The Walking Dead (5 page)

The circular ruminations of his mind keep going back to more immediate matters: the nagging feeling that the seventh member of the family that once lived here is still somewhere in the house.

Now that Brian has closed the deal among his compatriots that they should indeed stay here indefinitely, he can’t stop worrying about it. He hears every creak, every faint ticking of the foundation settling, every hushed whirr of the furnace coming on. For some reason that he cannot explain, he is absolutely certain that the blond-haired kid is still here, in the house, waiting, biding his time for … what? Maybe the kid is the only one in the family who didn’t turn. Maybe he’s terrified and hiding.

Before turning in that night, Brian had insisted they check the nooks and crannies of the house one last time. Philip had accompanied him with a pickaxe and a flashlight, and they had checked every corner of the basement, every cabinet, every closet and storage locker. They looked inside the meat freezer in the cellar, and even checked the washer and dryer for unlikely stowaways. Nick and Bobby looked up in the attic, behind trunks, in boxes, in wardrobes. Philip looked under all the beds and behind all the dressers. Coming up empty, they still made some interesting discoveries along the way.

They found a dog’s food bowl in the basement, but no sign of the animal. They also found an array of very useful power tools in the workshop: jigsaws, drills, routers, and even a nail gun. The nail gun would be especially handy for building barricades since it is somewhat quieter than a pounding hammer.

In fact, Brian is thinking about other uses for that nail gun when, all at once, he hears a noise that instantly frosts his scantily clothed body in goose bumps.

The sound is coming from above him, on the other side of the ceiling.

It’s coming from the attic.

THREE

Upon hearing the noise—almost subconsciously identifying it as something other than the house settling, or the wind in the dormers, or the furnace rattling—Brian sits up on the edge of the bed.

He cocks his head and listens more carefully. It sounds like somebody scratching at something, or the faint sound of fabric tearing in fits and jerks. At first, Brian feels compelled to go get his brother. Philip would be the best one to deal with this. It could be the kid, for God’s sake … or something worse.

But then, almost as an afterthought, Brian stops himself. Is he going to puss out again … as usual? Is he going to run, like always, to his brother—his
younger
brother, for God’s sake—the same individual whose hand Brian had once held at the crosswalk every morning when the two of them were grade school kids at Burke County Elementary? No, goddamnit. Not this time. This time, Brian is going to grow a pair.

He takes a deep breath, turns, and searches for the flashlight he had left on the bedside table. He finds it and switches it on.

The narrow beam shoots across the dark bedroom, spreading a silver pool of light on the opposite wall.
Just you and me, Justin,
Brian thinks as he rises to his feet. His head is clear. His senses are crackling.

The truth is, Brian had felt incredibly good earlier that night when he had concurred with his brother’s plans, when he had seen the look in Philip’s eyes, like maybe Brian is not a hopeless loser after all. Now it’s time to show Philip that the moment in the kitchen was not a fluke. Brian can get the job done just as well as Philip.

He moves quietly toward the door.

Before leaving the room, he grabs the metal baseball bat that he found in one of the boys’ bedrooms.

*   *   *

The papery rustling noises can be heard more clearly in the hallway, as Brian pauses under the attic hatchway, which is a glorified trapdoor embedded in the ceiling above the second-floor landing. The other bedrooms along the hallway—filled with the deep snores of Bobby Marsh and Nick Parsons—are situated on the other side of the landing, on the east side of the house, out of earshot. That’s why Brian is the only one hearing this right now.

A leather strap hangs down, low enough for Brian to jump up and grasp. He pulls the spring-levered hatch open, and the accordionlike stairs unfold with a pinging noise. Brian shines the flashlight up into the dark passage. Dust motes drift in the beam. The darkness is impenetrable, opaque. Brian’s heart chugs.

You fucking pussy,
he thinks to himself.
Get your pussy ass up there.

He climbs the steps with the baseball bat under one arm, the flashlight in his free hand, and he pauses when he reaches the top of the ladder. He shines the light on a huge steamer trunk with Magnolia Springs State Park stickers on it.

Now Brian smells the cold putrid odors of must and mothballs. The autumn chill has already seeped into the attic through the seams of the roof. The air is cool on his face. And after a moment, he hears the rustling again.

It’s coming from a deeper place in the shadows of the attic. Brian’s throat is as dry as bone meal as he climbs to his feet on the threshold. The ceiling is low enough to force him to hunch. Shivering in his underwear, Brian wants to cough but doesn’t dare.

The scratching noises stop, and then start again, vigorous and angry sounding.

Brian raises the bat. He gets very still. He’s learning the mechanics of fear all over again: When you’re really, really scared, you don’t shake like in the movies. You grow still, like an animal bristling.

It’s only afterward you start shaking.

The beam of the flashlight slowly scans across the dark niches of the attic, the detritus of the well-to-do: an exercise bike laced with cobwebs, a rowing machine, more trunks, barbells, tricycles, wardrobe boxes, water skis, a pinball machine furry with dust. The scratching noises cease again.

The light reveals a coffin.

Brian practically turns to stone.

A
coffin
?

*   *   *

Philip is already halfway up the staircase when he notices, up on the second-floor landing, the attic stepladder hanging down, unfolded.

He pads up to the landing in his stocking feet. He carries an axe in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The .22 pistol is shoved down the back of his jeans. He is shirtless, his ropy musculature shimmering in moonbeams filtering down through a skylight.

It takes him mere seconds to cross the landing and scale the accordion steps, and when he emerges into the darkness of the attic, he sees the silhouette of a figure across the narrow space.

Before Philip even has a chance to shine his flashlight on his brother, the situation becomes clear.

