurs outside the slats of the boarded window in his peripheral vision.

“Oh, my God, Josh, did you—”

“Get behind me,” he says, realizing several things all at once. He smells the odor permeating the musk of the moldy shed, he hears the low guttural vibrations of growls coming from the rear of the building, and he sees a slice of daylight blooming through a gap in the corner.

Worst of all, Josh realizes he left his pistol in his jacket.

TEN

Right then, a burst of automatic gunfire echoes outside the storage shed.

Lilly jerks in the darkness of the shed, and Josh whirls toward the pile of lumber, when the boarded window near the front door bursts inward.

Three snarling zombies—the pressure of their collective weight forcing the ancient lumber to give way—start climbing into the shed. Two males and a female, each with deep wounds in their faces, their cheeks torn away from exposed gums and teeth like rows of dull ivory, tumble into the darkness. A chorus of snarls fills the building.

Josh barely has time to register this fact when he hears shuffling coming toward him from the rear of the dark shed. He spins and sees the enormous walker in dungarees, most likely a former farmer, his lower intestines hanging out like slimy prayer beads, shambling toward him through the shafts of dust motes, bumping drunkenly into stacks of crates and piles of old railroad ties.

“LILLY, GET BEHIND ME!”

Josh lurches toward the stack of lumber and lifts a huge panel of wood up and in front of them like a shield. Lilly presses against his back, her lungs heaving now, hyperventilating with terror. Josh raises the panel and starts toward the big walker with the inertia of a middle linebacker going into the backfield to sack a quarterback.

The walker lets out a drooling groan as Josh slams the panel into it.

The force of the blow drives the huge corpse backward and to the cinder floor. Josh slams the lumber down on top of the thing. Lilly tumbles onto the pileup. The weight of their bodies pins the giant to the cinders, its dead limbs squirming beneath the panel, its blackened fingers sticking out the sides of the wood, clawing at the air.

Outside, in the wind, the sound of an emergency bell clangs.

“MOTHERFUCK!”

Josh loses control for a moment and starts slamming the panel down on top of the enormous dead farmer. Lilly is thrown off Josh’s back, as Josh rises up and starts stomping his work boot down on the panel, which is crushing the zombie’s skull. Josh starts jumping up and down on the panel, letting out a series of garbled, bellowing cries, the rage contorting his face.

Brain matter gushes and spurts out from under the top of the panel, as the sick crunch of dead cranial bones gives way, the farmer going still. Huge rivulets of black fluid spread from under the wood.

All this transpires within a matter of seconds, as Lilly is backing away in horror. All at once the sound of a voice rings out from the street in front of the shed, a familiar voice, calm and collected, despite its volume—“GET DOWN, FOLKS!! GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR”—and somewhere in the back of Josh’s brain he recognizes the voice of Martinez, and Josh also remembers, simultaneously, that the other three walkers are closing in from the front of the shed.

Josh jumps off the panel, spins around, and sees the three walkers approaching Lilly, reaching out for her with spastic lifeless arms. Lilly screams. Josh lurches toward her, scrambling for a weapon. Only scrap metal and sawdust litter the floor.

Lilly backs away screaming, and the din of her shriek blends with a booming, authoritative voice coming from outside the entrance: “GET DOWN ON THE FLOOR, FOLKS! DOWN ON THE FLOOR NOW!!”

Josh instantly gets it, and he grabs Lilly and yanks her to the cinders.

The three dead things loom over them, mouths gaping and drooling, so close now Josh can smell the hideous stench of their fetid breath.

The front wall lights up—a fusillade of automatic gunfire punching a pearl necklace of holes along the drywall, each hole blooming a pinpoint of daylight. The volley strafes the midsections of the three upright cadavers, making them dance a macabre Watusi in the darkness.

The noise is tremendous. Wood shards and plaster shrapnel and bits of rotting flesh rain down on Josh and Lilly, who cover their heads.

Josh catches glimpses of the macabre dancing out of the corner of his eye, the walkers jerking and spasming to some arrhythmic drumbeat, as threads of brilliant light crisscross the darkness.

Skulls erupt. Particles fly. The dead figures deflate and collapse one at a time. The barrage continues. Thin shafts of daylight fill the shed with a cat’s cradle of deadly luminous sunlight.

*   *   *

Silence descends. Outside the shed, the muffled noise of spent shells ringing off the pavement reaches Josh’s ears. He hears the faint clanging of bolts reloading, breeches refilling, collective breaths of exertion drowned by the wind.

A moment passes

He turns to Lilly, who lies next to him, clinging to him, clutching handfuls of his shirt. She looks almost catatonic for a moment, her face pressed against the cinders. Josh hugs her close, strokes her back.

“You okay?”

“Fabulous … just peachy.” She seems to awaken from the terror, looking down at the spreading puddle of cranial fluid. The bodies lie riddled and eviscerated only inches away. Lilly sits up.

Josh rises and helps her to her feet and starts to say something else when the creak of old wood draws his attention to the entrance. What remains of the door, its top half perforated with bullet holes, squeaks open.

Martinez peers in. He speaks hurriedly, purposefully: “You two good?”

“We’re good,” Josh tells him, and then hears a noise in the distance. Voices rising in anger, echoing on the wind. A muffled crash.

“We got another fire to put out,” Martinez says, “if you folks are okay.”

“We’re okay.”

With a terse nod, Martinez wheels away from the door and vanishes into the overcast daylight.

*   *   *

Two blocks east of the railroad tracks, near the barricade, a fight has ensued. Fights are commonplace in the new Woodbury. Two weeks ago a couple of the butcher’s guards came to blows over the rightful ownership of a well-thumbed issue of Barely Legal magazine. Doc Stevens had to set one fighter’s dislocated jaw and patch the other boy’s hemorrhaging left eye socket before that day was out.

Most of the time these brawls occur in semiprivate—either indoors or late at night—and break out over the most trivial matters imaginable: somebody looks at somebody else the wrong way, somebody tells a joke that offends somebody else, somebody just irritates somebody else. For weeks now, the Governor has been concerned about the growing frequency of serious brawls.

But until today, most of these little rumbles have been private affairs.

Today, the latest melee breaks out in broad daylight, right outside the food center, in front of at least twenty onlookers … and the crowd seems to fuel the intensity of the fight. At first the onlookers watch with revulsion as the two young combatants pummel each other with bare fists in the freezing wind, their inelegant blows full of spit and fury, their eyes ablaze with unfocused rage.

But soon something changes in the crowd. Angry shouts turn to whoops and hollers. Bloodlust sparks behind the eyes of the gallery. The stress of the plague comes out in angry hyena yells, psychotic cheers, and vicarious fist pumping from some of the younger men.

Martinez and his guards arrive right at the height of the fight.

Dean Gorman, a redneck farm kid from Augusta dressed in torn denim and heavy-metal tattoos, kicks the legs out from under Johnny Pruitt, a fat, doughy pothead from Jonesboro. Pruitt—who had the temerity to criticize the Augusta State Jaguars football team—now tumbles to the sandy ground with a gasp.

“Hey! Dial it down!” Martinez approaches from the north side of the street, his M1 on his hip, still warm from the fracas at the railroad shed. Three guards follow on his heels, their guns also braced against their midsections. As he crosses the street it’s hard for Martinez to see the fighters behind the semicircle of cheering onlookers.

All that’s visible is a cloud of dust, flailing fists, and milling onlookers.

“HEY!!”

Inside the circle of spectators Dean Gorman slams a steel-toed work boot into Johnny Pruitt’s ribs, and the fat man keens with agony, rolling away. The crowd jeers. Gorman jumps on the kid but Pruitt counters by slamming a knee up into Gorman’s groin. The witnesses howl. Gorman tumbles to his side holding his privates and Pruitt lashes out with a series of sidelong blows to Gorman’s face. Blood flings across the sand in dark stringers from Gorman’s nose.

Martinez starts pushing bystanders aside, forcing his way into the fray.

“Martinez! Hold up!”

Martinez feels a vise grip tighten on his arm and he whirls around to see the Governor.

“Hold up a second,” the wiry man says under his breath with a spark of interest glittering in his deep-set eyes. His handlebar mustache has come in dark and thick, giving his face a predatory cast. He wears a long, black duster over his chambray shirt, jeans, and stovepipe engineer boots, the tails flapping majestically in the wind. He looks like a degenerate paladin from the nineteenth century, a self-styled gunslinger-pimp. “I want to see something.”

Martinez lowers his weapon, tilts his head toward the action. “Just worried somebody’s gonna go and get his ass killed.”

By this point Big Johnny Pruitt has his pudgy fingers around Dean Gorman’s throat, and Gorman begins to gasp and blanch. The fight goes from savage to deadly in a matter of seconds. Pruitt will not let go. The crowd erupts in ugly, garbled cheers. Gorman flails and convulses. He runs out of air, his face turning the color of eggplant. His eyes bulge, bloody saliva spraying.

“Stop worrying, grandma,” the Governor murmurs, watching intently with those hollowed-out eyes.

Right then Martinez realizes the Governor is not watching the fight per se. Eyes shifting all around the semicircle of shouting spectators, the Governor is watching the watchers. He seems to be absorbing every face, every jackal-like howl, every hoot and holler.

Meantime, Dean Gorman starts to fade on the ground, in the stranglehold of Johnny Pruitt’s sausage fingers. Gorman’s face turns the color of dry cement. His eyes roll back in his head and he stops struggling.

“Okay, that’s enough … pull him off,” the Governor tells Martinez.

“EVERYBODY BACK OFF!”

Martinez forces his way into the huddle with his gun in both hands.

Big fat Johnny Pruitt finally lets go at the urging of the M1’s muzzle, and Gorman lies there convulsing. “Go get Stevens,” Martinez orders one of his guards.

The crowd, still agitated by all the excitement, lets out a collective groan. Some of them grumble, and some launch a few boos, frustrated by the anticlimax.

Standing off to the side, the Governor takes it all in. When the onlookers begin to disperse—wandering away, shaking their heads—the Governor goes over to Martinez, who still stands over the writhing Gorman.

Martinez looks up at the Governor. “He’ll live.”

“Good.” The Governor glances down at the young man on the ground. “I think I know what to do with the guardsmen.”

*   *   *

At that same moment, under the sublevels of the racetrack complex, in the darkness of a makeshift holding cell, four men whisper to each other.

“It’ll never work,” the first man utters skeptically, sitting in the corner in his piss-sodden boxer shorts, gazing at the shadows of his fellow prisoners gathered around him on the floor.

“Shut the fuck up, Manning,” hisses the second man, Barker, a rail-thin twenty-five-year-old, who glowers at his fellow detainees through long strands of greasy hair. Barker had once been Major Gene Gavin’s star pupil at Camp Ellenwood, Georgia, bound for special ops duty with the 221st Military Intelligence Battalion. Now, thanks to that psycho Philip Blake, Gavin is gone and Barker has been reduced to a ragged, seminude, groveling lump in the basement of some godforsaken catacomb, left to subsist on cold oatmeal and wormy bread.

The four guardsmen have been under “house arrest” down here for over three weeks, ever since Philip Blake had shot and killed their commanding officer, Gavin, in cold blood, right in front of dozens of townspeople. Now the only things they have going for them are hunger, pure rage, and the fact that Barker is chained to the cinder-block wall to the immediate left of the locked entrance door, a spot from which one could conceivably get a jump on somebody entering the cell … like Blake, for example, who has been regularly coming down here to drag prisoners out, one by one, to meet some hellish fate.

“He’s not stupid, Barker,” a third man named Stinson wheezes from the opposite corner. This man is older, more heavyset, a good old boy with bad teeth who once ran a requisition desk at the National Guard station.

“I agree with Stinson,” Tommy Zorn says from the back wall where he slumps in his underwear, his malnourished body covered with a significant skin rash. Zorn once worked as a delivery clerk at the Guard station. “He’s gonna see right through this stunt.”

“Not if we’re careful,” Barker counters.

“Who the hell is gonna be the one plays dead?”

“Doesn’t matter, I’ll be the one kicks his ass when he opens the door.”

“Barker, I think this place has put a zap on your head. Seriously. You want to end up like Gavin? Like Greely and Johnson and—”

“YOU COCK-SUCKING COWARD!! WE’RE ALL GONNA END UP LIKE THEM YOU DON’T DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!”

The volume of Barker’s voice—stretched as thin as high-tension wire—cuts off the conversation like a switch. For a long stretch, the four guardsmen sit in the dark without saying a word.

At last Barker says, “All we need is one of you faggots to play dead. That’s all I’m asking. I’ll coldcock him when he comes in.”

“Making it convincing is the trouble,” Manning says.

“Rub shit on yourself.”

“Hardy-har-har.”

“Cut yourself and rub blood on your face, and then let it dry, I don’t know. Rub your eyes until they bleed. You want to get out of here?”

Long silence now.

“You’re fucking guardsmen, for Chrissake. You want to rot in here like maggots?”

Another long silence, and then Stinson’s voice in the darkness says, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

*   *   *

Bob follows the Governor through a secure door at one end of the racetrack, then down a narrow flight of iron stairs, and then across a narrow cinder-block corridor, their footsteps ringing and echoing in the dim light. Emergency cage lights—powered by generators—burn overhead.

“Finally it hit me, Bob,” the Governor is saying, fiddling with a ring of skeleton keys clipped to his belt on a long chain. “Thing this place needs … is entertainment.”

“Entertainment?”

“The Greeks had their theater, Bob … Romans had their circuses.”

Bob has no idea what the man is talking about but he follows along obediently, wiping his dry mouth. He needs a drink badly. He unbuttons his olive-drab jacket, pearls of sweat breaking out on his weathered brow due to the airless, fusty dampness of the cavernous cement underground beneath the racetrack.

They pass a locked door, and Bob can swear he hears the muffled, telltale noises of reanimated dead. The trace odors of rotting flesh mingle with the mildewy stench of the corridor. Bob’s stomach lurches.

The Governor leads him over to a metal door with a narrow window at the end of the corridor. A shade is pulled down over the meshed safety glass.

“Gotta keep the citizens happy,” the Governor mutters as he pauses by the door, searching for the proper key. “Keep folks docile, manageable … pliable.”

Bob waits as the Governor inserts a thick metal key into the door’s bolt. But just as he is about to jack open the lock, the Governor turns and looks at Bob. “Had some trouble a while back with the National Guard in town, thought they could lord it over the people, push people around … thought they could carve out a little kingdom for themselves.”

Confused, dizzy, nauseous, Bob gives a nod and doesn’t say anything.

“Been keeping a bunch of them on ice down here.” The Governor winks as though discussing the location of a cookie jar with a child. “Used to be seven of them.” The Governor sighs. “Only four of them left now … been going through them like Grant went through Richmond.”

“Going through them?”

The Governor sniffs, suddenly looking guiltily at the floor. “They’ve been serving a higher purpose, Bob. For my baby … for Penny.”

Bob realizes with a sudden rush of queasiness what the Governor is talking about.

“Anyway…” The Governor turns to the door. “I knew they would come in handy for all sorts of things … but now I realize their true destiny.” The Governor smiles. “Gladiators, Bob. For the common good.”

Right then several things happen at once: The Governor turns and snaps up the shade, while simultaneously flipping a light switch … and through the safety glass a row of overhead fluorescent tubes suddenly flicker on, illuminating the inside of a three-hundred-square-foot cinder-block cell. A huge man clad only in tattered skivvies lies on the floor, twitching, covered with blood, his mouth black and peeled away from his teeth in a hideous grimace.

“That’s a shame.” The Governor frowns. “Looks like one of ’em turned.”

Inside the cell—the noises muffled by the sealed door—the other prisoners are screaming, yanking at their chains, begging to be rescued from this freshly turned biter. The Governor reaches inside the folds of his duster and draws his pearl-handled .45 caliber Colt. He checks the clip and mumbles, “Stay out here, Bob. This’ll just take a second.”

He snaps the lock open, and he steps inside the cell, when the man behind the door pounces.

Barker lets out a garbled cry as he tackles the Governor from behind, the chain attached to Barker’s ankle giving slightly, reaching its limit, tearing its anchor bolt from the wall. Taken by surprise, the Governor stumbles, drops the .45, topples to the deck, gasping, the gun clattering to the floor, spinning several feet.

Bob fills the doorway, yelling, as Barker crabs toward the Governor’s ankles, latching on to them, digging his filthy untrimmed fingernails into the Governor’s flesh. Barker tries to snag the skeleton keys, but the ring is wedged under the Governor’s legs.

The Governor bellows as he madly crawls toward the fallen pistol.

The other men cry out as Barker loses what is left of his sanity and goes for the Governor’s ankles and growls with feral white-hot killing rage and opens his mouth and bites down on the tender area around the Governor’s Achilles’ heel, and the Governor howls.

Bob stands paralyzed behind the half-ajar door, watching, thunderstruck.

Barker draws blood. The Governor kicks at the prisoner and claws for the pistol. The other men try to tear themselves free, hollering inarticulate warnings, while Barker rips into the Governor’s legs. The Governor reaches for the gun, which lies only centimeters out of his reach … until finally the Governor’s long, sinewy fingers get themselves around the Colt’s grip.

In one quick continuous motion the Governor spins and aims the single-action semiautomatic pistol at Barker’s face and empties the clip.

A series of dry, hot booms flash in the cell. Barker flings backward like a puppet yanked by a cable, the slugs perforating his face, exiting out the back of his skull in a plume of blood mist. The dark crimson matter sprays the cinder-block wall beside the door, some of it getting on Bob, who jerks back with a start.

Across the cell the other men call out—a garble of nonsense words, a frenzy of begging—as the Governor rises to his feet.

“Please, please, I ain’t turned—I AIN’T TURNED!” Across the room, Stinson, the big man, sits up, shielding his bloodstained face as he cries out. His quivering lips have been made up with mildew from the wall and grease from the door hinges. “It was a trick! A trick!”

The Governor thumbs the empty clip out of the Colt, the magazine dropping to the floor. Breathing hard and fast, he pulls another clip from his back pocket and palms it into the hilt. He cocks the slide and calmly aims the muzzle at Stinson, while informing the big man, “You look like a fucking biter to me.”

Stinson shields his face. “It was Barker’s idea, it was stupid, please, I didn’t want to go along with it, Barker was nuts, please … PLEASE!”

The Governor squeezes off half a dozen successive shots, the blasts making everybody jump.

The far wall erupts in a fireworks display just above Stinson’s head, the puffs of cinder-block plaster exploding in sequence, the noise a tremendous, earsplitting barrage, the sparks blossoming and some of the bullets ricocheting up into the ceiling.

The single cage light explodes in a torrent of glass particles that drives everybody to the floor.

At last the Governor lets up and stands there, catching his breath, blinking, and addressing Bob in the doorway. “What we got here, Bob, is a learning opportunity.”

Across the room, on the floor, Stinson has pissed himself, mortified and yet unharmed. He buries his face in his hands and weeps softly.

The Governor limps toward the big man, leaving a thin trail of blood droplets. “You see, Bob … the very thing that burns inside these boys—makes ’em try stupid shit like this—is gonna make them superstars in the arena.”

Stinson looks up with snot on his face now as the Governor looms over him.

“They don’t realize it, Bob.” The Governor aims the muzzle at Stinson’s face. “But they just passed the first test of gladiatorial school.” The Governor gives Stinson a hard look. “Open your mouth.”

Stinson hiccups with sobs and terror, squeezing out a breathless, “C’mon, pleeease…”

“Open your mouth.”

Stinson manages to open his mouth. Across the room, in the doorway, Bob Stookey looks away.

“See, Bob,” the Governor says, slowly penetrating the big man’s mouth with the barrel. The room falls stone silent as the other men watch, horrified and rapt. “Obedience … courage … stupidity. Isn’t that the Boy Scout motto?”

Without warning the Governor lets up on the trigger, pulls the muzzle free of the weeping man’s mouth, whirls around, and limps toward the exit. “What did Ed Sullivan used to say…? Gonna be a really big sssshooooow!”

The tension goes out of the room like a bladder deflating, replaced by a ringing silence.

“Bob, do me a favor … will ya?” the Governor mutters as he passes the bullet-riddled body of Master Gunnery Sergeant Trey Barker on his way out. “Clean this place up … but don’t take this cocksucker’s remains over to the crematorium. Bring him over to the infirmary.” He winks at Bob. “I’ll take care of him from there.”

*   *   *

The next day, early in the morning, before dawn, Megan Lafferty lies nude and cold and supine on a broken-down cot in the darkness of a squalid studio apartment—the private quarters of some guard whose name she can’t remember. Denny? Daniel? Megan was too stoned last night to file the name away. Now the skinny young man with the cobra tattoo between his shoulder blades thrusts himself into her with rhythmic abandon, making the cot groan and squeak.

Megan places her thoughts elsewhere, staring at the ceiling, focusing on the dead flies collected in the bowl of an overhead light fixture, trying to withstand the horrible, painful, sticky friction of the man’s erection pumping in and out of her.

The room consists of the cot, a ramshackle dresser, flea-bitten curtains drawn over the open window—through which a December wind whistles sporadically—and piles and piles of crates filled with supplies. Some of these supplies have been promised to Megan in return for sex. She notices a stringer of ragged fleshy objects hanging off a hook on the door, which she first misidentifies as dried flowers.

Upon closer scrutiny, though, the flowers reveal themselves in the darkness to be human ears, most likely trophies severed off walkers.

Megan tries to block out thoughts of Lilly’s last words to her, spoken just last night around the flaming light of a burning oil drum. “It’s my body, girlfriend, these are fucking desperate times,” Megan had rationalized, trying to justify her behavior. Lilly had responded with disgust. “I’d rather starve than do tricks for food.” And then Lilly had officially ended their friendship right then, once and for all. “I don’t care anymore, Megan, I’m done, it’s over, I don’t want anything to do with you.”

Now the words echo in the huge, empty chasm in Megan’s soul. The hole inside her has been there for years, a gigantic vacuum of sorrow, a bottomless pit of self-loathing carved out when she was young. She has never been able to fill this well of pain, and now the Plague World has opened it up like a festering, sucking wound.

She closes her eyes and thinks about drowning in a deep, dark ocean, when she hears a noise.

Her eyes pop open. The sound is unmistakable, coming from just outside the window. Faint and yet clearly audible in the windy hush of the predawn December air, it echoes up over the rooftops: two pairs of furtive footsteps, a couple of citizens sneaking through the darkness.

By this point, Cobra Boy has grown weary of his druggy copulation and has slipped off Megan’s body. He smells of dried semen and bad breath and urine-impregnated sheets, and he starts snoring the moment the back of his head hits the pillow. Megan levers herself out of bed, careful not to awaken the catatonic customer.

She pads silently across the cool floor to the window and looks out.

The town slumbers in the gray darkness. The vent stacks and chimneys on top of buildings stand silhouetted against the dull light. Two figures are barely visible in the gloom, creeping toward the far corner of the west fence, their breaths puffing vapor in the cold wee-hour light. One of the figures towers over the other.

Megan recognizes Josh Lee Hamilton first, and then Lilly, as the two ghostly figures pause near the corner of the barricade a hundred and fifty yards away. Waves of melancholy course through Megan.

As the twosome disappears over the fence, the sense of loss drives Megan to her knees, and she silently cries in the reeking darkness for what seems like an eternity.

*   *   *

“Toss it down, babydoll,” Josh whispers, gazing up at Lilly, as she balances on the crest of the fence, one foot over, one foot on the ledge behind her. Josh is hyperaware of the dozing night guard a hundred yards to the east, slumped on the seat of a bulldozer, his sight line blocked by the massive girth of a live oak.

“Here comes.” Lilly awkwardly shrugs the knapsack off one shoulder and then tosses it over the fence to Josh. He catches it. The pack weighs at least ten pounds. It contains Josh’s .38 caliber police special, a pick hammer with a collapsible handle, a screwdriver, a couple of candy bars, and two plastic bottles of tap water.

“Be careful now.”

Lilly climbs down and hops onto the hard earth outside the fence.

They waste no time hanging around the periphery of town. The sun is coming up, and they want to be well out of sight of the night guard before Martinez and his men get up and return to their posts. Josh has a bad feeling about the way things are going in Woodbury. It seems as though his services are becoming less and less valuable in terms of trade. Yesterday he must have hauled three tons of fencing panels and still Sam the Butcher claims that Josh is behind in his debt, that he’s taking advantage of the barter system, and that he’s not working off all the slab bacon and fruit he’s been going through.

All the more reason for Josh and Lilly to sneak out of town and see if they can’t find their own supplies.

“Stick close, babygirl,” Josh says, and leads Lilly along the edge of the woods.

They keep to the shadows as the sun comes up, skirting the edge of a vast cemetery on their left. Ancient willows hang down over Civil War–era markers, the spectral predawn light giving the place a haunted, desolate feel. Many of the headstones lie on their sides, some of the graves gaping open. The boneyard makes the flesh on the back of Josh’s neck prickle, and he hurries Lilly along toward the intersection of Main and Canyon Drive.

They turn north and head into the pecan groves outside of town.

“Keep your eyes peeled for reflectors along the side of the road,” Josh says as they begin to ascend a gentle slope rising into the wooded hills. “Or mailboxes. Or any kind of private drive.”

“What if we don’t find anything but more trees?”

“Gotta be a farmhouse … something.” Josh keeps scanning the trees on either side of the narrow blacktop road. Dawn has broken, but the woods on either side of Canyon Drive are still dark and hectic with swaying shadows. Noises blend into each other, and skittering leaves in the wind start to sound like shuffling footsteps behind the trees. Josh pauses, digs in the knapsack, pulls his gun out, and checks the chamber.

“Something wrong?” Lilly’s eyes take in the gun, then shift to the woods. “You hear something?”

“Everything’s fine, babydoll.” He shoves the pistol behind his belt and continues climbing the hill. “As long as we keep quiet, keep moving … we’ll be fine.”

They walk another quarter mile in silence, staying single file, hyperalert, their gazes returning every few moments to the swaying boughs of the deeper woods, and the shadows behind the shadows. The walkers have left Woodbury alone since the incident at the train shed, but Josh has a feeling they are due. He starts to get nervous about straying this far from town, when he sees the first sign of residential property.

The enormous tin mailbox, shaped like a little log cabin, stands at the end of an unmarked private drive. Only the letters L. HUNT reveal the identity of its owner, the numbers 20034 stamped into the rust-pocked metal.

About fifty yards beyond that first mailbox they find more mailboxes. They find over a dozen of them—a cluster of six at the foot of one drive—and Josh begins to sense they have hit the jackpot. He pulls the pick hammer from the knapsack and hands it to Lilly. “Keep this handy, baby. We’ll follow this drive, the one with all the mailboxes.”

“I’m right behind you,” she says, and then follows the big man up the winding gravel path.

The first monstrosity becomes visible like a mirage in the early-morning light, behind the trees, planted in a clearing as though it landed from outer space. If the home were nestled in some tree-lined boulevard in Connecticut or Beverly Hills it would not seem so out of place, but here in the ramshackle rural nether-region the place practically takes Josh’s breath away. Rising over three stories above the weed-whiskered lawn, the deserted mansion is a modern architectural wonder, all cantilevers and jutting balustrades and chockablock with roof pitches. It looks like one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s lost masterpieces. An infinity pool is partially visible in the backyard, lousy with leaves. Neglect shows on the massive balconies, where icicles hang down and patches of filthy snow cling to the decks. “Must be some tycoon’s summer home,” Josh surmises.

They follow the road higher into the trees and find more abandoned homes.

One of them looks like a Victorian museum, with gigantic turrets that rise out of the pecan trees like some Moorish palace. Another one is practically all glass, with a veranda that thrusts out over a breathtaking hill. Each stately home features its own private pool, coach house, six-car garage, and sprawling lawn. Each is dark, closed down, boarded, as dead as a mausoleum.

Lilly pauses in front of the dark glass-encased wonder and gazes up at the galleries. “You think we can get inside?”

Josh grins. “Hand me that clawhammer, babydoll … and stand back.”

*   *   *

They find a treasure trove of supplies—despite all the spoiled food, as well as signs of past break-ins, probably courtesy of the Governor and his goons. In some of the homes they find partially stocked pantries, wet bars, and linen closets brimming with fresh bedding. They find workrooms with more tools than small hardware stores. They find guns and liquor and fuel and medicine. They marvel that the Governor and his men have not yet scoured these places clean. The best part is the complete absence of walkers.

Later, Lilly stands in the foyer of an immaculate Cape Cod, gazing around at the elaborate Tiffany-style light fixtures. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I don’t know, girlfriend, what are you thinking?”

She looks at him. “We could live in one of these places, Josh.”

“I don’t know.”

She looks around. “Keep to ourselves, stay under the radar.”

Josh thinks about it. “Maybe we ought to take this one step at a time. Play dumb for a while, see if anybody else is wise to it.”

“That’s the best part, Josh, they’ve been here already … they’ll leave it alone.”

He lets out a sigh. “Let me think about it, babygirl. Maybe talk to Bob.”

*   *   *

After searching the garages, they find a few luxury vehicles under tarps, and they begin making plans for the future, discussing the possibility of hitting the road. As soon as they get a chance to talk to Bob, they will make a decision.

They return to town that evening, slipping into the walled area unnoticed through the construction zone along the southern edge of the barricade.

They keep their discovery to themselves.

Unfortunately, neither Josh nor Lilly has noticed the one critical drawback to the luxury enclave. Most of the backyards extend about thirty yards to the edge of a steep precipice, beyond which a rocky slope plunges down into a deep canyon. Down in the winter-seared valley of that canyon, along a dry riverbed, shrouded in tangled dead vines and limbs, a pack of zombies at least a hundred strong wander aimlessly back and forth, bumping into each other.

It will take the creatures less than forty-eight hours—once the noise and smell of humans draw them out—to crawl, inch by inch, up that slope.

ELEVEN

“I still don’t see why we can’t just live here for a while,” Lilly persists that next afternoon, flopping down on a buttery leather sofa positioned against a massive picture window inside one of the glass-encased mansions. The window wraps around the rear of the home’s first floor, and overlooks the kidney-shaped pool in the backyard, covered now with a snow-crusted tarp. Winter winds rattle the windows, a fine icy sleet hissing against the glass.

“I’m not saying it’s not a possibility,” Josh says from across the room, where he is selecting utensils from a drawer of fine silver and putting them into a duffel bag. Evening is closing in on their second day of exploring the enclave, and they have gathered enough supplies to stock a home of their own. They have hidden some of the provisions outside Woodbury’s wall, in sheds and barns. They have stashed firearms and tools and canned goods in Bob’s camper, and have made plans to get one of the vehicles in working order.

Now Josh lets out a sigh and goes over to the sofa and sits down next to Lilly. “Still not convinced these places are safe,” he says.

“C’mon … dude … these houses are like fortresses, the owners locked them up tight as drums before taking off in their private jets. I can’t take one more night in that creepy town.”

Josh gives her a sorrowful look. “Baby, I promise you … one day all this shit will be over.”

“Really? You think?”

“I’m sure of it, babygirl. Somebody’s gonna figure out what went wrong … some egghead at the CDC’s gonna come up with an antidote, keep folks in their graves.”

Lilly rubs her eyes. “I wish I had that kind of confidence.”

Josh touches her hand. “‘This too shall pass,’ baby. It’s like my mama always used to say, ‘Only thing you can depend on in this world is that you can’t depend on nothin’ to stay the same, everything changes.’” He looks at her and smiles. “Only thing ain’t never gonna change, baby, is how I feel about you.”

They sit there for a moment, listening to the silent house tick and settle, the wind strafing the home with bursts of sleet, when something moves outside, across the backyard. The tops of several dozen heads slowly rise up behind the edge of the distant precipice, a row of rotting faces, unseen by Lilly and Josh—their backs turned to the window now—as the pack of zombies emerge from the shadows of the ravine.

Oblivious to the imminent threat, lost in her thoughts, Lilly puts her head on Josh’s massive shoulder. She feels a twinge of guilt. Each day she senses Josh falling deeper and deeper for her, the way he touches her, the way his eyes light up each morning when they awaken on the cold pallet of that second-floor apartment.

Part of Lilly hungers for such affection and intimacy … but a part of her still feels removed, detached, guilty that she’s allowed this relationship to blossom out of fear, out of convenience. She feels a sense of duty to Josh. But that’s no basis for a relationship. What she’s doing is wrong. She owes him the truth.

“Josh…” She looks up at him. “I have to tell you … you’re one of the most wonderful men I have ever met.”

He grins, not quite registering the sadness in her voice. “And you’re pretty damn fine yourself.”

Outside, plainly visible now through the rear window, at least fifty creatures scrabble up and over the ledge, crabbing onto the lawn, their clawlike fingers digging into the turf, tugging their dead weight along in fits and starts. Some of them struggle to their feet and begin lumbering toward the glass-enclosed edifice with mouths gaping hungrily. A dead geriatric dressed in a hospital smock, his long gray hair flagging like milkweed, leads the pack.

Inside the lavish home, behind panes of safety glass, unaware of the encroaching menace, Lilly measures her words. “You’ve been so good to me, Josh Lee … I don’t know how long I could have survived on my own … and for that I will always be grateful.”

Now Josh cocks his head at her, his grin fading. “Why do I all of a sudden get the feeling there’s a ‘but’ in here somewhere?”

Lilly licks her lips thoughtfully. “This plague, this epidemic, whatever it is … it does things to people … makes them do things they wouldn’t dream of doing any other time.”

Josh’s big brown face falls. “What are you sayin,’ babydoll? Something’s bothering you.”

“I’m just saying … maybe … I don’t know … maybe I’ve let this thing between us go a little too far.”

Josh looks at her, and for a long moment he seems to grope for words. He clears his throat. “Ain’t sure I’m following you.”

By this point the walkers have overrun the backyard. Unheard through the thick glass, their atonal chorus of snarling, moaning vocalizations drowned under the drumming of sleet, the enormous regiment closes in on the house. Some of them—the old long-haired hospital patient, a limping woman without a jaw, a couple of burn victims—have closed the distance to within twenty yards. Some of the monsters stupidly stumble over the lip of the swimming pool, falling through the snow-matted tarp, while others follow the leaders with bloodlust radiating from their cue-ball eyes.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Lilly is saying inside the hermetically sealed environment of the stately glass house. “I will always love you, Josh … always. You are amazing. It’s just … this world we’re in, it twists things. I never want to hurt you.”

His eyes moisten. “Wait. Hold up. You’re saying being with me is something you would never dream of doing at any other time?”

“No … God, no. I love being with you. I just don’t want to give the wrong impression.”

“The wrong impression about what?”

“That our feelings for each other … that they’re—I don’t know—coming from a healthy place.”

“What’s unhealthy about our feelings?”

“I’m just saying … the fear fucks you up. I haven’t been in my right mind since all this shit went down. I don’t ever want you to think I’m just using you for protection … for survival, is what I mean.”

The tears well up in Josh’s eyes. He swallows hard and tries to think of something to say.

Ordinarily he would notice the telltale stench seeping into the circulatory systems of the house, the odors of rancid meat braised in shit. Or he would hear the muffled basso profundo drone outside the walls of the house—coming from outside the front and sides of the building now, not just the backyard—so resonant and low it seems to be vibrating the very foundation. Or he would see the teeming movement out of the corner of his eye, through the lozenge windows across the front foyer, behind the drawn drapes in the living room, coming at them from all directions. But he doesn’t notice a thing beyond the assault on his heart.

He clenches his fists. “Why the hell would I ever think something like that, Lil?”

“Because I’m a coward!” She burns her gaze into him. “Because I fucking left you to die. Nothing will ever change that.”

“Lilly, please don’t—”

“Okay … listen to me.” She gets her emotions under control. “All I’m saying is, I think we should take it down a notch and give each other—”

“OH, NO—OH, SHIT—SHIT SHIT!!”

In a single instant, the sudden alarm on Josh’s face drives all other thoughts from Lilly’s mind.

*   *   *

The intruders first make themselves known to Josh in a reflection on the surface of a framed family photograph across the room—a stiffly smiling assemblage of the previous owners, including a standard poodle with ribbons in its hair, the framed portrait mounted above a spinet piano—the ghostly silhouettes moving across the picture like spirit images. The faint double image reveals the house’s panoramic rear window, the one behind the sofa, through which a battalion of zombies is now visible pushing toward the house.

Josh springs to his feet and whirls around just in time to see the rear window cracking.

The closest zombies—their dead faces mashed up against the glass, squashed by the slow-motion stampede behind them—trail black bile and drool across the window. It all happens very quickly. The hairline fissures spreads like time-lapse spiderwebs spinning toward each corner, as dozens of additional reanimated corpses press against the throng, exerting tremendous pressure on the window.

The glass collapses just as Josh grabs Lilly and yanks her off the sofa.

A terrific crack, like a lightning bolt striking the room, accompanies the birthing of hundreds and hundreds of arms, thrusting forward, jaws snapping, bodies tumbling over the back of the sofa on a wave of broken glass, the wet wind rushing into the gracious family room.

Josh moves without thinking, dragging Lilly with one hand across the arched hall toward the front of the house, as the hell choir of dead vocal cords chirr and grind behind them, filling the stately home with zoo noises and the stench of death. Insensate, twitching in their hunger, the zombies take very little time regaining their legs, rising back up from where they had fallen and quickly trundling forward, flailing and growling, lumbering toward their fleeing prey.

Crossing the front vestibule in a flash, Josh rips open the front door.

A wall of the undead greets him.

He flinches and Lilly shrieks, jerking back with a start, as the battery of dead arms and pincerlike fingers reach for them. Behind the arms, a mosaic of dead faces snarl and sputter, some of them drooling blood as black as motor oil, others flayed open and glistening with the pink sinew and musculature of their damaged facial tissue. One of the curled hands hooks a gob of Lilly’s jacket, and Josh tears it away while letting out a booming howl—“FUCKERS!!”—and then on a jolt of adrenaline Josh gets his free hand around the edge of the door.

He slams the door on half a dozen flailing arms, and the impact—combined with Josh’s strength, as well as the deluxe quality of the heavy-duty door—severs each of the six appendages.

Flopping limbs of varying lengths splatter and quiver across the rich Italian tile.

Josh grabs Lilly and starts back toward the center of the house, but pauses at the foot of the spiral staircase when he sees the place is flooding with moving corpses. They have entered through the screen door in the mudroom on the east side of the house, and they’ve climbed in through the dog door on the west side, and they’ve wriggled in through cracks in the solarium on the north side of the kitchen. Now they surround Josh and Lilly at the base of the stairs.

Grabbing Lilly by the nape of her jacket, Josh pulls her up the steps.

On their way up the circular staircase, Josh draws his .38 and starts shooting. The first shot flashes and misses its mark entirely, chipping a divot out of the lintel along the archway. Josh’s aim is off because he is dragging Lilly up the stairs one riser at a time, as the growling, gnashing, flailing horde awkwardly follows.

Some of the walkers cannot negotiate the stairs and slide back down, while others topple to their hands and knees and manage to keep crawling. Halfway up the spiral, Josh fires again and hits a dead skull, sending wet matter across the newel posts and chandelier. Some of the zombies tumble back down the steps like bowling pins. But now, so many of them are on the risers that they begin to clamber over each other, inching up the stairs with the frenzied hunger of salmon spawning. Josh fires again and again. Black fluids bloom in the thunder cracks, but it’s futile, there are too many, far too many to fight off, and Josh knows it, and Lilly knows it.

“THIS WAY!”

Josh hollers at her the moment they reach the landing on the second floor.

The idea occurs to Josh fully formed, all at once, as he drags Lilly down the hallway toward the last door at the end of the corridor. Josh remembers checking the master bedroom the previous day, finding some useful pharmaceuticals in the medicine cabinet, and admiring the view from the second-floor bay window. He also remembers the enormous live oak standing sentry next to the window.

“IN HERE!”

The walkers reach the top of the stairs. One of them bumps the banister and stumbles backward, bowling over half a dozen other zombies, sending three of them toppling. The threesome skids down the curvature of the stairs, leaving slime trails of oily blood.

Meanwhile, at the far end of the hall, Josh reaches the bedroom door, throws it open, and pulls Lilly inside the spacious room. The door slams behind them. The silence and calm of the bedroom—with its Louis XIV furnishings, immense four-poster bed, luxurious Laura Ashley duvet, and mountain of frilly, ruffled pillows—provide surreal contrasts to the reeking, noisy menace coming down the hall outside the door. The shuffling footsteps loom. The stench grips the air.

“Get over by the window, babydoll! Be right back!!” Josh whirls and makes a beeline for the bathroom, while Lilly goes over by the huge bay window with its velveteen window treatments. She crouches down, breathlessly waiting.

Josh tears the bathroom door open and lurches into the deluxe, soapy-smelling chamber of Italian tile, chrome, and glass. There amid the Swedish sauna and enormous Jacuzzi tub he throws open the vanity cabinet under the sink. He finds the economy-sized brown bottle of rubbing alcohol.

Within seconds he has the bottle open and is back in the main room, dousing everything, flinging the clear liquid on the curtains and bedding and antique mahogany furniture. The pressure of dead weight making wooden seams creak—the noise of moving corpses piling up against the bedroom door—spurs Josh on.

He tosses the empty bottle and lunges toward the window in a single leap.

Outside the beautifully etched and leaded-glass panorama, framed in delicate ruffled curtains, a gigantic old oak stands over the roof pitches, its twisting limbs, bare in the winter light, reaching up past the weather vane at the crest of the roof. One of the gnarled limbs reaches across the second-floor window, coming within inches of the bedroom.

Josh muscles open the center window on wrought-iron hinges. “C’mon, girlfriend, time to abandon ship!” He kicks out the screen, reaches for Lilly, pulls her up and over the sill, shoves her through the gap, and out into the freezing winds. “Climb across the limb!”

Lilly awkwardly reaches out for the spiraling limb, which is the width of a ham hock, with bark as rough as cement stucco, and she holds on with a desperate vise grip. She starts shimmying her way out across the limb. The wind whistles. The twenty-foot drop seems to stretch away as though glimpsed through a backward telescope. The coach house roof wavers in and out of focus below—barely within jumping distance—as Lilly inches toward the center of the tree.

Behind her, Josh ducks back into the bedroom just as the door collapses.

Zombies pour into the room. Many of them tumble over each other, drunkenly reaching and snarling. One of them—a male missing an arm, with one eye socket cratered out as black and empty as cancer—trundles quickly toward the big black man, who stands by the window, digging frantically in his pocket. The air fills with a groaning cacophony. Josh finds his Zippo cigar lighter.

Just as the eyeless walker pounces, Josh sparks the butane and flings the lighter at the alcohol-dampened skirt around the bed. Flames blossom immediately, as Josh kicks out at the attacking zombie, sending the cadaver stumbling back across the floor.

The walker bounces across the burning bed and sprawls to the alcohol-sodden carpet as the fire licks up the pilasters. More corpses move in, agitated by the flaring light and heat and noise.

Josh wastes no time spinning around and vaulting back toward the window.

*   *   *

It takes less than fifteen minutes for the second floor of the glass house to go up, another five minutes for the infrastructure to collapse into itself on a tidal wave of sparks and smoke, the second floor plunging down onto the first, catching the staircase and gobbling through the warren of antiques and expensive floor coverings. The throngs of walkers inside the home are immolated by geysers of flames, the conflagration fueled by the methane of decay oozing off all the reanimated corpses. Within twenty minutes, more than eighty percent of the swarm from the ravine is vanquished in the firestorm, reduced to charred crisps inside the smoking ruins of the stately home.

Oddly, over the course of those twenty minutes, the nature of the house—with its spectacular enclosure of wraparound windows—acts as a chimney, accelerating the blaze but also burning it out quickly. The hottest part of the fire goes straight up, singeing the tops of the trees but containing the damage. The other homes in the area are spared. No sparks are carried on the winds, and the telltale cloud of smoke remains obscured behind the wooded hills, unseen by the citizens of Woodbury.

In the time it takes for the house to burn itself out, Lilly finds enough nerve to vault from the lowest limb of the oak to the roof of the coach house and then climb down the back wall to the rear door of the garage. Josh follows. By that point only a few walkers remain outside the home, and Josh easily dispatches them with the remaining three slugs in the .38’s cylinder.

They get into the garage and find the duffel bag, in which they had stashed some of their previous day’s take for safekeeping. The heavy canvas carryall contains a five-gallon jug of gasoline, a sleeping bag, a drip coffee machine, two pounds of French Roast, winter scarves, a box of pancake mix, writing tablets, two bottles of kosher wine, batteries, ballpoint pens, expensive red current jam, a box of matzo, and a coil of mountain-climbing rope.

Josh reloads the police special with the last six slugs in his speed loader. Then they sneak out the back door with the duffel bag over Josh’s shoulder, and they creep along the outer wall. Crouching in the weeds near the corner of the garage, they wait until the last moving corpse has drifted toward the light and noise of the fire before darting across the property and into the adjacent woods.

They weave their way through the trees without exchanging a word.

*   *   *

The access road to the south lies deserted in the waning daylight. Josh and Lilly keep to the shadows of a dry creek bed running parallel to the winding blacktop. They head east, down the long sloping landscape, back toward town.

They cover a little more than a mile without speaking, acting like an old married couple in the aftermath of a quarrel. By this point, the fear and adrenaline have finally drained out of them, replaced by a shaky kind of exhaustion.

The near miss of the home attack and ensuing fire has left Lilly in a state of panic. She jumps at noises on either side of the path, and she cannot seem to get enough air into her lungs. She keeps smelling walker stink on the wind, and she thinks she hears shuffling sounds behind the trees, which may or may not be mere echoes of their own weary footsteps.

At last, as they turn the corner at the bottom of Canyon Road, Josh says, “Just let me get one thing straight: Are you saying you’re just using me?”

“Josh, I didn’t—”

“For protection? And that’s it? That’s as far as your feelings go?”

“Josh—”

“Or … are you saying you just don’t want me to feel like you’re doing that?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, baby, I’m afraid you did, that’s exactly what you said.”

“This is ridiculous.” Lilly puts her hands in the pockets of her corduroy jacket as she walks. A layer of grime and ash has turned the fabric of the coat soot gray in the late-afternoon light. “Let’s just drop it. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No!” Josh is slowly shaking his head as he walks. “You don’t get to do that.”

“What are you talking about?”

He shoots a glance at her. “You think this is like a passing thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like this is summer camp? Like we’re all gonna go home at the end of the season after losing our virginity and getting poison ivy.” His voice has an edge. Lilly has never heard this tone before in Josh Lee Hamilton’s voice. His deep baritone skirts the fringes of rage, his jutting chin belying the hurt slicing through him. “You don’t get to plant this little bomb and walk away.”

Lilly lets out an exasperated sigh and cannot think of what to say, and they walk in silence for a while. The Woodbury wall materializes in the distance, the far western edge of the construction site coming into view, where the bulldozer and small crane sit idle in the waning light. The construction crew has learned the hard way that zombies—like game fish—bite more in the twilight hours.

At last Lilly says, “What the hell do you want me to say, Josh?”

He stares at the ground as he walks and ruminates. The duffel bag rattles, banging on his hip as he trudges along. “How about you’re sorry? How about you’ve been thinking it over, and maybe you’re just scared of gettin’ close to somebody because you don’t want to get hurt, because you’ve been hurt yourself, and you take it all back, what you said, you take it back and you really love me as much as I love you? How about that, huh?”

She looks at him, her throat burning from the smoke and terror. She is so thirsty. Tired and thirsty and confused and scared. “What makes you think I’ve been hurt?”

“Just a lucky guess.”

She looks at him. Anger tightens in her belly like a fist. “You don’t even know me.”

He looks down at her, his eyes wide and stung. “Are you shittin’ me?”

“We hooked up—what?—barely two months ago. Bunch of people scared out of their wits. Nobody knows anybody. We’re all just … making do.”

“You gotta be kidding me. All we been through? And I don’t even know you?”

“Josh, that’s not what I—”

“You’re putting me on the same level as Bob and the stoner? Megan and them folks at the camp? Bingham?”

“Josh—”

“All them things you said to me this week—what are you saying?—you been lying? You said them things just to make me feel better?”

“I meant what I said,” she murmurs softly. The guilt twists in her. For a brief instant she thinks back to that terrible moment she lost little Sarah Bingham, the undead swarming all over the little girl on those godforsaken grounds outside the circus tent. The helplessness. The paralytic terror that seized Lilly that day. The loss and the grief and the sorrow as deep as a well. The fact is, Josh is correct. Lilly has said things to him in the throes of late-night lovemaking that aren’t exactly true. On some level she loves him, cares for him, has strong feelings … but she’s projecting something sick deep within her, something that has to do with fear.

“That’s just fine and dandy,” Josh Lee Hamilton says finally, shaking his head.

They are approaching the gap in the wall outside town. The entranceway—a wide spot between two uncompleted sections of barricade—has a wooden gate secured at one end with cable. About fifty yards away, a single guard sits on the roof of a semitrailer, gazing in the opposite direction with an M1 carbine on his hip.

Josh marches up to the gate and angrily loosens the cable, throwing it open. The rattling noise echoes. Lilly’s flesh crawls with panic. She whispers, “Josh, be careful, they’re gonna hear us.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” he says, swinging the gate open for her. “Ain’t a prison. They can’t keep us from comin’ and goin’.”

She follows him through the gate and down a side road toward Main Street.

Few stragglers walk the streets at this hour. Most of the denizens of Woodbury are tucked away indoors, having dinner or drinking themselves into oblivion. The generators provide an eerie thrum behind the walls of the racetrack, some of the overhead stadium lights flickering. The wind trumpets through the bare trees of the square, and dead leaves skitter down the sidewalks.

“You have it your way,” Josh says as they turn right and head east down Main Street, trudging toward their apartment building. “We’ll just be fuck buddies. Quick pop every now and then to relieve the tension. No muss, no fuss…”

“Josh, that’s not—”

“You could get the same thing from a bottle of rotgut and a vibrator … but hey. Warm body’s nice every now and then, right?”

“Josh, c’mon. Why does it have to be this way? I’m just trying to—”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He bites down on his words as they approach the food center.

A cluster of men gather around the front of the store, warming their hands over a flaming brazier of trash burning in an oil drum. Sam the Butcher is there, a ratty overcoat covering his blood-spackled apron. His gaunt face puckers with distaste, his diamond-chip blue eyes narrowing as he sees the two figures approaching from the west.

“Fine, Josh, whatever.” Lilly thrusts her hands deeper into her pockets as she strides alongside the big man, slowly shaking her head. “Whatever you say.”

They pass the food center.

“Hey! Green Mile!” Sam the Butcher’s voice calls out, flinty, terse, a knife scraping a whetstone. “C’mere a minute, big fella.”

Lilly pauses, her hackles up.

Josh walks over to the men. “I got a name,” he says flatly.

“Well, excuse the hell outta me,” the butcher says. “What was it—Hamilburg? Hammington?”

“Hamilton.”

The butcher offers a vacuous smile. “Well, well. Mr. Hamilton. Esquire. Might I have a moment of your valuable time, if you aren’t too busy?”

“What do you want?”

The butcher’s cold smile remains. “Just outta curiosity, what’s in the bag?”

Josh stares at him. “Nothing much … just some odds and ends.”

“Odds and ends, huh? What kind of odds and ends?”

“Things we found along the way. Nothin’ that would interest anybody.”

“You do realize you ain’t covered your debt on them other odds and ends I gave y’all couple days ago.”

“What are you talking about?” Josh keeps staring. “I’ve been on the crew every day this week.”

“You ain’t covered it yet, son. That heating oil don’t grow on trees.”

“You said forty hours would cover it.”

The butcher shrugs. “You misunderstood me, hoss. It happens.”

“How so?”

“I said forty hours on top of what you logged already. Got that?”

The staring match goes on for an awkward moment. All conversation around the flaming trash barrel ceases. All eyes are on the two men. Something about the way Josh’s beefy shoulder blades are tensing under his lumberjack coat makes Lilly’s flesh crawl.

Josh finally gives the man a shrug. “I’ll keep on workin’, then.”

Sam the Butcher tilts his lean, chiseled face toward the duffel bag. “And I’ll thank you to hand over whatever you got tucked away in that bag for the cause.”

The butcher makes a move toward the duffel bag, reaching out for it.

Josh snaps it back and away from his grasp.

The mood changes with the speed of a circuit firing. The other men—mostly older loafers with hound-dog eyes and stringy gray hair in their faces—begin to instinctively back away. The tension ratchets up. The silence only adds to the latent violence brewing—the soft snapping of the fire the only sound beneath the wind.

“Josh, it’s okay.” Lilly steps forward and attempts to intercede. “We don’t need any—”

“No!” Josh jerks the duffel away from her, his gaze never leaving the dark, bloodshot eyes of the butcher. “Nobody’s taking this bag!”

The butcher’s voice drops an octave, going all slippery and dark. “You better think long and hard about fucking with me, big boy.”

“The thing is, I’m not fucking with you,” Josh says to the man in the bloody apron. “Just stating a fact. The stuff in this bag is ours fair and square. And nobody’s taking it from us.”

“Finders keepers?”

“That’s right.”

The old men back away farther until it feels to Lilly like she’s standing in some flickering, ice-cold fighting ring with two cornered animals. She gropes for some way to ease back the tension but her words get stuck in her throat. She reaches for Josh’s shoulder but he pulls away from her as though shocked. The butcher flicks his gaze at Lilly. “You better tell your beau here he’s making the mistake of his life.”

“Leave her out of this,” Josh tells him. “This is between you and me.”

The butcher sucks the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “Tell you what … I’m a fair man … I’ll give you one more chance. Hand over the goodies and I’ll wipe the debt clean. We’ll pretend this little tiff never happened.” Something approximating a smile creases the lines around the butcher’s weathered face. “Life’s too short. Know what I mean? Especially around here.”

“C’mon, Lilly,” Josh says without moving his gaze from the butcher’s lifeless eyes. “We got better things to do, stand around here flapping our jaws.”

Josh turns away from the storefront and starts down the street.

The butcher goes after the duffel. “GIVE ME THAT GODDAMN BAG!”

Lilly jerks forward as the two men come together in the middle of the street.

“JOSH, NO!”

The big man spins and drives the brunt of his shoulder into the butcher’s chest. The move is sudden and violent, and harkens back to Josh’s gridiron years when he would clear the field for a running back. The man in the blood-stippled apron flings backward, his breath gasping out of him. He trips over his own feet and goes down hard on his ass, blinking with shock and outrage.

Josh turns and continues on down the street, calling over his shoulder. “Lilly, I said c’mon, let’s go!”

Lilly doesn’t see the butcher suddenly contorting his body against the ground, struggling to dig something out of the back of his belt under his apron. Lilly doesn’t see the glint of blue steel filling the butcher’s hand, nor does she hear the telltale snap of a safety being thumbed off a semiautomatic, nor does she see the madness in the butcher’s eyes, until it’s too late.

“Josh, wait!”

Lilly gets halfway down the sidewalk—coming to within ten feet of Josh—when the blast cracks open the sky, the roar of the 9-millimeter so tremendous it seems to rattle the windows half a block down the street. Lilly instinctively dives for cover, hitting the macadam hard, the impact knocking the breath out of her.

She finds her voice then, and she shrieks as a flock of pigeons erupts off the roof of the food center—the swarm of carrion birds spreading across the darkening sky like black needlepoint.

TWELVE

Lilly Caul would remember things about that day for the rest of her life. She would remember seeing the red rosette of blood and tissue—like a tuft in upholstery—blooming from the back of Josh Lee Hamilton’s head, the wound appearing a nanosecond before the booming report of the 9-millimeter Glock fully registered in Lilly’s ears. She would remember tripping and falling to the pavement six feet behind Josh, one of her molars cracking, another incisor biting through her tongue. She would remember her ears ringing then, a fine spangle of blood droplets on the backs of her hands and lower arms.

But most of all, Lilly would remember the sight of Josh Lee Hamilton folding to the street as though he were swooning, his enormous legs going soft and wobbly like those of a rag doll. That was perhaps the strangest part: The way the giant man seemed to instantly lose his substance. One would expect such a person to not easily give up the ghost, to fall like a great redwood or old landmark building under the wrecking ball, literally shaking the earth on impact. But the fact is, that day, in the waning blue winter light, Josh Lee Hamilton would fade out without even a whimper.

He would simply keel over and land in a silent heap on the cold pavement.

*   *   *

In the immediate aftermath Lilly feels her entire body seize up with chills, gooseflesh pouring down over her flesh, everything going blurry and also crystal clear at the same time, as though her spirit were separating from her earthbound self. She loses control of her actions. She finds herself rising to her feet without even being aware of it.

She finds herself moving toward the fallen man with numb, involuntary steps, the strides of an automaton. “No, wait … no, no, wait, wait, wait,” she gibbers as she approaches the dying giant. Her knees hit the ground. Her tears run across the front of her as she reaches down and cradles his huge head and babbles, “Somebody … get a doctor … no … get … somebody … get a … GET A FUCKING DOCTOR, SOMEBODY!!”

Nestled in Lilly’s hands, the blood getting on her sleeves, Josh’s face twitches in its death throes, seeming to undulate and pass from one expression to another. His eyes rolling back, he blinks his last blinks, somehow finding Lilly’s face and locking on to it with his final spark of life. “Alicia … close the window.”

A synapse fires, a memory of an older sister fading away in his traumatized brain like a dying ember.

“Alicia, close the…”

His face grows still, eyes freezing and hardening in their sockets like marbles.

“Josh, Josh…” Lilly shakes him as though trying to kick-start an engine back to life. He’s gone. She cannot see through her tears, everything going milky. She feels the wetness on her wrists from his breached skull, and she feels something tightening around the nape of her neck.

“Leave him be,” a gravelly voice intones from behind her, thick with rage.

Lilly realizes someone is pulling her away from the body, a large male hand, fingers clutching a hank of her collar, tugging her back.

Something deep within her snaps.

*   *   *

The passage of time seems to elongate and corrupt, like that of a dream, as the butcher yanks the girl away from the body. He drags her back against the curb and she flops against the barrier, banging the back of her head, lying still now, staring up at the lanky man in the apron. The butcher stands over her, breathing hard, shaking with adrenaline. Behind him, the old geezers stand back against the storefront, shrinking into their baggy, ragged clothes, their rheumy eyes pinned wide.

Down the block, others materialize in the twilight, peering out of doorways and around corners.

“Look what you two have gone and done now!” the butcher accuses Lilly, shoving the pistol in her face. “I tried to be reasonable!”

“Get it over with.” She closes her eyes. “Get it over with … go ahead.”

“You stupid bitch, I ain’t gonna kill ya!” He slaps her with his free hand. “Are you listening? Do I have your attention?”

Footsteps echo in the distance—someone running this way—which goes unheard at first. Lilly opens her eyes. “You’re a murderer.” She utters this over bloody teeth. Her nose is bleeding. “You’re worse than a fucking walker.”

“That’s your opinion.” He slaps her again. “Now I want you to listen to me.”

The sting is bracing to Lilly. It wakes her up. “What do you want?”

Voices call out a block away, the charging footsteps closing in, but the butcher doesn’t hear anything but his own voice. “Gonna take the rest of Green Mile’s debt from you, little sister.”

“Fuck you.”

The butcher leans down and grabs her by the scruff of her jacket collar. “You’re gonna work that skinny little ass until you’re—”

Lilly’s knee comes up hard enough to drive the man’s testicles up into his pelvic bone. The butcher staggers and lets out a startled gasp that sounds like steam escaping from a broken vent.

Lilly springs to her feet, and she claws at the butcher’s face. Her nails are chewed to the quicks, so they don’t do much damage, but it drives the man back farther. He swings at her. She flinches away from the blow, which grazes her shoulder. She kicks him in the balls again.

The butcher staggers, reaching for his pistol.

*   *   *

By this point, Martinez is half a block away, running toward the scene, followed by two of his guards. He calls out, “WHAT THE FUCK?”

The butcher has gotten his Glock out of his belt and spins toward the oncoming men.

The burly, coiled Martinez pounces immediately, slamming the butt end of his M1 down on the butcher’s right wrist, the sound of delicate bones crunching audible above the wind. The Glock flies out of the butcher’s hand and the butcher lets out a mucusy howl.

One of the other guards—a black kid in an oversized hoodie—arrives in time to grab Lilly, pulling her away from the action. She writhes and squirms in the young man’s arms as the guard holds her at bay.

“Stand down, asshole!” Martinez booms, pointing the assault rifle at the staggering butcher, but almost instantly, before Martinez can react, the butcher gets his hands around the shaft of the carbine.

The two men grapple for the gun, their inertia driving them back into the flaming barrel. The barrel spills its contents, a swirl of sparks going up, as the twosome careens toward the storefront. The butcher slams Martinez into the glass door, glass cracking in hairline fractures as Martinez slams the gun up into the butcher’s face.

The butcher rears back in pain, clawing the M1 out of Martinez’s grip. The assault rifle flies off across the sidewalk. The old men scatter in terror, while other townspeople arrive from all directions, some of them already sending up a frenzy of angry shouts. The second guard—an older man in aviator glasses and ratty down vest—holds the crowd back.

Martinez delivers a hard right to the butcher’s jaw and sends the man in the apron crashing through the broken glass pane of the door.

The butcher lands inside the store’s vestibule, sprawling to the tile floor, which is littered with glass shards now. Martinez climbs in after him.

A barrage of punishing blows from Martinez keeps the butcher pinned to the floor, his spittle and blood flinging off in pink threads. Frantically shielding his face, flailing impotently, the butcher tries to fight back but Martinez overpowers the man.

The final blow—a roundhouse punch to the butcher’s jaw—knocks the man unconscious.

An awkward moment of silence follows, as Martinez catches his breath. He stands over the man in the apron, rubbing his knuckles, trying to get his bearings. The noise of the crowd outside the food center has grown to a dull roar—most of them cheering for Martinez—like a demented pep rally.

Martinez cannot figure out what just happened. He never much cared for Sam the Butcher, but on the other hand he cannot imagine what would have gotten into this prick to make him draw on Hamilton.

“What the fuck got into you?” Martinez asks the man on the floor, speaking somewhat rhetorically, not really expecting an answer.

“The man obviously wants to be a star.”

The voice comes from the gaping, jagged entrance behind Martinez.

Martinez whirls and sees the Governor standing in the doorway. Sinewy arms crossed against his chest, the long tails of his duster flapping in the breeze, the man has an enigmatic expression on his face, a mixture of bemusement and contempt and baleful curiosity. Gabe and Bruce stand behind the man like sullen totems.

Martinez is more confused than ever. “He wants to be a what?”

The Governor’s expression transforms—his dark eyes glittering with inspiration, his handlebar mustache fully grown in now and twitching around the corners of a frown—which tells Martinez to step lightly. “First,” the Governor says in a flat, impassive tone, “tell me exactly what happened.”

*   *   *

“He didn’t suffer, Lilly … remember that … no pain … he just went out like a light.” Bob crouches near the curb next to Lilly, who is slumped with her head down, the tears dripping onto her lap. Bob has his first-aid kit open on the sidewalk next to her, and he is dabbing a swab of iodine on her cut face. “That’s more than most of us can hope for in this shithole of a world.”

“I should have stopped it,” Lilly utters in a bloodless, sapped voice that sounds like a pull-string doll on its last legs. She has burned out her tear ducts. “I could have, Bob, I could have stopped it.”

The silence stretches, the wind rattling in the eaves and high-tension wires. Practically the entire population of Woodbury has gathered along Main Street to gawk at the aftermath.

Josh lies supine under a sheet next to Lilly. Someone covered the body with the makeshift shroud only minutes earlier, the folds of which now soak with red blotches of blood from Josh’s head wounds. Lilly tenderly strokes his leg, compulsively squeezing and massaging as though she might wake him up. Tendrils of hair are knocked loose from Lilly’s ponytail, blowing across her scarred, crestfallen features.

“Hush now, honey,” Bob says, placing the bottle of Betadine back into the kit. “There was nothing y’all could do, nothing at all.” Bob shoots a worried glance up at the jagged, broken glass of the food center entrance. He can barely see the Governor and his men inside the vestibule, talking with Martinez. The butcher’s unconscious body lies in the shadows. The Governor gestures expansively toward the body, explaining something to Martinez. “Goddamn shame is what it is,” Bob says, looking away. “Goddamn crying shame.”

“He didn’t have a mean bone in his body,” Lilly says softly, looking at the bloodstain soaking the head end of the sheet. “I wouldn’t be alive, wasn’t for him … he saved my life, Bob, all he wanted was—”

“Miss…?”

Lilly looks up at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, and sees an older man in eyeglasses and white lab coat standing behind Bob. A fourth person, a twenty-something girl with blond braids, stands behind the man. She also wears a tattered lab coat and has a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff dangling around her neck.

“Lilly, this is Doc Stevens,” Bob says with a nod toward the man. “And that there is Alice, his nurse.”

The girl gives Lilly a respectful nod while unwinding the cuff.

“Lilly, you mind if I take a quick peek at those facial bruises?” the doctor says, kneeling next to her, putting the earbuds of his stethoscope in his ears. Lilly says nothing, just turns her gaze back to the ground. The doctor gently touches the scope to her neck, her sternum, her pulse points. He inspects her wounds, softly palpates her ribs. “Very sorry for your loss, Lilly,” the doctor murmurs.

Lilly says nothing.

“Some of them wounds are old,” Bob comments, rising to his feet, backing away.

“Looks like hairline fractures to number eight and nine, also to the clavicle,” he says, gently nudging his fingers through her fleece jacket. “All of them pretty much healed up. Lungs sound clear.” He takes the scope out of his ears, winds it around his neck. “Lilly, if you need anything you let us know.”

She manages a nod.

The doctor measures his words. “Lilly, I just want you to know…” He pauses for a moment, groping for the right words. “Not everybody in this town is … like this. I know it’s not much in the way of consolation right now.” He looks up at Bob, then gazes at the ruined food center window, than back at Lilly. “I guess what I’m saying is, if you ever need somebody to talk to, if something is bothering you, if you need anything whatsoever … don’t hesitate to come down to the clinic.”

Seeing no reaction from Lilly, the doctor lets out a sigh and rises to his feet. He exchanges nervous glances with Bob and Alice.

Bob moves back to Lilly’s side, kneels down, and says very softly, “Lilly, honey, we’re gonna have to go ahead and move the body now.”

At first she barely hears him, in fact doesn’t even register what he’s saying.

She simply continues staring at the pavement and stroking the dead man’s leg and feeling empty. In anthropology class at Georgia Tech she learned about the Algonquin Indians and their belief that the spirit of the dead must be appeased. After a hunt they would literally breathe in the last breaths of a dying bear in order to honor it and accept it into their own bodies and pay homage to it. But Lilly feels only desolation and loss coming into her now from the cooling corpse of Josh Lee Hamilton.

“Lilly?” Bob’s voice sounds as though it’s coming from a distant solar system. “Is it okay, honey, if we go ahead and move the body?”

Lilly is silent.

Bob nods at Stevens. The doctor nods at Alice, and Alice turns and signals to two men standing their distance with a collapsible stretcher. The two men—both middle-aged cronies of Bob’s from the tavern crowd—move in. Unfolding the stretcher, they come within inches of Lilly and kneel down by the body. The first man starts to gently lever the massive body onto the stretcher, when Lilly snaps her gaze up at them, blinking back tears.

“Leave him alone,” she mutters, the words coming out in barely a whisper.

Bob puts a hand on her shoulder. “Lilly, honey—”

“I SAID LEAVE HIM ALONE! DON’T TOUCH HIM!! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HIM!!!”

Her anguished cry pierces the windswept stillness of the street, getting everyone’s attention. Onlookers halfway down the block pause in their conversations and look up. People in doorways peer around corners to see what’s going on. Bob waves off the two cronies, and Stevens and Alice back away in awkward silence.

The commotion has drawn several figures out of the food center. They now stand in the jagged opening of the entrance, staring at the sad state of affairs.

Bob gazes up and sees the Governor standing there, arms crossed against his chest on the glass-littered threshold, assessing the situation with his cunning, dark eyes. Bob walks sheepishly over to the entrance.

“She’ll be okay,” Bob says confidentially to the Governor. “She’s just a little torn up right now.”

“Who can blame her?” the Governor muses. “Lose your meal ticket like that.” He chews the inside of his cheek for a moment, thinking. “Leave her alone for a while. We’ll clean up the mess later.” He thinks some more, not taking his gaze off the dead body lying next to the curb. At last he calls over his shoulder, “Gabe—c’mere!”

The stocky man in the turtleneck and flattop haircut comes over.

The Governor speaks softly. “I want you to wake up that piece-of-shit butcher, take him down to the holding cells, and throw him in with the Guard.”

Gabe gives a nod, whirls, and slips back inside the food center.

“Bruce!” the Governor calls to his second in command. The black man with the shaved head and Kevlar vest comes over with an AK-47 on his hip.

“Yeah, boss.”

“I want you to round everybody up, take them over to the square.”

The black man cocks his head incredulously. “Everybody?”

“You heard me—everybody.” The Governor gives him a wink. “Gonna have a little town hall meeting.”

*   *   *

“We live in violent times. We’re all under tremendous pressure. Every day of our lives.”

The Governor barks into a megaphone that Martinez found in the defunct firehouse, the gravelly, smoky voice carrying up over the bare trees and torches. The sun has set on the town, and now the entire population mills about the darkness on the edge of the gazebo in the center of the square. The Governor stands on the stone steps of the structure, addressing his subjects with the stentorian authority of a politician crossed with a wild-eyed motivational speaker.

“I understand the pressures,” he goes on, pacing across the steps, milking the moment for all it’s worth. His voice echoes across the square, slapping back against the boarded-up storefronts across the street. “We’ve all dealt with the grief, last few months … losing somebody close to us.”

He pauses for effect, and he sees many of the faces turning downward, eyes shimmering in the light of torches. He senses the weight of pain pressing down. He smiles inwardly, waiting patiently for the moment to pass.

“What happened at the store today didn’t have to happen. You live by the sword … I get that. But it didn’t have to happen. It was a symptom of a greater sickness. And we’re gonna treat that sickness.”

For a brief instant he glances back to the east, and he sees the slumped figures gathered over the shrouded body of the black man. Bob kneels behind the girl named Lilly, stroking her back, as he stares trancelike at the fallen giant under the bloody sheet.

The Governor turns back to his audience. “Starting tonight we’re gonna inoculate ourselves. From now on, things are gonna be different around here. I promise you … things are gonna be different. Gonna be some new rules.”

He paces some more, burning his gaze into each and every onlooker.

“The thing that separates us from these monsters out there is civilization!” He punches the word “civilization” so hard it bounces off the rooftops. “Order! Laws! The ancient Greeks had this shit down. They knew about tough love. ‘Catharsis’ they used to call it.”

Some of the faces gaze up at him with jittery, expectant expressions.

“You see that racetrack up yonder?” he says into the bullhorn. “Take a good look!”

He turns and gives a signal to Martinez, who stands in the shadows at the base of the gazebo. Martinez thumbs a button on a two-way, and he whispers something to somebody on the other end. This is the part that the Governor insisted be carefully timed.

“Starting tonight,” the Governor goes on, watching many of the heads turn toward the big, dark flying saucer planted in the clay west of town, its huge bowl-like rim rising in silhouette against the stars. “Starting right now! That’s gonna be our new Greek theater!”

With the pomp and circumstance of a fireworks display, the great xenon spots above the track suddenly flare to life in sequence—making audible metallic snapping noises—sending giant blooms of silver light down on the arena. The gag gets an audible, collective sigh from many of those gathered around the gazebo, some spontaneously applauding.

“Admission is free!” The Governor feels the energy rising, crackling like static electricity, and he bears down on them. “Auditions are ongoing, folks. You want to fight in the ring? All you gotta do is break the rules. That’s all you gotta do. Break the law.”

He looks at them as he paces, daring them to respond. Some of them look at each other, some of them nod, while others look as though they’re about to give him a “Hallelujah.”

“Anyone breaks the law is gonna fight! That simple. You don’t know what the laws are, all you gotta do is ask. Read the fucking Constitution. Check the Bible. Do unto others. Golden rule. All that. But hear what I’m saying. You do unto somebody a little too much … you’re gonna fight.”

A few voices holler out their consent, and the Governor feeds off the energy, stoking the flames. “From now on, you fuck with somebody—you break the law—you’re gonna fight!”

A few more voices add to the din, the noise carrying up into the sky.

“You steal from somebody, you’re gonna fight!”

Now the crowd hollers its approval, a chorus of righteous howls.

“You bang somebody’s old lady, you’re gonna fight!”

More voices join in, all the fear and frustration boiling over now.

“You kill somebody, you’re gonna fight!”

The cheering starts to corrupt into a cacophony of angry shouts.

“You mess with somebody in any way—especially, you get somebody killed—you’re gonna fight. In the arena. In front of God. To the death.”

The clamor deteriorates into a mishmash of applause and whooping and hollering. The Governor waits for it to subside like a wave rolling away.

“It starts tonight,” he says in barely a whisper, the megaphone crackling. “It starts with this nutcase, guy that runs the general store—Sam the Butcher. Thinks he’s judge, jury, and executioner.”

All at once the Governor points at the arena and calls out suddenly in a voice that would not be out of place at a charismatic church service: “Who’s ready for some payback? WHO’S READY FOR SOME LAW AND ORDER?”

The voices erupt.

*   *   *

Lilly gazes up and sees the abrupt exodus of nearly forty people half a block away. The crowd disperses in a noisy mass, moving almost as one—a giant human amoeba of excited fist pumping and inarticulate, angry cheering—charging across the street toward the racetrack arena, which sits in a vast penumbra of silver light two hundred yards to the west. The sight of it turns Lilly’s stomach.

She looks away and mutters, “You can take the body away now, Bob.”

Standing over her, Bob leans down and tenderly strokes her shoulder. “We’ll take good care of him, honey.”

She gazes into the distance. “Tell Stevens I want to make the arrangements.”

“You got it.”

“We’ll bury him tomorrow.”

“That sounds fine, honey.”

Lilly watches the mob of citizens in the distance filing into the arena. For one terrible instant she recalls scenes from old horror movies, angry throngs of townspeople with torches and primitive weapons, closing in on Frankenstein’s castle, lusting for the monster’s blood.

She shudders. She realizes they are all monsters now—all of them—Lilly and Bob included. Woodbury is the monster now.

THIRTEEN

Curiosity gets the better of Bob Stookey. After escorting Lilly back to her apartment above the dry cleaner, and giving her ten milligrams of alprazolam for sleep, he checks in with Stevens. Arrangements are made to move Josh’s body to its temporary resting place in the makeshift morgue under the racetrack. Afterward Bob makes his way back to his camper and grabs a fresh bottle of whiskey from the back. Then he returns to the arena.

By the time he arrives at the south entrance, the crowd noises are swelling and ringing inside the structure like waves crashing against a shore, magnified by the metallic baffles of the arena. Bob creeps through the dark, fetid tunnel toward the light. He pauses just inside the south gate and takes a healthy pull off the bottle of hooch, girding himself, buffering his nerves. The whiskey burns and makes his eyes water.

He steps into the light.

At first all he sees are blurry, indistinct shapes down on the infield, obscured behind massive cyclone fences rising up in front of the spectators. The bleachers on either side of him are mostly empty. The citizens sit above him, scattered across the upper decks, clapping and whooping and craning their necks to see the action. The harsh brilliance of the arc light shining down makes Bob blink. The air smells of old burned rubber and gasoline, and Bob has to squint to identify what’s going on down on the track.

He takes a step closer, leans toward the fence, and peers through the chain link.

Two large men grapple with each other in the center of the muddy infield. Sam the Butcher, seminude in his blood-spattered athletic trunks, his bare chest sagging, and his belly hanging over his belt, swings a jury-rigged wooden club at Stinson, the big, lumpy middle-aged guardsman. Stinson, his camo pants dark with bodily fluids, staggers and jerks back, trying to dodge the onslaught, an eighteen-inch machete in his greasy hand. The end of the butcher’s club—sprouting rusty nails on one side—catches the side of Stinson’s doughy face, gouging flesh.

Stinson rears backward, throwing spittle and strands of thick blood.

The crowd issues a salvo of yelps and angry cheers as Stinson topples over his own feet. Dust rises up into the sodium light as the portly guardsman hits the ground, the machete flying out of his grip and landing in the dirt. The butcher pounces with the club. Nails puncture Stinson’s jugular and left pectoral before the man has a chance to roll away. The audience yowls.

Bob turns away for a moment, feeling nauseous and dizzy. He takes another huge gulp of whiskey and lets the burn soothe his terror. He takes another, and another, and finally works up enough nerve to gaze back at the action. The butcher is pummeling Stinson, sending gouts of blood—as black as tar in the sodium lights—spraying across the matted brown turf of the infield.

The wide dirt track circling the infield has armed guards at each gate, intently watching the fracas, their assault rifles cradled at the ready. Bob swallows more whiskey and averts his gaze from the grisly slaughter, focusing on the upper regions of the racetrack. The diamond-vision screen is blank, powerless, probably inoperable. The glass enclosures of VIP boxes lining one side of the arena are mostly deserted and dark … all except for one.

The Governor and Martinez stand behind the window of the center box, looking down on the spectacle with unreadable expressions on their faces.

Bob chugs another few fingers of whiskey—he’s already halfway through the bottle—and finds himself avoiding eye contact with the crowd. In his peripheral vision he can see the faces of young and old, male and female, all riveted to the bloody skirmish. Many faces contort with a kind of manic delight. Some of the onlookers rise to their feet, hands waving as though they are finding Jesus.

Down on the field the butcher delivers one last savage blow to Stinson’s kidney, the nails sinking into the guardsman’s fleshy lower back. Blood bubbles and gushes, and then Stinson sags in the dirt, convulsing, twitching in his death throes. Breathing hard, drooling with psychotic glee, the butcher raises the club and faces the crowd. The spectators respond with a surge of howls.

Repulsed, woozy, going numb with horror, Bob Stookey chugs more whiskey and looks down.

“I THINK WE HAVE A WINNER!”

The amplified voice coming through the public address system echoes and feeds back with harsh, electronic squealing noises. Bob gazes up and sees the Governor behind the center box window casually speaking into a microphone. Even from this great distance, Bob can see the weird pleasure glimmering behind the Governor’s eyes like two pinpoints of starlight. Bob looks back down.

“HOLD ON! HOLD ON!! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I THINK WE HAVE A COMEBACK!!”

Bob looks up.

On the infield, the big lump on the ground has come back to life. Lurching toward the machete, Stinson gets his blood-slick hand around the hilt and twists back toward the butcher, who has his back turned. Stinson pounces with every last ounce of strength. The butcher turns and tries to shield his face as the machete slashes.

The blade sinks into the butcher’s neck deep enough to get stuck.

The butcher staggers and falls backward with the machete still planted in his jugular. Stinson moves in with drunken rage, the blood loss making him lumber and weave with eerie resemblance to a zombie. The crowd jeers and roars. Stinson pulls the machete loose and delivers another devastating blow to the butcher’s neck, severing the gaunt man’s head between the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae.

The spectators cheer as the butcher’s neck floods the ground with its lifeblood.

Bob looks away. He falls to his knees, one hand still clutching the chain link. His stomach lurches and he vomits on the cement floor of the mezzanine. The bottle falls but does not break. Bob pukes out the entire contents of his stomach in heaving gasps—the noise of the crowd going all watery, everything getting blurry and indistinct in his watery vision. He vomits and vomits until there is nothing left but thin strands of bile hanging off his lips. He falls back against the first row of empty bleachers. He retrieves the bottle and sucks down the rest of its contents.

The amplified voice echoes: “AND THAT, FOLKS, IS WHAT WE CALL JUSTICE!”

*   *   *

Outside the arena, at that moment, the streets of Woodbury could be confused with any other deserted ghost ship of a village in the Georgia countryside—abandoned and scoured clean in the advent of the plague.

At first glance, every last inhabitant appears to be missing in action—the entire population still gathered in the stadium, riveted to the final moments of the battle royale. Even the sidewalk in front of the food center has been cleared, any lingering evidence of murder mopped away by Stevens and his men, Josh’s body carted off to the morgue.

Now, in the darkness, as the muffled echoes of the crowd swirl on the wind, Lilly Caul wanders the sidewalk in her fleece, torn jeans, and tattered high-tops. She cannot sleep, cannot think, cannot stop crying. The noise from the arena feels like insects crawling on her. The Xanax Bob gave her has done nothing but dull the pain, like a layer of gauze over her racing thoughts. She shivers in the cold and pauses in a dark vestibule in front of a boarded drugstore.

“It’s none of my business,” a voice says from the shadows. “But a young lady like yourself shouldn’t be out alone on these streets.”

Lilly turns and sees the glint of metal-rimmed glasses on a dark face. She sighs, wipes her eyes, and looks down. “What difference does it make?”

Dr. Stevens steps into the flickering light of torches. He stands with his hands in his pockets, his lab coat buttoned to the collar, a scarf around his neck. “How are you holding up, Lilly?”

She looks at him through her tears. “Holding up? I’m just grand.” She tries to breathe but her lungs feel as though they’re full of sand. “Next stupid question.”

“You might think about resting.” He comes over to her and inspects her bruises. “You’re still in shock, Lilly. You need sleep.”

She manages a pallid smile. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” She cringes and looks down, the tears burning her eyes. “Funny thing is, I hardly knew him.”

“He seemed like a good man.”

She looks up, focusing on the doctor. “Is that even possible anymore?”

“Is what possible?”

“Being a good person.”

The doctor lets out a sigh. “Probably not.”

Lilly swallows and looks down. “I have to get out of this place.” She winces at another sob building in her. “I can’t deal with it anymore.”

Stevens looks at her. “Join the club.”

A moment of awkward silence passes.

Lilly rubs her eyes. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Stay here … put up with this shit. You seem like a semisane person to me.”

The doctor shrugs. “Looks can be deceiving. Anyway … I stay for the same reason they all stay.”

“And that is…?”

“Fear.”

Lilly looks at the paving stones. She doesn’t say anything. What is there to say? The torchlight across the street dwindles, the wicks burning down, the shadows deepening in the nooks and crannies between the buildings. Lilly fights the dizziness washing over her. She doesn’t want to sleep ever again.

“They’re going to be coming out of there pretty soon,” the doctor says with a nod toward the racetrack in the distance. “Once they’ve had their fill of the little horror show Blake has concocted for them.”

Lilly shakes her head. “Place is a fucking madhouse, and that dude is the craziest one of all.”

“Tell you what.” The doctor gestures toward the opposite end of town. “Why don’t we take a little walk, Lilly … avoid the crowds.”

She exhales a pained breath, then shrugs and mutters, “Whatever…”

*   *   *

That night, Dr. Stevens and Lilly walk for over an hour in the cold, bracing air, meandering back and forth along the far fence on the east side of town, and then down along the abandoned railroad tracks inside the security fence. While they walk and talk, the crowd slowly files out of the arena, wandering back to their dwellings, bloodlust satiated. The doctor does most of the talking that night, speaking softly, ever mindful of the listening ears of guards, who are positioned at strategic corners along the barricade, equipped with guns, binoculars, and walkie-talkies.

The guards are in constant contact with Martinez, who has cautioned his men to pay close attention to the weak areas along the ramparts, and especially the wooded hills to the south and west. Martinez worries that the noise of the gladiatorial matches will very likely draw walkers.

Strolling along the outskirts, Stevens gives Lilly a lecture about the perils of conspiring against the Governor. Stevens warns her to watch her tongue, and he speaks in analogies that make Lilly’s head spin. He talks of Caesar Augustus and he speaks of Bedouin dictators through history and how the hardships of desert communities spurred brutal regimes and coups and violent insurrection.

Eventually Stevens brings the conversation full circle to the unfortunate realities of the zombie plague, and suggests that bloodthirsty leaders are very likely a necessary evil now, a side effect of survival.

“I don’t want to live like that,” Lilly says at last, walking slowly alongside the doctor through a palisade of bare trees. The wind spits a light sleet in their faces, which stings their flesh and coats the forest with a delicate rime of ice. Christmas is only twelve days off, not that anybody would notice.

“No choice in the matter, Lilly,” the doctor mutters, head down, scarf across his chin. He stares at the ground as he walks.

“You always have a choice.”

“You think? I don’t know, Lilly.” They walk in silence for a moment. The doctor slowly shakes his head as he walks. “I don’t know.”

She looks at him. “Josh Hamilton never went bad. My dad sacrificed his life for me.” Lilly takes a breath and struggles with her tears. “It’s just an excuse. A person is born bad. The shit we’re dealing with now … it’s just a fucking trigger. Brings out the real person.”

“Then God help us,” the doctor murmurs, almost more to himself than to Lilly.

*   *   *

The next day, under a low, steel-gray sky, a small contingent buries Josh Lee Hamilton in a makeshift casket. Lilly, Bob, Stevens, Alice, and Megan are joined by Calvin Deets, one of the workmen, who had grown fond of Josh over the last couple of weeks.

Deets is an older man, an emaciated chain-smoker—probably in the late stages of emphysema—who has a face like an old saddlebag left out in the sun. He stands respectfully back behind the front row of friends, his Caterpillar cap in his gnarled hands, as Lilly says a few words.

“Josh grew up in a religious family,” Lilly says in a choked voice, her face turned down as though addressing the frozen ground on the edge of a playground. “He believed we all go to a better place.”

Other recent graves spread across the small park, some with homemade crosses or carefully stacked cairns of polished stones. The mound of dirt over Josh’s grave rises up at least four feet above ground level. They had to enclose his remains in a piano case that Deets found in a warehouse—the only container big enough to accommodate the fallen giant—and it took Bob and Deets several hours to carve out a suitable hole in the icebound earth.

“Here’s hoping Josh is right, because we all…” Lilly’s voice falters, crumbles. She closes her eyes and the tears seep through her eyelids. Bob takes a step closer, puts an arm around her. Lilly lets out a sob that shudders through her. She cannot continue.

Bob says softly, “Father … Son and … Holy Spirit. Amen.” The others murmur likewise. Nobody moves. The wind kicks up and blows a sheet of powdery-dry snow across the playground, nipping their faces.

Bob gently urges Lilly away from the grave. “C’mon, darlin’ … let’s get you inside.”

Lilly puts up little resistance, shuffling alongside Bob as the others turn away silently, heads down, faces crestfallen. For a moment, it looks as though Megan—dressed in a worn leather jacket, which some anonymous benefactor gave her in a druggy post-coitus afterglow—is about to hurry after Lilly, maybe say something to her. But the corkscrew-haired woman with the dishwater-green eyes just lets out an anguished sigh and keeps her distance.

Stevens gives Alice a nod, and the two of them turn and head back down the side road toward the racetrack complex, turning up the collars of their lab coats against the wind. They get halfway to the main drag—safely out of earshot of the others—when Alice says to the doctor, “Did you smell it?”

He nods. “Yep … it’s on the wind … it’s coming from the north.”

Alice sighs, shaking her head. “I knew these idiots would draw a crowd with all that noise. Should we tell somebody?”

“Martinez already knows.” The doctor indicates the guard tower behind them. “Lots of saber rattling going on, God help us.”

Alice lets out another sigh. “Gonna be busy next few days, aren’t we?”

“That guardsman used up half our whole blood supply, gonna need some more donors.”

“I’ll do it,” Alice says.

“Appreciate the thought, sweetheart, but we got enough A positive to last us until Easter. Besides, I take any more out of you I’ll have to plant you next to the big guy.”

“Should we keep searching for an O positive?”

The doctor shrugs. “Like looking for a very small needle in a very small haystack.”

“I haven’t checked Lilly or that other new kid, what’s his name.”

“Scott? The stoner?”

“Yeah.”

The doctor shakes his head. “Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him in days.”

“You never know.”

The doctor keeps shaking his head, hands deep in his pockets, as he hastens toward the shadows of concrete archways in the distance. “Yeah … you never know.”

*   *   *

That night, back in her squatter’s flat above the boarded-up dry cleaner, Lilly feels numb. She’s thankful that Bob has chosen to stay with her for a while. He makes her dinner—his special beef jerky Stroganoff courtesy of Hamburger Helper—and they share enough of Bob’s single-malt Scotch and generic Ambien to ease Lilly’s racing thoughts.

The noises outside the second-story window grow fainter and farther away—although they seem to be making Bob nervous as he tucks Lilly in. Something is going on down on the streets. Maybe trouble. But Lilly cannot focus on the distant commotion of voices and running footsteps.

She feels as though she’s floating, and the moment she lays her head on the pillow she sinks into semiconsciousness. The bare floors and sheet-covered windows of the apartment blur away into a white oblivion. But right before she sinks into the void of dreamless sleep, she sees Bob’s weathered face looming over her.

“Why won’t you leave with me, Bob?”

The question hangs there for a moment. Bob shrugs. “Haven’t really thought about it.”

“There’s nothing for us here anymore.”

He looks away. “Governor says things are gonna get better soon.”

“What’s the deal with you and him?”

“Whattya talkin’ about?”

“He’s got a hold on you, Bob.”

“That ain’t true.”

“I just don’t get it.” Lilly fades. She can barely see the weathered man sitting on the side of her bed. “He’s trouble, Bob.”

“He’s just trying to—”

Lilly barely hears the knock on the door. She tries to keep her eyes open. Bob goes to the door, and Lilly tries to stay awake long enough to identify the visitor. “Bob…? Who is it…?

Footsteps. Two figures come into view over her bed like ghosts. Lilly struggles to see through the shade descending over her eyes.

Bob stands next to a gaunt, lean, dark-eyed man with a carefully trimmed Fu Manchu mustache and coal-black hair. The man smiles as Lilly sinks into unconsciousness.

“Sleep tight, girlfriend,” the Governor says. “You’ve had a long day.”

*   *   *

The behavior patterns of the walkers continue to baffle and enthrall the deeper thinkers among Woodbury’s inhabitants. Some believe the undead move as bees in a hive, driven by something far more complex than mere hunger. Some theories involve invisible pheromonelike signals passing among zombies, producing behaviors that depend upon the chemical makeup of their prey. Others believe in dog-whistle sensory responses above and beyond mere attraction to sound or smell or movement. No single hypothesis has stuck, but most of Woodbury’s residents feel certain about one aspect of zombie behavior: The advent of a herd of any size is to be dreaded and feared and treated with respect. Herds tend to grow spontaneously and take on troubling ramifications. A herd—even a small one, like the cluster of dead forming at this very moment north of town, drawn by the noise of the gladiatorial match the previous night—can overturn a truck, snap fence posts like kindling, or topple even the highest wall.

For the last twenty-four hours Martinez has been marshaling forces in order to suppress the imminent attack. Guards posted on crow’s nests at the northwest and northeast corners of the wall have been keeping tabs on the progress of the flock, which first began to morph into a herd about a mile away. The guards have been sending word down the chain of command that the size of the herd has grown from a dozen or so to nearly fifty, and the pack has been moving in a lumbering zigzag through the trees along Jones Mill Road, covering the distance between the deep woods and the outskirts of town at a speed of about two hundred yards an hour, growing in number as they come. Apparently the herds move even slower, collectively, than individual walkers. It has taken this herd fifteen hours to close the distance to four hundred yards.

Now some of them begin to emerge from the leading edge of the forest, shambling out into the open fields bordering the woods and the town. They look like broken toys in the hazy, distant twilight, like windup soldiers bumping into each other, running on the fumes of malfunctioning engines, their blackened mouths contracting and expanding like irises. Even at this distance the rising moon reflects off their milky eyes in shimmering coins of light.

Martinez has three Browning .50 caliber machine guns—courtesy of the ransacked National Guard depot—placed at key junctures along the wall. One sits on the bonnet of a backhoe at the west corner of the wall. Another one is situated on top of a cherry picker at the east corner. The third is positioned on the roof of a semitrailer on the edge of the construction site. Each of the three machine guns already has an operator in place, each man equipped with a headset.

Long gleaming bandoliers of incendiary armor-piercing tracer bullets dangle from the stock of each weapon, with extras in steel boxes sitting nearby.

Other guards take positions along the wall—on ladders and bulldozer scoops—armed with semiautomatics and long-range sniper rifles loaded with 7.62-millimeter slugs that will penetrate drywall or sheet metal. These men do not wear headsets, but each know to watch for hand signals from Martinez, who positions himself at the top of a crane gantry in the center of the post office parking lot with a two-way. Two enormous klieg lights—scavenged from the town theater—are wired up to the generator chugging in the shadows of the post office loading dock.

A voice crackles on Martinez’s radio: “Martinez, you there?”

Martinez thumbs the talk button. “Copy that, chief, go ahead.”

“Bob and I are on our way up there, gonna need to harvest some fresh meat.”

Martinez frowns, his brow furrowing under his bandanna. “Fresh meat?”

The voice sizzles through the tiny speaker: “How much time we got before all the fun and games start?”

Martinez gazes out at the darkening horizon, the closest zombies still about three hundred and fifty yards away. He thumbs the switch. “Probably won’t be within head-shot range for another hour, maybe a little less than that.”

“Good,” says the voice. “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

*   *   *

Bob follows the Governor down Main Street toward a wagon train of semi trucks parked in a semicircle outside the looted Menards home and garden center. The Governor walks briskly through the wintry evening air, a bounce to his step, his boot heels clicking on the paving stones. “Times like these,” the Governor comments to Bob as they march along, “must feel like you’re back in the shit in Afghanistan.”

“Yes, sir, I have to admit it does sometimes. I remember one time I got a call to drive down to the front, pick up some marines coming off their watch. It was nighttime, cold as a well digger’s ass, just like this. Air raid sirens screaming, everybody hopped up for a firefight. Drove the APC down to this godforsaken trench in the sand, and what do I find? Bunch of whores from the local village giving out blow jobs to the grunts.”

“No shit.”

“I shit you not.” Bob shakes his head in dismay as he walks alongside the Governor. “Right in the middle of an air raid. So I tell them to can it and get in before I leave them there. One of the whores gets in the APC with the men, and I’m like, what the hell. Whatever. Just get me out of this fucking place.”

“Understandable.”

“So I take off with the gal still going at it in the back of the APC. But you’ll never guess what happened then.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense, Bob,” the Governor says with a grin.

“All of a sudden I hear a crash in the back, and I realize that bitch is an insurgent, and she brought an IED in with her, set it off in the cargo bay.” Bob shakes his head again. “Firewall protected me, but it was a mess. Took off one of the boys’ legs.”

“Un-fucking-believable,” the Governor marvels as he approaches the circle of eighteen-wheelers. Full darkness has fallen, and light from a torch illuminates the side of a Piggly Wiggly truck on which a grinning pig leers down at them in the dim light. “Hold that thought a second, Bob.” The Governor pounds his fist on the trailer. “Travis! You in there? Hey! Anybody home?”

In a cloud of cigar smoke, the rear door springs up on rusty hinges. A heavyset black man sticks his head out of the cargo hold. “Hey, boss … what can I do you for?”

“Take one of the empty trailers down to the north wall, on the double. We’ll meet you there with further instructions. Got that?”

“Got it, boss.”

The black man hops off the rear rail and vanishes around the side of the truck. The Governor takes a deep breath and then leads Bob around the circle of trucks, and then north along a side road toward the barricade. “Pretty goddamn amazing what a man will do for nookie,” the Governor muses as they stride along the dirt road.

“Ain’t it?”

“These girls you came in with, Bob, Lilly and … what’s-her-name?”

“Megan?”

“That’s the one. That little thing’s a firecracker. Am I right?”

Bob wipes his mouth. “Yeah, she’s a cute little gal.”

“Kinda flirty … but hey. Who am I to judge?” Another lascivious grin. “We do what we do to get by. Am I right, Bob?”

“Right as rain.” Bob walks along for a moment. “Just between you and me … I’m kinda sweet on her.”

The Governor looks at the older man with an odd mixture of surprise and pity. “This Megan gal? Well, that’s great, Bob. No shame in that.”

Bob looks down as he walks. “Love to spend the night with her just once.” Bob’s voice goes soft. “Just once.” He looks up at the Governor. “But, hell … I know that’s just a pipe dream.”

Philip cocks his head at the older man. “Maybe not, Bob … maybe not.”

Before Bob can muster a response a series of explosive clanging noises go off ahead of them. Brilliant sunbursts from the klieg lights suddenly tear open seams in the distant darkness from opposite corners of the wall, the silver beams sweeping out across the adjacent fields and tree lines, illuminating the oncoming horde of walking corpses.

The Governor leads Bob across the post office lot to the crane gantry, on which Martinez now prepares to give the order to open fire.

“Hold your fire, Martinez!” The Governor’s booming voice gets everybody’s attention.

Martinez gazes nervously down at the two men. “You sure about this, chief?”

The rumble of a Kenworth cab rises up behind the Governor, accompanied by the telltale beeping noises of a semi moving in reverse. Bob glances over his shoulder and sees an eighteen-wheeler backing into position by the north gate. Exhaust vapors pulse from the truck’s vertical stack, and Travis leans out the driver’s side window, chewing a cigar and wrestling the steering wheel.

“Gimme your walkie!” The Governor gestures at Martinez, who is already descending the metal ladder affixed to the side of the crane. Bob watches all this from a respectable distance behind the Governor. Something about all this mysterious business makes the older man uneasy.

Outside the wall the meandering mass of zombies closes the distance to two hundred yards.

Martinez reaches the bottom of the ladder and hands over the two-way. The Governor thumbs the switch and barks into the mouthpiece. “Stevens! Can you hear me? You got your radio on?”

After a beat of crackling static the doctor’s voice replies, “Yes, I hear you and I don’t appreciate—”

“Shut up for a second. I want you to bring that tub-of-lard guardsman, Stinson, to the north wall.”

The voice crackles: “Stinson is still recovering, the man has lost a lot of blood in your little—”

“Don’t fucking argue with me, Stevens … JUST FUCKING DO IT NOW!”

The Governor clicks the radio off and throws it back to Martinez.

“Open the gate!” the Governor shouts at two workmen, who stand nearby with pickaxes and anxious expressions, awaiting orders.

The two workmen look at each other.

“You heard me!” the Governor bellows. “Open the goddamn gate!”

The workmen follow orders, throwing the bolt at one end of the gate. The gate swings open, letting in a gust of cold, rancid wind.

“You ask me, we’re pushing our luck with this routine,” Martinez mutters under his breath, slamming an ammo magazine into his assault rifle.

The Governor ignores the comment and hollers, “Travis! Back it into position!”

The truck shudders and beeps and rattles backward into the opening.

“Now put the ramp down!”

Bob watches, completely vexed by the proceedings, as Eugene hops out of his cab with a grunt and marches around behind the truck. He throws open the vertical door and lowers the ramp to the pavement.

In the glare of spotlights the zombie contingent approaches to within a hundred yards.

Shuffling footsteps draw Bob’s attention back over his shoulder.

From the shadowy center of town, in the flicker of burning trash barrels, Dr. Stevens emerges with his arm around the wounded guardsman, who hobbles along with the lethargic gait of a stroke victim.

“Watch this, Bob,” the Governor says, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the older man, and then, with a wink, adds, “Beats the hell outta the Middle East.”

FOURTEEN

The screams inside the empty trailer, amplified by the corrugated metal floor and steel walls, build and build, an aria of agony, which compels Bob, standing behind the crane, to look away, as the moving cadavers shamble toward the opening, drawn to the noise and smell of fear. Bob needs a drink more than ever now. He needs a lot of drinks. He needs to soak in the booze until he’s blind.

At least ninety percent of the herd—all shapes and sizes, in varying degrees of disintegration, faces contorted with scowling bloodlust—press toward the rear of the trailer. The first one trips on the foot of the ramp, falling face-first with a wet splat on the tread. Others follow closely, pushing their way up the incline, as Stinson shrieks inside the enclosure, his sanity torn to shreds.

The portly guardsman, bound to the front wall of the trailer with packing straps and chains, pisses himself, as the first walkers shuffle in for the feeding.

Outside the trailer, Martinez and his men keep an eye on the stragglers along the barricade, most of them milling about aimlessly in the glare of tungsten spotlights, cocking their gray faces and glazed eyes up at the night sky as though the screaming noises might be coming from the heavens. Only about a dozen of the dead miss this opportunity to feed. The men on the 50-calibers take aim, awaiting orders to blow the stragglers away.

The trailer fills up with specimens—the Governor’s growing collection of lab rats—until nearly three dozen walkers have swarmed Stinson. The unseen feeding frenzy ensues, and the screaming corrupts into watery, gagging death cries, as the last zombie staggers up the ramp and vanishes inside the mobile abattoir. The noises issuing out the back of the trailer now become almost feral, Stinson reduced to a mewling, squealing head of stock in a slaughterhouse, rendered by the ragged teeth and nails of the dead.

Out in the cold darkness Bob feels his soul contracting inward like an iris closing down. He needs a drink so badly his skull throbs. He barely hears the booming voice of the Governor.

“All right, Travis! Go ahead and pull trap now! Go ahead and close it down!”

The truck driver cautiously creeps around behind the vibrating death trailer and grabs for the rope hanging down from the lip of the door. He yanks it hard and fast, and the vertical gate slams down with a rusty squeak. Travis quickly latches the lock, and then backs away from the trailer as if from a time bomb.

“Take it back to the track, Travis! I’ll meet you there in a minute!”

The Governor turns and walks over to Martinez, who stands waiting on the lower rails of the crane. “All right, you can have your fun now,” the Governor says.

Martinez thumbs the radio send button. “Okay, guys—take the rest of them out.”

Bob jumps at the sudden roar of heavy artillery, the noise and sparks from the .50-calibers lighting up the night. Tracer bullets streak hot pink in the dark, crisscrossing the beams of magnesium-bright klieg lights, engaging their targets in plumes of black, oily blood mist. Bob turns away once again, not interested in seeing the walkers taken apart. The Governor, however, feels differently.

He climbs halfway up the crane ladder so he can see the festivities.

In short order the armor-piercing tracers eviscerate the stragglers. Skulls blossom, florets of brain matter spitting up into the night air, teeth and hair and cartilage and bone chips shattering. Some of the zombies remain upright for many moments, as the rounds spin them in macabre death jigs, arms flailing in the stage light. Bellies burst. Glistening tissue ejaculates in the glare.

The salvo ceases as abruptly as it had begun, the silence slamming hard in Bob’s ears.

For a moment the Governor savors the aftermath, the dripping sounds fading on the distant echoes of gunfire dying in the trees. The last few walkers still standing sink to the earth in heaps of bloody pulp and dead flesh, some of them now unrecognizable masses of vaguely human meat. Some of these mounds exude vapors in the chill air, mostly from the friction of the bullets and not from any kind of body heat. The Governor climbs down from his perch.

As the Piggly Wiggly truck pulls away with its load of moving cadavers, Bob swallows the urge to vomit. The ghastly noises from inside the trailer have diminished somewhat, Stinson reduced to a hollowed-out trough of flesh and bone. Now only the muffled smacking sounds of zombies feeding inside the enclosure fade away as the truck rattles toward the racetrack lot.

The Governor comes over to Bob. “Looks like you could use a drink.”

Bob cannot muster a reply.

“C’mon, let’s go have a cool one,” the Governor suggests, slapping the man on the back. “I’m buying.”

*   *   *

By the next morning, the north lots have been cleaned up and all evidence of the massacre has been erased. People go about their business as though nothing ever happened, and the rest of that week passes uneventfully.

Over the next five days a few walkers drift into the range of the .50-calibers—drawn by the commotion of the hordes—but mostly things remain quiet. Christmas comes and goes with very little ceremony. Most of the inhabitants of Woodbury have given up on following the calendar.

A few feeble attempts at holiday cheer seem to exacerbate the grim proceedings. Martinez and his men decorate a tree in the courthouse lobby, and they put some tinsel on the gazebo in the square, but that’s about it. The Governor pipes Christmas music through the racetrack PA system, but it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. The weather stays fairly mild—no snow to speak of, with temperatures remaining in the upper forties.

On Christmas Eve, Lilly goes to the infirmary to have some of her injuries checked out by Dr. Stevens, and after the examination, the doctor invites Lilly to stick around for a little impromptu holiday party. Alice joins them, and they open cans of ham and sweet potatoes—and they even break out a case of Cabernet, which Stevens has been hiding in the storage closet—and they toast things like the old days, better times, and Josh Lee Hamilton.

Lilly senses that the doctor is watching her closely for signs of post-traumatic stress, maybe depression or some other kind of mental disturbance. But ironically, Lilly has never felt more focused and grounded in her life. She knows what she has to do. She knows that she cannot live like this much longer, and she is biding her time until an opportunity to escape presents itself. But maybe on some deeper level it is Lilly who is doing the observing.

Maybe she is subconsciously looking for allies, accomplices, collaborators.

Halfway through the evening, Martinez shows up—Stevens invited the young man earlier that day to stop by for a drink—and Lilly learns that she is not the only one here who wants out. After a few cocktails, Martinez gets talkative, and reveals that he fears the Governor will eventually lead them off a cliff. They argue about which is the lesser of two evils—tolerating the Governor’s madness or drifting out in the world without a safety net—and they come to zero conclusions. They drink some more.

At length, the evening deteriorates into a drunken bacchanal of off-key caroling and reminiscences of holidays past—all of which depresses everyone even further. The more they drink, the worse they feel. But amid all the lubricating Lilly learns new things—both trivial and important—about these three lost souls. She notices that Dr. Stevens has the worst singing voice she has ever heard, and that Alice has a major crush on Martinez, and that Martinez pines for an ex-wife in Arkansas.

Most importantly, though, Lilly gets a sense that the four of them are bonding in their collective misery, and that bond might serve them well.

*   *   *

The next day, at first light—after spending the night passed out on a gurney in the infirmary—Lilly Caul drags herself outside, blinking at the harsh winter sunshine hammering down on the deserted town. It’s Christmas morning, and the pale blue sky seems to punctuate Lilly’s sense of being trapped in purgatory. Lilly’s skull throbs painfully as she buttons her fleece jacket up to her chin and then makes her way eastward down the sidewalk.

Very few residents are up at this hour, the advent of Christmas morning keeping everybody hunkered inside. Lilly feels compelled to visit the playground on the east edge of the town. The desolate patch of bare ground lies behind a grove of denuded crab apples.

Lilly finds Josh’s grave, the sandy dirt still freshly packed in a large mound next to his cairn. She kneels on the edge of the grave and lowers her head. “Merry Christmas, Josh,” she utters into the wind, her voice hungover, thick and rusty with sleep.

Only the rustle of branches serves as a response. She takes a deep breath. “Some of the things I’ve done … the way I treated you … I’m not proud of.” She swallows the urge to cry, the sorrow rising up in her. She bites off her tears. “I just wanted you to know … you didn’t die in vain, Josh.… You taught me something important … you made a difference in my life.”

Lilly looks down at the dirty white sand beneath her knees and she refuses to cry. “You taught me not to be scared anymore.” She mutters this to herself, to the ground, to the cold wind. “We don’t have that luxury these days … so from now on … I’m ready.”

Her voice trails off, and she kneels there for the longest time, unaware that her right hand has been digging into the side of her leg through her jeans, hard enough to break the skin and draw blood.

“I’m ready…”

*   *   *

The turning of the New Year closes in.

Late one night, beset with the melancholy mood of the season, the man known as the Governor locks himself into the back room of his second-floor apartment with a bottle of expensive French champagne and a galvanized pail brimming with an assortment of human bodily organs.

The tiny zombie chained to the wall across the laundry room sputters and snarls at the sight of him. Her once cherubic face now chiseled with rigor mortis, her flesh as yellow as rotten Stilton, she peels her lips back away from rows of blackened baby teeth. The laundry room with its bare bulbs hanging down and exposed fiberglass insulation—impregnated now with her stench—reeks of foul, infected oils and molds.

“Calm down, sweetheart,” the man with several names murmurs softly as he sits down on the floor in front of her, setting the bottle down on one side of him and the bucket on the other. He pulls a latex surgical glove from his pocket and works his right hand into it. “Daddy’s got some more goodies for you, keep your tummy full.”

He fishes a slimy, purplish-brown lobe from the bucket of entrails and tosses it to her.

Little Penny Blake pounces on the human kidney that has landed with a wet splat on the floor in front of her, her chain stretching to its limit with a clank. She clutches the organ with both of her little hands and gobbles the human tissue with feral abandon until the bloody bile runs between her tiny fingers and paints her face with a stain the consistency of chocolate sauce.

“Happy New Year, sweetheart,” the Governor says and pries at the champagne cork. The cork resists. He worries at it with his thumbs until the thing pops, and a stream of golden bubbly percolates over the rim and onto the worn tiles. The Governor has no idea if it is actually New Year’s Eve. He knows it’s imminent … might as well be tonight.

He stares at the puddle of champagne spreading on the floor, the tiny foam of carbonation vanishing into the seams of grout. He finds himself casting his thoughts back to New Year’s celebrations of his childhood.

In the old days he looked forward to New Year’s Eve for months. Back in Waynesboro he and his buddies would get a whole pig delivered on the thirtieth and start it slow-roasting in the ground behind his parents’ place, lining the hole with bricks—Hawaiian luau style—and they would have a two-day feast. The local bluegrass band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, would play all night long, and Philip would get really good weed, and they would party through the first and Philip would get laid and have a grand old time with—

The Governor blinks. He cannot remember if Philip Blake used to do this on New Year’s Eve or if it was Brian Blake who did this. He cannot remember where one brother ends and the other begins. He stares at the floor, blinking, the champagne reflecting a dull, milky, distorted reflection of his own face, the handlebar mustache as dark as lampblack now, the eyes deep set and glinting with cinders of something like madness. He looks at himself and sees Philip Blake staring back. But something is wrong. Philip can also see a ghostly overlay superimposed across his face, an ashen, frightened simulacrum called “Brian.”

Penny’s watery, garbled feeding noises fade in his ears, drifting far away, and Philip takes his first hit of champagne. The gulp burns his throat as it goes down cold and astringent. The taste of it reminds him of better times. It reminds him of holiday celebrations, family reunions, loved ones coming together after a long estrangement. It tears him apart inside. He knows who he is: He’s the Governor, he’s Philip Blake, the man who gets things done.

But.

But …

Brian starts to cry. He drops the bottle, and more champagne spills across the tiles, seeping under Penny, who is oblivious to the invisible war going on at the moment within the mind of her caretaker. Brian shuts his eyes, the tears seeping out the corners of his eyelids and tracking down his face in snotty runnels.

He cries for those New Year’s Eves gone by, those happy moments between friends … and brothers. He cries for Penny, and he cries for her woeful condition, for which he blames himself. He cannot block out the flash-frame image burned into the retina of his mind’s eye: Philip Blake lying in a cold, bloody heap next to a girl on the edge of the woods north of Woodbury.

While Penny feeds, slurping and smacking her dead lips, and Brian softly sobs, an unexpected noise comes from across the room.

Somebody is knocking on the Governor’s door.

*   *   *

It takes a while for the noise to register, the sound of knocking coming in a series of small bursts—hesitant, tentative—and it goes on for quite a while before Philip Blake realizes somebody is out there in the hallway banging on his door.

The identity crisis ceases immediately, the curtain in the Governor’s brain sweeping back in place with the abruptness of a power blackout.

It is, in fact, Philip who stands, removes his surgical gloves, brushes himself off, wipes his mucusy chin with the sleeve of his sweater, pulls on his stovepipe boots, brushes his long obsidian locks from his eyes, sniffs back his emotion, and exits the laundry room, locking the door behind him.

It is Philip who crosses the living room with his trademark strut. Heart rate slowing, lungs filling with oxygen, his consciousness fully transformed back into the Governor—his eyes clear and sharp—he answers the door on the fifth series of knocks. “What the hell is so goddamn important at this hour that you can’t—”

Not fully recognizing the woman standing outside the door, he stops himself. He had expected one of his men—Gabe or Bruce or Martinez—coming to bother him with some minor fire to be put out or some horseshit drama to be settled among the restless townspeople.

“Is this a bad time?” Megan Lafferty purrs with a dreamy tilt of her head, leaning against the doorjamb, the blouse under her denim jacket unbuttoned and showing generous amounts of cleavage.

The Governor pins her with his unwavering gaze. “Honey, I don’t know what game you’re running down right now but I’m in the middle of something.”

“Just thought you might need a little company,” she says with faux innocence. She looks like a caricature of a tart, her wine-colored curls mussed and hanging down in suggestive tendrils across her drugged features. She wears too much makeup and appears almost clownlike. “But I totally understand if you’re busy.”

The Governor lets out a sigh. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Something tells me you ain’t here to borrow a cup of sugar.”

Megan throws a glance over her shoulder. The jitters show on her face, in the way her gaze shifts back and forth from the shadows of the empty corridor to the doorway, in the way she holds one of her arms against her side, compulsively stroking the Chinese character tattooed on her elbow. Nobody ever comes up here. The Governor’s private quarters are off-limits to even Gabe and Bruce.

“I just—I thought—I—” she stutters.

“No reason to be afraid, darlin’,” the Governor says at last.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Might as well c’mon inside,” he says and takes her by the arm. “Before you catch your death.”

He pulls her inside and secures the door with a click. The sound of the bolt clanking home makes her jump. Her breathing quickens, and the Governor cannot help but notice the rise and fall of her surprisingly fulsome breasts underneath her décolletage, her hourglass figure, her generous hips. This little gal is ripe for breeding. The Governor searches the back of his mind for the last time he used a condom. Did he stock up? Did he have any left in his medicine cabinet? “Get you a drink?”

“Sure.” Megan gazes around the spartan furnishings of the living room—the carpet remnants, the mismatched chairs and sofa pulled off the back of a Salvation Army truck. For the briefest instant she frowns, turning up her nose, probably registering the odors permeating the place from the laundry room. “Y’all got any vodka?”

The Governor gives her a grin. “I think we might be able to come up with some.” He goes over to the cabinet next to the shuttered front window. He digs out a bottle, pours a few fingers in a couple of paper cups. “Got some orange juice around here somewhere,” he murmurs, finding a half-empty can of juice.

He comes back over to her with the drinks. She slugs hers down in one frantic gulp. She looks as though she’s been lost in the desert for days and this is her first taste of liquid. She wipes her mouth and lets loose a little belch. “Excuse me … sorry.”

“You are just the cutest little thing,” the Governor says to her with a grin. “You know something, Bonnie Raitt ain’t got nothing on you.”

She looks at the floor. “Reason I dropped by, I was just wondering…”

“Yeah?”

“Guy at the food center told me you might have some weed, Demerol maybe?”

“Duane?”

She nods. “Said you might have some good shit.”

The Governor sips his drink. “Now I wonder how Duane would know such a thing.”

Megan shrugs. “Anyway, the thing is—”

“Why come to me?” The Governor fixes her with that dark stare. “Why not go to your buddy Bob? He’s got a whole medicine chest in that truck of his.”

Another shrug. “I don’t know, I was just thinking, you and me, we could like … make a trade.”

Now she looks up at him and bites her lower lip, and the Governor feels the blood rushing to his loins.

*   *   *

Megan rides him in the moonlight darkness of an adjacent room. Completely nude, filmed in a cold sweat, her hair matted to her face, she pistons up and down on his erection with the empty fury of a hobbyhorse on a carousel. She feels nothing other than the painful thrusting. She feels no fear, no emotion, no regret, no shame. Nothing. Just the mechanical gymnastics of sex.

All the lights are off in the room, the only illumination coming from the transom above the drapes, through which the silver light of a wintry moon shines down across the dust motes and dapples the bare wall behind the Governor’s secondhand La-Z-Boy recliner.

The man sits sprawled on the armchair, his naked, lanky body writhing beneath Megan, his head tossing backward, the veins in his neck pulsing. But he makes very little sound, shows very little pleasure in the act. Megan can only hear the regular thrumming of his breath, as he thrusts angrily into her again and again.

The La-Z-Boy chair is positioned in a way that draws Megan’s peripheral attention to the wall behind her, even as she feels the man’s orgasm building, the climax imminent. No pictures hang in the room, no coffee tables, no shaded lamps—only the faint shimmer of rectangular objects lining the wall. At first Megan misidentifies these objects as TV sets, a configuration reminiscent of an electronics-store display. But what would this guy be doing with two dozen TV sets? Soon Megan realizes she’s hearing a low burble of white noise issuing from the objects.

“What the hell’s the matter?” the Governor grunts beneath her.

Megan has twisted around, her eyes adjusting to the moon shadows. She sees things moving inside the rectangular enclosures. The ghostly movement makes her stiffen, tightening up on his genitals. “Nothing … nothing … sorry … I just … I couldn’t help but—”

“Goddammit, woman!” He reaches over and flips on a battery-operated camp lantern, which sits on a crate next to the chair.

The light reveals rows of aquariums filled with severed human heads.

Megan lets out a gasp and slips off his cock, tumbling to the floor. She struggles to breathe. Lying prone on the damp carpet, her body rashing with gooseflesh, she gapes at the glass enclosures. In neatly stacked containers of fluid the zombified faces twitch and tic on ragged stumps, mouths palpitating like oxygen-starved fish, their milky eyes rolling around sightlessly in the watery capsules.

“I haven’t finished!” The Governor pounces on her, rolls her over, yanks her legs open. He’s still hard and enters her violently, the painful friction sending bolts of agony up her spine. “Hold still, goddammit!”

Megan sees a familiar face within the confines of the last tank on the left, and the sight of it turns her to stone. She lies supine on the floor, thunderstruck, her head turned sideways as she gapes in horror at that narrow face engulfed in bubbles in that last aquarium, as the Governor mercilessly plunges into her. She recognizes the peroxide-blond hair suspended in the fluid, forming a seaweedlike corona around the boyish features, the slack mouth, the long lashes, and the pointy button nose.

The recognition of Scott Moon’s severed head coincides with the hot gush inside her as the Governor finally finishes his business.

Something deep inside Megan Lafferty crumbles apart as permanently and irreparably as a sand castle collapsing under the weight of a wave.

*   *   *

A moment later the Governor says, “You can get up now, honey … clean yourself up.”

He says this to the woman without any rancor or contempt, as a proctor might inform a classroom at the end of a test that it’s time to put down the pencils.

Then he sees her gaping at the aquarium containing Scott Moon’s head, and he realizes this is a moment of truth, an opportunity, a critical juncture in the evening’s festivities. A decisive man like Philip Blake always knows when to look for opportunities. He knows when to take advantage of a superior position. He never hesitates, never backs off, never shies away from dirty work.

The Governor reaches down and finds the elastic waistband of his underwear—which is bunched around his ankles—and pulls his briefs back up and over himself. He stands and gazes down at the woman curled into a fetal position on his floor. “C’mon, honey … let’s go get you cleaned up and have a little talk, you and me.”

Megan buries her face in the floor and mutters, “Please don’t hurt me.”

The Governor leans down and applies a pinch grip to the nape of her neck—nothing intense, just an attention grabber—and says, “I’m not going to ask you again … get your ass in the bathroom.”

She struggles to her feet, holding herself as though she might burst apart at any moment.

“This way, honey.” He roughly clutches her bare arm as he ushers her across the room, out the doorway, and into an adjacent bathroom.

Standing in the doorway, watching her, the Governor feels bad about manhandling her but he also knows Philip Blake would not let up at a time like this. Philip would do what has to be done, he would be strong and resolute; and the part of the Governor that used to be called “Brian” has to follow through with this.

Megan hunches over the sink and picks up the washcloth with trembling hands. She runs water and tentatively wipes herself and trembles. “I swear to God I won’t tell anybody,” she mutters through her tears. “I just want to go home … just want to be alone.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” the Governor says to her from the doorway.

“I won’t tell—”

“Look at me, honey.”

“I won’t—”

“Calm down. Take a deep breath. And look at me. Megan, I said look at me.”

She looks up at him, her chin quivering, tears tracking down her cheeks.

He looks at her. “You’re with Bob now.”

“I’m sorry … what?” She wipes her eyes. “I’m what?”

“You’re with Bob,” he says. “You remember Bob Stookey, guy you came here with?”

She nods.

“You’re with him now. You understand? From now on you’re with him.”

Again she slowly nods.

“Oh and one more thing,” the Governor adds softly, almost as an afterthought. “Tell anyone about any of this … and your pretty little head goes in the tank next to the stoner.”

*   *   *

Minutes after Megan Lafferty makes her exit, vanishing into the shadows of the corridor, shivering and hyperventilating as she pulls on her coat, the Governor retires to the side room. He flops down on his La-Z-Boy and sits facing the matrix of fish tanks.

He sits there for quite a while, staring at the tanks, feeling empty. Muffled groans drift through the empty rooms behind him. The thing that was once a little girl is hungry again. Nausea begins to creep up the Governor’s gorge, clenching his insides and making his eyes water. He begins to shake. A current of terror over what he’s done crackles through him, turning his tendons to ice.

A moment later he lurches forward, slipping off the chair, falling on his knees, and roaring vomit. What is left of his dinner sluices across the filthy carpet. On his hands and knees he upchucks the remaining contents of his stomach, then sits back against the foot of the chair, gasping for breath.

A part of him—that deeply buried part known as “Brian”—feels the tide of revulsion drowning him. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. And yet he forces himself to keep gazing at the bloated, waterlogged faces staring back at him, bobbing and spewing bubbles in the tanks.

He wants to look away. He wants to flee the room and get away from these twitching, gurgling, dismembered heads. But he knows he must keep staring until his senses are numbed. He needs to be strong.

He needs to be prepared for what is to come.

FIFTEEN

On the west side of town, within the walled area, inside a second-story apartment near the post office, Bob Stookey hears a knock. Sitting up against the headboard of a brass bed, he puts down his dog-eared paperback book—a Louis L’Amour western called The Outlaws of Mesquite—and steps into his scuffed loafers. He pulls on his pants. He has some trouble with the zipper, his hands fumbling.

After drinking himself insensate earlier that evening, he still feels wonky and disconnected. The dizziness tugs at his focus and his stomach lurches, as he staggers out of the room and crosses the apartment to the side door, which opens out onto the darkness of a wooden landing at the top of a staircase. Bob belches and swallows bile as he pushes the door open.

“Bob … something horrible has … Oh, God, Bob,” Megan Lafferty sobs from the shadows of the staircase. Her face wet and drawn, her eyes sunken and red, she looks as though she’s about to shatter apart like a glass figurine. She trembles in the cold, holding the collar of her denim jacket tight against the bitter winds.

“Come in, darlin’, c’mon in,” Bob says, pushing the door wider, his heart beating a little faster. “What in God’s name happened?”

Megan staggers into the kitchen. Bob takes her by the arms and helps her over to a hard chair canted next to the cluttered dining table. She flops down in her chair and tries to speak but the sobs won’t let her. Bob kneels by her chair, stroking her shoulder as she cries. She buries her face in his chest and cries.

Bob holds her. “It’s okay, darlin’ … whatever it is … we’ll figure it out.”

She moans—gut shot with anguish and horror—her tears soaking his sleeveless undershirt. He cradles her head, stroking her damp curls. After an agonizing moment, she looks up at him. “Scott’s dead.”

“What!”

“I saw him, Bob.” She speaks in hitching gasps, her sobs shuddering through her. “He’s … he’s dead and … he’s turned into one of those things.”

“Easy, darlin’, take a breath and try to tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know what happened!”

“Where did you see him?”

She sniffs back the gasps and then tells Bob in broken, half-formed sentences about the severed heads bobbing in the darkness.

“Where did you see this?”

She hyperventilates. “In the … over in … in the Governor’s place.”

“The Governor’s place? You saw Scott at the Governor’s place?”

She nods and nods. She tries to explain but the words are caught in her throat.

Bob strokes her arm. “Darlin,’ what were you doing in the Governor’s place?”

She tries to speak. The sobs return. She buries her face in her hands.

“Let me get you some water,” Bob says at last. He hurries over to the sink and runs water into a plastic cup. Half the homes in Woodbury have no utilities, no heat or power or running water. The lucky few who still have these amenities are members of the Governor’s inner circle—those to whom the makeshift power structure has bestowed perks. Bob has become a sort of sentimental favorite, and his private quarters reflect this status. Littered with empty bottles and food wrappers, tins of pipe tobacco and girlie magazines, warm blankets and electronic gadgets, the apartment has taken on the look of a shabby man-cave.

