The Walking Dead (15 page)

The sickening thump is barely audible above the roar of the engine (and the thunderous drumbeats of Cheap Trick). In back Brian sinks down lower in his seat, feeling sick to his stomach and worrying about Penny. She slumps in her seat next to him, staring straight ahead.

Brian reaches over and buckles her in and tries to give her a smile.

“Gotta be an entrance ramp north of here,” Philip is saying over the noise, but the sound of his voice is almost completely drowned by the growl of the engine and the music. Two more walking dead loom off to their left, a man and woman in tatters, maybe homeless people, scuttling along the curb, and Philip happily swerves and takes them both down like soggy bowling pins.

A severed ear sticks to the windshield, and Philip puts the wipers on.

*   *   *

They reach the north end of Maynard Terrace, the entrance ramp straight ahead. Philip slams the brakes. The Escalade screams to a stop in front of a six-car pileup at the foot of the ramp, a cluster of upright corpses circling the wreckage like lazy buzzards.

Philip snaps the lever into reverse. The pedal goes down, the rock music thundering. The gravitational force sucks everybody forward. Brian braces Penny against her seat.

A yank of the wheel, and the Escalade does a one-eighty, then charges back down McPherson Avenue—which runs parallel to the interstate.

They cross a mile of real estate in a couple of minutes, with kick drum and bass providing syncopated beats to the horrible thumping of errant dead, too slow to get out of the way, colliding with the massive quarter panels and launching into the air like giant flailing birds. More and more of them are emerging from the shadows and trees, awakened by the bellowing growl of the muscle car.

Philip’s jaws tense with grim determination as they near another entrance ramp.

The brakes lock up at Faith Avenue, where a Burger Win burns out of control, the whole area fogbound with greasy smoke. This ramp is blocked worse than the last. Philip yells a garbled curse, and then slams the thing into reverse, rocketing backward.

The Escalade swerves over to an adjacent side street. Another yank of the steering wheel. Another kick of the pedal. Now they’re burning rubber again, moving westward, weaving around roadblocks, heading toward the skyscrapers in the distance, which loom larger and larger like apparitions in the haze.

The increasing number of blocked streets, debris, ruined cars, and wandering dead seem insurmountable, but Philip Blake will not be denied. He sits hunched over the wheel, breathing thickly, eyes fixed on the horizon. He passes a Publix grocery store that looks as though it’s been bombed in a blitzkrieg, its lot infested with dead.

Philip increases his speed in order to plow through a file of zombies in the street.

The tide of gore splashing up across the SUV’s huge hood is spectacular—a lurid display of morbid tissue spraying up and blossoming across the windshield. Wipers swish and streak the gruesome remains.

In the backseat Brian turns to his niece. “Kiddo?” No answer. “Penny?”

The child’s vacant stare is fixed on the Technicolor display across the windshield. She doesn’t seem to hear Brian over the din of rock and roll and the rumble of the car, or perhaps she chooses
not
to hear him, or perhaps she’s too far gone to hear anything.

Brian gently taps her shoulder, and she snaps her gaze at him.

Then Brian reaches across her, and carefully writes a single word on the inside of her fogged window:

AWAY

Brian remembers reading somewhere that the Atlanta metro area was up to almost six million people. He remembers being surprised at the number. Atlanta always seemed to Brian to be a sort of miniature metropolis, a mere token of Southern Progress, isolated in a sea of sleepy little redneck burgs. The few visits he had taken to the city at ground level gave him the impression that the town was one giant suburb. Sure, it had its midtown canyon of tall buildings—it had Turner and Coke and Delta and the Falcons and all the rest—but mostly it seemed like a little sister to the great northern cities. Brian had been to New York once, visiting his ex-wife’s family, and that vast, grimy, claustrophobic antfarm had seemed like a
real
city to Brian. Atlanta seemed like a
simulacrum
of a city. Maybe part of it was the town’s history, which Brian remembers learning about in a college survey course: During Reconstruction, after Sherman had torched the place, the planners decided to let the old historic landmarks go the way of the dodo bird; and over the next century and a half Atlanta got tarted up in steel and glass. Unlike other Southern towns like Savannah and New Orleans—where the flavor of the Old South still proudly permeates—Atlanta turned to the bland surfaces of modern expressionism.
Look, Ma
, they seemed to say,
we’re progressive, we’re cosmopolitan, we’re cool, not like those bumpkins in Birmingham
. But to Brian it always seemed like the Lady Atlanta “doth protested too much.” To Brian, Atlanta had always been a pretend city.

Until now.

Over the course of those next horrible twenty-five minutes, as Philip relentlessly zigzags down desolate side streets and across leprous vacant lots running parallel to the interstate, carving their way closer and closer to the heart of town, Brian sees the real Atlanta like a flickering slide show of forensic crime scene photos outside the tinted windows of the hermetically sealed SUV. He sees blind alleys choked with wreckage, flaming trash heaps, housing projects plundered and abandoned, windows blown out everywhere, stained sheets hanging out of buildings scrawled with desperate pleas for help. This is
indeed
a city—a primeval necropolis—overcrowded and malodorous with death. And the worst part of it is, they are not yet to the border of the downtown area.

At approximately 10:22
A.M.
Central Standard Time, Philip Blake manages to find Capital Avenue, a wide six-lane thoroughfare that wends past Turner Field and then downtown. He turns the stereo off. The silence booms in their ears as they turn onto Capital and then slowly proceed north.

The road is cluttered with abandoned cars, but they’re spaced far enough apart for the Escalade to weave in between them. The spires of skyscrapers—off to the left—are so close now they seem to glow in the haze like the mainsails of rescue ships.

