The Walking Dead (42 page)

The wet, gurgling, sucking noises coming from the clearing are barely audible above the constant buzzing of dirt track racers. Somewhere in the back of Brian’s hectic thoughts, he knows that the din of the racetrack is drowning the commotion in the clearing—probably part of Philip’s plan, his abduction of the girl going unheard, unseen.

Through the lacing of brambles and foliage, Brian can see the silhouettes of monsters tearing into the human remains left in the clearing. Clusters of zombies hunch over their quarry, apelike, gorging on hunks of flesh, detached bones dripping with gore, flaps of skin, torn scalps, unidentified appendages, and sopping organs still warm and steaming in the chill air. More of them crowd in, clumsily shoving each other aside, grunting for a morsel.

Brian closes his eyes.

For a moment, he wonders if he should pray. He wonders if he should offer a silent eulogy for his brother, for Nick and the woman, for Penny, for Bobby Marsh, for David Chalmers, for the dead, for the living, and for this whole fucked-up, broken, godforsaken world. But he doesn’t. He simply sits there as the zombies feed.

Some time later—God only knows when—the Biters drift away from the flensed, excoriated remains now lying strewn across the clearing.

Brian slips off the roof of the truck cab and makes his way back through the darkness to the apartment.

*   *   *

That night, Brian sits in the empty apartment, in the living room, in front of the empty, scummy fish tank. It’s the end of the programming day in Brian’s brain. The national anthem has been sung, the broadcast has signed off, and now only a blizzard of white noise blankets his thoughts.

Still clad in his filthy jacket, he sits staring through the fish tank’s rectangular glass side—which is filmed in green mold, and mottled with specks of chum—as though watching some monotonous still life being broadcast from hell. He sits this way, staring trancelike into the vacuous heart of that fish tank, for endless minutes. The minutes turn into hours. His mind-screen is a blank cathode-ray tube boiling with electronic snow. The coming of daylight barely registers. He doesn’t hear the commotion outside the apartment, the troubled voices, the sounds of vehicles.

The day drags on—time now meaningless—until the next evening draws its curtain of darkness down over the apartment. Brian sits in the dark, oblivious to the passage of time, continuing to stare with catatonic interest at the invisible broadcast originating from the empty shell of the fish tank. The next morning comes and goes.

At some point that next day, Brian blinks. The flicker of a message sparks and sputters across the blank screen of his mind. At first, it’s faint and garbled, like a poorly transmitted signal, but with each passing second, it grows stronger, clearer, louder: GOOD-BYE.

Like a depth charge in the center of his soul, the word implodes in a convulsion of white-hot energy, jerking him forward in the shopworn armchair, sitting him bolt upright, forcing open his eyes.

—
GOOD-BYE
—

*   *   *

He’s dehydrated and stiff, his stomach empty, his pants soaked through with his own urine. For nearly thirty-six hours, he sat in that chair, comatose, as still as a divining rod, and moving isn’t easy at first, but he feels cleansed, scourged, as clearheaded as he’s ever been. He limps into the kitchen and finds little in the cupboard other than a couple of cans of peaches. He tears one open and wolfs the whole thing down, the juice running across his chin. Peaches have never tasted so good. In fact, it occurs to him that perhaps he has never tasted peaches before. He goes into the bedroom and changes out of his disgusting clothes … puts on his only other pair of jeans and his only other shirt (an AC/DC silk-screened tee). He finds his spare Dr. Martens boots and slips them on.

Mounted on the back of the door is a cracked, floor-length mirror.

A wiry, disheveled, compact ferret of a man stares back at him. The crack in the looking glass bisects his narrow visage and his thatch of long, unruly black hair. His face is fringed with straggly whiskers, his eyes sunken and rimmed in dark circles. He hardly recognizes himself.

“Whatever,” he says to the mirror, and walks out of the room.

He finds his .38 in the living room, along with one last speed-loader—the last six rounds in his possession—and he shoves the gun down the back of his belt, the speed-loader into his pocket.

Then he visits Penny.

“Hey there, kiddo,” he says with great tenderness as he enters the laundry room. The narrow chamber of linoleum reeks of the dead. Brian barely notices the smell. He goes over to the little creature, who growls and sputters at his presence, straining against her chains. She’s the color of cement, her eyes like smooth stones.

Brian crouches down in front of her, looks in her bucket. It’s empty.

He looks up at her. “You know I love you, right?”

The Penny-thing snarls.

Brian strokes the side of her delicate little ankle. “I’m going to go get some supplies, sweetheart. I’ll be back before you know it, don’t worry.”

The little dead thing cocks its head and lets out a groan that sounds like air running through rusty pipes. Brian pats her on the leg—out of the range of her rotting incisors—and then rises to his feet.

“See ya soon, sweetie.”

*   *   *

The moment that Brian slips unnoticed from the side door of the apartment, and starts north, striding through the raw winds of the afternoon, his head down, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he can tell something is going on. The racetrack is silent. A couple of townspeople run past him, their eyes aglow with alarm. The air reeks of the dead. Off to the left, behind the barricade of buses and semis, scores of walking corpses wander along the barrier, sniffing for a way in. Up ahead, black smoke pours out of the clinic’s incinerator. Brian quickens his pace.

As he closes in on the town square, he can see, way in the distance, at the north end of the safe zone, where the fence is under construction, men standing on wooden parapets with rifles and binoculars. They don’t look happy. Brian hurries along. All his pain—the stiffness in his joints, the throb in his ribs, all of it—vanishes amid the high-voltage current of his adrenaline.

Woodbury keeps its food rations in a brick warehouse across from the old courthouse. Brian pauses in front of the warehouse when he sees the old derelict juicers loitering across the street in front of the flagstone government building with its chipped Romanesque columns. Other folks stand on the stone steps, nervously smoking cigarettes, while others crowd the entranceway. Brian crosses the intersection and approaches the gathering.

