Nell’s heart pounded in her chest. “Yes, sir. Most definitely.”
He nodded toward the three vehicles. “What about them?”
“They’re sitting this one out,” she told him. “It’s me who needs to get a few things off her chest.”
He chuckled and took a ring of keys from his pants pocket. “Then come on in and make yourself to home.”
As he unlocked the big padlock that held the gates together, Nell looked up at him. “What’s your name?”
“Tyrone, ma’am. Tyrone Jackson. Or Big T to my friends.”
As the gate swung open, giving access to the sidewalk beyond, Nell reached out and took his hand. It was like David shaking hands with Goliath. “Thank you, Big T.”
She didn’t think his smile could have grown any larger, but it did. “Yes, ma’am.”
Nell made her way up the sidewalk and the concrete steps nestled between tall, white columns. She hesitated before the big oak doors for a moment, and then glanced back. Levi sat in the truck across the street, giving her a big thumb’s up. She smiled at him, took a deep breath, and stepped inside.
She passed through a foyer and entered the sanctuary. The singing had ended and now the sermon was in progress. The church pews weren’t as full as she had expected. There were maybe eighty people scattered among oaken pews that normally held four hundred. The men were decked out in suits and shiny patent-leather shoes, while the women wore pastel dresses and matching hats. The preacher was short and lanky and loud, sporting a salt-and-pepper beard and horn-rimmed glasses. His voice—which seemed like it should have belonged to Big T instead of this bantam rooster—rebounded off the walls with a combination of authority, righteous fury, and a genuine love and respect for his Maker.
Nell found an unobtrusive spot on a back pew and sat there, hoping no one would notice. No one did. The audience was captivated by the pastor. His voice was first passive, then thunderous; his fist pounded upon the pulpit, both to drive his message home and awaken anyone who might have dozed off during his recitation of the Gospel.
He preached for half an hour, gave the invitation, and then dismissed the service. As he stood at a door near the back of the sanctuary and shook hands with the congregation, Nell stood up. She took a deep breath and then slowly walked up the aisle to the altar. She stared at the wooden cross behind the pulpit, draped with purple linen in semblance of Christ’s crucifixion. Then she slowly sank to her knees.
She remained there for several minutes, weeping, praying, cursing, pounding the risers of the altar with her small fists. All that had been bottled up inside her for the last few months came pouring out in a bittersweet mixture of sorrow, confusion, elation, and rage. When her tide of emotion finally subsided and she crouched, spent, before the cross, she felt strong hands cradle her shoulders firmly, yet lovingly.
“You feel better now?” asked a deep voice like thunder in a barrel.
She turned her head to find the pastor kneeling with her. He beamed a toothy smile, but there was concern in his magnified eyes. “I’m not sure,” she said honestly. “I feel like I could give it another round, if I got my second wind.”
The preacher threw back his head and laughed. “Well, if you feel the Spirit move you to do so, then you go right ahead. And, to tell the truth, I might just join you.”
Together, they rose and sat on the front pew. The lanky black man extended his hand. “My name’s Reginald P. Dandridge. But you can call me Reverend Reggie. And you are?”
“Nell Hobbs from Tennessee.”
The preacher nodded, impressed. “Quite a ways from home. Are you by yourself, Ms. Hobbs?”
“No, my family is outside and some others we’re traveling with.” She looked at the cross behind the pulpit. “They wanted to give me some space… knew I had to come in here and try to sort things out.”
“You’re a woman of faith then?”
“I have been for forty-three years, since I was baptized when I was nine,” she told him. “But I’m not so sure now. My faith has been mighty lacking lately.”
“So, you’re angry with God? About what’s going on in the world?”
