The Walking Dead (20 page)

Brian sprawls backward to the floor, and it all happens so fast that Philip and Nick have no time to intercede. They are too far away.

The moving cadaver lands on top of Brian, the thing snarling with black, slimy teeth and—in that split instant before Brian realizes that he is still holding the shotgun—the zombie opens its jaws so wide it looks as though its skull is about to unhinge.

Brian gets one horrible glimpse down the recesses of the thing’s throat—an endless black well straight down into hell—before he instinctively jerks the shotgun up. Almost by accident, the muzzle lodges itself in the gaping hole of the thing’s mouth, and Brian screams out a garbled cry as he squeezes off a single blast.

The back of the thing’s skull explodes, sending up a cloud of blood mist and tissue. The backwash hits the ceiling in deep purple arterial matter, and Brian is thunderstruck for a moment, his back pinned to the floor. The thing’s head is still skewered on the shaft of the shotgun. He blinks. The silver eyes of the girlfriend or daughter, or
whoever
she was, are frozen now and fixed on Brian.

He coughs and turns away as the girl’s head slowly slides down the length of the barrel, a giant shish kebob, the dead eyes still locked on Brian. He feels the moist slime of her face on his hands. He closes his eyes. He can’t move. His right hand still glued to the trigger, his left still welded to the stock, he grimaces with horror.

Cold laughter brings him back around. “Look who just scored his first touchdown,” Philip Blake says, standing over his brother in a cloud of cordite smoke, grinning from ear to ear with mirthless delight.

*   *   *

Nick is the one who finds the egress to the roof, and Philip is the one who gets the idea to deposit all the rotting carcasses up there so they don’t stink up the place any further (or make the scavenger hunt through the upper floors any more unpleasant than it has to be).

It takes them a little over an hour to drag all the inhuman remains up the stairwell to the third floor, and then up through a narrow stairwell to the fire door. They have to shoot the lock off, and have to work in a sort of modified bucket brigade, dragging the smelly flesh sacks down the hallways and up two flights of stairs to the roof, leaving leech trails of gore on the cabbage-rose carpet runners.

They manage to get every last one of them—they terminated fourteen of them altogether, going through two entire clips of .22-caliber rounds, as well as half a box of shells—up the passageway and onto the roof.

“Look at this place,” Nick marvels as he puts the last carcass down on the tarpaper warning track along the east side of the roof, the wind whipping his pant legs and tossing his hair. The corpses lie in a row like cordwood lined up for the winter. Brian stands at the opposite end of the file, gazing down at the dead things with a strange, implacable expression on his face.

“Pretty cool,” Philip says, walking over to the edge of the roof.

At this height, he can see the distant buildings of the exclusive Buckhead area, Peachtree Plaza, and the glass cathedral of skyscrapers to the west. The frozen spires of the city rise in pristine summits, impassive, stoic in the sunlight, untouched by the apocalypse. Down below, Philip sees the scattered wandering dead moving in and out of shadows like broken toy soldiers come to life.

“Cool place to hang out,” Philip says, turning and surveying the rest of the roof. Around a giant conglomeration of antennae, rent stracks, and heating and air-conditioning machinery, now cold and powerless, an apron of pea gravel offers enough space to play a touch football game. A forgotten tangle of lawn furniture leans against an air duct. “Grab a chair and take a load off.”

They drag tattered chaise lounges over to the edge of the roof.

“I could get used to this place,” Nick says, settling down on a lounger facing the skyline.

Philip sits down next to him. “You mean the roof or this place in general?”

“All of it.”

“Copy that.”

“How do you do it?” Brian says, standing behind them, fidgeting with nerves. He refuses to sit down, refuses to relax. He’s still wired from his encounter with the impaled head.

“Do what?” Philip says.

“I don’t know, like, the killing and stuff, and then the next minute you’re—”

Brian stops himself, unable to put it into words, and Philip turns and looks at his brother. He sees the man’s hands shaking. “Sit down, Bri, you did good down there.”

