The Walking Dead (9 page)

For most of these five miles, Philip keeps thinking of Bobby and all the things they could have done to save him. The pain and regret are burrowing deep down in the pit of Philip’s gut, a cancer metastasizing into something darker and more poisonous than grief. In order to fight the emotions he keeps thinking of that old trucker’s adage:
Scan don’t stare
. Gripping the wheel with the practiced clench of a longtime hauler, he sits forward in his seat, his gaze alert and fixed on the margins of the highway.

For five miles only a handful of dead brush the ghostly edges of their headlights.

Just outside of Conyers they pass a couple stragglers shuffling along the shoulder of the road like blood-spattered AWOL soldiers. Passing the Stonecrest Mall they see a cluster of dark figures hunkered down in a ditch, apparently feasting on some sort of roadkill, either animal or human, impossible to tell in the flickering darkness. But that has been the extent of it—for five miles, at least—and Philip keeps his speed at a steady (but safe) thirty miles per hour. Any slower and they risk hooking a stray monster; any faster and they risk sideswiping the growing number of wrecks and abandoned vehicles cluttering the lanes.

The radio is dead, and the others ride in silence, their gazes glued to the passing landscape.

The outer rings of metro Atlanta roll past them in slow motion, a series of pine forests broken by an occasional bedroom community or strip mall. They pass car dealerships as dark as morgues, the endless ocean of new models like coffins reflecting the milky moonlight. They pass deserted Waffle Houses, their windows busted out like open sores, and office parks as barren as war zones. They pass Shoney’s, and trailer parks, and Kmarts, and RV Centers, each one more desolate and ruined than the last. Small fires burn here and there. Parking lots look like the dark playrooms of mad children, the abandoned cars strewn across the pavement like toys thrown in anger. Broken glass glitters everywhere.

In less than a week and a half, the plague has apparently savaged the outer exurbs of Atlanta. Here, in the rural nature preserves and office campuses, where middle-class families have emigrated over the years to escape the arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, and high-stress urban life, the epidemic has laid waste to the social order in a matter of days. And for some reason, it’s the sight of all the devastated churches that bothers Philip the most.

Each sanctuary they pass is in a progressively worse state: The New Birth Missionary Baptist Center outside of Harmon is still smoldering from a recent fire, its charred ruin of a cross rising against the heavens. A mile and a half down the road the Luther Rice Seminary features hastily hand-scrawled signs over its portals warning passers-by that the end is nigh and the rapture is here and all you sinners can kiss your asses good-bye. The Unity Faith Christian Cathedral looks as though it’s been ransacked and scoured clean and then pissed upon. The parking lot at the St. John the Revelator Pentecostal Palace resembles a battlefield littered with bodies, many of the corpses still moving with the telltale, somnambulant hunger of the undead.
What kind of God would let this happen? And while we’re on the subject: What kind of God would let a simple, innocent good old boy like Bobby Marsh die in such a way? What kind of
—

“Oh shit!”

The voice comes from the backseat, and it shakes Philip out of his dark musings. “What?”

“Look,” Brian says, his voice weak from either his cold or the fear, or maybe a little of both. Philip glances at the rearview mirror, and he sees his brother’s anxious expression in the green glow of the dash. Brian is pointing toward the western horizon.

Philip gazes back through the windshield, instinctively pumping the brakes. “What? I don’t see anything.”

“Holy crap,” Nick says from the passenger seat. He is staring through a break in the piney woods off to the right, where light shines through the trees.

About five hundred yards ahead of them, the highway banks off in a northwesterly direction, cutting through a stand of pines. Beyond the trees, through clearings in the foliage, flames are visible.

The interstate is on fire.

“God
damnit,
” Philip says on a tense sigh. He slows the vehicle to a crawl as they make the turn.

