The Walking Dead Collection (52 page)

“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.