Brian pulls a chair over, sits down, wrings his hands, ruminating. “I’m just saying—”

Again, he can’t articulate what he’s “just saying” and he falters.

“It ain’t killing, sport,” Philip says. “Soon as you get that straight, you’re gonna be fine.”

“What is it then?”

Philip shrugs. “Nicky, what would you call it?”

Nick is staring out at the skyline. “God’s work?”

Philip has a big laugh at that one, and then says, “I got an idea.”

He gets up and goes over to the closest corpse, one of the smaller ones.

“Check this out,” he says, and drags the thing over to the edge of the roof.

The other two join Philip at the ledge. The rancid wind tosses their hair as they gaze over the ledge at the street thirty-five feet below them.

Philip shoves the cadaver with the toe of his boot until it slips over the side.

The thing seems to fall in slow motion, its limp appendages flopping like broken wings. It strikes the cement parkway down below, in front of the building, and comes apart with the sound, color, and texture of a very ripe watermelon erupting in a starburst of pink tissue.

*   *   *

In the master bedroom of the first-floor apartment, David Chalmers is sitting in his wifebeater T-shirt and boxer shorts, sucking on an inhaler, trying to get enough Atrovent into his lungs to quell the wheezing, when he hears the commotion outside the boarded sliding-glass doors of the rear portion of the apartment.

The sound instantly raises the hairs on his neck, and he quickly fumbles himself into his clothes, including the breathing tube, which he gets halfway on, one side dangling under a hairy nostril.

He storms across the room on creaking knees, yanking the oxygen tank along on its castors like a stubborn child being pulled by an impatient nanny.

Crossing the living room, he catches a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of three figures standing rapt and terrified at the threshold of the kitchen. April and Tara had been making cookies with the little girl—using up the last of their flour and sugar—and now the three females stand there, gaping in the direction of the noise.

David hobbles over to the boarded, meshed, burglar-barred sliding doors.

Through a narrow gap in the plywood planks, in between the branches of skeletal trees, he can just barely see the far end of the courtyard, and beyond that a slice of the street running parallel to the front of the apartment building.

Another body rains down as if dropped by God himself, hitting the pavement, making a wet, lurid, smacking sound not unlike a giant water balloon popping. But that’s not the noise that’s getting to David Chalmers right now. That’s not the noise that’s penetrating the apartment, coming in waves, a vast, distant, tuneless symphony.

“Sweet jumpin’ Jesus,” he mutters in a breathy wheeze, whirling around so fast he nearly tips over the tank in its caddy.

He drags the thing toward the door.

*   *   *

On the roof, Philip and Nick pause after heaving the fifth body off the ledge.

Panting from the effort and a sort of morbid giddiness, Philip comments: “They blow up good, don’t they?”

Nick is trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. “This is ten kinds of wrong but I gotta admit it feels good.”

“You got that right.”

“What’s the point, guys?” Brian wants to know, standing behind them.

“The point is, there
is
no point,” Philip says without looking at his brother.

“What is that, like a Zen saying?”

“It is what it is.”

“Okay, now you lost me. I mean, I don’t see how throwing these things off the roof is
accomplishing
anything.”

Philip turns and gives his brother a look. “Lighten up, sport. You bagged your first trophy today. It wasn’t pretty but it got the job done. We’re just blowing off a little steam.”

Nick sees something in the distance that he hadn’t noticed until now. “Hey, check out—”

“I’m just saying,” Brian interrupts. “We gotta keep our wits about us and shit.” He has his hands in his pockets, nervously kneading the change and the penknife that he has stashed in there. “April and her family are good people, Philip, we gotta behave ourselves.”

“Yes, Mom,” Philip says with a cold smile.

“Hey, you guys, check out that building down there on the corner.”