*   *   *

“It’s a tanning bed,” the voice says, making Brian jump. For the past few seconds, Brian Blake has been paralyzed with terror, standing ten feet away from the dusty, oblong enclosure shoved up against one wall of the attic. The top of the thing is latched shut like a giant clamshell, and something scratches to get out of it.

Brian jerks around and finds in the beam of his flashlight his brother’s gaunt, sullen face. Philip stands on the threshold of the attic with the axe in his right hand. “Move away from it, Brian.”

“You think it’s—”

“The missing kid?” Philip whispers, cautiously moving toward the object. “Let’s find out.”

The scratching noise, as if stimulated by the sound of voices, surges and rises.

Brian turns toward the tanning bed, braces himself, and raises the baseball bat. “He might have been hiding up here when he turned.”

Philip approaches with the axe. “Get outta the way, sport.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Brian says bitterly, moving toward the latch, his baseball bat poised.

Philip gently steps in between his brother and the tanning bed. “You don’t have to prove nothing to me, man. Just move outta the way.”

“No, goddamnit, I got this,” Brian hisses, reaching for the dusty latch.

Philip studies his brother. “Okay, whatever. Go for it, but do it quick. Whatever it is—don’t think about it too much.”

“I know,” Brian says, grasping the latch with his free hand.

Philip stands inches behind his brother.

Brian unlatches the enclosure.

The scuttling noises cease.

Philip raises the axe as Brian throws open the lid.

*   *   *

Two quick movements—a pair of blurs in the darkness—shoot across Philip’s sight line: a rustling of fur and the arc of Brian’s bat.

It takes a second or two for the animal to register in Philip’s heightened senses—the mouse darting out of the glare of the flashlight and scurrying across the fiberglass trough toward a hole gnawed in one corner.

The baseball bat comes down hard, missing the fat, oily-gray rodent by a mile.

Pieces of the bed’s switch panel and old toys shatter at the impact. Brian lets out a gasp and recoils at the sight of the mouse vanishing down the hole, slithering back into the inner workings of the bed’s base.

Philip lets out a sigh of relief and lowers the axe. He starts to say something when he hears a little metallic tune playing in the shadows next to him. Brian looks down, breathing hard.

A little jack-in-the-box, thrown by the impact of the bat, lies on the floor.

Triggered by the fall, the tinny music plays a few more notes of a circus lullaby.

Then the toy clown pops out—sideways—from the fallen metal container.

“Boo,” Philip says wearily, with very little humor in his voice.

*   *   *

Their moods improve slightly the next morning after a huge breakfast of scrambled eggs and slab bacon and grits and ham and griddlecakes and fresh peaches and sweet tea. The fragrant mélange fills with entire house with the welcoming odors of coffee and cinnamon and smoked meats sizzling. Nick even makes his special redeye gravy for the group, which sends Bobby into ecstasy.

Brian finds cold remedies in the master bedroom medicine cabinet and starts feeling a little better after he downs a few DayQuil capsules.

After breakfast, they explore the immediate vicinity—the single square block known as Green Briar Lane—and they get more good news. They find a treasure trove of supplies and building materials: woodpiles for fireplaces, extra planking under decks, more food in the neighbors’ refrigerators, cans of gas in the garages, winter coats and boots, boxes of nails, liquor, blowtorches, bottled water, a shortwave radio, a laptop, a generator, stacks of DVDs, and a gun rack in one of the basements with several hunting rifles and boxes of shells.

No silencer; but beggars can’t be choosers.

They also get lucky in the undead department. The houses on either side of the Colonial are empty; their residents evidently got the hell out of Dodge before the shit had gone too far down. Two houses away from the Colonial, on the west side, Philip and Nick encounter an elderly couple who have turned, but the oldsters are easily, quickly, and most importantly,
quietly
dispatched with some well-placed hatchet blows.

That afternoon, Philip and company cautiously begin work on the barricade across the front parkway of the Colonial and its two neighbors—a total span of a hundred and fifty feet for the three lots, and sixty down either side—which sounds to Nick and Bobby like a daunting amount of territory to cover, but with the ten-foot-long prefab sections they find under a neighbor’s deck, combined with fencing cannibalized off the place across the street, the work goes surprisingly fast.

By dusk that evening, Philip and Nick are connecting the last sections on the northern edge of the property line.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on ’em all day,” Philip is saying, pressing the forked tip of the nail gun against the bracing of a corner section. He’s referring to the swarms out near the golf club. Nick nods as he butts the two support beams against each other.

Philip pulls the trigger, and the nail gun makes a muffled snapping noise—like the crack of a metal whip—sending a six-inch galvanized nail into the boards. The nail gun is baffled with a small piece of packing blanket, secured with duct tape, to dampen the noise.

“I ain’t seen a single one of them wander closer,” Philip says, wiping the sweat from his brow, moving to the next section of support beams. Nick holds the boards steady, and the tip presses down.

FFFFFUMP!

“I don’t know,” Nick says skeptically, moving to the next section, the sweat making his satin roadie jacket cling to his back. “I still say it’s not
if
 … but
when
.”

FFFFFFFUMP!

“You worry too much, son,” Philip says, moving to the next section of planking, tugging on the gun’s cord. The extension cable snakes off toward an outlet on the corner of the neighbor’s house. Philip had to connect a grand total of six twenty-eight-foot cords to get the thing to reach. He pauses and glances over his shoulder.

About fifty yards away, in the backyard of the Colonial, Brian pushes Penny in a swing. It’s taken a little getting used to for Philip, putting his hapless brother in charge of his precious little girl, but right now Brian is the best nanny he’s got.