The Walking Dead (17 page)

Hunched over the wheel, teeth gnashing, knuckles white, Philip uses the wipers, with periodic sprays of cleaning solution, to keep the windshield clean enough to see through as he chews his way north, plowing the 8,300 pounds of Detroit iron through the moving sea of zombies. Varying his speed between thirty and fifty miles an hour, he carves a path toward the center of town.

At times, he is literally cutting a swath through a crowd so dense that it’s like blazing a trail through a thick forest of blood fruit, the flailing arms and curled fingers like tree limbs, clawing at the side windows as the Escalade digs through the walking excrement. At other times, the SUV crosses short sections of clear street, with only a few zombies trundling along on a sidewalk or at the edges of the pavement, and this gives Philip a chance to get his speed up, and to swerve to the right to a pick a few off, and then to the left for a few more, and then he’ll hit another wall-to-wall mob, and that’s probably the most fun, because that’s when the shit really flies.

It’s almost as though the viscera is raining down from above, from the sky, rather than from under the wheels or along the frame or over the top of the big front grill as the Escalade shears through the bodies. The wet matter streaks across the glass, again and again, with the rhythm of a giant pinwheel, a kaleidoscope of color, the palette like a rainbow of human tissue—oxblood red, pond-scum green, burnt-ocher yellow, and pine-tar black—and it’s almost kind of beautiful to Philip.

He roars around a corner and plunges into another mass of zombies coming down the street.

The strangest part is the continual repetitive flashes of similar tissues and organs—some of them recognizable, some of them not so recognizable. Entrails fly in all directions, splashing the windshield and sliding across the hood. Little kernels of teeth periodically gather in the wiper blades, and something else, something pink, like little pearls of fish roe, keeps collecting in the seams of the hood.

Philip glimpses dead face after dead face, each one flashing in his window—visible one moment, gone the next—and he’s in a zone now, he’s somewhere else, not in the SUV, not behind the wheel, but
inside
the mob, inside the city of undead, chewing through their ranks, devouring the motherfuckers. Philip is the baddest monster of them all, and he’s going to make it through this ocean of shit if he has to tear down the entire universe.

*   *   *

Brian realizes what is happening before he even looks. Ten excruciating minutes after they started mowing through the sea of zombies—after making it across nearly twenty-three city blocks—the Escalade goes into a spin.

The centripetal force tugs Brian against the floor, and he pops his head up—peering over the seat—as the SUV slides sideways on the grease of fifty thousand corpses. He has no time to yell or do anything about what is happening. He can only brace himself and Penny against the seat backs for the inevitable impact.

Wheels slick with gore, the SUV does a three-sixty, the rear end windmilling through the last few stray cadavers. The city blurs outside the windows, and Philip fights the wheel, tries to straighten it, but the tires are hydroplaning on a sheet of intestines and blood and spoor.

Brian lets out a strangled yelp—part warning and part inarticulate cry—as the vehicle spins toward a row of storefronts.

In the frenzied moments before the crash, Brian glimpses a row of derelict shop windows: hatless busts of bald mannequins, empty jewelry displays, frayed wires growing out of vacant floorboards, all of it blurred behind the wire-meshed display windows. But it’s just a vague impression of these things, Brian’s vision distorted by the violent spinning of the SUV.

And that’s when the right side of the Escalade collides with the display window.

*   *   *

The crash has that suspension-of-time feeling for Brian, the store window turning to stardust, the noise of shattering glass like a wave slamming a breakwater as the Escalade punctures the burglar bars and plunges sideways into the dark shadows of the Goldberg Fine Jewelry Center of Atlanta.

Counters and display cases explode in all directions, a sparkling, silver sleet of debris as the gravitational forces yank all passengers to the right. The Escalade’s airbags deploy in tiny explosions—great heaving balloons of white nylon filling the interior before it has a chance to collapse—and Nick is thrown sideways into the white fabric. Philip is flung sideways into Nick, and Penny is thrown across the rear floor into Brian.