Within moments the overturned tanker truck comes into view, lying jackknifed in a cocoon of flames, like an upended dinosaur. The truck’s carcass blocks the two westbound lanes, its cab detached and lying in pieces, tangled with three other cars across the median and both of the eastbound lanes. The scorched shells of other cars lie overturned behind the burning wreckage.

Beyond the wreck the lanes look like a parking lot, with scores of cars, some burning, most of them tangled in the chain reaction.

Philip pulls the Suburban over and brings it to a stop on the shoulder fifty yards from the dwindling flames. “That’s just fantastic,” he says to no one in particular, wanting to launch a barrage of profanity, but barely containing himself (on account of Penny’s ears being inches away).

From this distance—even in the flickering darkness—several things are clear. First, and foremost, it is obvious they are either going to have to find a team of firefighters and heavy-duty towing equipment in order to continue on course or they’re going to have to figure out a fucking detour. Second, it looks as though whatever happened here took place in the very recent past, perhaps earlier today, perhaps only hours ago. The pavement around the wreck is blackened and scarred, as though a meteor had punched a hole in it, and even the trees lining the highway are charred from the shock waves. Even through the closed windows of the Suburban, Philip can smell the acrid stench of burning diesel and melted rubber.

“What now?” Brian finally says.

“Gotta turn around,” Nick says, looking over his shoulder.

“Just lemme think for a second,” Philip says, staring at the overturned truck cab, the roof sheared off it like the lid of a tin can. In the darkness, charred bodies lie sprawled across the muddy median. Some of them are twitching with the lazy undulations of snakes waking up.

“C’mon, Philip, we can’t get around it,” Nick says.

Brian speaks up. “Maybe we can cut across to 278.”

“GODDAMNIT, SHUT UP AND LET ME THINK!”

The sudden flare of rage makes Philip’s skull throb with the force of a splitting migraine, and he grits his teeth, clenching his fists and stuffing the voice back down inside himself:
Crack it open, do it, tear it open now, tear the heart out
 …

“Sorry,” Philip says, wiping his mouth, glancing over his shoulder at the frightened little girl huddling in the darkness of the backseat. “I’m real sorry, punkin, Daddy lost it there for a second.”

The little girl stares at the floor.

“What do you want to do?” Brian asks softly, and from the forlorn tone of his voice it sounds as though he would follow his brother into the flames of hell if Philip thought that was the best option right now.

“Last exit was—what?—maybe a mile or so back there?” Philip glances over his shoulder. “I’m thinking that maybe we should—”

The slapping noise comes out of nowhere, cutting Philip off mid-thought.

Penny shrieks.

“SHIT!”

Nick jerks away from the passenger window, where a charred corpse has materialized out of the darkness.

“Get down, Nick. Now.” Philip’s voice is flat and unaffected, like a radio dispatcher, as he quickly leans over to the glove box, pops the tiny door, and fishes for something. The thing outside the window presses up against the glass, barely recognizable as human, its flesh blistered to a crisp. “Brian, cover Penny’s eyes.”

“SHIT! SHIT!” Nick ducks down and covers his head, as though in an air raid. “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!”

Philip finds the Ruger .22 pistol where he left it, already with a round in the chamber.

In one fluid motion Philip raises the weapon with his right hand, while simultaneously jacking down the power window with his left. The burned zombie reaches through the opening with its scorched, emaciated arm, letting out a guttural moan, but before it can grab hold of Nick’s shirt, Philip squeezes off a single shot—point-blank, into the thing’s skull.

The bark of the Ruger is enormously loud inside the Subrban’s interior, and it makes everybody jump, as the charred corpse whiplashes—a direct hit above its left temple sending brain matter spitting across the inside of the windshield.

The thing slides down the outside of the passenger door, the muffled sound of its body hitting the pavement barely audible over the ringing in Philip’s ears.

*   *   *

Twenty-two-caliber semiautos like the Ruger have a unique bark. The blast sounds like a hard flat slap—a two-by-four smacking concrete—and the gun invariably jumps in the shooter’s hand.