Bob brings the water over to Megan, and she gulps it from the plastic cup, some of it seeping out the sides of her mouth and soaking her jacket. Bob gently helps her remove her coat as she finishes the water. He looks away when he sees the front of her blouse buttoned haphazardly, open at the navel, a series of red blotches and deep scratches running down the length of her sternum between her pale breasts. Her bra is askew and one of her nipples shows prominently.

“Here, darlin’,” he says, turning toward the linen closet in the front hall. He retrieves a blanket, comes back and tenderly wraps it around her. She gets her crying under control until the sobs have subsided into a series of jerky, shuddering breaths. She stares downward. Her tiny hands lie limp and upturned in her lap, as though she has forgotten how to use them.

“I never should have…” she starts to explain and then chokes back the words. Her nose runs and she wipes it. Her eyes close. “What have I done … Bob … what the fuck is wrong with me?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he says softly and puts his arm around her. “I’m with you now, honey. I’ll take care of you.”

She settles down in his arms. Soon she is leaning her head on his shoulder and breathing more regularly. Soon her breaths are coming in low, thick wheezes, as though she might be falling asleep. Bob recognizes the symptoms of shock. Her flesh feels ice-cold in his arms. He wraps the blanket tighter. She nuzzles his neck.

Bob takes deep breaths, waves of emotion slamming through him.

Holding the woman tightly, he gropes for words. His mind races with contrary feelings. He is repulsed by Megan’s story of severed heads and Scott Moon’s dismembered corpse, as well as the fact that she paid the Governor such a questionable visit in the first place. But Bob is also overcome with unrequited desire. The nearness of her lips, the soft whisper of her breath on his collarbone, and the luster of her wild-strawberry roan curls brushing his chin—all of it intoxicates Bob faster and more profusely than a case of twelve-year-old bourbon. He fights the urge to kiss the top of her head.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he murmurs softly in her ear. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Oh, Bob…” Her voice sounds fuzzy, maybe still slightly high. “Bob…”

“Gonna be okay,” he says in her ear, stroking her hair with his greasy, gnarled hand.

She cranes her head up and plants a kiss on his grizzled jawline.

Bob closes his eyes and lets the wave pour over him.

*   *   *

They sleep together that night, and at first Bob panics at the prospect of being in such close and intimate proximity with Megan for such a long period of time. Bob has not had sex with a woman in eleven years, not since he and his late wife, Brenda, stopped having relations. Decades of drink have put the kibosh on Bob’s virility. But desire still glows within him like a smoldering ember—and he wants Megan so badly tonight he can taste it like Everclear in the back of his throat, like a finger prodding the base of his spine.

The two of them sleep restlessly in each other’s arms, tangled in sweaty blankets on the double bed in the back room. Much to Bob’s relief, they do not even remotely come close to having sex.

Throughout the night, Bob’s feverish thoughts vacillate between half-formed dreams of making love to Megan Lafferty on a desert island, surrounded by zombie-infested waters, and sudden moments of bleary wakefulness in the shadows of that second-floor bedroom. Bob marvels at the miracle of hearing Megan’s arrhythmic breathing next to him, the warmth of her hip nested against his belly, the wonder of her hair in his face, her musky-sweet scent filling his senses. In a strange way he feels whole for the first time since the plague broke out. He feels an oddly invigorating sense of hope. The troubling undercurrents of suspicion and mixed emotions about the Governor melt away in the dark limbo of that bedroom, and the momentary peace that washes over Bob Stookey eventually lulls him into a deep sleep.

Just after dawn he comes awake with a start to a piercing shriek.

At first he thinks he’s still dreaming. The scream comes from somewhere outside, and it registers in Bob’s ears as a ghostly echo, as if the tail end of a nightmare has just brushed across his waking state. In his half-conscious daze he reaches over for Megan and finds her side of the bed empty. The blankets are bunched at his feet. Megan is gone. He sits up with a jolt.

“Megan, honey?”

He gets out of bed and starts toward the door, the floor like ice on his bare feet, when another shriek pierces the winter winds outside his apartment. He does not notice the overturned chair in the kitchen, the drawers open, the cabinet doors agape, the signs of someone rifling through his belongings.

“Megan?”

He races toward the side door, which is partially ajar and banging in the wind.

“Megan!”

He pushes through the doorway and stumbles out onto the second-floor landing, blinking at the harsh, overcast light and the cold wind in his face.

“MEGAN!!”

At first he cannot take in all the movement and commotion around the building. He sees people gathered down below the stairs, across the street, and along the edge of the post office parking lot—maybe a dozen or so—and they’re all pointing at Bob or perhaps at something on the roof. It’s hard to tell. Heart hammering, Bob starts down the stairs. He does not notice the coil of towrope wound around the pilasters of the landing until he reaches the bottom of the stairs.

Bob turns and goes as cold and still as granite. “Oh, Lord, no,” he utters, gazing up at the body dangling from the landing, swaying in the wind, turning lazily. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…”

Megan hangs by a makeshift noose around her neck, her face as discolored and livid as antique porcelain.

*   *   *

Lilly Caul hears the commotion outside her window above the dry cleaner, and drags herself out of bed. She throws open the shade and sees townspeople gathered outside their doorways, some of them pointing off toward the post office with anxious expressions, speaking under their breaths. Lilly senses that something terrible has happened, and when she sees the Governor striding quickly along the sidewalk in his long coat with his goons, Gabe and Bruce, at his side, snapping ammo magazines into assault weapons, she dresses quickly.

It takes her less than three minutes to throw on her clothes, hustle down the back stairs, make her way down an alley between two buildings, and cross the two and a half blocks to the post office.

The sky churns with menacing clouds, the wind spitting sleet, and by the time Lilly sees the crowd milling about the base of Bob’s stairs, she knows she’s seeing the aftermath of something awful. She can tell by the expressions on the faces of the onlookers, and she can tell by the way the Governor is talking to Bob off to the side, each man gazing at the ground as they talk softly to each other, their faces screwed up with anxiety and grim resolve.

Within the circle of onlookers, Gabe and Bruce kneel on the pavement next to a sheet-covered lump, and the sight of that shrouded heap stops Lilly cold. She stands on the periphery, staring, a trickle of icy dread running down her spine. The sight of another pall-covered body on a street corner strums a terrible chord deep within her.

“Lilly?”

She turns and sees Martinez standing next to her, his leather jacket crisscrossed with a bandolier of bullets. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “She was a friend of yours, wasn’t she?”

“Who is it?”

“Nobody told you?”

“Is it Megan?” Lilly pushes her way past Martinez, shoving aside several onlookers. “What happened?”

Bob Stookey steps into her path, blocking her progress, gently taking her by the shoulders. “Lil, wait, there’s nothing you can do.”

“What happened, Bob?” Lilly blinks at the sting in her eyes, the heavy fist in her chest. “Did a walker get her? Let me go!”

Bob holds fast on her shoulders. “No, ma’am. That’s not what happened.” Lilly notices Bob’s eyes, raw and red rimmed, cratered out with grief. His face trembles with anguish. “These fellas will take care of her.”

“Is she—”

“She’s gone, Lil.” Bob looks down and softly shakes his head. “Took her own life.”

“What— What happened?”

Still looking down, Bob mumbles something about not being sure.

“Let me go, Bob!” Lilly pushes her way through the row of onlookers.

“Whoa! Whoa—slow down there, sister!” Gabe stands up and blocks Lilly’s path. The heavyset man with the bullish neck and flattop haircut holds on to Lilly’s arm. “I know she was a friend of yours—”

“Let me see her!” Lilly yanks her arm free but Gabe grabs her from behind and puts her in a firm shoulder lock. Lilly wriggles furiously. “LET GO OF ME, GODDAMMIT!”

Ten feet away, on the seared brown grass of the parkway, Bruce, the tall black man with the shaved head, kneels by the sheet-draped body, loading a .45 caliber semiautomatic with a fresh magazine. His face grim and set, he breathes deeply, preparing to complete some distasteful task. He ignores the commotion behind him.

“LET GO!” Lilly keeps writhing in the portly man’s grip, her gaze locked on the body.

“Calm down,” Gabe hisses. “You’re making this harder than it has to—”

“Let her go!”

The deep, cigarette-cured voice comes from behind Gabe, and both Lilly and the heavyset man freeze as though startled by an ultrasonic whistle.

They glance over their shoulders and see the Governor standing inside the circle of onlookers with his hands on his hips, his twin pearl-handled army .45s thrust into either side of his belt, gunslinger-style, his long rock-star hair—as black as India ink—bound in a ponytail and tossing in the wind. The crow’s-feet around his eyes, and the lines chiseling his sunken jowls, deepen and crease and grow more prominent as his expression darkens. “It’s okay, Gabe … let the lady say good-bye to her friend.”

Lilly rushes over to the corpse on the ground, kneels, and stares at the shrouded heap, putting her hand to her mouth as though holding in the tide of emotions rising in her. Bruce thumbs the safety down on his semiauto, and awkwardly backs away, standing, gazing down at Lilly as the crowd around them quiets down.

The Governor comes over and stands a respectful five feet away.

Lilly peels back the sheet and clenches her teeth, as she looks at the purplish-gray face of the woman that used to be Megan Lafferty. Eyes swollen shut, jaw set with rigor mortis, the bloodless china-doll face looks as though it has shattered into a million hairline fractures, the dark capillaries apparent now in the early stages of decomposition. The face is ghastly but also excruciatingly poignant to Lilly, wrenching her memories back to those crazy days at Sprayberry High School when the two girls would get high in the restroom and climb up on the school’s roof and throw pebbles at the jocks running drills behind the basketball courts. Megan had been Lilly’s best gal-pal for years, and despite the girl’s faults—and there had been many—Lilly still thinks of her as a best friend. Now Lilly cannot stop staring at this unrecognizable vestige of her feisty friend.

Lilly gasps as Megan’s swollen, purple-lidded eyes suddenly pop open, revealing milk-glass pupils.

Lilly does not move as the black man with the shaved head crowds in, the .45 poised to fire a direct blast into the cadaver’s head. But before the hammer has a chance to fall, the sound of the Governor’s voice calls out: “Hold your fire, Bruce!”

Bruce glances over his shoulder, as the Governor takes a step closer, and then says very softly, “Let her do it.”

Lilly looks up at the man in the long coat, blinks, and says nothing. Her heart feels like ash, her blood running cold in her veins. Way off in the distance the sky rumbles with thunder.

The Governor steps closer. “Go ahead, Bruce. Give her the gun.”

An endless moment passes, and somehow the gun ends up in Lilly’s hand. Beneath her, the thing that was once Megan Lafferty convulses and tenses on the ground, its nervous system dieseling, its mouth peeling away from moldering gray teeth. Lilly can barely see through her tears.

“Put your friend down, Lilly,” the Governor urges softly from behind her.

Lilly raises the gun. Megan’s neck cranes upward toward her like a fetus emerging from its embryonic fluid, teeth clacking hungrily. Lilly puts the muzzle against the monster’s brow.

“Do it, Lilly. Put her out of her misery.”

Lilly closes her eyes. The trigger pad burns her finger like an icicle. When she opens her eyes again the thing on the ground lunges at her, the rancid teeth going for Lilly’s jugular.

It happens so quickly it almost fails to register in Lilly’s brain.

The blast rings out.

Lilly topples backward, falling on her ass, the .45 slipping out of her hand as the top of Megan’s cranium erupts in dark red mist, painting the sidewalk adjacent to the parkway in a spray of brain matter. The reanimated corpse sags and lies still on the tangled shroud—its sharklike eyes fixed on the dark sky.

For a moment Lilly lies supine on the ground, staring at the clouds, gripped in a state of confusion. Who fired the kill shot? Lilly never pulled the trigger. Who did the deed? Lilly blinks away her tears and manages to focus on the Governor standing over her, his grave expression fixed on something to his right.

Bob Stookey stands over the corpse of Megan Lafferty with a .38 police special still clutched in his hand, his shooting arm dangling at his side, a thin wisp of gun smoke still curling out of the barrel.

The desolation on Bob’s weathered, deeply lined face is heartbreaking.

*   *   *

Those next few days, nobody pays much attention to the changing weather.

Bob is too busy drinking himself to death to notice anything as trivial as weather fronts, and Lilly occupies herself arranging a proper burial for Megan in a plot next to Josh. The Governor spends most of his time preparing for the next big battle in the racetrack arena. He has big plans for the next round of shows, integrating zombies into the gladiatorial matches.

Gabe and Bruce busy themselves with the nasty job of hacking up the dead guardsmen in an auxiliary warehouse beneath the track. The Governor needs body parts to feed the growing menagerie of zombies being housed in a secret room deep in the cinder-block catacombs. Gabe and Bruce enlist some of the younger men from Martinez’s crew to work the chain saws in the festering, cavernous abattoir next to the morgue, rendering human remains into meat.

Meanwhile, the January rains move into the area with slow, insidious menace.

At first, the outer bands of the storm system cause very little alarm—a few scattered showers swelling the storm sewers and icing the streets—with temperatures hovering above freezing. But the distant lightning and roiling black skies on the western horizon begin to worry people. Nobody knows with any degree of certainty—nor will they ever know—why this winter turns out to be anomalous for Georgia. The state’s relatively mild winters can be occasionally shattered by torrential rains, a nasty snowfall or two, or an ice storm here and there, but no one is prepared for what is about to sweep down across the fruit belt on a low-pressure cell slamming in from Canada.

The National Weather Service out of Peachtree City—still limping along on generators and shortwave radios—issues an early warning that week on as many frequencies as they can spark. But very few listeners benefit from the news. Only a handful of souls hear the frantic voice of the harried meteorologist, Barry Gooden, ranting about the blizzard of ’93 and the floods of 2009.

According to Gooden, the bitter cold front that will smash down upon the American South over the next twenty-four hours will collide with the moist, mild, warm surface temperatures of central Georgia and very likely make these other winter storms seem like passing sprinkles. With seventy-mile-an-hour winds in the forecast, as well as dangerous lightning and a mixture of rain and sleet, the storm promises to play unprecedented havoc with the plague-ridden state. Not only will the volatile swings in temperature threaten to turn the gulley washers into blizzards, but—as the state learned only a couple of years earlier, and now with the advent of the plague—Georgians are woefully unprepared for the ravages of flooding.

A few years back, a major storm pushed the Chattahoochee River over its banks and into the highly populated areas around Roswell, Sandy Springs, and Marietta. Mudslides tore homes from their foundations. Highways lay underwater and the catastrophe resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. But this year—this monster forming over the Mississippi, unfurling at an alarming rate of speed—promises to be off the charts.

The first signs of extraordinary weather roar into town that Friday afternoon.

By nightfall the rain is coming down at a forty-five-degree angle on fifty-mile-an-hour gusts, falling in sheets against Woodbury’s barricade, making defunct high-tension wires across the center of town sing and snap like bullwhips. Volleys of lightning turn the dark alleys to silver flickering photographic negatives, and the gutters spill over across Main Street. Most of Woodbury’s inhabitants hunker down inside for the duration … leaving the sidewalks and boarded storefronts deserted …

… mostly deserted, that is, except for a group of four residents, who brave the rains in order to gather surreptitiously in an office beneath the racetrack.

*   *   *

“Leave the light off, Alice, if you don’t mind,” a voice says from the shadows behind a desk. The dull glimmer of wire-framed spectacles floating in the darkness is the only thing that identifies Dr. Stevens. The muffled drumming of the storm punctuates the silence.

Alice nods and stands near the light switch, nervously rubbing her cold hands against each other. Her lab coat looks ghostly in the gloomy, windowless office that Stevens has been using for a storage room.

“You called this meeting, Lilly,” murmurs Martinez from the opposite corner of the room, where he sits on a stool, smoking a cheroot—the slender cigar’s glowing tip like a firefly in the darkness. “What are you thinking?”

Lilly paces in the shadows near a row of metal filing cabinets. She wears one of Josh’s army surplus raincoats, which is so big on her she looks like a child playing dress-up. “What am I thinking? I’m thinking I’m not going to live like this anymore.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning this place is rotten to the core, it’s sick, and this Governor dude is the sickest one of all, and I don’t see things getting any better in the foreseeable future.”

“And…?”

She shrugs. “I’m looking at my options.”

“Which are?”

She paces some more, choosing her words carefully. “Packing up and taking off by myself seems suicidal … but I’d be willing to take my chances out there if it was the only way to get away from this shit.”

Martinez looks at Stevens, who is across the room, wiping his eyeglasses with a cloth and listening intently. The two men share an uneasy glance. Finally Stevens speaks up: “You mentioned options.”

Lilly stops pacing. She looks at Martinez. “These guys you work with on the fence … you trust them?”

Martinez takes a drag off the cheroot, and smoke forms a wreath around his face. “More or less.”

“Some more and some less?”

He shrugs. “You could say that, yeah.”

“But these guys you trust more than the others, would they back you up in a pinch?”

Martinez stares at her. “What are we talking about here, Lilly?”

Lilly takes a deep breath. She has no idea if she can trust these people, but they also seem like the only sane individuals in Woodbury. She decides to play her hand. After a long pause, she says very softly, “I’m talking about regime change.”

Another series of apprehensive glances pass between Martinez, Stevens, and Alice. The edgy silence throbs with the muffled noise of the storm. The winds have kicked up even higher, and thunder rattles the foundation with increasing frequency.

At last the doctor says, “Lilly, I don’t think you know what you’re—”

“No!” she interrupts him, looking at the floor, speaking in a cold, flat monotone. “No more history lessons, Doc. We’re past that now. Past playing it safe. This dude Philip Blake has to go … and you know it as well as I do.”

Over their heads a volley of thunder reverberates. Stevens lets out an anguished sigh. “You’re going to buy yourself a gig in the gladiator ring, you keep talking like that.”

Unfazed, Lilly looks up at Martinez. “I don’t know you very well, Martinez, but you seem like a fairly even-tempered kind of guy … kind of guy who could lead a revolt, get things back on track.”

Martinez stares at her. “Slow down, kiddo … you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

“Whatever … you don’t have to listen to me … I don’t care anymore.” She makes eye contact with each of them, one at a time. “But you all know I’m right. Things are going to get a lot worse around here, we don’t do something about this. You want to turn me in for treason, fine, go ahead. Whatever. But we may never get another chance to take this freak down. And I for one am not going to sit on my hands and do nothing while this place goes down in flames and more and more innocent people die. You know I’m right about this.” She looks back down at the floor. “The Governor has to go.”

Another barrage of thunder rattles the ribs of the building, as the silence in the storage room stretches. Finally Alice speaks up.

“She’s right, you know.”

SIXTEEN

The next day, the storm—now a constant bombardment of driving rain and freezing sleet—lashes southeastern Georgia with massive force. Telephone poles buckle under the weight of the onslaught, crashing down on highways choked with abandoned cars. Culverts swell and gush, flooding deserted farms, while the higher elevations are coated with treacherous layers of ice. Eleven miles southeast of Woodbury, in a wooded hollow adjacent to Highway 36, the storm hits the largest public cemetery in the southern United States.

The Edward Nightingale Memorial Gardens and Columbarium lines a mile-long bluff just south of Sprewell State Park, and features tens of thousands of historic markers. The Gothic chapel and visitor center stand at the eastern end of the property, within a stone’s throw of the Woodland Medical Center—one of the state’s largest hospitals. Filled with freshly-turned zombies, abandoned by the staff since the early weeks of the plague, the complex of buildings—including the morgue at Woodland, as well as the enormous labyrinth of funeral parlors underneath the sublevels of Nightingale—teems with reanimated dead, some of them fresh corpses marked for autopsies and burials, others recent DOAs tucked into drawers, all of them trapped, up to this point, in their sealed chambers.

At 4:37 P.M. Eastern Standard Time that Saturday, the nearby Flint River reaches flood levels. In photo-strobe flashes of lightning, the violent currents crash over the banks, razing farms, toppling billboards, and tossing abandoned vehicles across the farm roads like toys scattered by an angry child.

The mudslides start within an hour. The entire northern slope along the borders of the cemetery gives way, sliding toward the Flint on a slimy, brown, mealy wave—ripping graves from the ground, flinging antique caskets across the hill. Coffins break open and spill their ghastly contents into the ocean of mud and sleet and wind. Most of the ragged skeletons break apart like kindling. But many of the non-interred corpses—especially the ones who are still fresh and intact and able to crawl or scrabble—begin slithering toward high, dry land.

Ornate windows along the base of the Nightingale visitor center crack under the pressure of the floodtide, imploding, the gale-force winds doing the rest of the work, tearing sections off Gothic spires and shaving the tops of steeples and decapitating gabled rooftops. A quarter mile to the east, the rushing floodwaters hit the medical center hard, driving debris through weakened entryways and windows.

The zombies trapped inside the morgue pour out of jagged openings, many of them sucked into the currents by the violent wind and air pressure.

By five o’clock that day, a multitude of dead large enough to fill a necropolis—like a vast school of sea creatures washed onto a beach—gets deposited across the neighboring orchards and tobacco fields. They tumble, one over another, on the flood currents, some of them getting caught in trees, others tangling in floating farm implements. Some drift for miles underwater, flailing in the flickering dark with involuntary instinct and inchoate hunger. Thousands of them collect in the moraines and valleys and sheltered areas north of the highway, struggling to climb out of the mud in grotesque pantomimes of primordial man emerging from the Paleolithic soup.

Before the torrential rainstorm has passed—the brunt of it moving on toward the Eastern Seaboard that night—the population of dead now littering the countryside outnumbers the population of living residents, preplague, in the nearby city of Harrington, Georgia—which, according to the sign on Highway 36, totals 4,011 souls.

In the aftermath of this epochal storm, almost a thousand of these wayward corpses begin to coalesce into the largest herd yet witnessed since the advent of the plague. In the rain-swept darkness, the zombies slowly, awkwardly cluster and horde, until a massive throng has formed in the rolling fields between Crest Highway and Roland Road. The herd is so densely packed that from a distance the tops of their putrid heads might be mistaken for a dark, brackish, slow-moving flood tide unfurling across the land.

For no particular reason other than the inexplicable behavior of the dead—be it instinct, scent, pheromones, or random chance—the horde starts churning through the mud in a northwesterly direction, directly toward the closest population center in their path—the town called Woodbury—which lies a little over eight miles away.

*   *   *

The tail end of the storm leaves the farms and fields of southeastern Georgia inundated with vast, black pools of filthy standing water, the shallow sections turning to black ice, the higher areas seizing up in mud.

The weakening band of freezing rain moves through the area, icing the forests and hills around Woodbury in a glassine wonderland of glittering branches, icicle-festooned power lines, and crystalline paths—all of which would be beautiful in another time and place, another context void of plagues and desperate men.

That next day, the residents of Woodbury struggle to get the town back in working order. The Governor orders his work crews to raid a nearby dairy farm for salt blocks, which are brought back on flatbeds and broken into manageable crumbs with chain saws, then spread across roads and sidewalks. Sandbags are positioned on the south side of town, against the flooded railroad tracks, in an effort to keep the standing waters at bay. All day, under a sky the color of soot, the inhabitants mop and salt and shovel and scrape and shore up flooded nooks and crannies.

“The show must go on, Bob,” the Governor says late that afternoon, standing on the warning apron of the dirt racetrack, the calcium light blazing down through the mists overhead, the thrumming of generators like a dissonant drone of a bassoon orchestra. The air smells of gas fumes, alkali, and burning garbage.

The surface of the track ripples in the wind, a sea of mud as thick as porridge. The rains hit the arena hard, and now the infield shimmers in the stadium lights with two feet of murky standing water. The ice-filmed bleachers are mostly deserted, except for a small crew of workmen who toil with squeegees and shovels.

“Huh?” Bob Stookey sits slumped on a bleacher twenty feet behind the Governor.

Belching absently, his head lolled in a drunken stupor, Bob looks like a lost little boy. An empty bottle of Jim Beam lies on the ice-rimed steel bench next to him, another one—half full—loosely gripped in his greasy, numb hand. He has been drinking steadily for the past five days, ever since he ushered Megan Lafferty out of this world.

An incorrigible drunk can maintain intoxication better than the average person. Most casual drinkers reach their optimum level of drunkenness—that painless, numbed, convivial buzz that gives shy people the strength to socialize—for only fleeting moments before edging over into complete inebriation. Bob, on the other hand, can reach oblivion after about a quart of whiskey and maintain it for days.

But now, this moment, Bob Stookey has reached the twilight of his binge. After drinking a gallon a day, he has begun to regularly nod off, to lose his grip on reality, to hallucinate and black out for hours.

“I said the show must go on,” the Governor says a little louder, coming over to the chain-link fence separating himself and Bob. “These people are getting cabin fever, Bob. They need catharsis.”

“Damn straight,” Bob slurs in a spittle-clogged grunt. He can barely hold his head up. He gazes down through steel waffling at the Governor, who now stands only a couple of feet away, looking balefully up at Bob through the links of the cyclone fence.

In Bob’s feverish gaze, the Governor looks demonic in the cold Lucolux stadium lights, a silver halo appearing around the man’s slicked-back hair with its raven-feather ponytail. His breath comes out in puffs of white vapor, his Fu Manchu mustache twitching at the edges as he expounds, “Little winter storm’s not gonna keep us down, Bob. I got something in mind, gonna blow these people away. You just wait. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

“Sounds … good,” Bob utters, his head lolling forward, a dark shade drawing down over his vision.

“Tomorrow night, Bob.” The Governor’s face floats in Bob’s faltering vision, a ghostly spirit. “This is a teaching moment. From now on, things are gonna be different around here. Law and order, Bob. This’ll be the greatest learning opportunity ever. And a great show to boot. Gonna rock their fucking world. It’s all gonna come together in here, in this mud and shit. Bob? You with me? Bob, you okay? Stay with me, old fella.”

As Bob slips off the bleacher, crumbling to the ground in another blackout, the last image burned into his mind’s eye is the Governor’s face, fractured by the rusty geometric diamonds of the chain-link fence.

“Where the hell is Martinez, anyway?” The Governor glances over his shoulder. “Haven’t seen a trace of that asshole in hours.”

*   *   *

“Listen to me,” Martinez says, welding his gaze into the eyes of each conspirator, one by one, in the dim light of the railroad shed. The five men crouch down in a loose semicircle around Martinez, huddling in the back corner, the cobweb-draped shed as dark as a tomb. Martinez lights a cigarillo and smoke engulfs his handsome, cunning face. “You don’t ease a trap over a fucking cobra—you strike as fast as possible, as hard as possible.”

“When?” utters the youngest one, the one named Stevie. Crouched next to Martinez, the tall, lanky kid of mixed race wears a black silk roadie jacket and has a peach-fuzz mustache, and nervously blinks his long-lashed earnest eyes. Stevie’s outward innocence is belied by his ferocious aptitude at destroying zombies.

“Soon.” Martinez puffs his stogie. “I’ll let you know tonight.”

“Where?” asks another conspirator, an older man in a peacoat and scarf, who goes by the name of the Swede. His wild mop of blond hair, leathery face, and barrel chest, which is perpetually crossed with ammo bandoliers, give him the air of a French Resistance fighter in World War II.

Martinez looks at him. “I’ll let you know.”

The Swede lets out an exasperated sigh. “We’re putting our asses on the line here, Martinez. Seems like you could give us a few details, what we’re getting into.”

Another one speaks up, a black man in a down vest named Broyles. “There’s a reason he’s not giving us the details, Swede.”

“Yeah? Why is that?”

The black man levels his gaze on the Swede. “Margin of error.”

“Come again?”

The black man looks at Martinez. “Too much to lose, somebody gets nabbed before the thing goes down, gets tortured and shit.”

Martinez nods, smoking his cheroot. “Something like that … yeah.”

A fourth man, a former mechanic from Macon named Taggert, chimes in: “What about the bookends?”

“Bruce and Gabe?” Martinez says.

“Yeah … you think we’ll be able to flip them?”

Martinez takes another drag off the stogie. “What do you think?”

Taggert shrugs. “I don’t think they’ll ever go along with anything like this. Blake’s got them so far up his ass they gargle for him at night.”

“Exactly.” Martinez takes a deep breath. “That’s why we gotta take them out first.”

“You ask me,” Stevie mumbles, “most of the folks in this town got no complaints about the Governor.”

“He’s right,” the Swede concurs with a nervous nod. “I’d say ninety percent of these people actually like the son of a bitch, and they’re just fine with the way things are run around here. Just so the pantry stays full, the wall stays up, the show goes on … it’s like the Germans in the 1930s when fucking Adolf Hitler—”

“Okay, put a sock in it!” Martinez tosses his cigar to the cinder-strewn floor and snubs it out with the toe of his jackboot. “Listen to me … everybody.” He meets each man’s gaze as he speaks in a low monotone shot through with nervous tension. “This thing’s gonna happen, and it’s gonna happen quickly and decisively … otherwise we’re gonna end up in that slaughterhouse room getting chopped up for zombie food. He’s gonna have an accident. That’s all you need to know at this point. You want out, there’s the door. No hard feelings. Now’s your chance.” He softens a little. “You guys have been good workers, honest men … and trust don’t come easy around this place. You want to shake hands and pass on this thing, I got no problem with you. But do it now. Because once this thing goes down it ain’t gonna have no reboot button on it.”

Martinez waits.

Nobody says anything, nobody leaves.

*   *   *

That night, the temperature plummets, the winds kicking up out of the north. Chimneys spume with wood smoke across Woodbury’s main drag, the generators working overtime. To the west, the great arc lights over the racetrack remain burning, the final preparations being made for the big world premiere the next evening.

Alone in her place above the dry cleaner, Lilly Caul lays a pair of handguns and extra ammunition across her bedspread—two .22 caliber Ruger Lite semiautomatics, along with an extra magazine and a carton of 32-grain Stingers. Martinez gave her the weapons, along with a quick lesson on how to reload the clips.

She stands back and stares at the gold-plated pistols with a narrowing of her eyes. Her heart quickens, her throat drying with those old familiar feelings of panic and self-doubt. She pauses. She closes her eyes and wills the fear back down her throat. She opens her eyes and holds her right hand up and ponders it as though it belongs to someone else. Her hand does not shake. It is rock steady.

She will not get a minute of sleep this night or perhaps the next.

Pulling a large knapsack from beneath the bed, she packs the weapons, the ammunition, a machete, a flashlight, nylon cord, sleeping pills, duct tape, a can of Red Bull, a cigarette lighter, a roll of plastic tarp, fingerless gloves, binoculars, and an extra down vest. She zips the knapsack shut and shoves it back under the bed.

Less than twenty-four hours remain until the mission that will change the course of her life.

Lilly bundles up in a down coat, insulated boots, and a stocking cap. She checks her windup clock on her bedside table.

Five minutes later, at 11:45 p.m., she locks up her apartment and heads outside.

*   *   *

The town lies deserted in the late-night chill, the air acrid with the odors of sulfur and frozen salt. Lilly has to step gingerly over the iced sidewalks, her boot steps crunching loudly. She glances over her shoulder. The streets are empty. She makes her way around the post office building to Bob’s condo.

The wooden staircase from which Megan hung herself, ice-bound since the storm has passed, cracks and snaps as Lilly carefully climbs the risers.

She knocks on Bob’s door. No answer. She knocks again. Nothing. She whispers Bob’s name but gets no reply, no sound issuing from within. She tries the door and finds it unlocked. She lets herself in.

The dark kitchen sits in silence, the floor littered with broken dishes and crockery, puddles of spilled liquids. For a moment Lilly wonders if she should have brought a firearm. She scans the living room to her right, sees the overturned furniture and mounds of dirty laundry.

She finds a battery-operated lantern on a counter, grabs it, and flips it on. She walks deeper into the apartment and calls out, “Bob?”

The lantern light glistens off broken glass on the hallway floor. One of Bob’s medical satchels lies on the carpet, overturned, its contents spilled across the floor. The wall shimmers with something sticky. Lilly gulps down the fear and moves on.

“Anybody home?”

She peers into the bedroom at the end of the hall and finds Bob on the floor, in a sitting position, leaning against the unmade bed, his head lolled forward. Clad in a stained wifebeater and boxer shorts, his skinny legs as white as alabaster, he sits stone-still and for the briefest instant Lilly mistakes him for dead.

But then she sees his chest slowly rising and falling, and she notices the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam loosely clutched in his limp right hand.

“Bob!”

She rushes over to him and gently raises his head, leaning it against the bed. His greasy, thinning hair askew, his heavy-lidded eyes bloodshot and glassy, he mumbles something like, “Too many of ’em … they’re gonna—”

“Bob, it’s Lilly. Can you hear me? Bob? It’s me, it’s Lilly.”

His head lolls. “They’re gonna die … we don’t triage the worst of ’em…”

“Bob, wake up. You’re having a nightmare. It’s okay, I’m here.”

“Crawlin’ with maggots … too many … horrible…”

She rises to her feet, turns, and hurries out of the room. Across the hall, in the filthy bathroom, she runs some water in a dirty cup, and returns with the water. She gently takes the booze from Bob’s hand and throws it across the room, the bottle shattering against the wall, splattering the cabbage-rose wallpaper. Bob jerks at the noise.

“Here, drink this,” she says, and gives him a little. He coughs it down. His hands flail impotently as he coughs. He tries to focus on her but his eyes won’t cooperate. She strokes his feverish brow. “I know you’re hurting, Bob. It’s going to be okay. I’m here now. C’mon.”

She lifts him by the armpits, heaving the deadweight of his body up and onto the bed. She lays his head on the pillow. She positions his legs under the covers, then pulls the blanket up to his chin, speaking softly to him. “I know how hard it was on you, losing Megan and all, but you just have to hang in there.”

His brow furrows, a look of agony contorting his pale, deeply lined, drawn face. His eyes search the ceiling. He looks like a person who has been buried alive and is trying to breathe. He slurs his words. “I never wanted to … never … it wasn’t my idea to—”

“It’s okay, Bob. You don’t have to say anything.” She strokes his brow and speaks in a low, soft tone. “You did the right thing. It’s all gonna be okay. Things are gonna change around here, things are gonna get better.” She strokes his cheek, the grizzled flesh cold beneath her fingertips. She begins to softly sing. She sings Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” to him, just like old times.

Bob’s head settles back into the sweat-damp pillow, his breathing beginning to calm. His eyelids droop. Just like old times. He begins to snore. Lilly keeps singing long after he has drifted off.

“We’re taking him down,” Lilly says very softly to the sleeping man.

She knows he cannot hear a thing she is saying anymore, if he ever could. Lilly is speaking to herself now. Speaking to some deeply buried part of her psyche.

“It’s too late to turn back now … we’re gonna take him down…”

Lilly’s voice trails off, and she decides to find herself a blanket and spend the rest of that night at Bob’s bedside, waiting for the fateful day to dawn.

SEVENTEEN

The next morning, the Governor gets an early start on the last-minute preparations for the big show. He’s up before dawn, quickly getting dressed, making coffee, and feeding Penny the last of his supply of human entrails. By seven o’clock he is out on the street, on his way to Gabe’s apartment. The salt crew is already up and working on the sidewalks, the weather surprisingly mild considering the events of the last week. The mercury has risen into the lower fifties, and the sky has lightened, perhaps even stabilized, now overcast with a pale gray ceiling of clouds the color of cement. Very little wind disturbs the morning air, and the burgeoning day strikes the Governor as picture-perfect for an evening of new and improved gladiator matches.

Gabe and Bruce supervise the transfer of zombies held captive in the holding rooms beneath the track. It takes several hours to move the things into the staging areas up above, not only because the walkers are unruly beasts but also because the Governor wants to do it in secret. The unveiling of the Ring of Death has gotten the Governor’s show biz juices flowing and he wants the evening’s revelations to dazzle the crowd. He spends the bulk of that afternoon inside the arena, checking and double-checking the curtain drops, the public address system, the music cues, the lights, the gates, the locks, the security, and last but certainly not least, the competitors.

The two surviving guardsmen, Zorn and Manning, still wasting away in their underground holding cell, have lost most of their body fat and muscle tissue. Subsisting on scraps, stale crackers, and water for months, chained to the wall 24–7, they look like living skeletons and have very little of their sanity left intact. The only saving grace is their military training—as well as their rage—which, over the weeks of their torturous captivity, has festered and deepened and turned them into wild-eyed revenants hungry for vengeance.

In other words, if they can’t rip into the throats of their captors, then they’ll happily do the next best thing and rip into each other.

The guardsmen are the final piece to the puzzle, and the Governor waits until the last minute to move them. Gabe and Bruce enlist three of their beefiest workmen to go into the holding cell and inject the soldiers with sodium thiopenthol in order to soften them up for travel. They don’t have far to go. Dragged along with leather restraints around their necks, mouths, wrists, and ankles, the two guardsmen are led up a series of iron stairs to the concourse level.

Once upon a time, race fans wandered these cement corridors buying T-shirts and corn dogs and beers and cotton candy. Now these tunnels lie in perpetual darkness, boarded up, padlocked, and used as temporary warehouse space for everything from fuel tanks to sealed cartons of valuables pilfered off the dead.

By six-thirty that night everything is ready. The Governor orders Gabe and Bruce to station themselves at opposite ends of the arena, inside the exit tunnels, in order to guard against any wayward contestants—or errant zombies, for that matter—attempting to flee. Satisfied with all his preparations, the Governor heads back home to change into his show garb. He dresses all in black—black leather vest, leather pants, leather motorcycle boots—and puts a leather stay in his ponytail. He feels like a rock star. He finishes off his ensemble with his trademark duster.

Shortly after seven the forty-plus residents of Woodbury begin filing into the stadium. All the posters tacked up on telephone poles and taped across store windows earlier in the week advertise the start time as seven-thirty, but everybody wants to get a good seat down in the center-front of the bleachers, get settled in, get something to drink, get their blankets and cushions situated.

The mild weather has everybody buzzing excitedly as the start time looms.

At 7:28 P.M. a hush falls over the spectators crowded around the front of the bleachers, some of them standing on the warning track, their faces pressed up against the chain-link barrier. The youngest of the men are down front, while the women and couples and older residents sit scattered across the higher rows, blankets wrapped around themselves to ward off the chill. Each and every face reflects the desperate dope hunger of a junkie in withdrawal—gaunt, wrung out, jittery. They sense something extraordinary about to occur. They smell blood on the wind.

The Governor will not disappoint.

*   *   *

At 7:30 on the nose—according to the Governor’s self-winding Fossil wristwatch—the music in the stadium begins to sneak under the ceaseless moaning of the wind. It starts out soft and faint through the PA horns—a low chord as deep as a subterranean tremor—the overture familiar to many, even though few would be able to name the actual symphonic poem: Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. Most know the piece as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the booming horn notes coming one at a time, building on a dramatic fanfare.

A light veil of snow becomes visible up in the arc lights, a brilliant beam hitting the center of the muddy infield, a magnesium-bright pool the size of a moon crater. The crowd lets out a collective holler as the Governor strides out into the cone of light.

He raises a hand—a regal, melodramatic gesture, as the music builds to its big climactic finale—the wind tossing the tails of his duster. His boots sink six inches into the muck, the infield a mire of rain-sodden earth. He believes the mud will only add to the drama.

“Friends! Fellow residents of Woodbury!” he booms into a microphone hardwired to a PA stack behind him. His baritone rises up into the night sky, the echo slapping back across the empty stands at either end of the arena. “You’ve worked hard to keep this town up and running! You are about to be rewarded!”

Three and a half dozen voices—their vocal cords, as well as their sanity, stretched thin—can make a hell of a racket. The caterwauls swirl on the wind.

“Are you ready for some hard-hitting action tonight?”

The gallery lets out a cacophony of hyena yelps and wild cheers.

“Bring on the contestants!”

On cue, huge follow spots flare on across the upper decks, the noise like giant match tips striking—the beams sweeping down across the arena. One by one, the silver pools of light land on enormous black canvas curtains, each of which drapes one of the five gangways around the concourse.

At the far end of the stadium, a garage-style door rolls up and Zorn, the younger of the two guardsmen, appears in the shadows of the gangway. Clad in makeshift shoulder pads and shin guards, he holds a large machete and trembles with latent madness. He starts across the track toward the center of the infield with a feral expression on his face, moving stiffly, jerkily, a prisoner of war off the leash for the first time in many weeks.

Almost simultaneously, like a mirror image of Zorn’s entrance, the garage door at the opposite end of the stadium jerks upward, and from the shadows comes Manning, the older soldier, the one with the wild gray hair and bloodshot eyes. Manning carries an enormous battle-axe and trudges through the mud not unlike a zombie himself.

As the two combatants approach each other in the center of the ring, the Governor bellows into the mike, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great pride that I give you the Ring of Death!”

The crowd lets out a collective gasp as the curtains around the periphery—once again, on cue—suddenly drop away, revealing clusters of snarling, decomposing, hungry zombies. Some of the spectators in the stands spring to their feet, instinctively wanting to flee, as the biters start lumbering out of their archways, arms reaching for human meat.

The biters get halfway across the infield, their awkward, shuffling steps mired in the mud, before reaching the end of their chains. Some of them—surprised by the limit of their freedom—are yanked off their feet, landing in comic fashion in the mud. Others growl angrily, flailing dead arms at the crowd and the overall injustice of their leashed captivity. The crowd jeers.

“LET THE BATTLE BEGIN!”

At the center of the infield Zorn pounces on Manning before Manning is ready—in fact, before the Governor has even had a chance to make a safe exit—and the older soldier barely has time to block the slashing blow with his weapon.

The machete comes down and grazes the axe head in a gout of sparks.

The crowd cheers as Manning careens backward into the mud, sliding through the muck, coming to within inches of the closest zombie. The walker, wild-eyed with bloodlust, snaps its jaws at Manning’s ankles, the chain barely holding the creature. Manning scrambles to get back on his feet, his face ablaze with terror and madness.

The Governor smiles to himself as he walks off the infield, exiting through one of the gates.

The crowd noises echo through the dark tunnel all around him as he walks through the cement-encased shadows, chuckling to himself, thinking about how amazing it would be if one of the guardsmen got bit before the crowd’s eyes and actually turned during the course of the battle. Now that would be entertainment.

He turns a corner and sees one of his men loading a clip into an AK-47 near a deserted food stand. The young man—an overgrown farm kid from Macon dressed in a ratty down coat and stocking cap—looks up from his weapon. “Hey, Gov … how’s it going out there?”

“Thrills and chills, Johnny, thrills and chills,” the Governor says with a wink as he passes. “Gonna go check on Gabe and Bruce at the exits … you make sure those walkers stay inside the infield and don’t wander back toward the gates.”

“Will do, boss.”

The Governor moves on, turning another corner and striding down a deserted tunnel.

The muffled noise of the crowd echoes in waves down the dark passageway as he makes his way toward the east exit. He starts whistling, feeling on top of the world, when all at once he stops whistling and slows down, instinctively reaching for the .38 snubbie in his belt. Something feels wrong all of a sudden.

He comes to an abrupt halt in the middle of the tunnel. The east exit, just visible around a corner twenty feet ahead of him, sits there completely deserted. No sign of Gabe anywhere. The outer gate—a vertical door made of wooden slats, pulled down across the opening—leaks thin strands of bright light from the headlamps of an idling vehicle.

At that point the Governor notices the muzzle of an M1 assault rifle on the floor, poking around the corner—Gabe’s gun—lying unattended.

“Son of a bitch!” the Governor blurts, drawing his gun and spinning around.

The blue spark of a Taser crackles in his face, knocking him backward.

*   *   *

Martinez moves in quickly, the Taser in one hand, a heavy leather sap in the other—as the fifty-kilovolt punch sends the Governor reeling backward, slamming into the wall, his .38 flying out of his hand.

Martinez brings the sap down hard on the Governor’s temple, the dull slapping noise like a tuneless bell ringing. The Governor convulses against the wall, swinging wildly, refusing to go down. He cries out with the garbled rage of a stroke victim, the veins in his neck and temples bulging, as he kicks out at Martinez.

The Swede and Broyles stand behind Martinez on each flank, ready to move in with the rope and tape. Martinez hits the Governor again with the sap, and this time the blunt object does its work.

The Governor stiffens and slides to the floor, his eyes rolling back in his head. The Swede and Broyles close in on the quivering, twitching body curled into a fetal position on the cement.

They get the Governor tied, bound, and gagged with duct tape in less than sixty seconds. Martinez signals the men outside the gate with a quick whistle, and the slatted door suddenly jumps up.

“On three,” Martinez mutters, holstering his Taser, shoving the sap behind his belt. He grabs the man’s rope-bound ankles. “One, two … three!”

Broyles takes the Governor by the shoulders, Martinez lifting the legs, and the Swede leads them out through the gate into the cold wind and around the back of the idling panel van.

The rear hatch is already gaping open. They slide the body in.

Within seconds, the men have climbed into the windowless van, and all the doors have slammed, and the vehicle is lurching backward, away from the gate.

The panel van slams to a stop, then the transmission wrenches down into drive and it roars away.

Within seconds all that’s left outside the entrance to the racetrack is a fading cloud of carbon monoxide.

*   *   *

“Wake up, you sick fuck!” Lilly slaps the Governor, the man’s eyes fluttering open on the floor of the crowded van as it rumbles out of town.

Gabe and Bruce are bound and gagged near the front of the cluttered payload bay, their mouths covered with duct tape. The Swede holds a .45 Smith & Wesson on the men, their eyes wide and searching. Cartons of military ordnance line the sides of the cargo bay, everything from armor-piercing shells to incendiary bombs.

“Take it easy, Lilly,” Martinez cautions, crouching near the front, a walkie-talkie clutched in his gloved hand. His face tight with nervous tension, a heretic rebelling against the church, Martinez turns away and thumbs the switch and says in a low voice, “Just follow the Jeep, and keep the lights off, and let me know when you see a roamer.”

The Governor regains consciousness in stages, blinking and scanning his surroundings, testing the strength of his bonds—the elastic shackles, nylon rope, and duct tape tight around his mouth.

“You need to hear this, Blake,” Lilly says to the man on the corrugated floor. “‘Governor’ … ‘President’ … ‘King Shit’ … whatever you call yourself. You think you’re some kind of benevolent dictator?”

The Governor’s eyes still shift around the confines of the van, not focusing on any one thing—an animal boxed in on the killing floor.

“My friends did not have to die,” Lilly goes on, looming over the Governor. Her eyes mist over for a moment and she hates herself for it. “You could have built this place into something great … a place where people could live in safety and harmony … instead of this twisted, sick freak show that it’s become.”

Near the front, Martinez thumbs the switch. “Stevie, you see anything yet?”

Through the speaker crackles the younger man’s voice. “Negative … nothing yet … wait!” The sound of static, then rustling noises. Stevie’s voice is heard off mike: “What the fuck is that?”

Martinez thumbs the switch. “Stevie, say again, I didn’t copy that.”

Static … rustling noises.

“Stevie! You copy? I don’t want to get too far from town!”

Through the static Stevie’s voice intermittently sizzles through the noise: “Stop, Taggert.… Stop!… What the fuck! WHAT THE FUCK!”

In back, Lilly wipes her eyes and latches her gaze on the eyes of the Governor. “Sex for food? Really? Seriously? That’s your great society—”

“Lilly!” Martinez barks at her. “Stop it! We got a situation!” He thumbs the send button. “Broyles, stop the van!”

By this point the Governor’s eyes have found Lilly’s, and the man is fully awake, staring at her with a silent fury that burns holes in her soul, and she doesn’t care, she doesn’t even notice it.

“All the fighting and the suicides and the fear driving everyone into catatonic stupors…?” She feels like spitting at him. “This is your idea of a fucking COMMUNITY—”

“Lily! Goddammit!” Martinez turns and faces her. “Would you please—”

The truck screeches to a stop, throwing Martinez backward against the firewall and tossing Lilly forward across the Governor and into a stack of ammo boxes. The cartons topple as Lilly sprawls across the floor. The walkie-talkie spins against a duffel bag. The Governor rolls from one side to the other, the duct tape coming loose from his mouth.

The crackle of Broyles’s voice squawks out of the speaker. “Got a visual on a walker!”

Martinez crawls toward the two-way, snatching it up and thumbing the button. “What the hell’s going on, Broyles? What’s the idea of slamming on the—”

“Got another one!” the voice squawks out of the tiny speaker. “Got a couple, coming out of the … Oh, fuck … oh, fuck … OH, FUCK!”

Martinez thumbs the switch. “Broyles, what the hell is going on?”

Through the radio: “There’s more than we—”

Static washes over the voice for a moment, and then Stevie’s voice cuts through the noise: “Jesus Christ, there’s a whole bunch of them coming out of the—” Static crackles for a moment. “They’re coming out of the woods, man, they keep coming—”

Martinez yells into the mike, “Stevie, talk to me! Should we dump them and come back?”

More static.

Martinez screams, “Stevie! Do you copy? Should we turn around?”

Broyles’s voice now: “Too many, boss! Never seen this many in one—”

A burst of static and the sound of a gunshot and glass breaking—echoing outside the walls of the van—all of it gets Lilly to her feet. She realizes what’s happening, and she reaches behind her belt for the Ruger. She pulls it out and cocks the slide, glancing over her shoulder. “Martinez, call your men back, get ’em outta here!”

Martinez thumbs the button: “Stevie! Can you hear me?! Get outta here, pull back! Turn around! We’ll find another place! Can you hear me? STEVIE!”

The sound of Stevie’s anguished cry spurts out of the speaker, right before another barrage of automatic gunfire rattles the air … followed by a terrific wrenching of metal … and then an enormous crash.

Broyles’s voice: “Hold on! They turned it over! There’s too goddamn many! Hold on! We’re fucked, y’all! WE ARE TOTALLY FUCKED!!”

The van shudders as the engine revs into reverse, rocketing backward, the centripetal force throwing everybody forward against the firewall. Lilly slams her shoulder against the gun rack, knocking half a dozen carbines to the floor like kindling. Gabe and Bruce roll, slamming into each other. Unbeknownst to the others, Gabe has his fingers under Bruce’s shackle now and he starts wrenching at it. Bruce’s gag has come loose and he booms a garbled cry: “YOU MOTHERFUCKERS, NOW WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!”

The van bumps over an object, and then another, and another—the wet, muffled thumps rocking the chassis—and Lilly holds on to the side brace with her free hand, scanning the cargo hold.

Martinez scrambles on hands and knees toward the fallen walkie-talkie while the black man spits and curses, and Swede aims the muzzle of his .45 at the bald black man. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

“YOU MOTHERFUCKERS DON’T EVEN—”

The rear of the van slams into an unknown object and bogs down, the rear wheels spinning on something slick and gooey on the road, the g-forces flinging everybody into the corner. Guns fly off across the hold, and the Governor rolls against a stack of cartons that fall on him. He lets out an angry cry—the duct tape hanging from his chin now—and then he gets quiet.

Everybody gets quiet as the van sits there for a moment, very still.

Then the entire vehicle shudders. The sideways jerk gets everybody’s attention. Broyles’s voice crackles from the fallen two-way, something about “too many” or “getting out,” when all at once the roar of Broyles’s AK-47 from the cab pierces the silence, followed by an eruption of broken glass and a human shriek.

Then things get quiet again. And still. Except for the low, droning, mucusy moans of hundreds of dead voices, which, coming through the walls of the windowless van, sound like a giant turbine engine rumbling outside the van. Something bumps the vehicle again, jerking it sideways with a violent convulsion.

Martinez grabs an assault rifle off the wall, jacks the lever back, lurches toward the rear hatch, and grasps the handle, when he hears a deep, whiskey-cured voice come from behind him.

“Wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Lilly glances down at the floor and sees the Governor—his gag loose—struggling into a sitting position against the wall, his dark eyes smoldering. Lilly holds her Ruger on him. “You’re not giving orders anymore,” she informs him through clenched teeth.

The van jerks sideways again. The rumbling silence stretches.

“Your little plan’s gone all to hell,” the Governor says with sadistic glee. His facial features tic with residual trauma.

“Shut up!”

“Thought you’d leave us out here, feed us to the biters, and nobody would be the wiser.”

Lilly puts the muzzle of the .22 against his forehead. “I said shut the fuck up!”

The van shudders again. Martinez stands frozen with indecision. He turns, and he starts to say something to Lilly, when a sharp blur of movement near the front takes everybody by surprise.

Bruce has managed to free his hands and suddenly lashes out at the Swede, knocking the gun out of the older man’s grip. The .45 goes off as it clatters to the floor, the boom so loud it ruptures eardrums, the blast chinking metal out of the floor and grazing the Swede’s left boot, making the older man cry out and slam against the back wall.

In one smooth movement, before Martinez or Lilly can fire, the big black man scoops up the hot .45 and empties three rounds into the Swede’s chest. Blood sprays across the corrugated side wall behind the older man as he gasps and writhes and slides to the floor.

From the rear, Martinez spins toward the black man and fires two quick, controlled bursts in his general direction, but by that point Bruce is already diving for cover behind piles of cartons, and the bullets are chewing through cardboard, metal, and fiberglass, setting off a series of muffled blasts inside the boxes, which send puffs of wood shards, sparks, and paper into the air like meteors—

—and everybody dives to the floor—and Bruce gets his hands on his bowie knife—a weapon he had hidden on his ankle—and he’s going for Gabe’s shackles—and things are happening very quickly now all around the cargo bay—as Lilly swings her Ruger toward the two thugs near the front—while Martinez leaps toward Bruce—and the Governor screams something like “DON’T KILL THEM!—and Gabe is loose now and scrambling for one of the fallen carbines—and Bruce slashes the knife at Martinez, who dodges the blow, and then stumbles against Lilly, sending her slamming against the rear doors—

—and the impact of Lilly’s body against the double-doors springs the latch.

The doors suddenly and unexpectedly burst open, letting a swarm of moving corpses into the van.

EIGHTEEN

A large, putrefied biter in a shredded medical smock goes for Lilly, and it nearly gets its rotten teeth into her neck, when Martinez manages to get off a burst that takes off the top of the thing’s skull.

Rancid, black blood fountains up across the ceiling, spitting across Lilly’s face, as she backs away from the open doorway. More biters scuttle in through the gaping hatch. Lilly’s ears go deaf—ringing from the noise—as she backs toward the front wall.

The Governor, still shackled, scoots backward, away from the onslaught, as Gabe gets a loaded carbine rifle up and barking, the barrage punching through dead tissue and rotting skulls. Brain matter blossoms like black chrysanthemums, as the interior of the van smokes and teeters and floods with death stench. More and more biters swarm the opening, despite the blazing gunfire.

“BRUCE, CUT ME LOOSE!”

The Governor’s voice—nearly drowned by the din, barely audible to Lilly’s ringing eardrums—gets Bruce moving with the knife. Meanwhile Martinez and Lilly unleash a salvo of gunfire, muzzles flashing, the noise enormous, entire clips being emptied, the successive blasts hitting eye sockets and mandibles and slimy bald pates and putrid foreheads, sending black tissue and blood and fluids spurting and flinging across the open hatch.

Bruce’s knife slices down on the Governor’s shackles, and within seconds the Governor is free and has a carbine in his hands.

The air blazes with gunfire, and soon the five surviving human occupants of the van are clustered together against the cab’s firewall, each of them blasting away at will, spraying a hell storm across the rear hatch. The sound is gargantuan, ear-piercing, amplified by the metal fuselage of the van. Some of the rounds miss their targets, ricocheting off the door frame in daisy chains of sparks.

Mangled zombies drop to the floor of the van, dominoes falling, some of them slipping off the slimy back edge of the hatch, others caught in the pile. The barrage continues another ten seconds, during which time the back spray of blood and bodily matter cover the humans in layers of gore. A splinter of steel strikes Lilly’s thigh, embedding itself, a wasp sting of pain waking her up.

Over the course of a single minute—an interminable sixty seconds of elapsed time that feels to Lilly like a lifetime—each and every last ammo magazine is emptied into dead flesh, and every last zombie crowding the doorway drops and slides to the pavement outside the van, leaving leech trails of blood on the corrugated ledge.

The last remaining bodies get stuck in the hatchway, and in the horrible, ear-ringing silence that ensues, as Gabe and Martinez and the Governor reload, Bruce lunges toward the hatch. He kicks the stragglers off the rear parapet, the bodies falling to the asphalt with a splat. Lilly thumbs her spent magazine out of her Ruger, the clip clattering to the floor, the metallic clunk unheard by her deafened ears. Her face and arms and clothing are covered in blood and bile. She reloads, her pulse throbbing in her traumatized ears.

In the meantime Bruce wrenches the double doors shut, the damaged hinges making a loud squeak that barely penetrates the ringing in Lilly’s ears.

The latch clicks, sealing them back inside the blood-drenched death chamber, but the worst part, the part that has everybody’s attention now, is the half-glimpsed landscape beyond the van, the forest on either side of the road, and the switchback way up on the plateau in the distance, draped in darkness and crawling with moving shadows.

*   *   *

What they glimpse before the doors bang shut challenges comprehension. They’ve all seen herds before, some of them huge, but this one defies description—a mass of dead the likes of which no one has seen since the plague broke out months ago. Nearly a thousand moving corpses in every imaginable state of decomposition stretch as far as the eye can see. Throngs of snarling zombies, so thick one could walk across their shoulders, line the edges of the hill on either side of Highway 85. Moving slowly and lethargically, their sheer number threatening mass destruction, they bring to mind a black glacier aimlessly cutting through the trees and slicing across the fields and roads. Some of them barely have flesh left on their bones, their ragged burial clothing hanging mosslike in the darkness. Others snap at the air with the involuntary twitching of snakes stirred from their nests. The length and breadth of the multitude, each face as pale white as mother-of-pearl, gives the impression of a vast, moving flood tide of infected pus.

Inside the van, the primordial terror touched off by this sight stiffens the spines of everyone present. Gabe raises his carbine at Martinez. “You stupid fucking son of a bitch! Look at what you’ve done! Look at what you’ve gotten us into!!”

Before anybody can react Lilly swings her Ruger up and trains it on Gabe. Ears ringing, she cannot hear exactly what he says in reply but she knows he means business. “I will fucking blow you away if you don’t back off, asshole!”

Bruce pounces on Lilly with his buck knife, putting it around her neck. “Bitch, you got about three seconds to drop that motherfucking—”

“BRUCE!” The Governor aims his carbine at Bruce. “Back off!”

Bruce doesn’t move. The blade stays pressed against Lilly’s throat, and Lilly keeps her gun leveled on Gabe, and Martinez trains his assault rifle on the Governor. “Philip, listen to me,” Martinez says softly, “I promise you I will drop you first before I go down.”

“Everybody just calm the fuck down!” The Governor’s knuckles are white on the carbine’s hilt. “Only way we’re gonna get outta this mess is together!”

The van shudders again as more zombies close in, making everybody jerk.

“What are you thinking?” Lilly says.

“First of all, get those fucking guns out of everybody’s face.”

Martinez burns his gaze into Bruce. “Bruce, get away from her.”

“Do what he says, Bruce.” The Governor keeps the muzzle on Bruce. A single pearl of sweat rolls down the bridge of the Governor’s nose. “PUT THE FUCKING KNIFE DOWN OR I WILL PUT YOUR BRAINS ON THAT WALL!”

Reluctantly, the rage blazing in his dark almond eyes, Bruce lowers the knife.

The van trembles again, as the guns slowly tilt down, one at a time, away from their targets.

Martinez is the last to lower his rifle. “If we can get to the cab, we can plough our way outta here.”

“Negative!” The Governor looks at him. “We’ll lead this fucking stampede back to Woodbury!”

“What do you suggest?” Lilly asks the Governor with cold acid running through her veins. She feels the horrible sensation of giving over to the madman again, her soul shrinking into a tiny black hole inside her. “We can’t just sit here on our thumbs.”

“How far are we from town? Like less than mile?” The Governor asks this almost rhetorically as he gazes around the van’s blood-sodden interior, glancing from carton to carton. He sees the spare parts of gun mounts, shell casings, military-grade ammunition. “Lemme ask you something,” he says, turning to Martinez. “You seem to have thought through this big coup d’état like a real military man. You got any RPGs in this crate? Anything with a little more punch than a simple grenade?”

*   *   *

It takes them less than five minutes to find the ordnance and load the RPG and lay out the strategy and get into position, and throughout that time the Governor gives most of the orders, keeping everybody moving, as the horde surrounds the van like bees swarming a hive. By the time the survivors are ready to launch their countermeasure, the number of dead pressing in on the vehicle is so high the van nearly tips over.

The muffled sound of the Governor’s voice, coming from inside the van, counting down … “three, two, one” … is incomprehensible to the dead, their putrid ears brushing the outer shell of the vehicle.

The first blast blows the rear doors off the van as if they were on explosive bolts.

The eruption catapults half a dozen walkers into the air, the rocket-propelled grenade punching through the dense crowd of corpses clustered outside the hatch like a hot poker ramming through butter. The projectile goes off ten yards away from the van.

The explosion immolates at least a hundred—maybe more—in the general vicinity of the vehicle. The sound of it rivals a sonic boom from a passing jet, the report shaking the ground, arcing up into the heavens, and echoing out across the tops of trees.

The back draft shoots up and out—a convection of flame the size of a basketball court—turning night to day and transforming the closest zombies into flaming human debris, some of them practically vaporized, others becoming dancing columns of fire. The inferno razes an area of fifty square yards around the van.

Gabe leaps out of the van first, a scarf around his mouth and nose to filter the acrid fumes of dead flesh cooking in the napalmlike maelstrom. He is followed closely by Lilly, who covers her mouth with one hand, and fires off three quick shots with her Ruger in the other hand, taking down a few stray zombies in their path.

They make it to the cab, throw the door open, and climb in—pushing Broyles’s contorted, bloody remains aside—and within seconds the rear wheels are digging in, and the vehicle is launching out of there.

The van bulldozes through files of zombies, turning the upright cadavers into putrefied jelly on the pavement, cutting a swath toward a hairpin turn that looms ahead of them. And when they reach the tight curve, Gabe executes the last phase of the escape.

He yanks the wheel, and the van careens off the road and up the side of a wooded hill.

The rough terrain taxes the tires and suspension, but Gabe keeps the foot feed pinned, and the rear-wheel drive churns through the soft muddy floor of the hill, fishtailing wildly, nearly dumping the other three men out the gaping, jagged opening in the rear.

When they reach the crest of the hill, Gabe slams on the brakes and the van skids to a stop.

It takes a minute to aim the mortar launcher, a squat iron cylinder that Martinez hastily jury-rigged to a machine-gun mount. The muzzle is pointed upward at a forty-five-degree angle. By the time they’re ready to fire, at least two hundred zombies have started shambling up the hill toward the van, drawn to the noise and headlights.

Martinez primes the launcher and touches off the ignition button.

The mortar booms, the projectile rocketing skyward, arcing out over the valley, the tracery of its tail like a glowing neon contrail. The explosive shell lands smack-dab in the middle of the sea of walking dead. At least four hundred yards from the van, the mini mushroom cloud of flame is seen a few milliseconds before the FFOOOMP of its impact is heard, and the flash that follows turns the underbelly of the night sky a deep, hot DayGlo orange.

Flaming particles blossom into the heavens, a mixture of dirt, debris, and dead tissue, the shock wave of fire rolling at least a hundred yards in all directions, burning hundreds of biters into ash. A vast autoclave could not cremate the dead faster or more thoroughly.

The remaining walkers, drawn away from the hill by the fiery spectacle, awkwardly turn and drag themselves toward the light.

Away from Woodbury.

*   *   *

They return to town on hobbling wheels, a cracked rear transaxle, shattered windows, and blown doors. They keep gazing out the back for indications of the phenomenal herd, signs of being followed, but other than a few wayward stragglers stumbling along the edges of the orchards, only the orange glow on the western horizon reflects the aftermath of the swarm.

Nobody sees Gabe silently pass the Governor a pearl-handled .45 semiautomatic behind Martinez’s back until it’s too late. “We got unfinished business, you and me,” the Governor blurts suddenly, pressing the muzzle against the back of Martinez’s neck as the van rumbles around a corner.

Martinez lets out one long, anguished sigh. “Get it over with.”

“You got a short memory, son,” the Governor says. “This is the kind of shit happens outside these walls. I’m not gonna waste you, Martinez … not yet, at least … right now we need each other.”

Martinez says nothing, just looks down at the iron corrugations of the floor and waits for his life to come to an end.

They enter the village from the west, and Gabe pulls around in front of the arena and slides into a parking place reserved for service vehicles. Crowd noises still echo from the stands, although from the sound of the catcalls and whistles, the fights have probably deteriorated into chaos. The show’s eccentric emcee has been missing in action for over an hour … but nobody has had the wherewithal to leave.

Gabe and Lilly get out of the cab and walk around to the rear hatch. Filmed in a layer of gore, her face spackled with blood spray, Lilly feels a skin-prickling sense of unease, and she puts her hand on the grip of her Ruger, which is wedged behind her belt. She’s not thinking straight. She feels as though she’s half asleep, sluggish with shock, groggy and breathless.

When she turns the corner at the rear of the van she sees Martinez standing without a weapon, his arms soot-covered from the mortar blowback, his sad chiseled face stippled with blood, the Governor directly behind him, pressing the muzzle of the .45 against his neck.

Lilly instinctively draws her Ruger, but before she can even aim it, the Governor issues a warning.

“You shoot that thing, your boyfriend’s going down,” the Governor hisses at her. “Gabe, take her little peashooter from her.”

Gabe snatches the gun out of Lilly’s hands, and Lilly just stares at the Governor. A voice rings out in the night air, coming from above them.

“Hey!”

The Governor ducks down. “Martinez, tell your guy on the upper deck everything’s okay.”

Way up on the crest of the arena roof, on one corner of the upper deck, a machine-gun turret is mounted. A long perforated barrel angles down at the dirt parking lot, behind which stands a young cohort of Martinez’s—a tall black kid from Atlanta, name of Hines—a young man who is not privy to the secret overthrow attempt.

“What the hell’s going on?” he yells down at them. “Folks look like y’all been in a war!”

“Everything’s cool, Hines!” Martinez calls up to him. “Had to deal with a few biters is all!”

The Governor keeps his .45 out of sight, the muzzle prodding the small of Martinez’s back. “Hey, kid!” The Governor jerks his head, indicating the dark grove of trees on the other side of the main road. “You want to do me a favor and take out those stragglers we got coming up behind us through the trees!” Then the Governor points at the van. “When you’re done with that, there’s two bodies in the van need shooting in the head, then take ’em to the morgue.”

The machine-gun turret squeaks, and the barrel swings up, and everybody whirls to see movement across the street, a pair of lumbering silhouettes emerging from the trees, the last of the stragglers.

The muzzle roars off the arena roof, the flare of sparks coming one millisecond before the booming report, as the Governor urges Martinez forward toward the building, everybody jerking at the noise.

Armor-piercing rounds strafe the walkers stumbling out of the forest, the zombies dancing upright for a moment like string puppets in an earthquake, blood mist issuing out the backs of their heads—red steam venting. Hines empties an entire bandolier of .762 millimeter cartridges into the walkers for good measure. When they finally go down in pulpy, steaming gut heaps, the kid named Hines lets out a little victory yelp and then looks back across the grounds.

The Governor, Martinez, and the rest of their party have vanished.

NINETEEN

“You people think this is a fucking democracy?” The Governor’s blood-spattered duster sweeps the floor, as his angry, smoky voice bounces off the cinder-block walls of the private room underneath the concession area.

Once designated an accounting office and vault for the track’s cash receipts, the room has been picked clean, the old iron safe on one side blown apart. Now only a long, scarred conference table, a few girlie calendars on the wall, a couple of accountants’ desks, and some overturned swivel chairs litter the space.

Martinez and Lilly sit on folding chairs against one wall, silent and shell-shocked, while Bruce and Gabe stand nearby with guns at the ready. The tension in the room crackles and sparks like a lit fuse.

“You people seem to have forgotten this place works for one reason and one reason only.” The Governor’s speech is punctuated by facial tics and residual twitching from the Taser trauma. Dried blood clings to his face, his clothes, and his hair in matted crusts. “It works because I’m the one makes it work! You see what’s out there? That’s what’s on the menu, you want to eat out! You want some kind of utopian paradise, some kind of oasis of warm and fuzzy fellowship? Call Norman Fucking Rockwell! This is fucking war!”

He pauses to let it sink in, and the silence presses down on the room.

“You ask any motherfucker out there in the stands, do they want a democracy? Do they want warm and fuzzy? Or do they just want somebody to fucking manage things … keep them from being some biter’s lunch!” His eyes blaze. “You seem to have forgotten what it was like when Gavin and his guardsmen were in charge! We got this place back! We got things—”

A knock on the outer door interrupts the rant. The Governor spins toward the sound. “WHAT!”

The doorknob clicks, the door cracking open a few inches. The sheepish face of the farm kid from Macon peers in, his AK-47 on a strap at his side. “Boss, the natives are getting restless out there.”

“What?”

“Lost both fighters ages ago, nothing but dead bodies and biters on chains out there. Nobody’s leaving, though … they’re just getting wasted on their BYOBs and throwin’ shit at the zombies.”

The Governor wipes his face, smooths down his Fu Manchu. “Tell ’em there’s gonna be an important announcement in a minute.”

“But what about—”

“JUST TELL ’EM!”

The farm kid gives a meek nod and turns away, latching the door behind him.

The Governor shoots a look across the room at the big black man in gore-splattered denim. “Bruce, go get Stevens and his little lapdog. I don’t care what they’re doing, I want their asses in here right now! On the double!”

Bruce gives a nod, shoves his pistol in his belt, and hurries out of the room.

The Governor turns to Martinez. “I know exactly where you got that fucking stun gun…”

*   *   *

The time it takes Bruce to go fetch the doctor and Alice is interminable for Lilly. Sitting next to Martinez, a slimy layer of zombie spoor drying on her skin, the wound in her leg throbbing, she expects a bullet to come smashing through her skull at any moment. She can feel Gabe’s body heat behind her, only inches away. She can smell his BO and hear his thick breathing, but he doesn’t say a word the whole time they’re waiting.

Nor does Martinez speak.

Nor does the Governor, who continues to pace across the front of the room.

Lilly doesn’t care about dying anymore. Something inexplicable has happened to her. She thinks of Josh rotting in the ground and she feels nothing. She thinks about Megan hanging by that makeshift noose and it stirs zero emotion. She thinks of Bob sinking into oblivion.

None of it matters anymore.

The worst part is, she knows the Governor is right. They need a Rottweiler on these walls. They need a monster to stanch the blood tide.

Across the room, the door clicks and Bruce returns with Stevens and Alice. The doctor enters in his wrinkled lab coat, walking a few feet in front of Bruce’s gun. Alice brings up the rear.

“Come on in and join the party,” the Governor greets them with an icy smile. “Have a seat. Relax. Take a load off, sit a spell.”

Without a word the doctor and Alice cross the room and sit down on folding chairs next to Martinez and Lilly like children sent to their rooms. The doctor says nothing, just stares at the floor.

“So the whole gang’s here now,” the Governor says, coming over to the foursome. He stands inches away, a coach about to give a halftime chalk talk. “Here’s the thing, we’re gonna strike a little agreement … a verbal contract. Very simple. Look at me, Martinez.”

It requires herculean effort for Martinez to look up at the dark-eyed man.

The Governor latches his gaze on to Martinez. “The agreement is this. As long as I keep the fucking wolves from the door, keep the gravy boats full around here … you don’t ask questions about how I do it.”

He pauses, standing in front of them, waiting, his hands on his hips, his blood-caked features grim and set, his gaze meeting each of their traumatized stares.

Nobody says anything. Lilly sees herself springing to her feet and kicking her chair over and screaming at the top of her lungs and grabbing one of the rifles and cutting the Governor down in a storm of gunfire.

She stares at the floor.

The silence stretches.

“One more thing,” the Governor says, smiling at them, his eyes dead and mirthless. “Anybody breaches this contract, sticks their nose in my business, Martinez dies and the rest of you get banished to the sticks. You got that?” He waits in silence. “Answer me, you cocksuckers! You understand the stipulations of our contract? Martinez?”

The reply comes on a haggard breath. “Yeah.”

“I can’t hear you!”

Martinez looks at him. “Yeah … I understand.”

“How about you, Stevens?”

“Yes, Philip.” The doctor’s voice drips with contempt. “Great closing argument. You should be a lawyer.”

“Alice?”

She gives him a quick, jittery nod.

The Governor looks at Lilly. “How about you? Are we clear on this?”

Lilly looks at the floor, says nothing.

The Governor presses in closer. “I’m not getting a consensus here. I’ll ask you again, Lilly. You understand the agreement?”

Lilly refuses to speak.

The Governor draws his pearl-handled .45 army Colt, snaps back the slide, and presses the muzzle to her head. But before he can say another word, or send a bullet into her brain, Lilly looks up at him.

“I understand.”

*   *   *

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” The nasally voice of the farm kid crackles through the arena’s PA system, echoing out over the chaotic scene behind the chain-link barrier. The tight knot of spectators has scattered across the stands, although not a single audience member has departed the stadium. Some of them lie on their backs, drunk, staring at the moonless night sky. Others pass bottles of hooch back and forth, attempting to numb the horrors of the mayhem they have just witnessed across the infield.

Some of the drunker patrons are throwing trash and empty bottles into the arena, tormenting the captive biters, who flail impotently on their chains, their rotting lips dripping with black drool. The two dead combatants lie in heaps just out of reach of the zombies, as the crowd jeers and catcalls. This has been going on for almost an hour.

The amplified voice crackles: “WE HAVE A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FOR YOU FROM THE GOVERNOR!”

This news gets their attention, and the cacophony of yelps and whoops and whistles dies down. The forty or so spectators awkwardly return to their front-row seats, some of them tripping on drunken feet. Within minutes the entire crowd has coalesced down front, behind the cyclone-fence barricade that once protected race fans from spinouts and flaming tires flying off the track.

“PUT YOUR HANDS TOGETHER FOR OUR FEARLESS LEADER, THE GOVERNOR!”

From the middle gangway, like a ghost, the long-coated figure emerges from the shadows into the cold vapor of calcium lights, blood stippled and muddy, his coattails flagging in the wind, a Trojan commander returning from the siege of Troy. Striding out to the center of the infield, standing amid the expired guardsmen, he whips the mike cord behind him, raises the mike, and booms into it: “FRIENDS, YOU ARE ALL HERE BECAUSE OF FATE … FATE HAS BROUGHT US TOGETHER … AND IT IS OUR FATE TO SURVIVE THIS PLAGUE TOGETHER!”

The crowd, most of them drunk, lets out an intoxicated cheer.

“IT IS ALSO MY FATE TO BE YOUR LEADER … AND I ACCEPT THAT ROLE WITH PRIDE! AND ANY SON OF A BITCH WHO DOESN’T LIKE IT CAN COME TAKE IT AWAY! ANYTIME! YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME! ANY TAKERS OUT THERE? ANYBODY GOT ENOUGH SAND TO KEEP THIS TOWN SAFE?”

The drunken voices fade. The faces behind the chain link go slack. He’s got their attention now. The wind in the high gantries punctuates the silence.

“EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU TONIGHT SHALL BEAR WITNESS TO A NEW DAY IN WOODBURY! TONIGHT THE BARTER SYSTEM OFFICIALLY COMES TO AN END!”

Now the silence grips the arena like a pall. The spectators do not expect this, their heads cocked as though hanging on every word.

“FROM NOW ON, SUPPLIES WILL BE GATHERED FOR THE GOOD OF ALL! AND THEY WILL BE DISTRIBUTED EQUALLY! THIS IS HOW PEOPLE WILL EARN THEIR WAY INTO OUR COMMUNITY! BY GATHERING SUPPLIES! BY BENEFITING THE COMMON GOOD!”

One older gentleman a few rows above the others stands on wobbly knees, his Salvation Army topcoat buffeting in the wind, and he begins to clap, nodding his head, his grizzled jaw jutting proudly.

“THESE POLICY CHANGES WILL BE STRICTLY ENFORCED! ANYONE CAUGHT TRADING FAVORS OF ANY SORT IN RETURN FOR GOODS WILL BE FORCED TO FIGHT IN THE RING OF DEATH AS PUNISHMENT!” The governor pauses, scanning the crowd, letting this sink in. “WE ARE NOT BARBARIANS! WE TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN! WE! ARE! OUR BROTHERS’ KEEPERS!!”

Now more and more of the onlookers stand and begin to applaud, some of them spontaneously sobering up, finding their voices, cheering as though in a church service responding to a hallelujah.

The Governor’s sermon strikes a climactic chord: “THIS WILL BE A NEW ERA OF WOODBURY WORKING TOGETHER! TO FORM A HAPPIER, HEALTHIER, MORE COHESIVE COMMUNITY!!”

By this point, nearly every spectator has risen to their feet, and the roar of their voices—a sound not unlike an old-fashioned tent revival meeting—reverberates up into the upper tiers and echoes across the night sky. People are clapping, hollering their approval, and exchanging glances of relief and pleasant surprise … and perhaps even hope.

The fact is, from this distance, behind the cyclone fence, most of them glassy-eyed from drinking all night, the spectators do not notice the bloodthirsty glint behind the dark eyes of their benevolent leader.

*   *   *

The next morning, the slender young woman in the ponytail finds herself down in the fetid, reeking atmosphere of the abattoir under the stadium.

Clad in her bulky Georgia Tech sweatshirt, antique jewelry, and ripped jeans, Lilly does not shake, does not feel compelled to chew her fingernails, does not in fact feel any nervous tension or repulsion at the disgusting task to which she’s been assigned as a sort of slap on the wrist for her complicity in the coup attempt.

She in fact feels nothing but a low simmering rage as she crouches in the dim light of the subterranean chamber, wielding the eighteen-inch Teflon-coated axe.

She brings the axe down hard and true, chopping the gristle of the Swede’s severed leg, which is stretched across the floor drain. Making a wet popping noise like a pressurized lid opening, the blade slices through the knee joint as a chef’s knife might notch a raw drumstick from a chicken thigh. The backsplash of blood spits up at Lilly, stippling her collar and chin. She barely notices it as she tosses the two sections of human limb into the plastic garbage bin next to her.

The bin contains parts of the Swede, Broyles, Manning, and Zorn—a caldron of single-serving-sized entrails, organs, hairy scalps, slimy white ball joints, and severed limbs—collected and stored on ice to keep the games running, keep the arena zombies complacent.

Lilly wears rubber garden gloves—which have turned a dark shade of purple over the course of the last hour—and she has allowed her anger to fuel her axe blows. She has dismantled three bodies with the greatest of ease, barely noticing the other two men—Martinez and Stevens—laboring in opposite corners of the filthy, windowless, gore-stained cinder-block chamber.

No words are exchanged among the shunned, and the work goes on unabated for another half an hour when, sometime around noon, the sound of muffled steps coming from out in the corridor on the other side of the door registers in Lilly’s deafened ears. The lock clicks, and the door opens.

“Just wanted to check on your progress,” the Governor announces, coming into the room in a smart leather vest, a pistol holstered on his thigh, and his hair pulled back and away from his chiseled features. “Very impressive work,” he says, coming over to Lilly’s bin and glancing down at the gelatinous contents. “Might need to procure a few morsels later for feeding purposes.”

Lilly doesn’t look up. She keeps chopping, tossing, and wiping the edge of her blade on her jeans. At last she pulls an entire upper body cavity, which still has the cadaver’s head attached, across her chopping area.

“Carry on, troops,” the Governor says with an approving nod, before turning and heading for the door. As he slips out of the room, Lilly murmurs something under her breath that no else can hear.

The voice in her head—firing across the synapses in her brain—reaches her lips on barely a whisper, directed at the Governor.

“Soon … when you’re not needed … this will be you.”

She brings the axe down again and again.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

THE WALKING DEAD: THE ROAD TO WOODBURY. Copyright © 2012 by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Kirkman, Robert.

The road to Woodbury / Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (The walking dead series; no. 2 of 3)

ISBN 978-0-312-54774-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-01344-6 (e-book)

1.  Zombies—Fiction.   2.  Atlanta Region (Ga.)—Fiction.   I.  Bonansinga, Jay R.   II.  Title.

PS3611.I7555R63 2012

813'.6—dc23

2012028306

E-ISBN 9781250013446

First Edition: October 2012

The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor, Part One

Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga

Thomas Dunne Books

St. Martin’s Press

New York

To Sheri Stearn, my constant reader and other mother, and to Diego for the mechanics of death and destruction

—Jay Bonansinga

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A very special thank-you to the man, Robert Kirkman, who never fails to pull magic out of his hat; to Andy Cohen, my career compass; to Brendan Deneen, my editor and best dude; to Christina MacDonald for the best line editing ever; and to David Alpert, who holds it all together. Also a huge thanks to Kemper Donovan, Nicole Sohl, Stephanie Hargadon, Denise Dorman, Tom Leavens, Jeff Siegel, and my boys, Joey and Bill Bonansinga. Last but not least, my undying love and gratitude to the woman who changed my life and made me a better writer and man, Jill Norton Brazel.

—Jay Bonansinga

PART 1

The Gathering

So when the last and dreadful hour

This crumbling pageant shall devour,

The trumpet shall be heard on high,

The dead shall live, the living die,

And Music shall untune the sky.

—John Dryden

ONE

Writhing in pain on the ground, Bruce Allan Cooper gasps and blinks and tries to catch his breath. He can hear the gurgling, feral growls of a half-dozen biters coming for him, moving in for a feeding. A voice in his brain screams at him: Move, you fucking idiot! You pussy! What are you doing?!

A big African American with an NBA forward’s physique, a shaved, missile-shaped head, and a grizzle of a goatee, he rolls across the scabrous earth, barely avoiding the clawing gray fingers and snapping jaws of an adult female biter with half a face.

He covers maybe five or six feet until a dagger of pain shoots down his side, radiating fire across his ribs, seizing him up in paralyzing agony. He lands on his back, still gripping his rusty fire ax. The pick head is caked in blood and human hair and the black, viscous bile that has come to be known among survivors as walker-droppings.

Momentarily thunderstruck, his ears ringing, one eye already closing up from the swelling of a broken nose, Bruce wears the tattered army fatigues and mud-caked jackboots of the unofficial Woodbury militia. He can see the Georgia sky above him—a low canopy of filthy dishwater-gray clouds, inclement and nasty for April—and it taunts him: You’re nothing but a bug down there, Brucey-boy, a maggot on the carcass of a dying earth, a parasite feeding off the scraps and ruins of a vanishing human race.

All at once the panorama of the sky above him is eclipsed by three alien faces—dark planets slowly blocking out the heavens—each one snarling stupidly, drunkenly, each pair of milky eyes geeked perpetually open. One of them, an obese adult male in a soiled hospital smock, drools black mucus-gunk that drips on Bruce’s cheek.

“GOD-DAMMMMMM!”

Bruce snaps out of his stupor, finding an unexpected reserve of strength. He lashes out with his ax. The pointed end arcs upward and impales the fat biter in the soft tissue under the jaw. The lower half of the thing’s face detaches and jettisons, a gristly phalanx of dead flesh and glistening cartilage pinwheeling upwards of twenty feet in the air before coming back down to earth with a splat.

Rolling again, scrambling to his feet, Bruce executes a one-eighty spin—fairly graceful for a big man in excruciating pain—and hacks through the putrid neck muscles of another female biter coming at him. The head falls to the side, wobbling for a moment on threads of desiccated tissue before breaking free and tumbling to the ground.

The head rolls for a few feet, leaving a leech trail of black spoor, while the body remains upright for an agonizing moment, twitching with insensate arms outstretched in horrible blind instinct. Something metallic lies coiled at the thing’s feet as it finally sinks to the ground.

Bruce then hears the strangest thing that can be heard—muffled in his traumatized ears—following in the wake of the carnage: cymbals crashing. At least, that’s what it sounds like to Bruce’s ringing ears—a throbbing, metallic crashing noise in his brain—coming from the near distance. Backing away with his weapon at his side, spurred on by the sound, Bruce blinks and tries to focus on other biters shambling toward him. There are too many of them to engage with the pickax.

Bruce turns to flee, and without warning runs directly into another figure blocking his path.

“WHOA!”

The other figure—a thick-necked white man built like a fireplug, his sandy hair cut in an old-school flattop—lets out a war cry and swings a mace the size of a horse leg at Bruce. The spiked club whizzes past Bruce’s face, passing within centimeters of his broken nose. Bruce instinctively rears backward, tripping over his own feet.

He topples to the ground in an awkward display that sends up a cloud of dust and elicits another series of cymbal crashes from the hazy middle distance. The ax goes flying. The sandy-haired man takes advantage of the confusion and roars toward Bruce, the mace poised for action. Bruce grunts and rolls out of range at the last minute.

The mace head slams down hard, stick-pinning into the earth mere inches from Bruce’s head.

Bruce rolls toward the fallen weapon that lies in the red dirt about ten feet away. He gets his hand around the wooden shank, when suddenly, without warning, a figure lurches out of the haze to Bruce’s immediate left. Bruce jerks away from the biter, which is crawling toward him with the languid twitches of a giant lizard. Black ooze issues from the female’s slack mouth—its sharp little teeth visible—its jaw snapping with reptilian vigor.

Then something else happens that brings Bruce back to reality.

The chain holding the female in place suddenly clangs, the monster reaching the limits of its bondage. Bruce lets out an instinctive gasp of relief, the dead thing only inches away, flailing impotently at him. The biter growls with inchoate frustration, the chain holding fast. Bruce feels like digging the thing’s eyeballs out with his bare hands, like chewing through the neck of this useless piece of rotting shit-flesh.

Again, Bruce hears that weird cymbal-crashing noise, as well as the voice of the other man, barely audible under the noise: “C’mon, man, get up … get up.”

Bruce gets moving. He grabs the ax and struggles to his feet. More cymbal-crashing noises … as Bruce spins, and then swings the ax hard at the other man.

The blade barely misses Flattop’s throat, slicing through the collar of the man’s turtleneck sweater, leaving a six-inch gouge.

“How’s that?” Bruce mutters under his breath, circling the man. “That entertaining enough for ya?”

“That’s the spirit,” the stocky man murmurs—his name is Gabriel Harris, Gabe to his cronies—as he swings the club again, the nail-studded head whispering past Bruce’s swollen face.

“That all you got?” Bruce mumbles, jerking away just in time, and then circling around the other way. He lashes out with the ax. Gabe parries with the club, and all around the two combatants, the monsters keep growling and gurgling their watery ululations, straining against their chains, hungry for human flesh, stirred into a feeding frenzy.

As the dusty haze on the periphery of the battlefield clears, the remnants of an outdoor dirt-track arena come into focus.

*   *   *

The size of a football field, the outer edges lined with cyclone fencing, the Woodbury Veterans Speedway is surrounded by the relics of old pit areas and dark cavernous passageways. Behind the chain link rise latticed bench seats, sloping up to huge, rusted-out light stanchions. The stands are now filled with scores of cheering Woodbury residents. The cymbal-crashing sounds are, in fact, the wild applause and jeering voices of the crowd.

Out in the miasma of dust swirling around the infield, the gladiator known as Gabe mutters under his breath so only his adversary can hear, “You’re fighting like a goddamn girl today, Brucey”—the wisecrack punctuated by a roundhouse swing of the club at the black man’s legs.

Bruce vaults into the air, executing a dodge that would be the envy of a World Wrestling Entertainment star. Gabe swings again and the club goes wide and strikes the head of a young male biter in ragged, greasy dungarees, a former mechanic perhaps.

The nails embed themselves in the thing’s cadaverous skull, sending ropy strands of dark fluid into the air, before Gabe has a chance to dig the mace out and mumble, “Governor’s gonna be pissed with your bullshit performance.”

“Oh yeah?” Bruce counterstrikes with the handle of the ax, slamming it into Gabe’s solar plexus, driving the stocky man to the ground. The ax arcs through the air and comes down within centimeters of Gabe’s cheek.

Gabe rolls away and springs to his feet, still muttering under his breath. “Shouldn’t have had that extra serving of cornbread last night.”

Bruce moves in for another swing of the ax, whizzing the blade past Gabe’s neck. “You should talk, fat boy.”

Gabe swings the mace again and again, driving Bruce back toward the chained biters. “How many times have I told ya? Governor wants it to look real.”

Bruce blocks the onslaught of mace blows with the ax handle. “You broke my fucking nose, motherfucker.”

“Stop your bellyaching, dickweed.” Gabe slams the mace down again and again until the nails stick into the ax handle. Gabe pulls the mace back and wrenches the ax out of Bruce’s grip. The ax goes flying. The crowd cheers. Bruce dives away. Gabe goes after him. Bruce cuts and runs the other way, and Gabe lunges while simultaneously swinging the mace under the black man’s legs.

The nails catch Bruce’s fatigue pants, tearing a swath and superficially lacerating flesh. Bruce stumbles and goes down hard. Thin tendrils of blood loop across the pale, dusty daylight as Bruce rolls.

Gabe soaks up the frenzied, frantic applause—the clapping is almost hysterical—and he turns toward the bleachers, which are filled with the bulk of Woodbury’s post-plague population. He raises his mace Braveheart-style. The cheers swell and rise. Gabe milks it. He turns slowly with the mace over his head, an almost comical look of macho victory on his face.

The place erupts into pandemonium … and up in the stands, amid the waving arms and whooping voices, all but one onlooker seems transported by the spectacle.

*   *   *

Sitting in the fifth row, way off on the north end of the bleachers, Lilly Caul turns away in disgust. A faded linen scarf wound tightly around her swanlike neck to ward off the April chill, she is dressed in her customary ripped jeans, thrift-shop sweater, and hand-me-down beads. As she shakes her head and lets out an exasperated sigh, the wind blows tendrils of her toffee-brown hair around her once-youthful face, which now bears the lines of trauma—the wrinkles nested around her aquamarine eyes and along the edges of her mouth—as deep as the grain in burnished cowhide. She isn’t even aware that she’s mumbling under her breath, “Fucking Roman circuses…”

“What was that?” The woman next to her glances up from an insulated cup of tepid green tea. “Did you say something?”

Lilly shakes her head. “No.”

“You okay?”

“Fine … just peachy.” Lilly keeps gazing off into the distance as the rest of the crowd yelps and hollers and emits hyena howls. Still only in her early thirties, Lilly Caul looks at least ten years older than that now, her brow perpetually furrowed in consternation. “You want to know the truth, I don’t know how much more of this shit I can take.”

The other woman sips her tea thoughtfully. Clad in a dull-white lab coat under her parka, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she’s the town nurse—an earnest, soft-spoken girl named Alice—who has taken a keen interest in Lilly’s tenuous place in the town’s hierarchy. “It’s none of my business,” Alice says finally, speaking softly enough to go unheard by any nearby revelers, “but if I were you, I would keep my feelings to myself.”

Lilly looks at her. “What are you talking about?”

“For the time being, at least.”

“I’m not following.”

Alice seems vaguely uncomfortable talking about this in broad daylight, in plain sight of the others. “He’s watching us, you know.”

“What?”

“Right now, he’s keeping tabs.”

“You gotta be—”

Lilly stops herself. She realizes that Alice is referring to the shadowy figure standing in the mouth of the vaulted stone passageway directly to the north, about thirty yards away, under the defunct scoreboard. Draped in shadow, silhouetted by the cage lights behind him, the man stands with hands on his hips, watching the action on the infield with a satisfied gleam in his eyes.

Of average height and build, clad in black, he has a large-caliber pistol holstered on his hip. At first glance, he appears almost harmless, benign, like a proud land baron or medieval noble surveying his manor. But even at this distance, Lilly can sense his serpentine gaze—as cunning as a cobra’s—scanning every corner of the stands. And every few seconds, that electric gaze falls on the spot at which Lilly and Alice now sit shivering in the spring winds.

“Better if he believes everything is just fine,” Alice murmurs into her tea.

“Jesus Christ,” Lilly mutters, staring down at the littered cement floor beneath the bleacher seats. Another surge of cheers and applause rises up around her as the gladiators go at it some more on the infield, Bruce going postal with his ax, Gabe getting boxed in by a cluster of chained biters. Lilly pays little attention to it.

“Smile, Lilly.”

“You smile.… I don’t have the stomach for it.” Lilly looks up at the grisly action on the field for a moment, the mace tearing through the rotten craniums of the living dead. “I just don’t get it.” She shakes her head and looks away.

“Don’t get what?”

Lilly takes a deep breath and looks at Alice. “What about Stevens?”

Alice gives her a shrug. Dr. Stevens has been Alice’s lifeline for almost a year now, keeping her sane, teaching her the nursing trade, and showing her how to patch up battered gladiators with the dwindling storehouse of medical supplies stored in the network of catacombs beneath the arena. “What about him?”

“I don’t see him playing along with this hideous shit.” Lilly rubs her face. “What makes him so special—that he doesn’t have to play nice with the Governor? Especially after what happened in January.”

“Lilly—”

“C’mon, Alice.” Lilly looks at her. “Admit it. The good doctor never shows up at these things, and he’s constantly grumbling about the Governor’s bloodthirsty freak shows to anyone who’ll listen.”

Alice licks her lips, turns, and puts a warning hand on Lilly’s arm. “Listen to me. Don’t kid yourself. The only reason Dr. Stevens is tolerated is because of his medical skills.”

“So?”

“So he’s not exactly a welcome part of the Governor’s little kingdom.”

“What are you saying, Alice?”

The younger woman takes another deep breath, and then lowers her voice even further. “All I’m saying is, nobody’s immune. Nobody’s got job security around here.” She tightens her grip on Lilly’s arm. “What if they find another doctor, one who’s a little more gung ho? Stevens could very easily end up out there.”

Lilly pulls herself away from the nurse, rises to her feet, and glances out at the ghastly action on the infield. “I’m so done with this, I can’t take it anymore.” She shoots a glance at the figure silhouetted in the shadow-bound cloister to the north. “I don’t care if he’s watching.”

Lilly starts toward the exit.

Alice grabs her. “Lilly, just promise me … you’ll be careful. Okay? Keep your head down? As a favor to me?”

Lilly gives her a cold, enigmatic little smile. “I know what I’m doing, Alice.”

Then, Lilly turns, descends the stairs, and vanishes out the exit.

*   *   *

It’s been over two years since the first of the dead reanimated and made themselves known to the living. In that time, the larger world outside the rural backwaters of Georgia gradually winked out with the slow certainty of metastasizing cells, the pockets of survivors groping for purchase in abandoned office parks, deserted retail outlets, and derelict communities. As the walker population incubated and multiplied, and the dangers increased, tribal alliances among humans formed themselves in earnest.

The township of Woodbury, Georgia, in the county of Meriwether, situated in the western part of the state, about seventy miles south of Atlanta, has become a virtual anomaly in the realm of survivor settlements. Originally a small farming village of about a thousand people, spanning a six-block stretch of main drag and railroad crossings, the town has been completely fortified and buttressed by the makeshift matériel of war.

Semitrucks retrofitted with fifty-caliber machine gun placements have been canted across the outer corners. Old railroad cars have been wrapped in concertina wire and positioned to block points of egress. Down through the center of town, walled ramparts surround the central business district—some of the barricades just recently completed—within which people live their forlorn lives clinging to memories of church socials and outdoor barbeques.

Making her way across the central walled area, striding purposefully down the cracked paving stones of Main Street, Lilly Caul tries to ignore the feeling that she gets whenever she sees the Governor’s goons strolling the storefronts with AR-15s cradled high across their chests. They’re not just keeping the walkers out … they’re also keeping us in.

Lilly has been persona non grata in Woodbury for months now, ever since her ill-fated coup in January. It was obvious to Lilly, even back then, that the Governor had gotten out of control, his violent regime turning Woodbury into a death carnival. Lilly had managed to recruit a few of the town’s saner denizens—including Stevens, Alice, and Martinez, one of the Governor’s right-hand men—to snatch the Governor one night and take him for a ride out into walker country for a little tough love. The plan was to accidentally-on-purpose get the Governor eaten. But walkers have a way of gumming up the works of the best-laid plans, and in the midst of the mission, a herd had formed out of nowhere. The whole enterprise reverted to a survival struggle … and the Governor lived to rule another day.

Oddly, in some kind of Darwinian twist, the assassination attempt only served to solidify and strengthen the Governor’s power base. To the residents already under his spell, he became Alexander the Great returning to Macedonia … Stonewall Jackson coming back to Richmond, bloodied but unbowed, a badass pit bull born to lead. Nobody seemed to care that their leader was obviously—at least in Lilly’s mind—a pure sociopath. These are brutal times, and brutal times call for brutal leadership. And for the conspirators, the Governor had become an abusive parental figure—teaching “lessons” and meting out his petty punishments with relish.

Lilly approaches a row of little redbrick two-story edifices lined up along the edge of the commercial district. Once quaint little landscaped condo complexes, the buildings now bear the marks of plague shelters. The picket fences have been wrapped in razor wire, the flowerbeds fallow and stony and littered with shotgun shells, the bougainvillea vines over the lintels as dead and brown as frayed cables.

Gazing up at all the boarded windows, Lilly wonders once again, for the millionth time, why she stays in this horrible, desolate, dysfunctional family known as Woodbury. The truth is, she stays because she has nowhere else to go. Nobody has anywhere else to go. The land outside these walls is rife with walking dead, the byways clogged with death and ruin. Lilly stays because she’s afraid, and fear is the one great common denominator in this new world. The fear drives people into themselves, it triggers base impulses, and leeches out the worst of the feral instincts and behavior lying dormant in the human soul.

But for Lilly Caul, the caged-animal experience has drawn out something else that has lurked deep within her for most of her life, something that has haunted her dreams and lurked in her marrow like a recessive gene: loneliness.

An only child growing up in middle-class Marietta, she usually ended up alone: playing alone, sitting alone in the back of the cafeteria or the school bus … always alone. In high school, her brittle intelligence, stubbornness, and sharp wit set her apart from the pom-pom-girl social scene. She grew up lonely, and the latent weight of this loneliness has dogged her in the post-plague world. She has lost everything that has meant anything to her—her father; her boyfriend, Josh; her friend, Megan.

She has lost everything.

Her apartment sits at the east end of Main Street, one of the shabbier redbricks in the complex. Dead kudzu clings to the west wall like mold, the windows veined in black, shriveled vines. The rooftop sprouts bent antennas and ancient satellite dishes that most likely won’t be receiving any signal ever again. As Lilly approaches, the low ceiling of clouds has burned off and the midday sun, as pale and cold as a fluorescent light, blazes down on her, making perspiration break out on the back of her neck.

She steps up to the outer door, fishing for her keys. But she pauses suddenly, something catching her attention out of the corner of her eye. She turns and sees a tattered figure slumped on the ground across the street, a man hunkered against a storefront. The sight of him sends a jolt of sadness down her midsection.

She puts her keys away and crosses the street. The closer she gets to him, the more clearly she can hear his ragged breathing—clogged with phlegm and misery—and his low, wheezing voice, mumbling incomprehensible exhalations in his drunken stupor.

Bob Stookey, one of Lilly’s last true friends, lies curled in a fetal position, shivering, passed out in his threadbare, reeking, navy pea coat, pushed up against the door of a derelict hardware store. The window above him bears the ironic, sun-faded advertisement in cheerful multicolored letters: SPRING CLEAN-UP SALE. The pain etched on the army medic’s deeply lined, leathery face—which is pressed against the pavement like wet trash—breaks Lilly’s heart.

The man has spiraled since the events of the past winter, and now he may be the only other resident of Woodbury who is more lost than Lilly Caul.

“Poor sweet thing.” Lilly speaks softly as she reaches over to a ratty woolen blanket bunched at his feet. The stench of body odor, stale smoke, and cheap whiskey wafts toward her. She pulls the blanket over him, an empty booze bottle rolling out of the fabric and cracking against the breakfront beside the door.

Bob gurgles. “… gotta tell her…”

Lilly kneels beside him, stroking his shoulder, wondering if she should clean him up, get him off the street. She also wonders if the “her” he’s babbling about is Megan. He was sweet on the girl—poor guy—and Megan’s suicide pulverized him. Now Lilly pulls the blanket up to his wattled neck and pats him softly, “It’s okay, Bob … she’s … she’s in a better—”

“… gotta tell…”

For the briefest instant, Lilly jerks at the sight of his fluttering eyes, revealing the bloodshot whites underneath. Has he turned? Her heart races. “Bob? It’s Lilly. You’re having a nightmare.”

Lilly swallows the fear, realizing that he’s still alive—if one could call this alive—and he’s simply writhing in a drunken fever dream, probably reliving the endless rerun of stumbling upon Megan Lafferty dangling at the end of a rope coiled off a broken-down apartment deck.

“Bob…?”

His eyes flutter open, just for an instant, unfocused but glazed with anguish and pain. “Gotta—tell her—what he said,” he wheezes.

“It’s Lilly, Bob,” she says, softly stroking his arm. “It’s okay. It’s me.”

Then the old medic meets her gaze, and he says something else in that halting mucous wheeze that makes Lilly’s spine go cold. She hears it clearly this time, and she realizes the “her” is not Megan.

The “her” is Lilly.

And the thing that Bob Stookey has to tell her will haunt Lilly for a lifetime.

TWO

That day, in the arena, Gabe delivers the final blow that ends the contest at just after three o’clock Eastern standard time, a full hour into the fight. The nail-studded head of the mace slams into Bruce’s ribs—his midsection protected with body armor concealed under his army fatigues—and Bruce goes down for the count. Exhausted from the rough-and-tumble charade, the black man stays down, veiled by a dust cloud, breathing hard into the dirt.

“WE GOT A WINNER!”

The amplified voice startles many in the stands, the crackling noise issuing forth from giant horns positioned around the arena, powered by generators rumbling underneath the grounds. Gabe does his strut, waving the mace in his best William Wallace impersonation. The jeers and applause mask the low communal growling of living dead chained to posts all around Gabe, many of them still reaching for a morsel of human flesh, their putrid mouths working and pulsing and drooling with robotic hunger.

“STICK AROUND, FOLKS, FOR AN AFTER-SHOW MESSAGE FROM THE GOVERNOR!!”

On cue the speakers crackle and thump with the downbeat of a heavy metal tune, a buzz-saw electric guitar filling the air, as a battalion of stagehands floods the infield. Most are young men in hoodies and leather jackets, carrying long iron pikes with hooked ends.

They circle around the walkers. Chains are detached, collars hooked, voices raised, orders given by foremen, and one by one—in a thunderhead of dust—the workers begin leading the monsters across the infield toward the closest portal. Some of the creatures bite at the air as they are ushered back down into the shadows beneath the arena, others snarling and flinging gouts of black drool like reluctant actors being dragged offstage.

Alice watches this from the stands with silent distaste. The other spectators are on their feet now, clapping along with the headbanger tune, hollering at the horde of undead being led away. Alice reaches down to the floor beneath her and finds her black medical bag under the bench. She grabs it, quickly struggles out of her section, and then hurries down the steps toward the infield.

By the time Alice makes it to track level, the two gladiators—Gabe and Bruce—are walking away, heading toward the south exit. She hurries after them. Out of the corner of her eye, she senses a ghostly figure emerging from the shadows of the north portal behind her, making a dramatic entrance that would rival King Lear treading the boards at Stratford-Upon-Avon.

He comes across the infield in his leathers and studs, his stovepipe boots raising dust, his long coat flapping in the breeze behind him. He looks like a grizzled bounty hunter from the nineteenth century, his pistol banging on his hip as he lopes along. The crowd surges with excitement as they see him, a wave of applause and cheers. One of the workmen, an older man in a Harley T-shirt and ZZ Top beard, scuttles toward him with a hard-wired microphone.

Alice turns and catches up with the two exhausted warriors. “Bruce, hold up!”

Walking with a pronounced limp, the big black man reaches the edge of the south archway, pauses, and turns. His left eye is completely swollen shut, his teeth stained in blood. “Whaddaya want?”

“Let me see that eye,” she says, coming up to him, kneeling down, and opening the medical bag.

“I’m fine.”

Gabe joins them with a smirk on his face. “What’s wrong, Brucie got a boo-boo?”

Alice takes a closer look, dabbing the bridge of his nose with gauze. “Jesus, Bruce … why don’t you let me take you down to see Dr. Stevens.”

“It’s just a busted nose,” Bruce says, pushing her away. “I said I’m fine!”

He kicks the medical bag over, the instruments and supplies spilling across the dirt. Alice lets out an exasperated groan and bends down to pick up the pieces, when the music cuts off and the sound of a low, velvety, amplified voice rings out over the winds and noise of the crowd.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN … FRIENDS AND FELLOW RESIDENTS OF WOODBURY … I WANT TO THANK ALL OF YOU FOR ATTENDING THE SHOW TODAY. IT WAS A BARN BURNER!”

Alice glances over her shoulder and sees the Governor standing center field.

The man knows how to work a room. Sizing up the crowd with fire in his gaze, grasping the hand mike with the puffed-up sincerity of a megachurch minister, he has a weird, charismatic aura about him. Not a huge man, not especially handsome—in fact, upon close scrutiny one might even call him a bit scruffy and malnourished—Philip Blake still gives off an air of preternatural confidence. He has dark eyes that reflect the light like geodes, and his gaunt face is festooned with the handlebar whiskers of a third-world bandit.

He turns and nods toward the south exit, stiffening Alice’s spine as she feels his cold gaze on her. The amplified voice crackles and echoes: “AND I WANT TO SEND A SPECIAL SHOUT OUT TO OUR FEARLESS GLADIATORS, BRUCE AND GABE! SHOW ’EM SOME LOVE, Y’ALL—GIVE ’EM A HAND!”

The cheers and whooping and hollering climb several registers, ringing off the metal stanchions and far awnings like a hungry pack of barking dogs. The Governor lets it play out, a conductor patiently prodding a symphony. Alice closes her medical bag and stands.

Bruce waves heroically to the crowd, and then follows Gabe into the shadows of the cloister, vanishing down the exit ramp with the formality of a religious ritual.

Across the infield, Philip Blake lowers his head, waiting for the wave of cheers to wash back out to sea.

In the gathering silence, he lowers his voice slightly, speaking softly, his velvety voice carrying over the wind: “NOW … GETTING SERIOUS FOR A MINUTE … I KNOW OUR SUPPLIES HAVE BEEN GETTING A LITTLE LOW. MANY OF YOU HAVE BEEN SCRIMPIN’ AND RATIONING. MAKING SACRIFICES.”

He looks up at his flock, making eye contact as he continues.

“I FEEL THE CONCERN GROWING. BUT I WANT Y’ALL TO KNOW … RELIEF IS ON ITS WAY. GONNA BE MAKING A SERIES OF RUNS … FIRST ONE TOMORROW … AND THESE RUNS ARE GONNA YIELD ENOUGH PROVISIONS TO KEEP US GOING. AND THAT IS THE KEY, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. WE WILL KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON! WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP! EVER!”

A few spectators applaud, but the majority of them remain silent, skeptical, ambivalent in their hard, cold seats. They have lived off the sour, metallic well water and rotting fruit of the untended orchards for weeks. They have given their children the last of the canned meats and the moldy remains of smoked game birds.

From the center of the infield, the Governor holds them in his gaze.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, A NEW COMMUNITY IS BEING BUILT HERE IN WOODBURY … AND IT IS MY SACRED MISSION TO PROTECT THIS COMMUNITY. AND I WILL DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. I WILL SACRIFICE WHAT HAS TO BE SACRIFICED. THAT’S WHAT COMMUNITY IS ALL ABOUT! WHEN YOU SACRIFICE YOUR OWN NEEDS FOR THE NEEDS OF THE COMMUNITY, YOU WALK WITH YOUR HEAD HELD HIGH!”

This gooses the applause meter a tad, some of the spectators finding Jesus and letting out yelps. The Governor pours on the sermonizing.

“YOU FOLKS HAVE HAD TO SUFFER IMMENSELY DUE TO THE PLAGUE. YOU HAVE BEEN ROBBED OF EVERYTHING YOU HAVE WORKED SO HARD FOR YOUR ENTIRE LIVES. MANY OF YOU HAVE LOST LOVED ONES. BUT HERE … IN WOODBURY … YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT CANNOT BE TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU BY MAN NOR BEAST: YOU HAVE EACH OTHER!”

Now some of the residents spring to their feet and put their hands together, while others pump their fists. The noise builds.

“LET ME BOTTOM-LINE IT FOR Y’ALL: THE MOST PRECIOUS POSSESSION WE HAVE IN THE WORLD IS OUR OWN PEOPLE. AND FOR THE SAKE OF OUR PEOPLE … WE WILL NEVER GIVE UP … NEVER FALTER … NEVER LOSE OUR NERVE … AND NEVER LOSE FAITH!”

More spectators stand. The cheering and applause rises up into the sky.

“YOU HAVE A COMMUNITY! AND IF YOU HOLD ON TO THIS, THEN THERE IS NO FORCE IN THE WORLD THAT CAN TAKE IT FROM YOU! WE WILL SURVIVE. I PROMISE YOU. WOODBURY WILL SURVIVE! GOD BLESS Y’ALL … AND GOD BLESS WOODBURY!”

Across the arena, Alice carries her medical bag out the south entrance without even looking back.

She’s seen this movie before.

*   *   *

After the post-game show, Philip Blake makes a stop in the men’s room at the end of the arena’s litter-strewn portico. The narrow enclosure reeks of dried urine, black mold, and rat turds.

Philip relieves himself, splashes water on his face, and then gazes for a moment at his cubist reflection in the cracked mirror. Way in the back of his mind, in some far-flung corner of his memories, the sound of a little girl crying echoes faintly.

He finishes up, and then bangs out the door, his metal-tipped boots and long belt-chain jangling. Down one long cinder-block corridor, down a flight of stone steps, down another hallway, and finally down one last flight of stairs, and he finds the “pens”—a row of rolling garage doors riddled with dents and ancient graffiti.

Gabe stands in front of the last door on the left, reaching into a metal oil drum and tossing something wet through a broken-out window. The Governor approaches without a word, pausing in front of one of the windows. “Nice work out there today, sport.”

“Thanks, boss.” Gabe reaches down into the drum and pulls out another morsel, a human foot severed raggedly at the ankle, glistening with gore. He casually tosses it through the jagged aperture.

Philip gazes through the dirty glass at the blood-speckled tile enclosure. He sees the swarming mass of undead—a small orgy of pale-blue faces and blackened mouths, the two dozen surviving walkers from the day’s event gobbling at body parts on the tile floor like a drove of wild pigs fighting over truffles—and he stares and stares, enthralled for a moment, fascinated by the spectacle.

At length, Philip tears his gaze away from the abomination and nods at the bin full of fresh remains. “Who is it this time?”

Gabe looks up, his tattered black turtleneck torn over one pectoral, bulging at the belly with body armor, his underarms stained with the telltale sweat-spots of exertion. He wears rubber surgical gloves that drip with fresh blood. “Whaddaya mean?”

“The chum you’re tossing in, who is it?”

Gabe nods. “Oh … this is that old codger, used to live by the post office.”

“Natural causes, I hope?”

“Yeah.” Gabe nods, and tosses another piece through the opening. “Asthma attack last night, poor dude. Somebody said he had emphysema.”

The Governor lets out a sigh. “He’s gone to Glory now. Gimme an arm. From the elbow down. And maybe one of the smaller organs … a kidney, the heart.”

Gabe pauses, the ghastly wet noises of the feeding frenzy echoing down the corridor. Gabe gives the Governor an odd look, a mixture of sympathy, affection, and maybe even duty, like a Boy Scout about to help his troop leader. “Tell you what,” Gabe says, his husky voice softening. “Why don’t you go home, and I’ll bring ’em to ya.”

The Governor looks at him. “Why?”

Gabe shrugs. “People see me carrying something, they don’t even give it a second thought. You carry something, they’ll want to help … maybe ask you what it is, wonder what you’re doing.”

Philip stares at the man for a moment. “You got a point there.”

“Won’t go over well.”

Philip gives a satisfied nod. “All right then. We’ll do it your way. I’ll be at my place the rest of the night, bring it around back.”

“Copy that.”

The Governor turns to leave, and then pauses for a moment. He turns back to Gabe and smiles. “Gabe … thanks. You’re a good man. Best I got.”

The thick-necked man grins. A merit badge for the top Scout. “Thanks, boss.”

Philip Blake turns and heads for the stairs with a very subtle change in his gait, a vague yet pronounced bounce to his step.

*   *   *

The closest thing Woodbury has to an executive mansion is the three-bedroom apartment spanning the top floor of a large condo building at the end of Main Street. Heavily fortified, the front door guarded at all times by a rotating crew of machine gunners manning the turret across the street, the building is clean yellow brick, nicely tuck-pointed, free of graffiti or grime.

Philip Blake enters the foyer that evening, whistling happily, passing the large bank of metal mailboxes that haven’t seen postal service in over twenty-eight months. He climbs the stairs two at a time, feeling good and righteous and full of affection for his small-town brethren, his extended family, his place in this new world. At his door at the end of the second-floor hallway he pauses, fishes for his keys, and lets himself in.

The place would never make the pages of Architectural Digest. The carpeted rooms are mostly unfurnished, a few armchairs here and there surrounded by boxes. But the place is clean and well organized, a macrocosm of Philip Blake’s compartmentalized, ordered mind.

“Daddy’s home,” he announces cheerfully as he enters the living room. “Sorry I’m so late, sweetie pie … busy day.” He unbuckles his gun, sheds his waistcoat, and sets his keys and his pistol on the sideboard by the door.

Across the room, a little girl in a faded pinafore dress has her back turned to him. She softly bumps against the large picture window, a goldfish compulsively trying to escape its bowl.

“How’s my little princess doing?” he says as he approaches the child. Momentarily lost in the domestic bliss of a normal life, Philip kneels down behind her and reaches out as though expecting a hug. “C’mon, babydoll … it’s your daddy. Don’t be afraid.”

The little thing that was once a girl suddenly whirls around to face him, straining against the chain hooked to her iron collar. She lets out a guttural growl, gnashing her rotten teeth at him. Her face—once that of a lovely blue-eyed cherub—now bears the pallid fish-belly color of the dead. Her eyes are empty, milky-white marbles.

All the joy drains out of Philip Blake as he sinks to the floor, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front of her, just out of her reach. She doesn’t recognize me. His mind races, his thoughts returning to their dark, brooding default setting: Why the fuck doesn’t she recognize me?

Philip Blake believes that the undead can learn, can still access dormant parts of their memories and past. He has no scientific proof of this theory, but he has to believe it, he has to.

“It’s okay, Penny, it’s just your daddy.” He offers her his hand as though she might hold it. “Give me your hand, honey. Remember? Remember when we used to hold hands and take long walks up to Lake Rice?”

She fumbles at his hand, tries to pull it to her mouth, her tiny piranha-like teeth clamping down.

He jerks his arm back. “Penny, no!” He tries again, attempts to gently take her hand. But she tries to take another bite out of it. “Penny, stop it!” He struggles to control his anger. “Don’t do this. It’s me … it’s your daddy … don’t you recognize me?”

She grabs at his hand, her blackened, decomposed mouth chewing at the air, noxious, fetid breath puffing out on a watery snarl.

Philip pulls away. He stands. He runs his hands through his hair, his stomach clenching with anguish. “Try to remember, sweetie.” He pleads with her with a catch in his throat, his voice wavering as though verging on a sob. “You can do it. I know you can. Try to remember who I am.”

The girl-thing strains against her chain, her mouth working involuntarily. She cocks her ruined head at him—her lifeless eyes registering nothing so much as hunger, and maybe even a trace of confusion—the confusion of a sleepwalker seeing something that doesn’t belong.

“Goddamnit, child, you know who I am!” Philip clenches his fists, towering over her. “Look at me!—I’m your father!—Can’t you see that?!—I’m your daddy, goddamnit!—Look at me!!”

The dead child growls. Philip lets out a roar of anger, raising his hand instinctively to give her a slap, when all at once the sound of knocking breaks the spell. Philip blinks at the noise, his right hand still poised to deliver a blow to the child.

Someone is knocking on the back door. He looks over his shoulder. The sound is coming from out in the kitchen, where the rear storm door opens out over a ramshackle back deck overlooking a narrow alley.

Letting out a breath, Philip flexes his hands and sniffs back the rage. He turns away from the child, and takes slow, deep breaths as he heads across the apartment. He goes to the back door and yanks it open.

Gabe stands in the shadows, holding a cardboard box spotted with oily wet-stains. “Hey, boss. Here’s that stuff that you said you—”

Philip reaches for the box, grabs it, says nothing, and goes back inside.

Gabe stands there in the darkness, vexed by the brusque reception, as the door slams in his face.

*   *   *

That night, Lilly has a horrible time falling asleep. Clad in a damp Georgia Tech T-shirt and panties, she lies on the bare mattress of her futon, trying to find a comfortable position, staring at the cracks in the plaster ceiling of her squalid garden apartment.

The tension in the back of her neck, her lower spine, and her joints grips her like electric current jolting intermittently through her. This must be what electro-convulsive treatments feel like. She had a therapist once who suggested ECT for her alleged anxiety disorder. She had declined. But she always wondered if the treatments would have helped.

Now all the shrinks are gone, the couches overturned, the office buildings decimated and scoured out, the pharmacies ransacked, the entire field of psychotherapy gone the way of health spas and waterparks. Now Lilly Caul is on her own, alone with her excoriating insomnia and circular thoughts haunted by memories of the late Josh Lee Hamilton.

Mostly Lilly is thinking about what Bob Stookey uttered to her earlier that day in his inebriated catatonia on the sidewalk. Lilly had to bend down close to hear his strangled wheeze, the words coming out with laborious urgency.

“Gotta tell her what he said,” Bob had muttered into her ear. “Before he died … he told me … Josh told me … it was Lilly … Lilly Caul … it was her … the only one he had ever loved.”

Lilly had never believed it. Ever. Not then. Not when big Josh Hamilton was alive. Not even after Josh had been murdered in cold blood by one of Woodbury’s thugs. Was there a wall around Lilly’s heart because of guilt? Was it because she had led Josh on, had used him mostly for protection?

Or was it because Lilly simply didn’t love herself enough to love someone else?

After hearing it being blurted out by a catatonic drunk on the sidewalk that day, Lilly had stiffened with horror. She had backed away from the old man as though he were radioactive, and then made a mad dash all the way back to her apartment, locking herself inside.

Now, in the eternal darkness of her lonely apartment, the restlessness and angst making her flesh crawl, she longs for the medication she routinely popped like candy during the old days. She would give her left ovary for a tab of Valium, a Xanax, maybe some Ambien … hell, she would even settle for a stiff drink. She stares at the ceiling some more and finally gets an idea.

She climbs out of bed and fishes through a peach crate of dwindling supplies. Amid the two tins of Spam, the bar of Ivory soap, and the half-used roll of toilet paper—in Woodbury, toilet paper is now acquired and distributed with the ruthlessness of gold bullion being traded on the New York Stock Exchange—she finds a nearly empty bottle of NyQuil.

She chugs the rest of it and gets back into bed. Rubbing her eyes, she takes shallow breaths and tries to clear her mind and listen to the white noise of the generators across the street, their ubiquitous, droning rumble becoming like a heartbeat in her ears.

A little less than an hour later, she sinks through the sweaty mattress and into the clutches of a vivid, terrifying nightmare.

It could be partially due to the NyQuil acting on her empty stomach, or partially because of the gruesome residue of the day’s gladiator fights clinging to her mind’s eye, or maybe it’s a result of her unresolved feelings for Josh Hamilton, but for whatever reason, Lilly finds herself wandering a country cemetery, in the dark of night, desperately looking for Josh’s grave site.

She’s lost, and she hears the sound of feral growling in the dark forest behind her, on either side of her. She can hear twigs snapping, gravel crunching, the lumbering footsteps of the walking dead—hundreds of them—coming for her.

She passes gravestone after gravestone in the moonlight … searching for Josh’s final resting place.

At first, the rhythmic banging sounds creep into the narrative of the dream subtly, from a distance, their echoes faint, drowned by the rising noise of the dead. Lilly isn’t even aware of the noise for quite some time. She’s too busy frantically searching for the one important grave marker, weaving through a forest of gray, weathered headstones. The biters close in.

At last, she sees a fresh grave off in the distance, on a steep slope of stony earth and skeletal trees. It lies in the shadows, a bone-white marble tombstone all by itself, the pale glow of moonlight reflecting off its surface. It stands at the head of a large mound of moist, ruddy earth, and as Lilly approaches, the name engraved on its face becomes visible in the moonbeams:

JOSHUA LEE HAMILTON

B. 1/15/69 – D. 11/21/12

The banging noises register in Lilly’s ear as she approaches the grave site. The wind whispers. The walkers surround her. Out of the corner of her eye, she can glimpse the pack closing in on her, the putrid bodies emerging from the woods, dragging toward her, tattered burial clothing flagging in the wind, scores of dead eyes in the darkness like shiny coins.

The closer she gets to the tombstone, the more prominent the banging noises become.

She climbs the slope and approaches the grave. The banging noises reveal themselves to be muffled knocking sounds—a fist pounding against a door, or perhaps the inside of a coffin—the noise dampened by layers of earth. Lilly can’t breathe. She kneels by the headstone. The knocking sounds are coming from inside Josh’s grave. They are so loud now that the loose earth across the surface of his grave trembles and skitters across the mound in tiny avalanches.

Lilly’s terror mutates. She touches the shivering mound of earth. Her heart goes cold. Josh is down there, knocking on the inside of his coffin, a horrible entreaty to be freed from death, to be loosened from this prison.

The walkers are coming for Lilly, she can feel their foul breath on the back of her neck, their long shadows sliding up the hill on either side of her. She is doomed. Josh wants out. The knocking rises. Lilly looks down at the grave, her tears tracking down her cheeks, dripping off her chin. Her tears flood the earth. The rough-hewn planks of Josh’s simple coffin become visible in the mud, something moving inside the slats.

Lilly weeps. The walkers surround her. The knocking rises to a thunderous beat. Lilly sobs, and she reaches down and tenderly touches the coffin, when all at once—

—Josh bursts out of the wooden enclosure, tearing through it as though it were made of matchsticks, his hungry mouth chewing the air, an inhuman groan coming out of him. Lilly screams but no sound comes out of her. Josh’s big square face churns with bloodlust as he goes for her neck, his eyes as dead and shiny as Buffalo nickels.

The impact of his rotting teeth hitting her jugular wakes her up in a spasm of horror.

*   *   *

Lilly jerks awake, soaked in feverish sweat, the morning light vibrating with the sound of someone knocking on her apartment door. She gasps for breath. She blinks away the nightmare, the sound of her own scream still ringing in her ears. The knocking continues.

“Lilly? You okay?”

The familiar voice, muffled outside the front door, barely registers in her ears. She rubs her face, taking deep breaths and trying to get her bearings.

At length, the room comes into focus, and her breathing returns to normal. She drags herself out of bed, the dizziness washing over her as she searches for her jeans and her top. The knocking gets frantic.

“Coming!” she blurts in a strangled voice as she pulls on her clothes.

She goes to the door. “Oh … hey,” she mumbles after opening the door and seeing Martinez standing on her porch in the pale light.

The tall, rangy Latino wears a bandanna pirate-style around his head, and he has muscular arms, which poke through the cutoff sleeves of his work shirt. He has an assault rifle slung over his broad shoulder, and his handsome face furrows with concern. “What the hell’s going on in there?” he says, giving her the once-over, his dark eyes shining with worry.

“I’m fine,” she says, a tad unconvincingly.

“Did you forget?”

“Um … no.”

“Get your guns, Lilly,” he says. “We’re going on that run I told you about, and we need all hands on deck.”

THREE

“Morning, boss!”

A squat, middle-aged, bald man named Gus greets Martinez and Lilly out by the farthest semitruck, which blocks the exit gate on the north side of town. With his rhino-thick neck and oil-stained sleeveless T-shirt stretched taut by a rotund belly, Gus gives off the impression of a blunt instrument. But what he lacks in intelligence, he makes up for in loyalty.

“Morning, Gus,” Martinez says as he walks up. “You mind grabbing a couple of them empty gas containers, in case we hit pay dirt on the trip?”

“Right away, boss.”

Gus whirls and trundles off with his pistol-grip 12-gauge under his arm like a newspaper he hasn’t gotten around to reading. Martinez and Lilly watch the little troll vanish around a corner.

Lilly glances to the east and sees the early morning sun peering over the crest of the barricade. It’s not even seven yet and already the unseasonable chill of the previous week has burned off. In this part of Georgia, spring can be a tad bipolar—coming in cool and wet, but turning as warm and humid as the tropics without warning.