The SUV skids sideways for an eternity through the empty store.

The vehicle finally comes to rest after slamming hard into a weight-bearing pillar in the center of the store, shoving everybody hard against the padded lining of the airbags, and for a moment, nobody moves.

*   *   *

White, feathery debris snows down through the dark, dusty air of the jewelry store, and the sounds of something collapsing behind them creaks in the sudden silence. Brian glances through the cracked rear window and sees the front of the store, a pile of fallen girders blocking the hole in the window, a cloud of dust obscuring the street.

Philip is twisting around in his seat, his face ashen and wild with panic. “Punkin? Punkin? You okay? Talk to me, little girl! You all right?”

Brian turns to the child, who is still on the floor, looking woozy and maybe in some kind of shock, but otherwise unharmed. “She’s good, Philip, she’s good,” Brian says, feeling the back of the child’s head for any blood, any sign of injury. She seems fine.

“Everybody else okay?” Philip looks around the dust motes of the dark interior. A thin ray of daylight filtering across the store is the only illumination. In the gloom, Brian can see the other men’s faces: sweaty, stone-still with terror, eyes glinting.

Nick raises a thumb. “I’m good.”

Brian says he is, too.

Philip already has his door open, and is struggling out from behind the airbag. “Get everything you can carry,” he tells them, “but make sure you get the shotguns and all the shells. You hear me?”

Yes, they hear him, and now Brian and Nick are climbing out of the SUV. Over the course of a mere minute, Brian makes a series of observations—most of them, apparently, already calculated by Philip—beginning with the front of the store.

From the chorus of moaning noises and thousands of shuffling feet, it is clear to Brian that the zombie horde is closing in on the accident scene. The Escalade is finished, its front end nearly totaled, its tires blown, its entire length shellacked with gore.

The rear of the store leads toward a hallway. Dark, narrow, lined with drywall, the corridor may or may not lead to an exit. There’s no time to investigate. All they have time to do is grab their packs, their duffels, and their weapons. Dazed from the collision, dizzy with panic, bruised and battered, ears ringing, Brian and Nick each grab a goose gun, and Philip takes as many bladed tools as he can stow on his body, a bad-axe in each side of his belt, the Ruger and three extra magazines.

“Come on, kiddo, we gotta skeedaddle,” Brian says to Penny, but the child looks lethargic and confused. He tries to pull her from the mangled interior, but she hangs on to the back of the seat.

“Carry her,” Philip says, coming around the front of the SUV.

“Come on, sweetie, you can ride piggyback,” Brian tells the girl.

Penny reluctantly climbs out, and Brian lifts her onto his back.

The four of them quickly creep through the jewelry store’s back hall.

*   *   *

They get lucky. Just past the glass doorway of a back office, they find an unmarked metal door. Philip throws the bolt, and he cracks the door open a few inches, peering out. The smell is incredible—a black, greasy stench that reminds Brian of the time his sixth-grade class took a field trip to the Turner stockyards outside Ashburn. The smell on the abattoir floor was like this. Philip raises a hand, motioning for everybody to stop.

Over Philip’s shoulder, Brian can see a long, narrow, dark alley lined with overflowing garbage Dumpsters. But it’s the actual
content
of the receptacles that registers most sharply in Brian’s brain: pale human arms dangling over the sides, ragged, ulcerated legs, matted hair hanging down, and pools of old blackened blood dried beneath them.

Philip motions to the others. “Y’all follow me, and do exactly what I say,” he says, snapping the cocking mechanism on the Ruger—eight rounds of .22-caliber bullets ready to rock—and then he’s moving.

They follow him out.

