The Walking Dead (35 page)

The shadow of the gunman begins falling, almost in slow motion, like an old redwood giving up the ghost.

Brian whirls around in time to see that the bearded man has been shot from behind, the top of his skull a mass of red pulp, his beard matted in blood. Eyes rolling back in his head, he collapses. Brian stares. Like a curtain dropping, the falling man reveals two figures behind him, charging toward Brian and Penny.

“GODDAMNIT NO!” Philip throws the pistol-grip shotgun—still smoking hot—to the ground and races through the trees. Nick follows on his heels. Philip roars up to Brian and shoves him aside. “NO! NO!”

Philip drops to his knees by the dying child, who is now asphyxiating, drowning in her own blood. He scoops her up and tenderly touches the gaping wound as though it’s just a boo-boo, just a scrape, just a little bump. He draws her into an embrace, her blood soaking him.

Brian lies on the ground a few feet away, breathing the musty earth, a curtain of shock pulling down over his eyes. Nick stands nearby. “We can stop the bleeding, right? We can fix her up? Right?”

Philip cradles the bloody child.

Penny expires in his arms in a breathy little death rattle, which leaves her face as white and cold as porcelain. Philip shakes her. “C’mon, punkin … stay with us … stay with us now. Come on … stay with us … please stay with us … Punkin? Punkin? Punkin?”

The terrible silence hangs in the air.

“Sweet Jesus,” Nick utters to himself, his gaze going down to the ground.

*   *   *

For the longest time, Philip holds the child while Nick stares into the dirt, silently praying. For most of that time, Brian lies prone on the ground, five feet away, crying into the moist earth, babbling softly, more to himself than to anyone else: “I tried … happened so fast … I couldn’t … it was … I can’t believe it … I can’t … Penny was—”

All at once, a big, gnarled hand wrenches down on the back of Brian’s shirt.

“What did I say?” Philip snarls, a guttural growl, as he yanks his brother off the ground, and then slams Brian against the trunk of a nearby tree. Brian goes limp. He sees stars.

“Philly, no!” Nick tries to step in between the two brothers, but Philip shoves Nick away hard enough to send the smaller man sprawling to the ground. Philip still has his right hand locked around his brother’s throat.

“What did I say?” Philip slams Brian against the trunk. The back of Brian’s skull bounces off the bark, sending veins of light and pain through his field of vision, but he makes no effort to fight back or escape. He wants to die. He wants to die at the hands of his brother.

“WHAT DID I SAY?” Philip heaves Brian away from the tree. The ground flies up at Brian like a battering ram, smashing one shoulder and the side of his face, and then a fusillade of kicks descends upon Brian as he rolls involuntarily across the ground. One kick from the steel-toed logger boot strikes him in the jaw hard enough to crack his mandible. Another one fractures three ribs, sending white-hot pain up his side. Yet another strikes the small of his back, dislocating vertebra and nearly puncturing his kidney. Shiny, bright pain splinters his tailbone. And after a while, Brian can hardly feel the pain anymore, he can only watch it all unfold from way up above his mangled body, as he surrenders to the beating as a supplicant surrenders to a high priest.

NINETEEN

The next day, Philip spends an hour in the toolshed out behind the villa, going through the collection of weapons taken from the intruders, as well as all the bladed tools and farm implements left by the former inhabitants. He knows what he has to do, but choosing the mode of execution is agonizing for him. At first, he decides on the nine-millimeter semiauto. It’ll be the fastest and the cleanest. But then he has second thoughts about using a gun. It just seems unfair somehow. Too cold and impersonal. Nor can he bring himself to use an axe or a machete. Too messy and uncertain. What if his aim is off by half an inch and he botches the job?

At last he decides on the nine-millimeter Glock, shoving a fresh mag of rounds into the hilt and snapping back the cocking slide.

