The Walking Dead Collection (48 page)

“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
.”