The Walking Dead Collection (81 page)

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.