Nobody says a thing as they roll past oceans of cement on either side of the street. The stadium parking lots are mostly empty. A few golf carts overturned here and there. Vending trucks sit in the corners, all closed up and defaced with graffiti. Scattered dead, way in the distance, wander the gray barrens in the cold autumn daylight.

They look like stray dogs about to fall over from malnutrition.

Philip rolls down his window and listens. The wind whistles. It has an odd smell to it—a mélange of burning rubber, melted circuits, and something oily and hard to identify like rotting tallow—and something chugs in the distance, vibrating the air like a vast engine.

A realization twists in Brian’s gut. If the refugee centers are open somewhere to the west—somewhere in the ventricles of the city—wouldn’t there be emergency vehicles out here? Signs? Checkpoints? Armed marshals somewhere? Police helicopters? Wouldn’t there be some indication—this close to the downtown area—that relief is in sight? Up to this point, over the course of their journey into the city, they have seen only a few potential signs of life. Back on Glenwood Avenue they thought they saw someone on a motorcycle flash by but they couldn’t be sure. Later, on Sydney Street, Nick said he saw someone darting across a doorway but he wouldn’t swear to it.

Brian pushes the thoughts out of his mind when he sees the vast tangle of highways forming a cloverleaf about a quarter of a mile away.

This sprawling interchange of major arteries marks the eastern border of Atlanta’s urban area—the place where Interstate 20 meets up with 85, 75, and 403—and now it sits baking in the cold sun like a forgotten battlefield, clogged with wrecks and overturned semis. Brian feels the Escalade beginning to ascend a steep upgrade.

Capital Avenue rises on massive pilings over the interchange. Philip takes the incline slowly, snaking through an obstacle course of deserted wrecks at about fifteen miles an hour.

Brian feels a tapping on his left shoulder, and he realizes that Penny is trying to get his attention. He turns and looks at her.

She leans over and whispers something to him. It sounds like, “I can’t see.”

Brian looks at her. “You can’t see?”

She shakes her head and whispers it again.

This time, Brian understands. “Can you hold it for a minute, kiddo?”

Philip hears this, and he glances in the rearview. “What’s the matter?”

“She has to pee.”

“Oh boy,” Philip says. “Sorry, punkin, you’re gonna have to cross your legs for a few minutes.”

Penny whispers to Brian that she really, really,
really
has to go.

“She’s gotta go, Philip,” Brian informs his brother. “Really bad.”

“Just hold it for a little bit, punkin.”

They are approaching the zenith of the hill. At night, the view from this part of the city, as a motorist crosses Capital Avenue, must be gorgeous. There’s a moment coming, about a hundred yards in the distance now, when the Escalade will clear the shadow of a tall building to the west. At night, the luminous constellations of city lights come into view at this point, providing a breathtaking panorama of the capitol dome in the foreground, and the sparkling cathedral of skyscrapers behind it.

They clear the shadow of the building, and they see the city spread out before them in all its glory. Philip slams on the brakes.

The Escalade lurches to a stop.

They sit there for an endless moment, all of them stricken speechless.

The street to the left runs along the front of the venerable old marble edifice of the capitol building. It is one-way going the wrong way, completely choked with abandoned cars. But that is not why everyone in the SUV is suddenly thunderstruck. The reason why nobody can muster a word—the silence lasting only a second, but seeming to go on for an eternity—is because of what they see coming at them down Capital Avenue from the north.

Penny wets herself.

*   *   *

The greeting party, as copious as a Roman army and as slapdash as a swarm of giant arachnids, comes from Martin Luther King Drive, a little over a block away. They come from the cool shadows where government buildings block out the sun, and there are so many of them that it takes a moment for the human eye to simply register what it is seeing. All shapes and sizes and stages of deterioration, they emerge from doorways and windows and alleys and wooded squares and nooks and crannies, and they fill the street with the profusion of a disordered marching band, drawn to the noise and smell and advent of a fresh automobile filled with fresh meat.

Old and young, black and white, men and women, former businessmen, housewives, civil servants, hustlers, children, thugs, teachers, lawyers, nurses, cops, garbage men, and prostitutes, each and every one of their faces uniformly pale and decomposed, like an endless orchard of shriveled fruit rotting in the sun—a thousand pairs of lifeless gunmetal-gray eyes locking in unison onto the Escalade, a thousand feral, primordial tracking devices fixing themselves hungrily on the newcomers in their midst.

Over the course of that single instant of horror-stricken silence, Philip makes a number of realizations with the speed of a synapse firing.

He realizes he can smell the telltale odor of the horde coming through the open window, and possibly even the air vents in the dash: that sickening, rancid bacon-and-shit stench. But more than that, he realizes that the strange drone he heard earlier, when he rolled down his window—that vibrating hum in the air like the twanging of a million high-tension wires—is the sound of a city full of the dead.

Their collective groaning, as they now labor as one giant multifaceted organism toward the Escalade, makes Philip’s skin crawl.

All of which leads to one final realization that strikes Philip Blake between the eyes with the force of a ball-peen hammer. It occurs to him—considering the sight unfolding in almost dreamy slow motion in front of him—that the quest to find a refugee center in this town, not to mention anyone still alive, is fast becoming about as prudent as the boy looking for a pony in a pile of horseshit.

In that microsecond of dread—that minuscule soupçon of frozen stillness—Philip realizes that the sun will probably not be coming out tomorrow, and the orphans will stay orphans, and the Braves will never again win the fucking pennant.

Before jerking the shift lever he turns to the others and in a voice laced with bitterness says, “Show of hands, how many y’all still hot to find that refugee center?”

PART 2

Atlanta

He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.