The Walking Dead Collection (38 page)

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.