“Lilly, why don’t you ride in back with the others.” Martinez nods toward a big military cargo truck in the middle distance. “I’ll put ol’ Gus up in the shotgun seat with me, in case we have to pick off anything on the way.”

Idling under a canopy of swaying live oaks, the heavy-duty truck sits perpendicular to the semitruck. It features enormous mud-speckled tires and a mine-resistant, riveted hull as durable as a tank—a recent acquisition from the neighboring National Guard station. The rear hatch is draped in a tarp.

As Martinez and Lilly approach, an older man in a baseball cap and silk roadie jacket comes around the front of the truck, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. A weather-beaten, rail-thin sixty-something with cunning eyes and an iron-gray goatee, David Stern has the vaguely regal, hard-ass bearing of a college football coach. “She was down a quart,” he says to Martinez. “I put some recycled oil in her … ought to keep her going a while. Morning, Lilly.”

Lilly gives the man a groggy nod and mumbles a drowsy greeting.

Gus returns with a pair of battered plastic gas containers.

“Throw them in back, Gus.” Martinez circles around the rear of the truck. Lilly and David follow. “Where’s the little lady, David?”

“In here!” The tarp flaps open, and Barbara Stern sticks her graying head out. Also in her mid-sixties, she wears a denim jacket over a faded cotton muumuu, and has the wild, silver tendrils of an aging earth mother. Her deeply lined, sun-browned face is animated with the rapier wit that has presumably kept her husband on his toes all these years. “Trying to teach Junior here something. It’s like pulling teeth.”

The “Junior” to which she refers suddenly peeks out of the cargo hold next to her.

“Nag, nag, nag,” the young man says with a rascally smirk. A boyish twenty-two, with long, dark, espresso-brown curls, Austin Ballard has deep-set eyes that sparkle with mischief. In his leather bomber jacket and multiple strands of bling around his neck, he affects the air of a second-tier rock star, an incorrigible bad boy. “How the hell do you stand it, Dave?” he says.

“Drink heavily and agree with everything she says,” David Stern cracks wise from behind Martinez. “Barbara, stop mothering the boy.”

“He was trying to light up in here, for Chrissake,” Barbara Stern grumbles. “You want I should let him smoke and send us all to kingdom come?”

“Okay, everybody, can it.” Martinez checks his ammo magazine. He’s all business, maybe even a little jittery. “We got a job to do. Y’all know the drill. Let’s get this done with a minimum of bullshit.”

Martinez orders Lilly and David to get in back with the other two, and then leads Gus around to the cab.

Lilly climbs up and into the rank atmosphere of the cargo hold. The airless chamber smells of old sweat, cordite, and must. A caged dome light shines down dully on shipping containers lined along either side of the corrugated floor. Lilly looks for a place to plant herself.

“I saved a seat for ya,” Austin says to her with a lascivious little grin, patting the unoccupied trunk next to him. “C’mon, take a load off … I won’t bite.”

Lilly rolls her eyes, lets out a sigh, and sits down next to the young man.

“You keep your hands to yourself, Romeo,” Barbara Stern jokes from the opposite side of the gloomy enclosure. She sits on a low wooden crate next to David, who grins at the twosome across the cargo hold.

“They do make a good pair, though, don’t they?” David says with a gleam in his eyes.

“Oh please,” Lilly murmurs with mild disgust. The last thing she wants to do is get involved with a twenty-two-year-old, especially a kid as annoyingly flirty as Austin Ballard. Over the past three months—since he drifted into Woodbury from the north, arriving malnourished and dehydrated with a ragtag group of ten—he’s hit on just about every single woman not yet in menopause.

If pressed, however, Lilly would have to concede that Austin Ballard is what her old friend Megan would call “easy on the eyes.” With his curly mane and long lashes, he could easily kindle Lilly’s lonely soul. Plus there seems to be more than meets the eye about the kid. Lilly has seen him in action. Underneath the pretty-boy looks and roguish charm lies a tough, plague-hardened young man who seems to be more than willing to put himself on the line for his fellow survivors.

“Lilly likes to play hard to get,” Austin prods, still with that sideways grin. “But she’ll come around.”

“Keep dreaming,” Lilly mutters as the truck vibrates and rumbles.

The gears kick in, and the cargo hold shudders as the vehicle slowly pulls forward.

Lilly hears a second engine—a big diesel—revving outside the hatch. Her stomach clenches slightly at the sound as she realizes that the exit is opening.

*   *   *

Martinez watches the semitrailer slowly backing away from the breach, its vertical stack spitting and spewing exhaust, opening up a twenty-five-foot gap in the barricade.

The woods adjacent to Woodbury reveal themselves in the pale sun a hundred yards away. No walkers in sight. Yet. The sun, still low in the sky, streams through the distant trees in hazy motes, burning off the predawn fog.

Pulling forward another twenty feet, Martinez brings the truck to a stop and rolls down his window. He peers up at two gunners perched on a cherry picker, which is pushed up against the corner of the wall. “Miller! Do me a favor, will ya?”

One of the men—a skinny African American in an Atlanta Falcons jersey—leans over the edge. “You name it, boss.”

“While we’re gone, keep the wall clear of biters. Can you do that for me?”

“Will do!”

“We want an easy entryway back in. You follow me?”

“We’re on it, man! No worries!”

Martinez lets out a sigh, rolling his window back up. “Yeah, right,” he mumbles under his breath, slamming the truck into gear and then stepping on the gas. The vehicle rumbles away into the dusky morning.

Just for an instant, Martinez glances through the driver’s side window at the side mirror. Through veils of dust stirred up by the massive tires, he sees Woodbury receding into the distance behind them. “No worries … sure. What could possibly go wrong?”

*   *   *

It takes them half an hour to get to Interstate 85. Martinez takes Woodbury Road west, weaving through the abandoned carcasses of cars and trucks littering the two-lane, keeping his speed between forty and fifty miles per hour in the unlikely event some errant biter tries to lumber out of the woods and latch on to them.

As the cargo truck intermittently swerves between wrecks, the rocking motion keeps the folks in back holding on to their seats. Feeling nauseous, Lilly studiously avoids brushing up against Austin.

En route to the interstate, they pass Greenville, another little farming community along Highway 18 that is practically the mirror image of Woodbury. Once upon a time, Greenville was the county seat, a quaint little enclave of redbrick government buildings, white capital domes, and stately Victorian homes, many of which were on the historic registry. Now the place lies demolished and drained of all life in the harsh morning sun. Through the flapping rear tarp, Lilly can see the rubble—boarded windows, broken colonnades, and overturned cars.

“Looks like Greenville’s been picked clean,” David Stern comments morosely as they stare out the back at the passing devastation. Many of the windows bear the telltale spray-paint mark—a big capital D in a circle, meaning DEAD, meaning “Don’t bother”—which adorns many of the buildings in this part of the state.

“What’s the plan, Dave?” Austin asks, cleaning his fingernails with a hunting knife, an affectation that annoys Lilly immensely. She can’t decide whether it’s a genuine habit or strictly for show.

David Stern shrugs. “I guess the next town over—Hogansville, I think it is—has a grocery store that Martinez thinks is still viable.”

“Viable?”

Another shrug from David. “Who knows … it’s all process of elimination.”

“Yeah, well … let’s just make sure we don’t get eliminated in the process.” He turns and pokes an elbow gently against Lilly’s ribs. “Get it, Lilly?”

“Hardy-har-har,” she says, and then glances back out the rear.

They pass a familiar access road snaking off the main two-lane, a tall roadside sign glaring in the morning sun. The trademark logo, with its gold sunburst, leans to one side, the big blue letters cracked and faded and strafed with bird shit:

Walmart

Save money. Live better.

A cold trickle of dread sluices down Lilly’s midsection as she remembers the events of the previous year. At this very Walmart, she and Josh and their contingent from Atlanta first stumbled upon Martinez and his goons. In flashes of woozy memories, Lilly remembers finding guns and supplies … and then running into Martinez … the standoff … Megan freaking out … and then Martinez doing his sales pitch … and finally Josh agonizing over whether or not they should try Woodbury on for size.

“What’s wrong with this joint?” Austin jerks his thumb toward the defunct retail outlet as they roar past the lot.

“Everything’s wrong with it,” Lilly murmurs under her breath.

She sees stray walkers wandering the Walmart’s parking lot like hellish revenants, the overturned cars and scattered shopping carts so weather-beaten and fossilized they now have weeds growing up through their guts. The gas station islands are blackened and scorched from the fires that ravaged the place back in February. And the store resembles an ancient ruin of broken glass and sagging metal, empty cartons and boxes vomited out of gaping windows.

“Place got picked clean of food and supplies long ago,” David Stern laments. “Everybody and their brother had a go at it.”

As they pass the Walmart, Lilly gets a glimpse through the fluttering tarp of the rural farmland north of the property. The shadows of walkers—from this distance as small and indistinct as bugs under a rock—inch back and forth beneath the foliage and behind the dead cornstalks.

Since the advent of the herd last year, walker activity has picked up, the population of living dead growing and spreading into the backwaters and desolate farmlands that once lay fallow and deserted. Rumors have circulated that ragtag groups of scientists in Washington and underground labs out West are developing behavioral models and population forecasts for the reanimated dead, and none of it is promising. Bad news hangs over the land, and it hangs right now in the dimly lit cargo hold of the transport truck, as Lilly tries to push dark thoughts from her mind.

“Hey, Barbara.” Lilly shoots a glance at the gray-haired woman sitting across from her. “Why don’t you tell us the famous story again?”

Austin gives a good-natured roll of the eyes. “Oh, God … not this again.”

Lilly gives him a look. “You be quiet. C’mon, Barbara, tell us the honeymoon story.”

Austin rubs his eyes. “Somebody shoot me.”

“Shush!” Lilly pokes Austin, then looks at the older woman and manages a smile. “Go ahead, Barbara.”

The gray-haired woman grins at her husband. “You want to tell it?”

David puts his arm around his wife. “Sure, this’ll be a first … me doing the talking.” He looks at the older woman with that glimmer in his eye, and something passes between the two of them that reaches out across the dim enclosure and squeezes Lilly’s heart. “Okay … first of all, it was back in the prehistoric days when I still had black hair and a prostate that worked.”

Barbara gives him an amused punch in the arm. “Can you just cut to the chase, please? These people can do without your entire urinary history.”

The truck rumbles over a railroad track, rattling the cargo hold. David holds on to his perch, then takes a deep breath and grins. “The thing is, we were just kids … but we were madly in love.”

“Still are, for some reason … God knows why,” Barbara adds with a smirk, giving him a loaded glance.

David sticks his tongue out at her. “So anyway … we found ourselves headed to the most beautiful place on earth—Iguazu, Argentina—with nothing but the clothes on our backs and about a hundred bucks in pesos.”

Again Barbara chimes in: “If memory serves, ‘Iguazu’ means ‘the Devil’s throat,’ and it’s basically a river that runs through Brazil and Argentina. We read about it in a guidebook, and we thought it would be the perfect adventure.”

David sighs. “So, anyway … we get there on a Sunday, and by Monday night we had hiked all the way upriver—maybe five miles—to this incredible waterfall.”

Barbara shakes her head. “Five miles?! Are you kidding me? It was more like twenty-five!”

David winks at Lilly. “She exaggerates. Trust me … it was only like twenty or thirty kilometers.”

Barbara playfully crosses her arms across her chest. “David? How many kilometers are in a mile?”

He sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know, honey, but I’m sure you’re about to tell us.”

“Like one point six … so thirty kilometers would be about twenty miles.”

David gives her another look. “Can I tell the story? Is that all right with you?”

She looks away petulantly. “Who’s stopping you?”

“So we find this amazing waterfall, and I mean, this is the most beautiful waterfall on earth. From a single point, you’re practically surrounded, three hundred and sixty degrees, and the water’s roaring all around you.”

“And rainbows!” Barbara marvels. “Everywhere you look. It really was something.”

“So then,” David goes on. “Lover-girl here decides to get frisky.”

Barbara grins. “I just wanted to give him a little hug, that’s all.”

“And she’s feeling me up with the water rushing all around us—”

“I wasn’t feeling you up!”

“She was all over me. And all of a sudden, she goes, ‘David, where’s your wallet?’ And I feel the back of my jeans, and sure enough, the thing’s gone.”

Barbara shakes her head, reliving the moment for the millionth time. “My fanny pack was empty, too. Somebody had ripped us off somewhere along the line. Passports, ID, everything. We were stuck in the middle of Argentina and we were stupid Americans, and we had no effen clue what to do with ourselves.”

David smiles to himself, holding the moment in his memory like a precious heirloom he keeps in a drawer. Lilly gets the feeling that this is something essential for the Sterns, something unspoken but as powerful as the motion of the tides or the gravitational tug of the moon. “We get back to the closest village and make a few calls,” David continues, “but there’s no embassy for miles and the cops are about as helpful as a poke in the eye.”

“We’re told we have to wait for our ID issues to be sorted out in Buenos Aires.”

“Which is like eight hundred miles away.”

“Kilometers, Barbara. Eight hundred kilometers away.”

“David, don’t start.”

“Anyway, we have a few centavos left in our pockets—the equivalent of what, Barbara? A buck fifty? So we find a little village and talk a local guy into letting us sleep on the floor of his barn for fifty centavos.”

Barbara smiles wistfully. “It wasn’t exactly the Ritz but we made do.”

David grins at her. “Turned out the man ran a little restaurant in town, and he agreed to let us work there while we waited for our passports to be ironed out. Babs waited tables while I worked in back, slinging chorizo and making menudo for the locals.”

“Funny thing was, it turned out to be one of the best times of our lives.” Barbara lets out a pensive sigh. “We were in such a different environment, and all we had to rely on was each other, but that was … it was … nice.” She looks at her husband and for the first time, her wrinkled, matronly face softens. A look comes over her—just for an instant—that obliterates time, erases all the years, and turns her back into a young bride in love with a good man. “In fact,” she says softly, “it was even kinda sorta terrific.”

David looks at his wife. “We were stuck there for—what? How long was it, Babs?”

“We were there for two and a half months, waiting for word from the embassy, sleeping with the goats, living off that god-awful menudo.”

“It was … an experience.” David puts his arm around his woman. He softly kisses her temple. “Wouldn’t have traded it for all the tea in Tennessee.”

The truck shudders over another series of bumps, and the noisy silence that ensues weighs down on Lilly. She had expected the story to lift her spirits. She had expected it to distract her, soothe her, maybe even put a salve on her brooding thoughts. But it has only served to pick at the scab that she has grown over her heart. It has made her feel small, alone, and insignificant.

Dizziness courses over her and she feels like crying … for Josh … for Megan … for herself … for this whole upside-down nightmare gripping the land.

At last, Austin breaks the spell with a confused furrow of his brow. “What the fuck is menudo?”

*   *   *

The cargo truck bangs over a series of petrified railroad tracks and enters Hogansville from the west. Martinez keeps both hands on the wheel as he scans the deserted streets and storefronts through the windshield.

The mass exodus has left the small village overgrown with prairie grass and ironweed, boarded up tight, and littered with cast-off belongings across the roadway—moldy mattresses, loose drawers, and filthy clothing clogging every gutter. A few stray walkers as ragged as scarecrows wander aimlessly in the alleys and empty parking lots.

Martinez applies the brakes and slows the truck to a steady twenty miles an hour. He sees a street sign and consults a page torn out of an old phone book, which he has taped to the dashboard. The location of the Hogansville Piggly Wiggly seems to be on the west side of town, about a half mile away. The tires crunch over broken glass and detritus, the noise drawing the attention of nearby walkers.

From the passenger seat, Gus pumps a shell into the breech of his 12-gauge. “I got this, boss,” he says, rolling down his window.

“Gus, wait!” Martinez reaches down to a duffel bag stuffed between the seats. He finds a short-barrel .357 Magnum with a silencer attached, and hands it to the portly bald man. “Use this, I don’t want the noise drawing more of ’em.”

Gus puts the scattergun down, takes the revolver, opens the cylinder, checks the rounds, and then clicks it shut. “Fair enough.”

The bald man aims the revolver out the window and picks off three corpses with the ease of a man playing a carnival game. The blasts—muffled by the noise suppressor—sound like kindling snapping. The walkers fold one by one, the tops of their crania erupting in bubbles of black fluid and tissue, their bodies sagging to the pavement with satisfying wet thuds. Martinez proceeds west.

Martinez makes a turn at an intersection blocked by the wreckage of a three-car collision, the burned-out husks of metal and glass tangled in a crumpled mess. The cargo truck skirts the sidewalk, and Gus takes down another pair of walkers in tattered paramedic uniforms. The cargo truck continues down a side street.

Just past a boarded strip mall, the Piggly Wiggly sign comes into view on the south side of the street, the mouth of the deserted parking lot crowded with half a dozen walkers. Gus puts them out of their misery with little fuss—pausing once to reload—as the truck creeps slowly into the lot.

One of the walkers topples against the side of the truck, a fountain of oily blood washing across the hood before the body slides under the wheels.

“Fuck!” Martinez blurts as he pulls up to the front of the store.

Through the blood-smeared windshield, he can see the disaster area that is the former Piggly Wiggly. Broken paving stones and overturned flowerpots spray across the storefront, the windows all broken out and gaping jaggedly, rows of rusted-out carts lying either on their sides or smashed by fallen timbers. Inside the shadowy interior of the store, the aisles are ransacked, the shelves empty, the fixtures hanging by threads and slowly turning in the wind. “Fuck! Fuck!—Fuck!—Fuck-fuck-fuck!”

Martinez rubs his face, leaning back against the driver’s seat.

Gus looks at him. “So what now, boss?”

*   *   *

The tarp snaps open, the harsh light of day flooding the cargo hold. The glare makes Lilly blink and squint as her eyes adjust.

She rises to her feet and gazes down at Martinez standing outside the rear of the truck, holding the tarp open with a dour expression on his dark features. Gus stands behind him, wringing his hands. “Good news and bad news,” Martinez grumbles.

The Sterns stand up, Austin also slowly rising and stretching like a sleepy cat.

“Grocery store’s been trashed, cleaned out,” Martinez announces. “We’re S-O-L.”

Lilly looks at him. “What’s the good news?”

“There’s a warehouse out behind the store, no windows, locked up tight. Looks like people have left it alone. Could be a gold mine.”

“What are we waiting for?”

Martinez levels his gaze at Lilly. “Not sure how safe it is in there. I want everybody locked and loaded, and on their toes. Bring all the flashlights, too … looks like it’s pretty dark in there.”

They all reach for their weapons and gear. Lilly digs in her rucksack. She pulls out her guns—a pair of Ruger .22 semiautos—and checks the ammo magazines. She has two curved clips, each one loaded with twenty-five rounds. Bob taught her how to use the high-capacity mags, which make the pistols slightly unwieldy but also give her staying power if things get hectic.

“Austin, I want you carrying the duffels,” Martinez says, tipping a nod toward the pile of canvas bags in the corner. “Keep ’em open and ready.”

Austin is already standing over the bags, gathering them up and slinging them over his shoulder. The others check their ammo supplies, holstering their weapons in quick-release rigs on their hips and belts. Barbara shoves a Colt Army .45 down the back of a sash wrapped tightly around her thick midriff, David handing her two extra clips.

They work with the practiced concentration of veteran bank robbers. They’ve done this many times. Still, there’s a certain tension crackling around the dim enclosure as Martinez takes one last look through the open tarp. “Gonna pull around back,” he says. “Be ready to rock and roll, and watch your backs on the way in … the noise of the truck’s already drawn more biters.”

A quick succession of nods around the cargo hold, and Martinez vanishes.

Lilly goes over to the rear hatch and braces herself on the jamb as the sound of the cab doors slamming is followed by the revving engine. The truck lurches out of there and then rumbles around the side of the supermarket.

Forty-five seconds later, the air brakes hiss and the truck jerks to a stop.

Lilly takes a deep breath, draws one of the Rugers, pushes the tarp open, and hops out.

She lands hard on the cracked pavement, the sun in her eyes, the wind in her face, the smell of burning rubber wafting in from some far-off cataclysm. Martinez is already out of the cab, the .357 with the silencer holstered and banging on his thigh, Gus hustling around the front of the truck. The bald man climbs behind the wheel.

The warehouse sits off to their right, on the edge of the back lot, nestled in a jungle of weeds and razor grass, an enormous corrugated metal box the size of three movie theaters. Lilly sees the unmarked metal door at the top of a small flight of stairs, situated right next to the loading dock, and two huge rolling garage doors in the shadows of the overhang. Everything looks congealed and petrified with age, rusted shut, scarred with graffiti.

She glances over her shoulder and gets a glimpse of a cluster of walkers, a hundred yards away, out by the busted Piggly Wiggly sign, slowly turning toward the commotion and starting to shamble in their direction.

Austin comes up behind Lilly. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he mutters, lugging the duffel bags. “While we’re young and in one piece!”

David and Barbara come up fast behind Austin, the older couple staying low, with eyes wide and alert. Martinez gives a hand signal to Gus, pointing off toward the loading dock. “Back it up, Gus, and keep the radio open and an eye on things outside.”

“Roger that.” Gus revs the engine, then starts to put the truck into gear.

“We’ll be coming out the loading dock side,” Martinez informs him. “So keep the engine running and be ready to roll at a moment’s notice.”

“Got it!”

Then things get moving very quickly, very efficiently, as Gus backs the truck up to the dock while the others swiftly and silently creep toward the unmarked side door, moving with the cold competence of a SWAT team. Martinez climbs stairs, pulls a long metal shim from his belt, and starts working on the padlock, pounding the shim with the butt of his gun. The others huddle behind him, glancing over their shoulders at the encroaching dead.

The lock snaps, and Martinez pries the door open on squeaking hinges.

They plunge into darkness and overwhelming stench—rotting meat, acrid pukelike smells, ammonia odors—the door slamming behind them, making them jump. A single skylight way up above the cobwebbed gantries provides barely enough illumination to reveal silhouettes of aisles and overturned forklifts scattered between the high shelves.

Each one of the intruders—including Lilly—pauses to smile as their eyes adjust enough to see all the canned goods and packaged food rising to the rafters. It is, indeed, the gold mine Martinez had hoped for. But as instantly as they all register their good luck, they hear the noises building in the deeper shadows, as if on cue with their arrival, and one by one their smiles fade—

—as they glimpse the first of the shadowy figures emerging from behind well-stocked shelves.

FOUR

On Martinez’s signal, they start firing, the collective snapping of silencers and flickering muzzle flashes lighting up the dark warehouse. Lilly gets off three quick blasts, and takes down two at a range of about fifty feet. One of the targets—an obese man in tattered work clothes, his flesh the color of earthworms—jerks against a shelf, his skull gushing cerebral fluids as he knocks over a row of canned tomatoes. The other biter—a younger male in greasy dungarees, perhaps a former forklift operator—collapses in a cascade of blood jetting out of the fresh hole in his skull.

The dead keep coming, at least two dozen or more, from every corner of the warehouse.

The air thumps and crackles with strobelike light, as the shooters stay clustered tight near the door, their gun barrels fanning out and blazing. Austin drops the duffels and starts working with his Glock 19, another acquisition from the National Guard depot, featuring a noise suppressor and an attachment below the barrel that sends a narrow thread of red light across the darkness. David picks off a female in a stained Piggly Wiggly uniform, sending the dead girl spinning against a rack of stale bagels. Barbara hits an older male in a blood-speckled dress shirt, clip-on tie, and name tag—maybe the former store manager—knocking the creature down in a red mist that paints a light fixture in pointillist profusion.

The dampened gunfire emits a surreal racket, like a round of mad applause, accompanied by a fireworks display ripping through the fetid stillness, followed by the jangle and clank of spent shells hitting the floor. Martinez edges forward, leading the group deeper into the warehouse. They pass perpendicular aisles and fire at lumbering figures with milky white eyes coming headlong toward them—former machinists, stock clerks, assistant managers, cashiers—each one collapsing in gushing baptisms of blood. They lose count by the time the last one sinks to the floor.

In the echoing silence, Lilly hears the metallic squawk of Gus’s voice coming through Martinez’s walkie-talkie. “—the hellfire is going on?! Y’all hear me?! Boss?! Y’all copy? What is going on?”

At the end of the main aisle, Martinez pauses to catch his breath. He grabs the radio clipped to his belt. “We’re good, Gus,” he says into the walkie’s mouthpiece. “Ran into a little welcoming party … but we’re clear.”

Over the air, the voice sizzles: “’Bout gave me a heart attack!”

Martinez thumbs the TALK button: “Whole fucking staff must have hid out in here when the shit went down.” He looks around at the carnage behind veils of blue smoke, the air stinking now of cordite. He thumbs the button. “You just be ready to roll, Gus. Looks like we’re gonna be loading the truck to the gills with goodies.”

The voice returns: “That’s good news, boss. Copy that. I’ll be ready.”

Martinez thumbs off the radio, puts it back, and turns to the others. “Everybody okay?”

Lilly’s ears ring, but she feels steady, alert. “All good,” she says, thumbing the catch on each of her Rugers, dumping the spent magazines, the clips clattering to the floor. She pulls fresh mags from the back of her waistband and slams them in place. She scans the aisles on either side of her, where the remains of walkers lie in gore-drenched heaps. She feels nothing.

“Keep an eye out for stragglers,” Martinez orders, glancing around the shadowy aisles.

“Damn this thing!” David Stern is complaining, shaking a flashlight. His gnarled hands tremble. “I checked the battery just last night.”

Barbara rolls her eyes in the darkness. “The man’s hopeless with technology.” She takes the flashlight from him. “I thought these batteries might be a little iffy.” She unscrews it and fiddles with the C-cells. It doesn’t help; the thing will not come on.

“Wait a second,” Austin says, shoving his Glock back behind his belt. “Got an idea.”

He goes over to a shelf on which bundles of firewood are stacked alongside sacks of charcoal briquettes, cans of lighter fluid, and packages of wood chips. He pulls a long piece of hardwood loose, pulls a bandanna from his pocket, and wraps it around the end of the log.

Lilly watches him with interest. She can’t quite figure this kid out. He seems older than his years somehow. She watches him douse the fabric with lighter fluid. He pulls a Bic and sparks the bandanna, and all at once a plume of brilliant orange light illuminates the center aisle in a radiant nimbus. “Very moody,” Lilly says with a smirk. “Nice work, Huckleberry.”

*   *   *

They split up into two groups. Martinez and the Sterns take the front of the building—a maze of shelves brimming with packaged goods, household supplies, dry goods, condiments, and kitchen staples—and Lilly and Austin take the rear. Martinez orders everybody to move quickly, no fucking around, and if they see something they’re not sure about, leave it. Take only the items with a shelf life.

Austin leads Lilly down a side corridor lined with deserted offices. They pass door after door, each of them locked and showing empty darkness behind their windows. Austin walks slightly ahead of Lilly, holding the torch high in one hand, the Glock in the other. Lilly has both her guns out, ready to rock at a moment’s notice.

In the flickering yellow light, they move past rows of propane tanks, garden supplies, sacks of fertilizer, cords of firewood, coils of garden hoses, and useless ephemera like bird feeders and garden gnomes. The skin on the back of Lilly’s neck prickles with goose bumps as she hears the echoing whispers and shuffling footsteps of the Sterns and Martinez coming from the darkness behind her.

At the end of the main aisle, against the back wall, they make a turn and discover a large hydraulic pallet jack sitting amid the rakes, shovels, and tools. Austin pulls the thing into the aisle—it’s a big greasy hand truck with heavy iron wheels and twin forks that protrude at least eight feet—and he tests it by pumping the huge hand jack. “This might just come in handy,” he speculates.

“Do me a favor, hold the torch up for a second.” Lilly indicates the shadows along the back wall. Austin raises the torch and reveals, in the dancing glow of torchlight, a pile of empty pallets.

They move quickly, slamming the forks under the closest pallet.

Then they head back down the dark center aisle, the wheels squeaking noisily on the filthy cement floor. They start loading the pallet, Austin pushing and holding the torch, and Lilly grabbing the essentials. They grab fifty-gallon jugs of drinking water, cartons of seeds, sharp-edged tools, coils of rope. They make another turn and head down an aisle of canned goods. Lilly starts working up a sweat stacking shrink-wrapped cartons of peaches, corn, beans, collards, tins of sardines, tuna, and Spam.

“Gonna be heroes, comin’ back with all this shit,” Austin grunts as he shoves the jack along the aisle.

“Yeah, maybe you’ll finally get laid,” Lilly cracks, stacking the heavy trays with a groan.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“What.”

“Where’s this attitude come from?”

Lilly keeps working, her guns digging into the back of her belt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“C’mon, Lilly … I noticed it right away … ever since I met you … you got a chip on your shoulder about something.”

They work their way toward the end of the canned goods aisle. Lilly slams another carton of cans on the pallet and grumbles, “Can we just get this thing done, and get the hell outta here?”

“Just making conversation,” Austin says as he shoves the dolly around the end of the aisle with a grunt.

They head down another aisle stacked with crates of rotted fruit. They pause. Austin holds the torch up and reveals the blackened, shriveled peaches and bananas in their maggot-infested crates. The fruit has decomposed into slimy black lumps.

Lilly wipes the sweat from her face, her voice coming out low and hoarse. “The truth is, I lost some people very close to me.”

Austin stares at the rotten fruit. “Look … I’m sorry I brought it up … I’m sorry.” He starts shoving the dolly deeper into the aisle. “You don’t have to—”

“Wait!”

Lilly grabs him, holds him still. A faint metallic tapping noise straightens her spine, and she whispers, “Shine the torch over there.”

In the flickering glow, they see a row of freezer doors along the left side of the aisle. The stench of rancid meat hangs in the air. Lilly pulls her guns. The last door on the left is intermittently jiggling and creaking, the rusty hinges loose.

“Stay behind me, hold the torch up,” Lilly whispers, thumbing the hammers on both her Rugers, creeping toward the last door on the left.

“Walker?” Austin grabs his Glock and moves in close behind her.

“Just shut up and hold the torch up.”

Lilly moves past the jiggling door, pauses, stands with her back against the freezer. “On three,” she whispers. “You ready?”

“Ready.”

Lilly grabs the latch. “One, two, three!”

She rips the freezer door open, and both barrels go up, and her heart skips a beat. There’s nothing there. Nothing but darkness and a reeking stench.

The odor engulfs Lilly, making her eyes water as she steps back, lowering the pistols. The black, oily death-rot clings to the inside of the dark freezer. She hears a noise, and looks down at something small and furry scuttling past her feet. She lets out a pained breath as she realizes it was just a rat making all the noise.

“Fuck me,” Austin comments breathlessly, lowering the Glock and letting out a sigh of relief.

“C’mon,” Lilly says, shoving her guns back in her belt. “We got enough. Let’s head back, get the truck loaded, and get the fuck outta here.”

“Sounds good to me,” Austin says, yanking the dolly back with a smile, then pushing it back down the aisle, following Lilly toward the front of the warehouse. Behind him, a large figure lurches out of the freezer.

Austin hears it first, and only has time to turn around and see the massive male in dungarees and mangled face barreling toward him. Mandibles clenching and unclenching, eyes the color of sour milk, the biter stands well over six feet tall and is covered with a film of white mold from being shut in the freezer for so long.

Jerking away from it, reaching for his Glock, Austin trips over the corner of the dolly.

He falls down, his gun slipping out of his hand, the torch rolling across the cement. The huge biter looms over him, drooling black bile, the torchlight now shining up at a surreal angle. Flames flicker and reflect off the corpse’s shimmering, milky eyes.

Austin tries to roll away but the biter gets its gigantic dead fingers around Austin’s pant legs. He lets out an angry howl, kicking at the walker, cursing it. The thing opens its mouth, and Austin slams the heel of his boot into the maw of black, sharklike teeth.

The crunch of the lower jawbone hardly slows the thing down.

The creature goes for the flesh of Austin’s thigh. The weight of the thing is unbearable, like a house pressing down on him, and just as the thing is about to bite down on Austin’s femoral artery—the blackened teeth only centimeters away—the snapping of two silenced .22 caliber rounds rings out.

Only a few seconds have transpired from the moment the biter first appeared, but that’s the exact amount of time it has taken Lilly to hear the commotion, stop in her tracks, spin around, jack the hammers, raise the guns, take careful aim, and intercede. She hits the biter dead center between the eyes, just above the bridge of the nose.

The huge corpse whiplashes backward in a cloud of blood mist that looks like smoke in the darkness, the top of its skull splitting open and gushing.

It lands in a wet heap at Austin’s feet as the young man squirms away from it and gasps for breath and edges backward on his ass on the cold cement for several frenzied moments. “Fuck!—Jesus!—FUCK!”

“You okay?” Lilly comes over, kneels, and inspects Austin’s legs. “You all right?”

“I’m—yeah—I’m—fine, fine,” he sputters and stammers, catching his breath. He stares at the massive lump of corpse lying at his feet.

“C’mon, let’s—”

“YO!”

The sound of Martinez’s voice coming from the front of the warehouse penetrates Lilly’s ringing ears. “Lilly! Austin! You two okay?!”

Lilly hollers over her shoulder, “We’re good!”

“Get your shit and come on!” Martinez sounds nervous. “The noise is drawing more of them out of the woodwork! Let’s go!”

“C’mon, pretty boy,” Lilly mutters to Austin, helping him up.

They get up, and Austin retrieves the torch before it has a chance to set anything on fire, and they get the hand dolly moving. The thing weighs a ton now, and it takes both of them, huffing and puffing, to roll it down the aisle.

*   *   *

They all meet at the loading dock. The Sterns and Martinez have filled the duffels as well as half a dozen large cardboard boxes with a plethora of packaged goods, including cartons of Ramen noodles, gourmet instant coffee, two-liter bottles of juice, packages of flour, boxes of Rice-A-Roni, several pounds of sugar, gallon jars of pickled vegetables, and shrink-wrapped cartons of Crisco, Hamburger Helper, macaroni and cheese, and cigarettes. Martinez radios Gus, and tells him to back the truck up as close to the loading dock as possible, and be ready to roll when the garage door comes up. Austin, still breathless and shaky from the attack, pushes the pallet up to the corrugated metal hatch.

“Gimme that hammer you found back there,” Martinez says to David.

The older man steps up and hands the hammer over to Martinez. The others crowd around, waiting nervously, as Martinez slams the business end of the hammer against the padlock at the bottom of the garage door. The lock is stubborn, and the pounding noises echo. Lilly glances over her shoulder, half aware of shuffling sounds coming from the deeper shadows behind her.

The lock finally snaps, and Martinez yanks the door. The thing rolls up with a rusty shriek. The wind and light rush into the warehouse, smelling of tar and burning rubber, making everybody blink. The floor swirls with stray packing straps and litter stirred up by the breeze.

At first, as they take their initial steps outside, nobody sees the pile of wet rubbish and moldy cardboard boxes across the loading dock, next to a garbage Dumpster, which is moving slightly, palpating with something underneath. They’re all too busy following Martinez out across the grimy deck with armfuls of supplies.

Gus has the truck revving, the tarp thrown open, the exhaust stack chugging and puffing in the spring winds. They start loading up the back.

In through the gap go the heavy duffel bags. In go the boxes. In go the contents of the pallet, the canned goods, the water jugs, the garden supplies, the tools, and the propane. Nobody even notices the moving cadaver across the loading dock, pushing its way out of the trash pile, then rising to its feet with the creaky, inebriated uncertainty of an overgrown baby. Lilly glimpses movement out of the corner of her eye, and turns toward the biter.

A wiry African American corpse in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, with short cornrows crowning his skull, shuffles clumsily toward them like a drunken mime walking against imaginary wind, clawing at the air. He wears a tattered orange jumpsuit that has a familiar look to Lilly, but she can’t place it.

“I got this,” Lilly says to no one in particular as she pulls one of her Rugers.

The others notice the commotion and pause in their efforts, drawing their weapons, watching Lilly stand stone-still, steady as a milepost, aiming her front sight at the approaching corpse. A moment passes. Lilly stands as still as a statue. The others stare as Lilly finally, calmly, almost languidly, decides to pull the trigger, again and again, emptying the remaining six rounds in the magazine.

The gun claps and flashes, and the young black corpse does a jitterbug on the dock for a moment, exit wounds spewing atomized blood. The rounds chew through the hard shell of its cranium, shredding its cornrows and sending chunks of its prefrontal lobe and gray cerebrospinal fluid skyward. Lilly finishes and stares emotionlessly.

The biter doubles over and collapses to the dock in a blood-sodden heap.

Standing in a blue haze of her own gun smoke and cordite, Lilly mumbles something to herself. Nobody hears what she says. The others stare at her for a long moment until Austin finally comes over and says, “Good job, Annie Oakley.”

Martinez breaks the spell. “Okay … let’s get a move on, people! Before we draw more of ’em!”

They pile into the back of the truck. Lilly is the last one to climb in and find a spot amid the overloaded cargo bay. She sits on one of the propane tanks, and holds on to a side rail in order to brace herself against the g-forces, as the cab doors slam, and the engine grinds, and the truck suddenly roars away from the loading dock.

Lilly remembers right then—for some reason, the realization popping into her head as the truck pulls away—where she’s seen an orange jumpsuit like the one Cornrow was wearing. It’s a prison suit.

They get all the way across the lot, out the exit, and halfway down the access road before Barbara Stern breaks the silence. “Not a bad day’s work for a bunch of emotional cripples.”

The giggling starts with David Stern, then spreads among every passenger, until finally even Lilly is giggling with crazy, giddy relief and satisfaction.

*   *   *

By the time they make it back to the highway, each and every occupant of that dark, malodorous enclosure is buzzing with excitement.

“Can you imagine the look on the DeVries kids’ faces when they see all that grape juice?” Barbara Stern looks positively ebullient in her faded denim and wild gray tresses. “I thought they were gonna storm the castle when we ran out of Kool-Aid last week.”

“What about that Starbucks instant Via?” David chimes in. “I can’t wait to retire those goddamn coffee grounds to the compost pile.”

“We got all the food groups, too, didn’t we?!” Austin enthuses from his perch on a crate across from Lilly. “Sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and Dolly Madison cupcakes. Kids are gonna be on a sugar buzz for a month.”

Lilly smiles at the young man for the first time since they met. Austin returns her gaze with a wink, his long curls tossing around his handsome face from the slipstream currents coming through the flapping tarp.

Lilly glances out through the rear hatch and sees the deserted country road passing in a blur, the afternoon sun strobing pleasantly through the trees receding into the distance behind them. For just an instant, she feels like Woodbury might have a chance after all. With enough people like these folks—people who care about each other—they just might have a shot at building a community.

“You did good today, pretty boy,” Lilly says at last to Austin. She looks at the others. “You all did good. In fact, if we can just—”

A faint noise from outside stops her short. At first it sounds merely like the wind buffeting the tarp. But the more Lilly listens to it, the more it sounds like an almost alien noise from another time, another place, a noise that she hasn’t heard—a noise nobody has heard—since the plague broke out years earlier.

“You hear that?” Lilly looks at the others, all of whom now seem to be listening in awe. The noise rises and falls on the wind. It seems to be coming from the sky, maybe a mile away, vibrating the air like a drum roll. “It sounds like—No. It can’t be.”

“What the fuck?” Austin pushes his way toward the rear of the chamber and sticks his head out, craning his neck to get a glimpse of the sky. “You’re kidding me!”

Lilly moves next to him, holding on to the rear hatch and leaning out.

The wind whips her hair and stings her eyes as she peers upward, and sure enough, she catches a fleeting glimpse of it in the western sky.

Just the tail of the craft is visible above the tree line, the rotor spinning wildly, the body of the chopper listing downward. The thing is in trouble. A thin contrail of black smoke flags behind the helicopter like a dark comet as it plunges out of sight.

The cargo truck slows. Martinez and Gus have obviously seen the thing as well.

“Do you think it’s—?” Lilly starts to pose the question on everybody’s mind when her words are cut off.

The impact of the crash—over half a mile away—rattles the earth.

A mushroom cloud of fire lights up the woods and scrapes the sky.

FIVE

“Here! Right here! Pull off!”

Gus pumps the brakes, the cargo truck groaning as it cobbles off the two-lane. It bumps across a narrow patch of muddy grass along the shoulder, and then rattles to a stop in a cloud of carbon monoxide and dust.

“This is as close as we’re gonna get in the truck,” Martinez says, leaning forward in the shotgun seat. He cranes his neck to see through the grimy windshield, getting a fleeting glimpse of the column of smoke rising over the trees on the western horizon. It looks to be about a quarter mile away. He reaches for his .357. “Gonna have to hoof it the rest of the way.”

“It’s a long way off, boss.” Gus gazes out his side window, scratching his grizzled cheek. “Looks like it went down in the deep woods.”

Martinez thinks about it, chewing the inside of his cheek. In this part of Georgia, many of the roadways cut through shallow, wooded valleys known as hollows. Formed by rivers and surrounded by densely forested hills, these thickets of brushwood, weeds, and muck can be rife with sinkholes, colonies of mosquitoes, and plenty of nooks and crannies in which mud-bound biters frequently lurk.

Gus looks at Martinez. “Whaddaya say we try and drive it?”

“Negative.” Martinez bites down hard on the word, checking the cylinder on his Magnum. He can hear the truck’s rear gate banging down, the others climbing out, their tense voices carrying on the afternoon breeze. “We’ll get stuck in this pea soup, sure as shit.”

“Whatever you say, boss.” Gus rams the shift lever into neutral and cuts the engine. The silence fills with the rush of nature—the jet-engine drone of crickets, the wind in the trees.

“Leave the 12-gauge, take one of the AR-15s, in case it gets hairy, and grab the machete under the seat.” Martinez has a black marine raider bowie knife with a fifteen-inch blade strapped to his leg, and now checks it. He does this compulsively, jaw clenched, all business, as he hears the others coming around the side of the truck. He climbs out of the cab.

They all gather at the front of the cab, in the weeds and buzzing clouds of gnats, their faces drawn and pale with tension. The air smells of rot and burning metal. Austin stands there wringing his hands, gazing off at the crash site. The Sterns huddle together, both their brows furrowed with worry. Lilly has her hands on her hips, her Rugers holstered high on her waist. “What are you thinking?” she says to Martinez.

“Dave and Barb, I want you two to stay with the truck, keep watch.” Martinez shoves his Magnum behind his belt. “If you get swarmed, just drive ’em off … lead ’em away … and then circle back and get us. You got that?”

David just nods and nods, looking like a nervous bobblehead doll. “Yes, absolutely.”

“Keep the walkie with you, keep the frequency open while we’re gone.”

Gus hands the two-way to David, who is still nodding and muttering. “Got it, got it.”

“There’s a box of road flares in the back,” Martinez says to Gus. “Go grab a handful. And get the first-aid kit, too, will ya?”

Gus hurries around the back of the truck while Martinez looks at his watch. “We got a good four hours of daylight left. I want to get out there and back before dark, no fucking around.”

Lilly has one high-capacity magazine left. She slams it into her Ruger, snapping the slide. “The thing is, what if we find survivors?”

“That’s the point,” Martinez says, unsnapping the sheath on his leg, positioning the knife hilt for quick access. “Plus the helo might still be in one piece.”

Lilly looks at him. “We got no stretcher, no medic, no way to get them back.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” Martinez says, adjusting his bandanna, already soaked in sweat, across his forehead.

Gus comes back with an armful of flares, which look like sticks of dynamite.

Martinez gives everybody a flare. “I want everybody to stay together, in tight formation … but if for some reason you get separated, light off one of these and we’ll find you.” He looks at the Sterns. “You run into any trouble back here, you light one off.” He glances at the bald man. “Gus, I want you on the right flank with the machete. Keep the noise down. Use the AR-15 as a last resort. I’ll take the left flank.” He looks at Lilly. “You and Junior take the middle.”

Austin gazes up at the sky. The midafternoon clouds have rolled in. The day has turned gray and ashy. The wetland ahead of them crawls with swaying shadows. It’s been a wet year and now the ground looks impassable, mired in washouts, deadfalls, and dense groves of white pines standing between them and the crash site.

“There’s a creek, runs through the middle of the woods,” Martinez is saying, taking a deep breath and drawing his Magnum. “We’ll follow it as far as we can, and then navigate by the smoke. Everybody got that?”

They all nod, saying nothing, swallowing back the mounting apprehension that passes between them like a virus.

Martinez nods. “Let’s boogie.”

*   *   *

It’s tough going for a while, the unforgiving mud sucking at the soles of their boots, making wet smacking noises in the primeval silence of the woods. They follow the serpentine bends of the brackish stream, and the deeper they venture into the hollow, the more the trees swallow the daylight.

“You okay, Huckleberry?” Lilly whispers to Austin, who walks alongside her, his Glock gripped tightly in both of his sweaty hands.

“I’m fantastic,” he lies. His long curls are pulled back from his glistening face with a leather tie. He chews on his lip nervously as he churns through the mud.

“You don’t have to hold your gun like that,” she says with a smirk.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re some kind of Delta Force commando. Just keep it handy.”

“Will do.”

“If you get one in the cross hairs, just take your time. They’re slow, so make your shots count. You don’t have to do the gunslinger routine.”

Austin shoots her a glance. “Just want to be ready … in case I need to come to your rescue.”

Lilly gives him an eye roll. “Yeah, great, I feel totally safe now.”

She peers into the trees ahead of them and sees the faint haze of smoke building in the woods. The air, hectic with bugs, smells of burned circuitry and scorched metal. The wreckage is still a few hundred yards off in the distant pines. The faint crackle of fire can be heard, barely audible above the wind rustling in the treetops.

Off to the right, maybe twenty yards ahead of Lilly, Martinez has taken the lead, weaving through the undergrowth, slicing through foliage with his bowie knife. On a parallel path to the left, Gus trudges along, his hound-dog eyes surveying the shadows for biters, his machete on his shoulder. The sky is barely visible above him, blocked by skeins of tree limbs and vines.

Lilly starts to say something else when a figure appears in front of Gus.

Lilly halts, her gun coming up fast, her breath seizing up in her throat. She sees Gus raise the machete. The large male walker, clad in tattered overalls, has its back turned to him, teetering on dead legs, its head cocked toward the crash site like a dog hearing an ultrasonic whistle. Gus sneaks up behind it.

The machete comes down fast, the blade making a crunching noise as it embeds itself in the gristly dura of the walker’s cranium. Fluids gush, making watery sluicing noises in the silence of the woods, as the walker collapses. Lilly hardly has a chance to breathe again when another noise draws her attention to the right.

Fifteen feet away, Martinez lashes out at another stray walker—a spindly female with gray hair matted like spider webs—probably a former farmer’s wife skulking around the brush. His knife impales the back of her head above the neck cords, putting her down with the speed of a silent embolism. She never saw it coming.

Letting out an involuntary sigh of relief, lowering her pistol, Lilly realizes that the walkers are currently mesmerized by the sights and sounds of the crash.

Martinez pauses to glance over his shoulder at the others. “Everybody good?” he says in a low voice, almost a stage whisper.

Nods from everyone. And then they’re moving again, slowly but steadily forward, into the denser trees and fog-bound shadows. Martinez motions for them to hurry up. The ground is spongy and soggy beneath their feet, slowing them down. The shadows close in, the odors of scorched metal and burning fuel engulfing them, the crackling noises rising.

Lilly feels nauseous, her skin prickling with nerves. She senses Austin’s eyes on her. “Do you think maybe you could stop staring at me?”

“It’s not my fault you’re so hot,” he says with that same nervous smirk.

She shakes her head in dismay. “Can you just try and focus?”

“I am totally focused, believe me,” he says, still gripping his gun with that fake cop-show grip as they continue on.

*   *   *

Less than a hundred yards from the crash site, they come to a washout—a bug-infested, swampy clearing blocking their path—the bog crisscrossed by enormous deadfall logs. With silent hand motions, Martinez directs them to use the logs as bridges. Gus goes first, crabbing across the largest deadfall. Martinez follows. Lilly goes next, and Austin brings up the rear. As he reaches the other side, Austin feels a tugging sensation on his jeans. The others have already crossed, and are now trudging toward the clearing. Austin pauses. At first he thinks he’s caught on a piece of bark, but then he looks down.

Decomposing hands rise out of the marsh, clawing at his pants leg.

He lets out a cry and fumbles with his gun as dead fingers clutch at him, pulling him downward. Rising out of the mire, the slimy top half of a moldering creature goes for his legs. Filmed in black gunk, its hairless skull unidentifiable as man or woman, its eyes as white and opaque as light bulbs, it snaps its black turtlelike mouth on the creaky hinges of a ruined jaw.

Austin gets off a single muffled gunshot—the silencer spitting sparks—but the bullet misses its mark. The blast grazes the top of the swamp biter’s head, and then plunks harmlessly into the swamp.

Fifty feet away, Lilly hears the blast. She spins around, reaching for her guns. But her legs tangle and she slips on the mud. She sprawls to the weeds, the guns flying out of her hands.

Austin tries to get a second shot off but the swamp biter is going for his leg. It rises out of the mire like a slimy black whale, its jaws unhinging and emitting a noxious growl. Austin jerks back involuntarily—a high-pitched cry blurting out of him—and the gun slips out of his hand. He kicks at the creature’s mouth, the toe of his boot getting caught in the mouthful of rotting black teeth and putrid drool. The swamp biter clamps down.

Lilly crawls toward her guns. Martinez and Gus, by this point, have both whirled toward the commotion, but it’s too late to intercede. The giant dripping biter is about to chew through Austin’s Timberland hiking boot, and Austin is fumbling madly for something in his pocket. Finally Austin gets his hand around the road flare.

At the last possible instant—before the swamp biter is able to break the skin of Austin’s foot—the young man sparks the flare and rams it into the biter’s left eye. The creature rears back suddenly, releasing its hold and tossing its ragged head back in a fountain of sparks.

Austin stares for a moment, mesmerized by the sight of flames inside the rotten cavity of the biter’s skull. The left eye glows for one horrible instant, shining with the intensity of a caution light. The biter stiffens in the muck. The back of its head suddenly bursts, spewing flames like the nozzle of a welding torch.

The left eye pops like a bulb overloading, spitting hot tissue on Austin … and then the creature sinks into the black void.

Austin shudders, wiping his face and watching for a moment, hypnotized by the spectacle of the biter sinking back into oblivion … until the only things that remain are bubbles floating on the surface of the swamp and a dull flickering glow under the muck. Eventually Austin manages to tear his gaze away. He finds his gun and catches his breath.

“Nicely done,” Lilly says with a grudging softness in her voice as she makes her way across the log bridge. “Here … gimme your hand.”

She helps Austin to his feet, holding him steady on the slime-slick log. He gets his breath back, swallows the shock, and shoves his gun back in his belt. He looks into her eyes. “That was close.” He manages a shaky grin. “That thing could have easily gotten you.”

“Yeah … thank God you were around,” she says, a smile on her lips now despite the beating of her heart.

“LILLY!”

The booming voice of Martinez intrudes on the moment, drawing Lilly’s attention back over her shoulder.

Thirty yards away, through a break in the trees, in a pall of acrid, black smoke, Martinez and Gus have found the crash site.

“Come on, pretty boy,” Lilly says, gritting her teeth with nervous tension. “We got work to do.”

*   *   *

The chopper lies on its side in a dry creek bed, spewing smoke from its breached fuel tank. No victims in sight. Lilly approaches cautiously, coughing, waving the fumes from her face. She sees Martinez approaching the cockpit, crouching down low, holding his hand over his mouth. “Be careful!” Lilly pulls her guns as she hollers at Martinez. “You don’t know what’s in there!”

Martinez touches the hatch release and burns himself, jerking his hand back. “Son of a BITCH!”

Lilly edges closer. The smoke, already clearing, begins to part like a curtain to reveal the soft, scorched ground around the crash site. It dawns on Lilly that the pilot must have aimed for the soft ground of the stream bed, the surrounding leaf-matted earth now torn up by the violence of the crash. The main rotor, detached and lying on the ground twenty feet away, looks as though it’s tied in a knot.

“Gus! Austin! Keep your eyes on the periphery!” Martinez indicates the adjacent wall of white pines higher up the bank. “Noise is gonna draw a swarm!”

Gus and Austin whirl toward the woods and raise their muzzles at the darkness behind the trees.

Lilly feels the heat on her face as she approaches the wreckage. The fuselage lies on its right side, the tail fin and rear rotor horribly bent. One skid is torn off as though from the force of a giant can opener. The canopy and hatch windows are cracked and either steamed up from hyperventilating passengers or clouded over from the smoke. Regardless of the causes, though, it’s impossible to see inside the cockpit. The soot has covered most of the markings on the bulwark and chassis, but Lilly sees a series of letters along the tail boom. She sees a W and maybe an R … and that’s about it.

Martinez raises his hand suddenly as the noise of the fire dies down enough for them to hear the muffled cries coming from inside the cockpit. Martinez duckwalks closer.

Lilly moves in with her Rugers up, cocked and ready to rock. “Just be careful!”

Martinez takes a deep breath, and then climbs onto the side of the fuselage. Lilly moves closer, aiming her twin .22s at the hatch. Balancing on the battered steel frame, Martinez pulls his bandanna off and wraps it around the release handle. Lilly hears a high-pitched voice. “—outta here—!”

Martinez yanks.

The door snaps, squeaking open on shrieking hinges, releasing a puff of smoke and the tattered form of a frantic woman. Clad in a torn down jacket and scarf, stippled in blood, she bursts out of the cockpit, coughing and screaming, “—GET ME OUTTA HERE—!!”

Lilly lowers her guns, realizing that the woman has not yet turned. Martinez pulls the victim out of the death trap. The woman writhes in his arms, her bloodless face a mask of agony. One of her legs is badly burned, the fabric of her jeans blackened to a crisp, glistening with pus and blood. She holds her left arm against her tummy, the fracture at the elbow bulging through the sleeve of her sweater.

“Gimme a hand, Lilly!”

They carry the woman away from the wreckage and lower her to the ground. She looks to be in her late thirties, maybe early forties. Fair skinned, dishwater-blond hair, squirming in pain, her face wet with tears, she babbles hysterically, “You don’t understand! We have to—!”

“It’s okay, it’s all right,” Lilly says to her, gently brushing her damp hair from her face. “We can help you, we have a doctor not far from here.”

“Mike—! He’s still—!” Her eyelids flutter, her body spasming from the pain, her eyes rolling back in her head from the shock. “We can’t leave—we have to—have to get him out—we have to—!!”

Lilly touches her cheek, the flesh as clammy and slimy as an oyster. “Try to stay calm.”

“—we have to bury him … it’s something I … before he—” The woman’s head lolls to the side, and she sinks into unconsciousness with the suddenness of a candle flame snuffing out.

Lilly looks up at Martinez.

“The pilot,” Martinez utters, meeting Lilly’s gaze with a hard look.

By now the smoke has cleared and the heat has dwindled, and both Gus and Austin have returned to gaze over their shoulders. Martinez rises to his feet, and he goes back to the wreck. Lilly follows. They climb up onto one of the mangled skids and boost themselves up enough to see into the open hatchway. The odor of charred meat assaults their senses as they gaze inside.

The pilot is dead. In the hazy, sparking enclosure, the man named Mike sits slumped in his scorched leather bomber jacket—still harnessed to his seat—the entire left side of his body blackened and disfigured from the in-flight fire. The fingers of one gloved hand have melted and fused to the control stick. And just for an instant, staring into that hellish cockpit, Lilly gets the feeling this guy was a hero. He brought the craft down in the spongy cleavage of the creek, saving the life of his passenger—his wife, his girlfriend?

“Too late to do anything for this guy,” Martinez murmurs next to her.

“Obviously,” she says, lowering herself back to the ground. She glances across the clearing, where Austin now kneels by the unconscious woman, feeling her neck for a pulse. Gus nervously keeps an eye on the woods. Lilly wipes her face. “But we should probably honor her request, right?”

Martinez climbs down and looks around the clearing, the smoke wafting away on the wind. He wipes his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Boss!” Gus calls out from the edge of the woods. Troubling sounds from the surrounding forest drift on the wind. “We ought to be thinking about gettin’ the hell outta here pretty soon.”

“We’re coming!” Martinez turns to Lilly. “We’ll take the woman back.”

“But what about—?”

Martinez lowers his voice. “You know what the Governor’s gonna do with this guy, right?”

Lilly’s spine tingles with rage. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Governor.”

“Lilly—”

“This guy saved this woman’s life.”

“Listen to me. We’re gonna have a hell of a time just getting her back through these woods.”

Lilly lets out an anguished sigh. “And you don’t think the Governor’s gonna find out we left the pilot?”

Martinez turns away from her and spits angrily. Wipes his mouth. Thinks it over.

“Boss!” Gus calls out again, sounding exceedingly nervous.

“I said we’re coming, goddamnit!” Martinez stares at the scorched ground, thinking and agonizing … until the whole issue becomes a foregone conclusion.

SIX

They get back to the truck just as the sun is starting to set, the shadows of the forest lengthening around them. Exhausted from the trip back through the hollow, where they encountered an increasing number of walkers, they enlist the help of David and Barbara in order to drag the bodies—each one tied to a makeshift stretcher of birch logs and willow switches—quickly toward the truck’s rear hatch. They lift them one at a time into the crowded cargo bay.

“Be careful with her,” Lilly cautions as David and Barbara shove the stretcher bearing the woman between two stacks of food crates. The woman is slowly coming back around, her head lolling back and forth, her eyes fluttering. There’s not much room for extra bodies in the truck, and Barbara has to hastily rearrange the boxes and stacks of cartons in order to make space.

“She’s hurt pretty bad but she’s hanging in there,” Lilly adds as she climbs up into the cargo hold. “Wish I could say the same for the pilot.”

All heads turn toward the rear hatch as Gus and Martinez lift the dead pilot—his disfigured remains still strapped to the gurney—up and into the back of the truck. David has to make room for the corpse by shoving a stack of canned peaches against one wall, and clearing a narrow strip of corrugated floor between a tower of Hamburger Helper cartons and a half-dozen propane tanks.

David wipes his arthritic hands on his silk jacket as he gazes down at the scorched remains of the pilot. “This presents somewhat of a dilemma.”

Lilly glances over her shoulder at the open hatch, as Martinez peers into the shadowy chamber. “We need to bury him, it’s a long story.”

David stares at the cadaver. “What if he—?”

“Keep an eye on him,” Martinez orders. “If he turns on the way back, use a small-caliber round on him. We promised the lady we’d—”

“Not gonna make it!”

The sudden outburst yanks Lilly’s attention back to the woman, who writhes on the iron floor, still cocooned in willow branches, her bloodstained head drooping back and forth. Her feverish eyes are wide open, her gaze pinned to the truck’s ceiling. Her mutterings come fitfully, as though she’s talking in her sleep. “Mike, we’re south of there.… What about … what about the tower?!”

Lilly kneels next to the woman. “It’s okay, honey. You’re safe now.”

Barbara goes to the opposite corner of the hold and quickly rips the protective lid off a gallon of filtered water. She returns to the injured woman with the jug. “Here, sweetheart … take a sip.”

The woman on the stretcher cringes at a wave of pain that ripples through her, as the water dribbles into her mouth. She coughs and tries to speak. “—Mike—is he—?”

“Shit!”

Austin’s voice rings out from the rear as he struggles to climb into the truck. Shooting nervous glances over his shoulder, he sees a pack of walkers lurching out of the woods—about twenty yards away and closing—at least ten of them, all large males, their hungry mouths working busily as they approach. Their milky eyes gleam in the dusky light. Austin climbs on board with his gun still gripped in his sweaty hand.

“GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!”

The slamming of the cab doors makes everybody jump. Gears grind. The chassis shudders and vibrates beneath them. Lilly holds on to the crates as the truck heaves into reverse in a whirlwind of fumes and dust.

Through the flapping rear tarp, Lilly sees the walkers looming.

The truck barrels directly into the dead, knocking them over like bowling pins, making wet thuds beneath the massive wheels. The truck bumps over them as the engine whines noisily, and the tires spin for a moment in the grease of rotten organs.

The wheels gain purchase on the pavement, Gus slams it into drive, and the truck rumbles out of there, fishtailing down the two-lane in the direction they had come. Lilly looks back down at the woman with the dishwater hair. “Just hang in there, sweetie, you’re gonna be okay … gonna get you to a doctor.”

Barbara tips more water across the woman’s chapped, burned lips.

Lilly kneels closer. “My name’s Lilly, and this is Barbara. Can you tell me your name?”

The woman utters something inaudible, her voice drowned out by the roar of the truck.

Lilly leans closer. “Say it again, honey. Tell me your name.”

“Chrisss … Chris-tina,” the woman manages through clenched teeth.

“Christina, don’t worry … everything’s gonna be okay … you’re gonna make it.” Lilly strokes the woman’s sweat-damp brow. Shivering, twitching on the stretcher, the woman takes shallow, quick breaths. Her eyes close to half mast, her lips moving, forming a silent, pained litany that nobody can hear. Lilly smooths her matted hair. “Everything’s gonna be okay,” Lilly keeps muttering, more to herself than to the victim.

The truck rumbles down the two-lane, the rear flap snapping in the wind.

Lilly glances out the back and sees the tall pines outside, passing in a blur. The setting sun behind the treetops causes a strobelike effect that is almost hypnotic. Lilly wonders for a brief moment if everything will indeed be okay. Maybe Woodbury has stabilized now. Maybe the Governor’s Machiavellian methods will actually keep them safe, keep a lid on the place. She wants to believe in Woodbury. Maybe that’s the key … simply believing. Maybe that alone will get them through.…

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe …

*   *   *

“W-where am I?” The voice is hoarse, choked, unsteady.

Dr. Stevens stands over the bed in his shopworn lab coat and wire-rimmed glasses, gazing down at the woman from the chopper. “Gonna be a little groggy for a while,” he says to her. “We gave you a couple happy pills.”

The woman named Christina lies in a supine position on a makeshift gurney in the cinder block–lined catacombs beneath the racetrack. Clad in a cast-off terrycloth robe, her right arm wrapped in an improvised cast of kindling and medical tape, she turns her pale, ashen face away from the harsh halogen light shining down on her.

“Hold this, Alice, just for a second.” Stevens hands the plastic vial of IV fluids to the young nurse. Also in a tattered lab coat, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Alice forces a smile as she holds the vial aloft, its line connected to a stick in the injured woman’s arm.

Again Christina manages to croak, “W-where am I?”

Stevens goes to an adjacent sink, washes his hands, and towels off. “I could level with you and say the Ninth Circle of Hell but I’ll refrain from the editorial comments for the moment.” He turns back to her and says with a warm but slightly cynical smile, “You’re in the sprawling metropolis of Woodbury, Georgia … population who-the-hell-knows. My name is Dr. Stevens and this is Alice, and it’s a quarter after seven, and I understand you were fished out of the wreckage of a helicopter this afternoon…?”

She manages a nod, and then flinches at a twinge in her midsection.

“That’s gonna be a little tender for a while,” Stevens says, wiping his hands on the towel. “You had third-degree burns over twenty percent of your body. Good news is, I don’t think you’ll need any skin grafts … just a little edema we’re treating intravenously. Lucky for you, we had three liters of glucose left. Which you’re sucking down like a drunken sailor. You managed to fracture your arm in two places. We’ll watch that as well. They said your name is Christina?”

She nods.

Stevens clicks a penlight, reaches down, and checks her eyes. “How’s your short-term memory, Christina?”

She inhales an excruciating breath, which whistles softly in her throat. “Memory’s fine.… My pilot … Mike is his name … was his name.… Did they—?”

Stevens puts his penlight back into his pocket and gets serious. “I’m sorry to say your friend died in the crash.”

Christina manages a nod. “I’m aware of that … but I just wondered … his body … Did they bring him back?”

“As a matter of fact, they did.”

She swallows thickly, licks her dry lips. “That’s good … because I promised him a Christian burial.”

Stevens looks at the floor. “That’s very admirable … a Christian burial.” Stevens and Alice exchange a glance. Stevens looks back at the patient and smiles. “One step at a time … okay? For now, let’s just concentrate on getting you up and running.”

“What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”

Stevens ponders the injured woman. “It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.”

“Is there a problem with me wanting to give my pilot a proper burial?”

Stevens sighs. “Look … I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”

Christina lets out a grunt as she struggles to a sitting position. Alice helps her sit up, gently keeping her arm elevated. Christina looks at Stevens. “What the hell is the problem?”

Stevens looks at Alice, then back at the patient. “The Governor is the problem.”

“Who?”

“Guy who runs this place.” Stevens takes off his glasses, pulls out a handkerchief, and cleans the lenses carefully as she speaks. “Fancies himself a civil servant, I guess. Hence the name.”

Christina furrows her brow, confused. “Is this guy—?” She searches for the words. “Is he—?”

“Is he what?”

She shrugs. “Is he—what would you call it? ‘Elected’? Is he an elected official?”

The doctor shoots another loaded glance at Alice. “Um … wow … that’s an interesting question.”

Alice grumbles, “He’s elected, all right … by a single vote … his own.”

The doctor rubs his eyes. “It’s a little more complicated than that.” He measures his words. “You’re new here. This man … he’s the alpha dog here in our little kennel. He leads by default. Keeps order by doing the dirty work.” A thin smile crosses Stevens’s narrow features. The smile drips with disdain. “Only problem is, the man has developed a taste for it.”

Christina stares at the doctor. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Look.” Stevens puts his glasses back on and wearily runs his fingers through his hair. “Whatever happens to your friend’s remains … take my advice. Grieve on your own, pay tribute silently.”

“I don’t understand.”

Stevens looks at Alice, his smile fading. He looks into Christina’s eyes. “You’re gonna be okay. A week or so … when your arm’s healed up … you might think about leaving this place.”

“But I don’t—”

“And one other thing.” Stevens fixes her with his gaze. His voice drops an octave, gets very serious. “This man. The Governor. He is not to be trusted. You understand? He is capable of anything. So just steer clear of him … and bide your time until you can get out of here. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She doesn’t answer, just stares at him, soaking it in.

*   *   *

Darkness closes in around the town. Some of the windows begin to glow with lantern light, others already pulsing with the unpredictable current of generators. At night, Woodbury has the surreal, retrofitted feel of the twenty-first century transported to the nineteenth—an atmosphere that has become de rigueur among most post-plague settlements. At one corner, torch flames bathe a boarded, desecrated McDonald’s, the yellow-orange light reflecting off the ruins of its crumbling golden arches.

Martinez’s men, posted on cherry pickers at key junctures of the barricade, now begin to deal with an increasing number of moving shadows on the edges of the adjacent woods. Walker traffic has picked up slightly since of the return of the reconnaissance party, and now .50 caliber placements on the north and west sides crackle with intermittent gunfire. It gives the little town—which now basks in the purple, hazy twilight of dusk—a war-zone feel.

Trundling past a portico of storefronts, carrying a peach crate brimming with provisions, Lilly Caul heads for her building. She hears the spit of automatic weaponry behind her, echoing across the windswept street. She pauses and glances over her shoulder at the sound of a voice rising over the gunfire.

“LILLY, WAIT UP!”

In the strobelike volleys of tracer bullets arcing across the sky, the silhouette of a young man in leather and flowing dark curls lopes toward Lilly. Austin has a duffel bag heavy with supplies over his shoulder. He lives half a block west of Lilly’s place. He comes up with a big, expectant grin on his face. “Let me help you with that.”

“It’s okay, Austin, I got it,” she says as he tries to take the crate from her. For an awkward moment, they play push-pull with the crate. Finally Lilly gives up. “All right, all right … take it.”

Now Austin happily walks alongside her with the crate in his arms. “That was quite an adrenaline rush today, was it not?”

“Easy, Austin … pace yourself.”

They walk toward Lilly’s building. In the distance, an armed man paces along a row of semitrailers at the end of the street. Austin gives Lilly that same provocative little grin he’s been plying her with for weeks. “Guess we tasted the camaraderie of the battlefield together, huh? Kinda bonded out there, didn’t we?”

“Austin, can you please give it a rest.”

“I’m wearing you down, though, aren’t I?”

Lilly shakes her head and lets out a little laugh despite her nerves. “You are relentless, I’ll give you that.”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Are you asking me out?”

“There’s a fight in the arena. Why don’t you let me take you to it, I’ll bring those Twizzlers I found today.”

Lilly’s smile fades. “Not a big fan.”

“Of what? Twizzlers?”

“Very funny. Those fights are barbaric. I’d rather eat broken glass.”

Austin shrugs. “If you say so.” His eyes glint with an idea. “How about this: Instead of a date, why don’t you give me some more pointers sometime?”

“Pointers on what?”

“On dealing with the dead.” All at once he gets a solemn expression on his face. “I’ll be honest with ya. Since all this shit started up, I’ve kinda hidden out with big groups … never really had to fend for myself. I’ve got a lot to learn. I’m not like you.”

She gives him a glance as they walk. “What do you mean by that?”

“You’re a badass, Lilly … you got that cold, calculating, Clint Eastwood thing going on.”

They reach the parkway in front of Lilly’s apartment building, now draped in shadow, the dead kudzu vines on the redbrick exterior looking like a cancerous growth in the waning light.

Lilly pauses, turns to Austin, and says, “Thanks for the help, Austin. I’ll take it from here.” She takes the crate and looks at him. “One thing, though.” She licks her lips and feels a twinge of emotion pinching her insides. “I wasn’t always like this. You should have seen me back at the beginning. Scared of my own shadow. But somebody helped me when I needed it. And they didn’t have to. Believe me. But they did, they helped me.”

Austin doesn’t say anything, just nods his head and waits for her to finish her thought, because it looks as though something is eating at her. Something important.

“I’ll show you some things,” she says at last. “And by the way … this is the only way we’re going to survive. By helping each other.”

Austin smiles, and for the first time since Lilly has known him, it’s a warm, sincere, guileless smile. “I appreciate it, Lilly. I’m sorry I’ve been such a dick.”

“You haven’t been a dick,” she says, and then, without warning, she leans over the crate and gives him a platonic little kiss on the cheek. “You’re just young.”

She turns and goes inside, gently shutting the door in his face.

Austin stands there for quite some time, staring at that wide oak entrance door, rubbing his cheek as though it were touched with holy water.

*   *   *

“Doc?” Three hard, sharp knocks shatter the stillness of the makeshift infirmary … followed by the unmistakable throaty voice, with its faint rural Georgia accent, just outside the door: “The new patient taking any visitors?”

Across the gray, cinder block–lined room, Dr. Stevens and Alice glance at each other. They stand at a stainless steel basin, sterilizing instruments in a pail of scalding water, the steam drifting up across their taut expressions. “Hold on a second!” Stevens calls out, wiping his hands and going over to the door.

Before opening the door, Stevens glances across the infirmary at the patient sitting up on the side of her gurney, her spindly, bandaged legs dangling. Christina, still in her robe, sips filtered water from a plastic cup, a woolen blanket pulled up across her midsection. Her swollen face—still beautiful, even with her matted wheat-straw hair pulled back into a knotted scrunchy—registers the tension.

In that instant before the door opens, something unspoken passes between doctor and patient. Stevens nods, and then opens the door.

“I understand we got a brave little lady in our midst!” the visitor booms as he sweeps into the room like a force of nature. The Governor’s gaunt, coiled body is now clad in weekend warrior garb—a hunting vest, black turtleneck, and camo pants tucked into black combat boots—making him look like a degenerate third-world dictator. His shoulder-length onyx hair shines and bounces as he saunters into the room, his handlebar mustache curled around a smirk. “Came to pay my respects.”

Gabe and Bruce enter on the Governor’s heels, the two men as dour and alert as secret service agents.

“There she is,” Philip Blake says to the girl sitting on the gurney. He walks over to the bed, grabs a nearby metal folding chair, and slams it down backwards next to the bed. “How ya doing, little lady?”

Christina puts her water down, and then chastely pulls the blanket up over the top of her threadbare décolletage. “Doing all right, I guess. Thanks to these folks.”

The Governor plops down on the chair in front of her, resting his wiry arms on the seat back. His stare is the jovial gaze of an overzealous salesman. “Doc Stevens and Alice here are the best … they surely are. Don’t know what we’d do without them.”

Stevens speaks up from across the room. “Christina, say hello to Philip Blake. Also known as the Governor.” The doctor lets out a sigh and looks away, as though disgusted by this whole display of fake conviviality. “Philip, this is Christina.”

“Christina,” the Governor purrs, as though trying the name on for size. “Now isn’t that just the prettiest name ever?”

A sudden and powerful tremor of apprehension trickles down the small of Christina’s back. Something about this man’s eyes—as deep-set and dark as a puma’s—sets her immediately on edge.

The Governor doesn’t take his glittering dark gaze off her as he speaks to the others. “You folks mind if the lady and I speak in private?”

Christina wants to say something, wants to object, but the force of this man’s personality is like a roaring river flowing through the room. Without a word, the others glance at each other, and then, sheepishly, one by one, they file out of the infirmary. The last one out is Gabe, who pauses in doorway. “I’ll be right outside, boss,” he says. And then …

Click.

SEVEN

“So, Christina … welcome to Woodbury.” At first, the Governor keeps his high-voltage smile trained on the injured woman. “Can I ask where you’re from?”

Christina takes a deep breath, looking down at her lap. For some inchoate reason, she feels compelled to keep the TV station she worked at a secret. Instead she simply says, “Suburb of Atlanta, got hit pretty bad.”

“I’m from a little shithole town outside Savannah, name of Waynesboro.” His grin widens. “Nothing fancy like them rich sections of Hot-Lanta.”

She shrugs. “I sure as heck ain’t rich.”

“Them places are all gone to hell now, ain’t they? Biters won that war.” He aims that grin at her. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

She stares at him, says nothing.

The Governor’s smile fades. “Can I ask how you ended up in that chopper?”

For a brief instant she hesitates. “The pilot was … a friend. Name’s Mike.” She swallows back her reticence. “Problem is, I promised him a Christian burial.” She feels the heat of the Governor’s stare like a furnace. “You think I could possibly see to that?”

The thin man scoots his chair closer to the bed. “I think we ought to be able to accommodate you in that department … that is … if you play ball.”

“If I what?”

The Governor shrugs. “Just answer a few questions. That’s all.” He pulls a pack of Juicy Fruit gum from his vest pocket, peels off a piece, and pops it into his mouth. He offers her a piece. She declines. He puts the gum away and scoots the chair closer. “You see, Christina … the thing is … I have a responsibility to my people. There’s a certain … due diligence I gotta tend to.”

She looks at him. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Were you and the pilot alone? Or were there other people with you before you took off?”

Again she swallows hard, girding herself. “We were holed up with a few people.”

“Where?”

She shrugs. “You know … here and there.”

The Governor smiles and shakes his head. “Now, see, Christina … that just won’t do.” He shoves the seat back against the gurney—close enough now for her to smell his scent: cigarettes and chewing gum and something unidentifiable like spoiled meat—and he speaks softly now. “In a court of law, a good counselor might see his way to making an objection on the grounds that the witness is withholding information.”

He’s about to cross a boundary, a voice drones in Christina’s head, he’s not to be trusted, he’s capable of anything. In barely a whisper, she says, “I wasn’t aware I was on trial here.”

The Governor’s lean, deeply lined face transforms, any trace of mirth going out of it. “You don’t have to be scared of me.”

She looks at him. “I’m not scared of you.”

“The truth of the matter is, I don’t want to force anybody to do anything they don’t want to do … nobody has to get hurt.” With the casual gesture of a man shooting his cuffs, he puts his gnarled hand on the edge of the bed, between her thighs, provocatively—not touching her, just resting it between her bandaged legs. His gaze doesn’t waver. It stays locked on to her. “It’s just that … I will do whatever it takes to make sure this community survives. You understand?”

She looks down at his hand, at the dirt under his nails. “Yes.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and start talking, sweetheart, and I’ll listen.”

Christina lets out an anguished breath, her posture changing. She stares into her lap. “I worked at Channel 9, WROM, the Fox affiliate out of North Atlanta.… I was a segment producer … bake sales and lost pets and such. Worked in that big tower on Peachtree, the one with the helipad on the roof.” Her breathing gets labored, the pain pressing down on her as she talks. “When the Turn happened, about twenty of us got trapped at the station.… We lived off the food in the cafeteria on the fourth floor for a while … then we started taking the traffic copter out on supply runs.” She runs out of breath for a moment.

The Governor stares. “They got any of them supplies left up there?”

Christina shakes her head. “Nothing … no food … no power … nothing. When we ran out of food … people started turning on each other.” She closes her eyes and tries to block out the memories that come flooding back like flash frames from a snuff film: the blood-spattered steam tables and all the monitors filled with snow and the severed head in the festering walk-in freezer and the screams at night. “Mike protected me, bless his heart.… He was the traffic pilot … we worked together for years … and finally he and I … we managed to sneak up to the roof and steal away in Mike’s traffic copter. We thought we were home free … but we didn’t realize … there was somebody in our group who was dead set on stopping anybody else from leaving. He sabotaged the helicopter’s engine. We knew it immediately. Barely made it out of the city … got maybe fifty miles or so … before we started hearing … before we saw the…” She shakes her head forlornly, and then looks up. “Anyway … you know the rest.” She tries to hide the fact that she’s trembling. Her voice sharpens, turns rueful. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

“You’ve been through a lot.” The Governor pats her bandaged thigh, his demeanor changing suddenly. He gives her a smile, pushes himself away from the bed, and rises to his feet. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. These are tough times … but you’re safe here.”

“Safe?” She can’t turn off her simmering anger. Her eyes water with rage. The hard-bitten side of her comes out now, the veteran segment producer who doesn’t take shit from anybody. “Are you serious?”

“I’m totally serious, sweetheart. We’re building something good here, something solid. And we’re always looking for good people to join us.”

“I don’t think so.” She glowers at him. “I think I’ll take my chances out there with the biters.”

“Now calm down, honey. I know you’ve been through the mill. But that’s no reason to pass up something good. We’re building a community here.”

“Give me a break!” She practically spits the words at him. “I know all about you.”

“All right, that’s enough.” He sounds like a teacher trying to calm an unruly student. “Let’s dial it back a little.”

“Maybe you can fool some of these hayseeds with your little Benevolent Leader routine—”

He lunges at her and slaps her—a backhand across her bruised face—hard enough to whiplash her head against the wall.

She gasps and blinks, and swallows the pain. She rubs her face and finds enough breath to speak very softly and evenly. “I’ve worked with men like you my entire career. You call yourself a governor? Really? You’re just a schoolyard bully who’s found a playground to rule. The doctor told me all about you.”

Standing over her, the Governor nods and smiles coldly. His face hardens. His eyes narrow, the halogen light reflecting in his dark irises like two silver pinpricks. “I tried,” he murmurs, more to himself than to her. “God knows I tried.”

He lunges at her again, this time going for her neck. She stiffens on the bed as he chokes her. She looks into his eyes. She calms down all of a sudden as he strangles her. Her body starts to spasm involuntarily against the gurney, making the casters squeak, but she feels no pain anymore. The blood drains from her face. She wants to die.

The Governor softly whispers, “There we go … there … there … gonna be all right…”

Her eyes roll back, showing the whites, as she turns livid in his grip. Her legs kick and twitch, knocking over the IV stand. The steel apparatus clatters to the floor, spilling glucose.

In the silence that follows the woman grows stone-still, her eyes frozen in an empty pale stare. Another moment passes, and then the Governor lets go.

*   *   *

Philip Blake steps back from the gurney on which the woman from Atlanta now lies dead, her arms and legs akimbo, dangling over the side of the bed. He catches his breath, inhaling and exhaling deeply, getting himself together.

In some distant compartment of his brain, a faint voice objects and pushes back, but he stuffs it back down into that dark fractured place in his mind. He mutters to himself, his voice barely audible to his own ears, as though an argument is under way, “Had to be done … I had no choice in the matter … no choice.…”

“BOSS?!”

The muffled sound of Gabe’s voice on the other side of the door brings him back. “Just a second,” he calls out, the forceful tone of his voice returning. “Just gimme a second here.”

He swallows hard and goes over to the sink. He runs water, splashes his face, washes his hands, and dries himself on a damp towel. And just as he’s about to turn away, he catches a glimpse of his own reflection in the surface of the stainless steel cabinet over the sink. His face, shimmering back at him in the liquid silver surface of the cabinet, looks almost ghostly, translucent, unborn. He turns away. “C’mon in, Gabe!”

The door clicks, and the stocky, balding man peers inside the room. “Everything okay?”

“Gonna need a hand with something,” the Governor says, indicating the dead woman. “This has to be done just right. Don’t talk, just listen.”

*   *   *

In a residential building next to the racetrack, on the second floor, in the dusty stillness, Dr. Stevens slouches drowsily with his lab coat unbuttoned, a Bon Appétit magazine tented over his poochy, patrician belly, a half-empty bottle of contraband Pinot Noir on the crate next to him, when a knock at his door makes him jerk in his armchair. He gropes for his eyeglasses.

“Doc!” The muffled voice outside his door gets him up and moving.

Woozy from the wine and lack of sleep, he trundles across the nominal living room of his Spartan apartment. A warren of cardboard boxes and stacks of found reading material, dimly lit by kerosene lanterns, his place is an end-of-the-world refuge for a lifelong intellectual. For a while, Stevens followed sporadic dispatches on the plague coming out of the CDC and Washington—often arriving with survivor groups, published on quickie print-on-demand circulars—but now the data sits collecting dust on his windowsill, all but forgotten in the doctor’s radioactive grief for his lost family.

“Need to have a little chat,” the man in the hallway says when Stevens opens the door.

The Governor stands outside, in the darkness of the corridor, with Gabe and Bruce hovering on his flanks, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. The Governor’s dark, hirsute face is aglow with fake cheer. “Don’t bother with the cookies and milk, we won’t be staying long.”

Stevens shrugs and leads the three men into the living room. Still woozy, the doctor motions at a ratty sofa stacked with newspapers. “If you can find a place to sit in this pigsty, you’re welcome to take a load off.”

“We’ll stand,” the Governor says flatly, looking around the hovel. Gabe and Bruce move around behind Stevens, predators circling for the kill.

“So … to what do I owe this unexpected—?” the doctor starts to say when the barrel of an APC pistol swings up and kisses the back of his skull. He realizes Gabe is pressing the muzzle of the semiautomatic against his neck cords, the mechanism cocked and ready to fire.

“You’re a student of history, Doc.” The Governor circles, jackal-like. “I’m sure you remember, back in the Cold War days, when the Ruskies were still swinging their nuclear dicks at us … they had an expression. Mutually assured destruction … M-A-D, they called it.”

Stevens’s heart races, his mouth drying. “I’m aware of the expression.”

“That’s what we got going on here.” The Governor comes around in front of him. “I go down, and you go down with me. And vice versa. You following me?”

Stevens swallows. “In all honesty, I have no inkling as to what you’re talking about.”

“This gal Christina, she got the impression that I was a bad guy.” The Governor keeps circling. “You don’t have any idea where she would have gotten such an impression, do ya?”

Stevens starts to say, “Look, I don’t—”

“Shut the fuck up!” The Governor draws a black 9 mm pistol, thumbs the hammer, and sticks the muzzle under the doctor’s chin. “You got blood on your hands, Doc. This girl’s demise is on you.”

“Demise?” Stevens’s head is upturned now, from the pressure of the gun’s barrel. “What did you do?”

“I did my duty.”

“What did you do to her?”

The Governor hisses at him through clenched teeth. “I removed her from the equation. She was a security risk. You know why?”

“What does that—?”

“You know why she was a security risk, Doc?” He increases the pressure on his chin. “She was a security risk because of you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a smart man, Doc. I think you know exactly what I’m talking about.” He releases the pressure, pulls the gun back, and continues circling. “Gabe, stand down. Let him be, now.”

Gabe pulls his weapon away, stands back. The doctor lets out a thin breath, his hands shaking. He looks at the Governor. “What do you want, Philip?”

“I WANT YOUR LOYALTY, GODDAMNIT!!”

The sudden roar of the Governor’s booming voice seems to change the air pressure in the room. The other three men stand deathly still. The doctor stares at the floor, fists clenched, heart thumping.

The Governor continues pacing around the doctor. “You know what happens when you damage my image in this town? People get nervous. And when they get nervous, they get careless.”

The doctor keeps gazing at the floor. “Philip, I don’t know what this woman told you—”

“Lives hang in the balance here, Doc, and you’re fucking with that balance.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything, I want you to listen for once. I want you to shut that smartass trap of yours, and listen and think about something.”

The doctor emits a faint sigh of exasperation, but says nothing.

“I want you to consider what happened to this gal before you poison anyone else against me.” The Governor comes closer to him. “I want you to focus your big brain on that. Can you do that for me?”

“Whatever you want, Philip.”

“And I want you to consider something else. I want you to consider how lucky you are … you got skills that keep you around.”

The doctor looks up at him. “Meaning what?”

The Governor bores his gaze into him. “Lemme put it this way. You better fucking pray we don’t run across another doctor. You follow me?”

The doctor looks down. “I follow you, Philip. You don’t have to threaten me.”

Now the Governor cocks his head at him and smiles. “Doc … c’mon … it’s me.” The old Fuller Brush salesman charm is back. “Why would I threaten my old sawbones?” He pats the doctor on the back. “We’re just a couple of neighbors flapping our jaws around the pickle barrel.” Philip looks at his watch. “In fact, we would love nothing more than to play a game of checkers with you, but we got—”

Out of nowhere, a sound outside cuts off his words and gets everybody’s attention.

Faint at first, carrying on the wind, the unmistakable crackle of .50 caliber gunfire comes from the east. The duration and fury of it—more than one gun placement barks for several moments—speaks to a serious firefight.

“Hold on!” The Governor raises his hand and cocks his head toward the window. It sounds as though it’s coming from the northeast corner of the barricade, but at this distance, it’s hard to tell for sure. “Something major’s going down,” the Governor says to Gabe.

Both Gabe and Bruce swing their Bushmaster machine guns around in front of them, safeties going off.

“C’mon!” The Governor charges out of the room, Gabe and Bruce on his heels.

*   *   *

They burst out of Stevens’s building with machine guns at the ready, the Governor in the lead, his 9 mm in hand, locked and cocked.

The wind skitters trash around their feet as they head east. The echoes of automatic gunfire have already faded on the breeze, but they can see a pair of tungsten searchlights—about three hundred yards away—the twin beams bouncing up across the silhouettes of rooftops.

“BOB!” The Governor sees the old medic huddled against a storefront half a block away. Shrouded in a ratty blanket, the drunkard crouches, shivering, his eyes popping wide toward the commotion. He looks as though the gunfire awakened him only moments ago, his expression bloodless and agitated, a man awakened from one nightmare by another. The Governor hurries up to him. “You see anything, buddy? We under attack? What’s going on?”

The medic sputters for a moment, hacking and wheezing. “Don’t know for sure … heard a guy … he was coming from the wall just a second ago…” He doubles over then with a coughing attack.

“What did he say, Bob?” The Governor touches the old man’s shoulder, gives him a little shake.

“He said … it’s a new arrival … something like that … new people.”

The Governor lets out a breath of relief. “You’re sure now, Bob?”

The old man nods. “Said something about new folks coming in with a pack of walkers right on their tail. They got ’em all, though—the walkers, that is.”

The Governor pats the old man. “That’s a relief, Bob. You stay put while we check it out.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do that.”

The Governor turns to his men, speaking under his breath now. “Until we get a handle on this situation, you boys keep them guns handy.”

“Will do, boss,” Gabe says, lowering the Bushmaster’s muzzle, but keeping the weapon cradled in his beefy arms. With his gloved hand, he releases the trigger pad, but keeps his index finger against the stock. Bruce does the same, sniffing nervously.

The Governor glances at his reflection in the hardware store window. He smooths his mustache, brushes a lock of raven-black hair from his eyes, and mutters, “C’mon, boys, let’s go roll out the welcome wagon.”

*   *   *

At first, standing in a halo of magnesium light and cloud of cordite, Martinez doesn’t hear the heavy footsteps coming toward him from a dark stretch of adjacent street. He’s too distracted by the mess that has tumbled into town in the newcomers’ wake.

“I’m taking them to the big man,” Martinez says to Gus, who stands near a gap in the wall, holding an armful of confiscated weapons—a couple of riot batons, an ax, a pair of .45 caliber pistols, and some kind of fancy Japanese sword still in its ornate scabbard. The air smells of flesh-rot and hot steel, and the night sky has clouded over.

Behind Gus, in a haze of gun smoke, ragged bodies are visible on the ground outside the barricade, and scattered across the pavement inside the gap. The freshly vanquished corpses steam in the night chill, their glistening black spoor spattered across the pavers.

“If I hear about a biter getting so much as twenty feet close to the wall,” Martinez barks, making eye contact with every one of the twelve men who stand sheepishly around Gus, “you’re going to hear about it! Clean house!”

Then Martinez turns to the newcomers. “You guys can follow me.”

The three strangers pause for a moment, leery and hesitant against the wall—two men and a woman—squinting in the tungsten radiance, their backs against the barricade like prisoners caught in mid-escape. Disarmed and disoriented, filthy from their hard travels, the men wear riot gear, the woman clad in a hooded garment that at first glance appears almost displaced in time, like a cloak from a monastery or some secret order.

Martinez takes a step closer to the trio and starts to say something else, when the sound of a familiar voice rings out from behind him.

“I can take it from here, Martinez!”

Martinez whirls to see the Governor walking up, with Gabe and Bruce on his heels.

As he approaches, the Governor plays the role of town host to the hilt, looking all hail-fellow-well-met, except for the clenching and unclenching of his fists. “I’d like to escort our guests myself.”

Martinez gives a nod, steps back, and says nothing. The Governor pauses, gazing out at the gap left by the missing semitrailer.

“I need you at the wall,” the Governor explains under his breath to Martinez, motioning at all the carnage on the ground, “cleaning off all the biters they no doubt drug with them.”

Martinez keeps nodding. “Yes, sir, Governor. I didn’t know you’d be coming out to get them when we gave word of their arrival. They’re all yours.”

The Governor turns to the strangers—a big smile here. “Follow me, folks. I’ll give you the nickel tour.”

EIGHT

Austin gets to the arena early that night—around eight forty-five—and sits alone, down front, behind the rusted cyclone-fence barrier, on the end of the second row, thinking about Lilly. He wonders if he should have pushed harder to get her to come along with him tonight. He thinks about that look she gave him earlier that evening—the softness that crossed her hazel eyes right before she kissed him—and he feels a strange mixture of excitement and panic burning in his gut.

The great xenon arc lamps boom to life around the stadium, illuminating the dirt strip and littered infield, and the stands slowly fill up around Austin with noisy townspeople hungry for blood and catharsis. The air has the snap of a chill in it and reeks of fuel oil and walker rot, and Austin feels weirdly removed from it all.

Clad in a hoodie, jeans, and motorcycle boots, his long hair pulled back in a leather stay, he fidgets on the cold hard seat, his muscles sore from the afternoon’s adventures in the hinterlands. He can’t get comfortable. He gazes out across the infield at the far side of the arena and sees the dark portals filling with clusters of upright corpses, each leashed to a handler by thick chains. The handlers start leading the biters out into the jarring light of the infield, the silver follow-spots making the dead faces look almost Kabuki-like, painted, like morbid clowns.

The crowd simmers with noise and catcalls and clapping. The phlegmy growling and moaning of the walkers as they take their places on the gravel warning track blends with the rising voices of the spectators to create an unearthly din. Austin stares at the spectacle. He can’t get Lilly out of his head. The roar that’s building all around him begins to fade … and fade … and fade away … until all he can hear in his head is Lilly’s voice softly making a promise.

I’ll show you some things … the only way we’re going to survive … helping each other.

Something pokes Austin in the ribs, and yanks him back to reality.

He jerks around and realizes an old man has taken a seat right next to him.

Sporting a nicotine-yellowed beard, an ancient face as wrinkled as wadded parchment, and a tattered black overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, he’s a feisty old Hasidic Jew who somehow managed to survive the streets of Atlanta after the Turn. His name is Saul, and he shows Austin his stained, rotting teeth as he says with a smile, “Gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight … am I right?”

“Yeah, absolutely.” Austin feels dizzy, light-headed. “Can’t wait.”

Austin turns back to the gathering of dead on the track’s periphery, and the sight of it makes him feel sick to his stomach. One of the biters, an obese male in bile-spattered painter’s overalls, sprouts a knot of small intestines from a sucking wound in his porcine belly. Another one is missing the side of her face, her upper teeth gleaming in the spotlights as she moans and tugs on her chain. Austin is quickly losing his enthusiasm for the fights. Lilly has a point. He looks down at the sticky tread beneath the bench, the cigarette butts and puddles of soft drinks and stale beer. He closes his eyes and thinks of Lilly’s sweet face, the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the slender curve of her neck.

“Excuse me,” he says, standing up and pushing himself past the old man.

“Better hurry back,” the geezer mumbles, blinking fitfully. “Show’s gonna start lickety-split!”

Austin is already halfway down the aisle. He doesn’t look back.

*   *   *

On his way across town, moving past the shadows of storefronts and the dark, boarded buildings of the main drag, Austin sees a half-dozen people coming toward him on the opposite side of the street.

Pulling his hoodie tighter, thrusting his hands in his pockets, he keeps moving, his head down. Avoiding eye contact with the oncoming group, he recognizes the Governor, who walks out in front of three strangers like a tour guide, his chest all puffed up with pride. Bruce and Gabe bring up the rear with assault rifles cradled and ready.

“—Guard station about a mile away—completely abandoned,” the Governor is saying to the strangers. Austin has never seen these people before. The Governor is treating them like VIPs. “All kinda supplies left inside,” the Governor is saying. “Been making good use of it. Night-vision goggles, sniper rifles, ammo, you seen it in action. This place wouldn’t be shit without it.”

As Austin passes on the opposite sidewalk, he gets a better glimpse of the newcomers.

The two men and one woman look battle-scarred, somber, and maybe even a little nervous. Of the two men—each of whom is clad in riot gear—the older one looks tougher, meaner, more cunning. Sandy-haired, with a grizzle of a beard, the older man walks alongside the Governor, and Austin hears him say, “You sound lucky. Where is it you’re taking us? We’re walking toward the light. What is that? A baseball game?”

Before they vanish around the corner, Austin glances over his shoulder and gets a better look at the other two strangers. The younger man wears a riot helmet and looks maybe Asian, his age hard to tell at this distance and in this light.

The woman is far more interesting to look at. Her lean, sculpted face barely visible within the shadow of her hooded garment, she looks to Austin to be in her mid-thirties, African American, and exotically beautiful.

Just for an instant, Austin has a bad feeling about these people.

“Well, stranger,” he hears the Governor saying, as they pass out of view, “it looks like we’re not the only ones lucky around here. You showed up on the perfect night. There’s a fight tonight.…”

The wind and the shadows drown the rest of the conversation as the group rounds the corner. Austin lets out a sigh, shakes off the inexplicable feeling of dread, and continues on toward Lilly’s place.

A minute later, he finds himself standing in front of Lilly’s building. The wind has picked up, and litter swirls across the threshold. Austin pauses, lowers his hood, brushes a strand of curly hair from his eyes, and silently rehearses what he wants to say.

He goes up to her door and takes a deep breath.

*   *   *

Lilly sits by her window in a cast-off armchair, a candle flickering on a side table next to her, a paperback cookbook open to the chapter on great Southern side dishes, when the sound of knocking interrupts her reverie.

She had been thinking about Josh Hamilton, and all the great meals he would have prepared had he survived, and the mixture of sorrow and regret drove away Lilly’s hunger for something better than canned meat and instant rice. She had also been thinking a lot that night about the Governor.

Lately, Lilly’s fear of the man has been morphing into something else. She can’t get the memory out of her head of the Governor sentencing Josh’s killer—the town butcher—to a horrible death at the hands of hungry walkers. With a combination of shame and satisfaction, Lilly keeps reliving the act of vengeance in her darkest thoughts. The man got what he deserved. And perhaps—just perhaps—the Governor is the only redress they have to these kinds of injustices. An eye for an eye.

“Who the hell…?” she grumbles, levering herself out of her chair.

She crosses the room on bare feet, her ripped bell-bottom jeans dragging on the filthy hardwood. She wears an olive green thermal underwear top deftly ripped at the neck in a perfect V, a sports bra underneath, rawhide necklaces and beads around her slender neck. Her flaxen locks are pulled back in a loose Brigitte Bardot parfait on the top of her head. Her funky sense of fashion—first developed in the thrift shops and Salvation Army stores of Marietta—has died hard in the post-plague world. In a way, her sense of style is her armor, her defense mechanism.

She opens the door and looks out at Austin standing in the dark.

“Sorry to keep bothering you,” he says sheepishly, one arm holding the other as though he’s about to break apart at the seams. He has his hoodie drawn tight around his narrow face, and for the briefest instant he looks like a different person to Lilly. His eyes have lost the arrogant swagger that perpetually gleams there. His expression has softened, and the real person underneath the hard shell has emerged. He levels his gaze at her. “Are you in the middle of something?”

She proffers a smile. “Yeah, you caught me on the phone with my stockbroker, moving my millions around all my off-shore hedge funds.”

“Should I come back?”

Lilly sighs. “It’s called a joke, Austin. Remember humor?”

He nods sadly. “Oh … right.” He manages a smile. “I’m a little slow tonight.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Okay … um.” He looks around the dark street. Practically the entire town has relocated to the arena for the night’s festivities. Now the wind scrapes trash along the deserted sidewalks and rustles in the defunct power lines, making an eerie humming noise. Only a few of Martinez’s men remain at the corners of the barricades, patrolling with their AR-15s and binoculars. Every now and then a searchlight sweeps its silver beam across the neighboring woods. “I was wondering, um, you know, if you’re not too busy,” he stammers, avoiding eye contact with her, “if you might be willing to, like, do a little training tonight?”

She looks askance at him. “Training?”

He clears his throat awkwardly, looks down. “What I mean is, you said you might consider showing me some things … giving me some pointers on how to … you know … deal with the biters, protect myself.”

She looks at him, and she takes a deep breath. Then she smiles. “Give me a second—I’ll get my guns.”

*   *   *

They go down by the train station on the eastern edge of town, as far away from the lights and noise of the arena as they can get. By the time they get there, Lilly has turned the collar up on her denim jacket to ward off the gathering chill. The air smells of methane and swamp gas—a mélange of rot—and the odor braces them in the moonlit shadows of the train yard. Lilly runs Austin through a few scenarios, quizzes him, challenges him. Austin has his 9 mm Glock with him, as well as a buck knife sheathed on his right thigh, tied with rawhide.

“C’mon, keep moving,” she says to him at one point, as he slowly inches his way along the threshold of the woods, his pistol at his side, gripped in his right hand, his finger outside the trigger pad. They’ve been at it for almost an hour now and Austin is getting restless. The forest pulses and drones with night noises—crickets, rustling branches—and the constant threat of shadows moving behind the trees. Lilly walks alongside him with the quiet authority of a drill instructor. “You always want to keep moving, but not too fast, and not too slow … just keep your eyes open.”

“Lemme guess—like this, right?” he says, a trace of exasperation in his voice. His gun has one of Lilly’s silencers attached to the muzzle. His hoodie is pulled tight around his face. A high chain-link fence runs along the woods, once serving as security for the railroad depot. A cinder-strewn trail runs along a row of derelict railroad tracks overgrown with prairie grass.

“I told you to pull your hood down,” she says. “You’re cutting off your peripheral vision.”

He does so, and keeps moving along the tree line. “How’s this?”

“Better. You always want to know your surroundings. That’s the key. It’s more important than what weapon you’re using, or how you’re holding your gun or your ax or whatever. Always be aware of what’s on either side of you. And what’s behind you. So you can make a fast getaway if necessary.”

“I get it.”

“And never ever-ever-ever let yourself get surrounded. They’re slow but they can horde in on you if there are enough of them.”

“You said that already.”

“The point is, you always know which way to run if you have to. Remember, you’re always going to be faster than they are … but that doesn’t mean you can’t get penned in.”

Austin nods and gazes intermittently over his shoulder, keeping track of the darkness on all sides of the trail. He turns and slowly backs along the trail for a moment, searching the shadows.

Lilly watches him. “Put your gun away for a second,” she says. “Grab your knife.” She watches him switch weapons. “Okay, now let’s say you’re out of ammo, you’re isolated, maybe lost.”

He gives her a sidelong glance. “Lilly, we’ve been through this part … like twice already.”

“That’s good, you can count.”

“C’mon—”

“And we’re going to go through it again, a third time, so answer the question. How do you hold your knife?”

He sighs, backing along the trees, his boots crunching in the cinders. “You hold it blade-down, a tight grip on the hilt.… I’m not stupid, Lilly.”

“I never said you were stupid. Tell me why you hold your knife like that.”

He keeps backing along the edge of the woods, moving absently now, shaking his head. “You hold it like that because you got one chance to bring it down hard on their skull, and you want to do it decisively.”

Lilly notices a stray timber—a piece of creosote-soaked railroad tie—lying beside the trail, about twenty feet away. She silently moves toward it. “Go on,” she says. With one quick, discreet movement, she kicks the timber across Austin’s path. “Why do you do it decisively?”

He lets out another weary sigh, blithely backing along. “You do it decisively because you got one chance to destroy the brain.” He keeps backing slowly toward the timber, gripping the knife, unaware of the obstruction lying across his path. “I’m not an idiot, Lilly.”

She grins. “Oh, no, you’re a regular ninja, the way you were clearing the woods for us today at the crash site. You got it all going on.”

“I’m not afraid, Lilly, I’ve told you a million times, I’ve been around—”

He trips on the railroad tie. “Ouch!—FUCK!” he blurts when he hits the ground, raising a puff of cinder dust.

At first Lilly lets out a blurt of laughter as Austin sits there for a second, looking defeated, embarrassed, humiliated. In the darkness, his eyes shimmer with emotion and his curls dangle in his face. He looks like a whipped dog. Lilly’s laughter dies, and guilt twinges in her gut. “I’m sorry, sorry,” she murmurs, kneeling by him. “I didn’t mean to—” She strokes his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m being an asshole.”

“It’s okay,” he says softly, taking deep breaths, looking down. “I deserve it.”

“No. No.” She sits down next to him. “You don’t deserve any of this.”

He looks at her. “Don’t worry about it. You’re just trying to help me and I appreciate it.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.” She rubs her face. “All I know is … we gotta be ready. We gotta be … I hate to say it … but we gotta be as fucking bloodthirsty as the biters.” She looks at him. “It’s the only way we’re gonna get through this.”

His gaze locks on to hers. The ambient drone deepens around them, the roar of night sounds rising. In the distance, barely audible, come the hyena howls of the dirt track spectators cheering for blood.

At last Austin says, “You’re starting to sound like the Governor.”

Lilly gazes into the distance and says nothing, just listens to the sounds drifting on the breeze.

Austin licks his lips and looks at her. “Lilly, I’ve been thinking … what if there’s no other side to get through to? What if this is it? What if this is all there is for us?”

Lilly thinks about it. “It doesn’t matter. As long as we have each other … and we’re willing to do what it takes … we’ll survive.”

The words hang in the night air for a moment. Almost imperceptibly they have come closer together, Lilly’s hand lingering on his shoulder, his hand finding the small of her back.

Lilly realizes—all at once—that she might have originally been thinking about the whole community sticking together but now she’s thinking only about Austin and her. She finds herself leaning in closer to him, and he responds by leaning toward her. She senses something unraveling, a letting go, and their lips coming together, and the kiss about to happen, when suddenly Lilly draws back. “What’s this? Jesus, what’s this?”

She feels something wet down around his waist, and she looks down.

The bottom hem of his sweatshirt is soaked in blood. Some of it drips in runnels onto the leafy ground, as black and shiny as axle oil. The knife blade sticks out of a tear in his denims where it sliced through the flesh of his hip in the fall. Austin puts his hand over it. “Shit,” he utters through gritted teeth, the blood seeping through his fingers. “I thought I felt something bite me.”

“C’mon!” Lilly springs to her feet and gives him a hand, carefully hoisting him to his feet. “We gotta get you to Dr. Stevens.”

*   *   *

Her full name was Christina Meredith Haben, and she grew up in Kirkwood, Georgia, and she went away to college in the 1980s to study telecommunications at Oberlin. She had a child out of wedlock that she carried to term and then gave up for adoption on the day after 9/11. She had suffered through a series of romantic misadventures in her life, never found Mr. Right, never married, and always considered herself wed to her job as the senior segment producer at one of the biggest stations in the South. She had won three Emmys, a Clio, and a couple of Cable Ace awards—all of which made her justifiably proud—and she never felt her superiors respected her or provided her with the remuneration that she deserved.

But at the present moment—on this filthy tile floor, in the glare of fluorescent lights—all of Christina Haben’s regrets, fears, frustrations, hopes, and desires are long gone, vanquished by death, her remains lying scattered across the gore-spattered parquet, while seventeen captive walkers tear into her organs and tissues.

The watery, orgiastic eating noises bounce around the cinder-block walls, as the dead feast on mostly unidentifiable body parts that used to comprise Christina Haben. Blood and spinal fluid and bile mingle in the corners of the room like multicolored cordials, sluicing through the seams in the tile, splashing the walls in blooms of deep scarlet, and drenching the frenzied biters. Selected for their physical integrity, earmarked for the gladiatorial arena, most of these creatures appear to be former adult males, some of them now crouching apelike in the bright light, gnawing on gristly nodules that used to belong to Christina Haben’s lower skeleton.

Across the room, a pair of rectangular portal windows are embedded in a garage door that encloses the room. Within the frame of the window on the left, a gaunt, weathered, mustachioed face peers in at the action.

Standing in the silent corridor outside the enclosure, gazing intently through the window glass, the Governor registers little emotion on his face other than stern satisfaction with what he is seeing. His left ear is bandaged from a recent encounter with the newcomers, and the pain braces him. It makes him clench his fists. It courses down his marrow like electricity, girding him, crystallizing his mission. All his doubt, all his second-guessing—in fact, all his remaining humanity—are being pushed aside by the rage and the vengeance and the voice deep within him that serves as a compass. He knows now the only way to keep this tinderbox from going up in flames. He knows what he must do now in order to—

The shuffling of footsteps from the opposite end of the corridor interrupts his thoughts.

*   *   *

Lilly has her arm around Austin as she reaches the bottom of the stairs, turns a corner, and hurries down the main corridor that cuts through the foul-smelling, cinder-block catacombs of garages and service bays beneath the arena.

At first she doesn’t see the dark figure standing alone at the far end of the corridor, gazing through the portal window. She’s too preoccupied with Austin’s injury, and the effort required just to keep pressure on the wound with her right hand as she shuffles along toward the infirmary.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” the figure says as Lilly and Austin approach.

“Oh … hey,” Lilly says awkwardly as she shuffles up with Austin dripping a few blood droplets on the floor, nothing life-threatening, but enough to be worrisome. “Gotta get this one to the doctor.”

“Hope the other guy looks worse,” the Governor jokes as Lilly and Austin pause outside the battered garage door.

Austin manages a smirk, his long, damp curls hanging in his face. “It’s nothing … just a flesh wound … fell on my knife like an idiot.” He holds his side. “Bleeding’s basically stopped, totally okay now.”

Very faintly the muffled noises of the feeding frenzy can be heard through the sealed glass. It sounds like an immense stomach growling. Lilly gets a glimpse through the nearest window of the gruesome orgy going on in the pen, and she glances at Austin, who sees it too. They say nothing. The sight of it barely registers to Lilly. Once upon a time she would have been repulsed. She glances back at the Governor. “They’re getting their vitamins and minerals, I see.”

“Nothing is wasted around here,” the Governor says with a shrug, nodding toward the window. “Poor gal from the helicopter up and died on us … internal injuries from the crash, I guess … poor thing.” He turns toward the glass and looks in. “She and the pilot are serving a larger purpose now.”

Lilly sees the bandaged ear. She shoots another glance at Austin, who also stares at the Governor’s blood-spotted bandage and the mangled ear underneath.

“It’s none of my business,” Austin says finally, pointing at the ear. “But are you okay? Looks like you got a nasty wound yourself.”

“Them new people, came in tonight,” the Governor murmurs, not taking his gaze off the window. “Turned out to be more of a liability than I first thought.”

“Yeah, I saw you with them earlier.” Austin perks up. “You were kinda taking them on a tour of the place, right? What happened?”

The Governor turns and looks directly at Lilly as though she asked the question. “I try to extend every courtesy to people, show them hospitality. We’re all in the same boat these days, am I right?”

Lilly gives him a nod. “Absolutely, yeah. So what was their problem?”

“Turns out they were a scouting party from another settlement somewhere nearby, and their intentions were not exactly neighborly.”

“What did they do?”

The Governor stares at her. “My guess is, they were going to try and raid us.”

“Raid us?”

“It’s happening all over the place now. Scouts slip in, secure a place, they take everything. Food. Water. The shirt off your back.”

“So what happened?”

“Got into a major tussle with them. I wasn’t gonna let them fuck with us. Not in a million years. One of them—the colored girl—tried to chew my ear off.”

Lilly shares another tense glance with Austin. She looks at the Governor. “Jesus … what is going on? These people are fucking savages.”

“We’re all savages, Lilly-girl. We just gotta be the biggest savages on the block.” He takes a deep breath. “Got into it pretty bad with the main guy. Fella fought back hard. Ended up cutting his hand off.”

Lilly can’t move. She feels contrary emotions flowing through her, pinching her insides, triggering sparks of trauma in the back of her mind—memories of a bullet destroying the back of Josh Hamilton’s head. “Jesus Christ,” she utters, almost to herself.

The Governor takes another deep breath, then lets out an exasperated sigh. “Stevens is keeping him alive. Maybe we’ll learn something from him. Maybe not. We’re safe now, though. And that’s what counts.”

Lilly nods and starts to say something when the Governor cuts her off.

“I am not going to let anyone fuck with our town,” he says, making eye contact with both of them. A single pearl of blood tracks down his neck from the bandaged ear. He wipes it away and sighs again. “You people are my number-one priority, and that’s all there is to it.”

Lilly swallows hard. For the first time since she came to this place, she feels something other than contempt for this man … if not trust, then maybe a scintilla of sympathy. “Anyway,” she says, “I better get Austin to the infirmary.”

“Go on,” the Governor says with a weary smile. “Get Gorgeous George here a Band-Aid.”

Lilly puts her arm around Austin and helps the young man shuffle down the corridor. But before they turn the far corner, Lilly pauses and looks back at Philip. “Hey, Governor,” she says softly. “Thank you.”

*   *   *

On their way through the maze of corridors leading to the infirmary, they run into Bruce. The big African American is coming in the opposite direction, striding along with purpose, his jackboots echoing, his .45 bouncing on his big muscular thigh, his face burning with urgency. He glances up when he sees Lilly and Austin. “Hey, guys,” he says in his tense baritone. “You two seen the Governor around here?”

Lilly tells him where the man is, and then adds, “Must be a full moon tonight, huh?”

Bruce looks at her. His expression taut, his eyes narrowing, he looks as though he’s wondering just exactly how much she knows. “Whaddaya mean?”

She shrugs. “It just seems like things are getting crazier by the minute.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know—these assholes trying to raid us—people acting crazy and stuff.”

He looks relieved. “Yeah … right … it’s some crazy shit. I gotta go.”

He brushes past them and hurries on down the hall toward the walker pens.

Lilly furrows her brow, watching him.

Something isn’t adding up.

NINE

When they get to the infirmary, Lilly and Austin find Dr. Stevens preoccupied, hunched over the partially nude form of an unconscious adult male sprawled on a gurney in the corner. The man—thirtyish, fit, sandy-haired, a grizzle of a beard—has a towel thrown across his privates, and a blood-sodden bandage on his right stump of a wrist. The doctor is carefully removing battered, blood-stippled body armor from the man’s shoulders.

“Doc? Got another patient for ya,” Lilly says as she crosses the room with Austin shuffling alongside her. The unconscious man on the gurney is unknown to Lilly, but Austin seems to recognize the sandy-haired man immediately and gives Lilly a poke in the ribs.

Austin whispers, “It’s him … the dude the Governor tangled with.”

“What now?” the doctor says, glancing up from the gurney and looking at them over the tops of his wire-rimmed glasses. He sees Austin’s fingers stained in blood, pressing against his ribs. “Put him over there, I’ll be right with you.” The doctor glances over his shoulder. “Alice, give us a hand with Austin, will you?”

The nurse comes out of an adjacent storage room with an armful of cotton bandages, medical tape, and gauze. Dressed in her lab coat, hair pulled back from her youthful face, she looks frazzled. She makes eye contact with Lilly but says nothing as she hurries across the room.

Lilly helps Austin over to an examination table in the opposite corner.

“Who’s the patient, Doc?” Lilly asks, playing dumb, gently helping Austin hop onto the edge of the table. Austin cringes slightly at a twinge of pain but seems more fascinated by the man lying out cold on the gurney across the room. Alice comes over and begins to gingerly unzip Austin’s sweatshirt, inspecting the wound.

Across the room, the doctor carefully pulls a threadbare hospital smock over the grizzled man’s lolling head, guiding his limp arms into sleeves. “I think I heard somebody say his name is Rick, but I’m not positive about that.”

Lilly walks over to the gurney and gazes distastefully down at the unconscious man. “What I heard is that he attacked the Governor.”

The doctor doesn’t look at her, he simply purses his lips skeptically as he gently ties the back of the gown. “And where, pray tell, did you hear this?”

“From the man himself.”

The doctor smiles ruefully. “That’s what I thought.” He shoots her a glance. “You think he’s giving you the straight scoop, do you?”

“What do you mean?” Lilly comes closer. She looks down at the man on the gurney. In the blank-faced stupor of sleep, his mouth slightly parted and emitting shallow breaths, the sandy-haired man could be anybody. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker … serial killer, saint … anybody. “Why would the Governor lie about this? What good would it do?”

The doctor finishes tying off the back of the smock, and then gently pulls a sheet over the patient. “You seem to have forgotten, your fearless leader is a congenital liar.” Stevens says this in a casual tone, as though imparting the time and temperature. He stands and faces Lilly. “It’s old news, Lilly. Look up the word ‘sociopath’ and see if you don’t find his picture.”

“Look … I know he’s no Mother Teresa … but what if he’s exactly what we need now?”

The doctor looks at her. “What we need? Really? He’s what we need?” Stevens shakes his head, turns away from her, and goes over to the pulse-ox monitor on a table next to the gurney. The machine is off, its screen blank. Hooked to a twelve-volt car battery, it looks as though it’s fallen off the back of a truck. Stevens fiddles with it for a moment, readjusts the terminals. “You know what we really need? We need a monitor down here that actually works.”

“We have to stick together,” Lilly persists. “These people are a threat.”

The doctor whirls angrily toward her. “When did you drink the Kool-Aid, Lilly? You once told me it’s the Governor who’s the biggest threat to our safety. You remember? What happened to the freedom fighter?”

Lilly narrows her eyes at him. The room goes still, Alice and Austin feeling the tension, their silence fueling the awkward edge to the atmosphere. Lilly says, “He could have killed us back then and he didn’t. I just want to survive. What is this thing you have for him?”

“This thing I have is lying right here,” the doctor says, indicating the unconscious man. “I believe the Governor attacked him.”

“What are you talking about?”

The doctor nods. “Without provocation, I’m talking about. The Governor mutilated this man.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

The doctor ponders her. His tone of voice changes, lowers, goes cold. “What happened to you?”

“Like I said, Doc, I’m just trying to survive.”

“Use your head, Lilly. Why would these people traipse in here with bad intentions? They’re just groping around like the rest of us.”

He looks down at the man on the gurney. The man’s eyes jerk slightly under his lids, a desperate fever dream unfolding. His breathing gets a little frenzied for a moment, then calms again.

The silence stretches. At last, Austin speaks up from the other side of the room. “Doc, there were two others—a younger guy and a woman with him. Do you know where they are? Where they went?”

Stevens just shakes his head, looking at the floor now. His voice comes out in barely a whisper. “I don’t know.” Then he looks up at Lilly. “But I’ll tell you this much … I wouldn’t want to be them right now.”

*   *   *

A muffled voice can be heard coming from behind a sealed garage door at the end of a lonely corridor in the arena’s subbasement. Hoarse with exhaustion, stretched thin with nervous tension, the voice is feminine, low, and indecipherable to the two men standing outside the door.

“She’s been at it ever since I put her in there,” Bruce says to the Governor, who stands facing the door with arms folded judiciously across his chest. “Talking to herself like that.”

“Interesting,” the Governor comments, his senses sharpened by the latent violence in the air. He can feel the rumble of generators in his bones. He can detect the odors of decay and plaster rotting.

“These people are fucking crazy,” Bruce adds, shaking his glistening bald head, his hand instinctively resting on the grip of the .45 holstered on his hip.

“Yeah … crazy like foxes,” the Governor murmurs. His ear throbs. His skin tingles with anticipation. Control. The refrain bubbles up from the voice that lives in the lowest compartment of his brain: Women are meant to be controlled … managed … broken.

For one fleeting instant, it feels to Philip Blake as though part of him is outside his body, watching all this transpire, fascinated by the voice within him that is second nature now, a second skin: You have to find out what these people know, where they come from—what they have—and most importantly how dangerous they are.

“That lady in there is tough as shit,” Bruce says. “She ain’t gonna give anything up.”

“I know how to break her,” the Governor mutters. “Leave it to me.”

He breathes deeply, inhaling slowly, preparing himself. He senses danger here. These people could very easily hurt him—they could tear apart his community—and so he must call on that part of him that knows how to hurt others, knows how to break people, knows how to control women. He doesn’t even blink.

He simply turns to Bruce and says, “Open it.”

*   *   *

The garage door rolls up on rusty, shrieking casters, banging against the top rail. At the rear of the enclosure, the woman in the darkness jerks against her ropes with a start, her long dreadlocks matted to her face.

“I’m sorry,” the Governor says to her. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

In the slice of light coming from the corridor, the woman’s left eye shimmers through a gap in her braids, just that one eye, balefully taking in the visitors standing like giants in the doorway, silhouetted by the bare bulbs in cages along the hallway ceiling behind them.

The Governor takes a step closer. Bruce comes in behind him. “You seemed to be having a nice, spirited conversation with—I’m sorry, who exactly was it you were talking to? Actually—never mind—I don’t even care. Let’s get this under way.”

The woman on the floor brings to mind an exotic animal leashed inside a pen—dark and lithe and supple, like a panther, even in her ratty work clothes—her slender neck strapped and roped to the back wall. Each arm is tied to an opposite corner of the chamber, and her espresso-colored skin gleams with perspiration, her Medusa braids shiny and flowing off her shoulders and back. She glares through her hair at the wiry man, who approaches her with menacing calm.

“Bruce, do me a favor.” The Governor speaks with the absent, businesslike tone of a workman approaching a faulty pipe or a pothole to be filled. “Take her pants off and tie one leg to that wall over there.”

Bruce moves in and does what he’s told. The woman tenses as her pants are yanked down. Bruce does this with the brisk certainty of someone ripping a Band-Aid off a sore. The big man steps back, and then pulls a coil of rope off his belt. He starts hog-tying one leg.

“And tie her other leg to that wall over there,” the Governor instructs.

The woman doesn’t take her gaze off the Governor. She glowers through that hair, eyes so filled with hate they could spot-weld steel.

The Governor comes closer to her. He starts to unbuckle his belt. “Don’t struggle too much just yet, girl.” He undoes his belt and unsnaps his camo pants. “You’re going to want to save your energy.”

The girl on the floor glares with the intensity of a black hole swallowing all matter. Every particle in the room, every molecule, every atom, is being drawn toward the black void of her eyes. The Governor comes closer. He feeds off her hate like a lightning rod.

“After you’re done there, Bruce … leave us to it,” the Governor says, his gaze clamped down on the woman. “We need the privacy.” He smiles at her. “And shut the door on the way out.” His smile widens. “Tell me something, girl. How long do you think it would take for me to ruin your life—shatter your sense of security—really fuck you up?”

No answer comes from the woman, only that ancient, hunched-back gaze of an animal bristling right before a fight to the death.

“I think half an hour could probably do it.” That smile. That heavy-lidded, serpentine stare. He stands only inches away from her. “But really, I plan on doing this every day as often as I can.…” His pants are down around his ankles now. Bruce moves off toward the door as the Governor steps out of his trousers. His spine tingles.

The outer door comes down as Bruce exits. The reverberation of the bang makes the woman jerk again, just slightly.

The Governor’s voice fills the vacuum of space as the underwear comes off. “This is going to be fun.”

*   *   *

Above ground. In the night air. In the stillness of the dark town. Late. Two figures walk side by side along the ramshackle storefronts.

“I can’t wrap my head around all this shit,” Austin Ballard is saying with his hands in his pockets as he strolls along the forlorn promenade. He shudders in the chill. His hood is drawn up and over his curls, the lingering dread of what he has just seen showing on his face in brief flashes as the intermittent light spills across their path.

“The feeding room?” Lilly ambles alongside him with her denim coat buttoned up to her neck. She holds herself, her arms around her midsection in some unconscious gesture of self-preservation.

“Yeah … that and the dude with his hand chopped off. What the fuck is going on, Lilly?”

She starts to answer when the distant pop of large-caliber gunfire echoes. The noise makes both of them jump. Martinez and his boys are still out there, burning the midnight oil, cleaning up any stray biters drawn to the wall by the earlier commotion of the racetrack arena.

“Business as usual,” Lilly says, not really believing it. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Sometimes it seems like the biters are the least of our problems.” Austin shivers. “You think these people really are planning a raid?”

“Who knows?”

“How many more of them do you think there are?”

She shrugs. She can’t shake the woozy feeling in her gut that something dangerous and inexorable has already started. Like a foreboding black glacier moving undetectably beneath their feet, the course of events seems to be slipping now toward some undefined horizon. And for the first time since she stumbled upon this ragtag little community … Lilly Caul feels a bone-deep fear that she can’t even identify. “I don’t know,” she says at last, “but I feel like we can kiss any restful night’s sleep good-bye for a while.”

“To be honest, I haven’t slept that great since the Turn broke out.” A twinge of pain from his injury makes him flinch, and he holds his side as he walks. “Matter of fact, I haven’t slept the night through since the beginning.”

“Now that you mention it, I haven’t either.”

They walk a little farther in silence … until Austin says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Are you really on board with the Governor now?”

Lilly has been asking herself the same thing. Was it a case of Stockholm syndrome—that weird psychological phenomenon where hostages start to feel empathy and positive feelings toward their captors? Or was she projecting all her rage and pent-up emotions through the man as though he were some kind of attack dog hard-wired to her id? All she knew was that she was scared. “I know he’s a psycho,” she says finally, measuring her words. “Believe me … if circumstances were different … I would cross the street and walk on the other side if I saw him coming toward me.”

Austin looks unsatisfied, anxious, tongue-tied. “So you’re saying … it’s like … the whole … when-the-going-gets-tough thing? Or something like that?”

She looks at him. “What I’m saying is this. Knowing what’s out there, we could be in serious danger again. Maybe the worst danger we’ve been in since the town was established.” She thinks about it. “I guess I see the Governor as … I don’t know … like fighting fire with fire?” Then she adds, a little softer, a little less sure of herself, “As long as he’s on our side.”

Another distant crackling volley of gunfire makes both of them twitch.

They come to the end of the main drag, where two streets intersect in the darkness with a petrified railroad crossing. In the dark of night, the broken-down street sign and shoulder-high weeds look like the end of the world. Lilly pauses, preparing to go her separate way to her apartment building to the north.

“Okay, well, anyway…” Austin looks as though he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “Here’s to another sleepless night.”

She gives him a weary grin. “Tell you what. Why don’t you come over to my place and you can bore me some more with your tales of surfing off the coast of Panama City Beach. Hell, maybe you’ll be boring enough to put me to sleep.”

For a moment, Austin Ballard looks like a thorn has just been removed from his paw.