*   *   *

As quietly and quickly as possible, they make their way through the stench and shadows of the deserted slaughterhouse of an alley toward a side street visible at one end. Weighed down by the duffel bag over one shoulder, and the child clinging to his back, Brian limps along in between Philip and Nick—Penny’s sixty-five pounds never feeling as heavy as they do now. Nick, who is bringing up the rear, walks with his Marlin 20-gauge cradled in his arms. Brian has his own shotgun wedged underneath his backpack—not that he has any idea how to use the damn thing.

They reach the end of the alley, and they are about to slip out and make their way down the deserted side street, when Philip accidentally steps on a human hand protruding from under a garbage Dumpster.

The hand—connected to a zombie with some fight still in it—instantly recoils under the container. Philip jerks backward with a start.

“DUDE!” Nick cries out, and the hand shoots back out and grabs Philip’s ankle.

Philip sprawls to the ground, his Ruger spinning off across the pavement.

The dead man—an ashy-skinned, bearded homeless person in bloodstained rags—crabs toward Philip with the speed of a giant spider.

Philip claws for his gun. The others fumble for their weapons, Brian going for his shotgun while trying to balance the child on his back. Nick thumbs back the hammers on his Marlin.

The dead thing clutches Philip’s leg and opens its jaws with the rigor-mortis creak of rusty hinges as Philip fumbles for his axe.

The zombie is about to take a chunk out of Philip’s lower calf when the barrel of Nick’s goose gun presses down on the back of the thing’s skull.

The blast rips through the zombie’s brain, sending half its face through the air on a geyser of blood and matter, the booming echo of the shotgun reverberating through the canyons of steel and glass.

“Now we’re screwed,” Philip says, struggling to his feet, scooping up the Ruger.

“What’s the matter?” Brian says, adjusting the weight of the little girl on his back.

“Listen,” Philip says.

In the brittle silence, they hear the ocean-wave sound of moaning suddenly change, altering its course as though on a shifting wind, the masses of undead drawn by the boom of the shotgun.

“So, we’ll go back inside,” Nick says in a strident, tense voice. “Back inside the jewelry store—there’s gotta be a second floor.”

“Too late,” Philip says, checking the Ruger, looking down into its breech. He’s got four rounds of hollow tips left in the hilt, and three mags of eight each in his back pockets. “I’m bettin’ they’re already flooding in the front of the place.”

“What do you suggest?”

Philip looks at Nick, and then at his brother. “How fast you think you can run with all that weight?”

*   *   *

They take off at a moderate clip, Philip in the lead, Brian hobbling along after him, Nick bringing up the rear, past caved-in storefronts and petrified, charred funeral pyres of bodies burned by enterprising survivors.

Brian can’t tell for sure but it seems like Philip is madly looking for a safe exit off the streets—a clean doorway, a fire escape ladder,
something
—but he’s distracted now by an increasing number of moving corpses appearing around every corner.

Philip blasts the first one at fifty paces, sending a slug through its forehead, dropping it like a bad habit. The second one surprises him at closer range, lurching out of a shadowy doorway, and Philip puts it down with his second shot. More of them are materializing from porches and gaping store windows. Nick puts the goose gun and two decades of boar hunting to good use, taking down at least a dozen of them in the space of two blocks.

The blasts echo up over the skyline like sonic booms in the stratosphere.

*   *   *

They turn a corner and hurry down a narrower side road of herringbone brick, perhaps a landmark antebellum street that once rang with buckboards and horses, now bordered on either side by boarded condominiums and office buildings. The good news is that they seem to be moving away from the congested area, encountering fewer and fewer walking dead with each passing block.

The bad news is that they feel trapped now. They sense the city closing in around them, swallowing them whole in its glass-and-steel gullet. By this point, the sun has begun its afternoon descent, and the shadows thrown by the massive skyline have begun to lengthen.

Philip sees something in the distance—maybe a block and a half away—and instinctively ducks under the canopy of a torn awning.

The others hunker down with him against the boarded window of a former dry cleaner, and they crouch in the shadows to catch their breaths.