That night, despite the muffling effect of the interior of the Suburban, that single boom echoed out across the dark landscape, reverberating over treetops and office parks, carrying on the wind.

The slapback could be heard a mile away, piercing the silence of the deep woods, penetrating the mortified auditory canals of shadowy creatures, awakening dead central nervous systems.

*   *   *

“Everybody awright?” Philip looks around the dark interior, setting the hot gun down on the carpeted hump next to him. “Everybody cool?”

Nick is just now rising back up, his eyes wide and hot, taking in all the residue on the inside of the glass. Penny, curled up in Brian’s arms, keeps her eyes shut, as Brian frantically looks around, peering through all the windows, looking for any other intruders.

Philip slams the Suburban into reverse, kicking the accelerator as he quickly rolls the window back up. Everybody jerks forward as the vehicle screeches backward—a hundred feet, a hundred and fifty feet, two hundred feet—away from the smoking tanker truck.

Then the Suburban skids to a stop, and they sit there in stunned silence for a moment.

Nothing moves outside in the flickering shadows. Nobody says anything for the longest time, but Philip is convinced he’s not the only one, at this moment, wondering if this twenty-mile trek into the city is going to be a lot harder than they originally thought.

*   *   *

They sit there in the idling Suburban for quite some time, debating their best course of action, and this makes Philip very antsy. He doesn’t like sitting in one place for very long, especially with the engine running, burning gas and time, with those moving shadows behind the burning trees, but the group cannot seem to come to a consensus, and Philip is trying his hardest to be a benevolent dictator in this little banana republic.

“Look, I still say we try to drive around it.” Philip gives a nod toward the darkness to the south.

The far shoulder of the oncoming lanes is littered with smoldering vehicles, but there’s a narrow gap—maybe the width of the Suburban, with a few inches to spare—between the gravel shoulder and the thicket of pines along the highway. The recent rains combined with the oil spill from the overturned tanker have turned the land to slop. But the Suburban is a big, heavy vehicle with wide tires, and Philip has driven the thing through far worse conditions.

“It’s too steep, Philly,” Nick says, wiping the gray matter from the inside of the windshield with a grimy towel.

“Yeah, man, I have to agree,” Brian says from the shadows of the backseat, his arm around Penny, the anguished features of his face visible in the flicker of firelight. “I vote for heading back to the last exit.”

“We don’t know
what
we’ll find on 278, though, it could be worse.”

“We don’t know that,” Nick says.

“We gotta keep moving forward.”

“But what if it’s worse in the city? Seems like it’s getting worse the closer we get.”

“We’re still fifteen, twenty miles away—we don’t know shit about what it’s like in Atlanta.”

“I don’t know, Philly.”

“Tell you what,” Philip says. “Let me take a look.”

“What do you mean?”

He reaches for the gun. “I’ll just take a quick look.”

“Wait!” Brian speaks up. “Philip, come on. We gotta stick together.”

“I’m just gonna see what the ground is like, see if we can make it through.”

“Daddy—” Penny starts to say something, and then thinks better of it.

“It’s okay, punkin, I’ll be right back.”

Brian looks out the window, unconvinced. “We agreed we’d stick together. No matter what. C’mon, man.”

“It’ll take two minutes.” Philip opens his door, shoving the Ruger into his belt.

The cool air and the sound of crackling flames and the smell of ozone and burning rubber waft into the Suburban like uninvited guests. “You guys sit tight, I’ll be right back.”

Philip climbs out of the car.

The door slams.

*   *   *

Brian sits in the silent Suburban for a moment, listening to his heart thudding in his chest. Nick is looking through each and every window, scanning the immediate vicinity, which is alive with flickering shadows. Penny gets very still. Brian looks at the little girl. The child looks like she’s shrinking into herself, like a little night bloom, contracting into itself, pulling its petals shut.