*   *   *

They settle down for the night in Lilly’s makeshift living room amid the cardboard boxes and carpet remnants and useless things left behind by nameless former residents. Lilly makes them some instant coffee on a chafing dish, and they sit in the lantern light and just talk. They talk about their childhoods—how they share similar innocuous suburban backgrounds full of cul-de-sacs and Scout troops and weenie roasts—and then they have that patented post-Turn discussion of what they’ll do if and when the cure comes and the Troubles go away. Austin says he’ll probably look to move somewhere warm and find a good woman and settle down and build surfboards or something. Lilly tells him about her dreams of being a clothing designer, of going to New York—as though New York still exists—and making a name for herself. Lilly finds herself growing more and more fond of this shaggy, good-natured young man. She marvels that he is such a decent, gentle person underneath the swagger. She wonders if the playboy routine wasn’t some kind of messed-up defense mechanism. Or maybe he’s just dealing with the same thing every other survivor is dealing with right now—the thing nobody can put a name to but feels like some kind of virulent stress disorder. Regardless of her epiphanies about Austin, however, Lilly is glad for the company that night, and they talk into the wee hours.

At one point, very late that night, after a long moment of awkward silence, Lilly looks around her dark apartment, thinking, trying to remember where she put her little stash of hooch. “You know what,” she says at last. “If memory serves, I think I have half a bottle of Southern Comfort hidden away for emergencies.”

Austin gives her a loaded glance. “You sure you want to part with it?”

She shrugs, getting up off the couch and padding across the room to a stack of crates. “No time like the present,” she mutters, rifling through the extra blankets, bottled water, ammunition, Band-Aids, and disinfectant. “Hello, gorgeous,” she says finally, locating the beautifully etched bottle of tea-colored liquid.

She comes back and thumbs off the cap. “Here’s to a good night’s sleep,” she toasts, and then knocks back a healthy swig, wiping her lips.

She sits down on the sofa next to him and hands the bottle over. Austin, who cringes again from the pain in his side, takes a pull off the bottle and then grimaces from the burn in his throat as well as the stitch in his rib cage. “Jesus, I’m such a goddamn pussy.”

“What are you talking about? You’re not a pussy. Young guy your age, going on runs … kicking ass outside the safe zone.” She takes the bottle and slugs down another gulp. “You’re gonna be fine.”

He gives her a look. “‘Young guy’? What are you, a senior citizen? I’m almost twenty-three years old, Lilly.” He grins. “Gimme that thing.” He takes the bottle and swallows another gulp, shuddering at the burn. He coughs, and holds his side. “Fuck!”

She stifles a giggle. “You all right? You need some water? No?” She takes the bottle from him and takes another sip. “Truth is, I’m old enough to be your … older sister.” She belches. Then she giggles, covering her mouth. “Jesus Christ, excuse me.”

He laughs. The pain surges up his rib cage again and he flinches.

They drink and talk for a while, until Austin starts coughing again, holding his side.

“You okay?” She reaches over and moves a lock of his curly hair out of his eyes. “You want some Tylenol?”

“I’m fine!” he snaps at her. Then he lets out a pained sigh. “I’m sorry … thank you for the offer, but I’m good.” He reaches up and touches her hand. “I’m sorry I’m being so … cranky. I feel like an idiot … like a fucking invalid. How could I be so fucking clumsy?”

She looks at him. “Would you shut up? You’re not clumsy, and you’re not an invalid.”

He looks at her. “Thanks.” He touches her hand. “I appreciate it.”

For a moment, Lilly feels the darkness around her shifting and spinning. She feels a loosening in her midsection, a warmth flowing down through her from her tummy all the way to her toes. She wants to kiss him. She might as well face it. She wants to kiss him a lot. She wants to prove to him he’s not a pussy … he’s a good, strong, virile, decent man. But something holds her back. She’s not good at this. She’s no prude—she’s had plenty of men—but she can’t bring herself to do it. Instead she just looks at him, and the look on her face apparently sends a signal to him that something interesting is going on. His smile fades. He touches her face. She licks her lips, pondering the situation, wanting so badly to grab him and suck his face.

At last, breaking the tension, he says, “You gonna hog that bottle the rest of the night?”

She grins and hands it over, and he downs a huge series of gulps, polishing off a major portion of the remaining booze. This time, he doesn’t cringe. He doesn’t flinch. He just looks at her and says, “I think I should warn you about something.” His big brown eyes fill with embarrassment, regret, and maybe even a little shame. “I don’t have a condom.”

*   *   *

It starts with drunken laughter. Lilly roars with belly-deep guffaws—she hasn’t laughed this hard since the outbreak of the plague—and she doubles over with chortling, honking laughter until her sides ache and her eyes begin to glaze over with tears. Austin can’t help joining in, and he laughs and laughs, until he realizes Lilly has grabbed him by the front of his hoodie, and she says something about not giving a flying fuck about condoms, and before they even know what’s happening, she has yanked his face toward hers, and their lips have locked onto each other.

The liquor-fueled passion erupts. They wrap themselves around each other, and they start making out so vigorously they knock over the bottle and the lamp next to the couch and the stack of books that Lilly was meaning to read at some point. Austin slips off the edge of the sofa and slams onto the floor, and Lilly tackles him, sticking her tongue into his mouth. She tastes the sweet liquor on his breath and spicy musk of his scent and she burrows between his legs.

They bathe in the heat flowing off each other—the latent desire repressed for so many months—and they go at it for many minutes there on the floor. She feels Austin caressing the curve of her breasts under her top and the softness of her hips and the sweet spot between her legs, and she moistens and begins breathing hard and fast, flushed with excitement. At last she realizes that he’s cringing from the pain in his side again, and she sees the bandage where his hoodie has been wrenched up toward his chest, and she pulls back. The sight of it breaks her heart—she feels responsible for it—and now she wants so badly to make it all better.

“C’mere,” she says, taking his hand and lifting him back onto the couch. “Watch me,” she whispers to him as he flops down on the sofa, out of breath. “Just watch.”

She takes off her clothes, one piece at a time, not taking her eyes off him. He already has his hands on his belt, unbuckling it. She slips out of her top, gazing at him with twinkling eyes. She takes her time. She folds each article of clothing as it comes off—her jeans, her bra, her panties—transfixing him, holding him rapt, until she is standing completely nude in the slice of moonlight in front of him, her hair in her face now, her head spinning, tipsy from booze and desire. Goose bumps rash down her arms.

She goes to him without another word. Not taking her eyes off him, she sits on him. He lets out a breathy, lusty sigh as she guides him into her. The feeling is extraordinary. She sees artifacts of light and sparks in her vision as she rhythmically rocks up and down. He arches his back and thrusts up into her. He is no longer injured. He is no longer just a young dude trying to be cool.

Austin comes first, his orgasm shaking both of them. She shudders then, the tingling sensation starting at the tips of her toes, and then coursing up through her until it converges on her solar plexus and explodes. The orgasm rocks her, and nearly knocks her off him, but she holds on to his long, lustrous, curly hair, landing in a heap of sweaty satisfaction in his arms. They collapse onto each other, holding each other, letting the calm return like a tide rolling back in.

*   *   *

For the longest time, they lie there in each other’s arms, listening to a silence broken only by the soft syncopated symphony of their breathing. Lilly pulls a blanket over herself and comes down hard to reality. A stabbing pain starts at her temples and travels down the bridge of her nose. What has she done? As the buzz fades, a vague sense of regret knots itself in her gut, and she gazes out the window. Finally, she starts to say, “Austin, listen—”

“No.” He strokes her shoulder, and then begins to pull on his pants. “You don’t have to say it.”

“Say what?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know … something about this being just one of those things … and we shouldn’t make too much of it … and it’s just the alcohol or whatever.”

She smiles sadly. “I wasn’t going to say that.”

He looks at her and grins. “I just want to do the right thing by you, Lilly … I don’t want to pressure you or anything.”

She kisses him on the forehead.

And then they start cleaning up their mess—picking up the spilled contents of the side table, propping lamps back in place, stacking books, and putting clothes back on. Neither of them has much more to say, although both are dying to talk about it.

*   *   *

Sometime later, near dawn, Austin says, “You know … something’s been bothering me about that feeding room down there in those garages underneath the track.”

She looks at him, flopping back down on the couch, exhausted. “What’s that?”

He swallows air. “I don’t mean to be gross but it’s bothering me.”

“What.”

He looks at her. “Okay … so … the Governor supposedly fed the dead pilot and the girl from the helicopter to those walkers. Right?”

Lilly nods, not wanting to think about it. “Yeah. I guess so. Alas.”

He chews his lip. “Again, I don’t mean to be disgusting but I just can’t shake this feeling there was something missing.”

“And that would be?”

He looks at her. “The heads. There were no heads. Where were the fucking heads?”

TEN

Bruce Allan Cooper stands outside the garage door in the subbasement beneath the arena, a single tungsten bulb in a cage above him providing the only illumination flickering in the narrow corridor. He puts the sounds coming from behind the door out of his mind—how the hell does a man go at this for so long? The angry shrieks from the black girl have now deteriorated into garbled, choked, sobbing sounds.

Bruce has his big arms—as thick as stovepipes—crossed against his broad chest, and his mind keeps wandering to those pre-plague days when he ran the gas station with his dad. He would lose track of time back then as well—buried in a 427 Camaro with overhead shafts and hemispherical combustion chambers. Now he’s lost track of time again. He thinks about his old girlfriend, Shauna, and how long they used to go at it—a memory that makes him happy in a vaguely melancholy way. But this. This is different.

He’s been standing there so long his legs are starting to cramp, and he keeps shifting his weight from one leg to the other. He weighs over two hundred and fifty pounds and has the hard muscle of a stevedore, but this is ridiculous. He can only stand for so long.

For the last twenty minutes or so, Bruce has heard the low mutterings of the Governor’s voice egging on the woman, taunting her, needling at her. God only knows what he’s doing to her now.

Silence crashes down.

Bruce puts his ear to the door: What the fuck is he doing to her?

*   *   *

In the dark holding cell, the Governor stands over the limp figure of the woman, buckling his pants, zipping up. The tethers on the woman’s bleeding wrists are the only things holding her ravaged body off the floor. Her labored breathing fills the silence, her dreadlocks hanging across her battered face. Tears, snot, and blood mingle and drip off her swollen lips.

Catching his breath, the Governor feels good and spent and flushed with exertion as he gazes down at her. His hands are sore, his knuckles skinned from working her over, repeatedly catching his fists on her teeth. He got pretty good at strangling her to the point of putting her under, but always bringing her back at the last moment with a well-timed slap or gut-punch. He stayed away from her mouth as much as possible but lavished her other orifices with a great deal of attention. The engine inside him kept him going strong, kept him sharp and hard.

“Okay … I’ll admit it,” he says calmly to her. “I got a little carried away.”

She huffs and sniffs and holds on to consciousness by a slender thread. She can’t lift her head, but it’s obvious she wants to do so. She really wants to say something to him. The floor beneath her is puddled with fluids and blood, her long braids dangling in the mess. Her spandex shirt is riddled with gouges, torn open at her breasts. Her nude lower half—still splayed apart by the rope tethers—shimmers with sweat and shows the darker welts and abrasions of the Governor’s handiwork on her caramel-colored flesh.

The Governor stares at her. “But I don’t regret a thing. I enjoyed every minute of it. What about you?” He waits to see if she says anything. She pants and heaves and lets out a garbled combination of cough, sob, and moan. He smiles. “No? I wouldn’t think so.”

He walks over to the door and bangs on it. Then he smoothes his long hair back. “We’re through here!” he calls out to Bruce. “Let me out!”

The door squeals up on ancient rollers, letting in the harsh light of the corridor.

Bruce stands there as silent and stoic as a cigar store Indian. The Governor doesn’t even make eye contact with the man. Turning back to the woman on the floor, the Governor cocks his head and studies her a moment. She’s a tough one, no doubt about that. Bruce was right. There is no way in hell this bitch is going to talk. But now—now—the Governor notices something about her that gives him an unexpected shiver of pleasure. He has to look closely to see it—with all that hair hanging down, masking her features—but the noise it makes is very distinct. He notices it then and grins.

She’s crying.

The Governor revels in it. “You go ahead and cry it out, honey. Just get it all out. You earned it. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of. Cry your little head off.” He turns to leave.

And then he pauses when he hears something else. He turns back to her, and cocks his head again. For the briefest instant, he thinks he hears her say something. He listens closely, and it comes out of her between huffs of agony.

“I’m—not—crying for me,” she says to the floor, her head lolling heavily with pain. She has to suck in shallow breaths of air in order to get the words out. “I’m—crying—for you.”

He stares at her.

She lifts her head enough to make eye contact through the curtain of wet braids. Her tawny brown face covered with mucus and blood, the tears tracking down her swollen cheeks, she stabs her gaze into him. And all the pain and despair and anguish and loss and hopelessness of this brutal plague world is displayed there for a moment, just for an instant—on her sculpted, desecrated face—until all of it is cauterized away in the space of a breath by the woman’s pure white-hot hatred … and what is left is a mask of feral kill-instinct. “I think about all the things I’m going to do to you,” she says very evenly, almost calmly, “and it makes me cry. It scares me.”

The Governor smiles. “That’s cute. Get some rest—as much as you can, at least. A guy’s going to be in here later to clean you up, maybe give you some bandages. Maybe have a little fun himself. But mostly he’ll be getting you ready for when I come back.” He winks at her. “Just want to give you something to look forward to.” He turns and gives her a wave over his shoulder. “Later.”

He walks out.

The rolling door comes down with a metallic thud.

*   *   *

The sun comes up while the Governor is walking back to his place.

The air smells clean—rich earth and clover—the dark mood of the catacombs washing away in the golden light and breeze of a Georgia spring morning. The Governor sheds his hard demeanor along the way, and steps into the skin of the benevolent town leader. He sees a few early risers, and gives them neighborly waves, bidding them a good morning with the jovial smile of a town constable.

He walks along with a bounce in his step now, the master of his little fiefdom, thoughts of breaking women and controlling outsiders evaporating, stuffed back down into the lower compartments of his brain. The sounds of truck engines and nails going into new timber already fill the air—Martinez and his crew fortifying the new sections of the barricade.

Approaching his building, the Governor runs into a woman and her two children, the little boys scampering across the street.

The Governor chuckles at the kids, stepping out of their way. “Morning,” he says to the mother with a nod.

Preoccupied with her brood, the woman—a matronly gal from Augusta—shouts at the boys, “Kids, please! I told you to stop running!” She turns to Philip and gives him a demure little smile. “Morning, Governor.”

The man walks on, and he sees Bob hunched on the sidewalk near his steps.

“Bob, please,” he says as he walks over to the ragged wreck of a human being hunkered down under an awning next to the Governor’s entrance. “Get some food. I hate to see you wasting away like this. We got rid of the barter system, they’ll just give you something.”

Bob gurgles and lets out a belch. “Fine … okay … if it’ll get ‘Mother Hen’ off my back.”

“Thanks, Bob,” the Governor says, heading for his foyer. “I worry about you.”

Bob mumbles something that sounds like “Whatever…”

The Governor goes inside his building. A fly—a huge bluebottle—buzzes over the staircase. The hallways are as silent as empty crypts.

Inside his apartment, he finds his dead baby girl crouching on the floor of the living room, staring emptily down at the stained carpet, making little noises that sound almost like snores. The stench wafts around her. The Governor goes to her, filled with affection. “I know, I know,” he says to her lovingly. “Sorry I was out so late … or early, depending on how you look at it.”

She roars suddenly—a screechy growl that comes out of her like the squeal of a tortured cat—and she springs to her feet and lunges at him.

He slaps her—hard—backhanding her, sending her slamming against the wall. “Behave yourself, goddamnit!”

She staggers and gazes up at him through milk-glass eyes. An expression like fear flutters across her livid blue face, twitches at her lipless rictus of a mouth, and makes her look oddly sheepish and docile. The sight of it makes the Governor deflate.

“I’m sorry, honey.” He wonders if she’s hungry. “What’s got you so riled lately?” He notices her bucket has overturned. “No food, huh?”

He goes over and picks up the bucket, shoving a severed foot back into it. “You need to be more careful. If you knock your bucket over, it’ll roll outta your reach. I raised you better than this.”

He looks inside the bucket. The contents have decomposed severely. The severed foot looks so bloated and livid it resembles a balloon. Furry with mold, radiating an indescribable stench that literally leeches tears from the eyes, the body parts stew in a thick, viscous substance with which pathologists are all too familiar: the yellow, bilelike goo that is essentially the signal that advanced decomposition has started—that all the maggots and blowflies have departed and left behind a mass of drying proteins.

“You don’t want that, do you?” the Governor asks the dead girl, plucking the swollen, blackened foot distastefully from the bin. He holds it with thumb and index finger, forming a pincerlike tong, and tosses it to the creature. “Here … go ahead.”

She gobbles the morsel on her hands and knees, her back arched with simian fervor. She seems to stiffen suddenly at the taste of it. “PFUH!” she grunts as she spits out the chewed particles.

The Governor just sadly shakes his head as he turns away and heads for the dining room, chastising her over his shoulder. “See … you knocked your bucket over and now your food has spoiled. That’s what you get.” He lowers his voice, adding under his breath, “Even fresh, I don’t see how you eat that stuff … really.”

He collapses into his Barcalounger, the chair creaking as it reclines. Eyelids heavy, joints aching, his genitals sore from all the exertion, he lies back and thinks about the time he actually tasted Penny’s food.

*   *   *

It was late one night about three months ago, and the Governor was drunk, and trying to get the dead child to calm down. It happened almost spontaneously. He simply grabbed a piece of tissue—part of a human finger; he can’t even remember its original owner—and popped it in his mouth. Contrary to all the jokes, it did not taste even remotely like chicken. It had a bitter, metallic, gamey taste—coppery like blood but with a mouth-feel similar to extremely tough, extremely granular stew meat—and he had immediately spit it out.

There is an axiom among gourmets that the food that is closest in genetic makeup to its consumer is the most delicious, the most succulent, the most satisfying. Hence the existence of exotic dishes among Eastern cultures such as trepanned chimpanzee brains and various sweetbreads. But Philip Blake knows this belief to be a lie—humans taste like shit. Perhaps if served raw with seasoning—human tartare, let’s say—the tissue and organs might be tolerable, but the Governor has yet to be in the mood to experiment.

“I’d get you some more food, honey,” he softly calls out now to the tiny cadaver in the other room, his body relaxing as he drifts off in his recliner to the soothing sounds of bubbles percolating in the shadows across the dining room. The soft hissing noises of aquariums are omnipresent in the apartment, like white noise, or static from a defunct television station. “But Daddy’s tired today, needs some shut-eye … so you’ll have to wait, honey … until I wake up.”

He falls fast asleep to the drone of burbling water tanks and has no idea how long he’s been out when the sound of knocking penetrates his slumber, and makes him sit up with a jerk.

At first he thinks it’s Penny making noise in the other room but then he hears it again, harder this time, coming from the back door. “This better be good,” he mumbles as he trudges across the apartment.

He opens the back door. “What?”

“Here’s what you asked for,” Gabe says, standing outside the storm door, holding a blood-speckled metal container. The thick-necked man looks grim and jumpy, uncertain of the prevailing mood, glancing over his shoulder. The ammo box he’s holding, procured from the Guard station, has been serving them well as a makeshift bio-container. He looks at the Governor. “The two from the helicopter.” He blinks. “Oh … and I put something else in there.” Another blink. “Didn’t know if you’d want to keep it. You can just get rid of it if you don’t want it.”

“Thanks,” the Governor mumbles, taking the container from him. The metal is warm, and sticky from the blood. “Make sure I get some sleep, okay? Don’t let anyone else up here.”

“Okay, boss.”

Gabe turns and descends the stairs quickly, happy to be rid of the package.

The Governor shuts the door, turns, and heads back to his dining room.

Penny lurches at him as he passes, stretching her chain, snuffling at him, reaching her spindly little dead arms for the goodies. She can smell the mortified flesh. Her eyes are big silver coins, locked onto the box.

“No!” the Governor scolds her. “This ain’t for you, honey.”

She snarls and sputters.

He pauses. “Well … okay … hold on.” Thinking it over, he pries open the top and reaches into the container. Wet, fleshy objects are enclosed inside large Ziplocs. One of the objects—a severed human hand curled like a fleshy white crab frozen in death—brings a smirk to the Governor’s lips. “I suppose you can have this.” He pulls out the hand once belonging to the intruder named Rick, and tosses it to the girl. “That should keep you quiet long enough for me to doze off.”

The dead child goes to town on the dripping appendage, making lusty slurping noises, cartilage crackling like chicken bones in her black little teeth. The Governor walks away, carrying the container around the corner and into the dining room.

In the dimly lit chamber, the Governor pulls the other two objects from their bags.

“You guys have got guests,” he says to somebody in the shadows, kneeling down and pulling a severed female head from the plastic. The dripping cranium belongs to the woman named Christina. The expression fixed on its face—now as doughy, puffy, and soft as unbaked bread—is one of unadulterated horror. “New neighbors, actually.”

He opens the top of an empty aquarium, which is pushed against the far wall, and drops the news producer’s head into the fluid.

“You can keep each other company,” he says softly, almost tenderly, as he drops the second cranium, the one belonging to the pilot, into the murky water of an adjacent aquarium. He lets out a sigh. The housefly buzzes somewhere nearby, invisible, incessant. “Gotta get off my feet now.”

He returns to his chair and plops down with a weary, satisfied groan.

Twenty-six aquariums bubble softly across the room, each one containing at least two—some of them as many as three or four—reanimated human heads. The filters pop and gurgle, the top-lights humming softly. Each apparatus is connected to a master power strip, its anaconda-thick cord running across the baseboard and up the corner of the wall to a generator on the building’s roof.

Encapsulated in their green vials of water, rows of livid, discolored faces twitch as though invisible puppet strings are tugging at them. Eyelids as thin and veined as ancient dried leaves blink at random intervals, the cataract-filmed eyeballs fixed on passing reflections and shadows refracted by the water. Mouths gape open and snap shut intermittently, like a perpetual Whac-A-Mole game spanning the length of the glass panels. The Governor has collected the heads over the course of twelve months with the care of a museum curator. The selection process is instinctive, the effect of all these dead faces quite mysterious.

He leans back in his chair, the springs squeaking as the footrest levitates. He lounges there, the heaviness of exhaustion pressing down on him as he stares at the totality of faces. He barely notices the new visage—the head of a woman once known for brilliant segment producing at WROM Fox Atlanta—now gasping and spewing bubbles from her insensate mouth. The Governor sees only the whole, the totality of all the heads—the larger impression of all these random victims.

The screams of that skinny black gal in the underground vault are still reverberating in the back of his mind. The part of him that is repulsed by such behavior still whines and objects in a deeper partition of his brain. How could you do that to another human being? He stares at the heads. How could anybody do that to another person? He gapes harder at those pale, bloated visages.

The nauseating horror of all those helpless faces—gasping for a deliverance that will never come—is so bleak, so grim, so perfectly timely, that it once again, somehow, penetrates Philip Blake’s rumination and cleanses him. Somehow, it seals his wounded psyche with the caustic nature of reality. It inoculates him from doubt, from hesitation, from mercy, from empathy. This, after all, could be how we all end up: heads floating in tanks for eternity. Who’s to say? This is the logical extreme, a constant reminder of what is waiting if one is weak for one millisecond. The heads represent the old Philip Blake. The weak one, the milquetoast … the eternal complainer. How could you do this horrible thing? How could anyone do such a thing? He stares. The heads gird him, empower him, energize him.

His voice drops a full octave and comes out in barely a murmur, “Fifty-seven channels and nothing on.”

How?—

Could?—

You?—

He ignores the voice inside him and gets sleepy staring at those moving mouths, bubbling and twitching and screaming their silent watery screams.—How?— He sinks into the darkness of sleep. Staring. Absorbing. He begins to dream—the nightmare world seeping into the real world—and he is running through a dark forest. He tries to scream but his voice won’t make a sound. He opens his mouth and lets out a silent cry. No sound comes out of him—only bubbles, which spew up into the darkness and vanish. The woods close in on him. He stands still, fists clenched, white-hot rage flowing out of him, pouring out of his mouth. Burn it all down. Burn it all. Destroy it. Destroy everything. Now. Now! NOW!

*   *   *

The Governor jerks awake sometime later. He can’t tell at first if it’s day or night. His legs have fallen asleep, and his neck aches from lolling at an odd angle on the armchair’s headrest.

He gets up and goes into the bathroom and gets himself together. Standing at the mirror, he can hear the low snoring groans of his little girl chained to the wall in the other room. The windup alarm clock on the commode tells him it’s almost noon.

He feels refreshed. Strong. He has a busy day ahead of him. He uses pumice soap to wash away the black lady’s blood from under his fingernails. He cleans up, changes into fresh clothes, and has a quick breakfast—powdered milk for his Post Toasties, instant coffee heated on a Sterno can—and he gives Penny another fresh morsel from the steel container.

“Daddy’s gotta go to work,” he says cheerfully to the tiny corpse as he heads for the door. He grabs his gun and the walkie-talkie charging by the door. “I love you, honey. Stay outta trouble while I’m gone.”

On his way out of the building, he gets Bruce on the two-way. “Meet me at the track,” he says into the mouthpiece, “at the top of the service entrance.” He thumbs the walkie off without waiting for an answer.

Ten minutes later, the Governor stands at the apex of a greasy staircase, which leads down into the cavernous, dark, underground maze. The sky over the racetrack looks threatening, the day turning dark and blustery.

“Hey, boss,” the big bald man says as he lopes up from the parking lot.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“I came right over, I’m sorry.”

The Governor glances over his shoulder, a few passersby catching his eye. He lowers his voice. “What’s the situation with the woman?”

“Still talking to herself. Bitch is bug-fuck crazy, you ask me.”

“Is she cleaned up?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Albert paid her a visit, looked her over, gave her some food … which she didn’t touch. I guess she had some water, that’s about it.”

“She still awake?”

“Yep. Far as I can tell. I looked in on her about an hour ago.”

“What was her … demeanor?”

“Her what?”

The Governor sighs. “Demeanor, Bruce. Her mood. What the fuck was she doing?”

Bruce shrugs. “I don’t know, just staring at the floor, talking to the voices in her head.” He licks his lips. “Can I ask you a question?”

“What?”

“Is she telling you anything? Giving you any information?”

The Governor runs his fingers through his long hair. “I’m not asking her anything … so there’s nothing for her to tell me, is there?”

Bruce furrows his brow, looks at him. “You’re not asking her anything?”

“That’s right.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

The Governor glances off into the distance at the plumes of exhaust puffing out of a bulldozer moving earth against the barricade, the workmen securing the last sections, the buzz of engines and hammers filling the air. “That’s coming,” he says, thinking about it. “Speaking of that … I want you to do something for me. Where’s the young one being kept?”

“The Asian kid? He’s on B-level, in the warehouse room next to the infirmary.”

“I want you to move him to the stall right next to the woman’s.”

Bruce’s brow furrows deeper, the folds and creases spreading up across his bald head. “Okay, but … you want him to hear what’s going on in that room?”

The Governor gives him a cold smile. “You ain’t so dumb, Brucey. I want that kid to hear everything I do to that bitch tonight. Then one of them’ll talk. Trust me.”

Bruce starts to say something else when the Governor turns and walks away without another word.

*   *   *

In the dusty stillness of her apartment, Lilly and Austin each manage to grab a few hours of restless sleep that morning, and when they finally awaken around one o’clock, the convivial atmosphere of the previous night has transformed into a series of awkward negotiations.

“Oh … sorry,” Austin says when he pushes the door to the bathroom open and finds Lilly on the toilet in her Georgia Tech T-shirt with her panties around her ankles. Austin turns away immediately.

“No problem,” she says. “Can you just give me a minute or two? Then it’s all yours.”

“Absolutely,” he says, thrusting his hands in his pockets and pacing the hallway. Earlier that morning, he had dozed off on the floor of the living room, covered in a packing blanket from the truck, while Lilly slept in the bedroom on her broken-down futon. From the hallway, Austin calls to her, “You got time to give me another lesson today?”

“You’re really a glutton for punishment,” she says inside the bathroom, flushing the toilet and getting herself together at the mirror. She comes out and gives him a good-natured punch in the arm. “Whaddaya say we give that side a chance to heal up first?”

“What are you doing tonight?”

“Tonight?”

“I could make you dinner,” he says, his eyes bright and guileless.

“Oh … um … wow.” Lilly wants so badly to say the right thing. She doesn’t want to lose Austin as a friend. Contrary emotions roil through her as she searches for the right words. She feels at once closer to him and strangely alienated from him. The fact is she can’t ignore her feelings for the scruffy young man. He is good-hearted, ballsy, loyal, and—she might as well admit it to herself—an amazing lover. But what does she really know about him? What does anybody really know about anybody in this fucked-up new society? Is Austin one of those old-school men who think sex seals the deal? And for that matter, why can’t Lilly just surrender to her tender feelings for him? What’s wrong with her? The answer is elusive—fear, self-preservation, guilt, self-loathing—she can’t quite put her finger on it. But she knows one thing for sure: She’s not ready for a relationship. Not yet. And she can tell by the look in the young man’s eyes right now, he’s already halfway there. Lilly finally says, “Let me … think about it.”

He looks crestfallen. “Lilly, it’s just dinner … I’m not asking you to pick out furniture.”

“I know … I just … I need to think about it.”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No. Not at all. It’s just…” She pauses. “It’s just that…”

He gives her a grin. “Please don’t say ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’”

She laughs. “Okay, I’m sorry. All I’m saying is … just give me some time.”

He gives her a little bow. “You got it, m’lady … I will give you time and space.” He goes out into the living room and gathers his gun, his coat, and his knapsack, and she follows him to the front door.

They go outside.

“Looks like a storm brewing,” Austin says, glancing up at the dark cloud cover.

“That it does,” she says, squinting up at the gray light, her headache returning.

He starts to descend the steps when Lilly reaches out and gently tugs on his arm. “Austin, wait.” She searches for the proper words. “I’m sorry … I’m being ridiculous. I just want to take it slow. What happened last night…”

He takes her by the arms, looks deep into her eyes, and says, “What happened last night was beautiful. And I don’t want to fuck it up.” His face softens. He touches her hair, and plants a platonic little smack on the side of her face. He does this without guile, without premeditation. He simply kisses her temple with great tenderness. “You want to know the truth of the matter?” He looks into her eyes. “You’re totally worth the wait.”

And with that, he shuffles down the steps and plods off into the gathering storm.

*   *   *

The rain comes in waves that afternoon. Martinez has to suspend the last of the construction on the northeast corner of the rampart, and he and his crew relocate under the awnings along the derelict train station, where they stand around, smoking, watching the weather, and keeping an eye on the woods to the north.

Walker sightings have increased over the last few weeks out there in the thickets and swamps behind the palisades of white pines. Now the curtains of rain unfurl from the heavens, strafing the forest and washing out the meadows. The sky unleashes volleys of thunder, while veins of lightning crackle off the horizon. It’s an angry storm, biblical in its volume and fury, and it makes Martinez nervous. He smokes his filterless cigarette with a vengeance—he rolls his own—sucking it down to the nub as he gazes at the storm. The last thing he needs right now is drama.

But that very moment it comes around the corner in the form of Lilly Caul. She hurries across the adjacent lot with her jean jacket held high over her head to ward off the rain. She approaches with an anxious expression on her face, hustling under the temporary shelter, out of breath, shaking the moisture from her jacket. “Jesus Christ, that came on quick,” she pants at Martinez.

“Afternoon, Lilly,” he says, stubbing out his cigarette on the pavement.

She catches her breath, looking around. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going.”

“What’s happening with the interlopers?”

“The who?”

“The strangers,” she says, wiping her face. “The ones … came in the other night?”

“What about them?” Martinez gives her a shrug, glancing nervously over his shoulder at his men. “I don’t have anything to do with that.”

“Aren’t they being questioned?” She looks at him. “What’s wrong?”

He gives her a strange look. “You weren’t even supposed to know about that.”

“About what?”

Martinez grabs her, leads her away from the men, over to the far edge of the awning. The rain has settled into a steady downpour, and now the jet-engine hum of the storm masks their conversation. “Look,” Martinez says to her, measuring his words, “this has nothing to do with us, and I would advise you to stay out of it.”

“What the hell’s the matter? I just asked a simple question.”

“The Governor wants to keep it on the down-low, he doesn’t want people to worry about it.”

She sighs. “I’m not worried about it, I was just curious if he found anything out.”

“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?”

Anger flares in Martinez’s gut, traveling up his spine and drying his mouth. He wants to strangle this busybody. He grabs her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. I got enough problems, I have to deal with this shit, too!? Stay out of it. Just leave it alone!”

Lilly pulls away. “Whoa, Kemosabe! Back off.” She rubs her shoulder. “I don’t know who pissed in your cereal this morning but you can take it out on somebody else.”

Martinez takes deep breaths, looking at her. “Okay, look. I’m sorry. But we’re on a need-to-know basis here. The Governor knows what he’s doing. If there’s something we need to know, he’ll tell us.”

Lilly waves him off, turns, and walks away in the rain, mumbling, “Whatever.”

Martinez watches her vanish in the mist. “He knows what he’s doing,” he says again, softly, under his breath, as though trying to convince himself.

ELEVEN

The rains continue, an unremitting deluge over south central Georgia for nearly three straight days. It’s not until midweek that the weather moves on, leaving flash floods and downed power lines in its wake all the way to the Eastern seaboard. The land around Woodbury is left drenched and bound up in mud holes and washouts, the fallow fields to the south so sodden and inundated that the men on the wall notice clusters of walkers driven out of the woods, wallowing in the flooded areas like giant glistening leeches climbing on top of each other. It’s like shooting fish in a fishbowl for the .50 caliber gunners on the northeast and southeast corners of the barricade. But other than these noisy, gruesome little displays of what the Governor has started calling “waste management,” the town of Woodbury remains almost eerily calm that week. In fact, it’s not until the end of that week that Lilly notices something amiss.

Up until then, she keeps a low profile, spending most of her days inside, honoring Martinez’s directive to keep any news of hostile strangers in their midst to herself. She passes the time reading, watching the rain, thinking, and lying awake at night agonizing over what to do about Austin. On Thursday, he shows up at her door with a bottle of wine that he nicked from the old storage room at the courthouse, along with a bouquet of Russian sage he picked down by the post office, and she is so touched by the gesture that she lets him in but insists that he avoid the subject of their relationship or any mention of that night they went over the line. He seems happy to just spend time with her. They polish off the entire bottle of wine playing Pictionary—at one point, Austin makes her laugh so hard she does a spit-take when he reveals that his drawing, which appears to be a fried egg, is his brain on drugs—and he doesn’t leave until the gray light of dawn is playing at the seams of the boarded windows. The next day, Lilly has to admit to herself that she likes this guy—regardless of the awkward circumstances—and maybe, just maybe, she would be open to the possibilities.

Then Sunday morning comes. Exactly one week after the fateful night, Lilly awakens with a start sometime before dawn. Something amorphous and unformed in the back of her mind has been bothering her, and for some reason—be it something she dreamed, or something that percolated down through her subconscious over the course of that week—it strikes her full force right then, that morning, like a ball peen hammer right between the eyes.

She jumps out of bed and hurries across the room, tearing open a three-ring binder lying on a makeshift desk of two cinder blocks and a plywood panel. Frantically she rifles through the pages.

“Oh no … no, no, no,” she utters under her breath as she searches through her calendar. For almost a year, she has been religiously keeping track of the date. For many different reasons. She wants to know when the holidays fall, she wants to know when the seasons turn, and most of all, she simply wants to keep in touch with the old order, with civilized life, with normalcy. She wants to stay connected with the passage of time—although there are many in this dark era who have given up, who don’t know their Arbor Day from their Yom Kippur.

She looks at the date and slams the calendar shut with a gasp.

“Oh shit … fuck … shit,” she mutters to herself, backing away from the desk and whirling around as though the floor is about to drop away from under her feet. She paces a nervous circle in the dark bedroom for a moment, her thoughts swimming and crashing into each other. It can’t be the twenty-third. It can’t be. She’s imagining this whole thing. She’s just paranoid. But how can she be sure? How can anybody be sure of anything in this fucked-up Plague World? There must be something she can do to set her mind at ease—to prove to herself she’s just being paranoid. All at once, she freezes and gets an idea.

“Okay!”

She snaps her fingers, and then rushes over to the old battered metal armoire in the corner where she keeps her coats and guns and ammo. She grabs her denim waistcoat, her twin Ruger .22s, the silencers, and a pair of twenty-five-round banana clips. She puts on her coat and then screws on the silencer attachments and shoves the guns behind her belt. She stows the clips in her pockets, takes a deep breath, raises her collar, and heads out the door.

Her breath shows in the predawn air as she emerges from her building. The town is still asleep, and the sun is just peeking out from behind the east woods—sending angelic rays of light across low-lying motes of fog—as Lilly crosses the street and pads quickly down the narrow sidewalk toward the old, derelict post office.

Just beyond the post office—on the other side of the south wall, outside the safe zone—stands a ransacked drugstore. Lilly needs to get into that store, just for a second, in order to find out if she’s crazy or not. There’s only one problem.

It’s outside the wall, and with the passing of the rainstorm, walker activity has picked up out there.

*   *   *

In the dimly lit subbasement beneath the racetrack arena, Bruce hears the telltale banging on the inside of the last garage door on the left.

He braces himself for what he’s about to see, leans down, unsnaps the lock, grasps the release, and yanks the door up on its congealed rollers. The door shrieks. The opening reveals a dark cement enclosure once used to store greasy chassis and spare parts—now a place of degradation and pain—and the Governor standing in the gloom, breathless from all the hard work.

“That’s entertainment,” he mutters, his face shiny with sweat, the dark wet spots under his armpits and the blood on his hands worse than they were after the last session two days ago. He worked on the woman all night—the third round of torture this week—and now the fatigue and the toll it’s taking on the man show in his sunken gaze.

For a brief instant, Bruce glimpses the ragged figure on the floor behind the Governor. Her torso hangs inches above the floor, the ropes barely keeping her aloft, her braids dangling, fluids dripping off her swollen face. Her narrow shoulders heave rhythmically, lungs gasping for air, her nude lower half crumpled like a broken doll. She is barely alive—at least at first glance—although on closer inspection, one might note a furnace burning behind her hemorrhaged eyes, a nuclear reactor of rage keeping her awake, keeping her clinging to a thin hope of vengeance.

“Close it,” the Governor says, grabbing a towel draped over Bruce’s shoulder.

Bruce obliges, slamming the rolling door to the deck with a metallic clang.

The Governor towels off his face. “She ain’t ever gonna talk. How many times we been at it now—three, four—I lost count.” He tosses the towel. “What about the kid? He break yet?”

Bruce shakes his head. “Gabe says he’s been hearing everything through the wall, says he’s been blubbering like a baby, day in and day out, and hasn’t let up since you started in on her.”

The Governor sniffs, stretching his overworked neck muscles, cracking his bloody knuckles. “But he didn’t give anything up, did he?”

Bruce shrugs. “According to Gabe, he just bawled and bawled and that’s about it. Wouldn’t talk.”

“That tears it.” The Governor takes deep breaths, thinking, turning things over in his mind. “These people are tighter than I thought, tough fucking nuts to crack.”

Bruce considers it. “Can I make a suggestion?”

“What’s that?”

Bruce shrugs again. “In the joint, they break people in solitary.”

The Governor looks at him. “So?”

“So what I’m thinking, we just keep ’em locked up, separated, you know, like solitary fucking confinement. Might be the easiest way to do it.”

“This ain’t no prison, Bruce, I got a town to—” The Governor blinks, cocking his head at a sudden revelation. “Wait a minute.”

Bruce looks at him. “What is it, boss?”

“Wait … hold on a second.”

“What?”

The Governor stares at the big black man. “Didn’t Gabe say those riot suits they came dressed in was the kind of shit they use in prisons?”

Bruce silently nods, looking around the corridor, thinking about it.

The Governor starts toward the stairs, muttering as he goes. “Now that I think of it, that Rick dude was wearing a prison jumpsuit under his gear.”

Bruce hurries after him. “Where you going, boss?”

The Governor is already climbing the steps, calling over his shoulder. “Clean that bitch up … and then get Gabe … and meet me at the infirmary. I think I got a better way to do this!”

*   *   *

Lilly pauses next to the wall, heart racing, the sun now fully risen, the early morning rays of light hammering down on the back of her neck. Fifty yards away, one of Martinez’s men—his husky form silhouetted against the dawning sky—strolls along a makeshift catwalk.

Lilly waits until the guard passes behind a vent stack, and then makes her move.

She quickly scuttles up and over the wall, landing hard on a parkway of gravel on the other side. The impact of her boots on the rocks makes a loud crunch, and she crouches down for a moment—her pulse quickening—waiting to see whether or not the guard notices her.

After a moment of breathless silence, she silently duck walks across the gravel road and slips behind a burned-out building. She checks her gun, jacking the slide. She keeps it at her side as she moves on, plodding down a side road strewn with wreckage and heaps of decomposing, headless walkers. The stench is extraordinary.

The cold wind blows the smell around her like a net as she passes the post office—staying low, creeping silently past old torn posters of happy postmen handing colorful packages to children, and graffiti-splashed placards of smiling retirees collecting stamps. She hears shuffling noises behind her—leaves on wind, maybe—and doesn’t look back.

She keeps heading south.

The bombed-out remains of Gold Star Sundries and Drugs sits at the end of the road, a tiny box of crumbling red brick with a bullet-riddled, boarded front window. The old R/X sign—a big mortar and pestle—hangs by frayed cables, twisting in the breeze. She hurries up to the entrance. The door is jammed shut, and she has to plow through it with one shoulder.

She bursts into the store’s dark interior, the glass from the broken door raining down on the floor. Her heart thrums in her chest as she surveys the disaster area that once offered cough medicine, denture creams, and cotton balls to farm wives and sniffling locals.

The aisles have been completely ransacked—the shelves scoured clean, only a few empty cartons and puddles of unidentified fluids lying here and there. She weaves through the detritus and heads toward the pharmacy counter in the shadowy rear aisles.

A noise gets her attention to her immediate right—a hiss of air, a bottle overturning—and her gun immediately goes up. She sees a blur of yellow fur. She lets up on the hammer when she realizes it’s a feral cat—the ragged creature darting between fallen displays of mouthwash and teeth whitener with a mouse in its jaws.

Lilly lets out a thin breath of relief, turns back toward the pharmacy counter … and she suddenly screams.

The old pharmacist lumbers out of the shadows next to her with reaching arms and blackened, gnarled hands curling into claws—his gigantic rotting mouth working like a wood chipper. His long, jowly face is the consistency of bread pudding, filmed in mildew the color of old rust, his milk-pod eyes as huge as hard-boiled eggs. He wears a white coat desecrated by blood and bile.

Lilly jerks backward, raising the gun and knocking over a display of dog food.

She falls on her ass, cans clattering to the floor all around her, the air knocked out of her lungs, and she starts firing. The clap of silenced gunfire sparks and flares and reverberates through the tight space, half the rounds going high, shattering fluorescent tubes. But half the slugs go into the balding head of the pharmacist.

Cranial bones shatter and fly, blood and tissue spattering the empty shelves. The giant biter falls like an old oak, landing directly on Lilly. She screams and writhes beneath the reeking dead weight of the corpse, the stench unbearable. Finally she rolls free.

For several frenzied, silent moments, she crouches there on the floor next to the fallen biter. She swallows back the repulsion, the urge to flee this hideous dark store, the voice in the back of her head telling her she’s crazy, she’s insane to be risking her life for this ridiculous little bit of personal reconnaissance.

She drives the thoughts away and manages to get her bearings back.

The pharmacy counter lies in darkness twenty feet away. Lilly cautiously negotiates the rear aisle, her eyes adjusting slowly to the gloom. She sees the counter, swamped with sticky, drying fluids, wadded documents, and mold so thick it looks like a coat of fur over everything.

She squeezes through the pass gate, and starts rifling through the meager contents of the pharmacy shelves. Nothing but useless drugs and tinctures remain unscathed by the looters—acne medicines, hemorrhoid treatments, and cryptically named medicines nobody bothered to identify—all the valuable central nervous system drugs and opiates and painkillers long gone. But she doesn’t care.

She’s not looking to get high or knock herself out or block pain.

After a seemingly endless, agonizing search, she finally finds what she’s looking for on the floor under the computer terminal, in a pile of discarded boxes and plastic pill vials. There’s only one box left, and it looks as though someone stepped on it at some point. Smashed flat, its top broken open, the container still holds its contents in a sealed, intact blister pack.

Lilly stuffs it into her pocket, rises to her feet, and gets the hell out of there.

Fifteen minutes later, she has returned to her apartment with the kit.

Five minutes after that, she waits to see if her life is about to change.

*   *   *

“He was a good man,” a muffled voice is saying on the other side of the closed infirmary door—unmistakable in its sardonic tone, its faint accent, its weary sarcasm—clearly the voice of the estimable Dr. Stevens. “Emphasis on was.”

The Governor stands outside the door to the infirmary with Gabe and Bruce. The three men pause before going in, listening to the low murmuring on the other side of the door with great interest.

“We found this town pretty early on,” the doctor’s voice continues. “The National Guard station, the narrow alleys—we decided we could defend this place. So we staked our claim.” There’s a brief beat of silence, the faint sound of water running. “Started out he was tough,” the voice goes on, “but he got the job done.”

The Governor balls his fists as he listens, the anger stiffening his spine, mixing with the sheer adrenaline of discovery.

“Philip emerged as the leader of our group very quickly,” the voice is saying. “He did what had to be done, what needed to be done to keep people safe. But after a while—”

The rage jolts up the Governor’s spinal cord, tingles in his fingers, fills his mouth with bitter, flinty bile. He leans toward the door to listen more closely.

“—it was clear to some of us that he was doing this more out of enjoyment than the need to protect us. It was clear he was little more than an evil bastard. I can’t even talk about his daughter.”

The Governor has heard enough. He reaches for the doorknob but something stops him.

On the other side of the door, a deeper, huskier voice with a thicker working-class Kentucky accent is speaking: “Why do you allow it to go on? The fights? Feeding the zombies?”

The doctor’s voice: “What do you think he’d do to anyone who opposed him? I hate the son of a bitch but I can’t do anything. Whatever else he does … he keeps these people safe. That’s enough for most people.”

The Governor swallows back the urge to break the door down with a battering ram and kill them all.

The doctor: “As long as there’s a wall between them and the biters they’re not too concerned with who’s with them on their side of the wall.”

Philip Blake kicks the door in, the lock-bolt snapping off and flying across the room, skipping across the tile floor like a spent shell casing. The door bangs against the adjacent wall, making everybody in the room jump.

“Well said, Doctor,” the Governor says as he calmly saunters into the infirmary, followed closely by his associates. “Well said.”

*   *   *

If it’s possible for an entire room to bristle with static electricity, that’s exactly what happens in that ensuing instant in which the eyes of everyone—Stevens, the stranger sitting on the bed, Alice over by the sink—snap toward the thin man strolling into the infirmary with hands on his hips like he owns the place. The coolly amused expression on the Governor’s face is belied by the sullen, baleful expressions on the faces of Bruce and Gabe, who enter like attack dogs on the heels of their master.

“What do you want?” the doctor finally manages in a taut tone.

“You said to come in today, Doc,” the Governor replies with the casual congeniality of just another patient arriving for a checkup. “You wanted to change my bandage?” He points helpfully at his wounded ear. “Remember?” The Governor then shoots a glance at the intruder, now frozen in a sitting position on the bed across the room. “Bruce, point a gun at Lefty over there.”

The big black man calmly draws a silver-plated .45 and trains it on the man named Rick.

“Sit down, Philip,” the doctor says. “I’ll make it quick.” His voice dips into a lower register, dripping with contempt. “I’m sure you have more important things to do.”

The Governor flops down on an examination gurney flooded with halogen light.

The man named Rick cannot take his eyes off the Governor, and the Governor returns his gaze—two natural predators in the wild, backs arched, sizing each other up—and the Governor smiles. “You’re looking well, stranger. Healing up nicely?” He waits for the stranger to reply but the man does not say a word.

“Well,” the Governor mutters to himself, as Stevens moves in and bends down to take a closer look at the bandaged ear, “as nice as you can.”

At last, the sandy-haired man across the room manages a retort: “So … when do you start torturing me?”

“You? Never.” The Governor’s eyes positively twinkle with derision. “I pegged you from the start, you’re not going to say shit. You’ve got family back wherever you’re from. You’re not about to sell them out.”

Stevens carefully folds back the bandage and shines a penlight on the mangled ear.

“No, I was going to torture the others in front of you,” the Governor explains. “I didn’t think you’d crack but I was pretty sure one of them would.” Now he winks. “But plans changed.”

The man on the bed glances at the muzzle of Bruce’s long-barrel Magnum, and then says, “To what?”

“You’re going into the arena,” the Governor tells him cheerfully. “I want to at least get some entertainment out of you.” He looks away with a faint grin. “I’m currently planning on raping the dogshit out of that bitch who took off my ear until she finds a way to kill herself.”

The room—almost as a whole organism—absorbs this in thunderstruck silence. The strange tableau stretches, the only sound being Stevens tearing a piece off a roll of medical tape, and the rustle of gauze.

“And the young Asian boy with the overacting tear ducts?” the Governor adds, his smile spreading practically from ear to injured ear. “I let him go.”

A moment of stunned silence. The man named Rick, taken aback, stares at him. “You let him go? Why?”

By this point, Stevens has finished examining and replacing the old bandage on the Governor’s ear.

The doctor steps back as the Governor lets out a satisfied breath, slaps his thighs jovially, and rises off the table. “Why?” He grins at the stranger. “Because he sang like a parakeet. Told me exactly what I needed to hear.”

The Governor nods at his men, and then heads for the door with a smile. “I know everything I need to know about your prison,” he murmurs on the way out. “And if he’s stupid enough to go there, he’ll lead us right to it.”

The three men slip out of the room, slamming the broken door behind them.

In their slipstream, the infirmary festers in horrible silence.

*   *   *

At first light that next day, the .50 caliber gunner on the northeast corner of the barricade starts shooting at a cluster of walkers skulking around the edge of the woods, sending fountains of brain matter and dead tissue up into the crisp morning air.

The noise wakes up the town. The bark of high-caliber clapping reaches a narrow alley behind the apartment blocks at the end of Main Street, echoing down the passageway, penetrating the inebriated slumber of a filthy, tattered figure huddling under a fire escape platform.

Bob stirs, coughs, and tries to figure out where he is and what year it is and what the fuck his name is. Rainwater still rings off the gutters and downspouts all around him. His pants are wet. Floundering in his alcohol-fueled stupor, soaked to the bone from the rain, he rubs his grizzled face and notices tears on his sunken, deeply lined cheeks.

Was he dreaming of Megan again? Was he having another nightmare where he can’t reach her as she hangs by the neck from her suicide perch? He can’t even remember. He feels like crawling into the garbage Dumpster next to him and dying but instead he struggles to his feet and staggers down the alley toward daylight.

He decides to have his breakfast—the last few fingers of cheap whiskey in the pint bottle in his jacket pocket—on the sidewalk, against the brick facade of the Governor’s building, Bob’s lucky spot, his home away from home. He collapses against the wall, digs in his pocket with greasy blackened fingers, and pulls out his “medicine.”

He takes a healthy swig, finishing up the last of the bottle, and then sinks against the wall. He can’t cry anymore. His grief and despair have burned out his tear ducts. Instead, he just lets out a phlegm-clogged sigh of noxious breath and lies back and dozes for an indeterminate amount of time before hearing the voice.

“Bob!”

He blinks and blinks, and through his rheumy eyes he sees the blurry figure of a young woman approaching from across the street. At first, he can’t even remember her name, but the look on her face as she draws near—frustration, anxiety, even a trace of anger—reaches down into some inner chamber of Bob’s soul and kindles memories.

“Howdy, Lilly,” he says, lifting the empty bottle to his lips. Good to the last drop. He wipes his mouth and tries to focus on her. “Top of the morning.”

She comes over, kneels, and gently snatches the bottle away from him. “Bob, what are you doing? Trying to kill yourself in slow motion?”

He breathes in, and then exhales a sigh so foul and flammable it could light a barbecue. “I’ve been … weighing my options.”

“Don’t say that.” She looks into his eyes. “It’s not funny.”

“Ain’t trying to be funny.”

“Okay … whatever.” She wipes her mouth, glances over her shoulder, nervously scanning the street. “You haven’t seen Austin, have you?”

“Who?”

She looks at him. “Austin Ballard? You know. Young guy, kinda scruffy.”

“The kid with the hair?”

“That’s him.”

Bob lets out another chorus of hacking, wheezing coughs. He doubles over for a moment, trying to cough it out. He blinks it back. “No, ma’am. Ain’t seen that rascal in days.” Finally he gets his coughing under control and then fixes his yellow eyes on her. “You’re sweet on him, ain’t ya?”

Lilly gazes out at the far reaches of the town, chewing a fingernail. “Huh?”

Bob manages a cockeyed grin. “You two an item?”

She just shakes her head, letting out a weary chuckle. “An item? I wouldn’t say that. Not exactly.”

Bob keeps looking at her. “Saw you two heading into your place together last week.” Another crooked grin. “I may be a juicer but I ain’t blind. The way you two was walking, talking to each other.”

She rubs her eyes. “Bob, it’s complicated … but right now I have to find him.” She looks at him. “Think hard. When was the last time you saw him?”

“Lilly, I ain’t too good with particulars. My memory ain’t exactly—”

She grabs him, shakes him. “Bob, wake up! This is important! I have to find Austin—it’s super important! Do you understand?” She gives him a little slap. “Now concentrate, try to get those booze-addled brain cells working and THINK!”

Bob shudders in her grip, his droopy eyes wide and wet. His liver-colored lips tremble, and he tries to form the words but the tears are coming. “I-I don’t—It’s been—I ain’t real clear on—”

“Bob, I’m sorry.” All the anger, urgency, and frustration drain out of her face, and she releases her hold on him, and her expression softens. “I’m so sorry.” She puts an arm around him. “I’m a little—I’m not—I’m dealing with a bit of a—”

“It’s okay, darlin’,” he says and hangs his head. “I ain’t been myself lately, ain’t exactly on top of the world right now.”

She looks at him. “You’re still hurting, aren’t you? Hurting bad.”

He sighs again. He feels almost normal when he’s around this woman.

For a moment, he considers telling her about his Megan dreams. He considers telling her about the enormous black hole in his heart that is sucking every last ounce of his life into it. He considers explaining to Lilly how he was never really that good at grief. He lost dozens of close friends in the Middle East. As an army medic, he saw so much death and heartache that he thought it would rip his insides out. But none of it even compared to losing Megan the way he lost her. He considers all this over the course of an agonizing instant and then looks up at Lilly and simply murmurs, “Yeah, honey, I’m still hurting.”

They sit there in the overcast morning light for a long while, saying nothing, both of them drowning in their thoughts, both of them ruminating over dark and uncertain futures, when finally Lilly looks at him. “Bob, is there anything I can get you?”

He lifts his empty bottle, and taps it. “Got another one of these stashed back at the fire escape. That’s all I need.”

She sighs.

Another long moment of silence passes. Bob feels himself drifting again, his eyelids getting heavy. He looks up at her. “You seem a little outta sorts, darlin’,” he says. “Is there anything I can get you?”

Yeah, she thinks to herself, the weight of the world pressing down on her. How about a gun and two bullets so Austin and I can finish each other off?

TWELVE

Martinez paces along the catwalk that crowns a semitrailer parked along the north corner of the wall when he hears somebody calling out to him.

“Hey, Martinez!” the voice cuts through the wind and distant thunder scraping the sky to the east. Martinez looks down and sees Rudy, the bearded former tuck-pointer from Savannah, coming across the construction site. Rudy is built like a redwood and keeps his dark hair pomaded back in a Dracula widow’s peak.

“What do you want?” Martinez calls down. Dressed in his trademark sleeveless shirt, bandanna, and fingerless racing gloves, the lantern-jawed Martinez carries a Kalashnikov with a banana clip and a sawed-off stock. From the rusty steel roof of the Kenworth, he can see for over a mile in any direction, and he can easily pick off half a dozen undead in one controlled burst if necessary. Nobody fucks with Martinez—neither man nor biter—and this unexpected visitor is already getting on his nerves. “My shift ain’t over for another couple hours.”

Squinting up into the sun, Rudy delivers a stoic shrug. “Well, I’m here to relieve you so I guess you’re getting an early break. Boss man wants to see you.”

“Shit,” Martinez mutters under his breath, in no mood to go to the principal’s office this morning. He starts climbing down the side of the cab, grumbling softly, “What the hell does he want?”

Martinez hops off the running board.

Rudy gives him a look. “Like he’s gonna tell me.”

“Stay alert up there,” Martinez orders, gazing out through the narrow gap in front of the truck, surveying the flooded fields to the north. The farmland is deserted but Martinez has a bad feeling about what lies out there behind the distant, dark pillars of pine. “It’s been quiet so far today … but that usually never lasts.”

Rudy gives him a nod and starts climbing up the side of the cab.

Martinez strides away as Rudy’s voice trails after him. “You going to watch the fight today?”

“Let’s see what the Governor wants to see me about first,” Martinez mumbles, passing out of Rudy’s earshot. “One fucking thing at a time.”

*   *   *

It takes Martinez precisely eleven minutes to cross town on foot, pausing a couple of times to kick the asses of workmen loitering in the nooks and crannies of merchant’s row, some of them already passing flasks at two o’clock in the afternoon. By the time Martinez reaches the Governor’s building, the sun has broken through the clouds and turned the day as humid as a steam room.

Sweat breaks out on the big Latino as he slips around back and climbs the wooden decking to the Governor’s back door. He knocks hard on the jamb.

“Get your ass in here,” the Governor greets him, pushing open the storm door.

Martinez feels the flesh on his neck crawling as he enters the sour atmosphere of the kitchen. The place smells of grease and black mold, and something putrid underneath. A pine-scented car deodorizer hangs over the sink. “What’s going on, boss?” Martinez says, putting his assault rifle down, leaning it against a lower cabinet.

“Got a job for you,” the Governor says, running water into a drinking glass. This apartment is one of the few left in Woodbury with working plumbing, although the tap often spews brown, rusty well water. The Governor guzzles the water. He wears a shopworn wifebeater over his sinewy upper body, his camo pants tucked into his combat boots. The bandage on his ear has turned orange from the blood and Betadine. “You want a glass of water?”

“Sure.” Martinez leans against the counter, crossing his muscular arms across his chest to quell the beating of his heart. He already doesn’t like where this is going. In the past, people sent on the Governor’s “special assignments” have ended up in pieces. “Thanks.”

The Governor fills another glass and hands it over. “I want you to go see this Rick character, and I want you to let slip how disgruntled you are with the way things are going around here.”

“Pardon?”

The Governor looks the man in the eyes. “You’re fed up, you understand?”

“Not really.”

The Governor rolls his eyes. “Try to keep up with me, Martinez. I want you to get to know this prick. Gain his confidence. Tell him how dissatisfied you are with the way the town’s being run. I want to take advantage of what’s going on in that fucking infirmary.”

“What’s going on in the infirmary?”

“This prick is wooing Stevens and his little cocker spaniel of a nurse. These strangers seem like decent people to them, they seem nice—but don’t you fucking believe it. They bit my fucking ear off!”

“Right.”

“They fucking attacked me, Martinez. They want our town, they want our resources … and they’ll do anything to fucking get them. Trust me on this. They will do anything. And I will do anything to prevent that from happening.”

Martinez drinks his water, nodding, thinking it over. “I get it, boss.”

The Governor goes over to the back window and peers out at the muggy afternoon. The sky is the color of spoiled milk. No birds are evident anywhere. No birds, no planes, nothing but endless gray sky. “I want you to go in deep,” he says in a low, somber voice. He turns and looks at Martinez. “I want you to try and get them to take you back to this prison they live in.”

“They live in a prison?” This is news to Martinez. “Did one of them talk?”

The Governor gazes back outside. Very softly, in a low voice, he tells him about the prison coveralls on the men, under their riot gear, and the logic of it—the perfect logic. “We got a few jailbirds in town,” he says finally. “I asked around. There are three or four state prisons within a day’s drive, one in Rutledge, one down by Albany, one over in Leesburg. It would be a hell of a lot better if we could pinpoint the location without a bunch of road trips.” He turns and looks at Martinez. “You follow me?”

Martinez nods. “I’ll do what I can, boss.”

The Governor looks away. A beat of silence passes, and the Governor says, “Clock’s ticking, Martinez. Get to work.”

“One question?”

“What is it?”

Martinez measures his words. “Let’s say we find this place…”

“Yeah?”

Martinez shrugs. “Then what?”

The Governor doesn’t answer. He just continues staring out at the empty sky, his expression as mean and desolate as the plague-ridden landscape.

*   *   *

The dominoes begin falling that afternoon, the seemingly random sequence of events unfolding with the dark implications of atomic nuclei colliding.

At 2:53 P.M. eastern standard time, one of the Governor’s best fighters, a lanky former truck driver from Augusta named Harold Abernathy, pays an unexpected visit to the infirmary. He asks the doctor to get him ready for that day’s fight. He wants his bandages removed so he looks badass for the crowd. With the stranger named Rick looking on, Stevens reluctantly begins working on Abernathy, unwinding gauze and removing the man’s myriad bandages from earlier bouts, when all at once a fourth man bursts into the room, his baritone voice booming, “Where is that fucker?! WHERE IS HE?!” Eugene Cooney—a toothless, tank-shaped man with a shaved head—goes straight for Harold, snarling and spitting something about Harold not pulling his punches out there and now Eugene has lost his last viable front teeth and it’s all Harold’s fault. Harold tries to apologize for getting “a little carried away” out there with the crowd and all but according to the crazed bald man “sorry ain’t gonna cover it” and before anybody can intercede, Eugene pulls a nasty-looking buck knife and goes for Harold’s throat. In the chaos, the blade slices through Harold Abernathy’s neck and severs his carotid artery and sends gouts of blood flinging across the tile walls in a gruesome display. Before Stevens has a chance to even react, or even begin to stanch the bleeding, Eugene Cooney has turned on his heels and made his exit with the casual satisfaction of a slaughterhouse worker bleeding a pig. “Fucker,” he comments over his shoulder before lumbering out of the room.

News of the attack—and Harold’s subsequent death from massive blood loss—wends its way across town over the course of that next hour. Word passes from man to man on the wall until it reaches the Governor at exactly 3:55 P.M. EST. The Governor hears about it on his back deck, peering out through his storm door and listening to Bruce calmly recount the incident. The Governor absorbs the report stoically, thinking it over, and finally tells Bruce not to make a big deal out of it. He should not alarm the townspeople. Instead, he should spread the word that Harold Abernathy succumbed to internal injuries sustained in the fights because Harold was a trooper and gave his all and was almost kind of a hero, and also because these fights are the real thing, and people should remember that. Bruce wants to know who will replace Harold in that day’s match, which is scheduled to begin in a little over an hour. The Governor says he has an idea.

At 4:11 P.M. that afternoon, the Governor leaves his apartment with Bruce at his side, and proceeds across town to the racetrack, which is already beginning to fill up with early birds eager for the day’s festivities to begin. By 4:23 P.M., the two men have descended two flights of stairs and passed through thousands of feet of narrow cinder-block corridor to the last stall on the left side of the lowest sublevel. Along the way, the Governor explains his idea, and tells Bruce what he needs. At last, they reach the makeshift holding tank. Bruce unlatches the rolling door, and the Governor gives a nod. The shriek of ancient casters pierces the silence as Bruce yanks the door up.

Inside the dark, squalid chamber of greasy cement and mold, the slender brown-skinned figure tied to the far wall lifts her head with every last scintilla of her strength, her dreadlocks dangling across her ravaged face. Hate as incandescent as fire kindles again in the pits of her almond eyes, the laser-hot stare peering through strands of hair, as the Governor takes a step toward her. The door bangs shut behind him. Neither one of them moves. The silence presses in on them.

The Governor takes another step closer and gets within twelve inches of her, and he starts to say something when she lunges at him. Despite her weakened condition, she comes close to biting him—so close that the Governor rears back with a start—the faint clacking of her teeth, and the creaking of the ropes holding tight filling the silence.

“Right, you’re gonna bite me and then what?” the Governor says to her.

Nothing but a faint hiss of air comes out of her mouth, her lips peeled away from her teeth in a grimace of pure, unadulterated hatred.

“How do you think you could get out of here?” he says, leaning toward her so their faces are centimeters apart. The Governor drinks in her rage. He can smell her—a musky odor of sweat and cloves and blood—and he savors it. “You really should just stop struggling. Things would be so much easier on you. Besides, last time you almost broke your wrists. We don’t want that, do we?”

She locks her serpentine gaze on him, the bloodlust in her eyes almost feral.

“So, for your sake,” he says, relaxing a bit, stepping back and taking her measure, “I’d appreciate it if you’d just give it a rest … but enough about that.” He gives the moment a dramatic pause. “We’ve got a bit of a problem. Well, you’ve got a huge problem, and depending on your definition, I’ve got plenty of ‘problems’ … but what I mean is, I’ve got a new problem, and I need your help.”

Her face holds its cobra stillness, its laser focus on the Governor’s dark eyes.

“I’ve got a fight scheduled today in the arena—a big one.” He takes on the flat tone of a dispatcher ordering a taxi. “A lot of people are supposed to be coming … and I just lost a fighter. I need a replacement—and I want it to be you.”

Something glints now behind the woman’s veiled expression, something new in her shiny eyes. She says nothing but cocks her head at him, almost involuntarily, as she absorbs his every word.

“Before you start spouting out the ‘I-would-never-do-anything-for-you’ and ‘who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are-to-ask-me-anything’ … I want you to consider one thing.” He gives her a hard look. “I am in the position to make your life easier.” For a fleeting instant, a grin crosses his features. “Hell, a bullet is in the position to make your life easier … but still, I can help you.”

She stares at him. Waiting. Dark eyes blazing.

The Governor smiles at her. “I just don’t want you to lose sight of that.” He glances over his shoulder at the door. “Bruce!”

The rolling door jerks, and a gloved hand appears under the edge.

Bruce yanks the door up, letting in the cold, naked light of the corridor.

The big man holds an object that catches the light, the steel edge gleaming with an almost liquid radiance.

*   *   *

The woman on the floor fixes her gaze on the object in the black man’s hand.

The scabbard is missing, but the glorious sword—exposed in the dim light—calls out to the woman like a homing beacon. The style originally created for samurai in the fifteenth century, hand-forged today by only a handful of master swordsmiths, the katana sword is pure steel poetry. With its long blade as gracefully curved as a swan’s neck, and its handle grip wound with hand-beaded snakeskin, the weapon is both a work of art and a precision instrument of death.

The sight of the thing simultaneously stiffens the dark woman’s spine and sends gooseflesh down her arms and legs. And all at once, all of her rage, all of the searing agony between her legs, all of the white noise in her mind goes away … replaced by the innate need to get her hands around that perfectly balanced grip. The presence of the thing so transports her, so mesmerizes her, that she barely hears the voice of the monster continuing to jabber at her.

“I would like to give this to you,” he is saying. “I’m sure you’d like to have it.” His voice fades as the weapon grows more and more radiant to the woman—the shimmering crescent of steel a sliver of new moon eclipsing everything else in the cell, in the world, in the universe.

“You’re going to be fighting a man,” the monster explains, his voice fading into nothingness. “And to the crowd, well, you’re going to need to appear to have the advantage. People don’t like watching guys beat the shit out of girls.” A pause here. “I know … I don’t get it either. I guess if you’re coming at him with a sword, it’ll be okay for him to clip you a good one with a baseball bat.”

In the woman’s traumatized brain, the sword seems to almost be softly humming now, vibrating, gleaming so brightly in the gloomy enclosure it appears as though it has caught fire.

“In return, you get a full week of rest,” the monster is saying. “And food, and maybe even a chair or a bed, I’ll have to look into it.” The monster’s shadow looms over her now. “To be honest, our little relationship has been pretty exhausting. I need a break.” He looks at her with an obscene grin on his face. “This is okay because, well, I’m still totally pissed off about the ear. But I feel like I’ve gotten at least a little payback already.” A pause. “And well, the fella you’re fighting tonight could kill you.”

In the woman’s imagination, rays of celestial light seem to be flaring off the sword’s chiseled tip.

“And I don’t want you to kill this guy,” the monster continues. “That’s the little secret we don’t really tell people. Our little arena fights are more than a little staged. The danger with the biters is there—sure—but you’re really not supposed to hurt your opponent too much.”

The tinsel of light reflecting off the weapon seems to be reaching out to the woman on the floor now, the voice in her head promising her, whispering to her … be patient, just wait, patience.

“You don’t have to decide now,” the Governor says at last, giving Bruce a nod. They head for the door, the Governor muttering, “You got twenty minutes.”

*   *   *

Lilly looks for Austin in every corner of the town that day. She gets worried at one point—after talking to the Sterns—that he might have lit out on his own to go find a mythical marijuana farm not far from Woodbury.

Austin had talked about the place off and on, usually adopting the wistful tone of someone describing Xanadu, claiming he had heard rumors that some government medical program was farming weed for Pfizer in preparation for the legalization laws to roll out. Lilly was fixing to go after him—the infamous farm apparently lay just east of Barnesville, a short car ride from Woodbury, or a long day’s hike on foot—when, late that afternoon, she started noticing signs that he might very well be right under her nose.

Gus mentions to her at one point that the young man was seen around noon that day skulking through the wild thickets next to the railroad yard, searching for something, which made no sense to Lilly whatsoever. But since when did Austin Ballard’s movements make sense?

Later that day, after her sad encounter with Bob, Lilly was on her way home when she ran into Lydia Blackman, an aging dowager from Savannah who had gladly taken on the role of town gossip. According to Lydia, Austin was seen only an hour or so earlier, rummaging around the trash heap behind the storage warehouse on Main Street, rifling through buckets and oil drums. A few passersby made snarky comments about the young man “turning into a hobo” and “the next thing you know, he’ll be pushing a shopping cart down Woodbury road looking for tin cans.”

Nonplussed by it all, nearing the end of her tether, her skin crawling with nervous tension, Lilly decides the best way to find somebody is to stay put. So she trudges over to Austin’s apartment building on the east side of town, near the rows of semitrucks, and plants herself on the porch. Which is exactly where she now sits, Indian style, her elbows resting on her legs, her head in her hands.

The sun has dipped below the gigantic, saucer-shaped arena to the west, and the breeze has cooled, and now Lilly watches the last of the townspeople file past Austin’s place on their way to the big show. The fights are scheduled to start in a half hour, and Lilly doesn’t want to be anywhere near this place at that point, but she is determined to find the long-haired young man and drop her bombshell.

Less than five minutes later, Lilly is just about to give up when she sees a familiar figure emerging like a curly-maned avatar in hoodie and ripped jeans from the nimbus of sun rays slanting down across the mouth of the adjacent alley. He carries his knapsack slung over his shoulder, the unidentified contents bulging inside it. He looks solemn, maybe even a little lonely, until he turns the corner and heads for his building and sees Lilly on the stoop. “Oh my God,” he says, walking up to her, his eyes brightening suddenly like a little boy discovering an Easter basket under his bed. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Lilly stands, thrusts her hands in her pockets, and gives him a terse shrug. “Really … that’s funny. I’ve been looking for you.”

“Sweet,” he says and kisses her on the cheek, carefully dropping his knapsack on the entryway steps. “I got something for you.”

“Yeah? I got something for you, too,” she says, her expression blank.

Austin digs in the knapsack. “I was waiting for you over at your place but you never showed up.” He pulls out a lovely bouquet of purple aster surrounded by ivory-white baby’s breath, collected in a big rusty can with the Clabber Girl baking powder insignia faded on the side. All of which explains his strange behavior that day, rooting around the weeds and the trash piles. “Barbara said this white stuff is called Doll’s Eyes … isn’t that creepy and cool?!”

“Thank you,” Lilly says, taking the gift from him without emotion and setting it down on the step. “That’s very sweet of you.”

“What’s the matter?”

She looks at him. “So, what are your plans?”

“Huh?”

“You heard me.” Lilly puts her hands on her hips as if she’s about to fire him from a job. “For the future, I’m talking about.”

He cocks his head at her with a puzzled frown. “I don’t know … I guess I’m going to keep practicing with the Glock, get better at zapping the biters … maybe try to score another generator so I can get some tunes in my place?”

“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.” She chews her lip for a moment. “I’m talking about when and if we get outta this mess. What are your plans? For the rest of your life?”

His head cocks even farther, a more profound confusion crossing his features. “You mean like … a job and shit?”

“I mean like a career. I mean like growing up. What are your plans? You gonna be a professional beach bum? Rock star? Drug dealer … what?”

He stares at her. “What’s going on?”

“Answer the question.”

Austin puts his hands in his pockets. “Okay, first of all, I don’t know if there’s even gonna be a future to make plans for. Second of all, I have, like, no idea what I’m gonna do.” He studies her morose expression. He can tell this is no joke. “I got a degree and shit.”

“From where?”

He sighs, his voice losing some of its verve. “ATC.”

“ATC … what’s that?”

His voice goes even lower. “Atlanta Technical College.”

“Really?” She gives him a look. “What’s that, Austin? Some fucking Internet Web site where you pay nineteen ninety-five for a paper diploma and they send you coupons for an oil change and a résumé service?”

Austin swallows hard. “It’s a real school.” He looks down. “There’s a campus out by the airport.” His voice drops an octave. “I was studying to be a paralegal.”

“That’s just perfect.”

He looks at her. “What the hell, Lilly? Where are you going with this?”

She turns away from him for a moment and gazes out across the empty street. The noise of the crowd revving up for the fights a block and a half away echoes across the sky. She slowly shakes her head. “Truck pulls and strip clubs,” she mutters to herself.

Austin stares at the back of her head, listening intently, getting more and more worried. “What was that?”

She turns and looks at him. “It’s a man’s world, pretty boy.” Her face is a mask of pain. Her eyes have already started to well up. “You guys think everything is just a quick pop, and then it’s ‘sayonara.’ Well, it’s not. It’s not, Austin. Actions have consequences. The simplest choices can get your ass killed.”

“Lilly—”

“It’s true more than ever right now.” She holds herself as though she’s freezing. She gazes off again. “This world of shit we’re in, it isn’t very forgiving. You get yourself in a jam, and you’re dead … or worse.”

He reaches out and gently strokes her shoulder. “Lilly, whatever it is … we can deal with it. Together. Isn’t that what you told me? Gotta stick together? Tell me what’s going on. What happened?”

She pulls away from him and starts down the steps. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says in a voice crackling with disdain.

“Wait!” he calls to her. “Lilly, I can fix it … whatever it is.”

She pauses at the bottom of the steps. She turns and looks at him. “Is that right? You can fix it?” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small plastic instrument. It looks like a digital thermometer. “Fix this!” She tosses it to him.

He catches it and looks down at it. “What the hell is this?” Upon closer scrutiny, he sees the little window on the digital test vial and the words stamped next to it:

not pregnant:|
pregnant:||

The display shows two vertical lines, indicating a positive test result.

PART 2

Showtime

For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, nor ever shall be.

—Matthew 24:21

THIRTEEN

The huge tungsten spotlight on the north end of the track snaps on with a pistol-shot sound, sparking like a giant match tip igniting, the silver beam hitting the infield of the arena formerly known as the Woodbury Veterans Speedway. The advent of the artificial light gooses the crowd of more than fifty spectators strewn across the bench seats on the west side of the field. Whoops and hollers and catcalls from all ages and dispositions tumble up into the dusky, yellow sky and mingle with the smell of wood smoke and gasoline on the chill air. The shadows are lengthening.

“Quite the turnout, eh?” The Governor surveys the meager yet boisterous crowd as he leads Gabe and Bruce up the press stairs to the crow’s nest, where local reporters and NASCAR scouts once passed bottles of Jack and chewed Red Man as they watched the controlled chaos down in the dust.

Gabe and Bruce follow the Governor toward the glass-encased box seats, giving him a “yes-sir,” and a “you-got-that-right” … and just as they are about to seal themselves inside their little clubhouse, a voice rings out from below.

“Hey, boss!” It’s a grizzled, former peanut farmer in a CAT hat, sitting in the back row, glancing over his shoulder as the Governor passes. “Better be a good one today!”

The Governor gives him the kind of look one gives a child who’s about to ride a roller coaster for the first time. “Don’t worry, pal. It will be. I promise.”

*   *   *

Underneath the arena, minutes before the evening’s festivities get under way, the door to the infirmary unexpectedly swings open, and a tall, handsome man with a bandanna tied around the crown of his head walks in with an expectant look on his face. “Doc? Dr. Stevens?”

Across the room, Rick Grimes, the ill-fated stranger, shuffles along the back wall, which is lined in second-hand medical gear. Hardly noticing the visitor, he moves almost robotically, his mind a million miles away. He holds his mutilated arm like a dead baby, the missing hand now apparent in a bulbous, stained bandage in the shape of a giant peg.

“Hey, man!” Martinez pauses inside the door, hands on his hips. “Have you seen—?” He stops himself. “Oh, hey—you’re—What was your name?”

The injured man slowly whirls, the bloody stump catching the light. His voice comes out of him in a heavy, hoarse, stringy garble. “Rick.”

“Oh my God.” Martinez stares, taken aback by the grisly sight of the severed wrist. “What happened to—? Jesus, what happened to you?”

Rick looks down. “An accident.”

“What?! How?!” Martinez comes over to him, places a hand on his shoulder. Rick pulls away. Martinez musters up as much outrage and sympathy as he can. It’s a fairly decent performance. “Did someone do this to you?”

The man named Rick lunges at him, grabs his shirt with the one good hand. “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” The man’s blue eyes flare with rage as hot as cinders. “You handed me to that psycho! You fucking did this!”

“Whoa—hey!” Martinez rears back, mortified, playing dumb.

“STOP IT!”

The sound of Dr. Stevens’s voice is like a splash of cold water on the two men. The doctor steps into the fray, holding each man at bay with an open palm. “Stop it, stop it right fucking now!” He sears his gaze into each of them. Then he puts an arm around Martinez. “Come on, Martinez. You need to leave.”

Rick deflates, staring at the floor, holding his stump, as Martinez walks away.

“What’s with that guy?” Martinez asks the doctor under his breath as he passes out of earshot on the other side of the room, satisfied with the ruse. The seeds have been planted. “Is he okay?”

The doctor pauses in the doorway, speaking softly, confidentially. “Don’t worry about him. What did you want? You were looking for me?”

Martinez rubs his eyes. “Our fine Governor asked me to talk to you—said you didn’t seem too happy here. He knows we’re pals. He wanted me to just—” Martinez pauses here, genuinely at a loss. He does feel a certain fondness for the cynical, wisecracking Stevens. Secretly, deep down, Martinez admires the man—an educated man, a man of substance.

For the briefest instant, Martinez glances over his shoulder at the man across the room. The stranger named Rick leans against the wall, holding his bandaged wrist, a faraway look on his face. He seems to be staring into the void, looking into the abyss, struggling to understand the cold reality of his situation. But at the same time, at least in Martinez’s eyes, the man somehow looks as solid as a rock, ready to kill if necessary. The jut of his whiskered chin, the crow’s-feet crimping the edges of his eyes from years of either laughter or bemusement or suspicion, or maybe all three—all of it seems to comprise a man of a different kind of substance. Maybe not advanced degrees and private practices, but definitely a man to be reckoned with.

“I don’t know,” Martinez mutters at last, turning back to the doctor. “I guess he wanted me to just … make sure you weren’t going to cause any trouble or something.” Another pause. “He just wants to make sure you’re happy.”

Now it’s the doctor’s turn to gaze back across the room and ponder things.

Finally Stevens aims one of those patented smirks at Martinez and says, “Does he now?”

*   *   *

The arena comes alive with a fanfare of thunderous heavy metal thrash-music and a fusillade of hyena yelps from the stands—and on cue, the crusty, scabrous, subliterate tank known as Eugene Cooney emerges from the shadows of the north vestibule like some thrift shop Spartacus. He wears secondhand football pads over his iron-girder shoulders, and carries a bloodstained bat wound with reams of tape.

The crowd eggs him on as he passes the gauntlet of walking dead chained to the gateposts on the edge of the infield. The creatures reach for him—rotting mouths working, blackened teeth gnashing, delicate stringers of black bile looping through motes of dusty light. Eugene gives them a middle-finger salute. The crowd loves the man, and roars their approval as Eugene takes his place out in the center of the infield, brandishing the bat with a kind of pumped-up majesty that would shame a marine color guard. The stench of ripe body organs and stewing offal mingles with the breeze.

Eugene twirls his bat and waits. The spectators wait. The entire arena seems to go quiet in a strange tableau as everybody awaits the challenger.

*   *   *

Way up in the press box, standing behind the Governor, looking on, Gabe wonders aloud, raising his voice enough to be heard, “You sure about this, boss?”

The Governor doesn’t even look at him. “The chance to see this bitch take a beating without me breaking a sweat? Yeah—I think it’s a good move.”

A noise down on the field wrenches their attention to the pool of light around the south portal.

The Governor smiles. “This is going to be good.”

*   *   *

She enters the showground from the darkness of the vestibule with a brusque, almost curt rhythm to her stride. Head down, shoulders square under her monastic cloak, dreadlocks flagging in the wind, she moves quickly and decisively despite her wounds and exhaustion, as though she’s about to simply grab a stray rabbit by the nape of the neck. Her long, curved saber, gripped firmly in her right hand, points downward at a forty-five-degree angle.

It happens so quickly, so casually, so authoritatively, that the exotic nature of this person—the strange officiousness of her demeanor—seems to momentarily hold the audience rapt, as though the entire gathering has inhaled and held its collective breath. The moving corpses reach for this woman as she passes—this odd specimen with the fancy sword—almost like supplicants, surrounding her, converging on her as she approaches Eugene with no expression, no pleasure, no emotion.

Eugene cocks the bat, and he growls some inane threat at her and then lashes out.

The man’s movements might as well be in slow motion as the woman simply and swiftly delivers a perfectly placed kick to the big brute’s genitals. The blow lands in the soft spot between his legs and elicits an almost girlish squeal from the behemoth, doubling him over as though he’s suddenly intoxicated with agony. The spectators howl.

The next part transpires with the swift and certain arc of a chef’s knife.

The woman in the cloak simply does a quick turn, a sort of low pirouette, the sword gripped in both hands now—a movement so natural, so practiced, so precise, so inevitable, as to be almost innate—and then brings the sword down on the big man’s neck. The hand-forged blade, tooled by artisans in the tradition of ancestors down through millennia, severs Eugene Cooney’s head with barely a whisper.

At first, up in the bleachers, the sight of steel flashing, a glimmer of tungsten on the blade—and the entire cranium of this giant man being lopped off with the ease of a band saw cutting through Brie—is so surreal that the crowd reacts awkwardly: a coughing sound among many, a chorus of nervous laughter … and then a tsunami of silence.

The sudden hush that grips the dusty stadium is so inappropriate and out of place that it takes the subsequent geyser of blood frothing out of Eugene Cooney’s cleanly dismembered neck, as the headless body drops puppetlike—first to its knees, then to its belly, landing in a heap as lifeless as a pile of shed skin—to suddenly elicit shouts of outrage.

Up in the crow’s nest, behind panes of grimy glass, a wiry figure springs to his feet. The Governor gapes down at the infield, teeth clenched, hissing: “What. The. Fuck?!”

For a long, dreamlike moment, it seems as though a strange paralysis grips each and every person within the confines of the press box and across the stands. Gabe and Bruce move in toward the glass, clenching and unclenching their fists. The Governor kicks his folding chair behind him, the metal contraption banging against the back wall.

“Get down there!” The Governor points at the tableau on the field—the dark amazon with her sword poised, the circle of cadavers reaching for her—and he screams at Gabe and Bruce: “Rein those biters in and GET HER THE FUCK OUTTA MY SIGHT!” Liquid rage courses through him. “I swear I’m going to kill that bitch!”

Gabe and Bruce stumble toward the door, tripping over each other to get out.

Down on the field, the woman in the cloak—nobody has yet bothered to even learn her name—unleashes her controlled fury on the ring of walking dead circling her. It begins almost as a dance.

From a crouch, she spins and simultaneously swings the sword at the first walker. The sharp edge whispers through mortified neck cords and gristle, effortlessly taking off the first head.

Blood and tissue bloom in the artificial light as the head falls and rolls in the dust, and the body collapses. The woman spins. Another head jettisons. Fluids fountain into the air. The woman spins again, zinging through another putrefied neck, another cranium flying off its ragged, bloody mooring. Another spin, another decapitation … another, and another, and another … until the dust is running black with cerebrospinal fluids, and the woman gets winded.

By this point—unbeknownst to the crowd or the woman in the center of the infield—Gabe and Bruce have reached the bottom of the stairs and are racing around the corner of the gate toward the track.

The crowd starts braying—odd donkeylike barking sounds mingling with boos—and to an undiscerning ear it would be hard to tell whether they are angry, scared, or excited. The clamor seems to fuel the woman on the infield. She finishes off the last three reanimated corpses with a graceful combination of grand plié, jeté, and deadly pas de pirouette, the sword detaching crania silently, the dance a baptismal bloodbath, the earth flooding with deep scarlet-black fluids.

Right then, Gabe has crossed the warning track, followed closely by Bruce, and the two men charge toward the woman, who has her back turned. Gabe reaches her first, and he literally dives at her, as though he’s got one chance to tackle an errant running back before the player scores.

The woman goes down hard, the sword flying out of her hands. She eats dust as the two men pile up on her. A gasp forces its way out of her lungs—she has said maybe ten words since she arrived in Woodbury—and she writhes on the ground under their weight, letting out huffs of anguished breath as they shove her face against the dirt. Little plumes of dust puff off the ground, kicked up by her angry breath. Her eyes glaze over with rage and pain.

The audience is struck dumb by all this—absorbing it on a deeper level by now—and the onlookers react again in stunned silence. The hush returns to the arena and presses in on the place until the only sound is the huffing and gasping of the woman on the ground, and a faint click coming from the crow’s nest above the stands.

The Governor emerges, drunk with rage, fists clenching so hard that his fingernails begin to draw blood.

“HEY!”

A deep female voice—tobacco cured and coarsened by hardship—calls out to him from below. He pauses on the parapet.

“You son of a bitch!” The owner of the voice is a woman in a threadbare smock, sitting in a middle row between two waiflike boys in tattered clothes. She gazes up angrily at the Governor. “What the hell was that shit?! I don’t bring my boys out here for that! I bring them to the fights for good clean fun—that was a goddamn massacre! I don’t want my boys watching fucking murder!”

The crowd reacts, as Gabe and Bruce wrestle with the amazon, dragging her off the infield. The audience voices its disapproval. Mutterings rise and meld into angry shouts. Most of the people concur with the woman but something deeper drives the gathering now. Almost a year and a half of hell and starvation and boredom and intermittent terror come pouring out of some of them in a volley of shrieks and howls.

“You’ve traumatized them!” the woman cries out between the shrieking noises. “I came here looking for some broken bones, a few missing teeth—not this! This was way too much! ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!”

Up on the parapet, the Governor pauses and gazes down at the crowd, the rage flowing through him like a brush fire gobbling every last cell, making his eyes water and his spine run cold, and deep in the folds of his brain, a part of him breaks apart … control … control the situation … burn the cancer out … burn it out now.

From the bleachers, the woman sees him walking away. “Hey, goddamnit! I’m talking to you! Don’t walk away from me! Get back here!”

The Governor descends the stairs, oblivious to the catcalls and boos, making his departure with hellfire and vengeance on his mind.

*   *   *

Running … hurtling headlong … lost in the darkness, night-blind … they plunge through the woods, frantically searching for the safety of their camp. Three women … one in her fifties, one pushing sixty, and one in her twenties … they flail at the foliage and tangled branches, desperately trying to get back to the circle of campers and mobile homes that lie in the darkness less than a mile to the north. All these poor women wanted to do was pick some wild blackberries and now they’re surrounded. Pinned down. Trapped. What went wrong? They were so quiet, so stealthy, so nimble, carrying the berries in the hems of their skirts, careful not to speak to each other, communicating only in hand gestures … and now the walkers are closing in on them from all directions, the stench rising around them, the chorus of watery snarling noises like a threshing machine behind the trees. One woman screams when a dead arm bursts out of a thicket, grabbing at her, tearing her skirt. How did this happen so quickly? The walkers came out of nowhere. How did the monsters detect them? All at once the moving corpses block their path, cutting off their escape, surrounding them, the women panicking, their piercing shrieks rising up now as they struggle against the onslaught … their blood mingling with the dark purple juice of the berries … until it’s too late … and the woods run red with their blood … and their screams are drowned by the unstoppable thresher.

*   *   *

“They came to be known as the Valdosta Women,” Lilly says with a shiver, sitting on Austin’s fire escape with a blanket wrapped around her as she tells her cautionary tale.

It’s late, and the two of them have been sitting there for almost an hour, lingering on the platform long after the lights of the arena had begun to sequentially wink out and the disgruntled townspeople had started the long trudge back to their hovels. Now Austin sits next to her, smoking a home-rolled cigarette and listening intently to her strange story. His gut clenches with huge emotions that he can’t quite parse, can’t quite understand, but he needs to process it all before he makes his case, so he says nothing and just listens.

“When I was with Josh and the others,” Lilly goes on in a voice drained of emotion, stretched thin with exhaustion, “they used to say, ‘Be careful … and wear a sanitary napkin at all times during your cycle, and dip it in vinegar to mask the smell … or you’ll end up like the Valdosta Women.’”

Austin lets out a thin, mortified breath. “One of them was having her period, I assume.”

“You got it,” Lilly says, lifting her collar and pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Turns out the walkers can smell menstrual blood like sharks … it’s like a fucking homing beacon.”

“Jesus.”

“Lucky for me, I’ve always been as regular as clockwork.” She shakes her head with a shiver. “The twenty-eighth day rolls around after my last period and I make sure I’m indoors or at least somewhere safe. Since the Turn started, I’ve tried to keep meticulous track of it. That’s one reason I knew. I was late and I just knew. I was getting sore and swollen … and I was late.”

Austin nods. “Lilly, I just want you to—”

“I don’t know … I don’t know,” she murmurs as though not even hearing him. “It would be a big deal any other time but now in this crazy shit we’re in…”

Austin lets her trail off, and then he says very softly, very gently, “Lilly, I just want you to know something.” He looks at her through moistening eyes. “I want to have this baby with you.”

She looks at him. A long beat of silence hangs in the chill air. She looks down. The pause is killing Austin. He wants to say so much more, he wants to prove to her that he’s sincere, wants her to trust him, but the words escape him. He’s not good with words.

At last she looks up at him, her eyes filling up. “Me too.” She utters this in barely a whisper. Then she laughs. It’s a cleansing laugh, a little giddy and hysterical, but cleansing nonetheless. “God help me … I do too … I want to have it.”

They wrap their arms around each other in a bear hug, embracing like that for a long moment on that cold, windy precipice outside Austin’s back window. Their tears come freely.

After a while, Austin reaches up to her face, brushes her hair from her eyes, wipes the tears off her cheeks, and smiles. “We’ll make it work,” he murmurs to her. “We have to. It’s a big fuck-you to the end of the world.”

She nods, caressing his cheek. “You’re right, pretty boy. When you’re right, you’re right.”

“Besides,” he says then, “the Governor’s got this place under control now. He’s made this place safe for us … a home for our baby.” He tenderly kisses her forehead, feeling a certainty he’s never felt before in his life. “You were right all along about him,” Austin says softly, holding her. “The man knows what he’s doing.”

FOURTEEN

Footsteps echo down the lower corridor under the sublevels. They close in hard and fast, coming down the stairs two at a time, moving at an angry clip, getting Gabe’s and Bruce’s attention in the darkness. The two men stand outside the last stall, in the shadows thrown by bare bulbs, trying to catch their collective breaths from the struggle to put the black gal back on ice.

For such a skinny little thing, she puts up quite a fight. Welts are rising on Gabe’s ham-hock arms where the lady scratched him, and Bruce nurses a sore spot just below his right eye where the bitch caught him with an elbow. But none of it compares with the whirlwind presently coming down the narrow corridor toward them.

The figure throws a long shadow as it approaches, back-lit by the cage lights, pausing with fists balled up tight. “Well?” the thin man says, standing thirty feet away, voice echoing, his narrow face veiled in shadow. “She in there?” His voice sounds wrong—twisted and strangled with emotion. “Did you get her back in there? Is she tied up? WELL?!”

Gabe swallows hard. “We got her back in there, man—but it wasn’t easy.”

Bruce still breathes hard from the exertion, holding the delicate sword in his huge hand like a child holding a broken toy. “Bitch is crazy,” he murmurs.

The Governor pauses in front of them, all blazing eyes and stiff-armed bluster. “Whatever—just—I just—GIVE ME THAT FUCKING THING!”

He snatches the sword away from Bruce, who instinctively jerks with a start. “Sir?” he says in a low and uncertain voice.

The Governor huffs and grits his teeth, pacing, with the sword clenched white-knuckle tight in his hand. “Where does that bitch get off?! I told her—told her I’d go easy on her—just needed her to do me a fucking favor—just this one fucking favor! ONE FAVOR!” His booming voice practically pins the two other men to the wall. “She agreed to help me! SHE AGREED!!” Temples pulsing, jaw clenching, neck cords prominent, lips curling away from his teeth, Philip Blake looks like a caged animal. “Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!” He turns to the two men. He snarls with spittle flying. “We. Had. An agreement!”

Gabe speaks up. “Boss, maybe if we—”

“Shut up! SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

The corridor echoes. The silence that follows could freeze a lake over.

The Governor gets his breath back. He settles down, inhaling and exhaling, holding the sword up in a strange display that looks, at first, just for a moment, as if he’s about to attack his men. Then he murmurs to them, “Talk me out of walking in there right now and slicing her open from cunt to collar with this thing.”

The two other men have no reply for him. They are out of ideas.

The silence is glacial.

*   *   *

At that moment, another pair of footsteps—heavy, urgent, and furtive—move through the warren of underground service bays and leprous corridors beneath the racetrack. In the musty stillness of the infirmary, these footsteps—which are approaching from the south end of the arena—are still far enough away to go unheard.

In fact, right then, in the makeshift clinic, in the moments before the troubling turn of events becomes known, the overhead fluorescents pulse and waver with faltering current from the generators on the upper level. The waxing and waning of the light, as well as the incessant droning noises, are beginning to make the man named Rick nervous.

He sits on a gurney in the corner, watching Dr. Stevens wash up at the sink. The frazzled physician takes a deep breath and stretches his weary back muscles. “Okay,” the doctor says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “I’m going home to take a nap, or at least try to. Haven’t really slept much in days.”

Across the room, Alice comes out of a pantry with a hypodermic needle in one hand, a vial of Netromycin—a strong antibiotic—in the other. She preps the needle and gives the doctor a look. “You okay?”

“Yeah, fine … fine and dandy … nothing a fifth of Stolichnaya won’t fix. Alice, can you just come and get me if something big comes up?” He gives it more thought. “If you need me, that is.”

“No problem,” she says, nudging Rick’s sleeve up and rubbing alcohol on the site. She injects another fifty cc’s into him, still absently talking to the doctor. “You go get some rest.”

“Thanks,” the doctor says, walking out and shutting the door behind him.

“So…” Rick looks at her as she holds gauze on his upper arm, sealing the injection site. “What’s with you two? Are you guys…?”

“Together?” She smiles wistfully, as though amused by a private joke. “No. I think he wishes we were, and honestly, he’s a nice man. Very nice, actually. And I do like him.” She shrugs, dumping the used vial into a waste receptacle, lowering Rick’s sleeve. “But I don’t care if it is the end of the world … he’s too old for me.”

The man’s face softens. “So you’re…?”

“Single?” Alice pauses, giving him a look. “Yes, but I’m not looking for anyone and you’ve got a ring on your finger, so…” She stops herself. “Is your wife still alive? I’m so sorry that I—”

“She is.” He sighs. “It’s okay. And don’t worry, I’m just trying to make conversation. I’m sorry if I sounded like I was…” Another sigh. “So you’re a doctor, too? A nurse? Paramedic? Something like that?”

She goes over to a cluttered desk, which is pushed up against the wall. She writes something in a log. “Actually, I was going to college to become an interior designer when the biters—walkers, whatever—made other plans for me. I didn’t really know any of this stuff a few months ago.”

“But now? How did you learn this stuff?” The injured man seems genuinely interested, if only in an idle-chatting-around-the-coffee-urn kind of way. “Did Dr. Stevens teach you?”

“Mostly, yeah,” she says with a nod, still writing notes on inventory, medicine dispensed, supply levels. In Woodbury, every commodity is limited—especially medicine—so Stevens has instituted a meticulous record system, with which Alice religiously keeps up.

In the pause that follows, the oncoming footsteps have reached the corridor outside the infirmary. Still distant enough to be inaudible to Rick and Alice, they approach quickly, purposefully, urgently.

“I’ve always been a quick learner,” Alice is saying. “Ever since I was a little girl. To be honest, I really just have to watch him do something once—maybe twice—and I can pretty much do it.”

Rick smiles. “Well, I’m impressed.”

“Don’t be.” She gives him a flinty look. “I don’t consider paying attention to be something special just because most other people don’t do it.” She pauses and lets out a sigh. “Did that sound mean? Did it make me sound like a bitch? I do that a lot. Sorry about that.”

“Think nothing of it,” Rick says, his smile lingering. “I didn’t take it that way. And you’re right, by the way.” He looks down at his thickly bandaged stump. “Most people don’t pay attention … to anything.” He looks at her. “They just cruise through life worrying so much about their own bullshit they don’t even notice the things that are happening around them.” He glances back down at his injury and lets out a dry little grunt.

She looks at him. “What is it?”

“I miss my wife,” he says softly, gazing down. “I just … I can’t stop thinking about her.” A long pause … and then: “She’s pregnant.”

Alice stares. “Really?”

Rick nods. “Yeah. She’s due in a couple months. Last time I saw her … she was … she was doing fine.” He swallows hard. “Thing about the baby, though … I don’t know if—”

Across the room, the door bursts open, cutting off his words. “Rick—get up! NOW!”

*   *   *

The man barging into the infirmary wears a faded bandanna, carries a high-powered rifle, and has muscular arms protruding from his sleeveless shirt, which is stained under the arms with flop-sweat. “Come on—we’ve got to go!” the man urges as he hurries over to Rick, grabbing him by the arm. “RIGHT NOW!”

“Wha—? What the fuck are you doing?!” Rick rears back, pulling himself away from this crazy person. Alice backs away, too, wide-eyed.

Martinez drills his gaze into Rick’s eyes. “I’m saving your life.”

Rick blinks. “What do you mean? How are you saving my life?!”

“I’m getting you out of here! I’m helping you escape! C’mon!”

“Let go of me, goddamnit!” Rick yanks his arm away, heart racing.

Martinez raises his hand in a gesture of contrition. “Okay. Look, I’m sorry. Okay. It’s just that we need to hurry. It’s not going to be easy getting you out of here without anyone noticing. Listen to what I’m saying. I’m gonna get you outta here but I can’t steal a vehicle—we only keep a couple gassed up and they’re too hard to get without being detected.”

Rick and Alice shoot panicked glances at each other, and then Rick looks back at Martinez. “Why are you—?”

“If they notice you’re gone before we’re far enough away, they’ll be able to run us down. We gotta get out of here without anyone knowing it for a long time.” Martinez looks at Alice, then back at Rick. “Now c’mon—let’s go!”

Rick takes a deep breath—a barrage of contrary emotions slamming through him—before giving the man a terse, reluctant nod. He looks at Alice, and then back at Martinez, who turns and starts toward the door.

“Wait!” Rick grabs Martinez on the way out of the room. “They told me there are guards posted at the door! How are we gonna get past them?”

Martinez almost smiles in spite of the adrenaline. “We already took care of them.”

“We?!” Rick follows him out the door at a fast trot, plunging into the corridor.

Left alone inside the room, Alice gapes at the open doorway.

*   *   *

Creeping cautiously down the central corridor, avoiding pools of light from hanging work lamps, descending stairs to the next level down, and making two quick turns, Martinez silently prays nobody sees them. Only he and the Governor know about this whole scam, and people like Gabe and Bruce are partial to shooting first and asking questions … well … never. Martinez silently raises his hand in a warning gesture as they approach one of the stalls. The two men pause in front of a security door.

“I think you’ve met my associate,” Martinez whispers to Rick, quickly opening the metal door.

Inside the dim enclosure, a pair of bodies lie sprawled unconscious on the cement floor. They are a couple of the Governor’s men—Denny and Lou—both of them bruised and battered but still breathing shallow breaths. A third figure, in riot gear, stands over them, fists balled, breathing hard, a nightstick in one hand.

“GLENN!”

Rick lurches suddenly into the room, and goes to the younger man.

“Rick, Jesus, you are alive!” The young Asian in the black SWAT-style body armor gives the other man a hug. With his round and boyish face, dark almond eyes, and short-cropped haircut, the young man could pass for a buck private in the army just out of basic training. Or maybe a Boy Scout, Martinez thinks to himself from the doorway, as the two men have their little tearful reunion.

“I thought you were dead, man,” the younger one says to the older one. “Martinez told me he saw you but I don’t know—I guess I didn’t believe it until now.” The kid looks at Rick’s stump. “Jesus, Rick, there was so much blood—”

“I’m okay,” Rick says, looking down, holding the bloody streaked bandage against his midsection. “I guess I’m lucky this is the only thing that freak took from me. What about you?” He pats the kid’s Kevlar shoulder pad. “They told me they let you go—that you told them everything about the prison, and they were going to follow you there.”

The kid lets out a burst of nervous laughter, which sounds more like a hyperventilating dog to Martinez. “Man—they never even asked me any questions.” Something changes in his face. Eyes narrowing, jaws clamped tightly, he looks down. “Rick, I spent a day locked in a garage next to another garage with Michonne in it.” Another pause here, the boy’s eyes watering with repulsion. “Rick—”

The young man pauses again, looking like he can hardly draw a breath, let alone explain what’s been going on. From across the room, Martinez soaks it all in. This is the first time he has heard the black woman’s name, and for some reason the sound of it—Mee Shaun? Meeshone?—makes him nervous. He can’t understand why exactly.

Rick pats the young man’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Glenn, we’re gonna get her and us outta here.”

“Rick, I love Maggie,” the kid finally says, looking up at the older man through wet eyes. “I don’t want to put anyone in danger—but the things I heard—the things they must have done to Michonne.” He stops again. He looks at Rick and says in a quavering voice, “I think I might have told them anything to make them stop.” He sniffs back the shame. “But they never even asked.” Pause, anger flaring. “It’s like they did it all just to fuck with me.”

It’s time for Martinez to step in and get this fucking show on the road. “That sounds about right,” he says, his voice going low and grave. He gives both men a sullen look as he continues, “Philip—the Governor—whatever you want to call him—he’s been slowly going over the edge for a while now. I’ve been hearing about the shit he’s been doing, whispers, rumors … didn’t want to believe it was true.” Martinez takes a deep breath. “You kinda choose to ignore that stuff—keeps you from having to do anything. After seeing you”—he gives Rick a nod—“I suspected the ‘accident’ that took your hand was related to him.”

Across the room, Rick and Glenn give each other a look. Something unspoken passes between them, and Martinez notices it but doesn’t react.

“He asked me to fill in for his guards,” Martinez goes on in a lower voice, “watch the garage he was keeping Glenn in. I didn’t know he was keeping prisoners in here. I mostly work security—all my time was spent on the fences.” Another breath. He looks at the two men across the room. “I couldn’t let it go on—I had to help put a stop to this fucking insanity.” He looks at the floor. “We’re still human, goddamn it!”

Rick is thinking about it, licking his lips pensively, the lines on his face deepening. He looks at Glenn. “My goddamn clothes.” He looks at Martinez. “My clothes!” He shakes his head. “We were wearing riot gear and when the doctor was working on me … someone had to see what I was wearing underneath.” He shakes his head slowly, looking at the crumbling mortar walls, the arteries of rust or blood veining the corners. “Christ,” he utters.

The younger man looks at him. “What do you mean?”

“The jumpsuit, the orange jumpsuit,” Rick mutters. “That’s how he knew about the prison. How could I be so fucking stupid?”

“Come on!” Martinez has heard enough; the clock is ticking. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Rick nods at Glenn, and the younger man flips down his visor.

And then the threesome slip out of the room and start down the corridor toward the ramp.

*   *   *

For almost ten excruciating minutes now, in the lowest level of the subbasement, Bruce and Gabe haven’t budged from their places against the gritty cinder-block wall adjacent to the holding chamber.

The Governor paces in front of them, wielding the katana sword, moving in and out of pools of dirty light from hundred-watt safety bulbs, mumbling to himself, his eyes glassy with rage and madness. Every few moments, the muffled voice of the woman—barely audible behind the rolling door of the service area—murmurs cryptically. Who the hell is she talking to? What kind of malfunction is rotting this lady’s brain?

Bruce and Gabe await their orders but decisions are not exactly forthcoming: The Governor looks as though he’s battling his own demonic voices, trying to cut both the air and his problems to shreds with the saber, every once in a while snarling a garbled, enraged, “Fuck … fuck … how could … fuck … how the fuck could this…?!”

At one point, Gabe ventures a suggestion: “Hey, boss, why don’t we focus on them prisons down by Albany? There’s a bunch of them over by—”

“Shut the fuck up!” The Governor paces. “I’ve got to round up new biters for the fights now! I’ve got to find new fighters! FUCK!”

Bruce chimes in: “Boss, what if we—?”

“FUCK!” He swings the sword at the air. “That fucking bitch!” He turns to the garage door and slams his boot as hard as he can against the rusty metal panels. The thing booms, leaving a dent the size of a pig belly. Gabe and Bruce jerk at the noise. “FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!” The Governor turns to them. “OPEN IT UP!!”

Bruce and Gabe exchange a quick, heated glance, and then Bruce goes to the door, kneeling and grasping the lower edge in both hands.

“I want to see her fucking guts spill out all over the ground, damn it,” the Governor growls. The door squeals up and the Governor twitches, as though a bolt of electrical current is coursing through him. “STOP!”

Bruce freezes with the door half up, his big hands welded to the edge. Both he and Gabe twist around and gaze at their boss.

“Close it,” the Governor says, his voice back to normal as though a switch has been thrown.

Bruce looks at him. “Sure, boss … but why?”

The Governor rubs the bridge of his nose, rubs his eyes. “I’m going to…”

The men wait. Another fleeting glance exchanged. Bruce finally licks his lips. “You okay, boss?”

“I’m sleeping on this one,” he says softly. “I don’t want to do anything I’ll regret later.” He exhales a long breath, stretching his neck muscles. Then he turns and starts walking away. “I gotta go over all the angles,” he mutters as he departs, not even looking at them. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

He vanishes around the corner at the end of the corridor, passing out of the gloomy light like a phantom.

*   *   *

“WAIT!”

The voice pops out of the shadows behind the escapees, from the depths of the corridor, and at first Martinez is sure they’re busted and his plan has gone all to hell before they even had a chance to take a single step outside.

“Please stop!”

The three men jerk to a stop near two intersecting tunnels, the back of Martinez’s neck prickling. They whirl around one by one—Martinez, then Rick, and then Glenn—each man breathing hard, hearts pumping, trembling hands going for the grips of their firearms and weapons. They squint to see who it is, a shadowy figure approaching quickly, passing under a yellow cone of light.

“Hold on,” the young woman says, the light illuminating the crown of her head, the shimmer of blond hair in a French braid, the tendrils hanging down across a girlish face. Her lab coat positively glows in the dull light of the passageway. She approaches, out of breath.

Rick speaks up. “What is it, Alice? What do you want?”

“I was thinking about it,” she says in a shaky voice, catching her breath in the murky, airless tunnel. Somewhere not far from there, one level up, outside the vestibules, the wind hums through empty bleachers and gantries. “If you’re going,” she says, “I want you to take us with you. Dr. Stevens and me.”

The men share tense glances, but nobody offers a response.

Alice looks at Rick. “Wherever you’re living has got to be better than this … and with your wife pregnant, I’m sure you could use us.”

Rick chews on this for a moment. Then he proffers her a thin smile. “I’m not arguing with that. We’d love to have you. In fact—”

“Okay, guys and gals,” Martinez breaks in, his voice as taut as a piano string. “We need to go now.”

*   *   *

They hurry down a branching tunnel and then down a long ramp, the clock ticking. They end up in the fetid darkness of the subbasement. Glenn has a sketchy memory of where Michonne is being kept—he’s thrown off a little by all the garage doors that look alike, the maddeningly similar scars of ancient grease and grit—but he remembers being dragged around this sublevel. They eventually find the last narrow warren of service bays and pause.

“I’m pretty sure it’s just around this next corner,” Glenn whispers as they huddle in the shadows of two intersecting tunnels.

“Good,” Rick utters softly. “We get her, and we get the doctor, and we go.” He looks at Martinez. “What’s the distance to the doc’s place and then to the fence? Is there an easy way out?”

“Hold it!” Martinez thrusts a gloved hand in the air, his voice a loud stage whisper. “Hold on … quiet. Stay back.” He cautiously peers around the corner, then looks back at the group. “I’d be shocked as all hell if the Governor didn’t put a guard where he’s got your friend.”

Rick starts to say, “Why don’t we—”

“Running up there ain’t the best of ideas,” Martinez cautions. “Unless you want to get shot. Everyone here knows me. I’ll go on—then call you guys up when I finish.”

Nobody argues.

Martinez takes a deep breath, brushes himself off, and then walks around the corner, leaving the three outcasts to huddle together nervously in the darkness of the tunnel.

Glenn looks at Alice. “Hi, I’m Glenn.”

“It’s Alice,” she says with a jittery smile. “Nice to meet you.”

Rick barely hears their exchange. His heart beats in syncopation with the ticking clock in his head. They have one shot.

FIFTEEN

“Hey—what’s up, Gabe?” Martinez approaches the last garage door with practiced calm, walking up to the stocky guard with a genial smile and wave. “He got you down here protecting the gold reserve or something?”

The portly man in the turtleneck—standing with his back pressed against the rolling door—gives Martinez a grin and a shake of the head. “Not exactly. That bitch who fucked up the fights is in there.”

Martinez comes up and stands next to the burly man. “Uh-huh.”

“She’s a pisser, that one,” Gabe says with a smirk. “Boss man ain’t taking any chances.”

Martinez returns the smirk with a lascivious grin of his own. “Think I could have a look? Just a peek. Didn’t get a good look at her at the fight. Seemed hot.”

Gabe’s grin widens. “Oh yeah—she was hot. After the beating the Governor threw her, though, she—”

The blow comes out of nowhere—a swift, hard knuckle-punch to the portly man’s Adam’s apple—and it shuts off Gabe’s air passage as well as his voice. The stocky man doubles over, gasping for air, shocked senseless.

Martinez finishes the job with the butt of his .762 caliber Garand rifle. The blunt end of the stock strikes Gabe squarely on the back of the skull, making a wooden smacking noise.

Gabe collapses facedown, a trickle of blood from the back of his head already forming in the cement. Martinez calls out over his shoulder, “ALL CLEAR!”

From the shadows at the end of the tunnel, they all come trotting up with eyes wide and adrenaline pumping. Rick takes one look at Gabe, and then turns to Martinez and starts to say something, but Martinez is already crouching by the base of the garage door.

“Help me get this door open—it’s all dented—not opening,” he says with a grunt, laboring at the bottom edge of the door with his gloved hands. Rick and Glenn come over and crouch next to him, and it takes all three of them to force the thing up. Hinges squeak and complain as they inch the thing halfway open.

They duck under the sprung door, and Rick takes a few steps into the dark, fusty-smelling mortar chamber … freezing in his tracks suddenly, paralyzed by the sight of his friend … instantly aware on some cellular level in his brain, like a synapse firing, that a war has already begun.

*   *   *

The woman on the floor of the dark holding cell, her arms pinioned to the wall, doesn’t recognize her friends at first. Long braids hanging down, chest rising and falling with pained, shallow breaths, blood trails fanning out from her spot across the concrete, she tries to raise her head and gaze through catatonic eyes.

“Oh God…” Rick approaches her cautiously, barely getting the words out. “Are you—?”

She levers her head up and spits at him. He jerks back, instinctively shielding his face. Dehydration and shock and exhaustion have dried her saliva to sawdust. She tries to spit again.

“Whoa, Michonne! Hold it,” Rick says, crouching down in front of her. “It’s me.” His voice softens. “Michonne, it’s Rick.”

“R-rick?” Her voice comes out in a withered, faint, husky whisper. Her eyes struggle to lock onto him. “Rick?”

“Guys!” Rick rises to his feet and turns to the others. “Help me get her untied!”

The other three hurry over to the ropes. Alice gently loosens one ankle, while Glenn kneels by the other and struggles with the slipknot, muttering to the woman, “Christ—are you okay?”

Another strangled wheeze comes out of the woman. “N-no … I’m not … not even close.”

Rick and Martinez each take a wrist, and they start tweezing the knots open.

Contrary emotions flow through Martinez as he works on the rope, smelling the poor woman, feeling the fever radiating off her ravaged body. The air reeks of despair—a mixture of body odor, festering wounds, and the spoor of violent sex. The woman’s pants are tied around her waist with strapping tape, the fabric torn and mottled with wet spots of every description—blood, tears, semen, sweat, urine, spittle—from days of torture. Her flesh looks scourged, as though somebody applied a belt sander to her arms and legs.

Martinez fights the impulse to confess everything to these people, to give up the ruse. His vision blurs. He feels light-headed, nauseous. Is all this worth a little security for this shit-heel town? A minor tactical advantage? What in God’s name did this woman do to deserve this? For a moment, Martinez imagines the Governor doing this to him. Martinez has never been this confused.

The ropes finally come off and the woman collapses to the floor with a gasp.

The others stand back as Michonne writhes for a moment on the floor in a prone position, her forehead pressed against the cement. Rick crouches down by her as she struggles to get a breath, to lift herself up, to get her bearings. He says to her, “Do you need—?”

The woman on the floor suddenly pushes herself up, rising to her knees. She sniffs back all the agony in one stubborn, loud snort.

Rick and the others stare at her. Mesmerized by her sudden reserve of energy, they stand silently around her, not knowing what to say or do. How are they going to get her out of here? She looks like a paraplegic laboring to get out of her wheelchair.

All at once she rises to her feet, moving on pure rage now, balling her slender hands into fists. She swallows all the pain and looks around the room. Then she looks at Rick, and her voice takes on the sound of a phonograph playing a scratchy recording. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

*   *   *

They don’t get very far. Barely making it out of the subbasement, and up a single flight of stairs, they are approaching the end of the main corridor—Michonne in the lead now—when the black woman suddenly shoots her hand up in a warning gesture. “Stop! Someone’s coming.”

The others freeze, pressing in behind her. Martinez shoves his way past the others and steps up beside Michonne, whispering in her ear, “I can handle this. People don’t know what I’m doing yet—I’ll keep them from seeing you.”

From around the corner, a shadow looms, a pair of footsteps approaching.

Martinez steps out into the shaft of light spilling down on the junction.

“Martinez?” Dr. Stevens jerks with a start when he sees the man in the bandanna. “What are you doing down here?”

“Uh, Doc—we were on our way to get you.”

“Is there a problem?”

Martinez gives him a hard look. “We’re leaving here—this town. We want you to come with us.”

“What?” Stevens blinks and cocks his head and tries to compute what he’s hearing. “Who’s we?”

Martinez shoots a glance over his shoulder, and he waves the others over. The doctor stares. Rick and Michonne and Glenn, and finally Alice, come sheepishly forward, out of the shadows, and stand in the harsh light of the work lamp. They all stare at the doctor, who stares back at them, processing all this with a somber look on his face.

“Hey, Doc,” Rick says at last. “What do you say? You with us, or not?”

The expression on the doctor’s face goes through a subtle transformation. His eyes narrow behind his wire-rimmed glasses, and his lips purse thoughtfully for a moment. He looks, just for an instant, as though he’s diagnosing a particularly complex set of symptoms.

Then he says, “I just need to gather some supplies from the infirmary and then we can go.” He gives them his patented sardonic smile. “Won’t take a minute.”

*   *   *

Outside the crumbling gates of the arena, they hurry across the parking lot, avoiding the stares of errant citizens wandering the side streets.

The night sky opens up above them—a riot of stars veiled by thin wisps of clouds, and no moon in sight. They move single file, quickly, but not so quickly as to make noise or to attract undue attention or to give the appearance of escape. Some of the passersby wave to them. Nobody recognizes the strangers—Rick and Glenn—but some of the wanderers do double-takes when they see the woman in dreadlocks. Martinez keeps them moving.

One after another, they hop the railing on the west side of the arena and cross a vacant lot, moving toward the main drag. The doctor brings up the rear, clutching his satchel of medical supplies.

“What’s the fastest way out of here?” Rick asks, already winded and breathing hard as he and Martinez pause to catch their breath in the shadows of the mercantile building. The others push in behind them.

“This way.” Martinez indicates the deserted sidewalk on the other side of the street. “Just keep following—I’ll get us out of here.”

They hurl across the street, and then plunge into the shadows of the unoccupied sidewalk. The walkway extends at least four blocks to the west, running under awnings and overhangs, shrouded in darkness. They hurry single file through the shadows.

“The less we’re out in the open like this, the better,” Martinez comments under his breath to Rick. “We just need to make it to an alley—then get over one of those fences. They’re not guarded as much as the front gate. This shouldn’t be hard.”

They cross another half a block when the sound of a voice rings out.

“DOCTOR!”

This throws everybody off their stride and raises hackles on the back of Martinez’s neck. Everybody staggers to a halt. Martinez turns and sees an unidentified figure coming around the corner of a building behind them.

Quickly, instinctively, not even looking, Martinez moves his fingertip toward the rifle’s trigger pad—ready for anything.

*   *   *

A nanosecond later, Martinez breathes a momentary sigh of relief, releasing pressure on the trigger, as he sees one of the town’s matrons approaching. “Dr. Stevens!” she calls out in a voice weak with malnourishment.

Stevens whirls. “Oh—hello, Miss Williams.” He gives a nervous little nod to the middle-aged hausfrau coming toward him. The others slip deeper into the shadows, out of the woman’s eyeline. The doctor blocks her path. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry to bother you like this,” she says, hurrying up to him. Dressed in a shapeless, frayed shift, with short-cropped hair, she looks up at him through huge, downtrodden eyes. The thickness of her middle and the jowls on her face belie her once youthful beauty. “My son, Matthew, he’s got a slight fever.”

“Oh … um—”

“I’m sure it’s nothing but I don’t want to take any chances.”

“I understand.”

“Do you have any time later?”

“Of course. I—I just—um,” the doctor stammers, and it makes Martinez crazy. Why doesn’t he just fucking get rid of her? The doctor clears his throat. “Just … uh … bring him by my office later today … if you could … I’ll see him then. I’ll be—I’ll make sure to fit him in.”

“Sure, I’ll—Are you okay, Dr. Stevens?” She glances at the others lurking in the shadows behind Stevens, and then gives the doctor a quizzical look with those big sad eyes. “You seem upset.”

“I’m fine—really.” He clutches the satchel tighter to his chest. “I’m just—I’m in the middle of something right now.”

He starts to back away from her, which sends a wave of relief down Martinez’s midsection.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Stevens says to the woman, “but I must be going. I’m sorry.” The doctor turns and joins the others.

Martinez leads the group around a corner and pauses on the edge of the sidewalk for a moment, adrenaline surging. For a brief instant, he considers cutting Stevens and Alice loose. They know too much, and they’re too tied into the community—they could be a huge liability. Worse than that, they may know Martinez a little too well. They could easily see through his gambit. Maybe they have already. Maybe they’re just playing along.

“Doctor?” Alice goes over to Stevens and puts a hand on his shoulder. Stevens looks crestfallen, rubbing his face. Alice speaks softly. “That woman’s son…?”

“I can’t think about that right now,” the doctor mutters. “It’s just too—I just can’t. We have to get out of here—we may not have another chance.” He takes a girding breath, looking down, shaking his head. “These people—they’ll just have to get along without us.”

Alice looks at him. “You’re right. I know. It’s going to be okay.”

“Hey!” Martinez hisses an urgent whisper at them. “Save it—we don’t have time for this right now!”

He gets them moving again—down a boardwalk, across another road, and down a side street toward the mouth of an alley two hundred yards to the south.

The hush that has fallen over the town bothers Martinez. He can hear the hum of generators, the rustling of branches against the wall. Their footsteps sound like pistol shots in his ears, the beating of his heart loud enough to lead a marching band.

He picks up the pace. The passersby have dwindled away. They’re alone now. Martinez increases his stride from a trot to a steady run, the others struggling to keep up. A moment later, he hears the one named Michonne make a strange comment to somebody behind him.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she says between heaving breaths as she runs. “Don’t worry about me.”

Glenn’s voice is barely audible over the noise of their churning footsteps and heavy panting. “Okay—sorry.”

“Keep it down!”

Martinez hisses a breathless whisper at them over his shoulder as they approach the mouth of the alley. Shooting his gloved hand up, he brings the group to a stop and then leads them around the corner of an adjacent building and into the litter-strewn darkness.

The alley is bound in thick shadows, sticky with the stench of garbage cans lined along one wall, a single flickering emergency light at the far end providing the only illumination. The beating of Martinez’s heart kicks up a degree. He quickly surveys the area. He sees the sentry at the far end of the alley.

“Okay—wait here a minute,” he says to the others. “I’ll be right back.”

Now Martinez faces another grand performance—a role within a role within a role—as he sniffs back his nerves and starts toward the end of the alley. He can see the young gang-banger on the lift platform thirty yards away, his back turned, an AK in his arms as he stares over a temporary barricade of riveted steel panels.

On the other side of the barricade lies the dark outskirts and freedom.

“Hey—hey, kid!” Martinez approaches the sentry with a genial wave. He keeps his voice casual but authoritative, as if giving a pet cat an order to get off the dinner table. “I’m taking over for you!”

The kid flinches with a start, and then he turns and looks down. Hardly out of his teens, with a spindly body decked out in hip-hop regalia, a headband drawn around his Jheri curls, he looks as though he’s playing cops and robbers on the perch. He also looks slightly stoned and more than a little paranoid.

Martinez comes closer. “Hand me that rifle and run along. I’ll cover the rest of your shift.”

The kid starts climbing down with a shrug. “Sure, man—whatever.” He hops to the pavement. “But, uh … why you doin’ this? You need me somewhere else or somethin’?”

Martinez reaches for the AK in the kid’s arms, again with that pet owner tough love in his voice. “Don’t ask any questions. I’m doing you a favor here. Hand me the gun, thank me—and enjoy your time off.”

The kid stares at him, handing over the firearm. “Uh … sure.”

The kid walks away, heading back down the alley, mumbling to himself. “Whatever … whatever, man … it’s your show … I just work here.”

*   *   *

The others huddle behind the adjacent edifice until the sentry has emerged from the alley and sauntered off into the night, muttering an off-key version of some obscure rap tune. They wait until the kid vanishes around a corner. Rick then gives Glenn a nod, and they slip into the alley—one by one—quickly traversing the length of dark, reeking, garbage-stained pavement.

Martinez is waiting for them on the lift perch, gazing down at them with businesslike fervor. “Come on!” He motions them over. “We get over this wall and we’re home free.”

The group gathers at the base of the barricade.

Martinez looks down at them. “This worked out better than I thought it would—but we still need to hurry. One of the Governor’s goons could walk by any minute.”

Holding his stump, Rick looks up at him. “Right, right … and you think we’re not in a hurry to get out of here?”

Martinez manages a tense smile. “Yeah, I guess I see your point.”

Behind Rick, a voice murmurs something that Martinez doesn’t catch at first.

Rick starts, spins, and looks at Michonne. Glenn does the same. In fact, they all turn and look at the black woman, who stands in the shadows, looking grim and stoic as she stares off at the night.

“I’m not leaving yet,” she utters in a voice so cold and committed it could be a declaration of name-rank-and-serial-number.

“What?!” Glenn gawks at her. “What are you talking about?!”

Michonne stares at the young man through bottomless dark eyes. Her voice is as steady as a cleric delivering the holy writ. “I’m going to visit the Governor.”

