The Walking Dead (12 page)

*   *   *

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.