He takes a deep breath, and then goes over to the shed’s door. He pauses and braces himself. Scratching noises sporadically travel across the exterior walls of the shed. The villa’s property buzzes with Biter activity, scores of the things drawn to the commotion of the previous day’s firefight. Philip kicks the door open.

The door bangs into a middle-aged female zombie in a stained pinafore dress who was sniffing around the shed. The force of the impact sends her skeletal form stumbling backward, arms pinwheeling, a ghastly moan rising out of her decomposed face. Philip walks past her, casually raising the Glock, hardly even breaking his stride as he quickly squeezes off a single shot into the side of her skull.

The roar of the Glock echoes as the female corpse whiplashes sideways in a cloud of scarlet mist, then folds to the ground.

Philip marches across the rear of the villa, raising the Glock and taking out another pair of errant Biters. One of them is an old man dressed only in yellowed underwear—maybe an escapee from a nursing home. Another one is most likely a former fruit grower, his bloated, blackened body still clad in its original sappy dungarees. Philip puts them down with a minimum of fuss—a single shot each—and he makes a mental note to clear the remains later that day with one of the snow-shovel attachments on the riding mower.

Almost a full day has passed since Penny died in his arms, and now the new dawn is rising clear and blue, the crisp autumn sky high and clean over the acres of peach trees. It’s taken Philip nearly twenty-four hours to work up the nerve to do what he has to do. Now he grips the gun with a sweaty palm as he enters the orchard.

He has five rounds left in the magazine.

*   *   *

In the shadows of the woods, a figure writhes and moans against an ancient tree trunk. Bound with rope and duct tape, the prisoner strains with futile desperation to escape. Philip approaches and raises the gun. He points the barrel between the figure’s eyes, and for just an instant, Philip tells himself to get it over with quickly:
Lance the wound, remove the tumor, get it done.

The muzzle wavers, Philip’s finger freezing up on the trigger pad, and he lets out a tormented sigh. “I can’t do it,” he utters under his breath.

He lowers the gun and stares at his daughter. Six feet from him, tied to the tree, Penny growls with the feral hunger of a rabid dog. Her china doll face has narrowed and sunken into a rotted white gourd, her soft eyes hardened into tiny silver coins. Her once innocent tulip-shaped lips are now blackened and curled away from slimy teeth. She doesn’t recognize her father.

This is the part that tears the biggest chunk out of Philip’s soul. He can’t stop remembering the look in Penny’s eyes each time he would pick her up at the day care center or at her aunt Nina’s house at the end of a long, hard work day. The spark of recognition and excitement—and hell yes, unadulterated
love
—in those big, brown doelike eyes each time Philip returned was enough to keep Philip going no matter what. Now that spark is gone forever—cemented over with the gray film of the undead.

Philip knows what he has to do.

Penny snarls.

Philip’s eyes burn with agony.

“I can’t do it,” he murmurs again, looking down, not really addressing Penny or even himself. Seeing her like this sends a bolt of electric rage down through his system, arcing like the pilot of a welding torch, touching off a secret flame deep within him. He hears the voice:
Tear the world open, tear it apart, rip open its fucking heart … do it now.

He backs away from the horror in the orchard, his brain roiling with fury.

*   *   *

The villa’s property—now basking in a mild autumn morning—is a half-moon-shaped plot of land, the main house at its center. Several outbuildings rise along the gentle curve behind the house: the carriage house, a small storage shed for the riding mower and tractor, a second shed for tools, a coach house on elevated pilings for guests, and a large wood-sided barn with a huge weather vane and cupola on top. This last structure, the worm-eaten wood siding faded to a sun-bleached pink, is where Philip now heads.

He needs to drain off this poisonous current coursing through him; he needs to vent.

The main entrance of the barn is a double door at one end, latched with a giant timber across its center. Philip walks up and throws open the plank, the doors squeaking apart, revealing the dust motes floating in shadows inside. Philip enters, closing the double doors behind him. The air smells of horse piss and moldy hay.