SIXTEEN

The mute silence that follows Michonne’s declaration seems to hold the entire group rapt for endless moments, as the implications of her pronouncement spread from person to person, from awkward glance to awkward glance, like a disease transmitted by eye contact. It goes unspoken what she has in mind for Philip Blake—although no one dares to contemplate the specifics—and that’s the part that hits people first. But as the silence lengthens and turns uncomfortable in that reeking dark alley, it becomes clear to Martinez, who is gazing down at this transaction from the lift platform, that Michonne’s unstoppable trajectory speaks to something darker than mere vengeance. In these brutal new times, the act of revenge—albeit a lower, baser instinct during the normal course of human events—now seems to take on an apocalyptic inevitability, as natural as shooting a walking corpse in the head or watching a loved one turn into a monster. Infected appendages are quickly severed and cauterized in this horrible new society. Evil people are no longer a thing of legend and forensic cop shows. In this new world, they are like sick cattle that simply need to be separated from the herd. They are defective parts that need to be replaced. Nobody standing at that wall that night could blame or even be surprised at Michonne’s sudden and inexorable decision to circle back and find the cancerous cell festering in that town—the man who desecrated her—but that doesn’t make it easier to watch.

“Michonne, I don’t think—” Rick starts to object.

“I’ll catch up with you,” she says, cutting him off. “Or I won’t.”

“Michonne—”

“I can’t leave without doing this.” She augers her gaze into Rick’s eyes. “Go ahead.” Then she turns and looks at Alice. “Where does he live?”

*   *   *

At that moment, on the other side of town, nobody notices two figures slipping into the dark maw of an alley just beyond the S-curve on Durand Street—about as far away from the commotion of the racetrack and the central business district as you can get and still be within the safe zone. No guards stray this far south of Main Street, and the outer concertina-wire fences keep errant biters at bay.

Bundled in denim, with blanket rolls under their arms, the two of them move side by side, staying low. One of them hauls a long canvas bag on a sling over his shoulder, the contents clanking softly with each bump. At the end of the alley, they squeeze through a narrow gap between a semitruck cab and a railroad boxcar.

“Where in God’s name are you taking me?” Lilly Caul wants to know, following Austin across a vacant lot veiled in darkness.

Austin gives her a mischievous chuckle. “You’ll see … trust me.”

Lilly steps gingerly over a patch of thorny milkweed and smells the odor of decay emanating from the adjacent forest, about fifty yards beyond the outer perimeter. The back of her neck bristles. Austin takes her arm and helps her over fallen timber and into a clearing.

“Be careful, watch your step,” he says, treating her with the kid gloves of an old-school father-to-be, which, to Lilly, is at once annoying and kind of adorable.

“I’m pregnant, Austin, not an invalid.” She follows him into the center of the clearing. It’s a private place, sheltered by foliage and deadfall branches. There’s a hollowed-out crater in the ground, scorched and petrified, where some previous visitor had dug a fire pit. “Where did you learn about prenatal care? Cartoons?”

“Very funny, wise guy … sit down.”

Two ancient tree stumps provide perfect—if not exactly comfortable—places for a couple to sit and talk. The crickets roar all around them as Austin sets his bag down, and then takes a seat next to Lilly.

The sky above them twinkles and pulses with the kind of starry heavens only seen in rural areas. The clouds have dispersed, and the air—for once—is clear of walker stench. It smells of pine and black earth and clear night.

Lilly feels for the first time since—well, since as far back as she can remember—like a whole person. She feels as though they might actually have a chance to make this work. Austin is no dream father, nor is he the perfect husband by any stretch of the imagination, but he has a spark to him that touches Lilly’s heart. He’s a decent soul, and that’s enough for now. They have a lot of challenges ahead of them, a lot to work out, a lot of dangerous terrain to navigate. But she believes now that they will survive … together.

“So, what’s this mysterious ritual you dragged me out here for, anyway?” she says finally, lifting her collar and stretching her stiff neck. Her breasts are sore, and her tummy’s been complaining all day. But in a strange way, she has never felt better.

“My brothers and I used to do this thing every Halloween,” he says, indicating the canvas bag. “Came up with it when we were high, I guess … but it makes sense right now for some reason.” He looks at her. “Did you bring those things I asked you to bring?”

She gives him a nod. “Yep.” She pats her jacket pocket. “Got ’em right here.”

“Okay … good.” He stands, goes over to the bag, and unzips it. “We usually make a fire to throw the stuff into … but I’m thinking tonight we’ll try to avoid attracting the attention.” He pulls out a shovel, goes over to the pit, and starts digging. “Instead we’ll just bury the stuff.”

Lilly pulls out a couple photographs she found in her wallet, a bullet from one of her Ruger pistols, and a small object wrapped in tissue paper. She lays the bundle in her lap. “Okay, ready when you are, pretty boy.”

Austin sets down the shovel, goes back to the bag, and pulls out a plastic one-liter bottle and two paper cups. He pours dark liquid in each cup. “Found some grape juice … we don’t want to be drinking wine in your condition.”

Lilly grins. “You’re gonna drive me crazy with this Jewish mother routine.”

Austin ignores the comment. “Are you warm enough? You need another blanket?”

She sighs. “I’m fine, Austin … for God’s sake stop worrying about me.”

He hands her a cup of juice, and pulls a small baggie from his pocket.

“Okay, I’ll go first,” he says. Inside the Ziploc are half an ounce of marijuana, a little metal pipe, and some rolling papers. He looks wistfully at the paraphernalia and says, “Time to put away childish things.” He raises his cup. “Here’s to a lifelong love affair with weed.” He looks at the bag. “You got me through a lot of rough shit but it’s time to go.”

He tosses the pot in the hole.

Lilly raises her cup. “Here’s to sobriety … it’s a bitch but it’s for the best.”

They drink.

*   *   *

“I can’t believe she just left us like that,” the young man named Glenn says after climbing up the wall. His body armor creaks as he stands in the wind on the edge of the lift platform, helping Alice scale the wall. The nurse is having trouble—her upper body strength not what it could be—and she labors to pull herself onto the perch. Glenn grunts with effort as he pulls her over the precipice. “Should we help her? I’m not crazy about that guy either.”

Rick stands on the platform behind Glenn, watching Martinez reaching down to Stevens, hoisting the doctor up the side of the barricade. “Trust me, Glenn,” Rick says softly, “we’d probably just slow her down. Our safest bet is getting out now while we can.”

The doctor struggles up the wall and cobbles onto the platform to join the others.

Martinez makes sure everyone is okay. They all take deep breaths, turning and gazing out at the wasted landscape on the other side of the rampart. They can see the neighboring woods through a narrow gap between two derelict buildings. The night wind swirls litter across empty dirt roads, the crumbling ruins of train trestles in the distance like fallen giants. The moon has risen full and high—a lunatic’s moon—and the milky light puts an exclamation point on all the dark crevices, shadowy alcoves, and snaking ravines that could potentially contain biters.

Rick takes another breath and gives Glenn a reassuring pat on the back. “Michonne can take care of herself,” he says in a low voice. “Besides, I get the impression this is something she’d want to do alone.”

“Ladies first,” Martinez says to Alice, indicating the far edge of the platform.

Alice takes a tentative step toward the ledge, filling her lungs with breath.

Martinez helps her find a foothold, and then he lowers her down the outer wall. “There you go,” he says, his hands gripping her under the armpits. He accidentally brushes the sides of her breasts. “You’re okay. Almost there.”

“Just watch the hands,” Alice says, scuffing and grunting down the side of the wall, until she finally hops down to the dirt road, raising a small cloud of dust. She crouches instinctively, looking around the danger zone, her eyes wide and her hackles up.

Martinez lowers Glenn down next, and then the doctor. The two men land next to Alice in the dirt, raising more dust. The silence is broken by their heavy, tense breathing—and the drumming of their hearts in their ears—as each of them turn and survey the dark road ahead of them, which leads out of town and into the black oblivion of night.

They hear the scuffling sounds of Martinez coming down the wall. The tall man lands with a thump, the weapons slung over his back rattling, and then he gazes back up at the parapet. “Okay, Rick … let’s go.”

Up on the platform, Rick tucks his bandaged stump against his sternum. “This ain’t going to be easy,” he murmurs. “You guys got me?”

“We got you, brother.” Martinez reaches up for him. “Just ease on down.”

Rick starts awkwardly lowering himself down the outer wall with one hand.

“Jesus,” Alice says, watching. “Don’t drop him. Be careful!”

Martinez catches the hundred-and-eighty-pound man with a grunt, easing him to the ground. Rick exhales a pained breath and looks around.

Across the dirt clearing, Dr. Stevens stands in the shadows of an abandoned storefront, a weather-beaten sign hanging by a thread, with the words MCCALLUM FEED AND SEED. He lets out a sigh of relief and checks his satchel for any damage. The glass vials of antibiotics and painkillers remain intact, the instruments in good order. “I just can’t believe we made it out of there so easily,” he mumbles, checking the last of the bag’s contents. “I mean, the walls aren’t exactly meant to keep people in … but…”

Behind the doctor, a shadow moves in the depths of the ramshackle doorway of McCallum’s. Nobody notices it. Nor does anybody hear the clumsy, shuffling footsteps faintly crackling over detritus and packing straps, moving toward their voices.

“I’m just so damn relieved,” Stevens is saying, snapping the satchel shut.

The figure lurches out of the doorway—just a blur of teeth, ragged clothing, and mottled fish-belly skin in the darkness—and clamps its jaws down on the closest human flesh in its path.

*   *   *

Sometimes the victim doesn’t even see it coming until it’s too late, which is maybe, on some fundamental level, the most merciful way for things to go down.

The creature that sinks its teeth into the nape of Dr. Stevens’s exposed neck is enormous—probably a former field hand or stock clerk accustomed to loading sixty-pound bales of fertilizer or cattle feed into truck beds all day, day in and day out—and it latches down on the doctor’s jugular so firmly, a crowbar couldn’t loosen its jaws. Clad in moldy bib overalls, its thinning hair reduced to spidery wisps on its veined white skull, it has eyes like yellow pilot lamps and makes a watery, garbled coughing sound as it roots its rotten incisors into live tissue.

Dr. Stevens stiffens immediately, arms going up, eyeglasses knocked off his face, satchel flying, a horrid shriek bursting out of him in complete involuntary shock. He can’t see or detect the agent of his demise—only the Day-Glo red shade of hot agony snapping down over his gaze.

The suddenness of the attack catches everybody by surprise, the group bristling in unison, reaching for weapons, scrambling backward.

Alice lets out a scream—“DR. STEVENS!!”—and she sees the weight of the massive biter, combined with the doctor’s involuntary writhing and staggering, pull Stevens backward, off balance, and onto the ground.

Stevens lands on top of his assailant with a wet grunt, the blood washing over and baptizing the giant biter underneath him in a torrent of fluid as black and oily as molasses in the darkness. In a strangled, insensate voice, the doctor jabbers, “What—? What is it? Is it—? Is it one of them? Is it—? Is it a biter?”

The others lunge toward him, but Alice has already reached for the sentry’s AK, which dangles on its strap over Martinez’s shoulder, her voice booming, “GIVE ME THAT!”

“Hey!” Martinez can’t tell what’s happening, the tug on his shoulder accompanied by voices yelling all around him, and the other men pushing past him.

Alice already has the AK up and aimed, and then she’s pulling the trigger—thank God the kid on the wall keeps his weapon locked and loaded, the safety off at all times—and the gun barks.

A bouquet of fire sparks and flickers out of the short muzzle as the shell casings fly, and the tracers burst a chain of holes in the biter’s temple, cheek, jaw, shoulder, and half its torso. The thing twitches and wriggles in its death throes beneath the wounded doctor, and Alice keeps firing, and firing, and firing, until the magazine clicks empty, and the slide snaps open—and she keeps firing.

“It’s okay … it’s okay, Alice.”

The faint sound of a male voice is the first thing that penetrates her ringing ears and her traumatized brain. She lowers the gun and realizes that Dr. Stevens is addressing her from the blood-soaked heap of a funeral bier on which he lies.

“Oh-God-Doctor—DR. STEVENS!” She tosses the assault rifle to the ground with a clatter and goes to him. She drops to her knees, and reaches for his neck, getting her fingertips wet with his arterial blood as she feels for a pulse, trying to remember the CPR lessons he provided her, the trauma unit protocols, when she realizes he is tugging at her lab coat with his blood-spattered fingers.

“I’m not … dying … Alice … think of it … scientifically,” he utters around a mouth filling up with blood. In the darkness, his face looks almost serene. The others press in behind Alice and look on and listen closely. “I’m just … evolving … into a different … a worse … life form.”

The horror spreads from person to person hovering over him, from face to face, as Alice fights her tears and strokes his cheek. “Doctor—”

“I’ll still exist, Alice … in some way,” he utters in barely a whisper. “Take the supplies, Alice … you’ll need them … to take care of these people. Use what I taught you. Now go … go … go on.”

Alice stares as the doctor’s life drains out of him, his intelligent eyes going glassy, and then empty, gaping at the nothingness. She lets her head loll forward but no tears will come. The desolation in her core won’t allow tears to come now.

Martinez stands over her, watching all this with nervous intensity. A fist of contradictory emotions grips his insides. He likes these people—the doctor and Alice—regardless of their hatred of the Governor, their petty betrayals, their scheming and gossiping and sarcasm and disrespect. God help Martinez—he likes them. He feels a weird kinship with them, and now he’s groping for purchase in the dark.

Alice rises to her feet, picking up the satchel of medical supplies.

Martinez touches her shoulder, and softly says, “We gotta move.”

Alice nods, says nothing, stares at the bodies.

“People in town will think the shots were just the guard taking out biters that got too close to the fence,” Martinez goes on, his voice hurried and taut with tension. He glances over his shoulder at the other two men, who stand by, looking rattled. Martinez turns back to Alice. “But the sound will attract more biters—and we need to be gone before they get here.”

He looks at the doctor’s slack face, stippled with blood, frozen in death.

“I—He was a good friend,” Martinez adds finally. “I’ll miss him too.”

Alice gives one last nod, and then turns away. She nods at Martinez.

Without another word, Martinez grabs the AK and gives a hand gesture to the others, and then leads the three survivors down a side road—and on toward the town limits—their silhouettes swallowed within moments by absolute, unforgiving, implacable darkness.

*   *   *

“Damn it, honey—eat it!” The Governor lowers himself to his hands and knees on the foul-smelling carpet of his living room, holding a severed human foot by its big toe in front of the dead little girl. The Japanese sword lies on the floor close by—a treasure, a talisman, a spoil of war that the Governor hasn’t let out of his sight since the debacle at the racetrack—its implications now the furthest thing from his mind. “It’s not completely fresh,” he says, indicating the gray appendage, “but I swear this thing was walking not two hours ago.”

The tiny cadaver jerks against its chain eighteen inches from his hand. It emits another little growl—a broken Chatty Cathy doll—and turns its frosted-glass eyes away from the tidbit.

“C’mon, Penny, it’s not that bad.” He inches closer and waves the dripping, severed foot in front of her. It’s pretty big, hard to tell if it’s male or female—the toes are small but all natural, no remnants of polish—and it has already begun to turn blue-green and stiffen up with rigor mortis. “And it’s only going to get worse, you don’t eat it now. C’mon, sweetie, do it for—”

An enormous thud makes the Governor jerk with a start on the floor.

“What the fuck!” He turns toward the front door, across the room.

Another massive thud rings out. The Governor rises to his feet.

A third impact on the door results in drywall dust sifting down from the lintel, and a faint cracking noise along the seams of the deadbolt.

“What the hell do you want?!” he calls out. “And don’t beat on my goddamn door so hard!”

The fourth impact snaps the deadbolt and chain, the door swinging open so hard it bangs into the adjacent wall in a burst of wood shards and dust, the knob embedding itself into the wood like a dowel.

The inertia drives the intruder into the room on a whirlwind.

The Governor tenses in the center of the living room—fists balling up, teeth clamping down in a tableau of fight-or-flight instinct. He looks as though he’s seeing a ghost materialize next to his secondhand sofa.

Michonne tumbles into the apartment, nearly falling on her face from all the forward momentum.

She skids to a halt three feet away from the subject of her quest.

Getting her balance back, she squares her shoulders, fists also clenching, feet planted firmly now, head tilted forward in an offensive posture.

For the briefest of moments, they stand facing each other. Michonne has put herself together on the way over—her jumpsuit straightened, her top tucked in, headband tightened around her lush braids—to the point where she looks as if she’s ready to begin a workday or possibly go to a funeral. After an unbearable pause—the two combatants staring each other down in an almost pathologically intense manner—the first sound emitted comes out of the Governor.

“Well, well.” His voice is low, flat, cold, with zero affect or emotion. “This should be interesting.”

SEVENTEEN

“My turn,” Lilly says, her voice barely audible above the din of crickets and the breeze that is rattling the branches around the dark clearing. She finds a snapshot taken on a disposable camera of her and Megan at a bar in Myrtle Beach, both of them completely baked, their eyes glazed over and red as cinders. She stands and goes over to the hole in the ground. “Here’s to my BFF, my gal pal, my old friend Megan, may she rest in peace.”

The photograph flutters and falls like a dead leaf into the fire pit.

“To Megan,” Austin says, and takes another sip of the sugary juice. “Okay … next up … my bros.” He pulls a small, rusty harmonica from his pocket. “I’d like to drink to my brothers, John and Tommy Ballard, who got killed by walkers in Atlanta last year.”

He tosses the harmonica in the pit. The little metal apparatus clunks and bounces off the hard ground. Austin gazes down at it, his eyes growing distant and shiny. “Great musicians, good dudes … I hope they’re in a better place right now.”

Austin wipes his eyes as Lilly raises her cup and says softly, “To John and Tommy.”

They each drink another sip.

“My next one’s a little strange,” Lilly says, finding the little .22 caliber slug and holding it up between her thumb and index finger. The brass gleams in the moonlight. “We’re surrounded by death, every day; death is everywhere,” she says. “I’d like to fucking bury it … I know it doesn’t change anything but I just want to do it. For the baby. For Woodbury.”

She tosses the bullet in the hole.

Austin stares at the little metal round for a moment, then mutters, “For our baby.”

Lilly raises her cup. “For our baby … and for the future.” She thinks for a moment. “And for the human race.”

They both stare at the bullet.

“In the name of the Holy Spirit,” Lilly says very softly, staring down at the hole in the ground.

*   *   *

A fight—the spontaneous hand-to-hand kind—comes in many varieties. In the East, the business of fighting is Zenlike, studied, controlled, academic—the opponents often coming at each other with years of training behind them, and a sort of mathematical precision. In Asia, the weaker opponent learns to use the adversary’s strengths against them, the mêlées settled promptly. On the other end of the spectrum, in competitive rings around the world, freestyle battles can last for hours, with many rounds, the final outcome resting upon the physical stamina of each pugilist.

A third kind of fistfight occurs in the dark back alleys of American cities, during which opponents engage in a wholly different kind of battle. Fast and brutal and unpredictable—sometimes awkward—the common street fight is usually over within seconds. Street fighters have a tendency to shotgun their blows at each other, willy-nilly, driven by rage, and the whole fracas usually ends in a draw … or worse, with somebody finally pulling a knife or a firearm to bring things to a quick and mortal conclusion.

The battle that ensues in the Governor’s foul-smelling, dimly lit living room that night encompasses all three styles, and spans a grand total of eighty-seven seconds—the first five of which involve very little fighting at all. It begins with the two opponents planted where they stand, staring into each other’s eyes.

Quite a lot of nonverbal information is exchanged during those first five seconds. Michonne keeps her gaze welded to the Governor’s, and the Governor stares back at her—neither adversary giving the other so much as a blink—and the room seems to crystallize like a diorama seized up in ice.

Then, right around second number three, the Governor averts his gaze for a scintilla of a moment to the floor on his right flank.

He makes note of both the child and the sword, each of which lie within his grasp. Penny seems oblivious to the human drama unfolding around her, her livid, pasty face buried in the bucket of entrails. The sword gleams in the dull light of an incandescent bulb.

The Governor tries his hardest, over the course of that split instant, not to register any panic, or any outwardly visual concern for his little dead girl’s safety, or the idea forming in his mind—the human brain can formulate complex notions in the smallest soupçon of time, in less time than it takes a synapse to fire—that he just might be able to grab the sword and conclude matters quickly.

In the space of that single second—the third in a series of eighty-seven—Michonne also flicks her own gaze toward the girl and the katana saber.

Second number four finds the Governor snapping his gaze back up to Michonne’s smoldering glare. In that time, she has also glanced back at the Governor.

Over the duration of the next one and a half seconds—number four and a portion of number five—the two enemies read each other’s look.

The Governor knows now that she knows what he’s thinking, and she knows he knows, and the next half second—the rest of number five—recalls the end of a countdown. The engines fire and the thing explodes.

It takes six seconds for the next phase of the encounter to unfold.

The Governor dives for the sword, and Michonne lets out a booming cry—“NO!”—and by the time the Governor’s shoulder hits the carpet three feet from the blade, and his outstretched hand has approached the general vicinity of that magnificent handle with its scaly serpentine pattern, Michonne has also moved in with the suddenness of a thunderclap.

She instinctively delivers the first blow of the conflict at second number eleven. Her leg comes up and she kicks out at him. The hard edge of her boot strikes the side of his face below the temple just as he is grasping the sword’s handle.

The sickly crack of hard leather fracturing a human mandible fills the room—a sound not unlike a celery stalk snapping—and the Governor winces backward in agony, a thread of blood flinging from his mouth. He falls onto his back, the sword unmoved.

The next eight seconds are a mishmash of explosive movement and sudden stillness. Michonne takes advantage of the Governor’s punch-drunken stupor—he has managed to roll over onto elbows and knees now, his face leaking blood all over the place, his lungs heaving—by darting quickly toward the fallen sword. She snatches it up and whirls back around in less than three seconds, and then spends the next four seconds marshalling her breath and preparing to deliver the killing blow.

By this point, exactly nineteen seconds have elapsed, and it looks as though Michonne has the advantage. Penny has glanced up from her feeding trough and softly growls and sputters at the two adversaries. The Governor manages to rise on his wobbly knees.

His face, without him even being aware of it, takes on an expression of pure unadulterated bloodlust, his mind a TV screen at the end of a programming day—a blank wall of humming white noise—blocking out all extraneous thought other than killing this fucking bitch right this instant. He instinctively lowers his center of gravity as a cobra might coil itself before striking.

He can see the sword in her hand like a divining rod absorbing all the energy in the room. He drips blood and drool from his mouth. Michonne stands only five feet away from him now, with the sword raised. Twenty-seven seconds have transpired. One well-placed strike with that beveled razor’s edge and it will all be over but that doesn’t even faze the Governor now.

At thirty seconds, he lunges.

The next maneuver on her part covers a total of three seconds. One, she lets him get within inches of her, and two, she unleashes one of her patented groin kicks, and three, the blow immobilizes him. At this proximity, the steel-reinforced toe of her work boot connects with such extreme results that the Governor literally folds in half, all the breath forced out of him, the mixture of blood, snot, and saliva in his mouth spewing out in a spray across the floor. He lets out a garbled grunt and falls to his knees before her, gasping for breath, the pain like a battering ram smashing through his guts. He flails his arms for a moment as though trying to hold on to something, and then falls to his hands and knees.

Bloody vomit roars out of him, splashing the carpet at her feet.

At forty seconds, things settle down. The Governor wretches and coughs and tries to get himself together on the floor. He can feel her standing over him, gazing down at him with that eerie calm on her face. He can sense her raising the blade. He swallows the bitter taste of bile in his throat and closes his eyes and waits for the whisper of hand-forged steel to kiss the back of his neck and end it all. This is it. He waits to die on his floor like a whipped dog. He opens his eyes.

She hesitates. He hears her voice, as smooth and tranquil and cold as a cat purring: “I didn’t want it to be this quick.”

Fifty seconds.

“I don’t want it to be over,” she says, standing over him, the blade wavering.

Fifty-five seconds.

Deep in the recesses of the Governor’s brain, a spark kindles. He has one chance. One last shot at her. He feigns another cough and doesn’t look up, coughs again, but ever so subtly he blinks and peers at her feet—those steel-toed boots spread shoulder-width in front of him—only inches away from his hands.

One last chance.

At the sixtieth second, he pounces at her lower region. Taken by surprise, the woman tumbles backward.

The Governor lands on top of her like a lover, the sword flying across the floor. The impact knocks the wind out of her. He can smell her musky scent—sweat and cloves and the copper-tang of dried blood—as she writhes beneath him, the sword only about eighteen inches away on the carpet. The gleam of the blade catches his eye.

At second number sixty-five, he makes a play for the sword, reaching for the hilt. But before he has a chance to get ahold of it, her teeth sink into the meat of his shoulder where it meets his neck, and she bites him so hard, her teeth penetrate flesh and layers of subcutaneous tissue, and finally down into muscle.

The searing pain is so sudden and enormous and sharp that he shrieks like a little girl. He rolls away from her—moving on instinct now—clutching at his neck and feeling the wetness seeping through his fingers. Michonne rears back and spits a mouthful of tissue, the blood running down the front of her in thick rivulets.

“Fuh—FUH-KING!—BITCH!” He manages to sit up, stanching the flow of blood with his hand. It doesn’t occur to him that she might have very well breached his jugular and he’s already a dead man. It doesn’t occur to him that she’s going for the sword. It doesn’t even occur to him that she’s rising up over him again.

All he can think about right then—at seventy-three seconds into the fight—is stopping all the blood from leaking out of his neck.

Seventy-five seconds.

He swallows the metallic taste in his mouth and tries to see through his watery eyes as his blood soaks the ancient carpet.

At seventy-six seconds, he hears inhaling sounds as his opponent takes a deep breath and rises up over him again and mutters something that sounds a little like, “Got a better idea.”

The first blow of the sword’s blunt-ended handle strikes his skull above the bridge of his nose. It makes a loud clapping noise in his ears—the brunt of a Louisville Slugger hitting the sweet spot of a hardball—and pins him to the floor.

Ears ringing, vision blurring, pain strangling him, he makes one last attempt to grab her ankles when the iron-hard handle comes down again.

Eighty-three seconds into the confrontation, he collapses, a dark shade coming down over his vision. The final blow to his skull comes eighty-six seconds in, but he barely feels it.

One second later, everything goes completely black and he’s floating in space.

*   *   *

In the moonlit darkness of the clearing, in the rushing silence of night, Lilly carefully unwraps the last object to be tossed into the mouth of the fire pit. The size of a peach pit, it lies nestled in a handkerchief. She looks down at it, a single tear tracking down her cheek. She remembers all that the little nodule means to her. Josh Hamilton saved her life. Josh was a good man who didn’t deserve to die the way he did, a bullet in the back of his head, fired by one of Woodbury’s thugs, the man they called the butcher.

Lilly and Josh journeyed many miles together, learned to survive together, dreamt of a better time together. A gourmet cook, an executive chef by trade, Josh Hamilton had to be the only man who traveled the roads of the apocalypse with an Italian black truffle in his pocket. He would shave flakes off the thing to flavor oils and soups and meat dishes. The nutty, earthy flavor was indescribable.

The thing in Lilly’s lap still gives off a pungent aroma, and she leans down and takes a big whiff. The odor fills her senses with memories of Josh, memories of first coming to Woodbury, memories of life and death. Tears well up in her eyes. She has a little grape juice left in her cup and she now raises it.

“Here’s to an old friend of mine,” she says. “He saved my life more than once.”

Next to her, Austin bows his head, sensing the importance of the moment, the sorrow being exorcised. He holds his cup tightly to his chest.

“Hope we meet again someday,” she says and goes over to the pit.

She tosses the little black node into the hole with the other symbolic objects.

“Amen,” Austin says softly, taking a sip. He goes over to Lilly and puts his arm around her, and for a moment, they both stand there in the darkness, staring down at the jumble of artifacts in the hole.

The ambient drone of crickets and wind accompanies their silent thoughts.

“Lilly?”

“Yeah?”

Austin looks at her. “Have I mentioned that I love you?”

She smiles and keeps looking at the ground. “Shut up and start shoveling, pretty boy.”

*   *   *

Out of the void of absolute night—the darkness at the bottom of the Marianas Trench—a nonsensical phrase floats in the opaque blackness like a ghostly sign, a message meaning nothing, a blip of coded electrical energy crackling across a wounded man’s mind-screen with neon intensity:

WAY UP AND SOLD!

The wounded man doesn’t understand. He can’t move. He can’t breathe. He’s fused to the dark. He’s an amorphous blob of carbon floating in space … and yet … and yet … he keeps sensing the presence of this message meant only for him, an urgent command that makes no sense whatsoever:

WAIT UP AND ROLL!

All at once he feels the physical laws of the universe returning very slowly, as though he’s a vessel in the deepest part of the ocean righting itself, feeling the weight of gravity through the mists of paralyzing pain, acting on him—first on his midsection, and then on his extremities—a tugging sensation from below and from each side of him, as though the moorings holding him prisoner in this black sensory deprivation tank are tightening.

He senses the existence of his own face, sticky with blood, hot with infection, a pressure on his mouth, and a stinging sensation in his eyes, which are still sightless but are beginning to absorb a glowing, nebulous light from somewhere above him.

In his midbrain, the neon message being transmitted to him slowly becomes clear, either through sound or some other inchoate telepathic means, and as the message jerkily comes into focus—a crude imperative clicking into place like tiles on a puzzle box—his fractured psyche begins to compute the deeper meaning of it.

The angry command currently being directed at him triggers a warning alarm that shatters his courage and weakens his resolve. All his defenses crumble. All the blockades in his brain—all the heavy-duty walls and partitions and compartments—come tumbling down … until he is nothing … nothing but a shattered human being groping in the dark, horrified, tiny, fetal … as the coded words are slowly decrypted in his mind:

WAKE UP, ASSHOLE!

The voice comes from inches away, a familiar breathy feminine voice.

“Wake up, asshole!”

He opens his encrusted eyes. Oh God, oh God, no-no-no—NO! A voice deep in his subconscious registers the horror and the true nature of his situation: He is tied to the walls of his own foul-smelling living room, which now serves as a perfect doppelganger for the torture chamber under the speedway in which he kept Michonne.

A single overhead safety lamp in a tin shade shines down on him. Michonne must have brought it in. The upper half of the Governor’s body is battered and bruised, torqued so severely by the ropes that his shoulders are nearly dislocated. The rest of him—which he now realizes with no small measure of horror is completely nude—rests with his legs bent at the knees and awkwardly splayed outward against a wooden panel hastily nailed to the carpet beneath him. His cock stings, stretched at an odd angle beneath him, as though glued to the floor in a puddle of coagulating blood. A strand of thick, viscous, bloody drool dangles off his lower lip.

The weak, mewling voice deep inside him pierces the noise in his head: I’m scared … oh God I’m scared—

—SHUT UP!

He tries to push back the voice. His mouth is as dry as a lime pit. He tastes bitter copper, as if he’s been sucking on pennies. His head weighs a thousand pounds. He blinks and blinks, trying to focus on the shadowy face right in front of him.

Gradually, in bleary, miragelike waves, the narrow face of a dark-skinned woman comes into focus—she crouches right in front of him, only inches away—burning her gaze into him. “Finally!” she says with an intensity that makes him jerk backward with a start. “I thought you were never going to wake up.”

Dressed in her dungarees and headband and braids and boots, she rests her arms on her haunches directly in front of him like a repairwoman inspecting a faulty appliance. How the fuck did she do this? Why didn’t anyone see this bitch skulking around his place? Where the fuck are Gabe and Bruce? Where the fuck is Penny? He tries to maintain eye contact with the woman but has trouble keeping his half-ton head aloft. He wants to close his eyes and go to sleep. His head droops, and he hears that awful voice.

“You passed out a second time when I nailed your prick to the board you’re on. You remember that?” She tilts her head curiously at him. “No? Memory a little messed up? You with me?”

The Governor starts to hyperventilate, his heart kicking in his chest. He senses his inner voice—usually buried deep within the remotest cavities of his brain—bubbling to the surface and taking over and dominating his stream of consciousness: Oh God I’m so scared … I’m scared … what have I done? This is God paying me back. I never should have done those things I did … to this woman … to the others … to Penny … I’m so damn scared … I can’t breathe … I don’t want to die … please God I don’t want to die please don’t make me die I don’t want to die oh God-oh-God—

—SHUT THE FUCK UP!!—

Philip Blake silently howls at the voice in his head, the voice of Brian Blake—his weaker, softer self—as he stiffens and cringes against the ropes. A sharp dagger of pain knifes up his midsection from the mutilated penis, and he lets out an inaudible gasp behind the tape clamped over his mouth.

“Whoa there, cowboy!” The woman smiles at him. “I wouldn’t do much moving if I were you.”

The Governor lets his head droop, and closes his eyes, and lets out a thin breath through his nostrils. The gag holds tight on his mouth, a four-by-four-inch hank of duct tape. He tries to moan but he can’t even do that—his vocal cords strangled by the pain and the war going on inside him.

The “Brian” part of him is pushing its way back up through the layers … until it insinuates itself again in the Governor’s forebrain: God please … please … I did bad things I know I know but I don’t deserve this … I don’t want to die like this … I don’t want to die like an animal … in this dark place … I’m so scared I don’t want to die … please … I beg you … have mercy … I will plead with this woman … I will plead for my life for mercy for my life please please-please-please-please-please-please-OH-GOD-please-GOD-please—

Philip Blake winces, his body convulsing, the rope digging into his wrists.

“Easy there, sport,” the woman says to him, her glistening brown face almost sanguine in the shifting light of the gently swaying lamp. “I don’t want you to pass out again before I get a chance to begin.”

Eyes slamming shut, lungs erupting with fire, the Governor tamps down the voice, swallows it back, shoves it back into the dark convolutions of his brain. He silently roars at his other self: STOP YOUR FUCKING WHINING YOU LITTLE WEAK-WILLED FUCKING BABY AND LISTEN TO ME, LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN—YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BEG AND YOU’RE NOT GOING TO FUCKING CRY LIKE A LITTLE FUCKING BABY YOU LITTLE BABY!!!

The woman interrupts the clamor: “Calm down for a second … and stop jerking around … and listen to me. You don’t have to worry about the little girl—”

Philip Blake’s eyes pop open at the mention of Penny, and he looks at the woman.

“—I put her in the front room, just inside the door, where you had all this junk. What are you doing? Building a cage for your little sex slave? Why do you have her here, anyway?” The woman purses her lips thoughtfully. “You know what … don’t even answer that. I don’t even want to know.”

She rises up, and stands over him for a moment and takes a deep breath. “I’m anxious to get started.”

Now the storm raging in Philip’s brain suddenly ceases as though a fuse has blown. He gazes up at the woman through tunneling vision—she has his undivided attention now—and he gapes at her as she turns and ambles across the room, moving with a kind of casual authority, as if she has all the time in the world.

For a single instant, he thinks he hears her whistling softly as she goes over to a large, grease-spotted duffel bag on the floor in the far corner of the room. She bends down and rummages through a phalanx of tools. “I’ll begin with some show-and-tell,” she mutters, pulling a pair of pliers from the duffel. She stands, turns, and displays the pliers to him as though asking for a bid at an auction. What can I get as an opening bid on these fine Craftsman titanium pliers? She glares at him. “Show-and-tell,” she reiterates. “I’m going to use everything here on you before you die. First up—these excellent pliers.”

Philip Blake swallows acid and looks down at the blood-soaked wooden platform.

Michonne puts the pliers back into the duffel, then grabs another tool and shows it to him. “Next up, a hammer.” She waves the hammer cheerfully. “Already used this puppy on you a little bit.”

She puts the hammer back and digs some more through the bag’s contents, while Philip stares at the stained platform and tries to get air into his lungs.

“LOOK AT ME, MOTHERFUCKER!” Her roaring voice yanks his attention back across the room. She holds a small cylindrical device with a copper nozzle. “Acetylene torch,” she says with a sort of righteous expression, her voice suddenly calm again. “Feels almost full, too. And that’s good. You used this for cooking.” She manages another icy smile. “I will too.”

Philip Blake’s head droops again, the white noise in his brain crackling.

The woman across the room finds another implement and pulls it out of the bag. “You’re really going to like what I do with this,” she says, holding a bent spoon up into the light so that he can get a good look at it. The concavity of the spoon gleams in the dim room.

Dizziness courses through the Governor, his wrists blazing with pain.

Michonne rifles through the duffel for another object and finally finds it.

She holds the apparatus up for him to see. “Electric power drill,” she says. “Must have just charged it recently … the battery’s full.”

She walks toward him, pulling the drill’s trigger, revving its motor. The noise recalls the whirr of a dental instrument. “I think we’ll start with this.”

It takes every last shred of strength for Philip Blake to look up into her eyes as the drill bit whirs and slowly comes toward the sinewy part of his left shoulder where the arm meets the torso—the place where all the nerves live.

EIGHTEEN

During the normal course of a small town’s ebb and flow of daily life, a muffled scream in the wee-hour dark of night would raise not only suspicion but also sheer terror among those minding their own businesses slumbering with their windows open to let in the pleasant breeze of a spring evening or dozing at their third-shift cash registers at all-night convenience stores. But right then, at exactly 1:33 A.M. Eastern standard time, in Woodbury, Georgia, as the keening emanates from the second floor of the Governor’s building, the noise dampened and muffled by layers of mortar, concrete, and glass—as well as the duct tape suppressing the screams—the course of daily life is anything but normal.

The men working the late shift on the north, west, and south walls have started abandoning their posts, flummoxed by their supervisor’s absence. Martinez hasn’t checked in for hours—a bizarre development that has most of the guards scratching their heads. Bruce and Gabe have already discovered the deserted infirmary—the doctor and Alice nowhere to be found—and now the two men are discussing whether or not to bother the Governor with the news.

The strange calm in town has also roused Bob from a restless sleep, and caused him to struggle to his feet and take a drunken walk in the night air to try to clear his mind and figure out why things seem so strangely still and quiet. In fact, Bob Stookey may be the only resident who actually hears the faint sounds of screaming at that moment. He is staggering past the front façade of the Governor’s building when the high-pitched shrieking—masked by the duct tape gag, as faint and yet unmistakable as a loon calling out over the dark reaches of a still lake—echoes behind one of the boarded windows. The sound is so eerie and unexpected that Bob thinks he’s imagining it—the hooch will sometimes play tricks on him—so he continues weaving down the sidewalk, oblivious to the import of the strange noises.

But right then, inside said building, at the end of the second-floor corridor, inside the airless living room of the largest apartment, in the jaundiced light of a hanging work lamp, which now sways gently in the air currents, there is nothing imaginary about the pain being inflicted upon Philip Blake. The pain is a living, breathing thing—a predator—chewing through him with the ferocity of a wild boar rooting for bloody nuggets in the nerve bundle between his left pectoral and deltoid muscles.

The drill sings as the bit digs deeper and deeper into his nerve tissue, throwing a wake of blood and human particulate into the air.

Philip’s scream—filtered behind the duct tape, almost to the point of sounding like a warbling car alarm—is constant now. Michonne pushes the spinning bit down to the hilt, the delicate mist of blood blowing back into her face. Philip lets out a feral moan—which sounds something like “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMGGGHHHHH!!!”—as the drill buzzes and whirs. Michonne finally lets up on the trigger and unceremoniously yanks the bit out of the pulp of Philip’s shoulder with a violent jerk.

The Governor shudders in agony between the two ropes that creak noisily with every twitch.

Michonne drops the drill on the floor with little concern for its well-being, cracking the housing. Tendrils of gristle and matter cling to its bit in a bloody tangle. Michonne gives it a nod.

“Okay,” she says, speaking more to herself than to her subject. “Let’s take care of that bleeding and make sure we keep you awake.”

She finds the roll of duct tape, snatches it up, pulls a strip clear, bites it off with her teeth, and wraps it around the bloody, wounded shoulder with very little tenderness. She would practice more care if she were dressing a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. She closes off the wound as though securing a leaky pipe.

Meanwhile, Philip Blake feels the curtain of darkness closing down over his line of vision. He feels the world separating like two panes of glass sliding apart underwater, forming a double image, which fades and fades, until his head lolls forward and the cold spreads through him, and he mercifully starts to pass out again.

The slap comes out of nowhere, hard and fast, to the side of his face. “WAKE UP!”

He heaves back against the ropes, eyes fluttering back open to the horrifying sight of the black woman’s steadfast, baleful expression. Still bearing the scars and the purple scourge marks of her own torture, the woman’s face furrows with contempt and fixes its unyielding glower on the Governor. Her smile is a clown’s grin of madness and hate. “The last thing you want to do is pass out again,” she says calmly, “you’ll miss all the fun.”

Next come the needle-nosed pliers. She procures them from the duffel, and comes back whistling that maddening tune that makes the Governor’s flesh crawl. It feels like a hive of wasps humming in his ears. He fixes his hot gaze on the pointed tips of those pliers as Michonne reaches down and grabs his right hand, which dangles loosely from its bound wrist. Whistling absently, she carefully holds his index finger up between her thumb and forefinger as though she’s about to give him a manicure.

It takes some effort, but she wrenches off his fingernail quickly, like ripping a Band-Aid off a sore. The searing pain corkscrews down his arm, strangles him, ignites his tendons with molten lava. His ferocious groan—suppressed by the gag of tape—sounds like a cow being slaughtered. She moves to the middle finger and tears off the nail. Blood drips and bubbles. Philip hyperventilates with agony. She does the third finger and then the pinkie for good measure.

“That hand is just ruined now,” she says as matter-of-factly as a manicurist offering grooming advice. She drops the pliers, turns, and searches for something across the room. “Just ruined,” she mutters, finding her sword.

She comes back and very swiftly—without hesitation—she winds up like a major league batter about to swing for the fence and brings the sword down hard and fast on the joint of his right arm just above the elbow.

The first sensation that smashes into Philip Blake—before the burning, unbearable pain—is a slackening of pressure as the rope tumbles away with the severed arm attached. His penis detaches from the board and blood fountains from the ragged stump as he falls sideways now, loosened from the east wall. He hits the floor hard, gaping at the remains of his right arm with uncomprehending horror—way down in the center of his eyes, in the pupils, in the cores of the irises, the apertures closing down to pinpricks that burn like diodes—and he lets out a grotesque sound behind the muzzle of duct tape that recalls a strangled pig.

The blood has bathed him by this point, making the wooden platform as slimy as an oil slick. Profound cold engulfs him, turning his flesh to ice.

“Don’t worry,” Michonne is saying to him, but he can hardly hear a thing she’s saying anymore. “I’m pretty sure I can stop the bleeding.” She pulls a Zippo from her pocket. “Where’s that torch?”

In the surreal passage of time before she comes back with the torch, lying on the floor in his own blood, the cold spreading through him, he senses the other voice way down in some far-flung cavity of his brain, sobbing and choking on its anguished plea: God please don’t let me die like this … please … save me … don’t let it end … not like this … I don’t want to die like—

ENOUGH!

ENOUGH!!

Deep down in the core of his soul, Philip Blake turns a corner, the revelation traveling up his spine and exploding in his brain.

In syrupy slow motion, Michonne approaches with the torch, lighting the nozzle with a WWWWHOOMP, but the sight of her no longer troubles him, no longer alarms him. She is fate on two legs and he finds his true character then. He watches her lowering the arcing flame toward his ragged stump of an elbow. He gazes at her with that one eye—peering through dangling strands of his greasy hair—and he has his greatest epiphany yet.

It’s time, he thinks, flinging his thoughts at her through the beacon of his feverish gaze. Go ahead. I’m ready. Get it over with. I dare you. Go ahead, bitch. I’m fucking ready to fucking die. So kill me … do it now … KILL ME! I’LL BET YOU DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING GUTS! GO AHEAD AND KILL ME NOW YOU FUCKING BITCH!!

She burns the stump with the blue flame, cauterizing blood and pulp and tissue, making horrible crackling noises in the silent living room, spuming smoke and sizzling marrow, and sending the worst pain through Philip he has ever experienced … ever.

Ever.

And unfortunately for Philip Blake—AKA the Governor—the process does not kill him.

And the woman named Michonne has only just begun to work on him.

*   *   *

On the other side of town, under the stars, as the ubiquitous droning of crickets and other rustling night sounds continue unabated, the first spadeful of earth gets dumped on top of the fire pit. The sandy, dark-brown Georgia dirt lands on the photograph of Megan with a soft thump. Austin scoops another shovelful and dumps it. And another. And another. And the dirt begins to cover the pile of precious objects with the finality of a graveside burial.

At one point, Austin pauses in his shoveling and glances over at Lilly, who stands nearby, wrapped in a blanket, watching. She holds it tightly around her neck, and she lets the tears build until they run down her cheeks and soak the edge of the blanket.

Austin hands her a shovelful of dirt, and she drops it on the pit.

Neither one of them says it aloud, but the sense passing between them is one of letting go.

They are letting go of their grief, their fear, their past. They have a future now. They have each other, and they have a tiny ember of new life growing inside Lilly like a silent promise. Lilly smiles sadly, wiping her face. Austin smiles back at her. They finish filling up the hole, and Austin puts down the spade.

Then they go back over to the tree stumps and rest their weary bodies in the dark silence.

*   *   *

“Oh, you’re awake again … good.”

The light has gone all gauzy and dreamy in the terrible living room as her voice floats like a beautiful moth hovering in the air behind him. He can’t see her anymore—only her shadow rippling across the floor beside him—but he can hear her back there near his ass. He realizes he’s been repositioned, and is now lying prone, his face pressed flat on the platform, his rear-end elevated. All his sensory organs now absorb the environment slowly, blearily—a camera whose lens has been knocked askew.

The cold hard edge of the spoon enters his rectum hard and deep.

He nudges forward with a jerk as the implement sinks as far as his sacrum. For a fleeting moment, the horrors of having the one prostate exam he ever had come flooding back to him, the doctor in Jacksonville—what was his name? Kenton? Kenner?—chatting idly about the Falcons’ draft picks the whole time. He imagines himself laughing at that private little joke but instead he gasps.

She shoves the spoon all the way down to his sacral vertebra and turns it with a vengeance—as though she’s trying to scoop out his entire coccyx and intestines—and he screams. Naturally the tape muffles his scream, and all he hears with his own ears is a series of infantile moaning noises. The fire in his abdomen blazes out of control as she starts to struggle a little bit, the spoon caught on some part of his internal anatomy.

He is about to once again sink into the quicksand of unconsciousness when she yanks the bent spoon from his anus with a wet smacking noise. “There,” she says. “Gonna be sore for a while down there.”

She rises and strolls around the front of him so that he can glimpse her in his feverish peripheral vision. She holds the bloody spoon up.

“And I thought getting it in was hard,” she comments wryly as the blinds close down, once again, ever so mercifully, on the Governor’s vision, taking him back to that blessed, empty, cold darkness.

*   *   *

The experts know how to keep a person awake and conscious during “enhanced interrogation”—CIA spooks, third world goons, KGB ghosts, drug cartels, et cetera—but this amazon with the Medusa dreadlocks has no questions in mind and has no apparent experience in the art of keeping a person conscious during this kind of slapdash, improvised torture. All she has, as far as the Governor can tell, is her innate sense of justice and a little street sass to keep her going and keep the Governor awake. The Governor realizes all this every time he snaps back awake and finds his level of comprehension corrupted and distorted even further through the surreal lens of his hellish pain.

This time, he awakes to the feeling that a piano has fallen on his head. He feels the massive impact, cracking the side of his skull, concussing him, sending particle-bombs of agony down the bridge of his noise. He hears the atonal clang of all eighty-eight keys of the piano, all at once, inside his head, and his ears sing an off-key aria, the ringing so loud he can’t even breathe.

Michonne stands over him. She slams the sole of her boot down on his head a second time.

The heel cracks his jaw, and all at once, the Governor is only half awake … not wholly conscious, and not really unconscious.

He lolls and moans and giggles behind the tape in a sort of neurological fog, the higher functions of his brain shutting down and going to the default program: his primal self. He feels as though he’s a little boy in Waynesboro, and he’s sitting on his dad’s lap at the carnival. He smells the popcorn and horseshit and cotton candy. He hears the calliope playing a comical little tune, and the star of the show—the Dark Warrior Woman from Borneo—slowly circles him, slowly circles his seat on his dad’s lap in the front row.

“I think I kicked you too hard,” she says in her funny little voice. The audience claps and laughs. “It looks like something ripped.”

He wants to laugh at her funny joke but somebody—his daddy, maybe?—holds a hand over his mouth. Which makes everything seem even funnier. The Dark Warrior Woman from Borneo kneels down really close to his face. He looks up at her. She looks down at him and grins a funny grin. What is she going to do with that spoon? Maybe she’ll do her greatest trick yet!

She holds the spoon near his left eye and murmurs, “Don’t pass out on me—we’re not done yet.”

The edge of the spoon is cold as she begins to shovel out his eyeball. It reminds him of the time the dentist had to drill into a cavity way in the back of his mouth—it hurt so, so, so, so, sooooooooooo bad—and he got a lollipop afterward, which made him feel a little better, but this time there’s no lollipop, and it hurts worse than he thought possible. He even hears the yucky sounds—like when his mama pulls a chicken apart for dinner—the snotty, wet smacking noises. As the Lady from Borneo digs out his eyeball, the thing eventually uncorks from its socket.

He feels like clapping for this amazing dark lady who manages to leave the eyeball lying halfway down his face, hanging on strands of nerves and icky red stuff like wet party streamers.

His vision now goes completely haywire and it’s like he’s on a thrill ride—like when his daddy took him and his brother Brian to the Heart of Georgia State Fair and they rode the Zipper—and everything is spinning. He can still see—kind of—out of the hanging eyeball. And he can still see out of his other eye. And what he sees right then makes him feel bad for the Great Wild Warrior Woman from Borneo.

She’s crying.

Tears roll down her brown, shiny face as she crouches in front of Philip, and Philip feels sad himself all of a sudden for this poor lady. Why is she crying? She’s staring at him like a lost child, like a little girl who has just done something very bad.

Then something else happens that gets Philip Blake’s attention.

A loud knocking on the door brings him back to the here and now. He blinks his one good eye, and the lady blinks away her tears, and they both hear the deep, angry, male voice outside the door.

“GOVERNOR! YOU IN THERE?!”

All at once, the calliope music stops and little Philip Blake is no longer at the carnival.

*   *   *

Michonne grabs her sword, stands, and faces the doorway—paralyzed with indecision. She hasn’t completed her masterpiece, the most important piece of the puzzle about to be put in place, but now the whole thing may have to be—on many levels—cut short.

She turns to the grotesque remains on the floor—the man barely clinging to life—and starts to say something to him when the voice booms outside the door.

“YO!—PHIL! OPEN UP! THE CRAZY BITCH IS GONE, MAN! THE DOCTOR AND ALICE—AND THE OTHER TWO AS WELL!” The creak of wood, a snapping noise.

Michonne looks down at the Governor as an enormous thud reverberates. She extends the tip of the katana sword toward his groin.

Gabe’s voice—unmistakable in its gravelly, heavily accented bark—rises an octave outside the door: “WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO YOUR DOOR, MAN?! WHAT’S GOING ON?! SAY SOMETHING, SIR! WE’RE COMING IN!”

Another massive thud—perhaps both Gabe and Bruce putting their shoulders into it, or perhaps a makeshift battering ram out there—the hinges already cracking, raining down dust, threatening to burst where Michonne had hastily nailed them back up.

Michonne holds the sword centimeters from the Governor’s flaccid penis.

“Looks like what’s left of that thing could possibly heal if you survive this,” she says softly to him, her voice so low now she could be talking to a lover. She has no idea whether he can even hear her, or comprehend her. “And we wouldn’t want that.”

With a single flick of her wrist, she expertly severs the man’s penis at its base, the blood bubbling and percolating as the organ flops lifelessly to the wooden flooring next to the man.

Michonne turns and darts out of the room, and she has already traversed the length of the apartment, thrown open a window, climbed out, and made it halfway down the fire escape when the door finally gives way.

*   *   *

Bruce lurches into the apartment first. Bald head glistening, eyes wide and hot, he nearly stumbles to the floor. Gabe lunges in behind him, fists clenched, eyes quickly scanning.

“FUCK!” Bruce whirls when he hears the tiny snarling voice of the dead child. “FUCK!” He sees Penny chained up for safekeeping across the foyer. “FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!” He smells the heavy stench of bodily fluids and the blood of an abattoir in the air. He looks around. “FUCK!-FUCK!-FUCK!-FUCK!-FUCK!—FUCK!!”

“Look out!” Gabe shoves Bruce aside when the little dead girl reaches for them, stretching her chains, snapping her tiny black teeth at the air near Bruce’s torso. Gabe hollers, “Get away from her!”

“Oh fuck … fuck,” Bruce utters suddenly when he turns toward the archway into the living room. He sees the gruesome remains of Penny’s meal. “Governor! Oh—fuck!”

*   *   *

In the calm, pristine darkness of the clearing, under the vast rural sky, Austin Ballard finally breaks the silence. “You know what? I just realized … I can build a little nursery in that sun room in the back of my apartment.”

Lilly nods. “That would be nice.” She thinks about it. “I saw a cradle in the warehouse nobody’s using.” She thinks some more. “Call me crazy but I think this is going to work out.”

Austin reaches over to her, and pulls her into a soft embrace. They sit on the same stump now, holding each other. Lilly kisses his hair. He smiles and pulls her tighter. “Woodbury’s the safest place we could be right now,” he says softly.

She nods. “I know … I get the sense the Governor’s got things under control.”

Austin squeezes her tenderly. “And Stevens and Alice can deliver the baby.”

“Good point.” She smiles to herself. “I think we’re in good hands.”

“Yep.” Austin stares at the night. “The Governor’s gonna keep us safe.” He smiles. “This is the best situation in the world to start a new life.”

Lilly gives him another nod. Her smile could power an entire city. “I like the sound of that—a new life—it has a nice ring to it.”

For the first time in her life, she actually feels like everything’s going to be okay.

*   *   *

Gabe and Bruce plunge into the torture chamber of a living room and all at once they see the evidence of Michonne’s handiwork—the bloody tools, the duffel bag, the severed arm, the tissues and blood smudges fanned out across the wooden platform like hellish demonic wings sprouting from the body. They take another few steps toward the remains.

Their minds swimming with panic, they try to stay calm and talk to each other.

Gazing down at the body, Gabe says, “What about the black chick?”

Bruce gapes. “Fuck her. She’s probably outside the safe zone by now—she ain’t got a chance.”

“Jesus,” Gabe mutters, looking at what’s left of his boss, the remains eviscerated, scorched, scourged, and contorted, one eye dangling by strings of tissue on the side of the man’s face. The body twitches. “Is he—Is he dead?”

Bruce takes a shallow breath and goes over to kneel by the Governor.

A faint sound whistles from the man’s nostrils.

Bruce can’t even find a place to feel for a pulse, the body is so mangled. He carefully peels the tape from the man’s lips.

Then Bruce leans down and brings his ear close to the man’s bloody mouth.

Signs of a faint breath reach Bruce’s ear but he can’t tell if it’s a death throe—

—or if the man is clinging to a twilight world on the cusp of death.

*   *   *

Under a canopy of twinkling stars, Austin touches Lilly’s face as though caressing the beads of a holy rosary. “I promise you, Lilly, everything is definitely going to take care of itself.” He kisses her. “Everything’s gonna be great.” He kisses her again. “You’ll see.”

She smiles. God help her, she believes him … she believes in the Governor … she believes in Woodbury. Everything is going to be okay.

Her smile lingering on her lips, she puts her head on Austin’s shoulder and listens to the eternal night continue to churn and drone its ancient cycle of destruction and regeneration.

Thank you, God.

Thank you.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

THE WALKING DEAD: THE FALL OF THE GOVERNOR, PART ONE. Copyright © 2013 by Robert Kirkman, LLC. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-312-54817-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-02064-2 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781250020642

First Edition: October 2013

The Walking Dead: The Fall of the Governor, Part Two

Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga

Thomas Dunne Books

St. Martin’s Press

New York

For Joey and Bill Bonansinga with Love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

More than ever, an extra-special thanks to Mr. Robert Kirkman for bringing me along for the ride of a lifetime; additional gracias to Andy Cohen, David Alpert, Brendan Deneen, Nicole Sohl, Kemper Donovan, Shawn Kirkham, Stephanie Hargadon, Courtney Sanks, Christina MacDonald, Mort Castle, Master Sergeant Alan Baker, and Brian Kett; and the best, as always, saved for last: Deep appreciation and undying love for my beautiful woman and best friend, Jill M. Norton.

PART 1

Battlefield

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

—J. Robert Oppenheimer

ONE

The fire starts on the first floor, the flames licking up the cabbage rose wallpaper, unfurling across the plaster ceiling, and spewing black, noxious smoke through the hallways and bedrooms of the Farrel Street house, blinding him, choking the breath out of him. He darts across the dining room, searching for the back stairs, finding them, hurling down the old, rickety wooden risers into the musty darkness of the basement. “Philip?!—PHILIP!?!—PHILLLLLLLLIP!!?!” He lurches across the filthy, watermarked cement floor, frantically scanning the dark cellar for his brother. Upstairs, the home blazes and crackles, the conflagration roaring through the cluttered chambers of the meager bungalow, the heat pressing down on the foundation. He whirls fecklessly in circles, scanning the shadowy reaches of the smoke-bound cellar, batting away cobwebs and choking on the acrid smoke and ammonia-rot stench of rancid canned beets, rat turds, and ancient fiberglass insulation. He can hear the creaking and thudding of wooden timbers collapsing onto the floor above him as the maelstrom rages out of control—which makes no sense because his little childhood home in Waynesboro, Georgia, never burned down in any fire as far as he can remember. But here it is, going up in a terrible inferno, and he can’t find his fucking brother. How did he get here? And where the fuck is Philip? He needs Philip. Goddamnit, Philip would know what to do! “PHILLLLLLLLLLIIIIP!” His hysterical cry comes out of him like a thin puff of air, a breathless chirp, a fading signal on a radio tuned to some distant station. All at once he sees a portal in one of the basement walls—a strange, concave opening like a hatch on a submarine, a weird greenish glow emanating from within it—and he realizes that the opening is new. There was never such an opening in the basement of his childhood home on Farrel Street, but again, like black magic, here it fucking is. He stumbles toward the dim, radiant, green gash in the darkness. Pushing through the opening, he steps into an airless cinder-block garage stall. The chamber is empty. The walls bear the marks of torture—streaks of dark, drying blood and the frayed ends of ropes affixed to U-bolts—and the place radiates evil. Pure, unadulterated, preternatural evil. He wants out. He can’t breathe. His flesh crawls. He can’t make a sound other than a faint mewling noise coming from the deepest part of his lungs, an anguished moaning. He hears a noise and spins around and sees another gangrenous-green glowing portal, and he lunges toward it. He goes through the opening, and he finds himself in a pine grove outside Woodbury. He recognizes the clearing, the deadfall logs forming a natural little amphitheater—the ground carpeted in matted pine needles, fungus, and weeds. His heart quickens. This is an even worse place—a death scene. A figure emerges from the forest and steps into the pale light. It’s his old friend, Nick Parsons, gangly and awkward as ever, lurching into the clearing with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, his face a sweaty mask of horror. “Dear Lord,” Nick murmurs in a strangled voice. “Cleanse us of all this unrighteousness.” Nick raises the shotgun. The muzzle looks gargantuan—like an enormous planet eclipsing the sun—pointing directly at him. “I renounce all sins,” Nick drones in his sepulchral voice. “Forgive me, O Lord … forgive me.” Nick pulls the trigger. The firing pin snaps. The slow-motion blast flares in a brilliant yellow corona—the rays of a dying sun—and he feels himself lifted out of his boots, slingshot into space, weightless, flying through darkness … toward a nimbus of celestial white light. This is it. This is the end of the world—his world—the end of everything. He screams. No sound comes from his lungs. This is death—the suffocating, magnesium-white void of nothingness—and very suddenly, like a switch being thrown, Brian Blake ceases to exist.

*   *   *

With the abruptness of a jump-cut in a motion picture, he is lying on the floor of his apartment in Woodbury—inert, frozen, pinned to the cold hardwood in paralyzing, icy pain—his breathing so labored and inhibited that his very cells seem to be gasping for life. His vision consists of a jagged, blurry, fractured view of the water-stained ceiling tiles—one eye completely blind, its orbital socket cold as if wind is blowing through it. The duct tape hanging off one side of his mouth, the tiny inhalations and exhalations through his bloody nostrils almost imperceptible to the casual listener, he tries to move but can’t even turn his head. The sound of voices barely registers with his agony-gripped auditory nerves.

“What about the girl?” a voice asks from somewhere in the room.

“Fuck her, she’s outside the safe zone by now—she ain’t got a chance.”

“What about him? Is he dead?”

Then another sound registers—a watery, garbled growl—which draws his attention to the edge of his vision. Seeing through the bleary retina of his one good eye, he can barely make out the tiny figure in the doorway across the room, her pale face mottled with decomposition, her pupil-less eyes like sparrow eggs. She lunges until her chain-link leash clangs loudly.

“GAH!” one of the male voices yelps as the tiny monster claws at him.

Philip tries desperately to speak, but the words catch in his scalded throat. His head weighs a thousand tons, and he tries again to speak with chapped, cracked, bleeding lips, tries to form breathless words that simply won’t coalesce. He hears the deep baritone voice of Bruce Cooper.

“Okay—fuck this!” The telltale click of a safety disengaging on a semiautomatic fills the silence. “This girl’s getting a bullet right—”

“N-nnggh!” Philip puts everything he has into his voice and manages another faint series of utterances. “D-duh—d-don’t!” He takes another agonizing breath. He must protect his daughter Penny—regardless of the fact that she’s already dead and has been for over a year. She is all he has left in this world. She is everything. “D-don’t fucking touch her … DON’T DO IT!”

Both men snap their gazes toward the man on the floor, and for the briefest fraction of an instant, Philip gets a glimpse of their faces gaping down at him. Bruce, the taller man, is an African American with a shaved head, which now furrows with horror and repulsion. The other man, Gabe, is white and built like a Mack truck with his marine buzz cut and black turtleneck. From the look in their eyes, it’s clear that Philip Blake should be dead.

Lying on that blood-soaked four-by-eight piece of plywood, he has no idea how bad he must look—especially his face, which feels as though it’s been tenderized by an ice pick—and for one fleeting moment, the expressions on the faces of these crude, simple men gaping down at him set off a warning alarm in Philip’s brain. The woman who worked him over—Michonne is her name, if memory serves—did her job well. For his sins, she left him as close to death’s door as a person can be without going through it.

The Sicilians say revenge is a dish best served cold, but this gal delivered it with a steaming plate of agony. Getting his right arm amputated and cauterized just above the elbow is now the least of Philip’s problems. His left eye is currently lying on the side of his face, glued to his flesh by drying tendrils of bloody tissue. But worse than that—far worse for Philip Blake—is the sticky-cold sensation spreading up through his entrails from the site where his penis was detached with a flick of the woman’s fancy sword. The memory of that little flick—the sting of a metal wasp—now sends him back into the twilight of semiconsciousness. He can barely hear the voices.

“FUCK!” Bruce stares bug-eyed down at the once-fit, once-lean man with the handlebar mustache. “He’s alive!”

Gabe stares. “Shit, Bruce—the doc and Alice are fucking gone! What the hell are we going to do?”

At some point, another man has entered the apartment in a flurry of heavy breathing and the clanging of a pump-action shotgun. Philip can’t see who it is, or hear the voices very well. He floats between consciousness and oblivion while the men hovering over him continue their terse, panicky exchange.

Bruce’s voice: “You guys, lock this little shit up in the other room. I’m going to run downstairs and get Bob.”

Gabe’s voice next: “Bob?! The fucking drunk that’s always sitting downstairs by the door?”

The voices begin to fade as the dark cold shroud draws down over Philip.

“—what the hell can he do—?”

“—probably not much—”

“—so why?—”

“—he can do more than either of us—”

*   *   *

Contrary to public opinion and the mythology of the movies, the average combat medic is not even remotely as skilled as an experienced, credentialed trauma surgeon or, for that matter, even a general practitioner. Most medics receive less than three months of training during boot camp, and even the most prodigious of these individuals rarely rises above the level of a common EMT or paramedic. They know basic first aid, a little CPR, and the rudiments of trauma care, and that’s about it. They are thrown into the breach with battle units and expected to simply keep wounded soldiers breathing—or keep the circulatory system intact—until the victim can be transported to a mobile surgical unit. They are human tugboats—hardened by front-line conditions, calloused by witnessing a constant stream of suffering—expected only to Band-Aid and splint the sucking wounds of war.

Hospital Corpsman First Class Bob Stookey served a single tour with the Sixty-Eight Alpha company in Afghanistan thirteen years ago, at the tender age of thirty-six, getting deployed not long after the initial invasion. He was one of the older enlisted men at the time—his reasons for signing up had a lot to do with a divorce going sour at the time—and he became somewhat of a Dutch uncle to the youngsters around him. He started as a glorified ambulance driver out of Camp Dwyer and worked his way up to battlefield medic by the following spring. He had a knack for keeping the boys entertained with lousy jokes and nonregulation sips from his ever-present flask of Jim Beam. He also had a soft heart—the grunts loved him for that—and he died a little bit every time he lost a marine. By the time he shipped back to the world one week after his thirty-seventh birthday, he had died one hundred and eleven times and was medicating the trauma with a half-quart of whiskey a day.

All of this Sturm und Drang of his past had long been drowned by the horror and clamor of the plague, as well as the excoriating loss of his secret love, Megan Lafferty, and the pain has grown so malignant within him that now—tonight—this instant—he is completely oblivious to the fact that he is about to be wrenched back onto the battlefield.

“BOB!”

Slumped against the bricks in front of the Governor’s place, half-conscious, dried spittle and ash across the front of his drab olive jacket, Bob stirs at the booming voice of Bruce Cooper. The darkness of night is slowly burning off with the dawn, and Bob has already started shaking from the chill winds and a restless night of fever dreams.

“Get up!” the big man orders as he lurches out of the building and comes over to Bob’s nest of soggy newspapers, ratty blankets, and empty bottles. “We need your help—upstairs! NOW!”

“W-what?” Bob rubs his grizzled face and belches stomach acids. “Why?”

“It’s the Governor!” Bruce reaches down and grabs hold of Bob’s limp arm. “You were an army medic, right?!”

“Marines … H-hospital Corps,” he stammers, feeling as though he’s being levered to his feet by a block and tackle. His head spins. “For about fifteen minutes … about a million years ago. I can’t do shit.”

Bruce stands him up like a mannequin, clutching him roughly by the shoulders. “Well, you’re going to fucking try!” He shakes him. “The Governor’s been taking care of you—making sure you’re fed, that you don’t drink yourself to death—and now you’re going to return the favor.”

Bob swallows back his nausea, wipes his face, and gives a queasy nod. “Okay, take me to him.”

*   *   *

On their way through the foyer, up the staircase, and down the back hall, Bob is thinking it’s probably no big deal, the Governor’s got the flu or something, fucking stubbed his toe and now they’re overreacting like they always do. And as they hasten toward the last door on the left, Bruce practically pulling Bob’s arm out of its socket, just for an instant, Bob catches a whiff of something coppery and musky wafting out of the half-ajar door, and the odor sets off warning bells in Bob Stookey’s head. Right before Bruce yanks him inside the apartment—in that horrible instant before Bob clears the jamb and sees what’s waiting for him inside—he flashes back to the war.

The sudden and unbidden memory that streaks through his mind’s eye at that moment makes him flinch—the smell, that protein-rich stew that hung over the slapdash surgical unit in Parwan Province; the pile of pus-ridden bandages earmarked for incineration; the drain swirling with bile; those gurneys washed with blood cooking in the Afghan sun—all of this flickers through Bob’s brain in that split second before he sees the body on the floor of the apartment. The odor raises his hackles and makes him hold on to the jamb for purchase as Bruce shoves him into the vestibule, and Bob, at last, gets a good look at the Governor—or what remains of the man—on the desecrated plywood platform.

“I locked the girl away and untied his arm,” Gabe is saying, but Bob can hardly hear the man or see the other guy—another goon named Jameson, now crouched across the room, hands clasped awkwardly, eyes hot with panic—and the dizziness threatens to drag Bob to the floor. He gapes. Gabe’s voice warbles as if coming from underwater. “He’s passed out—but he’s still breathing.”

“Holy sh—!” Bob barely makes a noise, his voice squeezed and colorless. He falls to his knees. He stares and stares and stares at the contorted, scorched, blood-soaked, scourged remains of a man who once prowled the streets of the little kingdom of Woodbury like an Arthurian knight. Now the mangled body of Philip Blake begins to metamorphose in Bob Stookey’s mind into that poor young man from Alabama—Master Sergeant Bobby McCullam, the kid who haunts Bob’s dreams—the one who got half his body torn off by an IED outside Kandahar. Overlaying the Governor’s face, in a grotesque double image, Bob now sees the marine, that death mask of a face under a helmet—parboiled eyes and bloody grimace tucked into a chin strap—the terrible gaze fixing itself on Bob the Ambulance Driver. Kill me, the kid had muttered to Bob, who couldn’t do anything for the young man but load him into a sweltering cargo bay already crammed with dead marines. Kill me, the kid had said, and Bob was helpless and stricken mute, and the young marine had died with his eyes locked onto Bob’s. All this passes through Bob’s imagination in an instant, pulling the gorge up into his esophagus, filling his mouth with stomach acids, burning in the back of his throat, erupting in his nasal passages like liquid fire.

Bob twists around and roars vomit across the room’s filthy carpet.

The entire contents of his stomach—a twenty-four-hour liquid diet of cheap whiskey and occasional sips of Sterno—come frothing out, splattering the rug. On his hands and knees now, Bob heaves and heaves, his back arching, his body convulsing. He tries to speak between watery gasps. “I—I can’t—can’t even look at him.” He sucks air. A spastic shudder rocks through him. “I can’t—I can’t do anything f-for him!”

Bob feels a hand as strong as a vise tighten on the nape of his neck and a portion of his army fatigue jacket. The hand jerks him to his feet so violently, he’s practically yanked out of his boots.

“The doc and Alice are gone!” Bruce barks at him, their faces so close now, a fine mist of spittle sprays Bob as Bruce tightens his grip on the back of Bob’s neck. “If you don’t do anything, he’s going to FUCKING DIE!!” Bruce shakes the man. “DO YOU WANT HIM TO DIE?!”

Sagging in Bruce’s grasp, Bob lets out a moan: “I—I—I don’t—no.”

“THEN FUCKING DO SOMETHING!!”

With a woozy nod, Bob turns back to the broken body on the floor. He feels the vise grip on his neck loosen. He crouches down and sees only the Governor now.

Bob sees all the blood running down the nude torso, forming sticky, maplike stains already drying and darkening in the dim light of the living room. He looks at the scorched stump of a right arm, and then surveys the breached eye socket all welled up with blood, the eyeball, as shiny and gelatinous as a soft-boiled egg, dangling off the side of the man’s face on tendrils of tissue. He makes note of the swamp of rich arterial blood gathered down around the man’s privates. And finally Bob notices the shallow, labored breathing—the man’s chest barely rising and falling.

Something snaps inside Bob Stookey—sobering him with the speed and intensity of smelling salts. Maybe it’s the old war footing coming back. There’s no time for hesitation on the battlefield—no room for repulsion or fear or paralysis—one just has to move. Fast. Imperfectly. Just move. Triage is everything. Stop the bleeding first, keep the air passages clear, maintain a pulse, and then figure out how to move the victim. But more than that, Bob seizes up right then with a wave of emotion.

He never had kids, but the surge of empathy he suddenly feels for this man recalls the adrenaline that flows through a parent at the scene of a car wreck, the ability to lift a thousand pounds of Detroit steel off a child pinned beneath the wreckage. This man cared about Bob. The Governor treated Bob with kindness, even tenderness—always making a point to check in with Bob, make sure Bob had enough food and water and blankets and a place to stay. The revelation steadies Bob, girds him, clears his vision and focuses his thoughts. His heart stops racing, and he reaches down to depress a fingertip against the Governor’s blood-soaked jugular. The pulse is so weak it could be mistaken for a fluttering pupa inside a fleshy cocoon.

Bob’s voice comes out of him in a low, steady, authoritative tone. “I’m going to need clean bandages, tape—and some peroxide.” Nobody sees Bob’s face changing. He wipes strands of his greasy, pomaded hair back over his pate. His eyes narrow, nested in deep crow’s-feet and wrinkles. His brow furrows with the intensity of a master gambler getting ready to play his hand. “Then, we’ll need to get him to the infirmary.” At last he looks up at the other men, his voice taking on an even deeper gravity. “I’ll do what I can.”

TWO

Rumors bounce around town that day with the haphazard trajectory of a pinball game. While Bruce and Gabe keep the Governor’s condition under wraps, the glaring absence of Woodbury’s leadership causes much speculation and whispering. At first, the prevailing wisdom is that the Governor, Dr. Stevens, Martinez, and Alice all stole away before dawn the previous day on an emergency mission—the purpose of which remains shrouded in mystery. The men on the wall each have a different version. One kid swears he saw Martinez taking a group of unidentified helpers out in a cargo truck on a predawn supply run. But this story loses much of its credence by midmorning when all the vehicles are accounted for. Another guard—the young wannabe gangbanger named Curtis, the kid whom Martinez unexpectedly relieved at the end of the east alley the previous night—claims that Martinez lit out on foot by himself. This rumor also loses steam when most of those left behind realize that the doctor and Alice are also missing, along with the Governor himself, as well as the wounded stranger who was being treated in the infirmary. The stoic man stationed outside the Governor’s apartment building with the assault rifle has nothing to say on the matter and won’t let anyone pass, nor will the guard at the top of the staircase leading down to the infirmary—both situations doing nothing to quell the rumor mill.

By late afternoon, Austin pieces together the real story. He’s been hearing rumblings that an escape has occurred—most likely the strangers he saw with the Governor a week and a half ago—and it all makes a lot more sense when he runs into Marianne Dolan, the matronly woman whose boy has been spiking a fever for twenty-four hours now. The woman tells Austin how she saw Stevens very early that morning, before dawn, hurrying across town with his doctor’s bag. She can’t remember for sure if he was with a group of people. She has a vague memory of seeing a cluster of folks waiting for him under an awning at the end of the street (near the corner where she stopped him), but she’s not positive about that. She remembers asking the doctor if he could possibly take a look at her boy later, and he said sure, but he seemed jittery, like he was in a hurry. With a little prodding, Marianne does suddenly remember seeing Martinez and Alice a few minutes later, hurrying down the street with the doctor, and then she remembers wondering who the others were—the strangers accompanying them—the big guy, the kid, the black lady.

Austin thanks her and immediately goes over to Lilly’s and tells her the whole story. Through process of elimination, they deduce that the whole group slipped out of town, unseen, at the end of the east alley—the gangbanger’s story lines up with this conclusion—and they decide to go over there. Austin brings his binoculars. He also brings his gun for some reason. The tension in the little town is running high by this time. When they arrive at the makeshift wall at the end of the alley, there’s nobody there. All the guards have congregated on the other side of town near the main barricades, to continue spreading gossip and smoke and pass around flasks of cheap booze.

“I can’t believe they would go with them,” Lilly says to Austin, holding a moth-eaten shawl around her shoulders to ward off the chill as she stands on top of the semitrailer blocking the alley from the outer world. A hastily constructed wall of hammered steel plates lines one side of the trailer. On the other side stretches the danger zone of dark side streets, rickety fire escapes, shadowy vestibules, and abandoned buildings given over to the walkers, all of it extending into the lonely outskirts of Woodbury. “Just bail on us without a word?” Lilly marvels softly, shaking her head, staring out at the opaque, black shadows of the pine barrens. The trees sway and flag menacingly in the breeze. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Austin stands next to her in his denim jacket, his long hair loose and tossing in the wind. By this point, dusk is setting in, the wind has cooled, and intermittent gusts swirl trash across the alley behind them, only adding to the desolate feeling of the place. “If you think about it, the whole thing makes a crazy kind of sense,” he says.

Lilly shivers and looks at him. “How do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, Stevens hates the Governor’s guts—right? I mean that’s obvious.”

Lilly gazes out at the wasted landscape draped in gathering shadows. “The doctor’s a good man but he never understood the situation we’re in.”

“Really?” Austin sniffs. “I don’t know.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Didn’t you guys try to take over last year? Stage a coup or whatever?”

Lilly looks at him. “That was a mistake.” She looks out at the woods again. “We didn’t see the … practical reasons for the things he does.”

“The Governor?” Austin gives her a noncommittal glance, his hair blowing across his narrow face. “Seriously? You call the shit he does ‘practical’?”

Lilly gives him another look. “This is our home now, Austin. It’s secure. It’s a place where we can raise our child.”

Austin doesn’t say anything. Neither of them notices the dark figure weaving out of the trees a hundred and fifty yards away.

“People have enough to eat,” Lilly goes on. “They have resources. They have a future here in Woodbury. All because of the Governor.”

Lilly shivers in the chill, and Austin takes off his denim jacket. He drapes it over her shoulders. Lilly gives him a glance.

At first she considers objecting, handing it back to him, but then she just smiles. She finds his constant mothering kind of adorable. Since learning that she’s pregnant with his child, Austin Ballard has transformed. He has stopped talking about finding more weed to smoke and has stopped acting like a slacker and most importantly has stopped hitting on any available woman who crosses his path. He genuinely adores Lilly Caul, and he sincerely loves the whole concept of being a father, of raising a new generation as a hedge against the end of the world. He has—at least in Lilly’s eyes—instantly grown up right in front of her.

While Lilly is thinking all this, the shambling figure approaches from the distance. It’s a hundred yards away now, and coming into view. An adult male clad in a blood-spattered white coat, its dead face upturned and rotating like a satellite dish, it lumbers back and forth across the gravel road, making a winding path toward the barricade as though homing in on some olfactory beacon, some predatory scent drawing it toward the town. Neither Lilly nor Austin notices the figure yet, their thoughts consumed by the exodus of their friends.

“Alice I can understand,” Austin says at last. “She would follow Doc Stevens into hell if he wanted her to. But Martinez is the one I can’t figure out. He always seemed so … I don’t know … gung ho or something.”

Lilly shrugs. “Martinez is a tough nut to crack. He helped us last winter. I always thought he was kind of ambivalent about the whole thing.” Lilly thinks about it some more. “I don’t know if I ever trusted him completely. I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

“Yeah, but—” Austin falls silent. “Hold on a second.” He sees the figure approaching. “Hold on.” He reaches for the binoculars hanging around his neck. He peers through the lenses at the figure, now closing the distance to fifty yards or so.

“What is it?” Lilly sees the walker shuffling toward them but at first doesn’t make much of it. The sighting of an errant corpse weaving out of the trees has become commonplace around here, and Austin has his Glock, so there’s really nothing to worry about. “What’s the matter?”

“Is that—?” Austin fiddles with the dial on his field glasses and takes a closer look. “It couldn’t be. Holy shit, I think it is.”

“What?” Lilly reaches for the binoculars. “Let me have a look.”

Austin says nothing, just hands her the binoculars and stares at the approaching figure.

Lilly raises the binoculars to her eyes and focuses the lenses, and all at once she gets very still and lets out a soft, hissing exhalation of air: “Oh my God.”

*   *   *

With awkward, lurching strides, the recently deceased man approaches the alley barricade as though he’s a dog being drawn there by a subsonic whistle. Lilly and Austin hurriedly climb down the stepladder and then circle around the trailer to a spot where a narrow gap between the semi and the adjacent building is fenced off with rusty chain link and a crown of barbed wire. Lilly stares through the cyclone fence at the creature lumbering toward her.

At this close proximity—the walker is now about ten feet away—Lilly can just make out the tall, thin physique; the patrician nose; the thinning, sandy hair. The man’s eyeglasses are missing, but the drab-white lab coat is unmistakable. Torn and gouged in tufts, soaked in blood now as black as crude oil, the coat hangs in shreds.

“Oh my God, no … no, no, no,” Lilly utters in absolute despair.

The creature suddenly fixes its nickel-plated gaze on Lilly and Austin, and it lunges at them, arms reaching instinctively, fingers curling into claws, blackened lips peeling away from a mouth full of slimy-black teeth—a horrible breathy snarl vibrating out of its maw.

Lilly jerks back with a start when the thing that was once Dr. Stevens bangs into the fence.

“Jesus … Jesus Christ,” Austin mutters, reaching for his Glock.

The chain link rattles as the former physician claws and bumps ineffectually against the barrier. His previously intelligent face is now reduced to a road map of livid veins and marble-white flesh, his neck and shoulders mangled to a bloody pulp as if they had passed through a garbage disposal. His eyes, which once perpetually gleamed with irony and sarcasm, are now an opaque white, refracting the twilight like geodes. His jaws gape as he tries to bite Lilly through the fence.

Lilly senses the muzzle of Austin’s Glock rising up in her peripheral vision. “No, wait!” She waves Austin back and stares at the walker. “God … no. Just wait. Wait. I need to—we can’t just—God damn it.”

Austin’s voice lowers an octave, goes cold and hoarse with revulsion. “They must have—”

“He must have turned back,” Lilly interrupts. “Maybe he had second thoughts, decided to come back.”

“Or maybe they killed him,” Austin ventures. “Fucking evil dicks.”

The creature in the lab coat hasn’t taken its shoe-button eyes off Lilly as it gnashes its teeth and works its blackened lips around snapping teeth, as though trying to bite the air or perhaps to speak. It cocks its head for a moment as though recognizing something through the fence, something important in its prey, something like muscle memory. Lilly meets its gaze for a moment.

The strange tableau—walker and human only inches away from each other, staring into each other’s eyes—doesn’t last more than a moment. But in that horrible instant, Lilly feels the weight of the whole plague, the enormity of it, the terrible emptiness of the world’s end pressing down on her. Here is a man who once ministered to the sick, advised all walks of life, cracked wise and slung witticisms—a man of integrity and humor and audacity and empathy for the weak. Here is the pinnacle of mankind—the highest-functioning member of the human race—stripped of everything that could be called human, diminished to a drooling, feral, neurological bundle of tics. The tears well up in Lilly’s eyes without her even being aware of them—the only sign of her anguish the blurring of that livid face in front of her.

At last, Austin’s strangled voice wrenches her out of this terrible reverie. “We gotta do it,” he says. He has his silencer out now, and he’s screwing it on the gun’s barrel. “We owe it to Stevens, right?”

Lilly bows her head. She can’t look at the thing anymore. “You’re right.”

“Stand back, Lilly.”

“Wait.”

Austin looks at her. “What is it?”

“Just … gimme a second, okay?”

“Sure.”

Lilly stares at the ground, taking deep breaths, clenching her fists. Austin waits. The thing on the other side of the fence sputters and snarls. With a sudden jerk, Lilly spins toward Austin and grabs the gun.

She sticks the muzzle through an opening in the fence and shoots the walker point-blank in the head—the dry clap of the slide echoing off the sky—the single blast slamming through the top of Dr. Stevens’s skull, taking off the back of his head.

The monster folds unceremoniously to the ground in a fountain of blood. Lilly lowers the gun and stares at the remains. A pool of black cerebrospinal fluid gathers under the body.

A moment of stillness passes, the thumping of Lilly’s pulse the only sound in her ears now. Austin stands beside her, waiting.

At last she turns to him and says, “You think you could find a shovel?”

*   *   *

They bury the body inside the barricade, in the hard earth of a vacant lot along the fence. By the time they get the hole dug, which isn’t easy, full darkness has set in, the stars coming out in profusion, a full moon rising. The air turns cold and clammy, the sweat on the back of Austin’s neck chilling him to the bone. He climbs out of the trench and helps Lilly lower the doctor’s remains into the grave.

Then Austin backs away and lets Lilly have her moment standing over the gravesite, gazing down at the body, before he fills in the crater.

“Dr. Stevens,” she says so softly that Austin has to cock his head to hear her, “you were … a true character. In some ways you were the voice of reason. I didn’t always agree with you, but I always respected you. This town will miss you desperately—not just because of the service you provided but because it won’t be the same around here without you.”

A pause follows, and Austin glances up, wondering if she’s done.

“I would have been proud to have you deliver my baby,” she says then, her voice breaking. She sniffs back the tears. “As it is … we have a lot of challenges ahead of us. I hope you’re in a better place now. I hope we all will be someday. I hope this craziness ends soon. I’m sorry you didn’t make it long enough to see that day. God bless you, Dr. Stevens … and may your soul rest in peace.”

She lowers her head then, and Austin waits for Lilly’s tears to pass before he starts filling in the hole.

*   *   *

The next morning, Lilly awakens early, her mind going in many directions all at once.

She lies in bed—the room just beginning to lighten in the predawn glow—Austin slumbering next to her. The two of them have been sleeping together since Lilly broke the news to Austin two days ago that she’s carrying his baby. So far, in the wake of the revelation, they have been inseparable, and their rapport is easy and natural. For now, they’re keeping the news to themselves, but Lilly is dying to tell others about it—maybe the Sterns, maybe Bob, perhaps even the Governor. She’s riding a wave of euphoria and feels for the first time since she arrived in Woodbury that she has a fighting chance to be happy, to survive this insanity. Austin has a lot to do with that, but so does the Governor.

And therein lies the problem. She hasn’t seen a trace of the missing leader for forty-eight hours, and she doesn’t buy the rumors that the Governor went out on a scouting party to find the escapees. If Woodbury is under the threat of attack—which, Lilly worries, is a real possibility—then it seems to her that the Governor would be needed right here, fortifying the town, preparing to defend it. Where the hell is he? There are other rumors flying around, but she’s not buying any of them. She needs to find out what the deal is herself; she needs to see the Governor with her own eyes.

She gently untangles herself from the blankets and climbs out of bed, careful not to waken Austin. He’s been a sweetheart to her these last couple of days, and the sound of his low, deep breathing gives her a good feeling. He deserves a good night’s rest—especially in the wake of recent events. But Lilly is as restless as a caged animal and has to find out what’s going on with the Governor. She walks across the room feeling dizzy and nauseous.

She’s had morning sickness from the get-go, but not just in the morning. That high, queasy feeling in the upper GI area has been coming in waves throughout the day—every day—sometimes taking her to the verge of throwing up, sometimes less so, but always churning in her gut like a fist. She has yet to vomit and wonders if that might bring her some relief. She’s been belching regularly, and that eases the nausea somewhat but not much. Maybe anxiety plays a part in it—her fear for the future, for the town’s safety in the wake of these escapes, for the mounting number of walkers in the area—but part of it, she is convinced, is the normal trials and travails of the first trimester. Like a lot of expecting women riding the roller coaster of hormones, a part of her is grateful for the queasiness—it means on some fundamental level that all systems are go.

Getting dressed as quietly as possible, she practices the deep breathing exercises she once saw on some TV girlie gabfest, a factoid buried in her far-flung media memory banks. In through the nose, out through the mouth, slow and deep and even. She pulls on her jeans, steps into her boots, and grabs her Ruger semiautomatic, which is loaded with a ten-round clip, and nestles it into the back of her belt.

For some reason, a fleeting memory of her father crosses her mind as she pulls on a cable-knit sweater and checks herself in a broken mirror sitting on top of boxes, canted against the plaster wall, reflecting a fractured slice of her narrow, freckled face. Had Everett Caul survived the initial surge of undead that swept across Metro Atlanta last year, the old man would be bursting at the seams with excitement right now. Had he not been brutally torn from the outer door of that rogue bus by a horde of biters, he would be pampering Lilly and saying things like, “A little gal in your condition shouldn’t be shootin’ firearms, missy.” Everett Caul raised Lilly well after the death of his wife from breast cancer back when Lilly was only seven years old. The old man raised his daughter with a tender touch, and had always been proud of Lilly, but the prospects of Everett Caul becoming a grandfather—spoiling her child, teaching the kid how to make fishing lures and soap out of beef tallow—stops Lilly cold at that broken mirror in the predawn light of her bedroom.

She lowers her head and begins to softly weep at the loss of her dad, her lungs hitching with emotion, making strangled hissing noises in the silent room, her tears tracking down the front of her sweater. She can’t remember crying like this—even when Josh got killed—and she gasps for air, holding her hand to the bridge of her nose. Her skull throbs. Maybe it’s just the “condition” she’s in, but she feels the sadness roiling within her like the waves of a storm-tossed sea.

“Enough of this shit,” she scolds herself under her breath, biting off the sorrow and the grief.

She draws her gun. Racks the slide. Checks the safety and tucks it back in her belt.

Then she walks out.

*   *   *

The day dawns clear, the sky bright and high, as Lilly strides down Main Street, her hands in her pockets, making note of the general mood of the few Woodburians who cross her path. She sees Gus with an armful of fuel cans, awkwardly negotiating the loading dock steps behind the warehouse on Pecan Street. She sees the Sizemore girls playing tic-tac-throw on the pavement of an alley under the watchful gaze of their mother, Elizabeth, who cradles a shotgun. The vibe on Woodbury’s streets is strangely calm and sanguine—apparently the rumor mill has quieted down for the time being—although Lilly detects an odd undertow of jitters threading through the people. She can sense its presence in furtive glances and the speed with which folks are crossing streets and carrying supplies through doors and passageways. It makes Lilly think of those old Westerns that used to play on Sunday afternoons on the Fox station in Atlanta. Invariably, at some point, some old grizzled cowboy would say, “It’s quiet … maybe a little too quiet.” With a shrug, Lilly shakes off the feeling and turns south at the corner of Main and Durand.

Her plan is to try the Governor’s apartment first—the previous day she got nowhere with Earl, the tattooed biker guarding the entrance—and if that doesn’t yield any information, then she’ll try the infirmary. She’s heard murmurings among the town gossipmongers that the Governor sustained injuries during a struggle to prevent the strangers from escaping. But at this point, Lilly doesn’t know what or whom to believe. All she knows is that the longer the town goes without a plan, without consensus, without information, the more vulnerable they’ll become.

She sees the Governor’s building in the distance—as well as the guard pacing across the entrance—and she starts to rehearse what she’s going to say, when she notices a figure trundling down the street. The man lugs two enormous thirty-gallon containers of filtered water, and moves with the intense haste of somebody rushing to put out a fire. Squat, broad-shouldered, and bullish, he wears a tattered turtleneck, which is dark under the arms with sweat, and army fatigue pants tucked into his hobnail boots. His big crew-cut head has an awkward forward lean to it like the prow of a storm-rocked ship as he hauls the jugs toward the center of town—toward the racetrack.

“GABE!”

Lilly tries to keep her voice even as she calls out, tries not to appear too alarmed, but the shout comes out tinged with hysteria. She hasn’t seen Gabe in forty-eight hours, not since the strangers escaped in such a shroud of mystery two days ago, and she has a feeling Gabe knows exactly what’s going on. The big, burly man remains one of the Governor’s closest lieutenants and confidantes—an attack dog that has completely sublimated its own personality in favor of serving the iron-fisted town tyrant.

“Huh?” Gabe looks up with a startled, vexed expression. He can hear footsteps but can’t see who’s approaching. He whirls around with the heavy weight dragging on his arms. “Ww-wha—?”

“Gabe, what’s going on?” Lilly says breathlessly as she clamors up to him. She swallows back the jitters and stanches her racing pulse. Then she lowers her voice. “Where the hell is the Governor?”

“I can’t talk right now,” Gabe says, and pushes past her, hauling the water containers down the sidewalk.

“Wait!—Gabe!—Hold on a second.” She chases after him, and clutches at his beefy arm. “Just tell me what’s going on!”

Gabe pauses, glances over his shoulder to see if anybody else is within earshot. The street is deserted. Gabe keeps his voice low. “Nothing’s going on, Lilly. Just mind your own fucking business.”

“Gabe, c’mon.” She shoots a glance over her shoulder, then looks back at him. “All I’m asking is … is he here? Is he in Woodbury?”

Gabe sets the containers down with a grunt. He runs fingers through his short-cropped, sandy hair, his scalp moist with perspiration. Right then Lilly notices something disconcerting about this barrel-chested bull of a man, something she has never seen before. His hands are shaking. He spits on the street. “Okay … look. Tell everybody … tell them…” He pauses, swallowing hard, looking down, shaking his head. “I don’t know … tell them everything’s okay, the Governor’s okay, and there’s nothing to worry about.”

“If there’s nothing to worry about, where the fuck is he, Gabe?”

He looks at her. “He’s … here. He’s … dealing with some shit right now.”

“What shit?”

“Goddamnit—I told you to mind your fucking business!” Gabe catches himself, the gravelly boom of his voice echoing across the far warrens of stone alleyways and brick storefronts. He takes a deep breath and calms down. “Look, I gotta go. The Governor needs this water.”

“Gabe, listen to me.” Lilly steps in closer and gets in his face. “If you know what’s going on, tell me … because the town is starting to come apart at the seams not knowing anything. People are making shit up. The guys at the wall are starting to not show up for their shifts.” Something inside Lilly hardens then, like a block of ice. All her fear and doubt drains out of her, leaving behind a cold, calculating, ticking intellect. She holds Gabe’s wide, shifting gray eyes in her gaze. “Look at me.”

“Huh?”

“Look at me, Gabe.”

He looks at her, his eyes narrowing with anger. “What the fuck is your problem, lady—you think you can talk to me like that?”

“I care about this town, Gabe.” She stands her ground, nose to nose with this nervous, snorting bull. “Listen to what I’m telling you. I need this town to work. Do you understand? Now tell me what’s going on. If there’s nothing wrong, you got no reason to hide anything.”

“Goddamnit, Lilly—”

“Talk to me, Gabe.” She arc-welds her gaze into him. “If there’s a problem, you need me on your side. I can help. Ask the Governor. I’m on his side. I need him on that wall. I need him keeping people sharp.”

At last, the portly man in the turtleneck deflates. He looks at the ground. His voice comes out paper-thin, reedy and defeated, like a little boy admitting to being naughty. “If I show you what’s going on … you gotta promise to keep it on the down-low.”

Lilly just stares at him, wondering how bad it could be.

THREE

“Jesus Christ.”

The words blurt out of her on a gasp, unbidden and involuntary, as she takes in the entirety of the tile-lined subterranean chamber all at once. Gabe stands behind her, in the doorway, still holding the water containers, frozen there as if held in suspended animation.

For a brief instant, all the information assaulting her senses floods Lilly’s brain in one great heaving gulp. The most prominent thing registering with her—overriding every other initial impression—is the pungent mélange of suffering, the coppery tang of blood, the black stench of infection and bile, and the ubiquitous scent of ammonia. But underneath it all, providing an odd counterpoint, is the smell of burnt coffee, an ancient percolator in the corner brewing a pot of bitter Maxwell House. This incongruous odor—a good reason for it, she will soon learn—mingles with other smells of the infirmary in a strangely disturbing way. Lilly takes a step closer to the gurney resting in the center of the room under the big light.

“Is he—?” She can barely speak. She stares at the body lying in the blazing silver light. In its current state, highlighted in that harsh light, the body brings to mind world leaders lying in state, beloved dictators pickled in death and exhibited in glass sarcophagi for the viewing pleasure of endless queues of mourners. It takes several moments for Lilly to realize that the patient is still breathing—albeit shallow, feeble breathing—his lungs rising and falling slowly under the blanket pulled up to his nude, iodine-stained rib cage. His head lolls to one side on a yellowed pillow, his face almost completely obscured by blood-soaked bandages.

“Hello, Lilly-girl,” a voice says from just behind her right flank, a blur of movement in her peripheral vision that interrupts her stupor. She turns and sees Bob Stookey standing beside her. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “It’s good to see you.”

Now Lilly stands paralyzed by another inconsistency—adding to the surreal sights and smells and sounds in that horrible tile room—another weird detail, which also strikes her as incomprehensible. Standing before her with a towel draped over his shoulder, his bloodstained lab coat buttoned at the collar like that of a competent barber, Bob has completely transformed. He holds a Styrofoam cup of coffee, his hands as steady as cornerstones. His greasy black hair is now combed neatly back off his weathered face, his eyes alert and clear and lucid. He is the picture of sobriety. “Bob, wh—what happened? Who did this?”

“Fucking bitch with the sword,” Bruce Cooper’s voice pipes in. From the corner of the room, the big man rises off a folding chair and comes over to the gurney. The man shoots a glare at Gabe. “What the fuck, Gabe? I thought we were supposed to keep this under wraps!”

“She ain’t gonna tell anybody,” Gabe mumbles, finally putting the water down. “Right, Lilly?”

Before Lilly can answer, Bruce throws a ballpoint pen at Gabe. The pen barely misses impaling itself in his eye, grazing off the top of his head. Bruce roars at him. “YOU STUPID FUCK!—WHOLE TOWN’S GONNA KNOW ABOUT IT NOW!!”

Gabe makes a move toward Bruce when Lilly steps in between them. “STOP IT!” She shoves them back, away from the gurney. “CALM THE FUCK DOWN!”

“Tell him!” Gabe stands nose to nose with Bruce, fists clenched and working. Bob hovers over the patient, feeling the Governor’s pulse. In all the excitement, the man’s head has lolled slightly, but that’s about the only change. Gabe takes shallow breaths, glaring at Bruce. “He’s the one gettin’ his panties in a bunch!”

“Shut up!” Lilly pushes each man aside, staying in between them. “This is not the time to lose your shit. We gotta keep our fucking wits about us—now more than ever.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” Bruce grumbles, meeting Gabe’s glare.

“Okay, let’s take a deep breath. I’m not gonna tell anybody. Okay? Calm down.”

She looks at both men, and Gabe looks down and says nothing. Bruce wipes his face, breathing hard, looking around the room as if the answer to their problems is hidden inside the walls.

“We gotta take this one step at a time.” She looks at Gabe. “Just answer one question. What they’re saying about Martinez … is it true?” Gabe doesn’t respond. “Gabe? Did Martinez go with those assholes from the other camp?” She turns to Bruce. “Did he?”

Bruce looks down and lets out a pained sigh. He nods. “The motherfucker helped them escape.”

“And we know this how?”

Bruce looks at her. “We got eyewitnesses, saw that cocksucker helping them over the wall at the end of the Durand Street alley.”

“What eyewitnesses?”

Bruce shrugs. “The lady with the sick kid, what’s-her-name, and also Curtis, the kid guarding the alley that night. Said Martinez relieved him, but the kid hung around and saw them going over … saw the black chick splitting off from the group. Bitch jumped the Governor minutes later.”

“Where?”

“In the Governor’s place—right in his fucking home—the fucking bitch bushwhacked him.”

“Okay … let’s just stick to the facts for a second.” Lilly starts to nervously pace the room, every few moments throwing a glance at the patient. The Governor’s face looks swollen and misshapen under his bandages, the gauze bulging where his left eye socket should be. “How do we know these douche bags didn’t have a gun on Martinez the whole time?”

Bruce shoots a look at Gabe, who stares at Lilly skeptically and says, “I wouldn’t bet on it, Lilly.”

“Why?”

Gabe glares at her. “Well … let’s see. How about the fact that Martinez is a lying son of a bitch with no loyalty to the Governor?”

“Why do you say that?”

Gabe snorts disdainfully, almost laughs. “Lemme think.” He points to an oblong bruise spanning his Adam’s apple. “For starters, he waylaid me outside the chick’s holding cell, pretty near cracked my skull open.” He glares at Lilly. “On top of that, wasn’t he part of your little hole-in-the-wall gang last year when you tried to take out the Governor?”

Lilly meets his gaze, doesn’t even flinch, just stares at him and says, “Things change—we made some bad choices.” She looks at Bruce, then back at Gabe. “I don’t know about Martinez but I’m with the Governor a hundred percent now—a thousand percent.”

Neither man says anything. Both just stare at the floor like children in detention.

Lilly gazes at the patient. “I guess it comes as no surprise that Stevens and Alice went along with the strangers; there was never any love lost there.”

Gabe lets out another snort. “That’s a fucking understatement.”

Lilly paces, thinking. “I think that’s what bothers me the most.”

Bruce speaks up: “Whaddaya mean? Because we ain’t gotta doc now?”

Lilly looks at him. “No. That’s not what I’m talking about.” She gestures toward Bob. “I think we’re covered in that department.” She glances back at Bruce. “What I’m worried about is the fact that these assholes have people from our town with them.”

Bruce and Gabe exchange another heated glance. Gabe looks at Lilly. “So what?”

“So what?” She walks over to the gurney and looks down at the Governor. The man clings to life—one lidded eye visible through an opening in the head dressing, the eyeball shifting slightly under the lid. Is he dreaming? Is he brain-damaged? Is he ever going to fight his way out of this vegetative state? Lilly stares at the slow rise and fall of the man’s chest and thinks some more. “Martinez, Alice, and the doctor know this town better than anyone,” she murmurs, not taking her gaze off the patient. “They know the weak spots; they know where we’re vulnerable.”

This sends a paralyzing silence through the reeking tile chamber. Everybody stares at Lilly as though waiting for her to provide an answer. She stares at the Governor’s ravaged body for another moment.

At last she turns to Bob and says with a newfound air of authority, “Bob, gimme a prognosis here.”

*   *   *

The first twenty-four hours had been anybody’s guess. Once they brought the Governor’s decimated body back to the infirmary, the main issue was keeping his heart beating, followed closely by stanching the blood loss. Despite the fact that he had a crudely cauterized stump halfway up his right arm at the point of dismemberment—slowing the bleeding from the amputation, which was mercifully clean thanks to the sharpness of the katana sword—there had been massive bleeding at other wound sites, especially the detached penis. Bob had done a lot of hasty battlefield stitching with the storehouse of dissolving catgut Doc Stevens kept on the shelf—reattaching the severed penis at one point with shaking hands. When he ran out of sutures, he used a needle and thread procured from the general store on Main Street.

The old lessons from the war zone came back to him in waves. He remembered the four stages of hypovolemic shock—battlefield medics call it the “tennis match,” since the stages of blood loss mimic tennis scores—15 percent loss is minor; 15 to 30 percent is serious, resulting in plummeting blood pressure and tachycardia; 30 to 40 percent is life-threatening, bringing on cardiac arrest; and 40 percent plus is deadly.

For hours, the Governor wavered in between stage two and three, and Bob had to resort to CPR twice to keep the man’s heart beating. Luckily, Stevens kept enough electrolytes in the storeroom to maintain the IV drip, and Bob even found half a dozen units of whole blood. He couldn’t figure out how to type the Governor—that was beyond Bob’s skill set—but he did know enough to get plasma into the man as soon as possible. The transfusions weren’t rejected, and after six hours the Governor had stabilized somewhat. Bob even found an old oxygen tank that was half-full, and administered it in dribs and drabs, until the Governor seemed to be holding his own. His breathing steadied and his sinus rhythm returned to normal, he settled into a semi-comatose state.

Later, in the fashion of an insurance investigator piecing together the chronology of a fatal accident, Bob Stookey had drawn crude sketches in a spiral-bound notebook of the instruments of torture left in the Governor’s living room (as well as the assumed points of entry). The puncture wound from the drill was especially problematic, in spite of the fact that it had apparently not severed any major arteries. It had come within two centimeters of a branching vein of the carotid, and Bob had worked for nearly an hour cleaning out the site. He ran out of gauze, ran out of tape, ran out of hydrogen peroxide, ran out of Betadine, and ran out of glucose. Another issue was internal bleeding—the treatment of which was, again, just out of Bob’s reach—but by the second day, Bob was convinced that the assault on the Governor’s rectum, as well as the profusion of blunt-instrument trauma to 75 percent of his body, had not resulted in any internal hemorrhaging.

Once the man was stabilized, Bob turned his attention to infection. He knew from front-line experience that infection is the silent partner in most battlefield fatalities—the number one tool of the grim reaper once a soldier is out of immediate danger—so he rifled through the supplies and ransacked the infirmary cupboards looking for antibiotics. He worried that the Governor was a perfect candidate for sepsis—considering all the rusty, filthy, oxidized tools used on him—so Bob used up every last cc of Moxifloxacin in the IV and administered hypodermically the last drops of Netromycin left in Woodbury. By the morning of the third day, the wounds had begun to close over and heal.

“I wouldn’t say he’s out of the woods yet,” Bob now reports, summing up the whole situation as he walks across the infirmary to the trash bin, into which he tosses a wad of used cotton swabs. It’s taken him nearly ten minutes to recap the whole timeline, and now he goes over to the coffee urn and pours himself another few fingers of the muddy stuff. “Put it this way, he’s on the edge of the woods, holding steady.” He turns to Lilly and holds up the coffee cup. “You want a cup o’ joe?”

Lilly shrugs. “Sure … why not?” She turns to Bruce and Gabe, who stand fidgeting by the door. “I’m not telling you guys what to do … but if it were me, I would go check the wall on the north end.”

“What are you, the Queen of Sheba now?” Bruce grumbles.

“With Martinez gone and the Governor out of commission, those guys have been deserting their posts left and right. We can’t afford to be careless right now.”

Bruce and Gabe look at each other, each one gauging the other’s reaction to being bossed around by some chick from the suburbs. “She’s got a point,” Gabe says.

“Jesus Christ … whatever,” Bruce grouses under his breath, then turns and storms out the door.

Gabe follows him out.

Bob comes over to Lilly and hands her a paper cup of coffee. Lilly notices again how Bob’s hands have stopped shaking. She takes a sip. “Holy crap, this is bad,” she says with a slight cringe.

“It’s wet and it’s got caffeine in it,” Bob comments as he turns back to his patient. Pulling the spiral-bound notebook from his back pocket, he nudges a chair next to the gurney, sits down, and makes a few notes. “We’re at a critical stage now,” he murmurs while he writes. “Got to keep track of how much Vicodin I’ve given him—not sure if all the drugs have ganged up on him, maybe induced the coma he’s in.”

Lilly edges her chair closer to the gurney and sits next to the foot of the bed. She can smell the cloying odors of antiseptic and iodine. She stares at the Governor’s untrimmed toenails and pale bare feet—as limp and pallid as dead fish—poking out from under the sheet.

For a moment, Lilly is stricken with a strange mixture of impressions—crucifixion and sacrificial lambs—which jolts through her with the strength of a lightning bolt. The unexpected emotion tightens her gut and makes her turn away. What kind of person could do this to another person? Who is this lady? Where the hell did she come from? And the deeper concerns banging around the back of Lilly’s mind: If this woman is capable of doing this to a man as dangerous as the Governor, then what is her group capable of doing to Woodbury?

“The key now is keeping infection away from the door,” Bob is saying, gently palpating the Governor’s neck with a fingertip, keeping track of the man’s pulse.

“Bob, tell me the truth,” Lilly says, looking into the older man’s eyes. Bob’s face furrows with bemusement as he meets Lilly’s stare. He puts down his notebook. She speaks softly. “Do you think he’s gonna make it?”

Bob takes in a deep, thoughtful breath, and then exhales with a sigh. “He’s a tough cuss, this one.” He looks at the Governor’s shrouded face. “If anybody can pull through something like this, he can.”

Lilly notices Bob’s gnarled left hand is resting gently on the Governor’s shoulder. The unexpected tenderness takes her aback for a moment. She wonders if Bob Stookey has finally found his raison d’être—a channel for all his grief and unrequited love. She wonders if this whole crisis has given Bob a way to stave off the pain of losing Megan. She wonders if this is what Bob always needed—a surrogate son, someone who needed him. The Governor has always been kind to Bob—Lilly noticed that almost from day one—and now she sees the logical extension of that kindness. Bob has never looked more alive, more at peace, more comfortable in his own skin.

“How long, though?” Lilly says at last. “How long do you think he’s gonna be laid up?”

Bob shakes his head with a sigh. “There’s no telling how long. Even if I was some highfalutin’ trauma surgeon, I wouldn’t be able to give you a timetable.”

Lilly sighs. “We’re in some deep shit here, Bob. We need fucking leadership. More than ever. We could be attacked at any minute.” She swallows hard, feeling a twinge of nausea ripple up her gorge. Not now, goddamnit, not now, she thinks. “With the Governor out of action, we are screwed. We need to batten down the fucking hatches.”

Bob shrugs. “All I can do is stay with him, keep watch, and hope for the best.”

Lilly chews her lip. “What do you think went down between the two of them?”

“Who?”

“The Governor and that girl.”

Another shrug from Bob. “I don’t know anything about that.” He thinks about it for a moment. “It doesn’t matter. Whoever did this to him was a nutcase—an animal—and they ought to be put down like a goddamn rabid dog.”

Lilly shakes her head. “I know he had her locked up; he was probably questioning her. Did Bruce or Gabe say anything about it?”

“I didn’t ask, and I don’t want to know.” Bob rubs his eyes. “All I want is to get him out of these weeds, get him back on his feet … no matter how long it takes.”

Lilly lets out another sigh. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do without him, Bob. We need somebody keeping these people on their toes.”

Bob thinks about it some more, and then gives her a wry little smile. “I think you might have already found that person.”

She looks at him.

All at once she realizes what he’s getting at and the pressure lands on her like a giant anvil, nearly taking her breath away.… No fucking way, not in a million fucking years is it going to be me.

*   *   *

That night, Lilly organizes an emergency meeting in the courthouse, in the community room in the rear, the doors locked down and all the lights off except for a pair of kerosene lanterns flickering on the conference table. She asks each person in attendance to keep the meeting a secret. The five of them arrive after midnight, after the town has quieted down, and they each take a seat at the table, with Lilly sitting at the head, near the broken-down metal stand bearing the faded, threadbare Georgia state flag.

For Lilly, the room teems with ghosts. Phantoms from her past ooze from the crumbling plaster walls, from the litter-strewn floor, from the overturned folding chairs, from the bullet holes in the front wall, and from the high windows, which are all cracked and boarded up now. A framed portrait of Nathan Deal, the long-forgotten eighty-second governor of Georgia, dangles on the lintel, the glass shattered and stained with rusty blood droplets in the dancing firelight—a fitting testament to the apocalypse.

The memories wash over Lilly that night. She remembers meeting Philip Blake in this room over a year and a half ago—when she first arrived in Woodbury with Josh, Megan, Bob, and Scott the stoner—and Lilly will never forget the swagger, the creepy impression the Governor initially gave off. Little did she know he would become her lifeline one day, he would be her anchor in this sea of chaos.

“Christ on a cracker,” Barbara Stern utters after hearing the whole story of the elaborate escape and the condition of the Governor. She sits next to her husband on one side of the table, wringing her slender hands. The gloomy light flickers off her deeply lined face and tendrils of iron-gray hair. “As if we don’t have enough on our plates in this godforsaken place—we have to deal with this now?”

“I think the first thing we have to do is put out a cover story,” Lilly says. She wears an Atlanta Braves cap with her hair in a ponytail poking through the plastic band in back—all business now. The crisis has driven her morning sickness away.

Bruce, sitting at the opposite end of the table, leaning back skeptically in his chair, his lean, cabled arms crossed against his chest, gives her a frown. “A what?”

She looks at him. “A cover story, some bullshit explanation that won’t get everybody all excited and stressed out.” She looks around the table. “We should keep it simple, make sure all our stories match up.”

“Lilly … um,” Austin speaks up from the chair to her immediate left. He has his hands clasped as if praying, and he holds a pained look on his face. “You do realize, people are gonna find out sooner or later. I mean … this is a really small town.”

Lilly lets out a nervous sigh. “Okay … well … if they find out, let’s make sure it stays a rumor. People have been saying all kinds of crazy shit.”

David Stern pipes in. “Honey, just out of curiosity, what is it you’re worried about happening if we just tell everybody the truth?”

Lilly exhales, pushes herself away from the head of the table, and starts pacing. “Look. We have to keep this town buttoned up tight. We can’t have people panicking right now. We really have no idea who these strangers are, or what they have in mind.” She clenches her fists. “You want to see what they’re capable of, go to the infirmary and take a look at the Governor. These people are nuts, they’re dangerous as hell. We have to up our defenses. If we’re gonna err, we’re gonna err on the side of being too careful.”

Gabe speaks up from over by the windows. “Then I say we go after them.” Leaning against the boarded, arched windowpane, his hands in his pockets, he glowers at Lilly. “Best defense is a strong offense.”

“Fucking-A,” Bruce says with a nod, leaning back against the defunct Coke machine.

“No!” Lilly stands her ground near the flag, her hazel eyes blazing with righteous fervor, her delicate chin jutting defiantly. “Not without the Governor. We don’t make any major moves while he’s out.” Now she looks at every person in the room, one at a time, her voice going low and steady. “We stick to a cover story until he’s on his feet again. Bob thinks it’s possible he could come out of it any day.” She looks at Gabe. “You understand what I’m saying? Until then, we zip this place up as tight as a drum.”

Gabe takes a deep breath and lets out an exasperated sigh. “Okay, missy … we do it your way.”

Lilly looks at Bruce. “You okay with this?”

He shakes his head, rolling his eyes. “Whatever you say, girlfriend. You got the wheel. You’re on a roll.”

“Okay, good.” She looks back at Gabe. “Why don’t we tell a couple of Martinez’s guys to get lost for a few days, and then we’ll tell everybody the Governor’s out on a search party with them. Can you handle that?”

Gabe shrugs. “I guess so … yeah.”

“In the meantime, we keep a guard on the infirmary at all times.” Lilly looks at the others. “So that’s our cover story. We’re gonna need everybody in this room to step up. Bruce, you handle the wall. Keep shifts going all the time, and make sure we got plenty of ammo for the machine guns. Make another run to the Guard station if you have to.” She looks at the Sterns. “David and Barbara, you two spread the word, keep your ears open. That group that has coffee in the square every morning, hang out with them. Keep tabs on what they’re saying. Austin … you and I will take regular walks around the barricade. We’ll make sure everything’s secure. This is critical, people. With the Governor on his back, we are totally vulnerable. We have to remember—”

A noise outside the boarded windows cuts her off. All heads snap toward the sound of yelling, glass breaking, wood splitting apart.

“Oh shit,” Lilly utters, frozen at the front of the room with her fists clenched.

Barbara Stern springs to her feet, her eyes suddenly wide with terror. “Maybe it’s just a fight, somebody drunk or pissed off or something.”

“I don’t think so,” David Stern murmurs, standing up and reaching around for the pistol wedged into the back of his belt. He draws his gun.

Austin jumps out of his chair and darts across the room to where Lilly stands staring. “Let’s let Gabe and Bruce check it out first.”

Across the room, Bruce is already on his feet, pulling the .45 from its holster, snapping off the safety, and shooting a look at Gabe. “You got the other MIG?”

Gabe has already whirled toward the far corner of the room, where two assault rifles are leaning against the wall. He grabs one, and then the other, and then turns to Bruce and tosses one of the rifles as he yells, “C’mon!—Let’s go!—Before all hell breaks loose!”

Bruce catches the weapon, chambers a round, and follows Gabe out the door, down the hall, and toward the exit.

The others stand frozen in the community room, looking at each other and listening to the pandemonium rising out on the street.

FOUR

In the darkness, an empty bottle of Jack rolls across the street half a block north of the courthouse, and Gabe kicks it aside as he barrels toward the southwest corner of town, Bruce right on his heels. In the night winds, Gabe can see the intermittent muzzle flashes behind the grove of trees along the town square, sparks as bright as arc welders bouncing off the sky, the cool night air alive with screams. One of the guards is already down on the ground by the curb, his drinking buddies scattering now, their silhouettes receding into the distance. Three walkers have piled up on the fallen guard, tearing into him, the blood tide spreading in all directions as they feed, burrowing down into flesh, ripping strings of tendons and cartilage in the flickering shadows. Gabe gets to within twenty yards of the feeding orgy and snaps the selector lever on the rifle. His barrel comes up as he charges in and pulls the trigger.

Hellfire blazes out of the MIG, strafing the top halves of the biters, punching holes through cranial bones in fountains of tissue and bursts of blood mist. The walkers fold. Bruce roars past Gabe with his own rifle up and braced on his big shoulder, his booming voice coming out in one spontaneous cry: “GET THAT FUCKING WALL BACK UP NOW!!”

Gabe glances back up and sees what Bruce is shouting about in the darkness twenty-five yards away: A weak spot in the corner of the barricade—a conglomeration of drywall panels, sheet metal, and roofing nails—has collapsed under the weight of a dozen or more walkers pushing in from the adjacent woods. The men must have been shirking their watch, fucking around, not paying attention, drinking or some such shit. Now one of the young guards on a gun turret frantically sweeps his arc lamp down on the scene—the silver beam crisscrossing the fogbound street—painting luminous halos around the silhouettes of twenty-plus biters staggering over fallen timbers.

Bruce unleashes a barrage of armor-piercing rounds at the onslaught.

He gets most of them—the casings flinging, one by one, up into the air—a row of reanimated corpses doing involuntary jigs in the swirling spray of fluids, ragged bodies collapsing in a synchronized line dance of death. But Bruce doesn’t notice Gabe fanning out to the right, going after an errant biter who is dragging toward an alley. If the dead infiltrate the shadowy nooks and crannies of the town before they are all dispatched, there will be hell to pay. In all the commotion—the guards returning with heavy artillery, the shouts, the sweeping beams of arc light, the two machine-gun placements starting to spit fire—Gabe gets separated.

He follows a biter into a dark alley and immediately loses track of the thing.

“FUCK-FUCK! FUCK!—FUCK!!” Gabe hisses loudly, spinning around, scanning the darkness, his rifle raised and ready, the shadows engulfing him. He can hardly see his hand in front of his face. He has two extra magazines in sheaths on his belt, a Glock tucked against his left pant leg, and a Randall knife thrust down the inside of his right boot. He’s loaded for bear, but right now he can’t see shit. He smells the thing—that rancid meat and toe-cheese odor—infecting the dark. He hears a crunch and jerks the muzzle toward the sound.

Nothing.

He moves deeper into the alley, the sounds of pandemonium out on the street fading in his ringing ears. His heart bangs in his chest. His mouth goes dry. He swings the gun’s barrel to the right, blinks away the sweat dripping in his eyes, and then swings the muzzle to the left. Where the fuck did that shit-bird go? He plunges deeper into the passageway. The darkness thickens.

A sudden noise to his immediate right straightens his spine—the clatter of a tin can rolling across pavement—and he pulls the trigger. Half a dozen high-velocity slugs trace through the dark like Roman candles, ricocheting off the adjacent brick in a necklace of dust puffs.

Gabe stops and listens, the blasts echoing in his ears. Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound. Maybe he has the wrong alley. He could have sworn the thing lumbered into this one, but the darkness works on Gabe now, steals his confidence, sends tremors of panic down his bones.

What the fuck?

He approaches the end of the alley, a dead end crowded with garbage Dumpsters and strewn with trash. He reaches for his Zippo with his free hand, his other hand propping the rifle on his ample hip. He can hear the low putter of a generator nearby—probably inside the wall—as he pulls the lighter out and thumbs the little flywheel, sparking a minuscule yellow flame.

The flickering cone of light illuminates a huge figure with milk-glass eyes in a tattered burial coat standing three feet away.

Gabe lets out a yelp and drops the lighter, jerking back and fumbling for the trigger as the biter lunges at him, chewing at the air. Gabe loses his balance. He falls on his ass hard, hitting the pavement with a grunt. The biter pounces—this one hungry and twitchy and full of fight—and Gabe flails impotently at the thing with the short barrel of the rifle, unable to get a good shot.

The gun discharges once, the muzzle flash capturing a snapshot of the monster going for Gabe’s throat with green, mossy incisors. Gabe manages to dodge the snapping teeth but loses his grip on the gun in the process, the MIG clattering to the pavement beside him. He squirms and writhes and lets out a throttled cry of rage and finally gets his hand around the grip of the Randall knife in his boot.

With one violent jerk he thrusts the blade up at the biter’s head.

At first the knife merely lands a glancing blow to the monster’s jaw, ripping open a flap of mortified flesh. Gabe’s eyes have adjusted to the dark enough now to see shapes—wet, fleshy blurs—and he slashes madly at the top of the creature until the knife impales the monster through the left nostril. The point penetrates the nasal cavity and the rotten skull fissures down the middle with the adrenaline-fueled force of Gabe’s stabbing blow.

The biter gushes fluids all over him as the cranium splits in half.

Gabe gasps and rolls away, the dead thing deflating and going still in a puddle of its own fluids, which spread on the paving stones like black oil. Gabe manages to roll toward his rifle. But before he can get to the gun—his heart racing now, his adrenaline sparking in his eyes like sunspots—he senses a change in the alley behind him. Movement as black as bat wings floods his peripheral vision as the noise of inhuman growling—a chorus of guttural, rusty gears grinding—rumbles slowly toward him. He smells the telltale stench of rancid proteins and black rot flooding the alley. Dizziness courses over him as he rises up on shaky legs and slowly turns. His eyes suddenly dilate—an involuntary shudder traveling down his spine—as he takes in the horror.

At least ten biters—maybe more—shuffle toward him with implacable dead stares—an entire pack blotting out any hope of escape, an insatiable regiment of monsters moving as one, closing in on him, silhouetted like deadly marionettes by the light spilling across the mouth of the alley behind them. Gabe lets out another garbled, defiant scream, and darts toward his gun.

It’s too late. Before he can scoop the weapon up, the lead walker goes for his beefy shoulder. He kicks at its midsection with his jackboot, reaching for his Glock, when another monster moves in from his other flank, clawing at his neck. Gabe puts his head down and raises the pistol and tries to steamroll his way through the center of the pack—firing wildly—the muzzle barking and flashing with the surreal, intermittent flicker of a nickelodeon.

There’s too many of them. Dead arms reach for him before he clears the jumble, cold fingers curled into grappling hooks, latching onto him, driving him to the pavement. He lands on the stones, wrenching his back, gasping for breath, his clip already empty, the air knocked out of his lungs. He tries to roll away, but the creatures descend on him—a pack of wolves going for his jugular—and he ends up on his back, wedged against the wall, trapped, staring at the inscrutable starry night sky looking down at him with impassive silence. He can’t breathe. He can’t move. The shock sets in, seizing up his stocky limbs, and he realizes with an odd measure of chagrin that this is it. This is all she wrote. Fuck. The monsters converge on him. They hover over him, their putrid maws dripping the drool of bloodlust, their eyes as shiny as Buffalo nickels. Everything slows down, as if Gabe is dreaming, as they close in for the feeding. The end … the end …

*   *   *

He always wondered if the end would be like they say it is in the movies—your life passing before you, or some bullshit woowoo thing like that—but it isn’t. Gabriel Harris learns in that horrible moment before the first set of rotten teeth clamp down on him that the end doesn’t come in gossamer wings and angelic visions. It comes in a loud pop—like a balloon exploding—and a final image steeped in wish fulfillment. He sees the closest walker whiplash suddenly in a gruesome eruption of tissue and blood, its head coming apart at the seams and raining blood on him in a slow-motion ritual baptism. He stares as the popping sounds continue—the dry, muffled snapping noises recalling a string of wet firecrackers—and more heads erupt.

The monsters collapse around him in a gruesome sequential massacre.

He comes back to his senses in time to see his savior out of the corner of his eye. She stands silhouetted in the center of the alley—thirty feet away—a matching .22 caliber Ruger rimfire pistol blazing in each hand, the muzzles silenced by noise suppressors. The last biter goes down, and the dry clapping noises cease as quickly as they started. The woman with the guns lets up on the triggers. Without any emotion or ceremony, she thumbs the magazine release on one gun, then the other, the empty mags dropping to the pavement with a clatter. The guns lower, dangling at her side now, as she scans the scene with the casual authority of a surveyor taking the measure of a building site.

Gabe tries to sit up, but his back complains, the nerves pinched, his sacrum sprained. “Holy fucking shit,” he mutters, kicking away a wet corpse that had fallen on his legs. He rises to a sitting position and cringes at the pain.

Lilly walks up to him. “You okay? Did you get nipped? Did they break the skin?”

Gabe takes in a series of deep breaths, glancing around the alley at the carnage. The dozen or so biters now lie in contorted bundles of morbid flesh across the width of the alley, their heads blossoming with the red jelly of breached brain matter, the paving stones around them running red with their diseased blood. “No … I’m … no,” Gabe stammers, trying to get his bearings. “I’m good.”

At the mouth of the alley, an arc light sweeps across the gap and penetrates the darkness. Lilly kneels by Gabe, and she shoves her pistols down the back of her jeans. The light puts a silver halo around her head, highlighting wisps of her chestnut-brown hair. “Lemme give you a hand,” she says and helps him to his feet.