Nick is pointing at a squat, ugly brick edifice on the northeast corner of the closest intersection. Blackened around the edges with the fumes of the city, the faded letters painted above the first-floor display windows say
DILLARD’S HOME FURNISHINGS.

Philip sees it. “What about it?”

“Look at the front corner of the building, there’s a pedestrian thing.”

“A what?”

“A walkway or a breezeway or whatever you call it. See it?”

Sure enough, Philip sees a grimy glass bridge spanning the adjacent street, connecting the office building catty-corner to them to Dillard’s second floor. The glass-encased footbridge is empty and sealed at either end. “What are you thinking, Nicky?”

“I don’t know.” Nick stares at the pedestrian bridge, pondering. “Could be—”

“Gentlemen!” The husky boom of the old man’s voice interrupts.

Brian turns and sees David Chalmers trundling toward them from the open stairwell door. Urgency burns in the old man’s eyes, and he drags his oxygen tank along with a practiced limp. Brian takes a step toward him. “Mr. Chalmers, did you get all the way up here by yourself?”

The old man is breathing hard as he approaches. Through his wheezing, rattling breaths, he says, “I may be old and sick, but I ain’t helpless … and call me David. I see y’all cleaned out them floors real nice and tidy, and for that I thank you, I truly do.”

Philip and Nick turn and face the man. “Is there a problem?” Philip asks.

“Hell yeah, there’s a problem,” the old man says, eyes flashing with anger. “What you been doin’ up here, pitchin’ them bodies off the roof like that? You’re just cutting off your own
feet
!”

“What do you mean?”

The old man lets out a grunt. “Y’all deaf or somethin’? You can’t hear that?”

“Hear what?”

The old man shuffles out to the edge of the roof. “Take a gander.” He points a gnarled finger at two buildings in the distance. “You see what you done?”

Philip gazes off to the north, and all at once he realizes why he’s been hearing that infernal noise of a thousand and one moans for the past fifteen minutes. Legions of zombies are migrating toward their building, most likely drawn to the noise and spectacle of bodies hitting the pavement.

Maybe ten or twelve blocks away now, they move with the undulating slither of blood clots traveling down arteries. For a moment, Philip can’t tear his eyes away from the hideous migration.

They’re coming from all directions. Percolating through the shadows, oozing out of alleys, choking the main drags, they meet up and multiply at intersections like a great amoeba growing in size and strength, inexorably drawn to the catalyst of humans in their midst. Philip looks away finally and pats the old man on the shoulder. “Our bad, David … our bad.”

*   *   *

That night, they try to eat dinner and pretend that it’s just an ordinary meal among friends, but the persistent clawing noises outside the building keep killing the conversation. The sounds are a constant reminder of their exile, of the mortal threat just outside their door, of their isolation. They tell each other their life stories, and they try to make the best of it, but the menacing noises keep everybody on edge.

Considering there are seventeen other apartments in the building, they had expected to harvest a bounty of provisions from the upper floors that day. But all they found was a few dry goods in the pantries, some cereal and hard pasta, maybe half a dozen cans of soup, a bunch of stale crackers, and a few bottles of cheap grocery store wine.

It had been weeks now since the building lay abandoned, without power, infested with the dead, and all the food had rotted. Maggots crawled in most refrigerators, and even the bedding and the clothes and the furniture had mildewed and soured with the stink of zombies. Maybe folks took their essentials with them when they fled. Maybe they took all the bottled water and batteries and flashlights and wooden matches and weapons.

They left their medicine cabinets untouched, though, and Tara manages to collect a shoe box full of pills: tranquilizers like Xanax and Valium, stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin, blood pressure meds, diet pills, beta-blockers, antidepressants, and cholesterol medications. She also finds a couple of bottles of bronchodilators that will serve the old man well. Philip gets a kick out of Tara’s flimsy pretense of being concerned for everybody’s health when he knows full well she is mostly interested in anything that will provide her with a recreational buzz. And who the hell can blame her? Pharmaceutical relief in this situation is as good an escape as any.