Two more figures wriggle and squirm in the corner, gripped in their own brand of hellish torment, bound and gagged with duct tape:
Sonny and Cher.

The twosome tremble against each other on the floor of the barn, their mouths taped, their backs pressed against the door of an empty horse stall, their bodies in the throes of some kind of withdrawal. Either heroin or crack or something else, it doesn’t really matter to Philip. The only thing that matters now is that these two have no idea how much worse life is about to get for them.

Philip walks over to the dynamic duo. The skinny gal is trembling with spasms, her painted eyes caked with dried tears. The man is breathing hard through his nostrils.

Standing in a narrow beam of sunlight teeming with dust and hay dander, Philip stares down at them like an angry god. “You,” he says to Sonny. “Gonna ask you a question … and I know it’s hard to nod with your head taped up and shit, so just blink once for yes, twice for no.”

The man looks up through raw, watery, sunken eyes. He blinks once.

Philip looks at him. “You like to watch?”

Two blinks.

Philip reaches down to his belt buckle and starts to unfasten it. “That’s a shame, because I’m gonna give one hell of a show.”

Two blinks.

Again … two blinks.

Two blinks, two blinks, two blinks.

*   *   *

“Easy, Brian, not so fast,” Nick says to Brian the next night, up in the second-floor sewing room. In the light of kerosene lanterns, Nick is helping Brian drink water through a straw. Brian’s mouth is still swollen and clumsy, and he dribbles on himself. Nick has been doing everything he can to help Brian recover, and keeping food down him is paramount. “Try some more of the vegetable soup,” Nick suggests.

Brian has a few spoonfuls. “Thanks, Nick.” Brian’s voice is choked, thick with pain. “Thanks for everything.” His words are slightly slurred, his soft palate still inflamed. He speaks tentatively, haltingly. Lying in bed, he has rags wrapped snugly around his broken ribs, Band-Aids on his face and neck, his left eye puffy with a purplish bruise. Something might be wrong with his hip; neither of them can tell for sure.

“You’re gonna be fine, man,” Nick says. “Your brother is another story.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s lost it, man.”

“He’s been through a lot, Nick.”

“How can you say that?” Nick sits back, lets out a pained sigh. “Look what he did to you. And don’t say it’s because he lost Penny—we’ve all lost people we love. He came very close to taking you out.”

Brian looks at his own mangled feet sticking out of the bottom of the blankets. With great effort, he says, “I deserve everything I got.”

“Don’t say that! It wasn’t your fault, what happened. Your brother’s turned a corner with this thing. I’m really worried about him.”

“He’ll be okay.” Brian looks at Nick. “What’s wrong? Something else is bothering you.”

Nick takes a deep breath and wonders whether he should confide in Brian. The Blake brothers have always had a complex relationship, and over the years, Nick Parsons has often felt that
he
was more of a brother to Philip Blake than his biological sibling. But there’s always been an X factor with the Blakes, a bond of blood that runs deep within the two men.

Nick finally says, “I know you aren’t exactly the religious type. I know you think I’m a Holy Roller.”

“That’s not true, Nick.”

Nick waves it off. “Doesn’t matter … my faith is strong, and I don’t judge a man by his religion.”

“Where you going with this?”

Nick looks at Brian. “He’s keeping her alive, Brian … or maybe
alive
is not the right word.”

“Penny?”

“He’s out there with her now.”

“Where?”

Nick explains what’s been going on over these last two days since the firefight. While Brian has been recovering from the beating, Philip’s been busy. He’s keeping two of the intruders—the only ones who survived the firefight—locked up in the barn. Philip claims he’s questioning them about possible human settlements. Nick is worried he’s torturing them. But that’s the least of their worries. The fate of Penny Blake is what’s eating at Nick. “He’s got her chained to a tree like a pet,” Nick says.

Brian frowns. “Where?”

“Out in the orchard. He goes out there at night. Spends time with her.”