Gabe groans slightly as he levers his bullish body to its full height. “Where’s my gun?”

“We’ll get it,” she says.

Gabe stretches his sore neck. “That was about as close as I ever want to come.”

“I hear ya.” She glances over her shoulder. The sounds of voices raised over the din of gunfire begin to fade. Lilly lets out a breath. “There’s no excuse for this,” she says. “We need all hands on deck from now on.”

“Copy that,” Gabe says.

“C’mon, let’s get you checked out and clean up this fucking mess.”

She starts toward the mouth of the alley when he grabs her and gently stops her.

“Lilly, wait,” he says, and licks his lips. He’s not good with words, but he needs to say something to her. He looks into her eyes. “Thanks for … you know … I’m just saying … I appreciate it.”

She shrugs and gives him a smirk. “I need you in one piece.”

He starts to say something else when he notices Lilly suddenly flinching, doubling over slightly. She holds her tummy.

“You okay?”

“Yeah … just a little cramp.” She breathes through her mouth, blowing breaths over her lips for a moment. “Girl stuff. Don’t worry about it.” The pain passes. “C’mon … let’s go kick some ass.”

She turns and walks away, stepping over the corpses of the dead.

*   *   *

That night, Lilly and her inner circle stay up late, working behind the scenes to shore up the town’s defenses. Bruce marshals every last able-bodied man on Martinez’s crew to reinforce the barricades. They repair the north wall, strengthening the ramparts with extra sheet metal and timbers, and they move more trailers across the weak spots. They keep a close watch on the surrounding wetlands.

All the noise and confusion of the walker attack has stirred more of the dead out of the adjacent woods. Gabe supervises a rotating shift of gunners positioned at the .50 caliber perches off each corner of the wall. Well into the wee hours, the armor-piercing rounds crackle and flare at regular intervals, picking off stragglers shambling out of the trees in groups of two or three, and sometimes as many as nine or ten clumped together in ragged phalanxes. Nobody really notices the fact that the behavior of the dead is changing, their number growing, their movements becoming agitated like schools of fish reacting to vibrations in a vast fishbowl. Nobody pays much attention to the growing threat of herds forming. Everybody is too busy worrying about an assault from the living.

Second-guessing the intentions of these violent strangers becomes an almost obsessive-compulsive activity for Lilly and her comrades that night. They talk about it under their breaths as they work on the wall, they discuss it in secret in dark back rooms, they agonize over it silently to themselves as they perform their individual tasks—taking inventory of their arsenal of firearms and ammunition, making plans for another run to the National Guard station, formulating countermeasures in the event of a raid, laying traps, constructing escape routes, and generally preparing for the worst. Lilly believes they could be attacked at any moment. Since becoming pregnant, she has been vacillating between debilitating fatigue and manic bursts of energy, but now she has little time for food, rest, even a break—despite Austin’s entreaties to take it easy for the sake of the baby. Maybe it’s the rush of hormones from the early stages of her first trimester. Senses are heightened during this phase, blood flow increases, brain activity sharpens. Lilly channels this surge of energy into a whirlwind of activity—Austin has to pound Red Bull and PowerBars just to keep up with her, following her around like some harried government attaché—and she rises to the occasion with relentless attention to detail.

Nobody says it aloud, but Lilly has almost imperceptibly slipped into the role of surrogate leader. Austin fears that it’s too much for a woman in her condition to be taking on such responsibility, but for Lilly it cuts the other way—she’s taking all these risks because she’s pregnant, not just in spite of it. She’s not only fighting for her own life—not to mention the future of the town—but she’s also fighting for the life of her unborn child. She will do what has to be done until the Governor is back in action. On a deeper level, she’s learning what Woodbury means to her. She almost feels as though she understands the Governor on a more fundamental level now. She would kill for this town.

With the dawning of the next morning, Austin finally talks her into having something to eat—he makes her ramen noodles on the Sterno pot—and then convinces her she should get off her feet for a few hours. Gabe offers to take over supervisory duties while she rests, and the town goes about its business of surviving another day.

The rumor mill quiets down—for the time being, at least—thanks to Barbara and David Stern, who assure the townspeople that the Governor is safe, and sending regular dispatches from the hinterlands. No, he hasn’t found the escapees yet. And no, there’s no immediate danger. And yes, everybody should just stay calm and tend to their families and not worry and take comfort in knowing the town is safe and in good hands and blah-blah-blah.

Of course, during this strange limbo—which continues for days—nobody suspects what’s in store for Woodbury—least of all Lilly. Despite her relentless attention to stepping up their defenses and planning for every imaginable contingency, she would never dream in her wildest nightmares what is on the horizon.

*   *   *

“Let’s take a gander at that throat,” Bob Stookey says with a wink to a little boy sitting on a peach crate in a cluttered studio apartment. The child—a freckled, cherubic eight-year-old in a faded SpongeBob T-shirt with a cowlick of black hair—says “Ah,” as Bob gently inserts a tongue depressor into the boy’s mouth.

The place smells of liniment and sweat and coffee grounds. Packing blankets drape the windows, and a ratty old sleeper couch in the corner has yellowed sheets on it. The woman of the house—the plump, olive-skinned matron who stopped Dr. Stevens during the escape—hovers over Bob and the child, wringing her hands nervously. “You see how red it is, Bob?”

“Little sore is it, sport?” Bob says to the boy, pulling the depressor free.

The boy nods sheepishly.

Bob reaches down to a medical bag and rifles through the contents. “Gonna fix you right up, little man.” He pulls a small vial out of the bag. “Have you screaming at your sister again in no time.”

The mother gives the medicine a skeptical look. “What is it?”

Bob hands the pill bottle to the woman. “Mild antibiotic. I’m thinking we got a little bug going around—nothing to worry about. Give him one of these three times a day with food, fix him right up.”

The woman chews her lip. “Um…”

Bob cocks his head at her. “There a problem?”

The woman shrugs. “I got nothin’ to trade, Bob. I can pay you back in food or something.”

Bob smiles, closing the bag with a snap. “There’s no call for that, Marianne.”

She looks at him. “Oh … Bob, you sure?”

“This is Woodbury.” He winks at her. “We’re all family here.”

Marianne Dolan once stopped traffic with her olive-skinned French-Canadian beauty, her hourglass figure, and enormous blue-green eyes. A decade and a half of hard housework and single parenting took its toll on her looks, and the plague times deepened the lines around her mouth and eyes, but now, as she breaks out in a guileless, warm smile, the splendor of her once-lovely face returns. “I really, really appreciate it, Bob, you’re a—”

A loud knocking on the door interrupts her. Marianne blinks with a start, and Bob glances toward the door.

Marianne turns and calls out. “Who is it, please?”

From the other side of the door, the sound of a clear, forceful, feminine voice rings out. “It’s Lilly Caul, Marianne. Sorry to bother you.”

Marianne Dolan goes across the room. “Lilly?” she says after opening the door and finding Lilly standing alone in the corridor. “What can I do for you?”

“I understand Bob’s here?” Lilly says. She wears her trademark ripped denim and baggy cable-knit, her hair in mussy tendrils, a web belt loaded with mag pouches around her waist. Something about her complexion, the way she’s carrying herself, speaks of vigor, sturdiness, strength—the likes of which Marianne hasn’t seen in this woman before. The web belt is not a fashion statement.

“He certainly is,” Marianne says with a grin. “He’s helping Timmy, in fact. Come in.”

Bob stands as the two women approach. “Well, well … looks like the cavalry’s here. How ya doin’, Lilly-girl?”

Lilly looks impressed. “Look at you, Bob—making house calls now.”

Bob smiles and gives her a shrug. “It’s nothing … just trying to do my part.”

The look on Bob’s weathered face—now alert and clear-eyed—says it all. His pouchy eyes glitter with pride, his dark hair neatly combed back. He is a new man, and it delights Lilly.

She turns to Marianne. “You mind if I borrow the good doctor for a minute? Austin woke up a little under the weather today.”

“Not a problem,” Marianne says, and then, turning to Bob, she adds, “I can’t thank you enough, Bob.” She looks at her son. “Whaddaya say, Timmy?”

“Thanks?” the little boy mutters, gazing up at his mom and the other adults.

Bob pats the child’s head. “Don’t mention it, sport. Hang in there.”

Lilly leads Bob out the door, down the corridor, and out the exit.

“What’s the problem with pretty boy?” Bob asks as they stroll down the brick path in front of the Dolans’ building. The sun is high and bright in the cloudless sky, the heat pressing down on them. The Georgia summer isn’t far off—the vaguest hints of asphalt baking and miserable muggy days on the breeze.

“Austin’s fine,” Lilly tells him, leading him into a little alcove of poplar trees for some privacy. “I didn’t want to ask you about the Governor in front of Marianne.”

Bob nods and gazes across the street at a row of storefronts, where some kids are playing kickball. “He’s okay, far as I can tell. Still in a coma, but his breathing seems normal. Color’s good, pulse is strong. I think he’s going to make it, Lilly.”

She nods and lets out a sigh. She gazes into the distance, thinking. “I’ve done everything I can think of to keep us safe while he’s out.”

“You done good, Lilly. We’re gonna be fine. Thanks to you taking the ball.”

“I just wish he would wake up.” She thinks about it some more. “I don’t want people getting nervous, panicking. They’re already wondering why he would be out on the search for so long.”

“Don’t you worry, he’ll come back to us. He’s as strong as a bull.”

Lilly wonders if Bob really believes this. The seriousness and duration of the induced coma—Bob’s best guess is that it was brought on by a combination of hypovolemic shock and all the painkillers and anesthetic administered to the man during the rough patch immediately after the attack—is impossible to predict. As far as Lilly can tell, the man could wake up any day now, or remain a vegetable for the rest of his life. Nobody has any experience with such things. And the uncertainty is driving Lilly crazy.

She starts to say something else when she notices the sound of heavy footsteps on the wind—somebody trotting swiftly down an adjacent sidewalk—the noise interrupting her thoughts. She glances over her shoulder and sees Gus trundling quickly toward them. Built like a fireplug, the little man looks like he just got served with a subpoena, his bulldog features filled with urgency.

“Lilly,” he says breathlessly as he waddles up to them, “been looking all over for ya.”

“Take a breath, Gus, what’s the matter?”

The man pauses, leaning over with his hands on his knees, catching his breath. “They want to use up the rest of that gas we got stored in the warehouse.”

“Who does?”

“Curtis, Rudy, and them other guards.” He looks at Lilly. “Say they need it for the rigs at the wall. Whaddaya think? That’s the last of the fuel; that’s all we got left.”

Lilly sighs. In the Governor’s absence, more and more of the townspeople have been coming to her for advice—for decisions, for guidance—and she’s not sure she wants to be the one giving it. But somebody has to. At last she says, “It’s all right, Gus … let ’em take it … we’ll go on another run tomorrow.”

Gus nods.

Bob looks at her for a moment, a strange expression crossing his deeply wrinkled features—a mixture of fascination, concern, and something unreadable—as though he knows something is different about her. Gasoline has become the lifeblood of Woodbury, not only an energy source but also a sort of morbid gauge of their odds of survival. Nobody fucks around with the rationing of fuel.

Lilly looks at Bob. “It’ll be okay. We’ll find some more tomorrow.”

Bob gives her a tepid nod, as though he knows she doesn’t really believe anything she’s saying.

*   *   *

Over the course of the next three days, they do find more fuel. Lilly sends a small contingent of guards—Gus, Curtis, Rudy, Matthew, and Ray Hilliard—out in one of the military cargo trucks. Their mission: to scour the auto centers at the ransacked Walmart and the two Piggly Wigglys on this side of the county line. They hope to find one of the underground holding tanks still containing a few gallons of residue. Plan B is to siphon as much as possible from any stray wreck or abandoned car that hasn’t been stripped to the bone by looters or two years of hard Georgia weather.

By the time the men return on Wednesday evening, they are exhausted but successful, having stumbled upon an abandoned KOA campground in Forsyth, forty miles to the east. The garage out behind the clubhouse, padlocked since the advent of the Turn, held a couple of rusted-out golf carts and a huge holding tank half-full of the sweet unleaded nectar of the gods—nearly a hundred and fifty gallons of the stuff—and Lilly is delighted with the windfall. If folks are frugal with it and ration it wisely, the fuel will provide Woodbury with another month or so of power.

For the rest of that week, Lilly keeps a lid on things as best she can, oblivious to the fact that events are about to spiral out of control.

FIVE

On Friday night—a night Lilly and her inner circle will later mark as a significant turning point—a warm front rolls in from the south, turning the air as muggy as a greenhouse. By midnight, the town has settled down and fallen silent, most of its inhabitants slumbering on sweat-damp sheets, a regiment of guards quietly keeping watch on the walls. Even Bob Stookey has taken a break from his round-the-clock vigil with the Governor and now sleeps soundly on a cot in one of the adjacent service bays under the racetrack. Only the infirmary—still blazing with the harsh halogen light of an operating room—buzzes with the muffled clamor of angry voices.

“I’m sick of it,” Bruce Cooper complains, pacing in front of the broken-down monitors and gurneys shoved up against the back wall of the medical bay. “Who made her Queen Bitch? Bossing people around like fucking Cleopatra.”

“Settle down, Brucey,” Gabe mutters from his chair angled next to the Governor’s bed, the wounded man lying as still and pale as a mannequin under the sheets. It’s been a week since the Governor tangled with the girl in the dreadlocks, and over the course of those seven days, Philip Blake has remained mostly unconscious. Nobody is comfortable with calling it a coma—although Bob has labeled it as such—but whatever grips the man seems to have its hooks deep within him. Only on two occasions has Philip stirred ever so slightly—his head lolling suddenly and a few garbled syllables coughing out of him—but each time he sank back into his twilight world just as abruptly as he came out of it. Nevertheless, Bob thinks this is a good sign. The Governor’s color continues to improve with each passing day, and his breathing continues to clear and strengthen. Bob has started increasing the amount of glucose and electrolytes in the IV, and keeping closer track of the man’s temperature. The Governor has been at 98.6 for over two days now. “What’s your problem with her, anyway?” Gabe asks the black man. “She never did anything to you. What’s your beef with her?”

Bruce pauses, thrusting his big hands into the pockets of his camo pants, letting out an angry breath. “All I’m saying is, nobody made it official that she should be the one in charge right now.”

Gabe shakes his head. “Who gives a shit? She wants to be temporary honcho, let her be temporary honcho.”

“Some stupid bitch from some fucking gated community?!” Bruce snaps at him. “She’s a lightweight!”

Gabe levers himself out of his chair, his back still a little stiff from the debacle in the alley a few days ago. He balls his fists as he comes around the Governor’s gurney and stands toe-to-toe with Bruce. “Okay, let’s get something straight. That lightweight bitch you’re talking about, she saved my fucking ass the other night. That lightweight bitch has more cojones than ninety percent of the men we got living in this place.”

“So what?—So fucking what?!” Bruce stands his ground, glaring at Gabe with eyes blazing. “She can aim a gun, pull a trigger. Big fucking deal.”

Gabe shakes his head. “What the fuck is your deal, man? You get up on the wrong side of bed today?”

“I’m outta here!”

Bruce storms toward the door, shaking his head, disgusted, mumbling obscenities under his breath. He makes his exit in a huff, slamming the metal door with a bang that reverberates through the tiled chamber.

Staring at the door, Gabe stands there for a moment, nonplussed by it all, when he hears a sound coming from across the room that stiffens his spine.

It sounds like a voice coming from the man lying on the gurney.

*   *   *

At first, Gabe thinks he’s hearing things. Looking back on it, he will come to the conclusion that he did indeed hear the Governor’s voice at that moment—right after that door had slammed—the words enunciated so clearly and spoken with such clarity that Gabe initially figured he was imagining the sound of the voice saying something like, “How long?”

Gabe whirls toward the gurney. The man on the bed hasn’t moved, his bandaged face still elevated slightly on its pillow, the head of the gurney at a forty-five-degree angle. Gabe slowly approaches. “Governor?”

The man on the bed remains still, but suddenly, almost in answer to Gabe’s voice, the single eye, which is still visible on that face—peering through a hatch-work of thick, white, gauze bandages—begins to blink open.

It happens in stages, feebly at first, but fluttering more and more vigorously until that single eye is wide open and staring at the ceiling. Another few blinks and the eye begins to focus on things in the room. The pupil dilates slightly as Gabe approaches.

Pulling the folding chair next to the bed, sitting down and putting a hand on the Governor’s cold, pale arm, Gabe fixes his gaze on that single searching eye. His heart races. He stares into that eye with such feverish intensity that he can almost see his own face reflected in the teary orb of the eyeball. “Governor? Can you hear me?”

The man on the gurney manages to loll his head slightly toward Gabe, and then fixes his one good eye on the stocky, crew-cut head looming over the bed. Over dry, caked, chapped lips, the man utters again, “How long—?”

At first Gabe is thunderstruck and can’t even form a response. He just stares at that haggard, bandaged face for one endless, excruciating moment. Then he shakes off his daze and says very softly, “—were you out?”

A very slow, very weak nod.

Gabe licks his lips, not even aware that he’s grinning with giddy excitement. “Almost a week.” He swallows back his urge to cry out with glee and hug the man. He wonders if he should get Bob in here. Even though this man is probably a few years his junior, this is his boss, his mentor, his compass, his father figure. “You were awake a bit here and there,” Gabe says as calmly as he can manage, “but I don’t think you’ll remember anything.”

The Governor turns his head slowly from side to side as if testing the limits of his condition. At last he manages another hoarse sentence: “Did you find Doc Stevens?” He takes in a shallow breath as though the very act of posing the question exhausts him. “Force him to patch me up?”

Gabe swallows hard. “Nope.” He licks his lips nervously. “Doc’s dead.” He takes a deep breath. “They found him right on the other side of our fence. He went with that bitch and her friends … but he didn’t last long.”

The Governor breathes through his nose for a moment. He swallows thickly and takes in another series of agonizing breaths. He blinks and stares at the ceiling, looking like a man waiting for the residue of a nightmare to pass, waiting for the cold light of reality to return and chase the shadows away. At last he manages to speak again: “Serves that fucker right.” The anger glittering in his eye slowly brings him back, gradually allows him to get his bearings and bite down on the situation. He looks at Gabe. “So if the doc’s gone, how the fuck am I not dead?”

Gabe looks at the man. “Bob.”

The Governor takes this in, his one visible eye dilating and widening with shock. “Bob?!” Another pained breath. “That’s … fucking ridiculous … that old drunk? He couldn’t draw a straight line—let alone patch me up.” He swallows with great effort. His voice sticks in his throat like a record skipping. “He refused to be Doc’s assistant—made that fucking girl do it.”

Gabe shrugs. “I guess he didn’t have to do much—thank God. Said your arm was sealed up good, sterilized enough by the fire, but he still cleaned you up real good, watched over you, gave you antibiotics or something. I’m not sure. The way I understand it is … when she cut off your … uh … when she nicked your thigh, Bob said it just missed a major artery, so there wasn’t as much blood loss as there could have been.” Gabe chews on his lower lip. He doesn’t want to throw too much at the man right now, not in his condition. “It would have killed you for sure if she’d hit it, though.” He pauses. “The eye almost got infected—but it didn’t.” Another pause. “Bob said she must have been real careful. He thinks she wanted to leave you alive—like she had more plans for you.”

The Governor’s right eye narrows with pure, unadulterated hate. “Plans for me?!” He lets out a phlegmy snort. “Wait until I hear back from Martinez. I could fill a book with the shit I’ve got planned for her.”

Gabe feels his stomach seize up. He contemplates not saying anything but then mutters in a low voice, “Uh … boss … Martinez went with them.”

The Governor cringes suddenly, either from the pain or a surge of white-hot rage flowing through him … or perhaps both. “I fucking know he went with them.” He draws a clogged breath and continues. “I didn’t know the doc and his slut would go with them—but this was my plan.” Thick breathing again, getting air into his leaden lungs. “Martinez helps them escape and then comes back and tells us where their fucking prison is.” Pause. “If I’ve been out for a week … he should be here any day now.”

Gabe nods as the Governor lets out a long, agonizing sigh and peers down at his heavily bandaged stump of a right arm. His eye registers the horror, the harsh reality. His phantom hand sends ghostly sensations up his shoulder to his brain, and he shudders. Then he presses his cracked lips together, and Gabe sees something glimmering way down in the dark iris of the Governor’s deep-set eye. Gabe sees it very clearly. The Governor is back. Whether it’s madness or strength or survival instinct or just plain meanness, the luminous pinprick of light in that one eye says everything about this man.

At last he turns his eye toward Gabe and adds in a voice husky with pain and fury, “And when that day comes … that bitch is mine.”

*   *   *

The rest of that week, the heat of late spring settles into the hollows and valleys of west central Georgia. The humidity presses in, and the brutal sun turns the days into steam baths. Since the air conditioners drain so much energy, most of the inhabitants of Woodbury sweat out the hot spell indoors or in the shade of live oaks, fanning themselves compulsively and shirking their daily labors. The Sterns figure out a way to make ice in the warehouse with an old Frigidaire without sucking too much power. Austin finds some prenatal vitamins in the ransacked drugstore and mothers Lilly incessantly, keeping track of her meals and insisting that she stay cool. People continue to ruminate about the escape, the absence of the Governor, and the future of the town.

Meanwhile, Gabe, Bruce, and Bob keep the Governor’s condition under wraps. Nobody wants the townsfolk to see the man moving around with crutches like a stroke victim as he convalesces. At night, they sneak him across town to his apartment, where he spends time with Penny and rests up. Gabe helps him clean his place up—removing as many remnants of the attack as possible, erasing the worst of the gouges and stains—and at one point Gabe mentions how Lilly stepped up during the aftermath of the escape. The Governor is impressed by what he hears, and at the end of the week he asks to see her.

“I know it goes without saying,” Gabe says to her that night, after dark, as he leads her through the littered foyer of the Governor’s apartment building. “But everything you’re about to see and hear stays right here. You understand? I don’t even want Austin knowing about this.”

“Understood,” she says uncertainly as she sidesteps a pile of wet cardboard, following the stocky, thick-necked man through the inner doorway. The first-floor stairwell smells of mildew and mouse droppings. Lilly follows Gabe up the shopworn, carpeted risers, the steps squeaking noisily as they ascend. “But what’s with all the secrecy? I mean … Austin already knows about the attack. So do the Sterns. And we’ve kept a lid on it for almost two weeks.”

“He’s got something in mind for you,” Gabe explains, leading her down the fetid second-floor hallway, “and he doesn’t want anybody to know about it.”

Lilly shrugs as they reach his door. “Whatever you say, Gabe.”

They knock, and the Governor’s voice—as strong and feisty as ever—orders them inside.

Lilly tries not to stare as she enters the living room and sees the man slumped on his ratty sofa with his crutches canted beside him.

“There she is,” the man says with a grin, waving her over. He wears a black eye patch—Lilly finds out later that Bob fashioned it out of the straps of a motorcycle saddlebag—and his right arm is missing, the bandaged stump barely poking through the armhole of his hunting vest. His once wiry form now swims in his camo pants and clodhopper boots, his sinewy muscles reduced to cables under his flesh. His coloring is as pale as alabaster—making his dark eye and hair look almost inky black—giving off the impression of a scarecrow. Despite the emaciated limbs, however, he looks as mean and capable as ever. “Please excuse my manners if I don’t get up,” he adds with a smirk. “I’m still a little shaky on my feet.”

“You look good,” Lilly lies, taking a seat on an armchair across from him.

Gabe remains standing in the archway. “It’s gonna take more than some crazy bitch to take this man out—ain’t that right, Governor.”

“Okay, you can both ease off on the bullshit,” Philip says. “I don’t need stroking right now. Okay? It is what it is. I’m gonna be fine.”

“That’s good to hear,” Lilly comments, and now she means what she says.

The Governor gives Lilly a look. “Been hearing some good things about you, how you stepped up when I was on my back all week.”

Lilly shrugs. “Everybody pitched in. You know. It was a group effort.”

For a brief moment, Lilly hears a strange, muffled noise from the other room—a rustling, a hissing of air, and the jangle of a chain. She has no idea what the hell she’s hearing, but she puts it out of her mind.

“The lady’s modest, too.” The Governor gives her a smile. “You see, Gabe? This is what I’m talking about. You walk softly and carry a big fucking stick around here. I could use about a dozen more like you, Lilly.”

Lilly looks down at her hands. “I’d be lying if I said this town didn’t mean a lot to me.” She looks up at him. “I want this place to survive. I want it to work.”

“You and me both, Lilly.” He lifts himself painfully off the couch. Gabe goes to help him, but he waves the man off. Breathing through his nose, Philip hobbles over to the boarded window—sans crutches—and gazes out through a narrow gap in the slats. “You and me both,” he murmurs, staring at the darkness and thinking.

Lilly watches him. She sees his expression change slightly, illuminated by a trickle of silver light leaking into the room from a distant arc lamp. The narrow band of light shimmers off the man’s one good eye as his face darkens and his gaze curdles with hate. “We got a situation needs dealing with,” he mutters. “If we want to keep this place safe, we’re gonna have to be … what’s the word? Preemptive.”

“Preemptive?” Lilly studies the man. He looks like a wounded pit bull in a cage, his limp amputation dangling off one side of him, the rest of his body as coiled as a spring. Lilly tries not to stare. His Betadine-stained bandages and scarred flesh call out to her. He is a living embodiment of the dangers facing them. It begs the question: Who could do this to a man as indestructible as this? Lilly takes a deep, girding breath. “Whatever it is you have in mind, I’m there for you. Nobody around here wants to live in fear. Whatever you need … I’m totally on board.”

He turns and peers at her from under the strap of his eye patch, his good eye blazing with emotion. “There’s something you should know.” He glances at Gabe and then back at her. “I let those fuckers escape.”

Lilly’s heart thumps a little faster. “Excuse me?”

“I sent Martinez with them. He was supposed to play spy, get a lock on their position—find this fucking prison they’re hiding out in—and then report back.”

Lilly nods, letting this sink in. Her mind swims with instant anxieties, variables, and implications. “I understand,” she says finally.

The Governor looks at her. “He should have been back by now.”

“Yeah … you got a point.”

“You’re a natural-born leader, girlfriend. I want you to organize a search party—you choose your team—and go find out what the fuck happened. See what you can turn up. Can you do that for me?”

Lilly gives another nod, but in the back of her mind she’s wondering if this is a good idea for someone in her condition to be doing something so … labor intensive. Labor is the key. Is she truly prepared for all the sacrifices that go along with being an expectant mother? Walking around with a medicine ball sticking out of her gut? Right now she’s in that tender transitional stage—not showing yet, not really handicapped physically, not fully prepared for the slog ahead—but what happens when she starts to slow down? She knows enough about the early stages of pregnancy to know that physical activity and regular exercise are totally safe—even recommended—but what about something as hazardous as going on a mission into plague-ridden backwaters? Over the space of a split instant she thinks it over and finally looks at the Governor and says, “I can absolutely do that for you. We’ll leave at first light.”

“Good.”

“One question, though.”

The Governor fixes his one eye on her. “What the fuck is it now?”

She chews her lip for a moment, measuring her words. One doesn’t rattle the cage of a wounded animal. But she has to say it. “People are climbing the walls not knowing your condition, your whereabouts.” She looks into his one good eye. “You gotta show them you’re okay.”

He lets out a tortured sigh. “I will soon enough, girlfriend. Don’t you worry about that.” The silence hangs in the room for a moment. The Governor looks at her. “Anything else?”

She shrugs. There’s nothing more to say.

Lilly and Gabe walk out, leaving the Governor to his privacy and the ceaseless, muffled clawing noises in the other room.

*   *   *

Lilly spends the rest of that night gathering her team and supplies for the reconnaissance mission. Austin is dead set against her going on the run and argues with her about it, but Lilly is adamant. She is galvanized by the task at hand—the need to secure the town, the prospects of nipping any potential danger in the bud. She is fighting for two now—three, if you count Austin. And perhaps more importantly, she doesn’t want anybody getting suspicious about her condition. She doesn’t want to give any indication that she is anything other than a hundred percent. This is her little secret. Her body. Her life. Her future baby’s life.

So she prepares for the journey with relentless attention to detail. She considers taking Bob along but decides against it—his services are needed in town a lot more than they’re needed on this trip; and besides, he’d probably just slow them down. She also decides to leave Bruce in Woodbury to run interference for the Governor. Instead, she enlists Gabe and Gus to go along with her, and Austin, not only for the added muscle but also because each man is intimately familiar with Martinez’s methods and behavior patterns and quirks. Gabe is still stinging from his run-in with Martinez in the subterranean tunnels under the racetrack, but Gabe is also a pragmatist. He knows now it was all part of a bigger plan, and he also knows that Martinez is a lynchpin for them. They need to find these people and intervene before something terrible happens. Plus, Gabe owes Lilly Caul his life.

The last person she recruits is David Stern—mostly for his steel-trap mind and innate intelligence—to help with strategy. Lilly is out of her element here. Tracking human beings across hundreds of square miles of biter-infested wetlands is not exactly a specialty of hers—although she is more motivated than ever now to do what has to be done. Other than Lilly, though, only Gabe and Austin know the real mission Martinez was on. Gus and David are operating under the assumption that Martinez was a traitor and they are now simply trying to catch the escapees.

“It’s been pretty soggy out there for a while now,” David Stern tells Lilly as he loads a crate into the back of the military cargo truck parked in the predawn darkness near the town’s north gate. The truck idles softly—the turbocharged diesel engine burbling and rumbling under the hood—masking the sound of their voices. “My guess is their tracks are still fairly evident.”

“Yeah, but how do we know their tracks from the boatload of walker tracks that have surely mingled with them over the last week?” Lilly poses the question with a grunt as she lifts a carton of bottled water into the cargo bay. They’ve packed enough provisions to stay out on the road for twenty-four hours or more—food, blankets, walkie-talkies, the first-aid kit, binoculars, night-vision goggles, extra batteries, extra ammunition, and an arsenal of weaponry from the Guard station—although Lilly wants to get this done as quickly as possible. The walker activity in the woods has picked up this week, and the faster they get answers, the better. “Seems like it’s gonna be needles in a haystack out there,” she says, shoving the carton on board the truck.

“We’ll start where they were last seen,” David says, climbing onto the running panel. “Sun’s gonna be coming up soon—we’ll assume they headed east, at least initially.”

They finish loading the truck, and then everybody climbs on board.

Gus drives, with Gabe in the shotgun seat—heavily armed—manning the two-way. Lilly rides in back with the supplies, also on a walkie-talkie, with David and Austin each perched on the rear running board for easy access on and off the vehicle. The sun is just beginning to lighten the horizon as the men on the barricade open up the gap—engines firing up, vertical stacks chugging, a semitrailer pulling out of their way—revealing the primordial darkness of the neighboring forest stewing in the morning mists.

Lilly’s stomach tightens as the cargo truck shudders noisily through the opening.

Peering through the rear canvas flap, now beginning to buffet in the breeze, Lilly can see the east side of town passing in the gloomy predawn light as Gus circles around the village. The place looks like Beirut—the territory outside the razor-wire-lined walls littered with wreckage, sinkholes, and mounds of carnage from past skirmishes with walkers. Some of the bodies are headless, scorched, and burned to husks … others lying in open graves of brackish water. As the day dawns, the Durand Street alley comes into view—the wall over which Martinez helped the escapees flee nearly two weeks earlier clearly visible now.

Gus grinds the air brakes, and the truck hisses to a stop on a gravel road thirty feet from the outer wall. David and Austin hop off the board and quickly sweep their flashlights across the ground, illuminating the tracks in the mud—now filled with tiny pockets of filthy rainwater—telling the story of Dr. Stevens’s attack and the subsequent flight toward Highway 85. Over crackling two-way radios, terse observations are sent back to the truck, and Lilly orders the two men back on board.

Now they proceed down a gravel dogleg toward the highway and then pick up the tracks on the other side of the asphalt two-lane. David Stern reminds them to ignore all the footprints that mark themselves with long slash marks—the telltale sign of a walker’s lumbering shuffle—and keep their eyes peeled for well-defined impressions. Once they get used to the differences, it becomes easier to spot evidence of the fleeing humans. Even two weeks old, the prints—at many junctures along the escape route—have dried into the mire in little perfect boot-shaped puddles.

By midmorning they lose the prints about a mile west of Greenville, and Gus pulls the truck over. Up to this point the escapees have apparently fled in a north-by-northwesterly direction from Woodbury, but now it’s anybody’s guess as to if and when they changed direction. Luckily, the walker sightings this morning have been few and far between, and as the sun beats down on the cargo truck, turning the interior into a sauna, they sit there for a moment, sweating through their clothes and discussing their next move. Gabe suggests striking out on foot, but Lilly doesn’t like the idea of splitting up or leaving the truck unattended.

Then Lilly remembers the crash site—the downed news chopper that sent them on a tangent on their last supply run several weeks ago—and she realizes that they’re only about a half a mile south of the wreckage. She asks Gus to drive north a little farther, and he does, and within minutes they’ve reached the same muddy washout over which they trod three and a half weeks ago.

Gus pulls over and brings the truck to a stop. They all look at Lilly, the realization dawning on everybody all at once: They can’t avoid it any longer.

They have to strike out on foot … into the walker-infested woods.

SIX

“Okay, David, check this out.” She leads him across the muddy gravel shoulder and pauses on the edge of the embankment, gesturing down at the constellation of footprints indelibly stamped in the clay. A cloud of gnats writhes around her head for a moment, and she bats them away as her comrades gather around her. Hundreds of footprints—all shapes and sizes and degrees of freshness—crisscross the mossy ground, many of them belonging to Lilly and her cohorts from earlier that month. But some of them look fresher. “What do you make of those?” Lilly says, pointing at a diagonal row of prints cutting a swath from the road to the woods—a file of people moving fairly quickly—toward the deeper woods.

David stares at the prints. “Looks like somebody knew where they were going.”

Gus chimes in. “Crash site?”

“You better believe it,” David says. “Maybe Martinez thought they could find something else out there. We didn’t get a chance to completely search the aircraft last time. Who knows what we missed.”

Lilly gazes out at the tree line in the distance, the dense netting of foliage billowing in the wind like dirty green drapes.

About five hundred yards away, in the cleavage of a thickly forested hollow, they first encountered the wreckage of the helicopter—its pilot dead, its lone passenger clinging to life. Now the smoke has long cleared, but chances are the chopper still lies on its side in the dry riverbed where they found it weeks ago. Lilly makes an instant decision. “Okay … everybody knows the drill. Gus stays with the truck. Bring extra ammo and water. We’ll stay in touch with the walkies. Let’s go.”

They load up their packs and strike out across the muddy wetlands.

*   *   *

By midday they reach the crash site. The chopper lies where they left it—crumpled on the banks of the muddy creek bed like a petrifying dinosaur, its rotors torn asunder, its fuselage battered, windows shattered—the riveted hull already beginning to oxidize in the unforgiving sun. Thousands of footprints circle the wreckage in the mud—many, many more than they remember leaving there—and David Stern begins to study them. He doesn’t hear the faint crackle of twigs in the middle distance, the collective shuffling of insensate feet churning through the undergrowth toward them from practically every direction. He’s too busy extrapolating the narrative of Martinez’s journey.

From the profusion of prints, as well as the rearrangement of certain pieces of wreckage, David concludes that Martinez’s group not only passed this way but also probably spent the night. The cabin door lies in a patch of weeds and nettle to the left of the nose, a wet blanket draped off one end. Inside the cabin, he finds signs of a bivouac—empty water bottles, wadded wrappers, an empty carton of ammunition. David is shining a flashlight into the shadows of the cockpit when a voice tugs at his attention. “David, take a look at this … over here.”

He turns and sees Lilly standing on the other side of the riverbed, kneeling, taking a closer look at the leaf-matted ground.

David goes over and sees the footprints embedded in the mud. “Those are fresher, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.” She points out the deeper tracks that have fanned out from a circle of newer prints near the crash. “Looks like they spent some time here, maybe met up with somebody, and then headed off in that direction.” She points to the deepening shadows to the west, where the trees thicken along the creek bed. “I say we head that way.”

By this point, Gabe and Austin have joined them, and they have their guns out and ready to rock. Gabe has been hearing noises he doesn’t like in the high trees above the stream, and he’s jumpy. Lilly checks her .22s and then takes the lead. She follows the dry gulley into the thickets, keeping an eye on both the prints and the adjacent barrier of trees on either side of her. The others follow. Conversation comes to a screeching halt.

The silence blankets them. It’s a sticky, droning, heavy silence, full of the implacable vibrations of nature—insects humming in their ears, a distant trickle of water—and it makes their footsteps sound like explosions. Gabe gets exceedingly edgy. Something doesn’t feel right. Lilly’s heart quickens. After a while, she draws both pistols and then plods along the riverbed holding the guns at her side.

They cross another quarter mile of wooded hollow—the dry creek bed snaking through endless palisades of pines and white birch—before they begin to feel as though the prints are leading them into a trap. The troubling noises have returned. Lilly hears twigs snapping and dry leaves crackling rhythmically from somewhere in the middle distance, but it’s impossible to parse which direction they’re coming from. They can smell the stench of walkers drifting on the breeze.

Their guns come up, thumbs on the safeties, poised, knife sheaths unsnapping, eyes peeled, hearts racing, muscles coiled, ears pricked, flesh crawling. The woods are alive now with noises and moving shadows and rotten odors rising and it’s driving everybody crazy. But from what direction are the dead coming? Lilly slows down and peers into the distant foliage and suddenly raises her hand. “Hold on!” she hisses in a loud whisper, making everybody freeze in their tracks. “Everybody down—GET DOWN!—right now!”

They move as one, each of them ducking down behind a row of mossy boulders embedded in the humus. Guns raised, eyes wide and alert, they all look at Lilly, who gazes over the top of the crags.

In the distance, about fifty yards away, she sees a break in the trees, revealing another clearing—this one a vast, overgrown meadow—crawling with ragged, dark figures. Lilly’s pulse quickens. She glances to her right and notices a narrow footpath snaking up an embankment into the higher trees. She looks at the others and points to the path, and then silently gestures at a ridge of deadfall logs higher up.

They follow her up the path—staying low, moving as silently as they can, their breaths stuck in their throats—and Lilly leads them across the top of the ridge. They duck down next to each other behind the massive timbers. From this vantage point—through the cover of trees—they each get a clear view of the huge meadow below.

“Good God … it’s a fucking convention,” Lilly utters through clenched teeth as she takes in the enormity of the primordial pasture.

*   *   *

The size of five football fields laid end to end, the rain-sodden ground riotous with windblown wild grasses and daubs of color from yellow dandelions and red columbine, the immense meadow teems with walkers of every description. Some of them circle a festering carcass of a dead deer, hectic with flies, while others wander aimlessly along the periphery like drunken sentinels. Some can barely move due to missing limbs or mangled appendages, while others look as though their tattered garb has been shredded and spray-painted with gore. The sun beats down on the pasture, the far corners wavering in skeins of heat rays and cottonwood floating in the air like ghostly snow. A faint burr of growling thrums on the breeze from the collective vocalization of at least fifty or more walkers.

“Lilly, honey,” David Stern finally murmurs very softly, “would you mind handing me those binoculars?”

Lilly shrugs off her backpack, unzips it, pulls out the small field glasses, and hands them over to David. The older man puts the lenses to his eyes and surveys the breadth and length of the meadow below them. The others gape. Austin huddles next to Lilly, his breathing audible in her ears, his nervousness palpable. Gabe fingers the trigger guard on his MIG, just itching to waste the entire field with a few well-placed bursts.

Lilly starts to whisper something when she hears David mumbling under his breath.

“No … not … oh God no … no.” He fiddles with the focus knob and presses the binoculars to his eyes. “Oh Jesus Christ … don’t tell me.”

“What?!” Lilly swallows her fear and hisses the words at him. “David, what is it?!”

He hands the binoculars over to her. “To the left, by the deer,” he says. “The one wandering off by himself in the corner.”

She gazes through the binoculars and finds the lone walker in the southeast corner of the meadow, and her entire body sags with despair as she identifies the frayed and torn figure shuffling along the cattails and weeds. A twinge of first-trimester cramps clenches her midsection for a moment, and her eyes burn. In the shaky blur of the binoculars’ narrow field of vision, she sees the trademark bandanna still wrapped around the tall male’s head, the sideburns apparent along the side of the once handsome face—now a nightmare of pallid flesh, cadmium eyes, and puckered, lipless mouth. “Fuck,” she utters breathlessly.

Gabe and Austin are both dying to grab the binoculars, so Lilly hands them over.

Each taking their turn, they gaze one at a time through the telescopic lenses at the sun-blanched meadow below them. Each man reveals through body language—a sudden anguished slump from Austin, an exhalation of air through gritted teeth from Gabe—that they have identified the lone walker.

Austin speaks first, gazing at Lilly. “Whaddaya think happened?”

Lilly looks through the binoculars, muttering as she carefully scans the meadow. “There’s no way of knowing for sure, but it looks like … I don’t know … see those deep ruts coming across the field from the east?”

“Yeah, I saw them.”

David chimes in. “Yes, I noticed them, too—they look like tire marks from a large vehicle—a truck, a van, a camper, something like that.”

Lilly peers through the lens and surveys the ragged circular divot in the ground where the truck or the RV either skidded out of control or came to an abrupt halt. For some reason, she thinks the tracks have something to do with Martinez’s demise.

She swings the binocs back over to the lone walker in the corner of the meadow. The thing that was once Caesar Ramon Martinez—a former gym teacher from Augusta, Georgia, a loner with natural leadership skills—now trundles awkwardly back and forth through the dust motes of cottonwood and pale rays of sun with no direction, no purpose, no goal other than to feed. His arms and torso—even from this distance, in the blur of the binoculars—appear completely scourged, eviscerated to shreds by many sets of rotting teeth. Cords of bloody gristle and sinew dangle from his gashed midsection. A slimy white bone fragment pokes through his tattered pant leg, giving his shuffling gate a pronounced limp.

The sight of this man reduced to such a monstrous shell takes Lilly by surprise, the sorrow coursing down her marrow, gripping her insides. She never got to know this man very well—nobody did—he wasn’t the sociable type. But over the course of that last year, in quiet moments, Martinez did talk about his pre-plague days. Lilly remembers the details of his modest life. The man never married, never had any kids, was estranged from his parents, but he loved teaching, loved coaching his football and basketball teams at Pope John Middle School. When the plague broke out, the school was overrun. First responders moved in to protect the children, fighting off the early waves of undead, and Martinez tried to save an entire class by locking them in the gymnasium, but that proved futile. Nightmares of that day haunted the man for the rest of his life—the sounds of screaming students calling out for their mothers as the skylights shattered and monsters tumbled into the gym like ragged paratroopers—but the worst part was the guilt. Martinez barely escaped, pushing his way out the loading dock … but he would never forget the sounds of the children shrieking behind him as he fled, the biters devouring the class in a ghastly feeding frenzy.

“By the looks of those tire tracks,” Lilly utters finally under her breath, “I’m guessing they found him out, took him down, maybe with the vehicle.” She looks down. “He wasn’t perfect, but he was one of us—he was a decent man. He didn’t deserve this.”

Austin reaches over and puts an arm around her. “There’s nothing you could have done, Lilly. He knew what he was getting into.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she murmurs, all the confidence draining out of her voice.

Austin lets out a weary sigh. “Can we get outta here now? I mean … mission accomplished, right?”

Gabe grumbles at him. “What are you talking about, mission accomplished? Nothing’s been accomplished here but Martinez getting wasted.”

Austin looks at him. “We found him, right? We found out why he didn’t show up. There’s nothing else we can do, man. File closed.”

David pipes in. “I have to say I agree with pretty boy. For all we know, the entire group of escapees may be dead. Besides, the sun’s gonna be setting fairly soon.”

Lilly glances over her shoulder, surveys the path and the route back—no biters in sight. “Okay, it’s settled then,” she says. “Stay low, and keep quiet … we don’t want any of these biters on our tail.”

They start edging their way back down the hillside toward the riverbed, but all at once Gabe springs to his feet and circles around in front of Lilly, blocking her path with fire in his eyes. “Hold up!” He shoves her back. “We’re not going anywhere!”

Austin steps in, getting protective. But Lilly waves everybody back down into crouching positions. “Keep it down, goddamnit!” She turns and looks at Gabe. “What the fuck is your problem?”

Gabe burns his gaze into her. “We need to bring back proof.”

“Excuse me?”

“Governor’s gonna want to see proof this happened.”

“Proof?!” She stares at him. “You got four witnesses. What do you want, Gabe—a lock of his hair? C’mon, you want to risk more lives?”

Gabe reaches down to his pant leg. He pulls his Randall knife from a sheath, the blade glistening in the beams of late-afternoon sun. “Do whatever you want, Lilly … but I’m not coming back without proof.”

Lilly crouches there, dumbstruck, watching Gabe turn and creep down the embankment. She turns to the others. “Goddamnit-to-hell, c’mon … we gotta cover him.”

*   *   *

By the time they reach the bottom of the wooded path, all available firearms have been drawn, cocked, readied, and aimed. Gabe moves toward the clearing, ducking behind an ancient, gnarled live oak. Lilly crouches down twenty feet behind him, staying low, eyes taking in everything, both her Ruger semiautomatics gripped tightly in her sweaty palms. Austin hovers close behind her, his Glock at his side, while David brings up the rear, scanning the woods behind them for fear of having their escape route cut off.

The silence is excruciating—a ten-ton weight pressing down on them—the only audible sounds now their breathing and their pulses racing in their ears. Lilly sees Gabe bend down and pick up a stone. She aims her Rugers at the distant swarm of walkers milling across the far meadow. So far, none of the creatures have taken notice.

The monster that once belonged to their inner circle—the former football coach who, less than a year ago, shared a New Year’s bottle of brandy with Dr. Stevens, Alice, and Lilly—now shuffles directionlessly through the weeds less than twenty-five feet away from Gabe. The creature’s opaque-white doll’s eyes scan the surrounding trees, his blackened mouth working and chewing involuntarily.

Gabe tosses a small stone across the clearing toward Martinez.

In a frozen tableau of hair-trigger tension, the four humans watch the lone biter become still, cocking its head at the faint sound of the stone clattering across the weeds in front of it. The monster slowly turns toward the noise, and then starts shuffling closer to the clearing.

Gabe pounces.

What happens next occurs with the speed of a nightmare, everything transpiring all at once. Gabe rushes the thing that was once in charge of security in Woodbury, and without hesitation—without even allowing the biter a chance to react—he slashes the eleven-inch blade with all his might at the monster’s neck. The knife slices through epidermis, cartilage, arteries, muscles, and cervical vertebrae with the force of a guillotine.

From Lilly’s vantage point, it looks as though Gabe has opened up a hydrant of blood. The head detaches and falls, and the body staggers and fountains for a moment before collapsing. Gabe grabs the fallen cranium, and then turns and rushes back toward the path. Unfortunately, the minimal noise generated by the assault—a negligible series of footsteps, grunts, and twigs snapping—proves to be enough of a commotion to rouse the attention of the other walkers. Lilly realizes this one moment before the shooting starts.

She whirls around in time to see Austin and David in the middle of the path with their guns up now, the muzzles flaring brilliant plumes of light—each blast emitting a silenced clap—the rounds chewing through foliage and taking down a half-dozen walkers in quick succession across the southeast corner of the meadow.

Gabe now stands beside her with the dripping head, fumbling for his assault rifle.

In one continuous movement, he gets his free hand around the trigger guard and swings the weapon up and fires off a volley. The short muzzle flares and sends hellfire through the upper bodies of approaching walkers, punching holes through a dozen skulls, sending tissue and bone fragments and a red fog across the foliage, dropping reanimated cadavers of all sizes, genders, and ages into the high grass in gruesome heaps. Gabe’s Bushmaster clicks empty.

More creatures stir from their stupors—drawn by the noise of the firefight and the smell of living tissue—and the dynamic changes dramatically out in the meadow. Like a school of fish shifting directions in one great undulating organism, scores of wandering dead turn in drunken choreography and start dragging themselves toward the humans. Lilly stands and begins backing away, mumbling, “There’s too many of them, Gabe … too many … Jesus fucking Christ, there’s too many!”

Standing beside her, Gabe lets out an angry grunt in response and quickly thumbs the rifle’s release, ejecting the clip. He fumbles with the greasy severed head for a moment, swinging his satchel around and stuffing the gruesome artifact into the carrier, and then he yanks another magazine from his belt and slams it into the gun’s receiver. He spins and sees another cluster of dead pushing through the foliage on their immediate right—deadly black mouths working like piranhas—and Gabe slaps the bolt release and lets loose another fusillade.

Lilly ducks down into a crouch as Gabe’s wild volley zings through the leaves.

The opposite wall of foliage shreds apart as a half-dozen more walkers go down in bursts of blood and tissue. Meanwhile, Austin and David send another half-dozen rounds across the opposite corner of the clearing, putting another three corpses out of their misery in a cloud of blood mist. Lilly keeps backing away, seeing no options, no purpose to the fight, no hope of stanching the swarm. The entire population of the meadow is now converging on them in one great mass of ragged moving corpses.

The guns click empty again, and for one frenzied instant, the other three men glance over their shoulders at Lilly, who freezes. The volume of gunfire and the fury of the counterassault have engulfed the clearing in a haze of cordite and floating particulate, the fog so thick that Lilly can barely see the others as the horde closes in. The only viable course of action is written across her petrified features. There’s only one thing left for them to do.

She doesn’t even have to say the word.

They run.

*   *   *

Charging headlong through the thick undergrowth, Lilly leads the group, leaping over deadfalls and exposed roots, arms pumping, breath coming in heaving gasps. Once upon a time, she was a track star at Marietta High School—her specialty was the five-thousand-meter run, which she could complete in just under nineteen minutes—and now she falls into that natural pace—not a sprint, not a wild-ass dead run, but more of a smooth churning gait that just feels right to her body. The fear drives all thoughts of her pregnancy from her mind, every muscle in her midsection taut with nerves now, masking any potential twinge of abdominal pain. The columns of black oak strobe past her as she follows the riverbed. Despite her delicate condition, she manages to race along that winding path with both guns still gripped in her cold, numb hands.

Gabe trots along right behind her, his bullish legs churning like an NFL linebacker grudgingly returning to the huddle, with Austin close on his heels, breathing hard. David is the slowest—a lifelong smoker—and he struggles to keep up. At one point, he shoots a glance over his shoulder—the walkers receding into the morass of trees behind him—and the awkward move almost topples him … but he manages to stay on his feet.

They cross a quarter mile of forest trail in less than three minutes.

*   *   *

At length, Lilly slows down, wheezing to catch her breath, marveling at the ease with which a healthy human can outrun a cadre of dead. If agitated, a biter can get the jump on a person, but over long distances, the creatures have no chance, and long distances are Lilly’s specialty.

Gazing over her shoulder, she sees that the walkers have fallen so far behind them that they’re now out of sight, upwind, and no longer an immediate threat. Lilly gets her breath back as she approaches the fallen chopper.

Nobody says anything as they file past the wreckage. What is there to say? Martinez is dead—his mission a failure—his severed head now twitching and ticking in Gabe’s knapsack like a tiny engine dieseling. Nobody says much as they find their way back through the swampy woods adjacent to the highway. When they reach the truck, Gus is standing outside it with his binoculars in his hands.

“What gives?” he asks Lilly, who throws her backpack in the rear cargo hold. “You find him?”

Gabe speaks up. “We found him all right.” He climbs into the cab. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

“What about Martinez?” Gus says as he climbs behind the wheel. The rear of the truck creaks as the others, still out of breath, struggle on board. Gus looks at Gabe. “What happened? What’s wrong with everybody?”

Gabe positions the greasy knapsack on the floor of the cab between his legs. “Just get us out of this fucking place, Gus, will ya?”

Gus puts the vehicle in gear and pulls back onto the highway.

*   *   *

On their way back to Woodbury, Lilly sits off to herself in the rear of the cargo hold, staring out the gap of flapping canvas at the passing landscape, ruminating silently, stewing in her thoughts. Austin tries to get her talking a few times, but she just shakes her head, unable to hide the revulsion on her face, and keeps gazing mutely out at the late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the blur of roadside trees.

She is disgusted at the prospect of returning with the alarming contents of Gabe’s pack. She thought Gabe was saner than this … but she knows she has to let it go. For the sake of Woodbury, she has to swallow her feelings. After all, if Martinez had died within the confines of the town, somebody—probably Lilly herself—would have likely been forced to chop up his carcass to feed to the arena biters anyway. So why the ambivalence?

Cognitive dissonance.

Lilly remembers a shrink in Marietta once telling her about this obscure psychotherapeutic term—a three-dollar phrase for the games a person’s mind plays on itself when faced with two or more conflicting ideas. In simpler times, Lilly struggled with her antithetical feelings of pride and self-loathing, but that was back when she had the luxury to contemplate her navel and whine to a therapist about the trivial annoyances of her cushy daily life. These days, it’s hard to argue fine points of morality, ethics, or right and wrong. In this new society, it’s all about getting to the next fucking day. Period. That’s why Lilly has nothing to add at the moment, and she just keeps staring out at the flickering sunlight—every few moments flinching at another prenatal cramp.

The abdominal pangs have been coming more frequently lately. Lilly has lost track of the triggers—if there are any—but God knows the stress of recent days could very well be bringing on the pain. She worries constantly now about her diet, her sleep, her general health. But how the hell is she supposed to stay on the straight and narrow in this crazy environment? Austin has started planning side runs to find healthy food somewhere. Ramen noodles and Kool-Aid just won’t cut it now. Lilly needs real nourishment, and she needs it consistently.

Once they get back to town, and the group goes its separate ways, Lilly keeps to herself. She doesn’t say much to Austin that evening, despite the fact that Austin, as usual, seems worried about her. Word has spread around town that the Governor is planning to make an appearance at the racetrack that night. Austin has to beg Lilly to go with him. He has a feeling that they should both be present—along with each and every resident—because there’s no telling what the man might say.

Austin believes that they may be facing a turning point in the evolution of their community, a milestone the likes of which none of them have ever encountered—a truly pivotal moment. But neither Austin nor Lilly—nor anybody in Woodbury, for that matter—has any idea how pivotal this moment will turn out to be.

SEVEN

At precisely 9:01 eastern standard time that night—the evening of May 11—in the second year of what some of the more religious folks in Woodbury are now calling the Great Tribulation—the arc lamp high above the south end of the speedway snaps on, shining its magnesium-hot glare down on the racetrack, turning the dusty infield—as well as the aging, weather-beaten oval of a track—a surreal shade of silver. The din of voices coming from the center stack of bleachers immediately dies down to the hushed murmurs and nervous muttering of a congregation preparing to offer supplication and alms to a stern cleric. No whoops and hollers, no cheering—in fact, none of the customary rowdiness that accompanies a typical night at the fights in Woodbury—now there is only the low drone of expectant whispers.

Due to a short in the generator’s circuits, or perhaps an imperfection in the spotlight’s xenon filament, the radiant beam that shines down on the arena begins to flicker. Other arc lights bang to life, also flickering intermittently. The effect has the dreamlike, nerve-jangling quality of a film projector that is out of registration, the resulting flashes creating slow-motion nitrate ghosts of dust devils and litter swirling across the abandoned track and empty walker pens on the night breezes.

Something epochal is about to happen, and each and every last one of the fifty or so spectators, which constitutes about 80 percent of the town’s population—Woodbury is now approaching sixty souls—fidgets in a state of jittery awe. Word has spread to every quarter that the evening’s festivities will feature a special address from the beleaguered Governor, and nobody wants to miss it. Some entered the arena that night with high hopes for the proverbial shot in the arm, a dose of reassurance from the man who gets things done and keeps the wheels greased and watches their backs. But as the minutes tick toward the appointed hour, the mood has spontaneously darkened. It’s as though the collective dread of living during the Great Tribulation has become a microbe itself, infectious as tuberculosis, contractible through the air, through the furtive glances of the downtrodden.

After a few more minutes—it is now 9:05—the loud crackle of the public address system reverberates across the amphitheater. “GOOD PEOPLE OF WOODBURY,” echoes the whiskey-cured pipes of Rudy Warburton, the good old boy from Savannah who has turned his expertise in tuck-pointing into the building of barricades. His words have the stilted quality of a script that was just handed to him—probably by the Governor himself. “LET’S WARMLY WELCOME BACK OUR LEADER, OUR GUIDING LIGHT … THE GOVERNOR!”

For a moment, nothing happens other than a tepid round of applause and a few halfhearted cheers ringing out from the stands.

Way off in the corner, in the first row, near the cyclone fence barrier, sitting next to Austin, Lilly Caul watches and waits and bites her fingernails. She has a blanket draped over the shoulders of her denim jacket, and she keeps her gaze on the far portal, the Governor’s preferred mode of egress on and off the field.

As the awkward pause lengthens, and the collective murmuring kicks in again, Lilly chews her cuticles. She had managed to stop biting her nails a few weeks ago—oddly right around the time she learned she was pregnant—but now the habit has returned with a vengeance. Her fingertips are already looking atrocious, stubby and flaked with tiny fissures. She sits on her hands. She takes a deep breath to ward off another twinge of cramps, a tendril of auburn hair blowing down across her eyes.

Austin turns to her, reaching up and brushing the hair from her eyes. “You okay?” he asks.

“Just ducky,” she replies with a wry little smile. They have talked a lot about her morning sickness, her first-trimester woes, the cramps and the soreness. But their unspoken fears lie at the base of everything they talk about now. Are these symptoms normal? Is she in jeopardy of losing the baby? How is she going to get the nutrition and prenatal care she needs? Is Bob capable of caring for her? And the granddaddy of all their concerns: Is the old army medic up to delivering a baby when the time comes? “I just wish he would come out already,” she mutters, giving a little tip of the head toward the shadowy vestibule on the north end of the arena. “The suspense is killing these people.”

Almost on cue, as if her words have conjured the man himself, the crowd goes silent—and the silence is as unsettling as a fuse being lit—as a gaunt figure appears in the mouth of the portal.

All heads turn toward the north, and scores of anxious faces gape in complete consternation as the man of the hour slowly ambles toward the center of the infield. He wears his trademark hunting vest, camo pants, and jackboots, but he moves gingerly, with the careful tenterhooks of a stroke victim, one step at a time. Rudy, the ersatz announcer, walks beside the Governor with a small grease-spotted cardboard box and a wireless microphone. The thing that transfixes the audience is not the black leather eye patch. Nor is it the profusion of scars and fading wounds visible even at a great distance across the Governor’s exposed flesh. The thing that bothers everybody is the missing arm.

Philip Blake pauses in front of them, grabbing the hand mike from Rudy, thumbing the On switch, and looking at the crowd. His face looks as pale as porcelain in the faltering silver arc light, the flicker effect making him look spectral and nightmarish—a character in a forgotten silent film moving in jump cuts.

His voice crackles through high loudspeakers as Rudy trots off the field: “I APOLOGIZE FOR BEING UNAVAILABLE TO YOU ALL RECENTLY.” He pauses and surveys the silent faces. “I KNOW SOME COMMUNITY MATTERS HAVE ARISEN THAT I’VE BEEN UNABLE TO HANDLE … AND FOR THAT I APOLOGIZE.”

No reaction emanates from the crowd other than a few throats clearing. From her front-row position on the north corner of the stands, Lilly feels a jolt of apprehension. The Governor’s condition somehow looks graver in this terrible flickering light.

“THE GAMES WILL BE UP AND RUNNING AGAIN SOON,” he goes on, undaunted by the eerie silence and the tension so thick it seems to weigh down on the stadium like a fog. “BUT AS YOU’VE PROBABLY NOTICED BY LOOKING AT ME—I’VE HAD OTHER, MORE PRESSING MATTERS TO DEAL WITH.”

Another pause here, as the Governor gazes across the rows of somber-faced residents.

Lilly shivers—despite the humid night air, which smells of burning rubber—an inexplicable wave of dread washing over her. I hope he can pull this one out; we need him back, we need leadership, we need him to be the Governor. Holding her collar tight with one hand, she feels conflicting emotions crashing within her. She feels sympathy for the man, shame, smoldering anger for the motherfuckers who did this, and swimming underneath the surface of it all—incessant, primal—a debilitating wave of doubt.

“AS YOU KNOW, IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE’VE HAD NEW PEOPLE ARRIVE IN TOWN.” He takes a deep breath as though girding himself against a surge of pain. “SO … RECENTLY, WHEN A SMALL BAND OF SURVIVORS SHOWED UP, I WAS THRILLED. I FIGURED THEY WERE LIKE US … HAPPY TO BE ALIVE … THANKFUL TO SEE OTHER SURVIVORS … BUT THAT WAS NOT THE CASE.” In the pause that follows, his words echo up into the sky and slap back at the crowd against the far storefronts. “THERE IS EVIL IN THIS WORLD … AND NOT ALL OF IT IS IN THE FORM OF THOSE UNDEAD MONSTERS CLAWING AT OUR FENCES.”

Just for an instant, he glances down at the cardboard box next to him. Lilly wonders what’s in the thing—a visual aid of some sort, perhaps—and the feeling it gives her isn’t exactly comforting. She wonders if anybody else in the stands is as bothered by that damp, moldering, blood-spotted box as she. Does it occur to anybody that whatever is in that box may change the course of their destinies?

“AT FIRST I HAD NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE CAPABLE OF,” Philip Blake continues, gazing back up at the gallery. “I TRUSTED THEM—IT WAS A GRAVE MISTAKE. THEY NEEDED SUPPLIES, SOME THINGS WE SEEMED TO HAVE PLENTY OF. THEY LIVE IN A NEARBY PRISON. THEY TOOK OUR HEAD OF SECURITY—MARTINEZ—BACK WITH THEM. I GUESS THERE WAS TALK OF COMBINING THE CAMPS—ONE GROUP MOVING TO THE SAFEST PLACE TO LIVE.”

Now he kneels down by the box, and his voice goes low and thick with contempt. The microphone picks up every nuance, every smack of his lips, every click and crackle in the back of his throat.

“SOME OF THEM STAYED BEHIND—AND ONE NIGHT WHILE MY GUARD WAS DOWN, THEY JUMPED ME AND TORTURED ME—MUTILATED ME—AND THEN LEFT ME FOR DEAD.”

From the corner of the stands, Lilly listens closely, her stomach going cold. She detects a slight embellishment of the truth. “They” jumped him? “They” tortured him? It was a woman with a katana sword, right? What is he up to? The suspicion starts to gnaw at Lilly as the man out in the dusty, flickering pantomime of light continues, his voice getting lower and thicker by the minute.

“THEY ESCAPED,” he goes on, kneeling by that mysterious box as though a paper clown is about to pop out. “BUT YOU ALL NEED TO KNOW THIS.” He pauses and scans the crowd as though taking their measure. “ALONG THE WAY THEY KILLED DR. STEVENS. THESE PEOPLE ARE RUTHLESS, INHUMAN SAVAGES.”

He pauses again, as though the exertion of his rage has already exhausted him.

Lilly watches the man kneeling in the flickering pool of phosphorous light. Something is very, very wrong about this. How does he know they killed Dr. Stevens? He was in a coma at the time, and all the witnesses are long gone. How does he know Stevens didn’t simply stumble into a nest of biters? Lilly clenches her fists.

“I FEARED FOR MARTINEZ’S LIFE,” the man goes on. “NOT KNOWING IF THEY’D TAKEN HIM PRISONER OR WORSE. BEFORE WE COULD SEND OUT A SEARCH PARTY, SOMETHING WAS LEFT AT THE MAIN GATE OVERNIGHT.” He flips open the flaps on the top of the box. He pulls out a dark, glistening object about the size of a deflated basketball.

“THEY LEFT THIS!”

He stands and displays the object for the perusal of all in attendance.

*   *   *

Despite the collective inhaling of breaths, faint gasps, and averting of gazes among some of the spectators, a strange transference occurs in the audience. The sight of a severed head when grasped by the hair and allowed to dangle in space provokes an innate reaction in humans formed not only by natural revulsion but also by hundreds of thousands of years of genetic programming.

Off to the side of the bleachers, her hands folded in her lap, Lilly just looks down and shakes her head. She expected something like this. All the lying has taken her by surprise, though, and the sight of the exsanguinated head of Caesar Martinez provokes more repulsion than she would have expected. She glimpsed it once or twice in the woods during their tempestuous retreat from the meadow, but this—this ghastly thing suspended by the hair in the Governor’s hand—looks different somehow in the context of the flickering arc light. A human head detached from its moorings registers to the mind in stages, first as artificial and then almost comically macabre—the pale rubbery face of the once handsome Latino now a mere simulacrum of a face—a fleshy Halloween effigy with a look of blank hunger frozen on its features.

Then the true horror quickly makes itself known, and the reality of the spectacle sets in.

For a brief instant, as the Governor silently holds the object for all to absorb, the head turns lazily on its pendulum of hair. To Lilly, the movement looks languid and dreamy in the flashing light. Tendrils of bloody tendons and nerves dangle from its ragged bottom like roots. Black fluid drips from its gaping mouth, and if it weren’t for the milky film over the eyes it would be hard to tell that Martinez had already turned at the point of decapitation. A tattered bandanna still clings to the skull, matted and soaked with blood.

The people in the back rows, gazing down upon the abomination at a distance of more than twenty-five yards, can’t see that the bloodless face is still twitching with the hectic rigor mortis of the undead—the tics and shudders, the rusty hinges of the jaw still pulsing—as it will for eternity until the thing is incinerated or the brain is destroyed. Lilly is among the few close enough to see this. She recognizes the dreadful signs of eternal damnation. “Jesus Christ,” she utters to no one in particular, barely sensing Austin’s presence next to her or the gentle reassurance of his hand on her arm.

The man out in the flickering infield comments: “I KNEW NONE OF YOU WOULD WANT TO SEE THIS, AND I APOLOGIZE FOR SHOCKING YOU. I JUST WANT TO MAKE YOU ALL COMPLETELY AWARE OF THE KIND OF PEOPLE WE’RE DEALING WITH HERE”—another dramatic pause from the Governor—“MONSTERS!”

Lilly swallows her disgust. Shooting a quick glance over her shoulder, she sees the insidious transaction rippling through the crowd. Some of the men present clench their fists, their expressions visibly changing from shock to anger, their eyes narrowing with rage. Some of the women clutch their children tighter, turning their faces inward against their breasts, averting young gazes away from the horror on the infield. Others grit their teeth in a pique of hatred and bloodlust. Lilly is mortified by the manipulation under way, the mob mentality emerging in the throng.

The voice from the loudspeakers continues: “THESE SAVAGES KNOW WHERE WE LIVE! THEY KNOW WHAT WE HAVE! THEY KNOW OUR STRENGTHS AND THEY KNOW OUR WEAKNESSES!” He scans the anguished faces. “I SAY WE STRIKE AT THEM BEFORE THEY HAVE A CHANCE TO COME AT US!”

Now Lilly jerks at the unexpected chorus of shouts and howls from the stands behind her. It’s not only men. The voices represent all ages, genders, and sensibilities—sending up a dark hallelujah of cries into the sputtering silver radiance of the sky. Some of the onlookers pump their fists. Others bellow garbled cries of rage that sound almost feral. The Governor feeds off it. Still holding the head like some deranged Shakespearean character in a play, moving in the surreal slow motion of the flickering lamps, he is pouring on the call to action as he speaks into the mike.

“I REFUSE TO STAND DOWN AND ALLOW THEM TO DESTROY US—NOT AFTER EVERYTHING WE’VE LOST—NOT AFTER EVERYTHING WE’VE SACRIFICED!”

Some of the spectators begin to holler encouragement as though in a religious call-and-response, which makes Lilly shudder with dread and coaxes another reassuring pat of the arm from Austin, who continually whispers to her now, “It’s okay … it’ll be okay … it’s okay, Lilly.…” Behind them, one man booms, “FUCK YEAH!” Another one yells, “DAMN STRAIGHT!” And the voices rise and swell as the Governor drowns the noise with his amplified growl.

“WE’VE WORKED TOO HARD TO BUILD WHAT WE HAVE HERE—AND I’LL BE GODDAMNED IF I’M GOING TO LET ANYONE TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME!”

The crowd roars, and Lilly has had enough. She rises to her feet and gives Austin a look. Nodding, Austin gets up and follows her out of the bleachers and around the corner of the stands.

“I’M GLAD TO SEE YOU FEEL THE SAME WAY,” the Governor is telling the crowd now, his tone calming, his voice becoming almost hypnotic. “FIRST WE NEED TO FIND THEM. I KNOW MOST OF THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED IN THIS AREA MIGRATED TO ATLANTA WHEN THE GOVERNMENT ORDERED US ALL INTO THE CITIES … BUT THERE HAS TO BE SOMEONE HERE WHO HAS AT LEAST A PASSING FAMILIARITY WITH THE AREA. IF YOU DO—PLEASE LET ME KNOW.”

On their way out of the arena, marching through the noxious darkness of a litter-strewn exit tunnel, Lilly hears the amplified voice like a ghostly revenant echoing and reverberating through the passageway.

“THE PRISON THEY LIVE IN COULD BE FIVE MILES AWAY OR IT COULD BE FIFTEEN … AND WE’RE NOT EVEN SURE OF WHICH DIRECTION IT’S IN. THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE EASY.”

Lilly and Austin emerge from the tunnel and walk away from the edifice, the sound of the crackling voice fading in their ears.

“BUT IT WILL GET DONE—THEY WILL BE PUNISHED—OF THAT YOU CAN BE SURE.”

*   *   *

Lilly gets very little sleep that night. She writhes in a tangle of bedsheets next to Austin, feeling heavy and lethargic and nauseous. She’s been taking prenatal vitamins for the last week and drinking as much water as possible, and her bladder has been on high alert. At least half a dozen times through the night, she gets up and goes to the bathroom, and while sitting on the toilet she hears the eerie, unsettling, distant voices of the dead drifting on the winds out in the vast fields of scabrous pastureland west of town. The Governor had correctly noted that the biters weren’t the true source of evil in this new world, and he was right. But now Lilly stews in a jumble of contrary emotions and festering doubt. She wants to believe in the Governor—she has to—but she can’t ignore the fears kindling in her. Her skin tingles and rashes with goose bumps as she wanders her apartment, getting in and out of bed, trying not to awaken Austin.

By the time the gray light of dawn has pushed the shadows away, she has formulated a course of action. She will talk to the man—try to reason with him—he’ll listen to her if she approaches it the right way. After all, they all want the same thing: to keep Woodbury safe. But stirring up the people this way—all this gruesome saber rattling—is insane. Lilly has to talk some sense into the man. He’ll listen to her. She has to try.

She waits until midmorning—suffering through a tense breakfast with Austin—before setting out to find the Governor. Austin wants to go with her, but for some reason, she wants to do this by herself.

She tries his apartment building first but finds no one home. She goes to the infirmary and asks Bob if he’s seen the man, but Bob has no idea where Philip is at the moment. She wanders the streets for a while until she hears the sound of gunfire coming from the fences out behind the racetrack. She follows the sound.

The day has already heated up, the pale sky heavy with humidity. The high sun bakes the cracked asphalt parking lots, and the air smells of tar and manure. Lilly has already sweated through her sleeveless Georgia Tech T-shirt and ripped denim shorts, and the cramps have returned. She has no appetite, and she can’t tell which is playing havoc with her system more—the pregnancy or the fear.

On the south side of the arena, she finds Gabe and Bruce standing near a gate, smoking cigarettes, their rifles slung over their shoulders paramilitary-style. The intermittent bark of small-caliber gunfire comes from behind them, from somewhere along the big cyclone fence barricade separating the town from the walker-infested outskirts.

“Is Philip around?” Lilly asks Gabe as she approaches the two bodyguards.

“Whaddaya want?” Bruce Cooper speaks up before Gabe has a chance to say anything. “He’s busy right now.”

“Hey, lighten up,” Gabe says to the big, barrel-chested black man in sweat-damp camo fatigues. “She’s on our side.” Gabe turns to Lilly. “He’s down at the fence doing a little target practice, Lilly. Whaddaya need?”

“Just wanted to talk to him for a second,” she says. “Any luck with the search for the prison?”

Gabe shrugs. “We got guys looking up and down Macauster Lane but nothing yet. There something I can help you with?”

Lilly sighs. “Just thought I might have a little chat with the Governor, no big deal … just had a few ideas.”

Gabe and Bruce share a fleeting glance. “I don’t know. He said he didn’t want to be—”

Right then, the sound of a gravelly voice rings out from around the corner. “It’s okay—let her come on down!”

They let Lilly pass, and she strides through the gate and down a narrow sidewalk, past rows of empty handicapped parking places, until she sees a gaunt, one-armed man in an olive drab army surplus jacket standing in the middle distance near a chain-link barricade.

“An amazing organ, the human brain,” he says without looking at her. He stands next to a wheelbarrow brimming with weapons—guns of all size and caliber—and it quickly becomes obvious that he’s been shooting at walkers on the other side of the fence as though trying his hand at a grotesque shooting gallery. A dozen or so ragged bodies lie on the ground outside the chain-link barrier, the air almost blue with gun smoke. “It’s like a computer that can reboot itself,” he mumbles, selecting a small 9 mm pistol from the wheelbarrow with his left hand, raising the gun, thumbing the hammer, and aiming it. “Yet so goddamn fragile … it can crash at any moment.”

He fires at the cluster of walkers on the other side of the fence.

“FUCK!” The bullet grazes the skull of a female in a tattered, bloodstained sundress. The female staggers and stays upright and keeps banging against the fence. The Governor spits angrily. “Ain’t worth shit left-handed!” He fires again and again, until the fourth blast shatters the female’s skull in a fountain of brain matter that sends her sliding down the fence in a greasy leech trail of gore. “This ain’t gonna be easy,” Philip grumbles. “Relearning every goddamn thing in the book.” He glances at Lilly. “You come to spank me a little bit?”

Lilly looks at him. “Excuse me?”

“I could tell you weren’t exactly thrilled with my little presentation.”

“I never said—”

“I could tell by your body language, the expression on your face … you didn’t seem all that crazy about my oratory skills.”

The way he says this in his Georgia twang—putting exaggerated enunciation on the word “orrrr-a-tory”—puts her hackles up. Is he toying with her? Is he challenging her? She licks her lips and carefully chooses her words. “Okay, look … I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’m not trying to tell you how to run this town. It’s just that … there were children in that audience.”

“And you think I crossed the line when I showed them what was left of Martinez.”

Lilly takes a deep breath. “All right, yes … to be honest with you … yeah … I thought it was a bit much.”

He puts the 9 mm back in the wheelbarrow and selects a nickel-plated .357. He checks the cylinder and lines up another shot. “There’s a war coming, Lilly,” he says softly, drawing a bead on another walker out in the shade of an ancient, twisted live oak. “And I promise you one thing.” His left arm is as steady as a steel girder now. “If these people are not ready to defend our town at all costs, we will lose … everything.” His left index finger caresses the trigger pad. He’s getting the hang of it now. “Everything you love … everything that is dear to you, Lilly. You will—I guarantee it—lose it.”

He closes his right eye and peers down the barrel with his left and fires.

Lilly doesn’t jerk at the noise—not even the slightest flinch, despite the volume of the .357’s report—but instead just stands there staring at the man, thinking, feeling the cold sensation of dread turning into certainty within her. The man has a point.

On the other side of the fence, a large male biter folds to the ground in a baptism of blood and fluids. Lilly bites down hard. She senses the tiny ember of life within her, struggling, a seedling starving for sunlight.

At last Lilly says very softly, “You’re right. I’m with you—we all are—no matter what happens. We’re ready. No matter how bad it gets.”

*   *   *

That afternoon, the cramps worsen until Lilly can’t even stand up straight anymore. She lies in a fetal position on the futon in her bedroom with packing blankets over the windows to block out the harsh light of the spring sun. She spikes a mild fever—a hundred and one by dinnertime—and she starts seeing streaks of light across her field of vision like sunspots, flaring brightly with each stabbing pain in her midsection and dull throb above the bridge of her nose.

By six o’clock the chills have begun quaking through her, making her shiver convulsively under the ratty thermal blanket that Austin has brought over from his place. She feels as though she’s about to vomit but can’t quite bring anything up. She’s miserable.

Eventually she manages to climb out of bed to go to the bathroom. Her lower back twinges painfully, stiffly, as she shuffles barefoot across her hardwood floors, staggering into the john and closing herself into the reeking chamber of cracked tile and ancient linoleum flooring. She slumps down on the toilet and tries to pee but can’t even do that.

Austin has been forcing fluids into her, trying to guard against dehydration, but Lilly’s system is so out of whack she can’t bear to drink more than a few ounces of water at a time. Now she sits in the darkness of the bathroom and tries to breathe through the cramps, which send hot tremors of agony up her bowels and through her guts. She feels weak. Wrung out. Limp. Like a piano just fell on her. Is it just the stress? She looks down and blinks.

She sees the blood, as bright as strawberry jam, stippling the crotch of her panties, which now dangle down around her ankles. Her entire body goes icy cold. She has been diligent about checking her underwear for spotting, and up until now has been clean. She tries to keep calm, tries to breathe deeply, tries to think.

A loud knocking shakes her out of her daze. “Lilly?” Austin’s voice comes from outside the door, tinged with alarm. “You okay?”

She leans over and grasps the doorknob, nearly falling off the porcelain stool. She manages to crack the door open and then looks up into Austin’s glassy, terrified eyes. “I think maybe we should go see Bob,” she utters softly, her voice brittle with fear.

EIGHT

That night, Philip Blake cleans house—metaphorically and literally—a man on the cusp of a revolution, a warrior on the precipice of war. He wants his environment to reflect the clean, austere, sterile organization of his brain. No more disembodied voices, no more ambivalence brought on by his symbiotic second self. In the autoclave of his mind—cauterized and cleansed by his ordeal—any vestige of Brian Blake has been burned away, sandblasted from the dark crevices of his thoughts. He is a clockwork mechanism now—calibrated for one thing and one thing only: vengeance.

So he begins the process with the rooms of his apartment, the scene of the crime. There are still faded signs of the abomination; he is compelled to clean deeper.

Bruce brings him cleaning supplies from the warehouse, and he spends hours eradicating any remaining evidence of his torture at the hands of that lunatic bitch with the sword. He wipes down the walls of his living room with Dutch cleanser, working awkwardly with his left hand, and he carefully runs a battery-powered Dirt Devil over the matted carpet, which still bears the faded stains of his own blood. He uses a cleaning solvent on the more stubborn stains, scrubbing with a soft brush until the rug begins to shred apart. He straightens the rooms, makes the bed, bags the dirty laundry, mops the hardwood floors with Murphy’s Oil Soap, and wipes the mossy grime from the glass panels of his matrix of aquariums, paying little attention to the twitching severed heads within them.

He keeps Penny chained to the eye-bolt in the foyer while he works, every few moments making note of her presence in the other room—the soft burr of her perpetual growling, the dull rattling of her chain as she strains to escape, the faint clack of her piranha-like teeth snapping at the air with blind hunger. As he cleans around her, he finds himself being more and more bothered by that soft clacking noise.

It takes him hours to sanitize the place to his satisfaction. Working with one arm makes some of the tasks, such as opening a garbage bag or pushing a broom around corners, a little tricky. To make matters worse, he keeps seeing corners that he missed, nooks and crannies still bearing signs of his torment—sticky patches of dried blood, a discarded roll of tape, a drill bit still crusted with his tissue under a chair, a fingernail in the nap of the carpet. He cleans well into the night, until he has nearly erased every last remnant of his suffering. He even rearranges the sparse furniture to cover or hide the scars he cannot expunge—the scorch marks from the acetylene torch, the nail holes in the rug from the plywood panel.

At length, he obliterates any visible proof that torture ever occurred here.

Satisfied with the job, he collapses into his recliner in the side room. The soft percolating of the aquariums calms him, the muffled thudding and tapping of the reanimated faces bumping against the inside of the glass almost soothing to him. He stares at the bloated, sodden faces undulating behind their veils of water. He imagines the glorious moment when he takes that dreadlock-wearing bitch apart piece by piece … and eventually he drifts off.

He dreams of the old days, and he sees himself at home in Waynesboro with his wife and child—a mythology his brain has now chiseled into itself with the permanence of a stone tablet—and he is happy, truly happy, maybe the only time he felt such happiness in his life. He holds Penny on his lap in the cozy little sunroom off the kitchen in the rear of the clapboard house on Pilson Street, with Sarah Blake curled up on the sofa next to them, her head on Philip’s shoulder, as Philip reads a Dr. Seuss book aloud to Penny.

But something intrudes on the scene—a strange tapping noise—a dull, metallic clacking. In the dream, he looks up at the ceiling and sees cracks forming, each tapping noise spreading another hairline fracture in the plaster overhead, a sifting of dust motes filtering down through rays of sunlight. The tapping noise rises and quickens, and he sees more cracks forming, until the ceiling begins to rend apart. He screams as the room collapses in on itself.

The cataclysm wakes him up.

He jerks forward in the chair with a start, his wounds panging with sharp stabs of agony from the hammer blows and gashes and puncture sores that are still tight with sutures under his clothes. He is damp with cold sweat, and his phantom arm throbs. He swallows stomach acid and looks around the room—the dull glow and bubbling of the aquariums bringing him back to reality—and he realizes he still hears the infernal clacking noise.

The sound of Penny’s chattering teeth in the other room.

He has to do something about it.

The last stage of his housecleaning.

*   *   *

“Don’t you worry, Lilly-girl, I happen to have quite a bit of practice catching babies,” Bob Stookey says, blatantly lying to the couple in the magnesium-silver brightness of the underground infirmary. It’s the middle of the night and the cavernous room is as silent as a morgue. Bob has rolled a pulse-ox unit over to the bed on which Lilly now lies covered in a sheet, with Austin nearby, fidgeting, chewing his fingernails, and shooting glances back and forth from Lilly’s ashen face to Bob’s weathered, smiling visage.

“I ain’t no O-B-G-Y-N,” Bob adds, “but I had to watch over my share of pregnant gals during my stint in the army. You and your baby are gonna be fine … shipshape … four by four, little lady.”

The truth is, Bob had only dealt with a single pregnant woman during his tour in Afghanistan—a translator—a local girl who had been only seventeen when one of the guys from the PX had knocked her up. Bob had kept her condition under wraps until the day she miscarried. It was Bob who had to give the woman the news—although he was convinced back then, and still is today, that she already knew. A woman knows. That’s all there is to it … a woman knows.

“What about the spotting?” Lilly asks. She lies on the same gurney on which the Governor floated in the balance between life and death for so many days. Bob has inserted an IV stick into her arm just above the wrist—the last bag of glucose in the storage pantry—in order to stave off dehydration and keep her stable.

Now Bob tries to maintain the reassuring tone in his voice as he hovers over her. “It ain’t that uncommon during the first trimester,” he says, not really knowing what he’s talking about, turning to wash his hands in the steel sink behind them. The drumming of the water on the basin is excruciatingly loud in the stillness of the infirmary. The room is a pressure cooker of emotion. “I’m sure everything is right as rain,” Bob says with his back turned to them.

“Whatever you need, Bob, just let me know,” Austin says then. Dressed in his hoodie and ponytail, he looks like a lost child who could break down into sobs at any moment. He puts a hand on Lilly’s bare shoulder.

Bob dries his hands on a towel. “Lilly Caul’s gonna be a mom … I still can’t get over it.” He turns and comes back over to the bed. He smiles down at her as he slips on surgical gloves. “This is just what we need around this place,” he says with false cheer. “Some good news for once.” He reaches under the sheet and gently palpates her tummy, trying to remember how to diagnose a miscarriage. “You’re gonna be great at it, too.” He turns to a tray of instruments, and finds a flat stainless steel probe. “Some people are just cut out for it. Know what I mean? I was never cut out for it—God knows.”

Lilly turns her head to the side and closes her eyes, and Bob can tell she’s trying not to cry. “It doesn’t feel right,” she murmurs. “Something’s wrong, Bob. I can tell. I can feel it.”

Bob looks at Austin. “Son, I’m gonna have to do a pelvic exam on her.”

Austin has tears in his eyes. He knows. Bob can see it in the young man’s glazed expression. “Whatever you need to do, Bob.”

“Honey, I’m gonna have to go in there and have a look-see,” he says. “It ain’t gonna be too comfortable, and it’s a gonna be a little cold.”

Her eyes still closed, Lilly barely emits a whisper. “It’s okay.”

“All right, here we go.”

*   *   *

“Dammit—hold still.” Philip Blake crouches in the darkness of his foyer, working with the needle-nosed pliers, his left hand gloved and protected with a layer of duct tape. “I know you’re not enjoying this, but I hope you understand how much better this will make things.”

He probes the black maw of his dead daughter’s mouth with the pliers, trying to latch on to her upper incisors. Penny keeps trying to chew on his hand, but he keeps her immobilized with his jackboot on her lower half. Her reek engulfs him as he works, but he ignores it.

“It really is for the good of our relationship,” he says, finally latching on to one of her upper teeth with the pincers. “Here it comes!”

He extracts a tooth—the sound like a tiny cork popping—and pulls the bloody pellet free, trailing delicate threads of pulp. Penny rears back for a moment, her demonic features puckering, her wide, milky eyes fixed on some empty void beyond this world.

“Here comes another one,” Philip mutters softly, as though speaking to a pet. “I can feel it loosening.” He grunts as another tooth pops free. “There. See? This isn’t so bad, is it?” He tosses the second tooth into a wastebasket behind him, and then turns back to the girl-thing. “You’re almost getting used to the feeling, aren’t you?”

She drools a black, oily substance as he removes one tooth after another, her face now going as blank as the dark side of the moon. “Just a few more, and we’ll be done,” he comments with fake cheer, working on her lower teeth. “Sound good?” He pulls the last few jagged lower teeth with minimum effort, the tiny threads of tissue looping across the front of her filthy sundress.

Thanks to advanced decomposition, the teeth come out easily on their dead roots.

“There,” Philip says reassuringly, “all done.”

*   *   *

For a brief instant, standing in that silent infirmary at the foot of Lilly’s gurney, Bob remembers that one time in Afghanistan when he assisted the field surgeon in the performance of a D&C on the translator—the removal of any remaining fetal or placental tissue after a pregnancy has been lost—and now he searches his memory for the lessons of that day. He gently reaches under the sheet covering Lilly’s lower half. He doesn’t look at Lilly’s face.

She looks away.

Bob begins the exam. He remembers the way a healthy uterus is supposed to feel during the early weeks of a viable pregnancy—according to the field surgeon—versus the way it feels in the aftermath of a miscarriage. It takes only a few seconds for Bob to find the end of the cervix. Lilly lets out an anguished mewling sound that breaks Bob’s heart. He palpates the uterus and finds it completely dilated, heavy with blood and slough. This is all he needs to know. He gently pulls back, removing his hand from her.

“Lilly, I want you to remember something,” he says then, removing his gloves. “There’s no reason—”

“Oh no.” She’s already softly crying, her head still turned away, her tears soaking the pillow. “I knew it … I knew it.”

“Oh Jesus.” Austin puts his head down on the gurney’s side rail. “Oh God.”

“What was I thinking?…” She softly, silently weeps into the gurney’s pillow. “What the fuck was I thinking?…”

Bob is crestfallen. “Now, honey, let’s not start kicking ourselves in the ass, okay? The good news is, you can try again … you’re a young gal, you’re healthy, you can definitely try again.”

Lilly stops crying. “Enough, Bob.”

Bob looks down. “I’m sorry, honey.”

Austin looks up, wipes his eyes, and gazes at the wall. He lets out a long pained breath. “Fuck.”

“Gimme a towel, Bob.” Lilly sits up on the gurney. She has a strange expression on her face, impossible to read, but one glance at it and Bob knows to shut the fuck up and get the woman a towel. He grabs a cloth and hands it to her. “Unhook me from this shit,” she says flatly, wiping herself off. “I gotta get outta here.”

Bob removes the stick, wipes her wrist, and puts a bandage on the site.

She shoves herself off the gurney. For a moment, she looks as if she might fall over. Austin steadies her, gently holding her by the shoulder. She pushes him away and finds her jeans draped over a chair back. “I’m fine.” She gets dressed. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“Honey … take it easy.” Bob circles around her as though blocking her path to the door. “You probably oughtta just stay off your feet for a while.”

“Get outta my way, Bob,” she says with fists clenched now, jaw set with determination.

“Lilly, why don’t we—” Austin falls silent when she shoots him a look. The expression on her face—the teeth gritted tightly, the smoldering cinders of rage in her eyes—takes Austin aback.

Bob wants to say something but figures maybe it’s better if he just lets her go. He steps aside, and then looks at Austin, gesturing for him to back off. Lilly is already halfway across the room.

The door slams behind her, the residual tension crackling in her slipstream.

*   *   *

For an endless, agonizing moment, Philip Blake kneels before his monstrous offspring in the dusty gloom of that apartment foyer. Penny looks strangely hobbled by the slipshod dental procedure. She wobbles on her spindly little legs for a moment, moving her blackened lips around rotten, bloody gums, her empty gaze riveted on the man in front of her.

Philip leans down toward the dead girl, his mind filled with false memories of tucking his daughter into bed at night, reading storybooks to her, stroking her lustrous goldenrod curls, and planting kisses on her fragrant little forehead. “All better,” he murmurs to the creature chained to the wall. “Now, come here.”

He puts his arms around her and gives her a hug. She feels like a brittle husk in his arms, like a tiny scarecrow. He cradles her cold, mottled jawline in his gloved left hand. “Give Daddy a kiss.”

He kisses her rancid divot of a mouth, seeking warmth and love, but tasting only the bitter rot of spoiled meat and flyspecked feces. He rears back, an involuntary jerk, repulsed by the string of slimy tissue adhering to his lips. He gasps and frantically wipes away the black drool, his stomach heaving suddenly.

She lurches toward him, eyes narrowing, trying to bite him with her pulpy black gums.

He doubles over, holding her head back with one arm. The nausea within him turns to a column of hot bile rising up his gorge. He vomits on the hardwood floor, the yellow viscous stew of stomach acids spattering across the floorboards. He wretches and convulses until there’s nothing left to expel.

Falling back on his knees, he wipes his mouth, hyperventilating. “Oh, honey … I’m sorry.” He swallows hard and tries to get his bearings back, tries to push back the shame and disgust. “Don’t think anything of it.” He gets his breath back. He swallows again. “I’m sure … with time … I’ll … I’ll…” He wipes his face. “Please don’t let this—”

All at once the bang of somebody knocking loudly on the apartment door interrupts. The Governor sniffs back his revulsion. He blinks at the noise. “Fuck!” He rises on weak knees. “FUCK!”

*   *   *

Over the course of the next thirty seconds—the time it takes Philip Blake to get himself together, cross the foyer, unsnap the dead bolt, and throw the door open—he transforms from a trembling, weak, unrequited father to a diamond-hard leader of men. “Did I or did I not say I was not to be disturbed?” he snarls coldly at the shadowy figure standing in the dim light of the corridor.

Gabe clears his throat instinctively. Clad in an army surplus jacket cinched at the waist with a gun belt and bandolier, he measures his words. “Sorry, boss—some shit’s going down.”

“What shit?”

Gabe takes a deep breath. “Okay, there was an explosion. We think at the National Guard station—huge cloud of smoke going into the air. Bruce took some men to investigate. They were gone a few minutes, and then we heard gunfire nearby.”

“Nearby?!”

“Yeah, same direction.”

The Governor sears his gaze into the man’s eyes. “Then why don’t you just grab a car and—FUCK!” He turns back to the apartment. “Never mind!—Forget it!—Follow me!”

*   *   *

They take one of the armored trucks. The Governor rides in the cab on the passenger side, holding an AR-15 on his lap, as Gabe drives. Gabe hardly says a word the whole trip out—down Flat Shoals Road, past miles of walker-riddled forest, up Highway 85, and down a long farm road toward the smudge of black smoke visible against the night sky—while the Governor silently broods in the shotgun seat. A pair of Gabe’s men, Rudy and Gus, ride outside the cab, one on each flank, standing on a footrail in the wind, cradling assault rifles.

As they rumble eastward through the night, the Governor feels his phantom arm twinge with needles of pain at every bump, every jerk—a bizarre sensation that keeps tugging at his peripheral vision in the green glowing darkness of the cab, making him think there’s a tingling ghost-arm protruding from his stump—and it makes him angrier by the minute. He ruminates silently in the rattling dark, thinking about going to war, thinking about twisting off the head of that bitch who attacked him.

The great military leaders of yore, the men Philip has read about in history books—everybody from MacArthur to Robert E. Lee—stayed away from the front, huddled in tents with their commanders, planning, strategizing, looking at maps. Not Philip Blake. He fancies himself as Attila the Hun, or maybe Alexander the Great, roaring into Egypt with revenge on his mind and death dripping off the bloody tip of his sword. His eye patch itches as the adrenaline courses through him. He wears a leather driving glove on his left hand that creaks as he clenches his fist.

They approach a familiar turnoff snaking off the main two-lane. The wind has blown a letter off the tall roadside sign, which now says:

Wal art

Save money. Live better.

In the middle distance, the Governor can see the vast leprous cement of the Walmart parking lot gleaming like a gray ocean in the moonlight. Near the west edge of the lot, a few dark, ragged objects lie on the pavement near a familiar-looking cargo truck. The Governor recognizes the truck—it’s from Woodbury’s fleet.

“Fuck!” The Governor points. “Over there, Gabe—near the garbage Dumpsters!”

Gabe guns the truck and it booms across the parking lot, raising a cloud of dust into the night sky. The air brakes come on as they approach the battlefield. Gabe skids to a stop thirty feet away with a jerk.

“FUCK!” The Governor shoves his door open and stands on the skid, gazing at the carnage strewn across the lot like discarded rag dolls. “FUCK!”

The Governor hops off the skid and leads the three other men across the lot to the dead bodies. For a moment, nobody says anything. The Governor surveys the scene, makes note of the evidence. The cargo truck still idles, the carbon monoxide and cordite still hanging in the air like a thick blue shroud over the scene.

“Jesus,” Gabe utters, looking down at the four bodies lying in pools of blood across the concrete. One of them is headless, the body also missing hands, the severed cranium lying in a puddle of gore fifteen feet away. Another one—the kid named Curtis—lies supine with arms akimbo and dead eyes still open and staring up at the stars. A third one lies dead in a swamp of blood and tissue, his guts blooming out of a large gash in his belly. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the long, clean cuts—the neatly severed appendages—are the result of a Japanese katana sword.

Gabe walks over to the largest body, a black man still clinging to life but quickly bleeding out, his neck ravaged by multiple high-caliber blasts. His face sticky with his own blood, his eyes showing mostly whites, Bruce Cooper tries to speak with his last breaths.

Nobody can understand him.

The Governor moves over to the fallen man and gazes down at the body with very little emotion other than simmering rage. “His head is still intact,” Philip says to Gabe. “He’ll probably be turning soon.”

Gabe starts to say something in response when the faint sound of Bruce Cooper’s baritone voice—now breathless and choked with agony—can be heard under the wind. The Governor kneels and listens closely.

“S-ssaw the bald f-fuck, the k-kid,” Bruce utters, his throat filling with blood. “They … came b-back … they…”

“Bruce!” The Governor leans closer. His angry bark lacks any compassion. “BRUCE!”

The big man on the ground has nothing left. His big shaved head—now stippled with blood as black as pitch—begins to loll one last time. His eyes flutter once, and then go still, fixed, lifeless as marbles. The Governor stares at the man for a moment.

Then the Governor looks down at the cement and closes his eyes.

He doesn’t see the others bowing their heads with grudging respect for the iron-fisted enforcer who dutifully did the Governor’s bidding, who stood by the Governor without question, without recompense, without hesitation. Now Philip Blake fights the anguish seeping into his thoughts like a volatile chemical clouding his resolve. Bruce Cooper is just one man—a single cog in the Woodbury machine—but he secretly meant the world to Philip. Other than Gabe, Bruce was the closest thing to a friend Philip had in this world. Philip confided in Bruce, let him see the aquariums, let him see Penny. Bruce was unconditional in his respect—if not love—for Philip Blake. In fact, as far as Philip can tell, it was Bruce who saved his life, who forced Bob to get his shit together and treat the injuries.

The Governor looks up. He sees Gabe turning away, bowing his head as though offering deference and privacy to his boss in this excruciating moment, the 9 mm Glock still holstered on Gabe’s hip. There is only one thing left to do—one loose end to be tied up.

The Governor grabs the pistol from Gabe’s holster, making Gabe jerk with a start.

Aiming the muzzle down at Bruce’s head, he squeezes off a single shot—point-blank—sending a hollow-point slug into Bruce’s skull. The discharge makes everybody else jump, everybody except the Governor.

He turns to Gabe. “They were just here.” The Governor speaks now in a low, thick voice—a voice charged with latent rage and mayhem. “Find their fucking tracks. Find their fucking prison.” He fixes his fiery gaze from one good eye into Gabe’s eyes and roars suddenly: “FIND IT NOW!!”

Then he walks away toward the armored truck without another word.

*   *   *

For a long time, standing amid the dead bodies scattered like broken mannequins across the desolate, moonlit parking lot, Gabriel Harris is paralyzed with indecision. Watching the Governor storm away, climb behind the wheel of the armored truck, and rumble off into the night leaves Gabe speechless and bewildered. How the hell is he supposed to find this fucking prison on foot, with no supplies, very little ammunition, and just a couple of men? For that matter, how the fuck are they supposed to get back home? Fucking hitchhike? Then, over the space of an instant, Gabe’s state of complete and utter vexation changes to pure, unadulterated resolve when he glances back at the remains of Bruce Cooper, his friend, his comrade-in-arms.

The sight of the big man lying in the moonlight—now as ruined and butchered as a flensed piece of meat—reaches down to some inner reserve deep within Gabe. A wave of contrary emotions wells up in him—sorrow, rage, and fear—and he bites down hard on the feelings. He orders the other two men to follow him.

They ransack what’s left of the merchandise rotting inside the defunct Walmart. In the shadowy nooks and crannies, under fallen displays and on the floors behind counters, they find a couple of useable backpacks, a flashlight, a pair of binoculars, a box of crackers, a jar of peanut butter, some notebook paper, pens, batteries, and two boxes of .45 caliber slugs.

They stow the supplies into the backpacks and then set out to the east, at first following tire tracks, wending their way down a dusty adjacent access road, and then making a sharp turn to the south. They follow the tracks down dirt roads all night, until the tracks take a turn onto a stretch of blacktop and instantly vanish.

Gabe refuses to give up. He decides they should fan out. He sends Gus to the east and Rudy off to the west, and they make plans to hook back up at the intersection of Highway 80 and 267.

The men go their separate ways, the thin beams of their flashlights receding into the predawn fog. Gabe uses his eleven-inch buck knife to slice through a stretch of thick foliage, cutting a swath straight south as the sky begins to lighten with the first hints of dawn.

An hour later, he runs into a few errant walkers weaving through the trees, drawn to his scent, and he manages to dodge most of them. At one point, a small one—either a child or a midget, its moldering face blackened beyond recognition—darts out of the brush at him. He takes it down with a single knife thrust to the skull. Sweat breaks out on the back of Gabe’s thick neck and drips down the small of his back as he picks up his pace, carving a path through the overgrown, neglected farm fields.

By midday, Gabe reaches the junction of two weather-beaten blacktop roads. He sees Rudy and Gus about twenty-five yards to the north, sitting side by side like owls on a split-rail fence, waiting for him, and judging by the sheepish, morose expressions on their faces, it’s obvious that they have each come up empty.

“Lemme guess,” Gabe says, approaching them from the south. “You didn’t find shit.”

Gus gives him a shrug. “Passed a bunch of little farm towns, all deserted … no prison.”

“Same,” Rudy grumbles. “Nothin’ but wrecked cars and empty buildings. Ran into a few walkers, was able to put them down without making much of a racket.”

Gabe lets out a sigh, pulls a handkerchief, and wipes the moisture from the back of his neck. “Gotta keep trying, goddamnit.”

Rudy starts to say, “Why don’t we try following—”

A sudden clap of gunfire echoes to the west, cutting off his words. It sounds like a small-caliber pistol. The sharp report reverberates across the sky, and Gabe jerks toward the sound, which comes from behind the tree line.

The other two men look up. Then they look at Gabe, who stares out at the rolling hills beyond the fence. For a moment, nobody says anything.

Then Gabe turns to the others and says, “Okay, follow me … and stay down. I got a feeling we just hit pay dirt.”

NINE

Lilly spends most of that day holed up in her apartment, chewing aspirin, prowling around her living room in her sweatpants and Georgia Tech football jersey, taking inventory of her storehouse of firearms and weaponry. The overcast daylight filters through the blinds, making her skull throb, but she ignores the aches and pains, operating now on the adrenal charge of pure hatred coursing through her like an electric current.

After a sleepless night and a series of tense exchanges with Austin, she is galvanized now, buzzing with contempt for these bastards who barged into Woodbury and made her lose her baby. After nearly two years of living amid the plague, Lilly has developed a unified theory of proper behavior among survivors. You either help one another—if you can—or leave each other the fuck alone. But these intruders have trampled over all decent modes of interaction and ruined everything, and the outrage burns brightly in Lilly. Thankfully, the tenderness in her midsection has faded slightly—along with the shock of all her dreams going up in smoke—which now only serves to make room for the white-hot loathing for these people that blazes within her as she paces the cluttered apartment.

All the crates and boxes and secondhand furniture have been pushed aside, stacked along the walls to make room for the arsenal of small arms, bladed weapons, and excess ammunition spread out across the floor. It hadn’t even occurred to her how much of this stuff she had been stockpiling over the months—perhaps out of paranoia, or maybe via some kind of dark intuition—but now she sees it all laid out in orderly rows. Her two .22 caliber Ruger MK IIs lay side by side at the top of the heap like crests on a coat of arms. An extra pair of 10-round magazines are lined up next to the pistols, and a web belt is coiled directly below the mags. Under this is a row of cartons filled with 40-caliber rounds, a machete, a row of assorted suppressors, Austin’s Glock on a stock of spare magazines, a Remington .308 bolt-action MSR rifle, three long-blade knives with varying degrees of sharpness, a long-handled pickax, and an odd assortment of holsters, sheaths, and pouches lined up in a neat little row.

Austin’s voice rings out from the adjacent kitchen. “Soup’s on!” He announces this with as much vigor and cheer as he can muster, but the sadness is apparent in his voice, a constant weight now dragging him down. “Whaddaya say we eat together in the back room?”

“Not hungry,” she calls to him.

“Lilly, c’mon … don’t do this to me,” he says, coming into the room wringing his hands on a towel. He wears a shopworn REM T-shirt, his long curls undone and spilling down his back. He looks nervous. “You need your nourishment.”

“What for?”

“Lilly, please.”

“Look … I appreciate the thought.” She doesn’t even look at him, just keeps studying the arsenal at her feet. “You go ahead and eat—I’m fine.”

He licks his lips, thinking, choosing his words carefully. “You do realize that we may never see these people again.”

“Oh, we’ll see them … I promise you … we’ll see them again.”

“What does that mean?”

She stares at the weapons. “It means we’re not going to stop until we find them.”

“Why? What good is it going to do?”

She looks at him. “Did the IQ level just drop in here to, like, room temperature?”

“Lilly—”

“Have you not been paying attention to anything that’s been going on?”

“That’s the problem!” He throws the towel on the floor. “I’ve been with you every step of the way, I’ve been paying fucking close attention to everything.” He swallows hard, takes a breath, and then tries to calm down and measure his words. “I can see you’re hurting, Lilly, but I’m hurting, too.”

Lilly looks back down at the firearms and says very softly, “I know that.”

He comes over to her and touches her shoulder. “This is insane.”

She doesn’t move her gaze from the weapons. “It is what it is.”

“And what is that?”

She looks at him. “It’s fucking war.”

“War? Really? That sounds more like the Governor talking.”

“It’s us or them, Austin.”

Austin lets out an exasperated sigh. “I’m not worried about them, Lilly … I’m worried about us.”

She scorches him with her gaze. “You better pull your head out of your ass and start worrying about them, or there’s not going to be an us … there’s not going to be a Woodbury, there’s not going to be fucking anything.”

Austin looks down, and says nothing.

Lilly starts to say something else when she stops herself. She sees something in Austin’s expression change, his eyes welling up, and a single tear tracking down his face. The tear drips off his chin and falls to the floor. All the fight goes out of Lilly, and her guts tighten with sadness. She goes to him and puts her arms around him. He hugs her back, and then she hears Austin’s voice in her ear, barely a whisper, all strangled with sorrow. “I feel helpless,” he utters breathlessly. “Losing the baby … and now … I feel like you’re pulling away … and I can’t lose you … I can’t … I just can’t.”

She holds him and strokes his long hair and murmurs softly in his ear, “You’re not going to lose me. You’re my man. Do you understand? It’s you and me—end of story. You understand?”

“Yes…” His voice is barely audible. “I understand … thank you … thank you.”

For a long moment they hold each other in the ashen light of that cluttered living room, saying nothing, just holding each other as though bracing themselves. She can hear Austin’s heavy breaths in her ear, can feel his heart beating against her chest.

“I know what it’s like to feel helpless,” she says at last, looking into his eyes, their faces nearly touching, their breath mingling. “Not long ago I was the poster girl for helplessness. I was a train wreck. But somebody helped me, gave me confidence, taught me how to survive.”

Austin holds her tighter, and he whispers, “That’s what you’ve done for me, Lilly.”

She plants a soft, tender kiss on his forehead and pulls him into a tighter embrace. God help her, she loves him. She will fight for him, she will fight for their future, she will fight to the death. She cradles the back of his head, stroking his long hair, but all she can think about now is getting into the shit and exterminating each and every one of these fucking monsters who remain a threat.

*   *   *

At dusk that night, the Governor sits by himself in the empty bleachers of the speedway, the wind tossing litter across the deserted infield. The sky, heavy with toxic particulates, streaks with ribbons of gold and fuchsia as the sun dips below the clouds and dust devils swirl across the track on the bluster of the day’s end—all of it reflecting Philip Blake’s pensive mood.

A great military leader once called this time “the great inhalation before the storm,” and Philip feels a similar weight in the air. Sitting in the waning light, he marshals his energy and fantasizes about the glory of battle and the satisfaction of seeing that bitch who crippled him come apart at the seams like a blood-filled piñata. Philip’s mind percolates with the dark energy of war like an atomic particle accelerator—humming with rage—turning this magic-hour light into an unholy rite, a sacred invocation.

Then, almost as if conjured by his thoughts, a harbinger appears—a stocky figure in camo pants, boots, and army surplus jacket—materializing in the shadows of the speedway’s far portal.

Philip looks up.

Gabe trots across the infield, breathless from running, his portly face filled with urgency, eyes blazing with excitement. He sees Philip. He circles around the end of the stands, hopping over the iron cordons and climbing the bench seats until he approaches the Governor. “They said I’d find you here,” he says, hyperventilating, leaning over and putting his hands on his knees.

“Take it easy, Kemosabe,” the Governor says. “I hope you got good news for me.”

Gabe looks at him and nods. “We found it.”

The words seem to hang in the air for a moment, the expression on Philip’s face unreadable in the fading blue light. He stares. “Start talking.”

*   *   *

According to Gabe, when they heard the shots that day, they crept through the thick woods adjacent to the two-lane until they snuck up on a couple of chicks and some older dude in a clearing doing some target practice. Gabe and his men stayed out of sight, huddling behind the trees, watching from a distance, as the three unidentified folks took down a few biters, and then started dragging one of the bodies back toward a high fence in the distance.

At first, none of it made any sense, but when Gabe and the boys finally followed a path up a hill to get a better view from higher land—and they got a good glimpse of what lay beyond the fence, spreading across the neighboring patchwork of farm fields like a vast housing block that had simply dropped out of space—all the pieces fell together.

The place once known as the Meriwether County Correctional Facility stretches almost as far as the eye can see across the pastureland on the eastern edge of the county, a zigzagging network of gray-brick postwar buildings situated behind three layers of security fencing. Gabe realized instantly that the reason nobody in Woodbury had thought of this place is probably due to the fact that it had been defunded by the state of Georgia in the crash of ’87, and for years it had been off the radar, sitting out here in the rural hinterlands like a ghost ship. The only reason that Gabe’s memory was jogged by the sight of the place was the fact that Gabe’s cousin, Eddie, a drug dealer from Jacksonville, had been held here in the late ’90s pending his appeal. The state had taken to using the place as a glorified waiting room—technically, a jail for convicted felons—running it on a skeleton crew but essentially keeping it stocked and armed and locked and loaded.

For the most part, the property seemed fairly secure to Gabe—but not by any stretch of the imagination invulnerable. Inside the perimeter of razor wire and guard towers, the exercise yards and run-down basketball courts lay deserted, cleared long ago of any biters. And although the outer edges of the fences swarmed here and there with stray walkers—clusters of them drawn to the scent of the human inhabitants like bees drawn to honey—the soot-stained buildings looked relatively solid, with good bones, and stacks on the roof pitches pluming puffs of exhaust. Somebody must have gotten the generators and emergency apparatus up and running. The condition of the place suggested the potential for refrigeration, showers, air-conditioning, cafeterias stocked with food and supplies, amenities such as gyms and weight-training rooms and arcades—all of it just begging to be taken.

“They’ve got the fences,” Gabe explains now, standing on a metal bench only inches away from where the Governor sits intently listening. “And they seem to be letting the biters form a perimeter around those fences, maybe by accident—or maybe they’re smarter than we thought.” Gabe pauses to let this sink in.

“Go on,” the Governor says, not taking his eyes off the empty racetrack, thinking it over as the gathering darkness pulls a curtain down on the arena. “I’m listening.”

“The thing is,” Gabe says, his voice dropping an octave, getting taut and thick with anticipation. “There ain’t a whole lot of them, and they can’t have that many weapons.”

The Governor doesn’t say anything, just keeps gazing at the hazy shadows that are deepening at the edges of the track, his single visible eye narrowing.

“We watched them for hours, man,” Gabe goes on. “We hit them tomorrow and they go down like chumps. I’m telling you … they’d barely put up a fight—”

“No.”

The word pops like a firecracker in the gloom, and it has the effect of a splash of cold water on Gabe’s face. He does a double take. He looks down at the Governor, and he tilts his head with consternation.

The Governor stares at the night for a moment, and then gazes up at Gabe. “We wait.”

Anger and dismay flare inside the stocky man. “Goddamnit, Governor! After what they did to Bruce?! We need to take them down now!”

“Excuse me?” The Governor’s one good eye holds Gabe in its thrall for a moment, the tiny pinprick of light in the center of his iris reflecting the moon like a fuse that’s been lit. “After they escaped, their guard was up, probably for weeks. We couldn’t find them.” He pauses with the theatricality of a professor giving a lecture. “After Martinez betrayed them—and they butchered him—their guard was up again. Still, nothing from us.”

By this point, Gabe has begun to nod slowly, almost to himself, finally getting it.

“Now they’ve raided our territory, killed some of our men,” the Governor goes on with that dark, glittering gaze locked onto Gabe. “They’ve got to be expecting us to follow them back. We wait. We wait for them to relax again. That way, they don’t expect it. They convince themselves they’re safe—that we’ve given up or we can’t find them.”

Gabe nods.

“That’s when we fucking strike,” the Governor says. “And if you want to be along for the ride and not a rotting piece of biter food, you’ll shut your goddamn mouth and get the fuck outta my sight.”

Gabe stands there for a moment, swallowing back the dismay and shame.

“NOW!”

The booming echo of the Governor’s voice carries over the empty stands.

*   *   *

The next day, the dynamic in Woodbury changes. Every man, woman, and child can feel it, but few can articulate the tension that looms sharklike beneath the surface of daily life—the way children are kept mostly indoors and quiet and occupied by coloring books or board games, or the way conversations among the adults become muted and hushed and urgent. Any trace of the gallows humor that once peppered the bitch sessions around the coffee urn at the Main Street diner now fade away completely, replaced by a grim sort of purpose to each exchange, each task, each anxious meeting.

Over the next week, Gabe and Lilly huddle with the town’s elders and explain what’s going on. In private meetings they prepare the heads of families and the strongest of the young adults—those who will be on the front line—for the coming assault on the prison. They delegate duties required to get the town on its war footing, and soon a kind of organic hierarchy emerges. If the Governor is the high command, then Lilly and Gabe become his generals, relaying orders to the rank and file, organizing the ragtag battalion of residents into a ferocious invasion force. Lilly becomes the self-appointed standard-bearer, turning the fear to righteous rage, spreading the word that this will be a just mission, the only way to protect the children of Woodbury.

The racetrack becomes the official command center, with stockpiles of matériel and ordnance gathered in the garages underneath the stadium and under rain tarps across the infield. The Governor’s inner sanctum is established high up in the press boxes, with maps of Meriwether County taped up onto the walls and across the surfaces of folding tables. Late at night, the one-armed warrior can be glimpsed pacing the press box, alone, silhouetted by the yellow light of bare bulbs, compulsively studying the twenty-three-mile distance between Woodbury and the prison—plotting the invasion with the intensity of Eisenhower planning the Allied attack on Anzio.

By the end of that week, Lilly has made an exhaustive inventory of the armaments at Woodbury’s disposal. They have twenty-seven crates of 7.62 and 5.56 rounds and enough magazines for a small army, as well as enough Kevlar to outfit half the adults. They have three .50 caliber machine guns and scores of rifles, of both the assault and the long-range sniper variety. They have enough fuel to convey at least a dozen vehicles—most of them from the Guard station—across the twenty-three miles of rural roads to the battlefront. They have six mine-resistant armored trucks, a couple of cargo vehicles, a personnel carrier, two Humvees, and a pair of big Buick four-door sedans that will do in a pinch.

Gabe spends the bulk of the second week getting the single Abrams M1 tank—discovered in mothballs at the Guard station—in working order. The armored tank features a remotely operated .50 caliber turret on top and a 105 mm cannon with forty-two rounds in the hull. Since the tank’s turbine engine runs on diesel, Gabe has to send two separate parties on fuel runs to nearby truck stops for the last drops of diesel available in the county.

By the end of that second week of waiting and girding and preparing, Lilly has completely shed her fears and finds herself sleeping soundly for the first time since the plague began. She has no dreams now, and she awakes every morning replenished, her spine tingling with anticipation for the fight. Even Austin is on board. He has been target shooting regularly and has gotten very handy with the sniper rifle. Lilly feels a strange tie binding her with Austin—not just the shared grief over the miscarriage, but also the galvanizing purpose of their mission, their common hunger for a better future. They have convinced themselves that this is the only way, and the collective resolve has drawn them closer together.

The following Tuesday night, after dusk has settled down on the town—almost three weeks after Gabe’s discovery of the prison—Lilly finishes loading the last of the high-capacity ammo magazines that are lined up on long tables in the corridor under the racetrack. She decides to head home … and she is just emerging from the west exit, stepping into the darkness of the speedway parking lot, when she hears a shuffling noise behind her—coming from the shadows of the portal—that raises her hackles and causes her to draw her Ruger and whirl around with the muzzle coming up instinctively in the general vicinity of the noise.

A voice out of the darkness: “Young lady walking around a bad neighborhood alone at night.” The slender male figure lurking in the shadows smokes a cigarette, the orange firefly of its tip the only thing visible. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

“Who’s there?” Lilly holds her gun on the silhouette shrouded in the shadows. The husky voice sounds familiar, but she can’t be sure. “Identify yourself, please.…”

The Governor steps out of the shadows into the pool of yellow security light. “Good to see your reflexes are sound,” he says, tossing the cigarette.

“Jesus, you scared the shit outta me.” She holsters her gun and feels her neck muscles relaxing. “You shouldn’t surprise people around this place, not if you want to keep your head from being shot off.”

“Point well taken.” He smiles at her, the fingers of his surviving hand stroking his whiskers thoughtfully. He wears his new trademark fashion statement—the makeshift eye patch—along with his customary camo pants and hunting vest, the stump of his right arm swaddled in yellowing bandages. In the scant illumination, his single surviving eye shimmers. “I’ve been keeping tabs on you, Lilly.”

“Oh?”

“You’ve been whipping these people into shape, and I appreciate it.”

“We gotta be ready.”

“You got that right.” He tilts his good eye toward her, the iris glittering. “Especially since we’re gonna be riding just before dawn.”

She looks at him. “Tomorrow?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He holds her in the thrall of that single eye. “You’re the first one to know this … didn’t want to get everybody all bent outta shape too soon. I want to come in from the east with the rising sun—through the trees—goddamn trucks make a lot of noise, don’t want to tip anybody off. Pass the word for me, will ya?”

“Absolutely.” She gives him a nod, her guts going cold, her brain swimming with anticipation. “We’re ready, Governor. We’re with you a hundred and ten percent.”

“Yeah? Good.” He rubs his chin some more. “How about that hunka-hunka burning love of yours? He finally master that scope?”

“Austin? He’s good. He’s ready. We’re all ready. You want me to drive the lead truck?”

“You take the transport wagon. I’ll have Gabe take the lead in the armored rig on the way out. We’re gonna take it nice and slow.”

“Right.”

“The tank is fast—it tops out at fifty-some miles per hour—but we’re gonna take it nice and easy.”

“Got it.” She looks at him. “Where are you gonna ride?”

“On the way out? I’m gonna be in the back of your transport truck with the boys.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be on the bitch box the whole way, staying in close contact with you and Gabe and Gus and Rudy. But when we get close, I want to pull everybody over, say a few words, get everybody ready to rock.”

“Makes sense.”

“When we’re ready to launch, I’m going to want to be riding on the tank.”

“Good.” Lilly licks her lips. “Something I’ve been wondering about, though.”

“What’s that?”

“What about the people in the prison?”

He looks at her. “What about them?”

She shrugs. “What if they … you know … surrender? Wave the white flag or whatever?”

The Governor gazes out at the night. He pulls another cigarette from his vest and sparks it with his Zippo, a wreath of smoke curling around his head. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he murmurs in a low, smoke-cured drawl. He looks at her. “You sure you’re ready?”

“Yeah … whaddaya mean? Yes, absolutely. Yes.”

“You’re feeling okay?”

“Yes. I want to take these bastards down as bad as you. Why do you ask?”

He takes a deep breath, looking at her. “I know about what happened.”

“You know about—?”

“With the baby.”

“What?” Gooseflesh rashes down her arms and legs, her midsection clenching. “How did you—?”

“Bob told me.” He looks down. “I’m sorry you had to go through all that. It’s hard on a woman, that kind of thing. That’s all I’m saying.”

Lilly swallows hard. “I’m ready, Governor. I told you I’m ready and I meant it.”

He studies her in the wan, yellow security light. It makes her very uneasy—the way he’s looking at her, with a trace of pity in his eyes—almost makes her ashamed. She wants to fight alongside this man now—this imperfect, vicious, coarse, blunt instrument of a man—more than anything else she has ever wanted.

He takes another drag off his smoke. “I need you, girlfriend.”

“You got me,” she tells him.

“I got plenty of muscle.” He burns that Cyclopean gaze into her. “But you’re a thinking person, a natural leader. Plus, you’re damn handy with a gun. I need you on that front line, Lilly.”

She gives him a nod. “I understand.”

He takes another drag. “What happened to you … it just goes to show what a dangerous world this is with these motherfuckers out there. They need to be taken care of before something worse happens, and we’re gonna be the ones to do it. No matter what—no matter what it takes. You follow me?”

She looks at him for a long moment before responding. Her voice comes out cold and flat. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she says.

And then she turns and walks away with fists clenched at her sides.

*   *   *

The Governor stands in the shadows of that exit portal, watching Lilly Caul walk away into the night. He can tell by the way she’s walking that she’s ready. She’s ready to kill for the cause.

She vanishes around the corner of Main Street, the night breeze blowing litter in her wake.

Philip takes a deep breath, tosses the cigarette, and snubs it out with his boot. He has one last thing to tend to before the next day dawns—one last member of the tribe to square away before the glorious blood can flow.

He walks down the portico toward the street, whistling now, feeling more alive than he’s ever felt in his life—his brain scoured clean of all doubt.

The war has begun.

PART 2

Doomsday Clock

The ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, with their households and all Korah’s men and all their possessions. They went down alive into the grave, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them.

—Numbers 16:23

TEN

Bob Stookey stands wringing his gnarled hands in the airless, fetid-smelling foyer of the Governor’s apartment. Woozy from being dragged out of bed at three in the morning, he tries to get his bearings and not stare at the dead child straining against her chain on the wall ten feet away. The thing that was once a little girl wears a tiny blue pinafore dress with flowers on it—the fabric so stained and tattered and soaked with filth now that it looks as though someone fed it through a meat grinder—her pigtails still flagging off her monstrous head like a cruel joke. Her eyes pop wide—a fish with a hook stuck in its mouth—the toothless black lips gumming at the air as she reaches for the closest human.

“I’ll be back soon, honey—don’t you worry,” the Governor says, kneeling in front of her. He smiles at her with the strangest look on his face. If asked to describe the look, Bob would have to say it resembles a death mask, a clown’s rictus planted on the face of a corpse. “You won’t even miss me, I’ll be back so fast. You be good for Uncle Bob, okay? You be a good girl.” The Penny-thing moans and gums at the air. The Governor puts his arms around her and gives her a hug. “I know—I love you, too.”

Bob looks away, filled with a strange and overwhelming surge of emotions—disgust, sadness, fear, pity—all of them jumbled up in his guts like a ball of flame. He is one of only three human beings whom the Governor has trusted with the knowledge of Penny’s existence, and right now Bob isn’t so sure he wants to be one of those confidantes. He stares at the carpet and swallows back the nausea.

“Bob?”

The Governor must have seen the sour look on the man’s face because he now speaks firmly to him as though gently chastising a child. “You sure you’re going to be able to do this? I’m serious—she means a lot to me.”

Bob braces himself against the wall and takes a deep breath. “I can watch her just fine, Governor. I’m sober as a judge. I’ll keep an eye on her. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

The Governor lets out a sigh, gazing back at the drooling creature in front of him. “You can let her walk around if you want … but I won’t judge you if you leave her tied up.” The Governor stares at the undulating black lips of the little girl-thing. “She can’t bite anymore, but she can still be a handful—and we don’t have anything to feed her right now, so she’s gonna get a little cranky.”

Bob gives a nod from across the foyer. Beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead, his eyes burning, he realizes right then that he’s standing about as close to the thing as he ever wants to get.

The Governor looks at Bob. “Anyone dies, though—and I mean anyone—you make sure she gets fed. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Yeah.” Bob tries not to stare at the thing. “You got it.”

The Governor gives the girl-thing one last embrace, a delicate little stringer of bile clinging to his shoulder as he finally pulls away.

*   *   *

A little over an hour later—at 5:14 A.M.—the Governor stands beside Gabe on the north end of the Woodbury town square. A single security lamp canted off an adjacent telephone pole shines a beam of light down at them through tiny clouds of moths fluttering haphazardly in the glare. Both men now wear the heavy Kevlar body armor procured from the Guard station, the chest pieces and vests giving the two of them a fierce, martial gravitas in the shimmering darkness. The predawn chill shows in faint puffs of vapor pluming from their mouths as they survey the twenty-three members of the makeshift militia standing at attention in front of them.

Nearly two dozen men and women laden with ammo bandoliers and gun belts heavy with firearms and extra rounds stand shoulder to shoulder across the curb, facing their leader, awaiting final orders. Behind them, the single-file row of vehicles—all fueled and idling—stretches down half the block, headlamps shining toward the exit gate.

They are about to leave twenty-five of their fellow villagers behind with nary a firearm or a bullet—the sum total of their arsenal now sitting on the flatbeds, in trunks, and piled into cargo holds. The Governor asked the Sterns to stay behind and watch the town, and when Barbara objected—after all, she and David are among the best shooters in Woodbury—the Governor told her he wasn’t asking her to do this, he was fucking ordering her to do it.

“We have them in our sights, my friends!” Philip Blake now announces to the brigade, his booming voice echoing across the dark square.