“What’s going on?” he asks the fat old man in the Salvation Army coat.

“Trouble in River City, son,” the old codger says, jerking a greasy thumb at the courthouse. “Half the town’s in there havin’ a powwow.”

“What happened?”

“Found three more residents out in the woods yesterday, picked clean as chicken bones … place is crawlin’ with roamers now, drawn by the racetrack most likely. Damn fools makin’ all that noise.”

For a moment, Brian considers his options. He could very easily avoid this mess, pack up, and move on. He could boost one of the four-wheelers and take Penny in the back and be gone in a flash.

He doesn’t owe these people anything. The safest bet is to not get involved, just get the fuck out of Dodge. That’s the smartest way to play it. But something deep inside Brian makes him reconsider. What would Philip do?

Brian stares at the crowd of townspeople milling about the entrance to the courthouse.

TWENTY-THREE

“Does anybody even know what their names were?” A woman in her late sixties with a halo of fright-wig gray hair stands up in the back of the community room on the first floor of the courthouse building, the veins in her neck wattle pulsing with tension.

The thirty or so beleaguered residents of Woodbury gathered around her—town elders, heads of small families, former merchants, and passers-through who landed here almost by mistake—fidget on folding chairs in tattered coats and muddy boots, facing the front of the narrow conference room. The space has an end-of-world feel to it, with crumbling plaster, overturned coffee urns, exposed wiring, and litter strewn across the parquet floor.

“What the fuck difference does it make?” barks Major Gene Gavin from the front of the room, his minions behind him with their M4 assault rifles on their hips like faux gangbangers. It feels right and proper to the Major to be standing at the head of this little town hall meeting right now, near the flagpoles displaying the American and Georgia State flags. Like MacArthur taking over Japan, or Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run, the Major relishes the opportunity to finally make his stand as the leader pro tem of this miserable town full of chickenshits and rejects. Ramrod tough in his green fatigues and jarhead brush cut, the Major has been waiting for this moment, biding his time for weeks.

No stranger to whipping pussies into shape, Gavin knows he needs respect in order to lead, and in order to be respected, he needs to be feared. Which is exactly how he used to deal with the weekend warriors under his command at Camp Ellenwood. Gavin was a survival instructor with the 221
^st
Military Intelligence Battalion, and he used to torment those lily-livered weaklings on overnight bivouacs up to Scull Shoals by shitting in their duffels and giving them the rubber hose treatment for the smallest infractions. But that might as well have been a million years ago.
This
situation is Code
Fucked
, and Gavin is going to take every advantage to stay on top of things.

“It was just a couple of them new guys,” Gavin adds as an afterthought. “And some slut from Atlanta.”

An elderly gentlemen in the front stands up, his bony knees trembling: “All due respect … that was Jim Bridges’s daughter, and she weren’t no slut. Now, I think I speak for everybody when I say we need protection, maybe a curfew … keep people in after dark. Maybe we could take a vote.”

“Sit down, old man … before you hurt yourself.” Gavin gives the old geezer his best menacing look. “We got bigger problems to deal with now—there’s a goddamn convention of them Biters closing in on us.”

The old man takes his seat, grumbling to himself. “All that noise from the damn dirt races … that’s the reason them Biters is surroundin’ us.”

Gavin unsnaps the holster on his hip, exposing the grip of his .45, and takes a threatening step toward the old man. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall opening the floor to comments from the nursing home.” Gavin jabs a finger at the old man. “My advice is for you to shut the fuck up before you get yourself in trouble.”

A younger man springs to his feet two chairs away from the old man. “Take it easy, Gavin,” the younger man says. Tall, olive-skinned, his hair tucked under a bandana, he wears a sleeveless shirt that reveals heavily muscled arms. His dark eyes gleam with street-level smarts. “This ain’t some John Wayne movie, take it down a notch.”

Gavin turns to the man in the bandana, brandishing the .45 with menace. “Shut your mouth, Martinez, and put your spic ass back in your chair.”

Behind Gavin, the two Guardsmen tense up, swinging the muzzles of their M4s up and into ready positions, their eyes scanning the room.

The man named Martinez just shakes his head, and sits back down.

Gavin lets out a frustrated sigh.

“You people don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of this situation,” he says, holstering the .45 as he moves back to the front of the room, speaking with the cadence of a drill instructor. “We’re sittin’ ducks here, we don’t do somethin’ about them barricades. Got a bunch of freeloaders takin’ up space. Expecting everybody else to carry the weight. No discipline! I got news for ya, your little vacation is over. Gonna be some new rules, and you’re all gonna pitch in, and you’re gonna do what you’re told, and you’re gonna keep your fucking mouths shut! Am I making myself clear?”

Gavin pauses, daring somebody to object.

The townspeople sit in silence, looking like children who’ve been sent to the principal’s office. In one corner, Stevens, the physician, sits next to a young woman in her twenties. Dressed in a stained smock, the girl has a stethoscope draped around her neck. Stevens looks like a man smelling something that’s been rotting for a long time. He raises his hand.

The Major rolls his eyes and lets out an exasperated sigh. “What is it now, Stevens?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the doctor says, “but we’re stretched thin already. We’re doing our best.”

“What’s your point?”

The doctor gives him a shrug. “What is it you want from us?”

“I WANT YOUR GODDAMN OBEDIENCE!”

The booming response barely registers on Stevens’s thin, cunning features. Gavin takes long, even breaths, getting himself back under control. Stevens pushes his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose and looks away, shaking his head. Gavin gives his men a look.

The Guardsmen nod in unison at the Major, trigger fingers on trigger pads.

This isn’t going to be as easy as Gavin thought.

*   *   *