Each and every face present that morning reflects the gravity of the moment. Underneath the brims of baseball caps and headbands, their eyes glint with sullen purpose and thinly veiled fear. Fingers brush nervously against trigger guards and along the stocks of assault rifles. These are not professional soldiers by any means, but Philip can see the cold slap of survival instinct waking them up now, girding them, galvanizing them.

He applies more of the stimulant to the group with his stentorian voice. “These motherfuckers killed Doc Stevens! They murdered Bruce Cooper!” He scans the row of somber faces and finally sees Lilly standing at the far end of the group. Austin stands next to her with his sniper rifle on his shoulder, his head cocked with grave resolve. Her hair pulled back in a tight, businesslike ponytail, Lilly has her hands on her hips, palming the handles of her twin Rugers, her Remington MSR rifle shouldered behind her. For the briefest instant, something about the look in her eyes bothers Philip. Maybe he’s imagining it, but she looks as though she’s deep in thought—ruminating about something—when she should be humming like a tuning fork with kill-lust. Philip holds her gaze as he booms, “They mutilated me—and it’s time for them to pay!!”

Lilly meets his gaze from twenty feet away and holds it for an endless moment.

Then she nods.

The Governor roars: “PILE IN AND LET’S MOVE!!”

*   *   *

At 5:30 A.M. on the nose, in a flurry of revving engines, creaking chassis, and chaotic shouting, the heavily armed convoy finally embarks.

In the middle of the pack, Lilly follows the red taillights in front of her as best she can, both hands riveted to the gigantic steering wheel of the rumbling two-and-a-half-ton M35 cargo truck. She can’t see shit. The drought of recent days has left the road out of Woodbury as dusty and granular as a sandbox, and now the procession kicks up a fogbank of haze in the predawn darkness as it thunders out the south gate. Lilly can barely see the truck’s fifteen-foot-long rear payload bay through the back window, enclosed by guard railing and filled with passengers.

She feels like a midget in the enormous cab, her foot barely reaching the accelerator pedal on the floor, the air reeking of the flop-sweat of generations of nervous National Guardsmen. Austin sits next to her in the passenger seat, cradling the two-way radio in his lap. Every few moments, the voice of the Governor crackles out of the speaker, admonishing Gabe to keep it under forty miles per hour to keep the formation tight and to make sure he takes 85 South—NOT NORTH GODDAMNIT!!—and to turn his fucking headlights off before he wakes up the entire county!

Years ago, Lilly spent a lot of couch time at a Marietta mental health clinic working on her panic attacks. The shrink was a kindly, middle-aged woman named Dr. Cara Leone, who preferred talk therapy to medication and devoted a lot of time to parsing the reasons for Lilly’s racing thoughts. Partly hormonal, partly growing pangs, partly neurochemical, and partly grief over her mother’s lost battle with breast cancer, Lilly’s anxiety attacks always came upon her in a public place, in a crowd, accompanied by a pandemonium of thoughts tumbling around her brain. She was ugly, she was a loser, she was overweight, she had cancer in her genes, people were staring at her, she was going to faint, she couldn’t breathe, she felt the world spinning, she had a brain tumor, she was going to die right here in this grocery store. Happily, she either outgrew these spells or worked her way through them … until now.

Following the cargo truck in front of her, its glowing red taillights veiled behind a miasma of exhaust and dust, she feels the stirrings of a panic attack coming on. She hasn’t felt these sensations for at least ten years, but, sure enough, she feels them now; she senses her thoughts slipping off their spindle, making her dizzy as the fears slide around her brain, sending gooseflesh across the back of her neck. She stares at those glowing red orbs in front of her. She stares and stares until they become two red-dwarf planets floating in space … and she concentrates on her training. She thinks of the lessons Bob taught her from his days in basic training: the zen of the sniper.

The bullet will travel with a curved trajectory. The sniper must compensate for this by aiming higher at longer distances. If the distance to the target is unknown, the shooter can calculate muzzle height by using some sort of landmark close to the target, a utility pole or fence post, and then extrapolating the adjustment for a nearby target. She thinks about this as she drives, stuffing the fear back down her throat through sheer concentration. The headshot is the preferred goal. The average head is six inches wide, and average human shoulders are twenty inches apart, and the average distance from a person’s pelvis to the top of their head is forty inches. In front of her, the cargo truck makes a ninety-degree turn onto Millard Drive, and she calmly follows, turning the wheel and gently commandeering the M35 through the dust and down the two-lane.

She feels better. She feels her racing thoughts settling into the cobra-calm of the sniper’s mind-set, a state that Bob once rhapsodized about while in his cups. The bullet type will determine the drop rate. The Remington shoots a .308 caliber, 175-grain projectile at 2,685 feet per second. At six hundred yards, a seventeen-degree-of-elevation adjustment would have to be made to hit the target. She feels the convoy speeding up in front of her, the speedometer edging past forty miles per hour. She follows. Austin says something next to her. “Huh?” She shoots a glance over at him, feeling as though she’s just awakened from a deep sleep. “Did you say something?”

He looks at her, the tension like a mask over his boyish features. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Good.” Austin nods and gazes out the side window at the horizon. Lilly notices the sky has changed color behind the trees, lightening from a deep black to a washed-out gray. Dawn is just around the corner. She grips the wheel tighter and follows the procession down a dirt exit road, the storm cloud of dust kicking up higher. Every few moments, she glances out at the side mirror and sees the Governor standing in back amid the silent men and women squeezed like silverware in a drawer.

He looks like he’s crossing the fucking Delaware, she thinks, and over the space of that instant, she experiences a wave of contrary emotions. She’s a little embarrassed for him, the way he’s standing back there with his rakish eye patch and body armor—his head upturned in defiance, his one good hand holding on to the cab in order to steady himself against the bumps—looking like a wounded Spartan general out for revenge. All of which, she realizes, is true. But another part of her drinks in the sight of the Governor’s Stonewall Jackson routine. He is the baddest of the badasses, and she feels confidence coursing through her now, knowing that she’s going into battle with this man. Who better to remove this cancer?

Fifteen minutes later, the sun has begun to blaze bright orange behind the palisades, and the road begins to wind up a gentle grade.

The forest on either side of the convoy thickens, the smell of pine and humus and walker droppings wafting through the cab’s interior. Another glance out at the side mirror reveals the Governor in the cargo bay in back, peering into the distance, and fumbling, one-handed, with his map, which flutters in the breeze. He grabs the walkie-talkie off his belt. The other passengers, seated in rows on either side of him, lift their rifles and check their chambers, their jaws tensing in anticipation.

The Governor thumbs the Talk button. The sound of his voice crackles in the truck’s cab: “We’re closing in on the hill that overlooks the prison … right, Gabe?”

Gabe’s voice sizzles and sputters: “We are, boss—prison’s about five hundred yards away, down in the flatlands, on the edge of the county line.”

“Okay,” the Governor’s voice replies. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. Find a wide spot to pull off, preferably within eyeshot of the place.”

“Copy that!”

*   *   *

The morning sun hammers down on the forest, filtering in gossamer ribbons through the boughs, the ghostly cottonwood tufts floating through the beams, giving off an almost primordial air. It is now exactly 6:15 A.M. Gabe finds a narrow clearing to pull off, and the rest of the convoy follows—moving slowly, keeping engine noise as quiet as possible—one after another gently coming to a stop.

Lilly pulls the M35 over behind the cargo truck, shoves the shifter into neutral and yanks on the parking brake.

For a long moment, everybody sits in silence. Lilly can hear her bloodstream pulsing in her ears. Then, one by one, the sound of doors gently clicking open signals the point of no return. Lilly and Austin climb out of the cab, their joints sore from the tension, their stomachs queasy with nerves. Lilly hears rifle bolts clang softly in the cool, blue shadows of the trees. Rounds are fed into chambers. Straps are tightened on ammo harnesses. Kevlar vests are adjusted, sunglasses go on, and everybody stands by the front grilles of their softly idling vehicles.

“Here we are,” the Governor announces from his perch on the back of Lilly’s cargo truck. The sound of his voice makes everybody go still. He makes a grand gesture toward a break in the trees to the east, a dirt path leading down a gentle rise into the valley. The prison is visible in the heat waves about four hundred yards away. “So close we can smell their evil.”

All heads turn toward the conglomeration of stone buildings in the distance, the complex looking like some kind of exotic Bedouin compound plopped down in the middle of nowhere. The low-slung dormitories are tucked behind layers of chain link and razor wire, the guard towers unmanned, empty, and impotent. The place calls out to Lilly—a haunted house, doomed and desecrated by ghosts, its warrens once filled with the dregs of society. It now looks as though it’s asleep—a network of dirt roads surrounding the outer perimeter—the only movement at present a mob of walkers, as thick as a subway platform at rush hour, wandering the edges of the fencing. They look so small and dark at this distance, they resemble bugs.

“Try and keep pace with the tank as we close in,” the Governor orders from his platform, speaking loudly enough to be heard, but not so loud as to announce their presence to anybody, at least not just yet. “I want to seem like an unrelenting wave on the horizon. We want to intimidate them right away—make them sloppy!”

Lilly pulls her rifle off her shoulder and checks the breach—it’s locked and loaded—her spine tingling with anticipation.

“When it begins, when the killing starts,” the Governor goes on, surveying with his single eye each and every one of his warriors, “don’t let their appearance deceive you. You will see women—children, even—but I assure you, these people are monsters—no different than the biters we kill without a second thought!”

Lilly shares a tense glance with Austin, who stands next to her with his fists clenched. He nods at her. His expression is heartbreaking—a once boyish face now aged many years in the harsh light of dawn.

“Life out here,” the Governor tells them, “it has changed these people, twisted them into creatures who will kill without mercy, without thought—with no regard for human life. They do not deserve to live.”

Now the Governor climbs over the side rail and hops down to the ground. Lilly watches him, her pulse quickening. She knows exactly where he’s going. He strides over to the lead vehicle, his boots crunching in the gravel, his gloved hand creaking as it makes a fist.

Gabe sits behind the wheel of the head truck, leaning out the open window with a puzzled expression. “Everything okay, boss?”

The Governor looks up at him. “Get in line with the others. I want the whole fleet spread across the width of the valley. And send a scout around the back of the place to keep an eye on any of them trying to slip away.”

Gabe nods, and then looks at him. “You’re not coming?”

The Governor gazes out at the distant prison. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” He gazes back up at Gabe. “I’m riding on the tank.”

*   *   *

They come out of the east, with the sun at their backs, raising a dust storm.

As they roar down the grade and across the valley, the Governor rides on the nose of the tank, his gloved hand welded to the turret as though he’s mounted on a bucking bronco. The massive treads of the tank, as well as the enormous wheels of all the military vehicles, kick up the drought-wasted earth as they close in, engines singing high opera—an army of Valkyries swooping down upon the damned—the dust cloud so profuse now it practically engulfs the entire fleet.

By the time they approach the outer access road—about fifty yards from the fence—a number of things have changed. All the walkers in the general vicinity, drawn to the noise and clamor, have now crowded in toward the east edge of the prison, the dead numbering a hundred or more—an added layer of protection, either planned or coincidental, for those inside the prison. At the same time, frenzied voices have begun to echo across the cement lots behind the fence—the inhabitants caught off guard and now scrambling for cover.

Adding to the pandemonium is the vast storm front of dust, now as big and thick as a sirocco, completely swallowing the convoy. Blinded by the dust cloud, Lilly slams on the brakes, nearly throwing her entire cargo bay of armed men and women through the cab’s rear window. Austin slams against the dash, smacking his forehead on the windshield. Lilly catches her breath and turns to Austin. “You all right?”

“I’m good,” he mutters, scrambling to get his gun up and ready.

The dust cloud begins to clear. The harsh morning sun shines down through the nimbus like firelight through gauze, turning everything luminous and dreamlike. Lilly’s heart hammers in her chest. Her head throbs with nervous tension. Through the dirt-filmed windshield, she can see the prison’s outer fence with its barbed crowns—thousands of feet long—teeming with walking dead.

They swarm and burrow in toward the fence like wasps engulfing a nest—hundreds of them, all shapes and sizes and genders, snarling and drooling, moving as one great organism—driven mad by some innate demonic hunger, whipped into a frenzy by the noise of the convoy, the frantic movement inside the compound, and the smell of human flesh.

Through her side window, in her peripheral vision, Lilly senses movement. The Governor has climbed out onto the tank’s prow like a glorious figurehead on the fore beam of a ship, his chest puffed up with adrenaline and hubris. He raises his one gloved hand and points at the throngs of undead. His voice booms with the impact of a cannon shot.

“DESTROY THEM ALL!—NOW!!”

*   *   *

The fusillade erupts all across the pasture—a horizontal tornado ramming into columns of dead flesh, mesmerizing Lilly, paralyzing her in ear-splitting wonder. Walkers begin erupting in gouts of blood and rotting tissue. Heads explode in choreographed, sequential explosions as the .50 calibers fire up—full auto—skulls popping like great strings of lightbulbs bursting and splattering the fence. Ragged bodies spin and pirouette in the dust. Spent shells spew into the air behind the vehicles with the profusion of fountains. The fence undulates and rattles with the mass slaughter, bodies piling up against the chain link. Lilly doesn’t even get a chance to lean out her window and fire a single shot. The massive onslaught of gunfire lasts only a few minutes—purely for show now—but in that time, it rips through the dead with the strength of a tsunami, a grisly red tide of destruction, shredding flesh and tearing limbs from their sockets and uncorking the tops of skulls and turning monstrous faces to red pulp. The noise is tremendous. Lilly’s ears ring, and she puts her hands over them, flinching, as the very air around her thumps and vibrates. The cordite forms a blue cloud over the east edge of the prison until most of the walkers have gone down.

As the last few corpses are slaughtered, much of the gunfire dwindles, until Lilly can just barely hear over the ringing of her ears the frantic voices of human beings inside the prison barricades hollering at each other—“GET DOWN!”—“STOP!”—“LORI!”—“GET DOWN, GODDAMNIT!”—“ANDREA, STOP!”—but Lilly can’t see much of anything behind the veils of dust and gun smoke being whipped up by the display of force.

At length, as the last few large-caliber blasts crackle in the fogbound sunlight, Lilly hears the sound of the Governor’s voice—now amplified by a bullhorn—piercing the intermittent popping of small arms fire.

“—CEASE FIRE!—”

The last of the shooters draw down, and all at once an eerie silence grips the landscape. Lilly stares through the dusty windshield at the tattered, mutilated, smoking bodies drifted against the fence. For one horrible instant, the sight of them registers in Lilly’s brain as a memory of atrocity photos she saw once from World War II—the bodies of prison camp victims piled by bulldozers into snow-dusted ditches of mass graves—and the feeling it gives her makes her blink and shake her head and rub her eyes as she tries to drive the unbidden thoughts from her mind.

The sound of a gravelly, smoky voice amplified by a bullhorn interrupts her stupor. “TO ANYONE INSIDE LEFT ALIVE—THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO MAKE IT OUT OF THIS WITH YOUR LIVES.” Standing on the front bulwark of the Abrams tank, the Governor aims the megaphone at the vast, deserted yards inside the fence—his voice echoing off the inner walls of cellblocks and administrative buildings. “I WILL NOT MAKE A SECOND OFFER.”

Lilly silently climbs out of the cab, Austin emerging from the other side.

They both crouch down behind the truck’s massive front wheels with their guns ready to go. They peer around the edges of the doors at the prison in the middle distance, and all the deserted basketball courts and parking lots and exercise yards. Nothing moves within the confines of the fences, only a few shadows flitting and flickering here and there across gaps between buildings.

“YOU HAVE KILLED AND MAIMED US—AND NOW YOU HIDE BEHIND YOUR FENCES—BUT YOUR TIME IS OVER!” This last word is pronounced with such venomous zeal that it seems to echo and penetrate the walls of the prison with the insidious half-life of an infectious disease. “WE WILL SHOW YOU MERCY … BUT ONLY UNDER ONE CONDITION.”

Lilly glances over her shoulder at the Governor, standing on the tank with the bullhorn. Even from this distance—twenty-five, maybe thirty feet away—she can see his one visible eye blazing like a burning ember. The sound of his amplified voice is like a tin can being torn apart.

“OPEN THE INNERMOST GATE … GATHER UP ALL YOUR WEAPONS, ALL GUNS, ALL AMMO, ANY KNIVES, WHATEVER YOU HAVE—THE RIOT GEAR, EVERYTHING—AND PILE IT UP IN FRONT OF THE INNERMOST GATE. THEN I WANT YOU TO CLOSE THE GATE, LOCK IT, AND WAIT WHILE WE CLEAR AWAY THE BITERS.”

The Governor pauses and listens to the silence, the stillness broken only by the fading echoes of his voice and the sound of engines softly idling all around him.

“WE DON’T HAVE TO KILL EACH OTHER … THERE’S STILL A CHANCE WE CAN WORK TOGETHER.”

More silence.

From her position behind the M35’s wheel, Lilly can see more walkers coming from the north, shambling around the corner of the fence toward their fallen brethren. She surveys the vast exercise yard inside the fence, the weeds fringing cracks across the sun-bleached pavement, the stray wads of trash rolling in the breeze. She squints. She can barely make out a few dark objects lying here and there that, at first glance, look like discarded bundles of trash or clothing shifting in the wind. But the more she stares, the more she becomes convinced that they’re humans crawling on their bellies for cover.

“DO AS I ASK AND OPEN THE GATES.” To Lilly’s ear, the Governor’s voice sounds almost reasonable—rational, even—like a teacher explaining to his students with great regret the protocols of detention. He says into the megaphone, “THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.”

The Governor lowers the bullhorn and calmly waits for a response.

Lilly crouches silently behind her door with the Remington rifle now gripped tightly in both hands, one sweaty finger on the trigger pad, and the pause that ensues—lasting only a few minutes—seems to go on for an eternity. The sun beats down on her neck. Sweat trickles down her back. Her stomach somersaults. She smells the faint stench of walkers on the wind and it makes her nauseous. She can hear Austin’s breathing on the other side of the cab, and she can see his shadow. He stares at the ground with his rifle cradled in his arms.

All at once, a series of cramps twists Lilly’s gut, sending sharp daggers of pain through her midsection and seizing her up against the truck’s fender. It feels like a circular saw tearing her in half, and she doubles over in agony. She tries to breathe. She feels the menstrual pad between her legs stinging and getting heavy, the flow of blood practically hemorrhaging inside her.

She’s been using tampons as well as pads since the miscarriage, and the flow has been off and on, but now the bleeding returns with a vengeance—either due to the stress or the aftermath of the exam or both—and it’s starting to drive her crazy. She tries to focus on the distant yards of the prison and ignore the cramps, but it’s pretty much a losing battle now. The pain throbs and twinges within her, and she starts associating the misery inside her with the evil bastards inside this prison. She knows it’s a stretch, but she can’t help thinking … This is their fucking fault, this pain, this misery, this fire raging inside me; it’s all because of them. Lilly hears the low murmur of the Governor’s voice then, and it sends a fine layer of chills down her spine.

From his perch on the tank, he mutters, “Motherfuckers … can’t make it easy.”

By this point, at least a dozen more walkers are lumbering toward the convoy, a few coming around the corners of the fence from the south and the west, and the Governor lets out an exasperated sigh. At last, he raises the bullhorn. “RESUME FIRING!”

Barrels go up, bolts snapping shells into breaches, but before anybody gets a chance to fire another shot, the sound of a single high-powered rifle pops loudly in the still, blue sky high above one of the guard towers.

The blast strikes the Governor’s right shoulder just above the pectoral.

ELEVEN

A bullet fired from a military-grade sniper rifle leaves the muzzle at velocities of up to thirty-five hundred feet per second. Most rounds traveling at this speed—in this case, a .308 caliber Winchester zipper from the prison’s armory—can easily penetrate Kevlar body armor and do mortal damage to a target. But the distance between the guard tower (at the southeast corner of the property) and the tank (parked nearly a hundred yards east of the outer fence) causes enough friction from air resistance to slow the bullet down considerably.

By the time the zipper reaches the Governor’s shoulder armor, it’s traveling at just under two thousand fps, and it merely punches a deep pucker in the Kevlar that feels to the Governor as though he’s just absorbed a roundhouse from Mike Tyson. The shock of the impact sends him careening backward off the edge of the tank.

He lands hard in the weeds, the breath knocked from his lungs.

The rest of the attack force bristles suddenly, each and every gunner looking up from their sights. The group paralysis lasts only a split second—even Lilly has frozen in her crouch behind the cab door, gaping at the fallen man—until the Governor gasps and rolls over, filling his lungs, blinking back the shock. He takes deep, wheezing breaths, getting his bearings back. He levers himself up to his feet, taking cover behind the iron bulwark of the tank.

“Shit!” he hisses through gritted teeth, looking around, trying to gauge the direction from which the bullet came.

Lilly gazes up at the southeast corner of the prison yard, the guard tower gleaming in the harsh rays of the rising sun. The wooden structure tapers near the top, crowned by a small shed surrounded by a catwalk. From this distance, it’s nearly impossible to discern if anybody’s up there, but Lilly is fairly certain that she sees a dark figure lying belly-down on the floor of the catwalk.

Lilly is about to say something about it when another flash—like the glint of a sunspot on a mirror—flares off the corner of the tower, the booming report following a nanosecond later.

Thirty feet away from Lilly, just off her left flank, one of the Woodbury gunmen—a young man with a goatee and unruly blond hair who goes by the nickname Arlo—convulses suddenly in a cloud of blood mist. The .308 caliber slug rips a pathway through his neck, spewing tissue through the exit wound and sending him backward with a lurch.

His Kalashnikov rifle goes flying as he bangs into the young man standing behind him before collapsing into the weeds. The other gunman lets out a yelp, blood spattering his face, and he immediately goes down on the ground. Thunderstruck, panicking, he crawls on his belly toward the undercarriage of Lilly’s truck.

The Governor sees what Lilly has already seen. “THE TOWER!” He points at the southeast corner of the lot. “THEY’RE IN THE DAMN TOWER!”

Another strobe of silver light against the sun flickers right before the third blast rings out. Another Woodbury man—this one twenty feet off the Governor’s right flank—jerks backward with the impact of a direct headshot. A piece of his skull is propelled through the air on a fountain of blood as he tumbles backward into the tall grass.

By this point, the entire invasion force is scrambling for cover, frantic voices blurting out inarticulate cries, many of the militia members lunging toward their machine-gun turrets and taking cover behind the quarter panels of vehicles and open doors of truck cabs.

“THERE!” The Governor points at the tower. “THE ONE ON THE LEFT!!”

Lilly aims her Remington through the window opening of the cab door and draws a bead on the sun-drenched tower. Through her scope, Lilly sees a figure lying prone on the floor of the catwalk, a long-barreled weapon aimed down at the lot. Lilly sucks in a breath. It’s a woman. Lilly can tell by the ponytail flagging in the wind and the slender body. For some reason, this revelation fills Lilly with rage, the likes of which she has never felt. But before she has a chance to squeeze off a single shot, a volley of thunder erupts on either side of the truck.

The air lights up as the entire brigade unleashes holy hell on that tower—the barking reports of high-powered rifles syncopated with the rattling, roaring .50 cal machine guns and assault rifles on full auto. Lilly cringes at the noise and heat, her ears already ringing unmercifully as she tries to get a few controlled shots off herself. Another surge of cramps steals her breath, throws off her aim, and kindles her agony into a brushfire of rage. She ignores the pain, holds her breath, makes the adjustment to her point of aim for the drop rate—aiming just a few inches high on the target—and then fires. Her rifle booms, the recoil punching her in the shoulder, the spit of cordite on the side of her face like hot grease.

Way up at the top of the guard tower, the edge of the catwalk comes apart in a daisy-chain of tiny explosions, sending a chain of dust puffs into the air, pulverizing the wooden supports, pinging and sparking off the metal railing, and riddling the area around the dark figure with smoking bullet holes.

It’s hard to tell the extent of the physical damage they’re doing to the sniper, but by the looks of the erupting wood shards and shattering glass, it would be a miracle if anybody survived the barrage—which goes on for at least a minute and a half—during which time Lilly goes through nine more rounds, pausing once to eject a spent cartridge and reload. At last she sees through the scope a splash of blood stippling the inner wall of the guard tower.

The gunfire ceases for a moment. In the lull, the guard tower remains still. Someone has apparently scored a headshot, very likely a mortal wound for this murderous bitch, but in all the chaos, it’s impossible to parse who actually did it. Lilly lowers her muzzle and notices two young gunmen on her left, each crouching down by the tailgate of a cargo truck, giving each other high fives.

Lilly hears the Governor’s voice: “Well?! You want a fucking medal?”

Glancing over her shoulder, she sees the one-armed man pushing his way in behind the two young gunmen. “Stop jerking each other off and get these bodies in bags!” He gestures toward their first casualties, the victims of the lady sniper—their human remains lying in heaps in the tall grass—their heads soaking in puddles of gore. “And kill the rest of these biters,” he says, indicating the few straggling reanimated dead that are now trundling around the corners of the fence, moving through the blue haze of gun smoke. “Before they find their way over here and start chewing on our fucking asses!”

*   *   *

Lilly lets the others finish off the remaining few walkers skulking along the fence. Instead, she crouches down behind the open door of the M35 and lowers her Remington and waits for the salvo to run its course. The sun beats down on her. Just for an instant, she thinks about the young men who were cut down only moments ago by the sniper in the guard tower. Lilly had a passing acquaintance with the first one, Arlo, but never even knew the second one’s name. Her mind swims with contrary emotions—sorrow for the fallen men, searing rage for these animals in this prison. She wants to burn this entire encampment down, nuke it, blast it off the face of the earth—but something deep down inside her, a kernel of doubt, now sits in the pit of her stomach like a cancerous tumor. Is this the best way? The only way? She can see Austin through the open cab, crouched behind the open passenger door, firing every few seconds as though on a shooting range. He appears calm and centered, but she can see the madness in his expression. Is Lilly now as insane as he? She sees something else blur in her peripheral vision, and she twists around just in time to see Gabe running behind the trucks.

The big, sweaty behemoth looks worried, panicked, as he approaches the tank, behind which Philip now stands looking exceedingly imperious and impatient, his one surviving hand clenched into a fist. The two men get into a shouting match. Drowned by the crackle of gunfire, Lilly can’t tell what they’re saying to each other, but it has something to do with “costing us too much ammo” and “these people are terrible shots” and “why don’t we just drive it through the fence?…”

Finally, the Governor turns to the front line of amateur warriors and bellows at the top of his lungs, “Stop!—STOP!—CEASE FIRE!!”

The excruciating din comes to an abrupt halt. Silence crashes down on the meadow. In Lilly’s ringing ears, the echo of the .50 caliber turrets blends with the white noise in her brain. She peers over the top of her door and sees quite a few walkers still standing by the fence—at least a dozen or more of them—mangled and scourged with bullet holes but heads still intact, still shuffling through the dirt—cockroaches impervious to the spray of exterminators.

Lilly hears the Governor’s voice to her left. “Jared! Fire up the tank!”

Lilly swallows her nerves and manages to rise on sore legs. She picks up her rifle and creeps around the back of the M35. She finds Austin diligently reloading his Garand rifle, sliding the rounds into the breach with trembling, sweat-slick fingers. Tendrils of his hair have come loose from his ponytail and hang in his face, some of the curls matted to his sweat-damp forehead. “You okay?” she asks, coming up behind him and putting a hand on his shoulder.

He jumps. “Yeah—I mean—yeah, I’m fine. I’m good. Why do you ask?”

“Just wanted to make sure.”

“What about you?”

“Fit as a fiddle, ready to rock.” She gazes over at the plume of exhaust suddenly issuing out of the tank, the turbine engine growling. “What the hell are they doing?”

Austin watches the tank begin to lurch toward the fence, and he stares, momentarily rapt by the strange contraption rumbling like a corsair toward the shuffling cluster of upright cadavers.

*   *   *

Moments later, the Abrams M1 plunges into the disorderly regiment of walkers milling along the fence. A dozen or more of the undead are pulled under the iron treads, the sound of their flesh and bones being ground to pulp like the hacksaw groan of a gigantic trash compactor. Lilly looks away. Nausea threatens to bring up her breakfast. The tank makes an abrupt ninety-degree turn in the greasy swamp of human carnage, and then starts chugging along parallel to the fence, bowling over walker after walker with the gruesome efficiency of a harvester gobbling stalks of wheat. Skulls are smashed, and organs pop like blood-filled blisters, and the collective hemorrhaging of literally hundreds of putrid bodies begins to send up a virtual fogbank of reeking, foul, hideous stench.

By this point, the Governor’s troops—most of them now hiding behind the cover of vehicles, their weapons at the ready—have become highly aware of movement inside the fences, along the shadows of passageways, in the gaps between distant cellblocks, and amid the dark alcoves on the edges of the yards. With the herd of biters being cleared now, the prison grounds are more exposed, more visible to the invaders. Figures dart here and there, running for cover or crawling on their bellies toward safety inside the nearest edifice. Lilly sees an older man wearing a floppy hat frantically crawling across the exercise area for cover. But it isn’t until the tank reaches the terminus point of the east fence and comes to a noisy stop, that Lilly realizes there are still dozens of walkers—maybe thirty or more—lurking beyond the outer corners of the property, stepping over the grisly remains of their fellow creatures.

The tank sits idling at the end of the fence for a moment as the Governor comes around behind one of the trucks, his eye bright and shiny with rage. He walks past Lilly’s cargo truck, pauses, and surveys the fence line, which is littered with rotting remains now. Gabe joins him, and Lilly listens to their conversation.

“I got an idea,” Gabe says to Philip. “The sight of the tank ain’t enough to scare them out—but what if we tried to fire that fucking cannon at them? That could get their attention, right?”

The Governor doesn’t even look at the man, just continues staring at the fences, stroking his whiskered chin and thinking. The tank rumbles back to the front gates, swinging awkwardly back around into its original position. The Governor watches it skeptically. “It took Jared five months to learn how to drive that fucking thing, but he never got around to figuring out how to load and shoot it. The truth is, it’s more or less just for show.”

Now the Governor glances at Gabe, and a glint of something disturbing—Gabe can’t identify exactly what it is—kindles in Philip’s eye. “The thing is, it’s really just there to thin the herd to a manageable level for the Pied Piper.”

Gabe looks at him. “The what?”

*   *   *

It begins with an engine revving behind the cargo trucks, and a blur of movement as one of the smaller vehicles—a gray, rust-speckled Chevy S-10—backs up toward the fence. Lilly and Austin stay behind their truck’s doors as the dynamic of the battlefield suddenly changes. They see two Woodbury men in body armor sitting on the pickup’s rear gate, waving their hands and hollering inarticulate taunts at the reanimated corpses still milling about the fences. This gets the attention of most—if not all—of the monsters.

The truck slowly pulls away, and the walkers begin lumbering instinctively after it.

While all this is going on, the Governor decides the area is clear enough, and it’s time to fucking end this, so he gives the order to shoot them all. Fucking shoot them all. Now. NOW!—

—SHOOT TO FUCKING KILL!

*   *   *

Inside the barriers, the settlers dive for cover as the air around them ignites, some of the weaker ones covering their heads and staying on the ground, others crawling madly for safety, some of the older ones trying to help the younger ones. The tremendous barrage from the east, from every corner of the pasture, sends tiny explosive dust puffs across the cracked macadam, crisscrossing the lots, sparking off Dumpsters and basketball backboards and gutters and downspouts and vent fans and air-conditioning compressors. Howling voices reach Lilly’s ears as she picks out moving targets and holds her breath and fires pinpoint blasts. “DOWN!” yells one figure, wrestling a woman to the concrete. “EVERYBODY DOWN!” shouts another, tackling another woman trying to flee the assault. The grounds become a blur of chaotic movement. Few of the figures—if any—appear to be armed. This bothers Lilly, to the point of making her pause and lift the scope from her eye. For a moment, she just watches as an older man—shirtless, portly, bearded, with long, wild hair—makes a mad dash for a doorway. A sudden burst riddles his shoulder with bloody bullet holes, tearing chunks from his hairy arms and belly. The old codger careens to the ground in a scarlet spray, and Lilly lets out a tense breath.

She sees another fleeing figure—for a brief instant, she recognizes the man.

She adjusts her scope, and in the telescopic field she sees the square-jawed man named Rick Grimes—the son of a bitch who led the escape from Woodbury, the leader of these animals, the one who tangled with the Governor and probably killed Martinez and God only knows what else—now grabbing a woman and shouting at her. “GOTTA GET INSIDE!—NO PLACE FOR COVER OUT HERE!—YOU HEAR ME?!!” He drags the woman toward the closest building—twenty yards between him and the building—a hundred and fifty between him and Lilly.

The litany of Bob’s sniper school steadies her, calms her down—breathe in, acquire the target, figure the distance, adjust your point of aim—and now she has the man named Rick centered in the scope. She slowly releases her breath. She begins to squeeze the trigger … but stops herself. Wait. Something flicks brightly, deep in the folds of her brain, something she can’t identify, something inchoate and almost electrical—like a synapse misfiring—causing a series of flashes in her mind’s eye, the images too fast to register.

She jerks at the sound of the Governor’s voice, coming from behind the tank, twenty feet away: “We’ve got them pinned down now! Only a matter of time before they—!”

The metallic ping of a ricochet zinging off the apex of the tank’s steel turret cuts off his words. He ducks. He looks across the prison grounds at the northeast guard tower on the opposite end of the property. The others whirl around, and all at once everybody sees the glint of another gun barrel up there against the sun—a second sniper. The Governor crouches behind the tank. He grabs the walkie off his belt, thumbs the switch, and issues a snarling, enraged order: “Take that fucker out!”

A pair of .50 caliber machine guns on the rooftops of adjacent cargo trucks swing to the north, and Lilly grits her teeth as the clattering roar of full-auto gunfire sends a world of hurt up at the tower. The high windows erupt against the pale blue sky. Waves of broken glass convulse into the air, a chorus of atonal crashes, sparkling tendrils issuing in all directions.

In her peripheral vision, from her position low on the ground, Lilly senses more movement inside the prison barricades. Many of those pinned down now take advantage of the distraction and make mad dashes for the cellblock entrances. The Governor sees this as well. He turns and shouts at the gunman: “HEY!” He points at the prison yards. “They’re making a break for the goddamn buildings!” He points at the tower. “We only need a few of you to be shooting up there to kill that prick! C’mon, goddamnit—use your heads!!”

A number of shooters now turn and spray the yards indiscriminately. Across the grounds, those who are fleeing once again dive for cover in the hail of gunfire. Lilly looks through her scope and sees several souls now scrambling for weapons. She sees a teenage girl with short black hair crawling toward a rifle, and she sees a big African American man digging in a satchel, and she sees the dreadlock-wearing woman—Michonne—snatching a small black pistol off a man’s belt that looks from this distance like a 9 mil. Dreadlock-lady spins and starts shooting. Her actions embolden another man to fire, and another, and another.

“FIND COVER!” The Governor’s voice raises up an octave. “EVERYBODY—FIND COVER NOW!”

Within moments, more members of the Woodbury militia begin to fall.

*   *   *

Johnny Aldridge was a forty-year-old drifter who ended up on Martinez’s crew, a gentle soul who could name every member of every heavy metal band who ever toured the South in the 1990s. Now he lies in the high grass next to Lilly, close enough for her to smell stale cigarette smoke on him, the man’s glassy eyes propped open in death, his Adam’s apple pulsing its death throes in a rhythmic gushing of arterial blood. Lilly looks away and closes her eyes. Cauterizing horror and anguish course down her spine.

She turns to Austin, who lies on his belly in the grass next to her. He swallows hard and doesn’t say anything, but the look on his face says it all. His eyes simmer with terror. She starts to say something when she hears the firestorm from the prison yard fading slightly, the last crackle of gunfire echoing up into the morning sky. Are they reloading? Have they managed to make it back to the buildings? Then she hears the Governor’s voice again, drenched in madness and fury: “FALL BACK! FALL BACK, GODDAMNIT!”

Lilly hears the harsh noise of gears grinding all around her, engines revving, exhaust pipes backfiring. The Governor’s voice is nearly drowned by the collective clamor of all the vehicles firing back up. “We need to regroup, goddamnit—need to get our shit together!”

Climbing out of her hiding place, she cautiously struggles back into the cab, keeping her head down, pushing open the passenger door for Austin. He climbs back into the shotgun seat, head down, breathing hard, flinching at the intermittent pop of handguns still firing through the fences. Out of the corner of her eye, Lilly sees Gabe hurrying around the back of the tank.

The portly man, still huffing and puffing, crouches next to the Governor. “Whaddaya think?”

“This isn’t working,” the Governor says, speaking more to himself than to Gabe. Clenching his one gloved hand so tightly it creaks, he bites down on the words, hissing psychotically, “THIS FUCKING ISN’T WORKING!”

Gabe starts to reply when the Governor rears back and punches Gabe in the jaw, hitting him so hard that the impact whiplashes his head back and busts his lip open. Stringers of bloody drool fling off Gabe’s mouth, and Gabe flinches against the tank’s hull with a start, blinking, pressing his hand down on his lip. He stares at the Governor with fire in his eyes. “WHAT THE HELL?!”

The Governor fixes his blazing eyes on the stocky man. “Just get in the fucking truck.”

Lilly watches all this from twenty-five feet away, from inside the M35’s cab, and she only hears about 80 percent of it, but she’s seen enough. Her stomach has gone cold, her throat filling with acid. She shoots a glance at Austin, who says nothing. She revs up the engine and puts the truck into gear, grinding the shift lever into reverse. But just for that split instant, before backing away, she glances at the prison yard.

Through the layers of ancient cyclone fencing, she sees a solitary figure lying on the edge of the exercise yard, soaking in a spreading pool of blood. Clad in a prison jumpsuit, male, late thirties maybe, sandy hair, grizzled, rugged looking, a stump where his right arm should be, he slowly tries to drag himself back toward the buildings, but he’s been mortally wounded—a gut shot—and all he can do is crawl, inch by inch, leaving a leech trail of blood. Even from this distance, Lilly can tell it’s the man named Rick, and from the looks of his wounds, his chances of survival are minimal at best.

She turns away as the convoy of vehicles begins to withdraw, one by one, the trucks doing U-turns and rumbling away toward the eastern horizon. Lilly follows the tank on its retreat, plunging into the fogbank of dust being kicked up by all the massive wheels, feeling nothing for the man named Rick … neither sympathy nor satisfaction … only emptiness.

TWELVE

“I feel like we should say something,” Austin ventures an hour later, speaking in a hoarse, exhausted voice, standing on the bank of a dry riverbed, three miles east of the prison, shivering, gazing down at a mass grave. Down in the trench, the bodies lie on top of each other, arms and legs akimbo, bloodstains turning black in the dusky light. The stagnant air swims with gnats and particulate floating through the beams of sunlight canting through the pines.

“I don’t know … yeah, probably we should.” Lilly stands next to him, chewing her fingernails, tendrils of her auburn hair that have come loose from her ponytail hanging down across her sullen face. Her guns are holstered on her hips, and her elbows are scuffed and bloody. Her lower back throbs with pain, her joints twinge with the dull ache of exhaustion, and daggers slice through her gut—the latest wave of cramps taking their toll on her. She sniffs back the agony and stares at the casualties.

Lilly knew all of these men—if not by name, certainly by sight—now stacked like cordwood down in the ditch to avoid adding to the walker population or having one of them end up as lunch for the swarm. These men who passed Lilly on the street in Woodbury from time to time, said hello, tipped their Caterpillar caps at her, winked at her a few times—they weren’t perfect by any means but they were decent, simple men. Some of them—Arlo and Johnny, for example—were sweethearts who shared their rations with Lilly on more than one occasion. Now Lilly feels a vacuum in her soul as she gazes down at them. Darkness presses in on her organs and chokes her as she tries to muster up a eulogy.

“Johnny, Arlo … Ronnie, Alex, and Jake … Evan and … um.” She can’t remember the last young man’s name. She looks helplessly at Austin.

His eyes shimmer with sadness. “Andy.”

Lilly nods. “Andy … right.” She bows her head and tries not to look at the bloodless forms piled in a grisly heap down in the leaves. As her Grandma Pearl would say, “They are just the shells left on the beach … their spirits have flown, dear.” Lilly finds herself wishing she believed in God. How could anybody believe in a loving deity in times like these? But it would be nice. Lilly swallows back the bitter anguish and softly says, “Each and every one of you gave your lives for a higher purpose … to protect your community … you gave your all.” Her voice weakens slightly, the weight of exhaustion dragging on her body. “Here’s hoping you’re in a better place now. May you all rest in peace.”

A long moment of silence follows, broken only by the distant, lonely call of a heron. Lilly senses the presence of others standing downstream, and she gazes to the south.

About fifty yards away lurks a dark figure standing on the edge of the trees—eye patch, missing arm, coal-black body armor—grimacing as he stares into the trees across the creek bed. Gabe stands next to him, not saying a word as he screws a silencer onto the muzzle of a stainless steel short-barrel .357 revolver. Two other men stand at a respectful distance downstream with shovels. The sixteen other surviving members of the makeshift militia—a dozen men and four women—can be seen through the trees, attending to the wounded and skulking around the circle of vehicles parked in a dusty clearing, the machine gunners keeping watch. Nobody seems too interested in graveside memorials right now.

Gabe hands the gun to the Governor, who gives him a terse nod. Then Philip Blake turns and strides along the embankment toward Lilly. “You finished?” he asks as he approaches with a dour look on his face.

Lilly nods. “Yeah … go ahead.”

The Governor steps in front of her, looming over the mass grave. “My uncle Bud fought in World War Two in the Pacific.” Philip doesn’t even look up as he speaks. He thumbs the hammer on the .45 and stoically fires the first round into the blood-caked cranium of Arlo Simmons.

Lilly barely reacts to the dry snap of the silencer—her nerves deadened now. The Governor aims at the skull of another victim and fires again into the open grave. This time Lilly flinches slightly at the horrible snapping noise of the bullet punching through bone.

The Governor glances over his shoulder at the others gathered across the clearing. “I want everybody to hear this! Come on over!”

Slowly, reluctantly, the others put down their canteens, ammo mags, and first-aid kits, snub out their cigarettes, and make their way across the clearing to the edge of the trees. The sun is dipping behind the western horizon and the deepening shadows add to the tension.

“My uncle Bud lost his life on the USS Sonoma, October of 1944,” Philip says in a cold, flat voice as he aims at another skull and fires a slug into dead tissue. Lilly jumps. Now the Governor speaks loudly enough for the whole group to hear. “Ship got hit by the Jap kamikazes … sunk … destroyed by savages with no respect for the conventions of warfare or life in general.” He fires again and again into the cairn of bodies, demolishing skull after skull. He pauses and turns to the onlookers, their ashen faces peering out through breaks in the foliage. “That’s what we’re dealing with here, and I don’t want any of you to ever forget it.”

He pauses to let this register, and then he glances over his shoulder and gives a nod to the pair of men with the shovels. “Go ahead, boys, cover ’em up now.” He looks at the others. “These men did not die in vain.”

The two men with the shovels approach and begin covering the bodies with loose dirt from the riverbank. The Governor watches. He takes deep breaths, and his expression goes through a series of transformations. Lilly sees it out of the corner of her eye but doesn’t stare.

“These people we’re fighting,” he goes on, “they’re worse than the fucking biters … they’re pure evil … they’re monsters with no regard for the lives of their children or elderly or anybody. You’ve seen them in action. You’ve all seen how they will shoot any one of you in the back of the head and not blink an eye. They’ll take everything from you and do the two-step on your fucking corpses.”

Philip Blake’s face subtly rearranges itself then in the gloomy, fading daylight … from an expression of simmering anger to something stranger and more delusional—a vainglorious tilt of the head, an ember of righteous rage burning in his one visible eye that makes Lilly nervous. He looks at his ragtag battalion.

“But I got news for these savages,” he says as the men behind him complete their shoveling and stand back from the mound of earth with heads bowed.

The tone of Philip’s voice changes, deepens and softens, like a preacher moving from the fire and brimstone to the psalms.

“They can attack us all they want … they can mutilate me … they can spit on our graves … but we will keep coming at them because we’re on a holy crusade here, people … not only to protect our community from these monsters … but also to rid the world of this evil.” He looks from face to face, taking his sweet time as he scrutinizes every last member of his private army. “We’re going to redouble our efforts. We’re going to fight fire with fire. It ain’t gonna be easy. We’re gonna have to give it everything we got.”

He looks at a middle-aged man in a Braves cap and denim shirt standing nearby with his hands on the stocks of his twin Colt .45s. “Raymond, I want you to pick a couple men and scout the perimeter tonight. Look for weak spots in their compound, any suspicious movement—I want to know what they’re up to in that roach motel they’re hiding out in.” He looks at another man—a bearded biker in leathers with a pump-action 20-gauge. “Earl, I want you and three others standing watch on all sides while we’re regrouping. You see anything that doesn’t look right, you blow it away. You understand?”

The bearded behemoth gives a nod, and then hurries off to choose his crew.

The Governor turns to Lilly and lowers his voice. “I’m gonna need you and Gorgeous George here to help do an inventory, figure out what kind of ammo situation we’re looking at. I want to hit back hard, but I want to make sure we got the wherewithal, all right?”

Lilly nods. “No problem … we’re on it.”

The Governor looks around, gazes up at the sky. “Gonna be dark soon.”

Lilly looks at him. “What are you thinking?”

He looks at the grave. “I’ll let you know.” And then he turns and walks off.

*   *   *

Nobody in the beleaguered Woodbury militia sees the two figures three miles to the east, darting out of the unmarked rear exit of Cellblock D and hurrying across the back lot of the prison, slipping off the premises through a temporary gate in the northwest corner of the fences.

Nobody in the Governor’s scouting party sees the dark silhouettes of a man and woman running side by side through the tall grass and into the thicket of trees along the western horizon. It’s not yet full-on darkness, and the golden dusk is turning the surrounding meadow into a gauzy, softly lit knoll. Shadows of live oaks and exhaust chimneys from the prison buildings stretch and elongate into surreal, ghostly patterns as the two fleeing figures pass unnoticed—their weapons sheathed and strapped and secured to their backs—into the tree line at precisely 6:17 P.M. eastern standard time.

At this point, Raymond Hilliard’s scouting party hasn’t lit out yet—they’re still discussing what weapons to bring along, how much ammo, and what supplies they might need. Meanwhile, the men on the steel bonnets of truck cabs, keeping an eye on the periphery of the Governor’s camp, are positioned far too low to see over the surrounding pines. If they were indeed elevated above the treetops, they might see the subtle peristalsis of twitching foliage, the twig-snapping and jiggling limbs marking the course of the two stealthy invaders as they weave their way through the deeper woods toward the militia’s temporary encampment.

At that moment, on the edge of the clearing along the riverbed, outside the circle of trucks, three men and one woman huddle in the gathering shadows, checking their weapons and taking stock of their ammunition.

“Leave that shit here,” Raymond Hilliard orders the oldest man in the scouting party.

“What—this?” James Lee Steagal, a rangy old farmworker from Valdosta with thinning hair and hound-dog eyes, indicates his little stainless steel flask, from which he has just taken a slug of cheap whiskey.

“No, ya moron—the goddamn backpack,” Raymond says, pointing at the heavy rucksack on the farmworker’s back. Raymond Hilliard is a former football coach with a Class C college team out of north Atlanta—a tall, sinewy, grizzled good old boy—with a Falcons cap pulled down low on his forehead over dark, cunning eyes. He carries an AR-15 with a high-capacity clip. “We’re traveling light, just bringing enough to defend ourselves.”

The woman steps forward. “Is my Tec-9 gonna be enough, Ray?” Gloria Pyne is a small, compact, ruddy-skinned woman—tough around the eyes—with deep crow’s-feet that belie her age and a thick thatch of red hair tucked under a visor that says I’M WITH STUPID.

“Yeah, just bring an extra mag or two.” Raymond turns to the other men standing behind Gloria—both of them younger, dressed in the tattered hip-hop regalia of urban youth—baggy shorts, high-top Jordans, mesh shirts, tats. They both look sheepish and a little scared, despite the fact they each pack an AK-47 with a high-capacity mag. “You two bring up the rear flanks, keep an eye on our backside.”

One kid looks at the other kid, clearing his throat nervously, muttering under his breath. “I ain’t staring at nobody’s backside, least of all Gloria’s.”

“Shut your mouth!”

The baritone growl comes from behind one of the vehicles, the shadow of a portly figure marching toward them. Gabe comes around the rear of a cargo truck with his MIG shouldered and a surly look on his face. His eyes blaze with tension. He storms up to the two younger men and hisses at them through gritted teeth, his thick neck beaded with perspiration, his black turtleneck damp with sweat spots: “Stop fucking around and get this show on the road!”

Raymond thumbs the safety off his assault rifle and gives the group a nod. “All right, let’s move out.”

*   *   *

They get less than five hundred yards from the clearing—moving single file through the deep woods, Raymond on point, Gabe coming along to keep watch on the proceedings, the others following closely behind—when Jim Steagal realizes he has to pee.

For the last few years, Jim’s prostate has been acting up. He forgot to relieve himself before they left camp, and now the combination of his weak bladder and the many sips of whiskey he’s been tippling all night make the trudge through the silent, shadow-bound forest very uncomfortable. But he doesn’t say anything at first. He just follows closely behind Gabe, twitching at every faint noise and chirring cricket that floods the dark woods with a low droning symphony of night sounds. Darkness has pressed in, and the air sparkles with fireflies and the occasional moth that ticks across their path. They can smell walker stink, but not in a profusion that worries them. The biters seem to be flocking toward the activity in the prison, which is keeping the adjacent woodlands blessedly clear of the dead. Jim grits his teeth at the urgent fullness of his bladder as they start down a winding path.

They reach a clearing—a mossy ravine about the size of a tennis court—the moonlight now as bright as a reading lamp. Raymond pauses. “PPSSSSST!” He turns to the others, and with hand gestures orders everybody down. His whisper is barely loud enough to be heard above the crickets. “Everybody just cool your heels for a second.”

Gabe comes over to him, and the two men crouch on the edge of the clearing. “What’s the problem?”

“I heard something.”

“What was it?”

Raymond gazes out across the clearing, toward the opposite line of trees. “I don’t know, maybe nothing.” He looks at Gabe. “We’re close to the prison, ain’t we?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Maybe we ought to find higher ground and take a look at what’s cooking down there.”

Gabe nods. “Okay … let’s double back and take that other trail up to the ridge.”

“I’m right behind you.”

The two men rise to their feet and are about to head back the way they came, when Jim Steagal comes up to them. “Guys, you go ahead. I’ll catch up with you.”

Gabe and Raymond look at each other. Gabe says, “What the fuck is the problem?”

“Nature calls, boys—gotta take a whiz.”

Gabe lets out an exasperated sigh. “Just be quick about it, and get your ass back in line.”

Jim gives them a nod and heads to the other side of the clearing.

Gabe and Raymond lead the others back up the trail and wait at the top of the ridge for the older man to finish his business. Jim goes over to a log, shoulders his rifle with its leather strap, and unzips. The urine stream arcs out over the hard-packed earth and makes a loud spattering noise as he empties his bladder.

He exhales with relief. Then he hears a noise off to his left, a twig snapping perhaps, or maybe he’s just imagining it. The woods tick and breathe. His piss puddle spreads across the cracked earth.

Movement in his peripheral vision gets his attention as he continues peeing. He glances to his left. He sees a shadow burst out of the woods—accompanied by the sound of body armor rattling—and he lets out an involuntary noise from deep within his lungs: “W-WHU—?!”

The woman comes at him with a gleaming katana sword, a blur of black Kevlar and dreadlocks flowing off her head, her slender, sculpted ebony face partially obscured by a riot helmet.

It all happens so quickly the piss stream continues unabated as she expertly swings the blade. The last thing Jim Steagal sees is the gleam of the blade’s beveled edge in his eyes.

The sword slices through his face between the earlobe and jawline with the sick crunching sound of a celery stalk snapping.

The top of his skull jettisons and tumbles to the ground. Blood fountains out of the concavity left behind, while his eyes continue sending imagery to his brain. For a split second, as the severed head hurls through the air, the optical nerves register the wobbling body left behind, still peeing, the involuntary urine stream continuing to fountain in a high arc. Then, what’s left of Jim Steagal collapses to the hard mud in a heap of blood and piss—and the rest of the events in that clearing go unheard and unseen by the dead man.

*   *   *

“Quickly, Tyreese!” The woman in dreadlocks whirls toward the fallen man. “Help me with the body!”

At that moment, up on the ridge, behind a netting of overgrowth, the face of Raymond Hilliard appears—peering through a break in the foliage—and his eyes bug. “OH—FUCK!”

Then things begin transpiring very quickly—almost too quickly for the naked eye to take in—as Raymond lurches down the trail toward the clearing with his AR-15 locked and loaded and coming up quick. Another blur of blue-black Kevlar appears out of nowhere and charges across the clearing toward the oncoming gunman. This enormous African American man—his shoulders as solid as bridge trestles—performs a flying tackle on Raymond Hilliard.

Raymond’s assault rifle discharges on impact—shattering the night air with a booming report—the blast going high into the treetops, shredding leaves and sending a flock of bats into the dark heavens. Raymond sprawls to the ground, the armored black man landing on top of him. Hitting his head on a rock, Raymond plunges into momentary unconsciousness.

Almost simultaneously, the woman named Michonne, standing twenty feet away on the opposite side of the clearing, sees the other members of the scouting party roaring toward the scene with guns coming up and muzzles starting to flare magnesium-white in the darkness.

“Oh shit,” she mutters, ducking down, as bullets whiz all around her.

*   *   *

Charging toward the clearing, Gabe sees Raymond writhing on the ground fifteen feet away, momentarily senseless, blinking at the sky, and the other man—the gigantic African American—struggling back to his feet. He stands at least six-four, and has almost 275 pounds on him—very few of those pounds fat—and it strikes Gabe that this guy is moving very quickly and nimbly for such a huge man.

The big man lurches back across the clearing and grabs the woman’s hand and tries to pull her away. “RUN!” he cries. “C’MON!”

“NO!” She wriggles out of his grasp. Gabe spins toward the blur of dreadlocks and fires—the bullet nicking off her shoulder armor, a firecracker in the dark, and she darts behind a tree. The huge man dives to the ground. In the flickering darkness, the woman’s voice cuts through the noise of gunfire. “We do this now, Tyreese! Or not at all!”

By this point, Gabe has taken cover behind deadfall logs across the clearing—along with the other members of the scouting party—and he squeezes off another pair of blasts that coax more shots from his team … until everybody is firing at will.

The arrhythmic crackling reports fill the air with silver lightning, tearing the foliage apart. Gabe uses a .357 Magnum revolver with a laser sight—the luminous red thread dancing across the clearing as he tries to lock onto the moving silhouettes—and his first three blasts kick up spits of dirt inches away from where the big black man lies on his belly, chunks of bark blowing off a tree trunk above him.

“FUCK!” the man named Tyreese grunts through clenched teeth, covering his head.

“Hey!” The sound of Michonne’s voice in the nearby shadows gets the big man’s attention. “Here!—Tyreese!—This way!” She gets her hand around the edge of his armored shoulder plate and yanks hard.

Tyreese careens backward, out of control, sliding on his ass down a small embankment formed by a trench or a burrow dug under the massive deadwood logs by possums or raccoons or God knows what. Gabe blinks and swings the gun downward as the giant slips away into the void of blackness, right behind the woman.

Like magic.

Both of them … vanishing into the dark.

*   *   *

“WHAT THE FUCK?!” Moments later, Gabe stands on the edge of the clearing with Gloria Pyne and the two younger men in their baggy shorts and silk jackets—each of them holding hot steel, muzzles smoking—their eyes wide and alert as they survey the deserted area. The stillness of night presses down on them—the crickets like a jet engine roaring in their ears—the moonlight shining off their tense faces.

“How the fuck did they—?” Gloria starts to pose the obvious question when the sound of Gabe’s bellow cuts her off.

“FIND THEM!” Veins pulsing at his temples, his thick neck and shoulders as tense as girders, Gabriel Harris ejects a spent casings into the dirt, and then grabs a speed-loader off his belt and slams another six rounds of hollow points into the Magnum. But before the others get a chance to even turn around and start their search, a noise from the other side of the clearing stiffens everybody’s spine. They all go still, their hackles up, the two young men—Eric and Daniel—staring at each other. It could be anything—the wind, animals. Those bastards that just attacked them could be a mile away from here by now.

Another noise—a plunking sound in the dark, almost like the snap of a switch, or a stick breaking—draws the attention of everybody to the west edge of the clearing. All their barrels go up, a collective inhalation of breaths, fingers on triggers. Gabe’s flesh crawls as he double-hands the Magnum, his beefy, ham hock arms locked in the shooting position, front sight aimed on the dense, primordial dark across the tree line. Nobody says a word for the longest time as they wait, and wait, and wait for something to move behind the dark veil of foliage, but nothing moves. They wait for another snapping noise, but silence grips the clearing. Gabe can hear his heart pulsing in his ears.

After another endless second or two, Gabe silently motions with hand gestures for Eric, the youngest of the two hip-hoppers, to go wide to the left, and the other, Daniel, to go wide to the right. With quick nods, the two young gunmen fan out slowly across the clearing, stepping softly over the hard-pack, moving as silently as possible. Gabe gestures to Gloria to stay quiet and follow him. Inching slowly toward the wall of black oak and wild brush—now as dark as black velvet curtains before them—Gabe aims the .357 as he goes, Gloria doing the same with her Tec-9, two-handing it, the tension narrowing their eyes and furrowing their brows. The woods remain silent as Gabe approaches the wall of undergrowth. Now he’s thinking it could be walkers in there, lurking, getting ready to pounce. It could be—

All at once, without warning, the sound of a woman’s voice bellowing at the top of her lungs pierces the silence from behind them—

“NOW!!”

—and Gabe has just enough time to spin around when two figures pounce from opposite corners of the clearing. And in that frenzied instant before a single gun discharges, Gabe’s mind races with a jumble of panic-stricken realizations—even as he swings the .357 up and starts to squeeze off the first shot—the variables flashing in his brain like sunspots in the darkness: They were tossing fucking pebbles or something across the clearing, the oldest goddamn trick in the book, and we fell for it—and now something glimmers like a streak of light in the darkness in front of Gabe’s face before he fires—watch out—WATCH OUT!

The katana sword gripped in the black woman’s hands whispers past Gabe’s face—coming within a centimeter and a half of his throat—and it’s only because of Gabe’s involuntary reaction of rearing back and accidentally firing the Magnum up into the air that he’s lucky enough to keep his head attached to his neck. He lets out an involuntary cry, and that’s when the clearing suddenly ignites.

For a moment, the mass chaos that ensues—the strobelike effect of all the muzzle flashes, the collective tumult of gunfire and yelling and flashing steel and bullets whizzing and two armor-clad ambushers diving out of the line of fire in different directions—turns the narrow clearing into bedlam.

THIRTEEN

The skirmish lasts for mere seconds, not even a full minute, but when the dust clears—the last gunshots echoing and fading over the far hollows of the forest—one of the younger scouts—Eric—lies on the ground, dead, his neck opened by the katana blade. One of the two assailants also lies facedown on the cold ground, wounded. The other has vanished, her katana sword lying in the weeds.

Gabe hyperventilates as he quickly scans the tree line around the edges of the clearing. “WHERE THE FUCK DID SHE GO?!!”

He hears a noise, and he realizes that in all the excitement the woman has slipped their grasp, careening down an adjacent embankment into the deeper woods. He lurches over to the edge of the slope and sees a shadowy figure down in the darkness to the east, now struggling to escape through thickets of deadfall and undergrowth. He can hear her heavy breathing and panting as she flees.

“STAY HERE!” Gabe roars at the others, pointing at the big black man on the ground. “KEEP HIM ALIVE!”

The man named Tyreese lets out an involuntary moan. One of Gabe’s rounds has penetrated the armor of the giant’s right thigh, passing through the fleshy part of his leg and disabling him. Now Daniel and Raymond hold the man down, shoving their muzzles against the nape of his thick neck, pressing their knees into the small of his back.

Gabe slams another speed-loader into his .357 and lurches down the embankment.

The darkness and chill air of the forest engulf Gabe as he hurtles headlong through the trees, two-handing the Magnum, flipping on the FastFire tactical light. The red dot dances on the leaves ahead of him. The woman has a head start, but the woods are so thick to the east, Gabe gains on her quickly, his girth bulldozing through the foliage. He can see her shadow maybe fifty yards ahead of him now, darting toward another clearing. She reaches the clearing and bursts out of the trees in one great paroxysm of churning arms and pumping legs—her stride gazelle-like as she races for the far barrens.

Gabe reaches the clearing and realizes he’ll never catch up to her—not in a full-on footrace across open land—so he cobbles to a stop on the soft ground and drops to one knee. He aims the laser sight at the fleeing bitch—now a blur of black Kevlar receding into the distance.

The slender thread of crimson light arcs out across the darkness and teases around her heels.

Gabe fires off half a dozen successive blasts, each booming report echoing up into the starry heavens, the recoil making his arms shudder. Through the scope, he can see the near misses—one goes high, a few puff off the dirt at her feet, and the rest go wide. She keeps running until he can’t see her anymore.

“FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK-FUCK-FUCK!” Gabe spits angrily into the dirt and lets out an inarticulate growl of rage. The woman is long gone now—a swirl of night wind tossing leaves across the deserted meadow in her wake.

A noise to Gabe’s immediate left draws his attention to a new shadow moving out of the trees.

The stray walker lumbers into the moonlight, drawn to the commotion—a male in ragged bib overalls and a long, wrinkled face the color of earthworms—the dead arms reaching for Gabe, the rotting dentures snapping like castanets. Gabe calmly reaches down to his boot and draws an eleven-inch Randall knife. “Bite this, motherfucker!”

Gabe drives the knife blade up through the biter’s jaw and into the sinus cavity. The creature sags immediately, the luminous fight in the thing’s yellow eyes going out like pilot lights. Gabe lets go of the hilt and the thing collapses in a heap, the Randall knife still sticking out of the creature’s double chins.

For a moment, Gabe just stares at the rotten remains lying in the tall grass at his feet. The sight of it gives him an idea. He gazes back out at the far reaches of the meadow, surveying the dark trees into which the woman has just vanished. Inspiration strikes.

“Fuck her,” he says to himself as he pulls his knife out of the walker. He has her sword. He knows what he’s going to do. He turns and starts back toward the others, formulating his story.

*   *   *

The Governor stands in the circle of vehicles—a single Coleman camp lantern glowing on a stump providing the only illumination in the dusty clearing at the top of the ridge, throwing a dim circle of pale yellow light on the other members of the militia tending to their wounds and taking stock of their supplies—when the sound of footsteps interrupts his thoughts.

“What the fuck?” he mutters as he turns and sees the group of battle-weary figures trudging out of the woods directly behind him. Many heads turn—nerves are frayed from an increase in walker activity in the area—and many breathe a sigh of relief at the sight of humans.

A stout man built like a Mack truck leads the ragtag brigade. Behind Gabe, two members of the scouting party—Raymond and Daniel—drag a fourth man, clad in black body armor and apparently wounded, between them. The ailing prisoner—the woman called him Tyreese—drips blood from his lolling face and barely shuffles along with his huge arms over the shoulders of the two other men. Gloria Pyne brings up the rear, carrying an armful of rifles and weapons.

“Yeah—we found him in the woods,” Gabe reports as he walks up to the Governor. “He and the woman attacked us. They killed Eric and Jim.”

The Governor’s expression hardens in the gloomy light of the lantern. “The woman? You talking about the hell-bitch that tortured me?”

Gabe gives him a nod. “Yep—the very same. We followed them into the woods. They put up a fight, but they couldn’t hold us off for long.”

The other men drag the big black man around the stump and hold him up for the Governor’s inspection. Barely conscious, his visor gone, his face starting to swell from the beating, Tyreese tries to raise his head but it’s a losing battle. He lets out a pained breath through clenched teeth.

“Thought you might like a chance to sit down with this one,” Gabe ventures, jerking a thumb at Tyreese, “maybe have a little chat with him?”

The Governor stares at the wounded giant. “The girl, Gabe. What happened with the girl?”

“She broke away from us—took off for the woods—so I did you a favor.”

The Governor cocks his head. “A favor? What the fuck are you talking about?”

Gabe gives the Governor a look. Neither a smile nor a grimace, the expression on the stocky man’s face is hard to read. Finally he says, “I ran her down and blew her fucking brains out.”

A brief instant of silence follows, during which time Philip Blake braces himself against an unexpected storm of contradictory emotions smashing down on him—relief, anger, morbid curiosity, disappointment, and more than anything else, suspicion. “You shot her in the head?” he asks at last. “You killed her?”

“Yeah.” Gabe looks into the Governor’s eyes—a prodigal son returning with the elixir—and the pause stretches. “She’s fucking dead, boss.”

The Governor thinks about it some more. “You saw her die?” He wants to know every detail, wants to know the look on her face in her last moments—wants to know that she suffered. Instead of asking about all these things, he simply says, “You witnessed it?”

Gabe turns and looks over his shoulder. “Gloria!” The woman in the I’M WITH STUPID visor comes forward, fumbling with her cache of weapons. Gabe explains: “The bitch ran away. She got pretty far. I saw her run. I shot her. I saw her fall down. I saw her stop moving.” Gabe licks his lips, measuring his words carefully. “I’m sure it wasn’t as slow and painful as you would have liked—but she’s dead, boss.” Gloria hands him something wrapped in a chamois-like cloth. “But before she got away from us—”

Gabe takes the object, carefully unwraps it, and reveals it to the Governor.

“—we took this.” Gabe holds it up so that it gleams dully in the jaundice-yellow light. “Figured you would want a trophy.”

Gabe brandishes the katana sword with a flourish, holding it over his head at a parallel angle to the ground, looking somewhat foolish to the Governor. Gaping at the thing, taking in all the implications, he breathes in a long breath. Then all at once he snatches the thing away from Gabe, and the rest of the scouts step back with a jerk. Gabe goes stone-still, staring at the Governor.

Latent violence glitters in Philip’s gaze as he squares his shoulders, raising the gleaming blade over his head. For a moment, Gabe’s spine goes cold with terror. Then, with a decisive one-handed swing, Philip slams the tip of the sword down into the center of a tree stump, making a loud thwack!

Another horrible moment of silence transpires as the sword sticks rigidly out of the rotten timber like a flag planted on a summit.

“Bring him over to my private office,” the Governor finally says, gesturing at the wounded man in body armor. “We’ll have a little talk.”

*   *   *

“We’re on the same side, you and me,” the Governor says to the huge man sitting on the bench in the rear of the cargo vehicle. The airless enclosure reeks of sweat and the coppery stench of blood. A single flyspecked dome light shines down on the steel tread-plate floor as the Governor paces, his boots ringing on the iron. “You realize that, don’t ya?”

The black man slumps against the wall in his battered black Kevlar, his hands bound behind his back, his swollen face drooping forward and from side to side. He spits bloody saliva on the floor and manages to look up, his grizzled ebony visage screwed up with pain and rage. “Really?—What side is that?”

“The side of survival, homie!” The Governor flings his words at the man, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to provoke him. “We’re all in the same boat—fighting for our lives—am I wrong, homes?”

The black man swallows and looks into the Governor’s eyes, replying in a very low, taut voice, as though on the verge of a scream. “The name’s Tyreese.”

“Tyreese! Ty-rreeeeeese … I like that.” The Governor paces. “Okay, Tyreese, let me ask you a question. And be honest.”

The black man spits again. “Whatever … I got nothing to hide.”

“We could torture the shit outta you, make your last moments a living hell, all that good stuff, but c’mon … do we really need to go through that dance again? I hurt you real bad, take you to the point of passing out, but not quite, and when you refuse to talk, I break you, flay the skin off you or something, blah-blah-blah … do we really need to go through that ridiculous shit again?”

The big man looks up and fixes his gaze on the Governor and says, “Have at it.”

The Governor slaps him. Hard. A sharp, forceful backhand slap from his gloved left hand—violent and abrupt enough to slam the back of the man’s skull against the wall behind him—making Tyreese gasp and blink as though snorting smelling salts. “Wake up, man!” The Governor maintains a cheerful, helpful, benevolent tone. “You’re not thinking this through—I’m just sayin’!”

Tyreese takes heaving breaths, trying to control his rage and blink away the pain. His enormous shoulders tremble under the battered armor. “Fuck you.”

“Tyreese, c’mon.” Now the Governor sounds disappointed, crestfallen. “Don’t make this one of those annoying situations where I gotta hurt you real bad—worse than you’ve ever been hurt. A few simple questions is all.”

Tyreese sniffs away the pain. “What do you want to know?”

“Weak spots in the prison, for instance.”

Tyreese chuckles then, a wry, weary, amused chuckle that lasts for several moments. Then he looks up. “There ain’t no weak spots—it’s a fucking prison, Sherlock!”

“How about you tell me how many people you got up in there? What kind of arsenal you got, ammunition, supplies, what kind of power you runnin’?”

The black man looks at him. “How about you eat shit and die?”

The Governor stares at the man for a moment, then winds up to hit him again—this time with a balled-up fist—but right before he swings, the sound of knocking interrupts. Somebody is tapping on the doorframe outside the truck’s tarp-covered rear hatch.

“Governor?”

It’s Lilly’s voice, and the sound of it sends a warning alarm like icy water trickling down the Governor’s spine. He chews on the inside of his cheek for a brief instant before answering, thinking it over. Maybe this is a good thing—maybe she should see this—see the brutality in the man’s dark eyes, see who they’re fighting. “Come in here, Lilly,” Philip says at last. “You can be a witness.”

The tarp folds inward, and Lilly Caul climbs up into the enclosure. She wears a tattered denim jacket, her hair pulled back from her suntanned face, which is shiny with sweat and bright with nervous tension. She keeps her distance, watching from the rear.

The big man on the bench glances up at her, breathing hard, trying to control his emotions. He looks as though he’s on the verge of exploding.

The Governor sees that the man is about to lose it, and leans down close to him, staring into his eyes. Tyreese looks up at him. The Governor smiles and speaks softly, as if to a child: “Lilly, meet Tyreese. Nice enough fella, good head on his shoulders. I was just trying to talk some sense into him, seeing if there was a way he could talk to this Rick fella, get him to wise up and surrender, so we could all avoid more bloodshed and—”

The big man lunges suddenly—putting all of his 275 pounds into the move—slamming his forehead into the Governor’s face. The head-butt, instantaneous and brutal, sounds like a board snapping, taking the Governor completely by surprise, knocking him momentarily insensate and sending him flinging backward against the wall. He slams into the struts with a gasp and then topples to the floor.

Lilly draws her Ruger and aims it at the big man. “GET BACK!” She thumbs the safety off. “GET BACK, GODDAMNIT—NOW! SIT DOWN!!”

Tyreese sits back down, his wrists still bound, and he exhales angrily, his face twitching with rage. His thigh drips blood from the gunshot wound, but he barely seems to notice it. A former NFL linebacker, as well as a bouncer for some of the toughest bars in Atlanta, he looks like he could snap Lilly in two. His grizzled face remains stoic as he spits blood from a split lip, looking down and shaking his head. He mumbles something inaudible.

Lilly goes over to the Governor, kneels, and helps him sit up. “You okay?”

The Governor blinks and tries to get his bearings, tries to draw breath into his lungs. His forehead is bleeding, and he coughs convulsively, but the pain braces him, galvanizes him, energizes him. “See?—See what I’m talking about?” he utters thickly. “You can’t reason with these people … you can’t … bargain with them … they’re fucking animals.”

Across the enclosure, the big man mutters something else, his head down.

Lilly and the Governor look up. Tyreese speaks under his breath as though talking to himself, “And the nations were angry…”

“What was that, asshole?” the Governor snarls at him. “You want to share it with the rest of the class?”

Tyreese looks up at them, his dark face filling with sullen, baleful hate. “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and it shall be the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and to them that fear my name, small and great, thou shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth … and there will be war in heaven.” He pauses and looks at them. “It’s from Revelation … not that you would know shit about the Bible. It’s what’s happening. You can’t turn back the tide; you’ve opened the door. Kiss your asses good-bye. You’ll die by your own fucking swords and you don’t even—”

“SHUT UP!” Lilly springs to her feet, lunges toward Tyreese, and presses the Ruger’s muzzle against his forehead. “JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

The Governor lifts himself to his feet, moving in between Lilly and Tyreese. “Okay, let’s dial it down now. Back off, Lilly. I got this.” He gently ushers Lilly away from the prisoner toward the rear hatch. “It’s okay. I got this. I’ll take care of it.”

Lilly, breathing hard, stands in the hatchway, re-engaging the safety and shoving the gun back into its sheath on her hip. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the Governor says, giving her a reassuring pat on the arm. He wipes the blood from his forehead. “I’ll handle this. You go and try and get some sleep.”

Lilly looks at him. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m good. I got this. Don’t worry.”

After a long pause, she glances back at the prisoner, who now sits staring at the floor. She lets out a pained sigh and makes her exit.

The Governor turns and looks at Tyreese. Very softly, under his breath, Philip Blake murmurs, “I got this.” He goes over to the bench facing the prisoner on the opposite side of the enclosure. Under the bench, in the cobwebs and litter, Philip finds a baseball bat lying next to a pile of rags. “I got this,” he says in barely a whisper as he picks up the bat, then goes over to the rear hatch and pulls down the metal door. The door clangs shut, giving them privacy. The Governor turns to the prisoner.

Philip smiles at the man. “I got this.”

*   *   *

Very few surviving members of the Woodbury militia get any sleep that night—least of all Gabe. Tossing and turning on a hard pallet in the back of his cargo truck, his rotund, barrel-shaped belly wedged between the wall and a row of supply crates, he tries to clear his mind, but his brain revs and chugs and circles back around to his lies. How many times has he lied since the plague broke out? He’s lost track. But this latest lie could truly bite him on the ass—the bitch with the hair braids is still out there. What will the Governor do when he finds out? Gabe wonders if he should bail out of this whole fracas with the prison people. He tosses and turns some more. The drone of crickets and frogs and loons outside the truck rises and swells in the dark until it sounds positively thunderous to Gabe, like a rainstorm, and he puts his hands over his ears and tries to drive the thoughts away. His stomach burns and seethes with nervous indigestion. He’s been having upper GI problems for months now—a combination of the shitty diet he’s been on and the constant stress—and now he feels stickpins stabbing him in the guts, piercing his innards. He tries to breathe evenly, deeply, and eventually the breathing exercise sends him into a half-comatose doze in which he dreams snippets of night terrors such as the black lady with the dreadlocks sneaking up on him and driving her katana sword into his abdomen just above the belly button and then swizzling it around as though trying to open a doorway in his guts, and he tries to scream in the dream but nothing but silent air will come out of him, and he wakes up right around dawn with a gasp.

Somebody is knocking on the rear hatch, and Gabe blinks at the pale light filtering through the tarp, and the sound of a deep, smoky baritone voice. “Hey! Gabe, get your fat ass up. I need you right now!”

The Governor appears in the back hatch of the cargo truck as Gabe is struggling off the pallet, clutching for his wadded turtleneck shirt, and starting to get dressed. “I’m up, boss. Whaddaya need?”

“I’ll tell you on the way. Grab your AR-15 and give me a hand with the big dude.”

*   *   *

Gabe follows the Governor across the clearing to a transport truck. Inside the passenger hold, the man named Tyreese is barely alive, curled into a fetal position on the floor of the payload bay, his body armor gone, his wrists still bound by rope and wire, his flesh battered and scourged by the Governor’s constant assault throughout the night with the baseball bat. Now the man barely draws a breath, both his eyes swollen shut, his lips cracked and bleeding, mouthing silent litanies, prayers, apocalyptic Bible quotes that nobody can hear.

The Governor and Gabe lift the man onto a bench—not an easy task, considering the 275 pounds of nearly dead weight—then they tie his wrists to the wall. The Governor covers the man with a tarp and mutters, “We’ll unwrap the present when we get there.”

Gabe looks at Philip. “Get where?”

Philip lets out a sigh. “You are one stupid motherfucker, Gabe.”

They hop out of the rear hatch and go around to the cab, Gabe climbing behind the wheel, Philip taking the passenger seat. Philip orders Gabe to take it nice and slow—no headlights—and they pull out of the clearing unnoticed by everyone but Lilly.

She appears in their path in the predawn glow like a ghost, waving them to a stop.

Gabe pulls up to her and rolls down his window. “What do you want, Lilly?”

“What are you doing? Where the hell are you going?” Lilly peers into the cab and sees the Governor. “Let me come with you. I’ll get my guns, just give me a second.”

“No!” From the passenger seat, the Governor leans forward and makes eye contact with her. “You stay here and keep an eye on things. We’re going to go and try and negotiate with them, use the big boy as leverage.”

Lilly nods slowly, reluctantly. “Okay, but be careful, you’re gonna be outnumbered.”

“You let us worry about that.” The Governor gives her a wink. “You hold down the fort.”

They take off in a cloud of dust as Lilly watches from the shadows.

She realizes right then—for some reason, with mounting dread—that Michonne’s sword was leaning against the Governor’s hip as they drove off.

*   *   *

They arrive at the prison at 6:53 A.M., according to the clock on the truck’s dash, barreling through a cluster of walkers wandering the tall grass east of the grounds. The truck’s grille smashes through groups of reanimated cadavers with a series of watery thuds and brittle bones cracking beneath the massive wheels. On Philip’s orders, Gabe blows the air horn once, waking anybody who might still be slumbering inside the gray stone cellblocks behind the razor wire. Gabe pulls up close to the east fence and then makes a huge U-turn. He rolls his window down and grabs the .38 Special lodged under the dash, firing out the side of the truck at a few stray biters. Heads snap back in mists of blood and brain tissue—at least a half-dozen more going down in sequence like bowling pins.

“Now back it up to the fence,” the Governor orders, peering out his side mirror.

Gabe slams on the brakes, then wrestles the stick into reverse and makes a big show of revving the engine and backing toward the chain link as if they have a pizza to deliver. A blur of movement catches the corner of Gabe’s eye in his mirror as he navigates the truck closer and closer to the fence—the inhabitants of the prison dashing across gaps between the buildings, waking each other up, scurrying for their weapons. Over the noise of the diesel engine, Gabe can hear the faint shouts of alarm.

The truck clatters to a stop less than ten feet from the outer fence.

“Let’s do this,” the Governor murmurs as he kicks open his door and climbs out.

The two men calmly step off the running boards, and then stride around to the rear of the truck. The katana sword, tucked into its scabbard, bounces off the Governor’s hip as he reaches up and pulls open the hatch. Gabe feels the eyes of both walkers and humans on the back of their necks. Before climbing up into the cargo bay, the Governor mutters under his breath, “Keep the fucking biters off us long enough for me to finish, okay?”

“Will do,” Gabe says, and slams a magazine into the AR’s receiving port. He thumbs the safety as the Governor climbs up into the cargo enclosure.

The tarp comes off the dazed black man with the abruptness of a Band-Aid being torn off a wound. Tyreese still breathes shallow breaths, his eyes swollen to slits. He tries to see, and makes a feeble attempt to move, but the pain keeps him docile. He makes a choking noise deep in his throat as the Governor yanks him to his feet.

“It’s showtime, homes,” Philip whispers, with the tenderness one might proffer to a sick animal on the way to the veterinarian.

FOURTEEN

Inside the barricade of razor wire and tall cyclone fencing, many shadowy figures suddenly stop in their tracks, many pairs of eyes fixing themselves on the unexpected sight of their comrade being displayed in the back of a truck, in full view of the prison. The Governor has positioned the dazed black man on the edge of the truck’s rear hatch, on his knees, facing the prison complex, head drooping, the strange tableau almost reminiscent of some obscure Asian death-cleansing ritual. The rear hatch and the truck’s cargo area have momentarily become a theatrical stage. The big man’s wrists are still bound, his head drooping as though it weighs a ton. The silence spreads across the grounds like a black tide. The wind tosses the Governor’s hair across his eye patch as he dramatically draws the gleaming sword from its sheath.

“BEFORE ANYONE GETS TRIGGER HAPPY,” he calls out to those inside the ramparts, holding the sword over the hunched figure of Tyreese, “KNOW THAT I’VE GOT THE WOMAN, TOO!” He takes in the stillness, the silence. “MY FAT FRIEND AND I DON’T GET BACK TO OUR CAMP IN ONE PIECE, SHE DIES!”

He pauses for a moment to allow this prefatory matter to settle in.

“SO NO SUDDEN MOVES—OKAY?”

Again he pauses, hearing his voice echo across the warrens of passageways and cellblocks. He interprets the overwhelming silence as cooperation and nods.

“FROM THAT I THINK YOU CAN SEE WHERE THIS IS GOING. OPEN THE GATES. GET IN THIS TRUCK AND COME BACK WITH US—OR I DO SOMETHING HORRIBLE TO YOUR FRIEND.”

The Governor lets this sink in and then starts to say something else when a sharp movement inches away from him yanks his attention down to the prisoner. Tyreese jerks his head up with great effort and peers through swollen eyes out the rear hatch at the prison grounds.

“D-don’t let him in!” The voice that comes out of him is strangled with pain, garbled by blood in the back of his throat. “Don’t—”

Philip smashes the blunt end of the sword down on the back of the man’s skull, hard enough to make a cracking sound and drive the man to the corrugated iron floor. Tyreese lets out a half grunt, half moan.

“Shut up!” Philip gazes down at the man as though looking at garbage. “Shut your fucking mouth!” Then he looks back up at the barren, silent prison grounds. “SO WHAT’S IT GOING TO BE, PEOPLE?”

He waits for a moment, the sound of Tyreese’s ragged breathing the only audible sound.

“YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE TO DECIDE!”

An endless minute passes, and over the course of that time, the Governor realizes he’s being watched from every quarter of the property—a small cluster of figures huddling behind one of the guard towers, another group lurking inside a dark alcove of the main cellblock, a few scattered at opposite ends of the yards—all eyes fixed on him. Some of the people aim weapons, while others frantically whisper and argue. But in very short order, the verdict becomes clear to Philip—he knows what he has to do.

“SO THAT’S IT, THEN?” He feels a tingling sensation at the base of his spine—that familiar clarion ringing in his brain, a red shade coming down over his solitary eye. His skin prickles, and his mind goes still—the great silent cobra-calm before the strike.

*   *   *

The first blow comes down decisively yet slightly impeded by the uncoordinated tendons of Philip’s left arm—he has to awkwardly twist his body to get a good angle—and the blade buries itself a mere inch and a half into the man’s neck. Tyreese lets out a strangled hiss. His entire body hunches suddenly as if electrocuted.

“Fuck!” the Governor grumbles under his breath as the blood sluices around the beveled edge of the katana sword, the blade caught in the cords and cartilage of the big man’s nape. The faint gasps and moaning sounds coming from within the confines of the prison barely register in Philip’s ears. He puts a boot on the man’s shoulders and yanks the blade free with a watery smacking noise.

All the fight instantly drains out of the big man as though someone flipped a switch, the shock paralyzing him, keeping him pinned to the floor of the cargo bay, his head shuddering as major arteries disconnect from their moorings.

Tyreese sags lower, but somehow—in his involuntary stiffening, his nervous system shutting down—he manages to remain on his elbows and knees, his face pressed to the cold floor now, his arms and haunches trembling in their death throes, his lungs heaving as he drowns in the tremendous hemorrhage soaking the rusty platform beneath him.

The Governor raises the sword for a second blow, and this time, he brings it down harder. The blade sinks halfway through the man’s thick neck—blood gushing now with the force of a geyser, arcing up through the air, sluicing down until it floods the entire cargo hold—and this time the Governor can hear the startled gasps from inside the fences. He yanks the blade back.

Tyreese collapses. His head lolling, barely connected now, he lands at an awkward angle, his lifeless face pressed against the blood-sodden iron floor, the gaping maw of his neck now displaying the coils and strands of his circulatory system as it pulses futilely. Other than a few postmortem twitches and tics of the big man’s musculature, he lies still, gone, his spirit flown.

With a flourish, the Governor delivers the final blow—the massive force causing catastrophic damage to the enormous man’s neck—sending a font of blood spurting up. The blowback spatters the Governor as the head finally detaches. The expression frozen on the unmoored face is almost tranquil as the head wobbles free, its eyes frozen shut with a strange look of deliverance. The head rolls a few centimeters from its former spindle, which now releases a torrent of blood like a baptismal font flowing over the edge of the rear gate.

Winded from all the exertion, taking in huge breaths, huffing and wheezing, the Governor steps back from the horrible spectacle, the sword still gripped in his left hand. Even at this distance, he can hear the traumatized mutterings coming from inside the prison. It sounds like white noise on the wind—the sound of revulsion mixed with despair—and it fuels Philip’s rage.

He kicks the loose cranium off the ledge of the rear gate, and the severed head goes bouncing off into the tall grass, rolling nearly twenty yards before coming to a stop facedown. Philip shoves the blood-drenched remains of Tyreese’s body off the rear as well, the massive form flopping to the earth with a wet, hollow thud.

By this point, Gabe has moved back toward the truck’s cab, his watchful eyes on the dozens of walkers shambling this way from the north and the west, drawn to all the hubbub. He opens the driver’s-side door as Philip hops off the blood-slick rear ledge and circles around the truck.

“We’ll leave his body for the biters,” Philip mutters as he walks calmly toward the cab. He doesn’t hurry; he doesn’t show any fear. He approaches Gabe and says, “Let’s roll before the biters get too close or one of these shell-shocked fucks decides to—”

The dry, harsh clap of a high-powered rifle cuts off his voice, and the Governor instinctively ducks down as the first shot rings off the front fender, dimpling the steel and sending a rosette of sparks into the air.

“FUCK!—FUCK!” The Governor stays down on the ground as more shots are fired—another three high-caliber rounds—puncturing the quarter panel and raising puffs along the ground mere centimeters from Philip’s head. He crawls around the front of the truck as Gabe slams the driver’s-side door and fires up the engine.

“DRIVE, GODDAMNIT—DRIVE!!” the Governor booms after climbing in the shotgun side. The truck lurches, and a cloud of dust swirls after it as Gabe slams the pedal to the floor and makes a beeline for the main road a quarter mile away. Within seconds they have crossed the adjacent pasture and screeched back onto the south road—

—vanishing into the early morning heat rays as abruptly as they arrived.

*   *   *

Two figures stand sentry at the threshold of the dusty clearing as Gabe pulls the truck back up the winding access road leading to the temporary camp. Raymond Hilliard and Lilly Caul stand on opposite sides of the road, hands on their hips, the sun blazing down on the circle of military vehicles behind them. They each look worried.

Gabe drives past them, pulls the cargo truck across the clearing, and parks next to the tank. He turns off the engine with a sigh of relief.

The Governor has already climbed out his side and sees the two sentries approaching.

“Well?” Raymond Hilliard speaks first, taking off his Falcons cap and wiping the sweat from his bald pate. “Uh … how did it go?”

“How did it go?” the Governor says, not even breaking stride, walking angrily past the man. The katana scabbard bounces on his hip as he walks. “It didn’t go well, that’s how! IT DIDN’T FUCKING WORK!”

Raymond watches the man head back toward the temporary tent set up on the edge of the clearing for supplies. Lilly hurries after him.

“What happened?” she asks, catching up with Philip and gently grabbing his left arm.

He pauses and burns his gaze into her, Gabe standing behind him, looking sheepish and guilty. “We tried to get them to open the gates—trade their man for access inside. We even threatened the man’s life.” The Governor holds Lilly’s stare, his single, dark, glittering eye radiating madness at her. “These crazy, evil sons of bitches shot their own man!” Behind Philip, Gabe lowers his head, stares awkwardly at the ground. “We had a bit of leverage and so they shot their own guy in the fucking head!”

Lilly gapes, mumbling. “Why the fuck—?”

“They killed him so we couldn’t use him against them!” The Governor stares at her. “You follow me? You understand what we’re dealing with here?”

By this point, others have gathered behind Lilly to listen to the news—eleven weekend warriors standing slack-jawed and stunned, their eyes telling the story. This is more than they bargained for. This is closer to the bone than any of them have ever ventured. Gloria Pyne looks down and kicks the dirt, turning things over in her mind. Raymond Hilliard pushes his way between Gus and Gabe and says to the Governor, “So … what do we do now?”

The Governor slowly turns—aiming his one good eye at the man like a beacon—and says very softly, very coldly, “What do we do?”

Raymond Hilliard gives a terse little nod, the nod of a lost child.

The Governor snarls, “We fucking kill every last one of them—THAT’S WHAT WE FUCKING DO!”

Lilly clenches her fists at the unexpected cymbal crash of the Governor’s voice—the clenching is involuntary at this point—her gaze riveted to Philip Blake. He backs away from Lilly and turns to the group. He looks down at the katana sword gripped in his hand as if he’s forgotten it’s there. He speaks in a dry, flat monotone as he stares at the sword’s fine craftsmanship. “No more waiting—no more stalling. It’s time to finish this.” He sniffs suddenly, blinking as though from an electric shock. A rustling noise comes from behind him, Gabe mumbling something under his breath, but he barely notices it. “WE MOVE NOW!”

The others stand paralyzed for a moment, like totems in the morning light, which dapples the ground around them with fiery yellow pools. They stare and stare, their mouths agape, some of them swallowing hard or reaching for their guns. The Governor swishes the sword through the air.

“NOW!” He stares at them. “Get in your cars—load your fucking guns and let’s move! We’re taking these monsters down—ridding the world of their evil, right here—RIGHT NOW!” He looks at their pallid, ashen expressions. “What the fuck is wrong with you people—you heard me—get your shit together and let’s move!”

Nobody budges. The Governor hears a quick inhalation of air coming from Gabe, and he turns and looks at the stocky, thick-necked man in the turtleneck. “What the hell is your problem?”

“I—Uh—!” Gabe struggles to say something, gazing off at the shadows behind a nearby cargo truck, the same shadows from which a dark figure has just lunged, taking everybody by surprise.

The Governor sees Gabe’s eyes shifting toward the area around the cargo truck behind them, but before Philip even has a chance to turn around, he feels the unmistakable kiss of cold, blue steel against the back of his neck just above his upper vertebrae.

*   *   *

Philip remains still, the barrel of a high-powered rifle pressing hard against his neck cords. He lets out a puff of air and a single, strangled word: “Fuck.”

Gabe is the closest to the assailant, and he licks his lips cautiously before saying anything—a player in a deadly game of chess, the starter clock now beginning to tick—his hand on the butt of his spare semiautomatic wedged between his belt and his hip. “Okay, you’re not stupid,” he says very softly to the invader standing behind Philip. “You gotta know, if you do kill him, you’re gonna be going down next.”

“Yes … I’m aware of that,” the familiar voice replies inches away from Philip’s left ear. It’s a woman’s voice, calm and measured as a telephone operator. The sound of it stiffens the Governor’s spine. Very slowly, very subtly, the onlookers standing around the clearing begin to reach down for their pistols, or carefully thumb the safeties off their assault rifles.

“Okay, do the math,” Gabe says to the woman with as much sincerity and reason as he can muster. “You see how many of us there are, and basically you’re surrounded, so … you know … it’s kinda academic.”

“You really think I care?” she says. She wears her body armor secured around her slender form and has a samurai-style headband wrapped tight around her cascading dreadlocks. She holds an AK-47 on the Governor, a weapon capable of firing 100 rounds of 7.62 mm hellfire per minute. “You think I haven’t planned for that?” She lets out an amused grunt. Philip hasn’t moved one millimeter since the conversation began. The woman says, “You’re the stupid one.”

“Really?” Gabe smiles, drawing his .45 in one easy movement. “That a fact?”

“Gabe—don’t.” The Governor’s single eye gazes with fiery intensity at the barrel of Gabe’s semiauto coming up in the air. “Gabe!”

“You got a death wish, lady?” Gabe aims the gun at the general vicinity of the Governor’s head. “Fine … I’ll grant you that wish!”

“GABE!!”

The booming report of the .45 shatters the still air at the precise moment Michonne’s rifle roars, making her jerk from the recoil one nanosecond before Gabe’s metal-jacketed hollow point bullet strikes her shoulder piece, chewing a divot in the Kevlar and sending a chunk flying. The Governor has already convulsed forward and gets grazed in the lower mandible just under his wounded ear.

The noise drives everybody in the area down to their bellies or behind the nearest cover as the tense tableau explodes apart in a blur of lightning-quick movements—actions and reactions, one tumbling into another—the slap-back reports echoing and rising in the sky. The Governor instantly ends up on the ground, the wind knocked out of him, his bloody drool flinging across the earth, the sword flying out of his hand. Michonne moves with the feral grace of a panther as she dives for the sword, the other combatants getting their bearings now. Lilly comes up behind the front quarter panel of the cargo truck with her Ruger gripped in both hands—the Weaver position that Bob taught her, the Israeli-commando tactics almost second nature to her now—and she scans for the dark figure in her front sight. Gabe, on the ground now, fires wildly at the blur of motion while he simultaneously crawls toward the fallen Governor—emptying the .45’s entire clip—unable to hit anything but the heels of Michonne’s jackboots. By this point, Michonne has gotten her gloved hands around the finely tooled handle of the ninja sword and is spinning sideways toward Raymond Hilliard, who is backing away with his AR-15 jerking sideways and up and down, seeking a target. In one fluid movement, Michonne spins and slashes, opening a gap in Raymond’s midsection with silent efficiency.

A tide of blood spumes down Raymond’s lap as he cries out and drops his gun and tumbles backward to the ground, and now several things transpire with the flickering, dreamlike speed of a nightmare in the harsh rays of sunlight stabbing through the trees.

The other militia members have scattered for cover, alarmed by the advent of that gleaming, deadly sword, while Gabe has climbed on top of the fallen Governor to provide a human shield. Meanwhile, Michonne has spun behind the trunk of an ancient live oak with her assault rifle raised and ready now, and she opens up on the stragglers.

With one hand, she sprays armor-piercing shells across the cracked earth of the clearing, raising chunks of turf, puckering the steel of adjacent trucks, sparks pinging and blooming off fenders, sending bark chips flying, and generally gobbling the clearing in a maelstrom of fire and hot lead. The Governor, pinned to the ground beneath the portly Gabe, slams his eye shut as dust and sparks spit all around him.

And then—just like a switch has been thrown—the assailant is gone.

*   *   *

The silence that abruptly follows the barrage takes everyone by surprise. The fusillade has ceased as suddenly as it began, and for several moments, the Governor lies with his face in the dirt, the cold sting from his wounded jaw spreading down his spine. “Get the fuck off me,” he hisses at last, wriggling under the massive lump of his bodyguard. “The girl, goddamnit—THE GIRL!”

Gabe rolls off Philip, struggles to his feet, and quickly scans the perimeter—simultaneously ejecting the spent clip from his .45, chucking in a fresh mag, and releasing the slide. He lowers the gun. “Shit.” He looks in all directions and sees that the girl has vanished. “Shit—shit—shit!”

The Governor climbs to his feet, holding his gloved hand over the deep gash along his jawline, the blood seeping through his fingers. He looks around the clearing. In the blue haze of cordite, he sees Raymond lying in a spreading pool of blood, the others cautiously coming out of their hiding places, frazzled, angry, and scared. Lilly steps out from behind a vehicle, her gaze riveted on the Governor.

Without even a glance at her Ruger, she dumps the empty mag on the ground—her furrowed expression fixed on Philip. She breathes heavily, her lips trembling with rage, her eyes blazing with anger. She looks as though she would follow Philip into hell now.

Philip turns to Gabe, who’s still surveying the periphery as though Michonne might materialize out of thin air at any moment. Then Gabe notices the Governor staring at him with baleful intensity. Gabe swallows hard. “Boss, I—”

“That what it was like?” Philip interrupts in a low, thick growl, his voice dripping with contempt, his gloved hand still pressed to his jaw, barely stanching the bleeding gash. “Last time you ‘blew her fucking brains out’—was it just like that?”

“Boss—” Gabe starts to explain but stops himself when he sees the Governor raising a bloody gloved hand.

“I don’t want to hear it.” Philip jerks his thumb at the others. “Get them ready to roll—we’re gonna end this thing now—RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!”

*   *   *

With Austin at her side, Lilly orders every last crate of ammunition opened and loaded into weapons, every last ounce of fuel poured into tanks, every ammo clip filled, every available piece of body armor put on and secured. She has Gus tend to the Governor’s wound, using the dissolving sutures in the first-aid kit to do a quick field stitch. She checks all the radios, checks all the vehicles, all the tires, all the engines, all the batteries, all the fluids, all the gun turrets, the scopes, the binoculars, the helmets, the visors, and the incidental supplies. Her pulse quickens as she nears completion of the last few preparations, the gravity of the situation quickly taking hold of her. It feels different this time.

Hate is a microbe that passes from one host to another, and it has passed fully from the Governor to Lilly. She hates these people now like never before—enough to launch a slaughter, enough to wipe them off the face of the earth. She hates them for what they have done to her town, her future, her hope for a better life. She hates them for their brutality. She hates them for what they have taken from her. Lilly’s life is meaningless now in the Grand Scheme of Things. Nothing has meaning anymore but her hate. Lilly has gone completely inward to the other side, completely self-contained and ready to kill … ready to burn these motherfuckers to the ground.

At one point, Austin notices her unfamiliar aura as she loads extra magazines into the truck’s cab for easy access. She has two sniper rifles tucked behind her seat.

“Hey, you okay?” he asks, giving her a tender pat on the shoulder. “What’s with the humming?”

She pauses, looking at him. “Humming?”

“You were humming to yourself—didn’t recognize the song—but it struck me as kinda weird.”

She wipes her face. All around the clearing, engines are firing up, gouts of exhaust spewing from tailpipes. Doors slam, gunners climb into place on the backs of turrets, and the Governor stands on his beloved tank, watching it all, looking stiff and pale, blanched of all humanity, like a golem rising from the mud. It takes Lilly’s breath away. She wants to see him tear limbs off these people, chew their jugulars out with his teeth, burn the prison to ashes and then bury the ashes and seed the ground with fucking salt. “Get in, pretty boy,” Lilly says at last, climbing behind the wheel. “We got a fucking job to do.”

They pull out of camp at just before noon, the sun high and pale in the sky.

*   *   *

Austin doesn’t say much en route, just sits in the passenger seat, cradling his Garand in his lap, every once in a while glancing out at the side mirror to check on the four soldiers riding in the back. Lilly drives in silence, feeling a strange sort of calm. In every transaction, the person willing to lose everything has the advantage—Lilly has nothing else to live for but her hate—and this strength makes her flesh tingle as the convoy climbs the winding access road toward the eastern horizon. She slams the shift lever into the lower gears and hums a tuneless tune, more of a tic than an actual melody. She glances across the cab at Austin, and all at once something flutters in her gut, a jolt of unease nagging at the back of her mind, pinching her midsection and shattering her confidence.

His head down, his hair hanging in his face, Austin Ballard has never looked younger or more vulnerable to Lilly than he does at this moment, and it wakes her up, breaks through her stupor, and sends an unexpected wave of dread coursing through her. His life is on the line as well, and the realization crashes down on her—he’s not ready for this, he’s not equipped—and this revelation leads to another unexpected bombshell. At first, she sees it out of the corner of her eye, and she’s not sure anybody else in the regiment of vehicles notices it.

Just as the procession of vehicles crests the top of the ridge east of the prison and the wide, scabrous slope of pastureland bordering the property comes into view through the trees—in the middle distance a few dozen dead straggling across the meadow in the front of the prison—Lilly sees faint signs of movement on either side of the dirt road, way back in the shadows of the woods, blending in with the dark columns of pines, milling through the gloom with the hectic purpose of ants in an ant farm.

Scores and scores of walkers, maybe hundreds of them, have converged on the area—drawn over the last thirty-six hours to the commotion of the skirmishes—their number now multiplying like amoebas growing in the vast petri dish of the forest. Lilly knows what this means. She’s tangled with herds of undead before. Autumn of last year, during the ill-advised coup d’état attempt on Woodbury, a herd had engulfed Lilly’s band of conspirators in the woods like a tidal wave, nearly overturning their van and devouring everything within miles. Lilly knows all too well how unpredictable and dangerous herds can be, especially if they coalesce into a slow-motion stampede. In their legion of stubborn, clumsy, shuffling bodies, they can mow down the sturdiest barricade, turn settlements to rubble, and break through the fences of any prison.

In that one horrible instant, as the convoy crosses over the ridge and vehicle by vehicle starts down the slope, Lilly’s brain registers a dark truth. She realizes at last the difference between this assault and the last.

Now both sides are fucked.

FIFTEEN

The people in the prison are prepared this time. The convoy barely gets halfway across the pasture before the yards light up with heavy fire, taking the invasion force by surprise. Air breaks hiss. Windshields shatter. Ricochets shriek off iron and steel. Trucks skid on the damp turf. Drivers and passengers alike duck down for cover, some of them diving off flatbeds and belly-crawling under the chassis of the massive transports. Lilly slams on her brakes and brings the truck to a shuddering stop and screams for Austin to get out in case the fuel tanks go up in the barrage. She kicks the door open, lurching out of the cab and hitting the ground, a series of divots exploding in the dirt around her. She can’t see anything. Austin has vanished out the other side of the cab. Over the din of the gunfire, Lilly can barely hear the Governor’s ranting and raving somewhere in the gathering haze of gun smoke and dust, but she can’t locate his position. She tries to fumble with her rifle, and maybe return fire—some of the militia members are making feeble attempts to answer the salvo—but Lilly’s hands won’t obey the signals her brain is sending to them. The people in the prison have taken positions behind parked vehicles, on their stomachs, firing from underneath the cars, causing mass chaos now, taking down more and more of Woodbury’s beleaguered militia. Lilly hears Gabe’s baritone voice barking frantically, hollering above the noise, arguing with the Governor, demanding to know why these insane tactics are going to work this time. Lilly covers her head as the turf continues to get chewed up around her, puffing up clods from the relentless bombardment. She tries to take deep breaths and focus on her weapon and her rage and her meager training, but something else is intruding on her thoughts. Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees the edges of the battlefield filling up with ragged, stumbling figures, and her chest freezes with the realization: There’s countless more of them now, coming from every direction, descending upon the meadow like a moving plague.

Lilly manages to crawl under the M35. She sees Austin’s feet shuffling next to the cab—he’s struggling to rise up and return fire—and she calls out above the noise for him to get the fuck down and get under the fucking truck for fuck’s sake.

Walkers have surrounded them, most of them managing to shamble between the gunshots or turn away from the bullet-riddled fences and lumber toward the invaders. Lilly starts firing at walker feet, knocking them down and then systematically sending slugs into their crania. Skulls pop out like fuses overloading, sending blood stringers across the grass and onto Lilly’s arms and legs, but she keeps firing. The ragged figures continue dragging themselves toward the invaders, and Lilly keeps blasting away, until her clip clicks dry and a cloud of blue haze builds around her truck. Her heart drumming in her chest, Lilly suddenly feels a vise tighten around her ankle. She lets out a yelp of shock, and she looks down at her lower half.

A large male walker in a funeral suit has crawled under the truck and has her leg in his blackened, gnarled hands, his rotting mouth opening—the mossy green teeth inches away from the exposed flesh of her slender shin between the top of her boot and the cuffed leg of her jeans—and the sight of it paralyzes her for a moment. She swings the barrel of the Ruger down at the thing’s skull and pulls the trigger—forgetting that the gun needs a fresh mag, the feeder slide gaping open—and now nothing but a click issues from the empty gun.

Lilly screams and kicks and scrambles for the magazine in her belt when a third figure fills the narrow space under the M35—just a dark blur at first—and then the gleaming blue steel of Austin’s Glock.

A flare of a spark and the flat blast puts the male biter down in a gushing stream of oily fluid from its freshly breached skull, spreading across the matted grass under the truck, the stench of the dead now engulfing Lilly as she lets out a pained, shocked sigh of relief. Austin crawls over to her.

“You okay, did he get you, did he nick you?—You all right?!” Austin babbles, putting his arm around her, tenderly wiping away the damp tendrils of hair loosened from her ponytail.

Lilly manages a nod, swallowing back the coppery taste of acid in her throat. The noise of another volley from all around them makes it impossible to be heard. She twists back around and reaches for her rifle, crawling out from underneath the truck.

The air has gotten so thick with cordite and crisscrossing gunfire, it looks as though night has rolled in, and it chokes the breath out of Lilly, numbing her senses, making her eyes water. She positions herself against the cab. She tries to get her bearings back, slamming another clip into the Ruger pistol, shoving it into her belt, and then swinging the Remington around into shooting position. Austin huddles behind her, aiming the Garand at the sparking, flaring gunfire coming from inside the fences.

Lilly is lifting the scope to her eye when all at once she sees a tiny object floating up through space above the razor-wire fence tops and everything slows down.

A momentary lull in the firefight ensues unexpectedly, and the fast-forward motion of the skirmish slams on its brakes. In her mind’s eye, Lilly sees the projectile arcing over their heads in extreme slow motion until it lands on the ground in front of a big Buick sedan, bouncing once and clattering under the car’s dented front grillwork.

The explosion that follows rocks the earth and sucks the air pressure out of the landscape, turning the pasture—just for an instant—into the surface of the sun.

*   *   *

The grenade propels the two-thousand-pound vehicle into the air, tearing shrapnel from its front half and sending every man and woman within a fifty-yard radius falling to their feet. The boom shatters eardrums and rattles the trees and throws the Governor and Gabe into different directions, each man sprawling to the ground and rolling.

The Governor slams into the undercarriage of the tank, his breath squeezed from his lungs as he catches a bleary glimpse from his one working eye of the projectile-spray blooming in the sun—razor-sharp particles of the Buick’s front end—ripping through the closest, unsuspecting combatants. Jagged pieces of metal punch through portly old Charlie Banes, tearing a chunk out of his chest, lifting him four feet off the ground and sending him hurling backward, arms pinwheeling, the gush of lifeblood enrobing him in liquid scarlet as he lands in the weeds, his heart shutting down and his life draining out of him before he even stops rolling.

At the same exact moment, on the other side of the lot, a constellation of shards like tiny missiles have passed through Rudy Warburton’s upper body, causing him to momentarily jitterbug in a gruesome death dance, his gun flying off, his deep, whiskey-cured voice—the same ringside announcer’s voice that proudly introduced the Governor to crowds at the racetrack arena—now bellowing a death wail that sets the Governor’s teeth on edge.

“F-FUCK!” The Governor rolls out from under the tank, gasping for breath and seeing double through his lone eye. He tries to focus on the ground. His eye patch has come askew. Blades of crabgrass are in his hair, the stench of burning fuel in his nostrils. His body screams with pain. His bandaged face feels wet and hot, his phantom arm twisting and clawing at the air on its ghostly stump. “F-FFF-FUCK!—F-FFFF-FUCK!!”

He rises to his hands and knees, his ears ringing, his brain blazing with rage. He barely hears the return fire screaming over his head. Most of the surviving militia have ducked behind cover and have started firing wildly at the guard towers and the nooks across the prison grounds. The air ignites with tracers and ricochets. A total of six men lie in heaps around the blackened, scorched earth cratered by the grenade blast.

Charlie is gone. Rudy, Teddy Grainger, Bart, Daniel, and even big Don Horgan, the wrestler—all gone—mutilated to shreds by either gunfire or the deadly shrapnel.

The Governor sees Gabe on his back about thirty feet away, next to the flatbed, his head drooping, the concussion blast knocking him silly. Magnesium-hot rage courses through Philip as he struggles to his feet, wincing painfully as .50 cal bursts zing over his head. On top of a nearby flatbed truck cab, the machine gunner, Ben Buchholz, sprays the prison grounds furiously, without strategy or purpose. A quick glance at the southeast guard tower reveals puffs of white flame as a lone sniper rains pinpoint shots down on the convoy, the bullets ringing off fenders, shattering windshields, and nipping at the heels of surviving militiamen.

“GABE!”

The Governor’s voice sounds muffled and garbled to his own damaged ears. He manages to dart across the gap between the tank and the flatbed. By this point, Gabe is hauling himself back to his feet, blinking away the shock and pain. The Governor reaches the fat man and grabs the nape of his turtleneck as though lifting a runt from a litter. “GET THE FUCK OVER HERE!”

Philip drags Gabe across the wasted ground to the rear of the Abrams.

“C’MERE!” The Governor slams the portly Gabriel Harris against the back of the tank, knocking the wind out of Gabe’s lungs as more high-velocity blasts ping and spark off the armored Abrams.

“Wh-what the—!!” Gabe convulses with agony, jerking at the buzz-saw grind of the .50 cal twenty yards away. Bullets blaze around them for a moment, distracting them, making each of them duck and twitch with nervous tension, giving each man a weird sort of tunnel vision.

Neither man sees the giant, battered, road-worn Winnebago camper roaring out of the trees directly to the west, skirting the edges of the battlefront in a fogbank of dust. In fact, at first, nobody in the attack force notices the new addition to the war zone.

*   *   *

“We have got to rethink this fucking thing,” Gabe proclaims a few seconds later in a strangled, exhausted voice, standing with the Governor behind the armored tank while bullets whiz over their heads like wasps. Burning his gaze into the Governor’s solitary eye, speaking loudly enough to be heard above the noise of intermittent gunfire, Gabe deploys a tone of voice he has never used with the Governor—a tone dripping with recrimination and anger. “Our people are scared shitless! They’re getting the shit beat out of them—dropping like flies—you gotta do something, man, you gotta fucking take charge!”

The Governor’s left hand thrusts out and grabs Gabe by the throat, slamming the heavyset man against the riveted hull of the Abrams. “Shut your fucking mouth, Gabe! We’re not gonna pussy out this time—we’re taking this place down—it’s now or never!!”

In that tense millisecond of a pause, Gabe stares wide-eyed at his boss—his mentor, his father figure—and a spark of shame kindles in Gabe’s gaze. Neither man is aware of the Winnebago circling around the far western edge of the battlefield, far enough back to go unseen by most of the combatants—even those within the confines of the prison. The camper skids to a stop in a whirlwind of dust, and a figure appears like a specter on the roof, a solitary woman holding a sniper rifle.

“Okay, okay, I’m s-sorry, sorry,” Gabe babbles, both his gloved hands on the Governor’s wrist, trying to wrench it off the ample girth of his bullish neck. Philip releases his grip. Gabe hyperventilates as he goes on raving over the noise of the firefight. “I’m just saying, we’re getting beat up and we need a plan! We can’t just keep hammering away at these cocksuckers without a—”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Philip Blake trains his blazing eye on the burly man and hears voices in his head bubbling up from the dark catacombs of his brain—Philip’s dead, gone, Philip is dead and buried, he’s dust—and Philip flinches suddenly at the unexpected banshee shrieking in his head—Shut up, shut up! Guns roar behind him, the crackle making him twitch, distracting him from the sight of the lone sniper standing on the roof of a rust-pocked camper hundreds of yards away, ghostly in the mirage of heat rays on the edge of the forest.

“Listen, listen to me, you chicken-shit fat body—we’re not gonna fucking pull back again!” Philip manages to bellow in a strangled voice, shoving Gabe across the slimy iron bulwark of the tank. “You understand?! You got that?! We’re gonna end this thing NOW!—NOW!!”

Gabe backs away, rubbing his neck, blinking back tears of dread, looking suddenly like a little boy who would say or do anything to appease his abusive father, who would lie and steal and kill and rape and pillage, anything to please his angry parent and squelch the taunts of schoolkids who once called him a big tub-o-lard.

The single shot that rings out from the west, a large-caliber bullet fired with the precision of a beesting from the roof of a mobile home 350 yards away, hits the exposed part of Gabriel Harris’s skull.

The Governor jerks back as Gabe’s head erupts, washing the tank with a splash of gelatinous pink brain matter, forming a giant fuchsia blot on the iron. The Governor’s breath freezes in his lungs as Gabe teeters on wobbly legs for a moment, his glassy eyes fixed on Philip, a death stare reminiscent of a computer crashing, locked onto Philip’s face, endlessly looking for a parent’s approval that will never come. And then the big man collapses as if swooning.

He hits the earth with a thud that wakes Philip up with the force of a cold slap.

“MOTHERFUCK!”

Philip Blake lurches behind the tank and peers around the other side.

“FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!—FUCK!!” In quick stages, he sees the distant Winnebago and glimpses the female figure standing boldly on the roof like some mythical creature, some Valkyrie swooping down from the heavens to aid and assist the inhabitants of the prison, and finally he notices the pickup truck parked fifty feet off his left flank in the weeds. He sees Gus crouched behind the rear gate, firing an AR-15 at will, cursing and firing and cursing.

“GUS!” Philip roars. “GET IN YOUR TRUCK AND DRIVE IT UP THAT WOMAN’S ASS—RIGHT NOW!!”

It takes only a moment for Gus to see what the Governor is talking about. With a terse nod, Gus gets moving, staying low and duckwalking around the other side of the Chevy S-10 to the cab. He climbs behind the wheel, the windshield already cracked into a million diamond-bright shards of broken glass from all the gunfire.

The tailpipe coughs vapor as Gus slams it into drive and blasts off toward the camper.

The Governor goes over to Gabe’s body and untangles the Bushmaster rifle from the dead man’s shoulder, and by the time Philip has straightened back up and taken stock of the battlefront, things have begun to go from bad to worse.

*   *   *

From behind the tail gate of the M35, Lilly Caul watches the chain of events unravel and implode like a nuclear reaction, her lungs heaving for air, her heart banging as loudly as a timpani drum against her rib cage. She grips her Remington with sweat-sticky hands and jerks at the concussive blast of metal on metal thundering on the horizon to the west. She peers around the edge of the hatch just in time to see Gus ramming his pickup into the Winnebago, nearly breaking the massive camper in two.

The impact sends particles of broken glass and shards of trim and metal fittings into the air and throws the sniper—a fair-haired woman in a ponytail and prison dungarees—cartwheeling off the roof and into the weeds on the edge of the woods. It’s hard to tell at this distance, but it looks as though Gus has been hit—his door springing open on impact, his squat body flopping out of the cab, a swirl of black smoke obscuring the crash site.

Lilly hears a strangled, maniacal laugh and glances to her left and sees the Governor crouched behind the tank watching Gus’s pickup and what’s left of the Winnebago go up in a mushroom cloud of smoke and flame. “TAKE THAT, BITCH—YOU FUCK WITH US!—YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT!” He sounds to Lilly like he’s finally slipped his tether.

“Jesus … Jesus … this is insane!” Lilly ducks behind the hatch and jumps at a booming series of blasts that nearly pop her eardrums, the gunfire coming from inches away. She wrenches around and sees Austin, crouched behind the opposite end of the hatch, firing his Garand at the guard tower, the .308 shells booming and ringing. He’s yelling something. Lilly tries to get his attention. “Austin!—AUSTIN!”

“—fuckers are picking us off like flies!” He shoots some more, glancing at Lilly, shooting, then glancing at her again with eyes blazing. “C’mon!—Lilly, what’s wrong?!—Whaddaya doing?!”

“Save your ammo, pretty boy!”

“Whaddaya talking about?!”

“You’re gonna—!”

Lilly starts to explain that they have a finite amount of rounds and they need to get better positions and these bastards could lob another grenade at any second when the sound of the Governor’s voice rings out above the gunfire. She twists back around and sees him limping across the battlefield, his face filled with psychotic glee.

“Only a matter of time now!” He walks toward a pair of shooters huddled behind a pile of fallen supply crates, firing blindly at the towers. “We got ’em pinned down! Motherfuckers can’t last!”

One of the shooters behind the crates—an older man with thinning hair and yellow aviator sunglasses—looks up from his scope when a round hits him in the left eye.

The blast shatters the aviator lens and bursts out the back of his skull. He convulses backward, his rifle flying out of his hands—his brain matter spraying the weeds behind him—as he collapses less than ten feet from where the Governor is shuffling along.

“We got them right where we want them!” Philip strides along behind the row of vehicles and shooters like a black-clad General MacArthur. “Don’t let them take a fucking breath! Keep the pressure on!”

“Hey—Governor!” Lilly tries to get his attention from behind the M35. “HEY!”

Another hail of bullets streaks down from the tower—the Governor doesn’t even flinch, the blasts puffing at his feet—and all at once another militia member goes down in a burst of blood mist from the back of his skull, the man’s Caterpillar cap flying off as he drops to the ground.

“GOVERNOR!!” Lilly screams at the man. “THEY’RE KILLING US!—WE CAN’T DO THIS!”

Some of the men are backing away from the line of fire now, searching for cover, running this way and that, diving under truck chassis.

“The fuck are you doing?!” the Governor booms at the retreating troops. “WE CAN’T GIVE UP NOW!! WE CAN’T LET THEM WIN!!”

Another volley of sniper fire drives Lilly back to the ground behind the M35—Austin on his belly inches away from her—gouts of turf kicking up with each blast, dirt spitting in their faces. Dizziness washes over Lilly and threatens to steal her eyesight, her ears ringing so badly now the gunfire sounds as if it’s underwater—PLING! PLING!—PLINK-PLINK-PLINK!!—and she hears the Governor bellowing something and tries to see through the growing haze of dust and gun smoke engulfing the meadow.

“FUCK IT!” The Governor marches toward the tank like a wooden soldier, his single arm flexing stiffly, his solitary gloved hand balled into a tight fist. “FUCK IT!—FUCK IT!!—FUCK IT!!—IT’S TIME TO END THIS!!”

He reaches the Abrams and then climbs up the steel side ladder.

In Lilly’s compromised vision, as watery and bleary as runny ink, she can barely take in the surreal sight of the Governor pounding on the tank’s hatch, as though he has a parcel to deliver to the crew. He howls at Jared to let him in, and the hatch unscrews suddenly, springing open like a jack-in-the-box. The Governor plunges down into the darkness of the enclosure, the hatch slamming shut just as his booming cry reaches Lilly’s ringing ears: “—JUST DRIVE!”

A plume of dense smoke suddenly spews from the back of the tank as the treads engage. The engine roars, and the beast begins to move.

Lilly freezes on the ground, gaping at the bizarre sight of the armored monolith rolling toward the fence. Her irises dilate involuntarily, her breath stalling in her throat, as she sees the course of the battle suddenly take an unexpected turn.

*   *   *

The tank rattles toward the chain-link barrier, mowing over the last few walkers that still stand in its way, the massive treads pulverizing rotten bones and flesh. The front of the tank slams into the fence, the chain link and concertina wire heaving, the reverberations traveling a city block in each direction. The noise is like a metallic rainstorm.

The outer fence gives way in a paroxysm of steel ripping apart.

The Abrams grinds over the first barrier with the ease of a giant trash compactor, smoke billowing from its turbine, treads smashing the chain link into spaghetti. A hundred yards of cyclone fence in each direction collapses as the beast crosses the gap to the next fence. The second barrier goes down as easily as the first.

While all this is transpiring, Lilly observes the eerie cease-fire inside the prison grounds. The only sounds now—barely audible above the creaking, complaining, ringing chain-link fences—are footsteps running in all directions, as the folks inside scatter for cover.

In a dust cloud of haze and crisscrossing sniper fire pinging off the tank’s iron carapace, the Abrams devours the last barrier—the innermost fence—as sparks snap and crackle in the air. Most of the walkers in the general vicinity have been vanquished either in the cross fire or beneath the treads of the tank.

Now the ricochets echo eerily across the passageways between cellblocks.

Soon, even the towers go silent and still as the armored monolith comes to rest twenty feet inside the gate, trailing shreds of metal linkage in its treads like particles of food stuck in the teeth of a ravenous monster. The engine revs for a moment, almost like an overture to the next movement of this terrible symphony. Exhaust huffs from the ass-end of the tank. The pause that follows—the duration of which is mere seconds—seems to Lilly to last for hours.

“Lilly?! You all right?! Talk to me!” Austin’s voice, barely audible to Lilly, cuts through the white noise of her racing thoughts. She turns and sees him huddled next to her behind the M35’s rear gate, his M1 Garand gripped white-knuckle tight. “Whaddaya think?” he asks her with fear shimmering in his eyes. “What now?”

She starts to mumble something in response when the sound of another voice cuts through her daze.

“C’mon, we got them outnumbered!” It comes from behind her. She twists around and sees the remaining members of the militia coming out from behind the vehicles with their guns raised and ready. Tom Blanchford, a big mechanic from Macon, has his back pressed against the side of his flatbed. “C’mon!—Let’s put these evil bastards out of their misery once and for all!—COME ON!!”

One by one, creeping low and quick, weaving between the vehicles, the surviving men and women of the Woodbury militia make their way across the battlefield, over the smashed remnants of mangled chain link, and into the prison.

“Let’s do this,” Austin says, rising to his feet, and then reaching down to help Lilly up.

For the briefest instant, she pauses. She stares at Austin’s hand. She feels the pulse of acid throbbing in her spine, down her arms and legs, tasting of copper and blood in her mouth.

Then, in a hoarse, faint whisper, she says, “Yeah, let’s finish it.”

She takes his hand, springs to her feet, swings the Remington around into shooting position, gives a quick nod, and charges into the fray.

SIXTEEN

Inside the prison yard, in a fogbank of dust, the tank’s top hatch bursts open and a dark, cadaverous, blood-caked face surfaces like a shark emerging from the oceanic darkness. “OPEN FIRE!—KILL THEM ALL!!—WE GOT THEM PINNED DOWN!!”

On either side of the tank, a total of seven members of the Woodbury militia fan out in different directions, most of them leading with the barrels of their assault rifles, shooting at anything that moves. The exercise yard crawls with chaos for a moment. The prison’s inhabitants flee for cover, retreating into the convolutions of the buildings—cockroaches vanishing into cracks.

Bursts of automatic gunfire crackle and echo back and forth. Movement blurs. The Governor shouts orders from the tank’s hatch that get drowned in the noise. Gunners on either side dart behind the corners of buildings or under shadowy overhangs, searching for cover and purchase in the onslaught. One of the Governor’s men takes the initiative to climb the southeast guard tower, his buck knife clenched between his teeth, his M4 strapped to his shoulder.

The tide of the battle has turned, the denizens of the prison now scattering for cover and the most expedient ways to escape.

*   *   *

Lilly and Austin follow the last contingent over the fallen fence and into the prison yard, their heavy boot-steps making the chain link jangle. They move quickly with their guns cocked and ready, hot on the heels of two other men, the sun in their eyes. Lilly has a pistol in each hand, her Remington strapped and bouncing on her shoulder. Austin hyperventilates as he runs, a combination of fear, exhaustion, and rage.

The passage of time seems to slow, now moving in milky, syrupy impressions, as Lilly and Austin reach the closest building—thirty feet away from the Governor’s tank—and slam their backs against the stone wall. Lilly’s heart races. Even amid the adrenaline rush of storming the grounds, she feels a surreal kind of claustrophobia inside the massive compound. Three-story cellblocks press down on them from all sides, throwing long shadows on the yards. The air has the acrid smell of overloading circuits and burning rubber. Muffled voices and the sound of running emanate from within the walls.

A moment later, Lilly jerks at a flash of movement between two buildings, raises one of the Rugers, fires a single shot at the blur, and hits nothing but stucco wall. She sees the puff of plaster dust atomizing in the shadows twenty yards away. She glances across the yard at the tank. She sees the Governor climbing out of the iron beast with a Tec-9 pistol gripped in his gloved hand. Then she sees something else in the distance behind the Governor that makes her spine go cold and her throat go as dry as sawdust.

Way out across the adjacent meadow—the earth now scarred and rutted with tire tracks, scorched and cratered from the grenade blast, and littered with the carnage of the undead—Lilly can see the distant forest. Up along the ridge, behind colonnades of ancient oaks and dense curtains of foliage, the woods teem with innumerable ragged figures birthing themselves from the shadows, pushing their way out of the undergrowth—hundreds of them—emerging stiff-legged and ravenous into the daylight. There are so many of them now that they resemble, from this distance, a black tide—a putrefied dark wave the width of a soccer field—slowly unfurling and rolling down the hill toward the noise and confusion of the prison. In that horrible instant, over the course of a single electrical impulse firing in her brain, Lilly makes a spontaneous calculation. Within a matter of minutes—ten, perhaps, maybe fifteen at the most—the prison will be overrun.

*   *   *

The Governor climbs down the tank’s steel hull and takes a supervisory position behind the stern of the Abrams. Most of the surviving inhabitants of the prison have now vanished inside cellblocks and outbuildings, but a few of the sturdier souls have remained outdoors, putting up halfhearted resistance, the intermittent crackle of suppressing fire and panicky shouts making Philip Blake twitch and flinch as he points at one of his soldiers.

“HEY! YOU!” The Governor signals to a tall, rangy man with a shaved head who is busily firing his assault rifle at the barred windows of the nearest building, a man Philip has seen on Martinez’s crew before, a man whose name Philip never bothered to learn. “C’mere!”

The man ceases firing and trots over to the Governor. “Yessir?”

The Governor speaks with jaws clenched, his wounds tingling, the voices in his head plaguing him now like static crackling on a shortwave radio, distant signals from a ghostly transmission interfering with his thoughts. “There ain’t many of them left!” he shouts at the bald man. “I want you to gather a few of your men—are you fucking listening to me?”

A manic nod from the bald man. “Y-yessir—yes.”

“I want you to take your men inside—understand?—you’re looking for anyone hiding or trying to hold out inside—you follow me?”

“Yessir … and you want us to … what?”

The Governor snarls at him. “I want you to fucking read them a fucking bedtime story.… YOU FUCKING IDIOT, I WANT YOU TO WASTE THEM!”

With a nod, the man with the shaved head whirls and runs off in the direction of the other gunman. The Governor watches him for a moment, twitching, his blood-spattered face prickling hotly, his wounded jaw throbbing and feverish. He shakes off the voice reverberating behind his thoughts and murmurs to himself, “Only a matter of time now … so shut the fuck up … leave me alone.”

He sees a shadow flit between two buildings dead ahead, fifty yards away, a small group of survivors huddled in an alcove, arguing, two men and a woman … and he ducks down behind the tank, raising Jared’s Tec-9 and taking aim. He gets the woman in his front sight and squeezes off three quick blasts—the recoil nearly dislocating his shoulder—the distant puff of blood mist across the alcove invigorating to him, the sight of the woman dropping to the ground like a blast of smack in his veins.

The Governor nods with satisfaction, but before he can draw another breath, he sees the other two figures—an older man and a younger man, both clad in body armor, maybe father and son—suddenly dart out of the hiding place and make a run for it. They pass out of range quickly, charging toward the motorcade of battered prison vehicles parked along the west side of the grounds. The Governor notices three of his gunmen milling around the base of the guard tower to his left, and he calls out to them. “TAKE THEM BASTARDS DOWN RIGHT NOW!”

Within seconds, the men by the tower open up on the twosome, a barrage of automatic fire bursting like a drumroll—plumes of silver sparks flickering in the daylight—filling the air with ugly noise.

The Governor sees the cross fire engulf the two fleeing men, and a direct headshot knocks the younger man off his feet. The kid in the armor sprawls to the concrete in a swath of blood as dark as crude oil. The older man screeches to a halt and goes back to the younger man.

The gunmen hold their fire now as the older one tries to help the younger one up—it’s hard to see exactly what’s going on out there in the haze of blue smoke and dust, but it appears to the Governor that the older one is sobbing—a father stroking a dying son—cradling the younger man’s ruined skull in his lap, and then letting the wave of agony come out in sobs.

The older man weeps and weeps now on the ground, holding the boy, oblivious to the dangers around him, presumably beyond caring about his own life. The whole thing makes the Governor want to puke.

Philip marches over to the militia members standing sheepishly by the tower, their guns lowered, their stricken gazes locked on the death scene across the yard. “What the fuck is your problem?” the Governor demands as he approaches the first gunman.

“Oh God … I … Oh God.” The man in the Massey Ferguson hat and long sideburns—he goes by the moniker Smitty—once chatted with the Governor at Woodbury’s Main Street Tavern about shooting turkeys for Thanksgiving. Now the man’s grizzled, wind-chapped face has fallen, his red-rimmed eyes welling with tears. “I just … I killed a boy.” He fixes his anguished gaze on the Governor. “I just killed that man’s boy like he was some kinda sick animal.”

The Governor throws a glance across the dusty yard and sees the older man—grizzled, graying temples, late fifties, maybe early sixties—on his knees, slumped over the boy, tears streaming down the geezer’s face. From the jut of the man’s jaw, his pomaded iron-gray hair, and the wind-burned lines around his eyes, he looks like a laborer or farmer, but with a certain gravitas, which makes the crying all the more incongruous. The sight does nothing for the Governor, makes no impression other than a slight tremor of alarm that nobody’s blowing this wrinkled fuck away. The Governor turns back to Smitty and says, “Listen to me, listen, this is important—you listening?”

The man named Smitty wipes his face with the back of his arm. “Y-yessir.”

“How many of our people did that so-called ‘boy’ kill with his fucking rifle? Huh? HOW MANY?!”

Smitty looks down. “Okay … I get it.”

The Governor puts his gloved hand on the man’s shoulder and squeezes. “You should be proud that you killed him!” Then a gentle shove. “C’mon! Get your ass in gear—this isn’t over yet!”

“Okay,” Smitty says with a terse nod. “Okay.” He looks down at his rifle and slams another shell in the breach with a grunt, his voice barely a whisper now. “Whatever.”

The Governor has another thought and starts to say something else when a streak of movement off to his left crosses his peripheral vision. He snaps his head toward the nearest building and sees four figures darting out of a side exit. At first, the Governor just points and starts to say, “There!—THERE—HERE COMES—!”

But his words stick in his throat when the identity of two of these figures suddenly registers over the space of a heartbeat.

He recognizes the big, handsome man named Rick—the self-proclaimed leader—limping furiously across the grounds, his tattered prison coveralls now bunched in the midsection with heavy bandages where he was shot. He trundles along with a woman on one flank, a little boy of about nine on the other. Rick helps the woman leap over a pile of wreckage as though she’s sick. Plunging through the fogbank of dust, wide-eyed and frantic, they look as if they’re making a break for the far gate on the northwest corner of the yards. Following closely on their heels, the fourth figure—a younger woman in a stained white lab coat—carries a lever-action Winchester and already has the weapon raised to her eye.

The Governor recognizes Alice and suddenly cries out to his minions. “TAKE THAT BACKSTABBING BITCH DOWN!”

*   *   *

Thirty yards to the east, under the overhang of Cellblock D, Lilly Caul sees the encounter developing across the wasted grounds, the first bark of automatic fire shattering the temporary lull in the assault, raising hackles on her neck—and she swings her gun up—forgetting, just for a moment, the oncoming horde of undead.

Already the battalion of walking corpses, as densely packed as a stockyard full of cattle, have made their way down the far slopes of the meadow and have begun shuffling and trundling as one great undulating mob of rotting paralytics across the tall grass of the adjacent pasture. They look from this great distance like an invasion force, an army of dead centurions hailing from some hellish necropolis—arms outstretched, banging into each other, heads lolling, eyes like yellow reflectors catching the pale sunlight—coming into clearer and clearer focus as they approach the outer fences. From Lilly’s vantage point, their myriad varieties of age, shape, size, gender, and degree of decomposition are all still a blur, but they’re getting close enough to smell and hear. The rancid aroma of gaseous decay and incessant choruses of toneless moaning rise on the gentle breezes of the afternoon.

Distracted by the appearance of Rick Grimes, his family, and Alice, her adrenaline spiking with equal parts panic and rage, Lilly has lost track of the terrible onslaught of the dead and now grabs Austin with her free arm. “Look!” She pulls him toward the skirmish across the grounds. “Look who it is! Jesus Christ, Austin—COME ON!”

They dash across the leprous cement of a defunct basketball court, their weapons raised and ready to fire. Dead ahead, about twenty yards away, half a dozen militiamen fire on the fleeing family.

“Go!—Keep going!—RUN!!” Alice cries out at Rick, and then fires off a series of wild shots.

Lilly bounds headlong toward the fracas, her teeth cracking with tension. She sees Alice making a feeble attempt to keep firing long enough to give the Grimes family a chance to flee. But the nurse is quickly overcome. One of the rounds chews through her leg, knocking her feet out from under her, another one grazing her shoulder and sending her to the ground.

Lilly gets close enough to see the Governor marching toward the nurse.

Alice looks up with blood on her face, seeing three separate men approaching her commando-style with muzzles raised, and she spits. “FUCK YOU!”

She fires one last time, hitting one of the men next to the Governor in the gut.

“FUCKING BITCH!” The Governor lunges at her and kicks her rifle from her hands.

Lilly approaches from the opposite direction with her Remington ready to fire, and she aims it down at the fallen nurse. She makes eye contact with Alice, and Alice holds her gaze, and for the briefest moment, the two women stare silently at each other. Lilly can barely recognize the woman who was once her friend and confidante. Alice spits blood at Lilly, and Lilly feels a twinge of rage like a match tip igniting in her guts.

In her peripheral vision, she can see the Grimes family fleeing toward the far gates. A shot rings out—a near miss—sparking off the concrete at Rick’s heels.

The one-armed Governor looms over the fallen nurse and jacks the cocking mechanism on his Tec-9 by yanking it down against his belt with a loud metallic click. His teeth are showing. He breathes thickly through his nostrils as Alice closes her eyes and looks away. She’s ready to die. The Governor aims the Tec-9 at her face and growls softly at her, “… traitor…”

The single burst from the Tec-9 makes Lilly jump as the back of Alice’s head erupts in a wet red particle bomb across the concrete.

“Take them out,” the Governor says softly to Lilly, but Lilly doesn’t hear him at first.

“What?” She looks up from the murdered nurse. “What was that?”

The Governor scowls at Lilly. “I said take those motherfuckers out.” He points the pistol’s muzzle at the fleeing family. “NOW!”

Lilly assumes a shooting stance and squares her shoulders and sucks in a breath, raising the weapon toward the three figures fleeing in the distance. They are twenty-five yards away from freedom.

Over the course of that next second and a half, before she puts the scope to her eye, Lilly glimpses several things out of the corner of her eye that register like screaming warning alarms in her brain. She sees the other members of the Governor’s army whirling toward the devastated cyclone fence, some of them backing away, wide-eyed and jittery. Outside the mangled remnants of chain-link barricade, the tsunami of walking dead rolls toward the prison.

Closing the distance to about fifty yards now, the leading edge of the herd looks like a nightmarish chorus line of encephalitic monsters dressed in ragged civvies—moldering suits, tattered dresses dark with bile, and denim overalls hanging in shreds—their autonomic yellow stares fixed on the fresh meat scurrying across the grounds. The stench engulfs the general area, mingling with the dust devils, forming a fogbank of death scent. The dissonant symphony of mortified vocal cords rises to the level of a psychotic marching band, now throbbing and droning with the off-key music of their insatiable moaning.

Lilly focuses on the task at hand, and puts the scope to her eye.

For a single, frenzied instant she calculates the distance and the drop rate, and all at once she registers the fleeing woman, now running one half step behind Rick Grimes and holding something close to her chest.

Through the cross hairs, the woman’s cargo looks like ordnance of some kind—a bomb, a bundle of grenades, a short-barreled automatic weapon wrapped in cloth—so Lilly puts the woman in her sights.

She holds her breath, puts the center hairs on the woman, and quickly, decisively yanks the trigger.

The recoil punches Lilly’s shoulder, and one nanosecond later she sees the woman come apart in the scope’s telescopic lens.

In the narrow, magnified field of vision it looks like a silent movie death, the woman’s back opening up in a bloom of scarlet, her body thrown off stride, the impact of the .308 round tearing through her body as well as her mystery package—sending fragments of bone, tissue, blood mist, and fabric into the air.

The woman sprawls to the ground on top of the bundle, a tiny object flopping out of a blanket, visible now in the scope’s tunnel vision. Lilly freezes. The scope adheres to her eye socket as though dipped in liquid nitrogen. She stares at the object.

Lilly’s midsection goes cold as she stares and stares at that pink, smooth object visible in the upper right quadrant of the scope.

The distant howl of anguish from the man named Rick reaches Lilly’s ears. The man scuttles to a stop, gazing over his shoulder in absolute horror at his fallen wife. He stands paralyzed for a moment, staring at the fatally wounded woman and the object sticking out from under her chest. The boy reaches the fence and turns to see what happened, and the man waves him on. “Don’t look back, Carl! JUST KEEP RUNNING!!”

The boy darts toward a flatbed truck parked near the northwest gate, as more shots ring out from some of the other militiamen, but now the man named Rick lunges toward the boy, grabs him. “NO, CARL! WE WON’T MAKE IT TO THE TRUCK—!” The man spins the child in the other direction. “WE’VE GOTTA GO THIS WAY!—KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN AND, WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T STOP RUNNING!”

Lilly barely notices the man and boy changing course and heading back along the fence toward the opposite gate, which is now crowded with the first wave of walking dead, the leading edge of the herd shambling over the chain-link wreckage and pouring into the prison with mouths working and dead arms reaching and flailing. They come one by one through the massive gap in the fence, fanning out across the yards in their slow-motion stampede, hungry yellow eyes scanning, but Lilly is beyond caring.

She can’t tear her gaze from the scope, or stop staring at the tiny, fleshy object sticking out from under the fallen wife, an object that reveals itself to be an arm.

A baby’s arm.

*   *   *

At first, the Governor doesn’t notice Lilly’s catatonic stupor. He’s preoccupied with the quickly shifting dangers coming at them—the first wave of corpses now less than fifty yards away, shuffling awkwardly across the cracked cement toward the surviving militia—spreading their stench and noise like a pox on the barren grounds.

The Governor can see Rick Grimes and his boy reach the gap between the two demolished fences and weave through the oncoming horde, the man firing into the heads of the closest creatures, making an opening through which they can escape, creating quite a racket. “Crazy fucks,” Philip grumbles to his men. “Don’t waste any more bullets—the biters will get them before we can.”

Sure enough, Rick and his son’s frenzied flight begins to draw the attention of the leading edge of the herd, giving the Governor and his men time to clean up and take possession of the prison.

“What the fuck?” The Governor notices the older man in body armor twenty-five yards away, slumped on his knees next to the body of his son. “Why the fuck is that old bastard still breathing?”

Next to Philip, a gangly former high school math teacher nicknamed Red gives a nervous shrug, fingering the trigger pad of his AR-15, glancing over his shoulder at the herd bearing down on them, then glancing back at the old man in body armor. “Wasn’t moving—dropped his gun, looked like he was surrendering.”

The Governor walks over to the old man. The buzzing drone of the walkers fills the air. Philip feels as though ants are crawling on his skin. He can see the encroaching horde out of the corner of his one good eye. His phantom arm itches as he trains his Cyclopean gaze down at the sobbing man with gray slicked-back hair.

The old man slowly looks up as though seized up in a bad dream, still struggling to wake up. The two men make eye contact. “Dear God,” he mutters softly, almost as if reciting a litany. “Please … just kill me.”

The Governor puts the muzzle of the Tec-9 against the furrowed brow of the old man. But he doesn’t pull the trigger—not at first—he just presses it against the man’s forehead for an endless moment, staring, hearing the incessant crackle of radio interference in his head:… dust to dust, dead and gone, he’s gone, Philip Blake is gone.

The blast of the Tec-9 cuts off the voice and sends the old man into the void.

For a moment, Philip Blake stares down at the old man now lying in a fresh pool of deep-crimson blood next to his son, the puddle spreading, forming wings on the cement, like a Rorschach inkblot test, two angels lying in state, one next to the other—martyrs, sacrificial lambs. Philip starts to turn away when he hears another voice, anguished and grief-stricken, coming from somewhere nearby.

He turns and sees that Lilly Caul has moved across the yard, and now stands over the Grimes woman, who lies frozen in death on top of the pale remains of her baby. Austin Ballard stands twenty feet away from her, looking horror-struck and confused, spinning toward the oncoming biters. The herd has progressed across the grounds, closing the distance to about thirty yards or so. The stink and noise have risen to unbearable levels, and now some of the Governor’s men have begun firing at the front line, picking off the closest ones—one after another—the escaping fluids painting the weathered cement Day-Glo red and squid-ink black.

“What the fuck is her problem?” the Governor says to no one in particular as he strides over to where Lilly stands, slowly shaking her head, her Remington still gripped in one hand, tendrils of glistening auburn hair unmoored from her ponytail and dangling in her face.

The Governor yells at her, “What the fuck is wrong with you?—We gotta get our asses inside!—WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING DEAL?!—ANSWER ME!!!”

Very slowly she turns and scorches him with such a contemptuous look that it nearly takes his breath away. She utters something that he doesn’t hear at first, his one-eyed gaze held rapt by her blazing stare.

“What was that?” he demands of her, his single gloved hand balling into a fist.

“You monster,” she says again, louder this time, through clenched teeth.

The Governor goes very still, serpentine-still, a boa coiling itself in the presence of a threat—all this in spite of the looming threat of the horde filling the general vicinity with the odor of rotten meat and the sound of broken gears grinding and groaning. Very carefully, enunciating every word, the Governor says, “What. The. Fuck. Did. You. Just. Say to me?”

Austin whirls toward the Governor and raises his gun as though trying to decide whom to shoot.

“I said,” Lilly Caul barks at him, her words like darts now, projectiles aimed at his face, fueled by scalding tears tracking down her face, “you are a fucking monster! LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO?!” Without tearing her gaze from him, she gestures down at the murdered woman and baby, the pathetic carnage joined in the eternal bond of mother clutching child to her bosom. “JUST FUCKING LOOK!!”

He does look now, and he does see, and maybe for the first time since he took control of Woodbury, Georgia—since he became the Governor—the man who calls himself Philip Blake does sees the consequences of his actions. “F-fuck,” he utters to himself, his voice drowned by the clamor of gunfire staving off the pitiless, rotting, hellish onslaught now bearing down on them.

“A baby!” Lilly roars at him. “A BABY!” She turns her gun around and slams the butt into the Governor’s face. The pain shoots up the bridge of his noise, the impact making a wet thud that momentarily blinds him and drives him to the ground. “YOU MADE ME KILL A FUCKING BABY!”

The Governor flops onto his back and tries to sit up, but his head is ringing like an alarm, the dizziness washing over him and stealing his breath. “W-what are you—?”

Lilly Caul turns the barrel of her Remington around and lunges at him. She rams the blue-steel muzzle into his mouth hard enough to crack two of his front teeth. The barrel lodges itself so deep in his throat that it forces a strangled gag out of him.

Lilly’s finger starts to tighten on the trigger. Philip Blake’s single eye finds her eyes.

The entire world seems to stop—time standing still—as if hell has at last frozen over.

PART 3

The Fall

The call of death is a call of love.

—Hermann Hesse

SEVENTEEN

“LILLY, DON’T!!” The voice blurts out of the closest militia member—Hap Abernathy, the retired bus driver, in his soiled Atlanta Braves cap and gray eyes, now bugging as big as silver dollars—as the other men press in toward the horrible tableau. Some of them involuntarily raise their hands. Others aim their guns at Lilly’s head. She barely notices her fellow combatants as she stares down intensely at the kneeling Governor, the barrel of her Remington still thrust into the man’s mouth.

Why isn’t she firing? Inside her brain, a clock ticks … impassive, cold, cruel, undeniable … counting off the moments until she finally decides to yank the trigger the rest of the way and bring this terrible era to a conclusion. But she doesn’t pull the lever. She just stares … into the face of the poster boy for all that is base and feral and brutal in the human animal.

What Lilly doesn’t realize, though—at that moment—is that the gunmen have momentarily lost track of the oncoming horde. The first walkers—now shuffling a few paces ahead of the herd—have closed the distance across the weather-beaten grounds to about twenty-five yards. Now they lock their glassy doll eyes on the humans and trundle awkwardly toward the sweet scent of living tissue, their dead arms rising, their fingers curled into talons and innately reaching, clawing the air, eager to rip into the living.

“Lilly, listen to me,” Austin Ballard says as he pushes his way through the other gunmen, pressing in next to her, speaking softly yet urgently into her ear. “You don’t have to do this … listen to me … there are other ways to handle this … you don’t need to do this.”

A single tear traces down from the corner of Lilly’s eye and drips off the edge of her jawline. “A baby, Austin … it was a baby.”

Austin fights his own tears. “I know, sweetie, but listen, listen to me. This is not the way to—”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish his thought because a long shadow suddenly blots out the sun. His Glock still gripped in his right hand, Austin jerks around a split second before the first slimy, molting, clawlike fingers take a swipe at him with feral bloodlust.

Lilly twists around and screams. Austin jerks back and squeezes off four quick blasts—number one going high, numbers two and three going into the head of the closest biter, number four hitting a second one in the jugular. The first biter convulses, a flood of brain fluid and blood showering down over its body before it collapses to the pavement. The second biter rears back, its neck gushing, but it doesn’t go down. It merely backs into its brethren, stupidly knocking over a couple of smaller creatures.

Meanwhile, the rest of the militiamen scatter, furiously blasting away at the army of reanimated corpses engulfing the area. The dusty haze flickers with gunfire, sparking ricochets, and plumes of muzzle flares percolating out of the assault rifles on full auto. Some of the men make mad dashes for the closest ingress—a door partially visible in the shadows of a nearby alcove—while others fire frantically into the heart of the encroaching herd, sending fragments of rotten flesh flying off in all directions.

Lilly turns back to the Governor at the exact moment he makes his move.

Grabbing the barrel of the Remington, Philip slams the butt of the rifle as hard as he can into Lilly’s face. The stock hits her chin, the impact splitting her lower lip, chipping a tooth, sending Roman candles of stars across her field of vision, and knocking her momentarily senseless. She jolts back with a start. The gun slips from her hands and clatters to the pavement as the Governor springs to his feet.

A biter lunges at Lilly, and she smashes a boot into its midsection at the last possible moment. The dead teenager in gouged black leather doubles over and staggers backward but doesn’t go down. Lilly manages to dart away, and while she runs, she reaches around to the back of her belt and grabs her .22, despite her double vision and throbbing, wet, bleeding lip.

“LILLY, THIS WAY!” Austin stands twenty feet north of her now, firing into another wave of biters coming from the opposite direction. He frantically indicates the alcove about thirty-five feet away.

Lilly hesitates. She glances over her shoulder. She sees the Governor whirling around with the Remington rifle in his hands. He blows away a female biter at point-blank range, practically vaporizing the crone’s gray head in an eruption of moldering scalp and particles of rotting brain tissue. The blowback sprays across his face and makes him flinch and stagger backward, coughing and spitting.

A scream rings out in the opposite direction, and Lilly spins around in time to see a Woodbury man—a squat, heavyset pipe-fitter from Augusta named Clint Mansell—succumb to the black teeth of a huge male walker. The corpse latches onto the portly man’s neck, burrowing into the hemorrhaging nerve bundle underneath the fat, while another biter pounces on the man’s back. Clint Mansell’s watery, choked death cry as he goes down gets the rest of the men moving.

“THERE’S TOO MANY OF THEM!” cries one of the older men as he backs toward the alcove, firing bursts from his AK at the gathering horde.

Lilly gets off a series of controlled blasts at a cluster of biters that are closing in on her. Each shot slams through a rotten cranium, sending plumes of black matter out the back of every skull, when she hears the psychotic jabber of the Governor behind her.

“DON’T PANIC! THEY CAN’T—THEY CAN’T OUTRUN—WHERE THE FUCK IS—? SHUT UP! LISTEN TO ME, WE CAN—WE CAN—SHUT THE FUCK UP!!—WE CAN—GET INSIDE THE—CLEAR OUT THE—WE CAN REBUILD THE—WE’VE GOTTA STICK TOGETHER, PEOPLE—FUCK! FUCK!—WE CAN MAKE THIS WORK—!!”

All at once, Lilly feels a tingling sensation at the base of her spine and a strange kind of stillness coursing over her, the noise and chaos fading in her ears to a low drone. She ejects the spent magazine from the Ruger, draws another one from her belt, slams it into the hilt, and racks the slide. Then she turns toward the Governor, who is gibbering at the voices in his head, his back turned to her.

She has about sixty seconds before the next cluster of biters reaches her.

She blocks out everything, the pain, the sound of Austin’s voice calling out to her, the fear, the pandemonium—everything.

Thirty seconds now before the Governor spins around and sees her.

She aims the Ruger at the back of his head and she sucks in a breath.

Fifteen seconds.

She aims.

Ten seconds.

She fires.

*   *   *

Considering the fact that the .22 caliber long-rifle 40-grain round strikes the Governor in the back of his head—plowing through his brain and exiting out his eye socket—he feels surprisingly little pain. His one good eyeball jettisons into the air on the wake of a bloody thread, and the cold wind slams through the trough in his head.

For one horrible instant, like a brain surgery patient remaining lucid and semiconscious during his procedure, he remains upright, standing on faltering knees, his back to his assailant, only semi-aware of his mortality rushing toward him with the unstoppable inertia and brilliant white light of a freight train.

A mere fraction of a second passes before his frontal lobe and the rest of his brain shut down and stop sending involuntary signals to his central nervous system, but it’s enough time for his condition to register to the deepest chasms of his brain, the bad news spreading throughout his cerebral lobes and hemispheres, his memory centers, and the mysterious fissures and convolutions of his secret disorder. The voice in his head returns with renewed strength, giving him even worse news that will carry him into oblivion: Philip Blake has been gone for nearly a year. Philip Blake is dust. Gone. The Governor’s reign has been a sham … a lie.

“NNNGGHHUH—!!” A garbled yowl comes out of the Governor as he blindly staggers for a brief instant, trying to argue one last time with the voice in his head, his body now as heavy as an elephant, a dying elephant gripped in the paralysis of its own dead weight.

The oncoming swarm of biters closes in, their talonlike fingers reaching en masse for the Governor’s warm, nourishing flesh. Their cumulative jet-engine drone of rancid breath and watery groans makes one last impression on the Governor’s auditory nerves, the noise of the biter stampede engulfing him and drowning the inner voice needling the Governor with the savage truth: He’s gone … he’s been gone for ages … he’s in the ground … dead … gone … he no longer exists!

The Governor barely feels the sensation of being kicked in the small of the back by Lilly.

Her final nudge sends him reeling forward blindly, his one good arm pinwheeling futilely, almost comically, like the fin of a fish, as he plunges into the rotting, desiccated bosom of the reanimated cadavers. The biters practically catch him with their flailing arms and snapping jaws, and he collapses into the throng, writhing in the awful darkness, finding his voice one last time.

“PHILIP BLAKE LIVES!!”

His death cry, albeit hoarse and bloodless and papery thin, is shockingly audible and clear to all those within a hundred-foot radius.

“PHILIP BLAKE LIVES!!” he shrieks as the blackened, slimy teeth descend upon him, driving him to the ground, incisors tearing great mouthfuls of his clothes, burrowing into the soft spots in the seams of his body armor. They go for his exposed neck. They go for his extremities. They go for the concavities of his wounds, chewing through his eye patch, ferreting down into the pulsing meat of his hollowed-out eye socket. They tear through his nose and suck the tissue from his nasal cavity with the vigor of truffle hogs rooting for delicacies. The last warm remnants of the Governor’s life flow out of him in one great hemorrhage that inundates his attackers in a baptismal bath until the feeding frenzy begins to disconnect flesh and sinew from bone, drawing and quartering the body into more manageable pieces … the last ghostly blips of brain activity like a vinyl record stuck on the same incessant skipping phrase over and over again … PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES PHILIP BLAKE LIVES …

Within moments, there’s nothing left but the feeding and the blood …

… and the eternal white noise of Brian Blake’s mind-screen at the end of its programming day.

*   *   *

Now it occurs to Lilly Caul—as she backs away from the horrible scene, bristling with terror, both her Rugers drawn, one in each hand—that the unintended effect of the Governor being devoured by the very creatures he once used as entertainment is a slim opportunity opening up for the survivors—a momentary diversion—as scores of biters engulf the heaping pile of fresh meat. The onslaught has stalled, drawn to the commotion of the feeding frenzy, more and more of the creatures pressing in to get a taste of the still-warm human remains.

The lull in the stampede has left the remaining members of the Woodbury militia standing paralyzed between the herd and the closest building, stricken dumb, staring, watching their leader being reduced to slimy, wet shreds of tissue and clothing before their eyes. Moving on pure adrenaline now, Lilly quickly assesses the situation. In all the excitement, she has momentarily lost track of Austin. But right then, before she has a chance to figure out what happened to him, she sees a clear path to the closest alcove-entrance.

“HEY!” She tries to get the other combatants’ attention, gazing across the grounds at the horrified remnant of four men and one woman—Matthew, Hap, Ben, Speed, and Gloria Pyne—as they back toward the building. “LOOK AT ME! ALL OF YOU LOOK AT ME!”

For a single instant, amidst the adrenaline-soaked horrors of that swarming, smoke-bound prison yard, a subtle yet instant shift in power occurs. Lilly finds a voice that she didn’t know she had, a strange baritone shout from deep within her—her father’s voice, firm but fair, steadfast but humble, and strong enough to shout a coyote off a porch—and she aims it at the group of survivors.

“THAT’S GONNA SLOW A FEW OF THEM DOWN BUT NOT FOR LONG!” She indicates the feeding frenzy in progress across the grounds, and then jerks a thumb at the nearest alcove draped in shadows. “C’MON!—EVERYBODY FOLLOW ME!”

Lilly starts toward the building, the others following her, some of them snapping out of their dazes and firing shots into the swarm. Some of the horde has separated from the feeding frenzy and are lumbering toward the humans, and a series of shots-on-the-fly takes them down in puffs of brain fluid and pieces of rotting skull flying up into the haze. “KEEP MOVING AND KEEP SHOOTING!” Lilly hollers. “I’M ALMOST OUT OF AMMO—WE’VE GOT TO GET—!”

A loud booming blast from behind her cuts off her words, and she whirls in time to see Austin—careening backward to the ground, a pair of biters clawing at his legs—his Glock emptying the last rounds of its last magazine across the tops of the creatures’ heads. Unfortunately, the rounds take the male down but just graze the skull of the female. Austin screams a curse and kicks and flails at her. The big-bellied former housewife—still dressed in her filthy terry-cloth robe, curlers in her slimy hair—snaps her rotten teeth at Austin’s wrists and flailing legs.

“AUSTIN!!”

Lilly charges toward him, closing the gap between them in mere seconds—maybe thirty feet or so—raising both .22s as she runs, sending surgically precise blasts across the distance at the dead housewife. Direct headshots drive the monstrous woman off Austin in a series of skull-shattering eruptions of meat and glistening gray matter, until half her head is gone. She lands beside Austin, her cranium trepanned open like a hollowed-out gourd, showing a cross-section of her infected cerebrum with the scientific precision of a high school biology class. Gas expels from the depths of her malodorous brain cavity, and Austin rolls over, coughing and gagging.

Lilly reaches him, shoves her pistols into her belt, and latches onto one of Austin’s hands with the strength of an iron vise. She yanks him to his feet. “C’mon, pretty boy … we’re outta here.”

“Fine with me,” he utters in a strangled voice, levering himself up.

The two of them race toward the alcove, leading the others out of harm’s way, through a breached metal door and into the unknown chambers of Cellblock D.

*   *   *

Fueled by the eating frenzy, bolstered by the growing number of walkers hauling themselves through the gaps in the fences, the herd engulfs the prison grounds in short order, until multitudes of ragged, molting figures are clumsily crowding every corner, every square foot of every yard and basketball court and walkway. Some of them find entry into buildings through gaping doorways, left open by the exodus of inhabitants. The incredible noise and stink floods the passageways and echoes up into the impassive gunmetal sky.

From high on the ridges overlooking the property, the last of the fleeing inhabitants pauses to gaze back at their temporary home being overrun by the walking dead.

If there is a more indelible portrait of the world’s end, no single soul gazing back at that derelict prison property that day can think of what it would be. The vast compound stretching across several hundred acres of pastureland virtually swims with upright corpses. From such a distant vantage point, it resembles so many black dots in a hellish pointillist painting, the shambling horde filling every nook and cranny, thousands of them, many cocking their dead faces toward the uncaring heavens and letting out yawps and groans as if being consumed from the inside by their overwhelming, cancerous, inescapable hunger. The sight of it brings tears to the eyes of those who lived there in relative safety for many months. The image will live in their minds for the rest of their lives. The prison has become a bellwether of doom.

The last few souls slipping away that day into the adjacent woods stare down at the swarm only briefly, unable to bear looking at it for long before turning away and beginning the next phase of their arduous search for shelter.

*   *   *

A massive thud reverberates the bones of the receiving room, making everybody jump. The prison is collapsing under the weight of the onslaught, the troubling din of thousands of shuffling feet and mortified vocal cords moaning incessantly inside and out, filling the air, as the surviving members of the Woodbury militia huddle in the middle of a desolate, flyspecked, littered foyer, trying to catch their breaths and figure out their next move.

“Austin!” Lilly points at a rack along the room’s back wall, upon which are stacked signposts and flagpoles and implements. “Do me a favor and grab one of those sign poles and reinforce that side door!”

Shuffling with a limp, Austin hurries across the room and grabs one of the iron stands. He turns to a side exit situated under a powerless CORRIDOR D-1 sign and slams the object down across the middle of the door, wedging it under the broken bolt plate and a side hinge at the precise moment another muffled thud strikes outside the door.

Austin jerks with a start as plaster dust rains down and metal creaks, the force of multiple walkers outside the door pressing to get in, trying to get to the source of the human smells that are taunting them.

“They’re gonna break that fucking door in!” Matthew Hennesey cries out from the front of the room. “There’s too fucking many of them!”

“No, there’s not!” Lilly rushes over to the front entrance and starts pushing a metal credenza brimming with heavy file folders and directories across the boarded glass of the front door. “C’mon, gimme a hand with this—Matthew and Ben—get your asses over here!”

They heave and push the immense shelving unit across the door.

The room is a little less than five hundred square feet of shopworn tile flooring and painted cinder-block walls scarred with illegible graffiti and the wear and tear of generations of intake procedures. The air smells chalky and sour, like the inside of an old refrigerator. One wall houses the grimy glass-fronted guard desk, elevated to shoulder height, where newcomers became official wards of the state of Georgia. Another wall is gouged with bullet holes and the cracked, dangling, framed portraits of former wardens and state officials. A lack of power has plunged the room into cold darkness, but the ambient daylight from outside the high, barred windows provides enough illumination for Lilly to see the owlish, terrified faces of her contingent.

In addition to Lilly and Austin, the ragtag group of surviving Woodbury militia consists of the following four men and one woman, now huddled in a tight group in the middle of the receiving room: Matthew Hennesey, the twentysomething bricklayer from Valdosta, now draped in half-empty mag pouches and a sweat-soaked camo jacket; Hap Abernathy, the gaunt, graying, retired school bus driver from Atlanta who currently looks like a candidate for a hip replacement with his pronounced limp and bandaged ribs; Ben Buchholz, a pouchy-eyed man from Pine Mountain who lost his entire family last year in a swarm outside F.D. Roosevelt State Park and now appears to be flashing back to that earlier trauma; Speed Wilkins, a cocky nineteen-year-old high school football star from Athens who, at the moment, looks punch-drunk and dazed by the struggle, all his big-man-on-campus swagger long gone; and Gloria Pyne, her wounded leg wrapped in a crude bandage, her deeply creased, world-weary eyes still glowering out from underneath her I’M WITH STUPID visor, the headgear frayed and spattered with blood and soot.

Another thud makes them all jump. “Take it easy, everybody.” Lilly stands before them with her back to the front entrance door. Each of her Rugers is shoved behind her belt on an opposing hip for easy access, but the problem is, she only has about six rounds left in one magazine, and one round in another, with an extra bullet in each chamber. The sound of scraping sets her teeth on edge and the pressure makes the credenza tremble and creak as the swarm shoves against the door. “This is hugely important—that we stay calm and don’t panic.”

“Are you shitting me?!” Hap Abernathy trains his ancient, gray eyes on her. “Stay calm? Did you happen to notice how many of them things are out there? It’s only a matter of time before—”

“SHUT UP!” Austin booms at the man with fire in his eyes, his outburst uncharacteristic enough to raise even Lilly’s eyebrows. “Just shut the fuck up and let the lady talk or maybe you want to just—!”

“Austin!” Lilly gives him a gentle warning-wave of her gloved hand. She still wears the fingerless driving gloves that Austin gave her the previous night. “It’s okay. He’s just expressing what everybody’s thinking.” Lilly looks at all of them, one at a time, that voice of her father coming through. “I’m asking all of you to trust me, and I will get you out of here.”

She waits for everybody to get their breath back, get their bearings. Hap Abernathy stares at the floor, cradling his AR-15 as though it were a security blanket. Another thud makes them jerk. A cracking noise comes from the depths of the prison; something falls and shatters above them.

The walkers have gotten inside Cellblock D—one of the back entrances had been left open—but nobody knows how many of them have infiltrated the building or what parts of the prison are still secure.

“Hap?” Lilly speaks softly to him. “You okay? You with me on this?”

He nods slowly, staring at the floor. “Yes, ma’am … I’m with you.”

A beat of noisy silence follows as the creaking noises and low, ubiquitous drone of walking dead pressing in on them grips the air with unbearable tension. The thing that nobody expresses at that moment—the gorilla in the room that they all try desperately to ignore—is Lilly’s assassination of the Governor in plain view of everybody only moments earlier. Deep down inside all of them, they expected it to happen in some form sooner or later. They are all children of an abusive father trying to recover from the inevitable yet logical outcome of situations such as these—and like abused children everywhere, they have already begun to repress their unresolved feelings. They look at Lilly now with new eyes. They wait for her to lead.

“We’re safe here in this room,” she says at last. “For the time being at least. We’ll keep close watch on the high windows, and keep the doors as secure as possible. How much ammunition does everybody have?”

It takes a moment for them to figure this out. In all the excitement, they have lost track. Matthew has the deepest reserve—a couple dozen 7.62 mm slugs in his cargo pocket, and seven more in the AK’s magazine—but the rest of them have paltry supplies. Ben’s got eleven 115-grain 9 mm rounds left for his Glock 19. Gloria’s got a full mag of 305.56 mm slugs for her AR-15, and Hap’s got a revolver with six rounds left. Speed’s got a Bushmaster with five rounds still in the clip. And Austin has a single round remaining in his M1 Garand—Gloria loans him her spare Glock 17—which makes Lilly wonder how many bullets she has left in two separate magazines for her .22 caliber pistols. She checks them and confirms that she only has four rounds remaining.

“Okay, so we’re not exactly loaded to the teeth, but we’re safe here,” Gloria finally speaks up, taking off her visor and running her fingers through her dyed red hair. “Then what? What’s the plan? We can’t just stay in this fucking room indefinitely.”

Lilly nods. “I’m thinking we wait out the swarm, give them a chance to clear a little bit.” She looks at them, giving each of them a respectful look as though offering them an option when they really have none. “We’ll stay the night, and then we’ll reassess in the morning.”

A long silence follows, but nobody argues with her.

*   *   *

Late that night, after each of the six survivors have staked out private little corners and recesses within the confines of the intake room (mostly for the purpose of trying to get some semblance of rest), Lilly and Austin find themselves ensconced in the shadows behind the glass-fronted receiving counter. They spread a tarpaulin from the room’s storage locker across the floor for a modicum of comfort, and now they sit slumped on the tarp, their guns on the shelf behind them, their backs resting against the file cabinets along the back wall … as the relentless drone of walkers continues unabated outside the barricaded doors and windows.

For the longest time, neither Lilly nor Austin says a word. They merely pass the time holding each other, stroking each other’s arms and hair. After all, what is there to say? The world has spiraled out of control and they’re just trying to hold on. But Lilly can’t turn her mind off. She keeps dabbing the pearls of blood oozing from her split lip with a Kleenex and noticing little things around them that don’t add up, such as the pine tree deodorizer hanging from the desk lamp above her, or the unexplained bloodstain on the ceiling, or the lump under Austin’s sleeve.

“Wait a minute,” she says at one point very late that night, her stomach growling from nerves and the empty feeling of not having eaten anything for almost twenty-four hours. She looks at the sleeve of Austin’s leather jacket and realizes there are two puncture holes directly over the lump. “What is that?”

“Okay, now don’t get all bent outta shape on me,” Austin says as Lilly reaches down and pulls up his sleeve. Under the cuff, a faded blue bandanna is wrapped around Austin’s wrist, the cloth soaked in blood.

Lilly gently pulls the bandanna back and sees the telltale puncture wounds. “Oh God no,” she utters under her breath. “Please tell me you cut yourself on the fence.”

From the look on his narrow face peering out at her through unruly tendrils of curly hair—an uncanny mixture of sadness, resolve, anguish, and calm—it’s clear he didn’t hurt himself on barbed wire.

EIGHTEEN

Already beginning to darken and turn livid around the edges with infection, the bite marks are so severe—perhaps deep enough to have nipped an artery—that it’s a miracle Austin hasn’t bled to death. Lilly springs to her feet. Mind racing, heart thumping in her chest, she yammers for a moment, “Jesus … Austin, we have to … Jesus Christ … the first-aid kits are in the … fuck … FUCK!”

Austin hoists himself to his feet, replacing the bandanna, wrapping it around the wound. He starts to say something, but Lilly is busily whirling around, madly searching the shelves and drawers of the intake office for something—anything—to stanch the infection. “We have to take care of it immediately before it … SHIT!”

She throws open drawers, rifling through old documents, dusty intake forms, office supplies, candy wrappers, empty bottles of booze. She glances back at Austin and blurts out, “A tourniquet!”

“Lilly—”

She reaches down to the tails of her denim shirt, starts ripping off a strip of fabric, her hands trembling. “We need to apply a tourniquet before—!”

“What the hell’s going on?!”

The voice comes from the opposite end of the intake counter, a figure standing outside the glass partition, audible through the pass-through slot. Gloria Pyne has a packing blanket wrapped around her, and from the puffy redness underneath her eyes she appears to be half asleep. She knocks on the glass.

Lilly takes a deep breath and tries to appear semi-calm. “It’s nothing, Gloria, it’s just—”

“What’s wrong with Austin?” She notices the bloody bandanna. Two other figures—Hap and Ben—appear behind her, gazing through the glass. “Is that a bite?” Gloria stares at the blood-soaked cloth around his wrist. “Did he get bit out there?”

“No, goddamnit, he just—”

“Lilly, come here for a second.” Austin speaks softly to her. He puts his good arm around her and gives her a gentle squeeze. He looks into her eyes and smiles sadly. “It’s too late.”

“What?!—NO!—What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s too late, kiddo.”

“No!—No!—Fuck no!—Don’t say that!” She gazes across the dusty vestibule and sees the entire group now gathered outside the glass, the moonbeams slanting down through the high lintels, silhouetting their tense stares. They’re all gaping at Austin.

“Lilly—” Austin starts to say, but she cuts him off with a raised hand. She turns toward the others. “Go back to sleep, goddamnit, all of you—GO ON! GO BACK! GIVE US SOME FUCKING PRIVACY!!”

Slowly, one by one, they turn away from the glass and slip back into the shadows of the foyer. In the silence that ensues, Lilly turns and searches for the right words. She will not allow him to give up.

Austin touches her face. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?!” She blinks away the tears. She can’t afford to cry right now. Maybe someday she’ll be able to cry again. But not now. Now she has to think of something. Fast. “Okay … look. I’m gonna have to do something radical here.”

He shakes his head calmly. “I know what you’re thinking. Unfortunately, the thing has already gone way beyond amputation, Lilly. I can feel the fever. The thing has already spread. There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late.”

“Goddamnit, would you stop saying that!” She pulls away from him. “I’m not gonna lose you!”

“Lilly—”

“No, no … this is unacceptable!” She licks her lips, gazing around the enclosure, thinking, searching for some answer. She looks back at Austin, and she sees the expression on his face, and all at once the fight goes out of her, and she realizes there is, indeed, nothing she can do for him. Like a balloon deflating, she sags, letting out an anguished sigh. “When did it happen? Was it that big lady walker, jumped you before we came inside?”

He nods. His expression remains tranquil, almost beatific, like a person who’s had a religious conversion. He strokes her shoulder. “You’re gonna survive this thing. I just know it. If anybody can do it, you can.”

“Austin—”

“The time I got left … I don’t want to, like, dwell on it. You know what I mean?”

Lilly wipes the tears from her eyes. “There’s so much we don’t know. I heard about this one victim, up near Macon, who never turned. They got a fucking finger chewed off, and they never fucking turned.”

Austin lets out a sigh, smiling to himself. “And unicorns exist.”

She takes him by the shoulders, and burns her gaze into his eyes. “You’re not gonna die.”

He shrugs. “Yeah. I am. We all are. Sooner or later. But you got a good shot at avoiding it for a long time. You’re gonna get outta here.”

She wipes her face, the sorrow and horror rising up her gorge and threatening to break her into a million pieces. But she stamps it down, shoves it back, swallows it … hard. “We’re all gonna get out of here, pretty boy.”

He gives her another weary nod, and then he sits back down on the tarp, leaning back against the wall. “If I’m not mistaken, I think I saw a flask in one of those drawers you were banging around in.” He gives her one of his patented rock-star smiles, brushing wisps of curly hair from his ashen face. “If there’s a God, there’ll be liquor left in there.”

*   *   *

They stay wide awake the rest of the night, sharing the last few fingers of stale hooch in the flask left behind by some overworked intake guard. Throughout the wee hours, they talk softly, careful not to be heard by the others out in the foyer, discussing everything but Austin’s bite wound. They talk about how they’re going to get out of this place, whether they might find any supplies in other parts of the prison, and how they might avoid the infestation of walkers currently skulking around the corridors of the building.

Lilly puts Austin’s condition out of her mind. She has a job to do—get these people home safely—and she has assumed the mantle of leadership as readily as slipping into a new wardrobe, as easily as pulling a trigger, as quickly as a shot to the head. They talk about how the people in Woodbury will react to Philip Blake’s death. And for a while, Lilly fantasizes about a new Woodbury, a place where people can breathe and live in peace and take care of each other. She wants this badly, but neither she nor Austin can admit to themselves how farfetched it all sounds—how slim their odds are of even escaping this godforsaken prison with their skins intact.

Around dawn, as the high windows turn a luminous gray and begin to cast pale light into the receiving room, Lilly shakes herself out of her reverie. She looks at Austin. He shivers with a worsening fever. His dark eyes—once perpetually alive with mischief—now look like those of an eighty-year-old man. Dark circles rim the lower eyelids, and burst capillaries have turned the whites to a sickly pink. His breathing seems labored, rough and clogged with phlegm, but he manages to smile back at her. “What’s wrong? What are you thinking?”

“Listen to that,” she whispers. “You hear that?”

“What? I don’t hear a thing.”

She tilts her head toward the side door leading into the cellblock corridor. “Exactly.” She stands and brushes herself off, then checks her pistols. “Sounds like the stragglers have drifted away, gotten bored with the empty hallways.” She flicks the safety on her Ruger. “I’m gonna check out the cellblock, see if we can’t find anything useful.”

Austin stands up and nearly falls over from the rush of dizziness. He swallows the nausea rising inside him. “I’ll go with you.”

“No, no way.” She shoves the gun in her belt, checks the second pistol, shoves it down the back of her jeans. “You’re in no shape to go. I’ll take the others with me. You stay here and hold down the fort.”

He looks at her. “I’m going with you, girlfriend.”

She sighs. “Okay … whatever. I don’t have the energy to argue with you.” She goes over to the glass door, pushes it open, and gazes out at the dreary light of the foyer. “Ben? Matthew?”

Out in the reception area, the others are huddled together on the floor. They sit on a blanket after a sleepless night, their eyes red and drawn with fatigue. At first, they appear to be playing some kind of game, the contents of their pockets in a pile on the blanket in front of them as though wagers are being made. But very quickly Lilly realizes that they’re pooling the meager resources from their pockets: candy bars, keys, cigarettes, a flashlight, chewing gum, a couple of hunting knives, a scope, a walkie-talkie, handkerchiefs, a canteen, and a roll of electrical tape.

“What’s going on?” Matthew springs to his feet, reaching for his ammo belts. “What’s happening with junior?”

“I’m right as rain,” Austin replies sternly from behind Lilly, his voice sounding as though he’s about as right as a whipped dog. “Thank you for asking.”

“I need some of you to give me a hand with a quick search of the corridor,” Lilly tells them. “Matthew, you come along with the AK … just in case … and Ben, you too … bring those knives.” She looks at Gloria. “The rest of you hold down the fort. Something goes awry, fire off a single warning shot. You understand?”

They all nod.

“C’mon,” she says to the others, “let’s do this quickly and quietly.”

The three men follow Lilly over to the side door. Lilly draws her .22, takes a breath, and yanks the iron stand off its temporary mooring. She carefully turns the knob, the door squeaking softly as she cracks it open a few inches. Through the gap she peers out, craning her neck to see down the hundred-foot length of main corridor.

The hallway sits in silent darkness, a few cells along the walls sitting open.

At the far end of the corridor, so far away that they look like indistinct jumbles of clothing strewn across the floor, Lilly sees the remains of the three men sent into the prison by the Governor the previous afternoon. They now lie torn to shreds on the tiles, their torsos and extremities so mutilated that they’re unrecognizable as men. Their drying blood coats the floor and walls.

Fortunately, as far as Lilly can tell, the walkers have moved on, despite the fact that their putrid odors still cling to the air.

Lilly gives everybody a nod, and one by one they slip into the corridor.

*   *   *

They get halfway down the hallway, passing empty cell after empty cell, finding nothing but litter and discarded clothing on the floors—people obviously left in a hurry—when Austin suddenly hears a noise behind him. He wheels around and comes face-to-face with a figure bursting out of one of the darker, windowless cells.

Austin jerks back with a start, instinctively raising his Glock at the precise same moment a huge male biter with a wild gray Rasputin beard unhinges its creaking jaws and pounces at him. Jowls hanging in bloody shreds from a recent gunshot wound, milk-pod eyes flashing with bloodlust, the dead old man tries to gobble Austin’s face as the Glock’s muzzle almost accidentally lodges itself inside the creature’s throat. Austin starts to squeeze the trigger.

“Austin, don’t fire it!” Ben Buchholz hisses at him from the shadows off his right flank. “The noise!—Austin, don’t!”

Blinking with shock, his fever spiking with streaks of painful light across his field of vision, Austin shoves the creature’s huge head against the closest wall. The impact cracks the thing’s skull, but it keeps chewing furiously on the barrel in its mouth as though trying to masticate the gun.

Austin grunts and slams the skull again and again against the wall when a flash of steel streaks across his peripheral vision and a knife blade embeds itself in the thing’s forehead with a watery crunch.

Rotten blood and black fluids gush around the knife’s hilt as Ben Buchholz pulls the blade free, and then he stabs it a second time, and a third, until the thing with the beard collapses to the floor in a bloody mass of blubber and escaping gases.

A moment of edgy silence follows as everybody gets their bearings.

They move on. Austin brings up the rear, moving slowly, the nausea twisting his insides into knots, the fever sending clammy gooseflesh down his back. They creep toward the end of the corridor. Ben and Matthew take the lead, each with a buck knife at the ready. Austin sees Lilly pausing in front of an open cell about twenty-five feet ahead of him. She stares at something inside the cell. The two other men pause and look over her shoulder.

Something’s wrong. Austin can see it in Lilly’s body language, the way she lowers herself to one knee and picks something up off the floor. The other two men wait impatiently for her, saying nothing. Austin approaches and looks over her shoulder.

He sees what has Lilly so transfixed and turns to the other men. “Give us a second, guys,” Austin says to them. “See if you can go secure the door at the end of the hall.”

The two men pad away, scanning the depths of the hallway ahead of them with knives poised and ready. Troubling scratching noises echo. The distant, omnipresent drone of the herd vibrates in the air. The yards are still rife with the dead, the horde surrounding the cellblocks. At the moment, though, the corridor remains still and silent. Austin crouches next to Lilly and puts an arm around her.

A single tear drops off her chin. Her shoulders tremble as she takes in the former sleeping quarters of a child, its former inhabitant evidently abandoning it in a hurry. Across the cinder-block wall over the cot someone has hung a small banner of letters from the alphabet spelling out the name S-O-P-H-I-A. Lilly cradles a small teddy bear in her arms as if it’s a wounded bird—the stuffed animal is missing an eye and its fur is worn down to the nubs from compulsive fondling. On a makeshift dresser of crates in one corner is an old music box.

“Lilly…?”

Austin feels a tremor of fear as Lilly pulls herself away from him and crosses the cell to the dresser. She opens the lid of the music box, and a tinkling melody rattles out of the thing for a moment. Hush, little baby, don’t you cry … Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby. Lilly collapses into a sitting position in front of the music box, her expression crumbling with grief. She sobs. Softly. Uncontrollably. Her body shudders and convulses as she lowers her head. Tears stream down her face, falling to the grubby tile floor. Austin joins her, kneeling next to her, searching for the right thing to say. No words come to him.

He turns away from her, partly out of respect and partly because he can’t bear to see her weep like this. He studies the contents of the cell, patiently trying to give her the space and time to let this horrible grief work its way through her. He sees the child’s things strewn across the floor, on the bed, and on a meager little shelf nailed into the rotted cinder-block wall. He sees Kewpie dolls, arrowheads, leaves pressed onto construction paper, and books—dozens of them—lined along the shelf and shoved under the bed. He studies the titles: The Wizard of Oz, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Eloise, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Matilda.

His gaze lingers on one of the books. His head throbs. His eyes moisten and his stomach clenches with fever chills as he stares and stares at the book’s title. An idea strikes him right then, a way out of this place—Austin’s destiny written on the cracked gold-leaf spine of a dog-eared Little Golden Books classic—all of it coalescing in his mind in one great paroxysm of inspiration.

He looks at Lilly. “I promise you, we’re gonna get out of here,” he says in a low, measured, confident tone. “You’re gonna live a long life, have a lot of babies, be a terrific mom, and have a lot of parties with drinks with those little umbrellas in them.”

She manages to raise her head and look at him through wet, swollen eyes. She can barely talk. Her voice sounds drained of life. “What are you babbling about?”

“I got an idea.”

“Austin—”

“It’s a way out of this mess. C’mon. Let’s get the guys together, and I’ll lay it out for you.” He helps her to her feet.

She looks at him, and he returns her gaze, and for the first time since the war began, the love between them returns in earnest. “Don’t argue with me,” he says, giving her a wan smile and ushering her out of the cell.

But before heading back to the receiving room, Austin throws one last fleeting glance into that sad little child’s lair …

… and takes one final look at the threadbare, split, well-thumbed spine of The Pied Piper from Hamelin.

NINETEEN

Less than an hour later, before the sun has even cleared the tall pines to the east, Lilly stands with the others in the musty intake room, waiting for Austin’s signal. She can’t show any emotion. She can’t show her fear, her sorrow, or her anguish over letting Austin execute this insane plan. The five other surviving members of the Woodbury militia—by this point having taken their positions around the room—need to know this is going to work. They are coiled and ready to spring, and each of their frightened gazes rests on Lilly. They need her leadership now more than ever.

Matthew and Speed—the strongest of the six—stand near the giant metal credenza blocking the exit door. Gloria, Hap, and Ben—each clutching their weapons with sweat-slick hands—stand in the center of the room, facing the exit, prepared to move on Lilly’s cue. Lilly has a Ruger pistol in each hand, taking deep breaths on the other side of the credenza, a runner in the blocks, muscles taut with tension, as ready as she’ll ever be.

Nobody knows about the hushed argument that transpired only half an hour ago between Austin and Lilly behind the shattered glass of the intake desk. Nobody heard Lilly pleading with him not to do this. And no one else will ever know what happened when Austin finally broke down and admitted through runnels of snot and tears that he has to do this—he has no choice—because he has always been a coward and a liar, and these attributes only worsened when the plague broke out, and this is the only way he will ever be able to redeem himself, and do something good and right.

He told Lilly then the truest thing—the thing that will live in Lilly’s heart the rest of her life—that she is the only person that he has ever loved, and he will love her for eternity.

The first shot rings out on the far side of the yard, faint and muffled inside the foyer, dampened by walls of brick and mortar.

Everybody in the room bristles, spines stiffening at the noise. Lilly raises one of her guns at the ceiling, getting everyone’s attention. “Okay,” she says. “There’s the first signal. He needs two minutes, and then we head out. Get ready.”

Lacking a stopwatch, Lilly begins counting off the seconds in her head to occupy her thoughts.

One Mississippi … two Mississippi … three Mississippi.

*   *   *

Austin gets halfway across the exercise yard on the north edge of the grounds—firing off large-caliber attention-grabbers every few seconds in order to draw the swarm away from the cellblocks—when the herd gets too thick.

Dizzy from the harsh sun pounding behind his eyes, in a weakened state from the fever, he manages to kick his way through a cluster of biters on the edge of the fences, but soon the monsters outnumber him three hundred to one. He reaches the mangled wreckage of chain link, taking a few down with headshots—Matthew equipped him with an AK, a full magazine, and a knife—but the moment he plunges into the wall of walkers milling about the tall grass, he gets pinned down.

He spins and strafes a group of ragged monsters coming up behind him, sending flesh and blood into the air in an arabesque of red spray, but when he whirls back toward the meadow, one of the larger males pounces on him and knocks him down. He drops his gun and tries to scuttle back to his feet but the male clamps down on his ankle, rotten bicuspids digging in, latching onto him with the force of grappling hooks. Austin cries out and kicks, to no avail.

Through sheer force of will, he rises back to his feet. With every last shred of strength he can muster, the searing pain spreading through every tendon, every capillary, he starts moving again, the huge male still clamped onto him. He knows, deep down, that this isn’t about destroying creatures—it’s about drawing them away—so he drags the male as far as he can across the leprous meadow.

It’s slow going at first, but he covers nearly twenty-five yards in this manner, hemorrhaging pints of blood, the knife now in his sweat-greasy fist, the pain a living thing inside him, devouring him. He flails and strikes out at more and more attackers coming at him from every direction, screaming as loud as he can, “COME AND GET ME, MOTHERFUCKERS—YOU BUNCH OF STINKING, ROTTEN PUSSIES!!—COME AND GET ME!!”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the leading edge of the swarm shifting like a black tide rolling back out to sea, many of those who had been snuffling around the buildings now awkwardly turning, bumping into each other, starting to trundle back toward the meadow, drawn by the commotion of fresh meat in their midst.

Austin’s plan is working—at least for the moment. The trick is going to be getting them away from the vehicles. Austin’s body begins to shut down, the male clawing at the place in his legs where the femoral arteries live, ragged arms tangling with his feet, throwing him off stride. He knows he only has a few more minutes left in him, a few more feet, a few more strangled breaths.

“COME AND GET IT, SHITHEADS!! SOUP’S ON!! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!!”

He can see the closest vehicle—a military transport truck—its doors still hanging open, the wind blowing through the empty cab. He manages to drag the monster off to the left of the abandoned caravan another few yards before the pain and the pressure of the creature’s teeth and the clawing fingers drag him to the ground.

He crawls another few feet before more rotting teeth close in, a fogbank of noxious black stench engulfing him, the hellish choir of growls contracting around him like a giant turbine turning and turning. The pain steals his breath, makes his vision grow dim and amorphous, makes the growing number of teeth sinking into his flesh lose all meaning. He hears a whisper in his mind, which drowns the horror, numbs the pain, and turns the black inkblots of a hundred cadaverous faces looming over him into a gauzy blur. The whisper carries him over—takes him across a beautiful pristine-white threshold—as the feeding opens him up: I love you, Austin … and I always, always, always, always will … I will never stop loving you. It is the last thing Lilly said to him this morning, and it is the last thing he hears in his mind as his arteries collapse and spill his life-force into the grass, the blood seeping down into the earth.…

*   *   *

The giant credenza shrieks across the floor suddenly as the two young men shove it away from the door. Lilly gives Gloria, Hap, and Ben a terse nod—they nod back at her—and Lilly turns to the door, jacks the knob, and throws it open.

The harsh light of a pale sun shines in her face as she steps outside.

Several things register to Lilly as she takes her first loping strides across the concrete deck of the exercise yard—the others following closely, their guns poised, their hot gazes everywhere at once—but she tries to focus solely on the task of getting the group to a vehicle in one piece rather than succumb to the chaotic flow of information now streaming into her brain.

The first thing that occurs to her is the absence of any sign of Austin. She scans the grounds, and then surveys the outer fences, and sees only walkers. Where the hell is he? Did he make it to the woods? She leads the group toward the outer fence.

The second thing that registers in Lilly’s churning mind is the dearth of walkers still wandering the grounds. Only a few stragglers still drag across the cement here and there, providing very little threat to a tightly packed group of humans racing across the exercise yard.

Matthew wields the largest knife—and he runs alongside Lilly—keeping an eye on the errant biters that might make note of them.

They cross the sparsely populated grounds in less than a minute, and Matthew has to drive his knife into the decaying craniums of a mere handful of walkers before they get to the pasture.

Which leads to the third thing that registers fully at that point in Lilly’s brain: The configuration of the herd has now spontaneously shifted to the north. Like a teeming mass of ants, they swarm around something dark and glistening on the ground fifty feet from the farthest vehicle.

The noise of the feeding frenzy reaches her ears as she leads the group toward her truck—the massive vehicle still sitting with its cab doors open exactly as she left them the day before—and she calls out to the others as they crane their necks to see the gruesome scene along the north edge of the pasture: “DON’T LOOK!”

Lilly’s voice sounds almost robotic in her own ears—all emotion blanched out of her now by the scalding rush of adrenaline—as she comes around the driver’s side of the cab. She jerks to a stop when she sees the ragged female in a soiled sundress inside the cab, wedged behind the steering wheel, her threadbare dress tangled on the stick shift. Lilly quickly raises her .22 and puts the female out of her misery, sending the back of the girl’s skull across the glass of the passenger door.

Dark blood washes the inside of the windshield as the female sags to the cab floor. Lilly kicks the body toward the door, ripping the dress free. Gloria Pyne reaches in from the passenger side and yanks the body out of the cab, dumping it in the grass.

The others rush around to the rear hatch and start climbing onto the truck. First, Hap Abernathy … then Speed, then Matthew, and finally Ben. Lilly throws a glance out the driver’s-side window and sees—in the cracked reflection of the shattered mirror—that Ben Buchholz has to struggle to heave his way on board. The contents of the truck—crates of ordnance and supplies—have shifted and spilled, and now the four men have to huddle dangerously close to the rear gate in order to fit into the cluttered cargo bay.

The sound of a muffled knock on the rear wall signals they are all safely on board.

The keys still dangle from the ignition, and Lilly kicks the engine to life. Gloria takes her place on the passenger side, shutting the door behind her as quietly as possible. She gazes out her open window. On the edges of the herd, some of the stray biters have noticed them, turning languidly in their direction, starting to drag toward them.

Gloria sticks the barrel of her Glock 19 out the open window, preparing to fire a few suppressing shots as Lilly slams the gearbox into reverse, but Gloria freezes when she catches a glimpse of just exactly what lies on the ground in the heart of the swarm.

Already torn apart and eviscerated beyond recognition, the human remains feature familiar clumps of long curly hair, shredded leather, and an ammo vest now torn to pieces. Two biters fight over a single motorcycle boot, the visible white fibula bone and part of a bloody ankle still lodged inside it. Gloria sucks in a breath. “Oh dear Jesus God … what have we done?”

“Don’t look,” Lilly utters under her breath as she kicks the accelerator.

The gears shriek, and the truck lurches into reverse. The gravitational forces shove Lilly and Gloria forward, nearly slamming them into the dash as the vehicle’s undercarriage shudders and threatens to break into pieces. The massive tires cobble and bump over dead bodies—both walkers and humans alike—which still lie strewn across the battlefield. Lilly keeps the foot-feed pinned. A few errant biters get bowled over by the rear bumper in a succession of watery, arrhythmic thuds as the truck careens.

“DON’T LOOK!”

She cries it out in a strangled voice—addressing herself more than Gloria or the others—as the vehicle screams backward, skirting the edges of the swarm. The stench engulfs the rattling truck, the air black with smoke and carbon and gouts of exhaust enveloping the open windows, as the countless creatures flock like carrion crows fifty yards to the north around the pathetic human remains, which are now scattered across an entire square acre of scabrous, blood-sodden, sacrificial ground.

Don’t look, Lilly tells herself as she slams on the brakes thirty feet from the edge of the wooded slope, smashing Gloria into the folds of the passenger seat. Lilly wrestles the shift lever into second gear and guns it.

The engine booms and the rear wheels dig into the muddy turf for a moment, spinning in place, and Lilly realizes—for one terrible split second—that she now has a fleeting opportunity to get a good view of the feeding frenzy that saved their lives transpiring right this instant through the blood-slimy windshield. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, she keeps repeating to herself in her mind as the rear wheels finally find purchase, and the truck plunges forward in a huge wake of dirt and detritus.

She manages not to look for the entire span of time it takes them to circle around the slope to the access road and start to weave headlong up the side of the hill, the engine bellowing.

But just as the vehicle crests the hill, Lilly shoots an involuntary glance out at the hairline fractured reflection of the side mirror.

The first thing she takes in is the entirety of the prison—the grounds now completely overrun, demolished, abandoned of all life, littered with bodies, some of the towers still smoldering faintly with the aftermath of the firefight—and she registers this in a single microsecond of a synapse firing in the deepest part of her limbic brain: This is both the end and the beginning.

Then, in that single horrible instant before reaching the road along the edge of the woods, she does the one thing she promised herself she would not do.

Eyes drawn involuntarily to the corner of the mirror still reflecting the swarm of biters to the north, at this distance looking like a million black maggots burrowing into a cairn, she does the thing that will scar her soul forever.

She looks.

*   *   *

“Lilly?—Sweetie?—You okay?—Talk to me.” Gloria Pyne breaks the excruciating silence of the rumbling cab about five miles down the road as the cargo truck wends its way along the snaking asphalt highway.

The desolate two-lane cuts a swath through the dense, biter-infested shadows of primordial woods, the blur of ancient pines on either side of them making Gloria feel almost claustrophobic. Lilly just keeps silently driving. They are closing in on Woodbury. The town lies in a valley just up ahead, around a bend in the road, maybe ten minutes away, maybe less.

“Lilly?”

No answer.

Gloria chews her lip. The relief of fleeing the prison in one piece has been short-lived for her, the thing her mother called “woman’s intuition” revving now in her brain at the advent of Lilly Caul’s stony, ashen, miserable silence. Her hands welded to the steering wheel, her eyes shiny and cratered out with agony, Lilly hasn’t said a single word since they escaped the prison.

“Talk to me, honey,” Gloria says. “Yell … scream … cry … curse … something.”

Lilly suddenly throws a glance at her, and the two women make eye contact for a single moment. Gloria is taken aback by the clarity in Lilly’s eyes. “We were going to have a baby,” Lilly says at last in a clear, calm voice.

Gloria stares at her. “Oh my God … I’m so sorry, honey. Did you—?”

“He saved our lives,” Lilly adds then, as if to put the final punctuation on something.

“He surely did,” Gloria says with a nod, her mind reeling for a moment. She looks at Lilly. “So did you, honey. You saved us when you—”

“Oh no.” Lilly sees something troubling up ahead of them as they round the bend. “Oh Jesus no.”

Gloria snaps her gaze toward the windshield, and she sees what Lilly sees as the air brakes kick on, hissing noisily and slowing the truck to a crawl.

In the middle distance, about a quarter mile away, above the tops of the swaying pine boughs bordering the eastern outskirts of town, an enormous cloud of black smoke billows up into the sky.

Woodbury is burning.

TWENTY

The cargo truck thumps across the derelict railroad crossing outside Woodbury’s southernmost outskirts. The air crackles with the noise of burning timber, and the acrid stench of scorched flesh and tar hangs thick over the streets. Lilly slams on the brakes a couple hundred yards from the barricade.

In the middle distance, the east wall burns, sending up a noxious, swirling cloud of smoke. Lilly can see the place is under attack—from this distance it looks like a small herd of walkers has pressed in from the south woods—and now the remaining twenty or so townspeople, most of them seniors and children, struggle to stave off the onslaught with torches and bladed weapons.

For a brief moment, Lilly is almost mesmerized by the sight: Some of the biters along the breaches in the barricades have caught fire, and now stumble without direction or purpose, like phosphorescent schools of fish, wreathed in flame, radiant and surreal in the morning sun. Some of the sparks issuing from the creatures are touching off sections of the outbuildings, adding to the chaos.

“Jesus Christ, we gotta help them!” Gloria blurts out, wrenching open her door.

“Wait—WAIT!” Lilly grabs the woman, holds her back. In her side mirror, Lilly can see the others in back leaning out of the rear hatch, their eyes hot and wide with panic, some of them hopping off the gate and cocking their weapons. Lilly calls out to them. “EVERYBODY WAIT!”

Lilly climbs out of the cab. She has two or three bullets left in each Ruger, but Matthew has at least two dozen rounds of armor-piercing slugs still tucked into his gear, and the magazine in Gloria’s Glock 19 is nearly full. The other men have a few bullets each, but considering the fact that there appears to be no more than fifty walkers—give or take—engulfing the south side of town, they should have enough ammo to intercede.

Matthew comes around the front of the cab, jacking back the charging handle on his AK. His youthful face furrows with panic, his dark eyes blazing with tension. “What’s the plan?”

A gust of wind rife with sparks and death-stench slams into them, and they all crouch down by the front of the cab, each of them starting to breathe faster.

Ben Buchholz speaks up from the other side of the cab. “I say we go in blazing—what other choice do we have?”

“No, we’re going to—” Lilly starts to say when a voice cuts her off from the other side of the truck.

“Whatever we do,” Gloria Pyne says, gaping at the fires and the monstrous apparitions robed in flame staggering here and there along the crumbling barricade, “we better do it quick. These people can’t hold them off much longer with matchsticks and bare hands.”

“Listen up, listen up!” Lilly raises her hand, and turns to Hap Abernathy, who crouches behind the truck’s fender. “You used to drive buses, right?”

The older man nods furiously. “Thirty-four years and a gold Timex from the Decatur School District—why?”

“You’re gonna drive the truck.” She looks at the others, making eye contact with each tense face. “The rest of you, how are your singing voices?”

*   *   *

Minutes later, Barbara Stern sprints around the corner of Main and Mill with a chemical fire extinguisher in her arms when she hears the strangest sound warbling on the winds above the chorus of moaning, reanimated corpses.

Her iron-gray hair pulled away from her deeply creased face, her peasant dress and denim jacket soaked with sweat and chemicals, she feels responsible for this disaster. So does David. The Governor thought enough of them to leave them in charge of the town during the battle and now this!

All of which makes Barbara Stern bristle when she hears the advent of human voices singing out from the south, ululating like a tribe of Bedouin maidens, their piercing cries rising above the din of burning wood and flesh. Barbara sniffs back the panic and alters her course slightly, charging toward the railroad crossing at the end of Mill Road—the place where the largest number of biters now swarm and press in through the holes in the fortification.

She sees something moving out beyond the blazing inferno, something raising a thunderhead of dust into the sky, and the closer she gets, the more she hears an engine—as distinct as a bell—grinding through its low gears: a truck! Her heart beats faster as she closes in on the chaos at the wall. Heat punches her in the face as she approaches the haze-bound corner of Mill and Folk Avenue.

She sees her husband near the abandoned railway office, shouting orders to the others. Some of the older citizens are stationed at key junctures along the tracks, awkwardly flailing torches at swarming biters, fighting a losing battle, the human shouts drowned by the noise. Barbara’s eyes water as she closes in on the scene.

Near the office building, Barbara sees three other seniors spraying dwindling amounts of chemical foam on the burning facade. David has a hunting bow in his trembling hands and pulls another arrow from the pack as Barbara approaches. They found the bow in the warehouse with an old quiver filled with a couple dozen arrows, and now David shakily aims one of the last arrows at an oncoming walker.

Flames envelop a huge male in greasy workman’s overalls as it lumbers toward David, its flaming face still biting at the air, arms sleeved in flame but still reaching. The arrow pierces its moldering skull between the eyes, and the walker staggers backward in a miasma of sparks, opening its gaping maw of a mouth—smoke curling out of its black gorge—before collapsing to the oily pavement.

“DAVID! LOOK!” Barbara drops the fire extinguisher as she approaches her husband, the tank rolling across the cobblestones of the intersection. “LOOK!—OUT BEYOND THE TRACKS!—DAVID, IT’S THEM!”

David notices what she’s babbling about just as a cornerstone collapses and half the railway office caves in on a fountain of sparks. The heat and noise and tendrils of flame spewing out like a particle bomb make every survivor jerk back with a start, some of them diving for cover, falling to the ground on their brittle, aging joints. David stumbles backward and trips over his own feet, dropping the bow and arrows. The flames catch on an oil spill and lick across the road. Voices cry out, and Barbara goes to David.

“Sweetie, this is no time for a nap,” she taunts him breathlessly, lifting him up with a grunt. “Look, David!—Look!—They’re backing off!—LOOK!”

Sure enough, David Stern manages to get his bearings back and look up, and all at once he sees what she’s talking about. In the middle distance, the swarm has changed course, many of the biters still sparking and smoking as they clumsily turn toward the engine noises and howling sounds emanating from the vacant lot beyond the tracks. A large vehicle now slowly rumbles across the lot, drawing their attention. The plumes of black exhaust are visible above the wall, and the clamor of crooning voices fills the air. Barbara and David rise to their feet and scurry across the intersection.

They find a vantage point near the old wooden water tower and gaze through a break in the flaming barricade at the military cargo truck now prowling the hard-packed gravel on the far side of the tracks. “Oh my God,” Barbara utters, putting her hand to her mouth. “It’s Lilly!”

David gapes at the strange spectacle unfolding in the defunct train yard.

The truck rattles over petrified tracks as the horde of walkers, many of them still smoldering, fuming with smoke and sparks, follow the sounds of human voices trumpeting out the rear of the vehicle. Three men sit on the hatch with guns, yammering and whooping and hollering at the throng, and every now and then shouting out off-key choruses from old Southern rock tunes—“Green Grass and High Tides,” “Long Haired Country Boy,” “Whipping Post”—and the strangeness of it, the very incongruity of a bunch of good old boys hollering and crooning, mesmerizes every walker and human within hearing distance. Then the shooting starts.

The muzzle flashes from the rear of the truck take down monster after monster. Some of the creatures stagger and whirl in swirls of sparks and blood spume before going down. Others collapse like bags of rocks. One by one, like clay pigeons, they get picked off by the falsetto-howling noisemakers in the rear of the truck.

Lilly stands behind them, holding on to a side brace, overseeing the operation with her laser-focused gaze, until suddenly, without warning, the truck hits a rut. The bump knocks Speed Wilkins—the youngest of the three—off the rear of the truck.

From her vantage point behind the burning water tower, Barbara Stern inhales a startled breath. “Oh Jesus … Jesus, Jesus … shit!”

Out in the vacant lot, the man behind the wheel of the cargo truck evidently doesn’t see the accident and keeps rolling slowly away from the fallen man, who is now rising to his knees just as a phalanx of biters surrounds him. Speed madly searches the ground for his gun, but the biters are pressing in on all sides—at least a dozen of them—most of them still smoking from tufts of ragged clothing that are still on fire. One of them—a wiry female with a scorched face, dead flesh burned as crisp as parchment—unhinges her creaking jaws to reveal rows of slimy, sharp teeth.

Speed lets out a yelp and dives away from her, shoulder-rolling into three more monsters.

This all happens within the space of a few seconds, Barbara and David Stern watching helplessly from behind the tower. David fecklessly raises his bow, thinking he might be able to hit the three attackers now converging on the boy—but he is so far out of range he might as well be in the next county. Just as he stretches a metal-tipped arrow back in the sling, several things transpire with neck-snapping swiftness.

Barbara sees a flash leap out of the truck, vaulting through the air before the other two men even get a chance to raise their guns.

Lilly lands fifteen feet away from Speed Wilkins, just as the three smoldering corpses pounce on him. Wilkins rolls away, flailing wildly, kicking out at the smallest one with his work boots. Lilly charges across the gap, pausing only for a split instant to scoop up Speed’s Bushmaster—the rifle has maybe two rounds left, if that, but it’s something—and she simultaneously raises the .22 in her left hand while tossing the rifle to Speed with the other.

At the last possible instant before the rotting jaws of the closest biter close around Speed’s forearm, Lilly pinches off a series of quick blasts at the heads of the attackers, hitting two out of three dead center in their foreheads, sending black fluids skyward and causing the smoldering bodies to deflate into the dirt.

Practically at the exact same moment, Speed catches the rifle, slams it up into the mouth of the third creature, and squeezes off the last round in the chamber. The third biter’s cranium vaporizes in a mist of purple-black cerebrospinal fluid, leaving the onlookers across the lot, huddling behind the water tower, utterly breathless as they watch. Barbara holds her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and hot while David lets out a pained breath.

Now they watch the team in the cargo truck spring into action—muzzles sticking out of open cab windows, men rising up on the edge of the rear gate—emptying the last of their precious ammo into the cluster of biters. Bullets riddle molding flesh and take the ragged figures apart in a gruesome ballet of death—a plié of ripping flesh over here, a jeté of blood spray over there, a grand pas de deux of two sparking, burned figures slamming into each other and going down in a seizure of blood—as the air lights up with the tommy-gun rattle of automatic gunfire.

“Good God,” Barbara Stern murmurs in absolute awe, her voice barely audible even in her own ears, as she watches Lilly calmly stride back toward the truck, tear a hank of her shirttail from her waist, unscrew a cap on the truck’s rear quarter panel, and stuff the cloth into the truck’s fuel tank. Only about ten biters still stand, and now start lumbering toward the truck. Lilly pulls a lighter from her pocket, lights the rag, and then ambles around to the driver’s side of the cab to say something to the others.

The four men and one woman all turn and charge toward the barricade as Lilly reaches up and starts honking the air horn—the harsh bleating noise drawing every last biter in the vicinity toward the noise—and finally Lilly turns and runs off as the smoldering rag ignites the diesel fumes and then sparks the contents of the tanks.

Lilly covers about twenty-five yards—nearly reaching the burning wall—when the fuel reservoir explodes. The blast is preceded by a quick and silent flash of magnesium-bright light like a photographer’s strobe, making a match-head sound, and then the thing erupts.

The remaining biters are liquefied in the blast, the sonic boom like Vulcan’s hammer shattering the entire town, rattling windows for at least three blocks. The shock wave rams into Lilly and lifts her off her feet, sending her careening through the gap in the burning fence. She lands only a few feet away from the point at which the Sterns now gape at the spectacle from behind the water tower.

A black mushroom cloud the consistency of coal dust curls and rises into the sky over the mangled truck, about 60 percent of the frame and superstructure now reduced to scorched wreckage.

The silence that follows is almost as shocking as the explosion. Lilly rolls onto her back and stares at the empty sky, her head spinning, her ears ringing, her mouth coppery-tasting from the split lip opening back up, the small of her back wrenched in the concussion. The other members of her team come out from behind flaming debris and stand staring at her for a moment, as if knocked senseless by the final act of their counterassault.

Nobody says anything for the longest moment as the flames crackle around them. The sun is high in the sky now, the day warming up. At last Barbara Stern steps out from behind the water tower and casually walks over to where Lilly still lies, catching her breath.

Barbara stares down at her and lets out a long, anguished breath, and then manages a weary smile. Lilly smiles back at her—thankful to see a rational face—and the two women communicate volumes to each other without saying a word. Finally, Barbara Stern takes a deep breath, narrows her eyes at Lilly, and murmurs a single word.

“Show-off.”

*   *   *

They can’t relax—even for the briefest of moments—because the town is vulnerable. They’ve used up most of the ammunition, and the wall continues burning, throwing sparks, catching other structures. Plus, the pandemonium has almost certainly drawn more walkers out of the adjacent woods.

Lilly takes the reins and starts addressing the issue of the fire. She places her able-bodied men—Matthew, Ben, Speed, Hap, and David Stern—along the breach to guard against further walker attacks with the meager amount of ammunition they have left. Then she enlists the healthiest of the seniors and children to form a bucket brigade along the railroad tracks, using the stagnant well water from behind the courthouse.

They assail the fires with surprising efficiency, considering the varying skills and physical prowess of the weaker citizens now lugging buckets of foul-smelling water and tanks of CO2 across the south edge of the town. Nobody questions Lilly’s authority as she gently but firmly shouts orders from the roof of a semitrailer. People are too shell-shocked and jittery to argue with her.

Besides, most of the surviving Woodbury citizens still expect the Governor to return. Everything will be okay when he shows up. It might be mass chaos now, but when Philip Blake comes back, things will most certainly settle down and return to normal.

By dusk that evening, Lilly finally manages to secure the town.

The fires have all been extinguished, the bodies removed, the barricades repaired, the wounded taken to the infirmary, the alleys cleared of any lurkers, and the leftover provisions and ammunition inventoried. Exhausted, sore, and drained, Lilly makes an announcement in the town square. Everybody should take a quick break, tend to the wounded, replenish themselves, and then meet in the community room in the courthouse in an hour. They all need to have a little talk.

Little does anybody know, Lilly has a bombshell to drop and she needs to do it as gently as possible.

TWENTY-ONE

The entire population of Woodbury—a town that once upon a time was known for being the largest railroad hub in west central Georgia and was referred to in promotional literature and water tower insignias as “A Peach of a Place”—now gathers in the damp, fusty-smelling, cluttered community room in the rear of the modest little courthouse building.

The total number of souls still inhabiting the village—not including the two men currently patrolling the walls outside (Matthew and Speed) or the man presently occupied by some unknown task down in the infirmary (Bob Stookey)—amounts to a grand total of twenty-five: six women, fourteen men, and five children under the age of twelve. These twenty-five people now take their places around the scarred parquet floor on folding chairs, each of them facing the front of the room, theater-style, waiting for the single speaker on the program that night to begin her presentation.

Lilly paces along the cracked, bullet-riddled front wall, where the shredded remains of the state and national flags hang by threads on dented metal standards like totems of a long-lost civilization. Since the plague broke out nearly two years ago, men have lived and died in this room. Unspoken threats have been made, contracts have been sealed, and regimes have changed in the most violent of fashions.

Before speaking, Lilly measures her words silently, her face damp with flop-sweat. She has changed into clean clothes, a colorful orchid bandanna now battened around her neck. Her paddock boots click on the dusty tile as she paces. She has one Ruger MK II in a new holster on her hip. The wind rattles the high dormers, and the squeak of metal chairs settles, the hushed, expectant whispers fading into silence.

Everybody waits in the stillness for Lilly to say what she has to say.

She knows she has to just come out and say it, so she takes a deep breath, turns to the group, and tells them the truth. She tells them everything.

*   *   *

Bob Stookey trundles down the dark, deserted sidewalk with his sticky, bloodstained biohazard container under his arm, turning the corner at Main Street and Jones Mill Road, when he sees the generators on the courthouse lawn twenty yards across the square. The squat little five-horsepower engines vibrate and puff with exhaust, working busily, making the windows of the annex glow softly with warm yellow light.

The sight of the entire town gathered inside those windows gives Bob pause, and he lingers on the edge of the square for a moment, watching the reactions of his fellow citizens to Lilly’s news. Bob knows what happened, knows about Austin and all the others who perished, and he knows what she has most likely just dropped in the laps of these poor people. Late this afternoon, Bob spoke briefly with Lilly, shared her grief, and told her that he would support her in whatever she has planned for this place. He didn’t tell her about the Governor’s last request, however, nor did he show her the sole occupant of that second-floor apartment at the end of Main Street.

Now Bob stands alone with his box full of entrails, staring through the proscenium of windows into the radiant light of the community room.

He sees Lilly nodding at the folks, and he sees some of the townspeople raising their hands, speaking up, asking imponderable questions, their faces furrowed with worry. But Bob also sees something right then that makes him furrow his own deeply lined brow with bemusement, maybe even a little dismay. From this distance, hiding behind a skeletal poplar tree with his gruesome chum wafting its stench all around him, he can see some of the faces displaying expressions of … what? Hope? Humanity?

Bob’s mother, Delores, a former navy nurse in the Korean War, had a word for what Bob is seeing right now through those grimy windowpanes on the weathered, world-weary faces as they patiently listen to Lilly make her case for the future of their little motley hamlet. The word is “grace.”

Even in the worst situations, Bobby, Delores Stookey used to tell him … in the midst of death and suffering and, yeah, even evil … people can find grace. God made us this way, Bobby, don’t you see? God made us in His image. Don’t you ever forget that, honey. People can find grace under the rocks of misery, if they have to.

Bob Stookey watches the faces in the community room, most of them eagerly listening as Lilly Caul explains the road forward. From the expression on her face—the way she holds herself, the way she almost imperceptibly squares her shoulders toward her audience despite her battered body and soul, her exhaustion, and her grief—she now looks as though she’s closing the deal.

Nobody would ever accuse Bob Stookey of being a trained OB-GYN—although he did treat that poor gal overseas after her miscarriage—but now he is convinced that he’s watching the birth of another new soul.

This one, a leader.

*   *   *

Standing in that airless room, caught in the feverish gazes of twenty-five expectant, frightened, hopeful faces, Lilly Caul waits for the whispering to quiet down one last time before laying her proverbial cards on the table.

“Let me bottom-line it for you,” she says finally. “Whatever you thought of Philip Blake, he kept us alive, and he kept the walkers at bay. It’s that simple. But you got used to living under a dictator. We all did.”

She pauses for a moment, parsing her words carefully, watching them watching her. The room gets so quiet, Lilly can hear the ticking of the foundation, and the whistling of the breeze through the bones of the hundred-year-old building.

“I don’t want to dictate anything,” she says. “But I’m willing to take responsibility for this community. We have an opportunity here. I’m not asking for power. I’m not asking for anything. All I’m saying is, we can make Woodbury a good place to live again, a safe place, a decent place. And I’m willing to be the one who … you know … guides us there. I won’t do it, though, if you don’t want me to. So it’s time we took a vote. No more dictatorships. Woodbury’s a democracy now. So here we go. All in favor of me taking the wheel for a while, raise your hands.”

Half the hands in the room go up immediately. Barbara and David Stern—sitting in the front row, their hands the highest of them all—are already smiling, their sad eyes belying the struggle ahead.

Some of the people in the back of the room look at each other as though searching for a signal.

Lilly lets out a sigh of both profound relief and exhaustion when the rest of the hands go up.

*   *   *

Sleep comes hard that night, despite Lilly’s fatigue. It feels as though she hasn’t slept in her own bed in years—in fact, hasn’t slept in years—when, in fact, it’s only been a couple of days. She dozes off and on and gets up a couple of times to pee, and while she’s up, she discovers Austin’s things scattered across the apartment.

With a tenderness and sorrow that sneaks up on her, she carefully gathers all of his personal effects—his lighter, a deck of playing cards, a pocketknife, a few articles of his clothing, including a spare hoodie and a porkpie hat—and puts them in a drawer for safekeeping. She would never throw them out. But she needs to clear the deck for the challenges ahead.

Then she sits down and has a good cry.

When she goes back to bed, she gets an idea—something that she and the rest of Woodbury should do first thing in the morning before they tackle any of the other myriad tasks that need to be done. She sleeps for a few hours, and when she awakens to a room full of sunlight, the rays slanting through the curtains, she feels transformed. She gets dressed and then walks down to the square.

A few of the older townspeople with weaker bladders and aging prostates have already convened in the diner across from the courthouse and fired up the ancient stainless-steel coffee urn by the time Lilly arrives. They greet her with a conviviality reserved for world leaders. She gets the sense that everybody’s secretly relieved that the Governor’s regime is over, and people are delighted to learn it’s Lilly who has stepped up.

She tells them her idea, and they all agree it’s a good one. Lilly enlists a couple of the stronger folks to go out and spread the word, and an hour later, the entire town has gathered in the bleacher section of the speedway.

Lilly takes center stage—walking out across the dusty infield, standing in the former fight ring where men and women fought to the death for the titillation of the residents—and she thanks everybody for coming, says a few words about her plans for the future, and finally asks everybody to bow their heads for a moment in remembrance of those among their number who have passed away.

Then she simply lists the names of the men and women who have died over the past weeks and months in the struggle to survive.

For nearly five minutes, the slow litany of names echoes up into the robin’s-egg-blue sky. “Scott Moon … Megan Lafferty … Josh Lee Hamilton … Caesar Martinez … Doc Stevens … Alice Warren … Bruce Cooper … Gus Strunk … Jim Steagal … Raymond Hilliard … Gabe Harris … Rudy Warburton … Austin Ballard…”

On and on, she recites the names in a strong, respectful, resonant voice, pausing for a moment after each of them as the wind takes them off into the echoing reaches of the stadium. She has memorized most of them, glancing down only occasionally at her crib notes scrawled on an index card nestled in her moist palm for a few last names she never knew before today. Finally she comes to the last name and pauses for a beat before saying it without emotion.

“Philip Blake.”

The name has its own echo—ghostly, profane—as it reverberates on the breeze. She glances up at the beleaguered crowd gathered against the chain-link barrier, most of the bowed heads turning upward to look at her. Silence greets the exchange of glances. Lilly lets out a long exhalation of breath and then nods. “May God have mercy on their souls,” she says.

A smattering of whispered responses and amens drifts across the arena.

Lilly invites everybody onto the field for the final phase of the ritual. Slowly, one by one, the elders and children and surviving members of the militia file through the gate and onto the dirt infield. Lilly supervises the dismantling.

They take down the post and shackles that once bound walkers to the periphery of the fighting ring. They clean up the vestibules and cloisters, removing the forlorn remnants of torn clothing and spent shells and broken bats and mangled blades that litter the passageways. They clean up the congealed puddles of blood. They sweep the ramps, wipe down the walls, and toss all evidence of the fights into huge garbage bins. A few of the younger men even go down into the catacombs beneath the stadium and destroy the walkers still enclosed in their hellish purgatory, and Lilly begins to feel their housekeeping project is a cleansing of a deeper sort.

The Roman Circus officially closes today—no more gladiators, no more fights other than the collective one for survival.

While they work, Lilly notices something else that surprises her. Very subtly at first, but gathering momentum as the infield transforms, moods begin to lighten. People start talking to each other in positive tones, cracking jokes, reminiscing about the old days, and hinting at better times to come. Barbara Stern suggests that they turn the grounds of the infield into a vegetable garden—the feed store still has viable seeds in it—and Lilly thinks that’s a damn fine idea.

And for one brief stretch of time, in the warming sun of a Georgia spring morning—however fleeting it might be—people almost seem happy.

Almost.

*   *   *

By sunset that evening, things have settled down in the new Woodbury.

The barricade has been reinforced on the southeast and north corners of town, a new patrol schedule established—the surrounding woodlands remaining relatively quiet—and the town’s supply of fuel, drinking water, and dried goods is accounted for and distributed evenly among the residents. No more bartering, no more politics, no more questions asked. They have enough provisions and sources of energy to keep them going for months—and Lilly sets up a town meeting room in the courthouse, where she begins the process of establishing a sort of steering committee among the elders and heads of families to vote on critical matters.

As the dusk presses in and the air cools, Lilly finally decides to head back home. She’s flagging from the pain that lingers in her lower back, and the intermittent cramps that still torment her, but she’s as clear-headed and grounded as she’s ever been.

Exhausted but oddly tranquil, she walks along the deserted sidewalk toward her apartment building, thinking about Austin, thinking about Josh, and thinking about her father, when she sees a familiar figure trundling along on the opposite side of the street with a dark gunnysack dripping black droplets on the boardwalk.

“Bob?” She crosses the street and approaches him warily, gazing at the blood-sodden sack. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”

He pauses in the shadows, a distant sodium vapor light barely illuminating his weathered features. “Nothing much … um, you know … takin’ care of business.” He looks strangely nervous and embarrassed. Since he managed to stop drinking, his grooming has improved, his greasy hair now pomaded neatly back away from his deeply creased forehead, accentuating the crow’s-feet around his droopy eyes.

“I don’t mean to be nosy, Bob.” She nods at the sack. “But this is the second time I’ve seen you hauling something disgusting across town. It’s none of my business, but is that by any chance—?”

“It ain’t human, Lilly,” he blurts. “Got it down by the switchyard. It’s just meat.”

“Meat?”

“Pieces of a rabbit I found in one of my traps, just a carcass.”

Lilly looks at him. “Bob, I don’t—”

“I promised him, Lilly.” All the pretense goes out of him then, his shoulders slumping with despair, maybe even a little shame. “This thing … it’s still in there … poor wretched creature … was once his daughter, and I promised him. I had to keep that promise.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re not talking about—”

“You could make the argument that he saved my life,” Bob says, looking down at the ground. The sack drips. Bob sniffs miserably.

Lilly thinks about it for a moment, and then says very softly yet very evenly, “Show me.”

TWENTY-TWO

Bob turns the key and pushes the door open, and Lilly follows him inside the apartment, crossing the threshold of the Governor’s inner sanctum.

She pauses in the foul-smelling foyer. Bob still clutches the sack of meat in his gnarled hand as he scuttles around the corner, vanishing into the living room, but Lilly lingers in that cramped vestibule, taking in the sad remnants of the Governor’s private life.

Since arriving in Woodbury, Lilly Caul has been in the Governor’s lair only a couple of times, each visit brief and accompanied by a flesh-crawling uneasiness. She remembers hearing those inexplicable noises coming from other rooms—the thick breathing, the faint metallic jangling sounds, and that weird percolating drone of bubbles, as though a meth lab were chugging away in the kitchen—but right now, standing with her arms crossed defensively against her chest, hearing those same noises, she feels very little of the repulsion or aversion she had experienced earlier.

The heartrending sadness of the place calls out to her, and weighs down on her. The scarred hardwood floor, the faded wallpaper, the windows masked with black muslin and threadbare blankets, the single bare lightbulb hanging from the cracked plaster ceiling, the odors of mold and disinfectant thick in the stagnant air—all of it squeezes Lilly’s midsection with tremendous sorrow. She takes a girding breath and tries to push the sadness out of her mind. Bob calls out to her from the living room.

“Lilly, come on in here … I’d like you to meet somebody,” his voice beckons, wavering slightly as he tries to keep things light and easy. Lilly takes another breath, a strange thought passing through her mind: The man who lived here lost everything, and that drove him over the edge, and he ended up here, a castaway in this tawdry, lonely limbo of masked windows and bare lightbulbs and no life.

Lilly walks into the living room, and the tiny figure shackled to the opposite wall stops Lilly cold in her tracks. The sight of Penny Blake sends an icy trickle of terror—most of it involuntary—down through Lilly’s bowels. The flesh on the back of her neck prickles. But accompanying these innate responses come stronger and stronger waves of despair, sadness, and even empathy.

Something about the way the accouterments of childhood still cling to this creature sends Lilly’s mind reeling—the shriveled, blackened face crowned with ratty pigtails and filthy ribbons tied in bows, the little pinafore dress so inundated with drool and bile and gore that its original cornflower-blue color has now turned earthworm gray. Bob kneels near the creature, close enough to stroke her shoulder but far enough away to be just beyond the reach of her snapping, gnashing, rasping jaws.

“Lilly, meet Penny,” Bob says with a tenderness that’s almost jarring as he reaches into the gunnysack and pulls out a morsel of purplish-red tissue. The girl-thing gnaws at the air and moans an excruciating moan. Bob feeds her the organ. Her milky-white eyes fill with agitation and something that almost looks like agony as she masticates the offal, fluids leaking through her tiny, puckered, toothless gums and running down her chin.

Lilly comes closer, the sorrow weighing down on her, forcing her to fall to her knees a few feet away from the child-thing. “Oh my God … Bob … Jesus Christ … is this his…? Oh Jesus, Jesus.”

Bob gently strokes the child’s waxy hair as the thing devours the entrails. “Penny, meet Lilly,” Bob says very softly to the creature.

Lilly bows her head and stares at the floor. “Bob, this is … Jesus.”

“I promised him, Lilly.”

“Bob … Bob.” Lilly shakes her head and continues staring at the floor as the watery smacking noises fill the air. She can’t bear to look at the tiny monster. In her peripheral vision, Lilly can see nail marks on the worn carpet, an outline of bloodstains where a panel was hastily driven into the floor. She can also see smudges of stubborn bloodstains on the walls that refused to come out with Comet and elbow grease. The air smells of sour rot and copper.

Bob says something else but Lilly doesn’t hear it. Her mind swims with sadness now, marinating in the misery and madness baked into the fabric of this place, festering in the drapes and the grain of the floorboards and the black mold in the seams of the baseboards. It takes her breath away and burns her eyes. The tears come then, and Lilly tries to get breath back in her lungs and stanch the welling of her eyes and the urge to sob. She stuffs it back down her gorge. She clenches her fists and looks back up at the girl.

A long time ago, Penny Blake sat on her father’s lap and listened to bedtime stories and sucked her thumb and nuzzled a security blanket. Now she gazes out through eyes the color of a fish belly, insensate as a mole, catatonic with a black hunger that will never fade. She is the living embodiment of the plague’s toll.

For an unbearable eternity, Lilly Caul slumps on her knees in front of the girl-thing, shaking her head, staring at the floor while Bob feeds the rest of the chum to the creature, saying nothing, softly whistling as though merely braiding a little girl’s hair.

Lilly gropes for the right words. She knows what has to be done.

At last, after endless minutes, Lilly finally manages to look up at Bob. “You know what we have to do, right?” She holds Bob’s droopy, red-rimmed, crestfallen gaze. “You know there’s no other way to go.”

Bob lets out a miserable sigh, levers himself to his feet, shuffles over to the sofa, and plops down as though the stone of Sisyphus rests on his shoulders. He slumps and wipes his eyes, his lips trembling as he says, “I know … I know.” He looks at Lilly through his tears. “You’re gonna have to do it, Lilly-girl … I ain’t got the heart for it.”

*   *   *

They find an ice pick in the kitchen drawer and a relatively clean sheet on the bed, and Lilly tells Bob to wait outside. But Bob Stookey—a man who has ministered to dying soldiers and taken in stray dogs all his life—refuses to dishonor the memory of a little girl. He tells Lilly that he will assist her.

They sneak up behind the girl-thing while she’s feeding, and Lilly throws the sheet over her, covering her head and face, trying not to disturb the creature any more than necessary. The tiny monster writhes and struggles in the cocoon of fabric for a moment, as Lilly gently forces the wriggling body to the floor. Pressing her weight down on the shuddering form, Lilly grips the ice pick in her right hand.

The head squirms and flails under the sheet, and Lilly struggles for a moment to position it properly for a clean and decisive thrust. Bob crouches next to her, next to the shivering lump, and begins softly singing to it—an old Christian hymn—and Lilly pauses for a moment, just before plunging the ice pick into the head under the sheet, taken aback by the sound of Bob’s voice.

“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,” Bob croons softly to the thing that was once a child—his gravelly drawl suddenly transformed, turning soft and warm and as sweet as honey. “It’s the emblem of suffering and shame, and I love that old cross where the dearest and best, for a world of lost sinners was slain.”

Lilly freezes, feeling something extraordinary develop inside the damp sheet beneath her. The writhing and shuddering and growling subside, the creature suddenly and inexplicably growing calm, as though listening to the sound of Bob’s voice. Lilly stares at the sheet. It doesn’t seem possible, but the thing remains still.

Bob softly sings, “Then He’ll call me someday to my home far away … Where His glory forever I’ll share.”

Lilly thrusts the point deep into the cranium under the sheet.

And the thing named Penny goes to her home far away.

*   *   *

They decide to have a burial ceremony for the child. Lilly comes up with the idea, and Bob thinks it’s a pretty good thing to do.

So Lilly sends Bob out to gather the others, find a wheelbarrow, some tarp, a suitable container, and a proper location for the gravesite.

After Bob leaves, Lilly lingers in the apartment, one piece of unfinished business left to address.

TWENTY-THREE

Lilly finds a box of shells in Philip’s bedroom closet, which fit the 12-gauge pigeon gun leaning against the wall behind a stack of peach crates. She loads the gun and carries it into the side room.

All it took was a single glance through the doorway into that shadowy chamber where the ghastly aquariums are still lined along the wall, bubbling and thumping in the darkness, for the mystery of Philip Blake to forever be burned into Lilly’s memory.

Now Lilly positions herself in front of the glass containers and pumps the shotgun. She levels the barrel on the first aquarium and fires. The blast nearly blows her eardrums out as the container explodes, sending glass shards through the air and a gush of fluid across the floor. The bloated head tumbles out.

She pumps another shell into the chamber and fires, and she does it again and again, hitting each aquarium dead center, spewing waves of water across the floor at her feet and sending the heads to oblivion. She goes through twenty-five shells, until the room swims with cleansing water, broken glass, and the remains of the Governor’s trophies.

She tosses the shotgun to the floor and wades out of the flooded room, her ears ringing and the last traces of Philip Blake’s madness exorcised from the earth.

*   *   *

That evening, as the sun begins its descent behind the high treetops on the western horizon and the air turns cool and luminous in the lengthening shadows, the twenty-eight surviving inhabitants of Woodbury, Georgia, stand in a semicircle around a freshly turned mound of earth, finishing up their tribute to a lost child … and closing a violent chapter in the town’s post-plague history.

The spot Bob picked out for Penny’s final resting place is outside the wall, shaded by massive live oaks, dappled in wildflowers, and relatively free of the detritus of past skirmishes and attacks.

Everybody stands in respectful silence, heads bowed, mouthing their final whispered prayers. Even the children present stop fidgeting for a moment and look down into the dirt and clasp their little hands together in prayer. Lilly closes the small, dog-eared Bible that Bob loaned her for the occasion, and she gazes at the ground for a beat, waiting for the moment to run its course. She has just finished reciting a brief eulogy for a child no one knew, a child who seems a fitting symbol for the loss of many others, as well as the sanctity of those lives still being lived, and now Lilly feels a profound sort of closure.

“Rest in peace, little Penny,” she says at last, breaking the spell and bringing the moment to an end. “Thanks, everybody. Probably ought to be getting back now … before darkness rolls in.”

Bob stands next to Lilly with a wadded handkerchief in his huge hands, the cloth soaked with his tears. Lilly can tell by the sanguine look behind his rheumy, hound-dog eyes that this little impromptu ceremony has been good for him. It’s been good for all of them.

One by one, they turn away from the grave and start making their way across the vacant lot outside the northeast corner of town. Lilly walks in the lead, Bob ambling along next to her, wiping his eyes with his handkerchief. Behind Bob, Matthew and Speed carry rifles on their hips in case they encounter any stray walkers.

The others follow closely, chatting softly, talking idly about matters great and small, when the faint sound of an engine in the distance gets everybody’s attention. Most of them stop and crane their necks to see what in God’s name might be coming this way.

“If I didn’t know better,” Bob says to Lilly, reaching for the Smith & Wesson lodged behind his belt, “I’d say that was a car coming down 109.”

“Okay, just take it easy—everybody—take it easy,” Lilly says to the group, glancing over her shoulder at the column of people behind her and seeing some of them pulling weapons, some of the kids pushing in closer to the adults. “Let’s just see what it is before we get all bent outta shape.”

For a moment, other than the sputtering sound of a dying engine, all Lilly can make out in the distance is a wisp of black exhaust rising above the tree line and then diffusing in the wind. She keeps her eyes on the bend in the road a couple hundred yards away when a battered station wagon comes into view.

Lilly can tell instantly that the car poses no threat. It appears to be an old, battered, rust-flecked Ford LTD, a late 1990s model, burning oil, with half the wood panels shaved off in side-swipe mishaps, the wheels wobbling as though they might fall off at any moment. “Lower your weapons,” Lilly says to Matthew and Speed. “C’mon … it’s okay.”

As the vehicle rattles closer and closer, the people inside come into view—a tattered couple in the front, three small urchins in the back—apparently a family, their engine running on fumes. They pull up to within a safe distance—about twenty-five yards down the road—and cobble to a stop in a cloud of noxious haze.

Lilly raises her empty hands to show the people in the car she’s not a threat.

The driver’s-side door squeaks open and the father climbs out. Dressed in layers of Salvation Army rags, as malnourished as a prisoner of war, the man is skin and bones. He looks as though he might collapse at any moment. He responds to Lilly’s gesture by raising his own hands to show that he, too, means no harm.

“Evening!” Lilly calls out to the man.

“Hello.” The man’s voice sounds hollow, like that of a terminal cancer patient. “Mind if I ask if y’all got any spare drinking water ya might part with?”

Lilly recognizes the faint, urbanized drawl of a Southern city—Birmingham, Oxford, Jacksonville maybe—and she glances over her shoulder at the others. “You folks stay put for a second; I’ll be right back.” She turns again to the stranger. “I’m gonna stroll a little closer, sir, if that’s all right?”

The man turns and looks worriedly at his family huddling nervously in the car. He turns back to Lilly. “Sure … I guess so … c’mon over.”

Lilly walks calmly toward the station wagon, her hands still raised. The closer she gets, the more she can see how badly these people are hurting. The man and his wife look like they have one foot in the grave, their sallow, ashen faces so thin they look cadaverous. In the cluttered backseat, the children are caked with grit and scantily dressed. The wagon is filled with empty wrappers and moth-eaten blankets. It’s a miracle these people are still upright. Lilly approaches and stands a few feet away from the father. “My name’s Lilly, and yours is…?”

“Calvin … and that’s Meredith.” He points at his wife, and then at his kids. “And that’s Tommy, Bethany, and Lucas.” He looks at Lilly. “Ma’am, I would be forever grateful if you could maybe part with some food, and maybe any weapons you might be able to spare?”

Lilly looks at the man and proffers a warm, guileless, genuine smile. “I’ve got a better idea, Calvin. How about I show you around?”

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

THE WALKING DEAD: THE FALL OF THE GOVERNOR: PART TWO. Copyright © 2014 by Robert Kirkman LLC. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contect Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Date is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-05201-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-5322-5 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781466853225

First Edition: March 2014

Just Another Day at the Office

A Walking Dead Short

Jay Bonansinga

St. Martin’s Griffin

Thomas Dunne Books

New York

At exactly 4:34 P.M. Central Standard Time, on a crisp evening in November—the same night that Major Gene Gavin’s tenure as ersatz leader of Woodbury is terminated with extreme prejudice—the leading edge of the zombie throng arrives at the outer fence a mile west of the town square. Like a flimsy breakwater holding back a tsunami, the wooden barricade begins to collapse under the collective weight of innumerable dead things dumbly bumping into it, clawing at it, aimlessly rubbing along its seams.

Inside the fence, people scatter. The noise of wood giving in—a sick cracking sound—drifts out over the rooftops. Screams ring out.

All at once the entire south edge of the fence goes down, a great and massive THUD that rattles the very foundation of the town, ripping moorings from the ground in giant clumps and raising a storm cloud of dust.

A moment later, the dust cloud belches out shambling figures of all varieties. They emerge like phantoms from the fog. Ragged arms akimbo, grotesque bobbleheads lolling, mouths working busily, they slowly fan out toward all quarters. Doors slam. Rifle barrels protrude from second-floor windows, spitting fire and cordite. Folks dive for cover. The noise of scattered gunfire crackles from all directions as the zombie horde moves in.

Some of the biters drag mangled, putrefied legs along like balls and chains. Others hobble toward doorways with eviscerated guts hanging from their stomach cavities. One of the old men loitering outside the courthouse is caught in a dead-end alley, quickly surrounded by the onslaught, and when he tries to push his way to daylight he trips and twists his ankle. The zombies descend upon him.

High-pitched girlish screams erupt from the old codger as a pair of zombies tear into him—one on his left flank, chewing through the soiled gabardine of his pants, into his thick buttocks, and straight through to the bone underneath; the other on his jugular, opening an artery and slurping at the garish fountain of blood.

Within seconds the old man is reduced to a quivering mass of flesh, twitching and gurgling, as the monsters share his face.

In no time at all, the town is overrun. Every doorway, every alley, every courtyard, every lawn, every sidewalk, every square, every playground, every parking lot, every nook and cranny piles up with reeking clusters of walking dead. They bump into one another and claw at windows and groan their atonal chorus of bloodlust. Some of them go down in bursts of gunfire, their brain matter airbrushing swaths of brick walls and boarded doors. Others take errant bullets in their lower extremities and chest cavities and keep on going, flinching at the wounds as a horse might jerk at a fly. The townspeople quickly run out of bullets.

The stench rises like a storm front, choking the afternoon with its acrid mixture of pus and shit and rancid proteins. The collective clamor of a thousand cadaverous vocal cords, their dissonant moaning like the buzzing of a vast hive, drowns every other sound.

Amidst this carnival of carnage, a little human boy, lost and alone, wanders a deserted back street on the northeast corner of town. Maybe five or six years old, dressed in a Thomas the Tank Engine sweat suit, barefoot, holding a moth-eaten blanket to his cheek, sucking his thumb, stupefied with terror, he aimlessly wanders. A casual observer might think he is sleepwalking.

A shadowy gang of dead appears behind him. Three adults in shredded clothing and mangled faces and four teenage creatures with necks bent hideously, they lock their pewter-colored eyes on the tiny human.

The boy continues on, barely noticing the zombies slowly gaining on him. Separated from his caretakers, dazed senseless, the child just keeps on walking and sucking his thumb and pressing the blanket to his cheek.

He reaches a desolate intersection and pauses. As though waking from a nightmare, he blinks suddenly and looks around. He hears languid footsteps and garbled groaning noises behind him, and he slowly turns around to gaze up into the milky eyes of monsters.

The boy squeals with horror. One of the biters grabs at him, but the boy darts away, and he almost makes it to a side alley when another pair of zombies lurches out from the shadows of a doorway. With a yelp, the child dodges the newcomers, stumbles, and falls to the ground. The blanket flutters down into a filthy puddle.

Now the little boy is surrounded, and he lies on his back. Too petrified to scream, too paralyzed to cry, he lies there and looks up at the cadre of corpses towering over him, opening their jagged, blackened mouths, reaching out with insatiable need.

The sudden burst of automatic gunfire reminds the child of his dad’s chain saw.

The attackers stiffen suddenly as armor-piercing slugs zip through the backs of their skulls, exiting the front of their faces in clouds of red. Before the zombies go down—one by one—the continuing bursts smash through the backs of their legs and torsos and spines, making them jitter and dance, a macabre boogaloo in a haze of blood-mist.

Then they collapse like dominoes, and the boy sees four men running up with machine guns.

“Check him for bites!” the slender one says as the men approach. This thin man has hair as dark as crow feathers and he’s so skinny, his muscles so tightly coiled, he looks as though he’s made of hammered steel.

A man with a bandanna on his head kneels next to the little boy. “He’s clean, he’s okay!”

“Get him inside somewhere,” the dark-haired, skinny man says. “And meet us back at the fence.”

It is now obvious—even to this traumatized little boy—that this thin, dark man is a leader. His eyes gleam with some kind of magical power that the child recognizes.

Maybe he’s an angel.

Or a demon.

Philip Blake turns and heads back the way he came, his wing men, Gabe and Bruce, following along on his flanks, running to keep up. Each man carries an assault rifle and a row of extra magazines in their belts. They don’t pause to pick off any stray individual zombies—they have bigger plans.

Working their way back to ground zero—the place where the fence caved in—they encounter growing numbers of dead. Philip learns very quickly that the best way to use the TEC-9 is not to go for a direct head shot. He’s not good enough with the machine pistol yet to hit the bull’s-eye of a moving target.

The best way to use the thing is to spray in the general vicinity of the head.

He gets another chance to practice this technique when a grouping of biters lurch into his path as he is approaching the crossroads at the north end of the street. Without breaking stride, he points the blunt nipple of the muzzle at their upper bodies and jacks the trigger—four quick bursts that strafe across the zombies.

Their flaccid bodies jerk and twitch and do the death-dance, as the top edge of the barrage finally connects with brain matter. Sequential puffs of pink mist paint the tree trunks behind the biters.

The dominoes fall, one by one—quicker and cleaner than in any shooting gallery.

Philip turns the corner and runs into another firing line of zombies—dozens of them—spanning the width of the road. Philip and the other two men widen their stances, drop empty magazines, slam in new cartridges, jack the levers, and unleash a torrent of hellfire.

The street turns into a gruesome dance party of jerking craniums.

“The fence stays down! You understand?! It stays down until I say different!” Philip yells from inside the raised tailgate of Martinez’s battered SUV, which is parked up against the corner of the fallen fence. The carryall—filled with weaponry and ordnance from the National Guard station—is split down the middle, and Philip is rooting out assault rifles for the townspeople. He turns and tosses another gun to a middle-aged father standing behind the vehicle.

“What’s gonna keep more of them from gettin’ in?” the father wants to know. The roar of automatic gunfire bounces off the sides of buildings behind them, punctuating their conversation. The father jerks at the noise.

A line of heavily armed men circle the SUV, keeping the biters at bay. The town is closed up now, as tight as a miser’s purse.

Philip comes over to the dad and gives the man a pat. “Just keep the biters away from your barracks…and let me worry about the wall.”

Martinez comes over, slamming a magazine into his M4. His dark-skinned face gleams with stress sweat under his bandanna. “What do you have in mind?”

Philip looks at him. “Is the south side still secure?”

“Yeah, I guess…. The buses and trucks are still there, blocking ’em from getting in…but they’re also blocking them from getting out.”

“Good. You know the gas station up on the hill? Just beyond the fence?”

“The one by the radio tower?”

“That’s the one.”

“What about it?”

“I need five minutes.”

“Five minutes for what?”

Philip nods at the commotion in the streets. “Just keep the biters occupied—keep ’em bunched in the center of town—in five minutes, everybody ditches inside. It’s duck-and-cover time, you understand what I’m saying?”

Martinez stares at Philip for a moment. “We’ll give it our best shot.”

Philip gives him a nod, goes around to the SUV’s driver’s side door, and climbs in.

The engine fires, the rear wheels dig in, and the vehicle roars away.

Over the course of those next five minutes—most of which Martinez keeps close track of on his watch—the heartier souls of Woodbury go through fifteen hundred rounds of metal-jacketed, armor-piercing shells. The makeshift militia consists of eleven men and two women, most of them parents, most at the end of their tethers—former middle-class working people with equal parts fear and madness in their eyes.

Thirty magazines’ worth of 5.5-millimeter slugs taken from the National Guard station are sprayed across the boundaries of vacant lots, into alleys, through tangled knots of zombies that have clustered together near the racetrack, and across rows of storefronts in order to shake the biters out of hiding and ultimately herd them into the center of town. Side roads are blocked with cars. Gates are swung shut. The zombies change course like sheep.

Martinez calculates that four and a half minutes have passed when they finally see the shift in the tide of walking dead. The main road that runs through the heart of Woodbury becomes clogged with a virtual traffic jam of upright corpses. They crowd intersections and mill about in their slow, retarded manner, craning their necks up at the rooftops, where the echoes of automatic gunfire slap back against the clouds.

At almost precisely the five-minute mark, as Martinez is climbing a fire escape ladder, he begins wondering if the stranger with the dark hair has up and vanished. Maybe it was all a scam. Maybe the guy just wanted to steal the SUV with all the goodies from the Guard station.

Right then Martinez hears the amplified voice reverberating in the distance.

“YYYYYOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

Philip Blake stands on the roof of the idling SUV, parked on the edge of a Marathon station two hundred yards north of the downed fence. The wind whips his pant legs, and the brilliant cold sun shines in his eyes as he screams into the bullhorn that the guardsmen had tossed into the carryall, probably earmarking it for crowd control.

“COME AND GET ME, YOU BRAINLESS SMELLY STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!!”

The megaphone crackles and rings with feedback, the volume turned up to ten. In the distance Philip can see the first dribbles of dead things coming this way, about twenty or thirty of them, drawn to the sound of his voice. Philip starts jumping up and down, waving his free hand while he clutches the bullhorn and presses the transmitter button.

“I WILL SKULL-FUCK EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU PATHETIC SHIT-BIRDS!!”

More of them are coming. In the distance, across the bulldozer-rutted lot bordering the construction site, the twenty or thirty in the lead are joined by a huge crowd only half a block or so behind them, hundreds of them, all sizes, all conditions, some of them bloodied by bullet wounds, others dragging entrails.

“YYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHOOOOOOO!! THAT’S RIGHT!! COME TO PAPA SO I CAN RIP EVERY STINKING HEAD OFF EVERY FUCKING ONE OF YOU AND SHIT DOWN YOUR NECKS!!!”

It only takes another minute or so for the multitude to begin its spectacular exodus. Behind the hundreds in the lead appear hundreds more, maybe thousands. The human eye can barely take it all in, the throngs homing in on the gas station like a broken-down army coming home starving and shell shocked. And the sound is almost beyond comprehension—a wave of feral groaning that swells to a gurgling roar—and the stench is worse. The incredible putrid odor bathes the entire countryside in its black tide.

Philip pulls the .45 pistol from his belt, and slams in a fresh magazine.

The first zombies reach the gas station and come toward the SUV.

From the vehicle’s roof Philip fires into the top of the first one’s head, blowing a divot in its skull and sending it to the pavement. The second one reaches up for him and Philip blows it away. Brain tissue splatters the side of the SUV and spits across the insteps of Philip’s boots. More of them reach the SUV and claw at the roof. Philip empties the clip into their heads and then springs into action.

He swings his legs down and through the open driver’s side window, and then lowers himself into the driver’s seat. He jacks up the windows and drops the empty magazine, grabbing another one from the passenger’s side. He shoves it into the gun, cocks the slide, and watches the gas station parking lot teem with dead people.

The SUV begins to shake as more and more zombies arrive. They flood the property and crowd in like rotting, moldering lemmings seeking the source of the clarion voice. Philip honks the horn.

Within seconds there are so many of them filling the lot and surrounding the SUV that Philip can barely see daylight. Greasy fingers and slimy lips drag across the window glass. Some of them manage—almost accidentally—to crawl onto the hood. Pale, gray faces with pupilless eyes scrape across his windshield. The symphony of gurgling moans—muffled by the sealed windows—vibrates the air and penetrates Philip’s ears and puts the hackles up on the back of his neck.

He keeps honking the horn until it looks as though the SUV is buried in an undulating womb of dead flesh. Like sides of rotting beef, the lacerated ribs of cadavers streak against the glass in Technicolor hues of purple, salmon, oxblood red, and the deepest, darkest, oiliest black. Hair matted with dried blood and torn fingernails and the blackened stumps of ragged amputations—all churn against the window. The sights and sounds would drive any normal human being out of their wits, and even Philip, locked in this zone of utter focus and concentration, starts to feel the wind of madness stirring in his brain. This is what Judgment Day looks like. He flashes on the impulse to put the barrel of the .45 in his mouth and make it all go away. But he has other plans.

He yanks the shift lever down into drive and slams his foot on the accelerator hard enough to bend the metal brace.

The SUV lurches.

The front end steamrolls through layers of the dead, and then gets stuck, the rear wheels spinning in the grease and slime of all the human tissue collecting under the chassis. Philip keeps the pedal pinned. The rear end fishtails for a moment, the engine screaming. Then the tires find purchase and the vehicle rockets forward, bowling over another hundred or so on its way out of the lot.

Philip slams on the brakes at the edge of the lot, then twists around and shoots out the rear window. The earsplitting blasts erupt inside the car. Philip’s ears ring unmercifully as he trains the front-site of the .45 on four tiny spiral-shaped objects on the ground by the fuel pumps, only partially visible now behind the throngs of zombies milling about the lot. Only moments ago Martinez gave him a quick tutorial on the volatility of such military ordnance, and now Philip executes his Hail Mary pass.

He squeezes off four quick blasts—the rest of the clip—and the sparks off the pavement catch the detonator cords coiled by the pumps.

The first explosion pops like a camera strobe, followed by three more successive pops of the flexible plastic tubing, which is filled with Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (or so its says on the label, right next to the field guide directions), sending debris up into the air and roasting a small group of dead that are too close. As these initial flashes of “det” cord light up the sky, Philip gives the SUV a kick, and the vehicle takes off with a jerk.

He gets far enough away, slamming through another few rows of zombies, and then careening across the vacant lot, that the second-level explosion—the C-4 that he hastily squeezed under the pump housings—merely slams him against the dash and momentarily blinds him. The SUV keeps going, while the eruption behind him vaporizes hundreds of moving cadavers and opens up the sky, sending a necklace of fireballs heavenward, making Philip swerve and gasp, the shock wave goosing the vehicle and flashing magnesium-white in the rearview.

Now he knows he has only microseconds to get behind cover, and he yanks the wheel.

The SUV skids sideways in the mud, completely clear of the zombie horde now. The gravitational forces push the vehicle over. The interior slams down onto its side, cracking Philip’s teeth and sending jolts of searing pain up his rib cage. He curls into a fetal position, as the third and final level of explosive gases ignite.

On the fire escape across town, above the dry cleaners, Martinez instinctively ducks down. The shock wave rattles the storefronts, some of the windows imploding in a series of sucking crashes. The few zombies left inside the cordon of town are knocked over like bowling pins. Martinez shields his eyes against the heat flash.

In the distance, a fireball the size of a house shoots up and ignites the sky.

Martinez backs into the corner, squinting up at the brilliant maelstrom. A crown of black smoke curls up on the tail of the fireball, then mushrooms with a rumbling roar that sounds like a freight train. The radio tower ignites in a fiery column of pure white light.

Martinez is transfixed by the sight.

At this distance, it looks as though the blast is raining litter. The sparks and burning chunks of debris bloom in all directions, then cascade down like a smoldering waterfall. With a mixture of exhilaration and nausea Martinez realizes that the burning particles are body parts.

The blast dissipates within seconds, but the light and noise are so intense that the shock wave seems to go on for many minutes. Martinez covers his head as debris rains down from the overhang. Car alarms go off. The very foundation of the building seems to shiver and quake in aftershocks.

Then the roar ceases, and Martinez inhales a deep breath. He stretches his sore neck in the ensuing stillness. Now there are only scattered car alarms chirping and a few stray gunshots as the stragglers are dispatched.

At length Martinez gets his bearings. He picks up his M4 and climbs down the ladder to ground level. Dizziness washes over him as he starts north. The sky hangs low with a haze of noxious smoke.

The streets are relatively quiet. Burning debris lies here and there. A few of the armed residents patrol, some them dragging bodies into a giant funeral pyre near the courthouse. Others take out the last of the errant dead with easy head shots.

Martinez makes his way north toward the construction site. He can see men already starting to gather at the fence, the sound of the bulldozer firing up somewhere. They will have to get the barricade back up soon. The explosions will surely draw more biters to the area.

At the end of the main road, as he makes the turn, Martinez sees a ragged figure emerging from the fog of smoke beyond the fence.

The figure limps along with a .45 in his hand, and the closer he gets the more familiar he looks. His raven black hair is frosted with ash, his face covered in soot. His clothes are scorched and torn. But he walks with a hell-bent purpose, like a repairman who has just grappled with a stubborn job and emerged victorious. Some of the townspeople see him and rush over to him to slap him on the back and congratulate him and thank him.

The figure sees Martinez and comes over, coughing lungs full of smoke.

Martinez puts hand on the man’s shoulder. “That was…fucking good.”

Philip Blake looks at him though parboiled eyes. Something resembling a smile appears on Philip’s face. “Just another day at the office.”

Martinez shrugs. “You okay? You might want to see the doc….”

Philip rubs his eyes. “I’ll live.”

Martinez cannot put his emotions into words so he just nods.

An overwhelming certainty is washing over him that he is looking at the new leader of the little community called Woodbury.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE. Copyright © 2012 by Jay Bonansinga. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
e-ISBN 9781466831964
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contect Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

Other Books in the Walking Dead Series

Descent

About the Authors

Megan Mack

Robert Kirkman is the creator of many popular comic books, including The Walking Dead, Invincible, and Super Dinosaur. In addition to being a partner at Image Comics, Kirkman is an executive producer and writer on The Walking Dead television show. In 2010, Kirkman opened Skybound, his own imprint at Image, which publishes his titles as well as other original work.

Jill Brazel Photography

Jay Bonansinga is a New York Times bestselling novelist whose works include Perfect Victim, Shattered, Twisted, and Frozen. His debut novel, The Black Mariah, was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award.

These are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these novels are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

THE WALKING DEAD COLLECTION. Copyright © 2014 by Robert Kirkman, LLC. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com

Cover art by Lisa Pompilio
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

e-ISBN 978-1-4668-8289-8

First Edition: November 2014