Nell nodded. “Yes! Why has He done this, Reverend? Set this plague upon us… these parasites? I’ve seen awful things take place in the past couple of months. Friends and neighbors turned into these walking, eating things, neither dead nor alive. And my family has changed, too, and not for the better. My children have lost their innocence. They’re killing folks… both zombie and those who are still alive. My daughter… my sweet little girl who once made mud pies and played with dolls… can shoot a man betwixt the eyes without a second thought. My husband lost his family home… had to blow it up because Biters had overtaken it. There’s no longer any good in the world, no hope. It’s dragged my spirits—and my trust in the Lord—down to rock bottom.”
The pastor scratched his wooly beard. “Maybe God has a reason for doing this. Maybe he’s weeding out all the sinners… or maybe just all the stupid people. His ways are known only to Him sometimes and are beyond our comprehension. We have a tendency to blame Him whenever something goes wrong and praise him when everything is sunny skies and rainbows. And what’s happening now is as wrong as it can get.”
“Yes, I understand,” she said, the lines on her face easing a bit. “Or I don’t understand, but I accept. It’s just so hard to see something as tiny as a speck of dust turn our lives inside out. And it’s hard to see my family transform into something they weren’t before.”
“I know that feeling well,” the preacher said, his bright eyes growing dim with hurt. “All too well.”
Nell began to stand. “Well, I’d best be getting out to the others. I thank you for talking with me.”
Reverend Reggie took her hands in both of his. “Now don’t go running off just yet! We’re having a big meal in the fellowship hall… a lot of good food you folks probably haven’t had in a while. And it’s safe food, too, not tainted by those confounded black bugs. Please, stay awhile and break bread with us.”
Nell thought about it. “Well, a hot, home-cooked meal would certainly be a blessing, and some fellowship with good, God-fearing folks would be one, too. I’ll go out and fetch the others.”
“Good!” said the preacher with a smile. “I’ll prepare a table for y’all. And I’ll send someone to relieve the man at the gate. Just tell him…”
“Big T?”
Reverend Reggie laughed. “Yes! Tell Big T to come on in and join us.”
Nell Hobbs walked down the center aisle of the sanctuary and through the big double doors. The autumn sunshine hit her face and she smiled. Not everything had been settled between her and her Lord that Sunday morning, but she felt on steadier ground spiritually and ready to face adversity once again.
As Levi and Abe sat at a table and ate with Reverend Reggie, they looked out the broad, plate-glass window of the fellowship hall. The fenced-in compound stood a hundred feet from the church. The area looked to have once been a picnic area, with redwood tables and benches and a metal swing set for the kids. Inside the compound, Biters, both black and white, wandered aimlessly. Some stood with their faces plastered against the chain-link fence, gnawing at the metal strands, while others sat dumbly at the picnic tables, glaring at one another. A little girl sat on one of the swings, feet dangling, black teeth grinding. Her toe bones poked through the flesh and cut furrows in the earth as she slowly swung back and forth. Several ugly bites had been taken out of her arms and legs. They wondered if a Biter had done that to her… or she had done it to herself.
“What’s the deal here, Reverend?” Levi asked him. “Why are they out there?”
The pastor shook his head. “To tell the truth, I don’t really know. We’ve been praying over them, like we used to pray over the sick and dying. Maybe we’re just hoping that the Lord will place His healing hand upon them and turn them back the way they were.”
“You know that isn’t going to happen, don’t you?” asked Abe fl
atly. “This has nothing to do with God. It is the parasites that are causing this hellish outbreak. God has no hand in it.”
Reverend Reggie’s eyes were challenging behind his glasses. “God has a hand in everything.”
“We could argue theology all day and it would get us nowhere,” Levi told them. He looked back at the preacher. “Why don’t you just do the merciful thing? Put a bullet in their head and end it for them?”
A sad look crossed the reverend’s face. “That would be a difficult and sorrowful thing for us to do. We grew up with a lot of those folks out there. Loved and respected them. You see that woman out there in the purple dress?”
They picked out the one he was referring to—a small, elderly black woman with snow white hair, dressed in a bloodstained lavender dress with matching flats. A white pillbox hat decorated with a lavender rose sat askew on her head, held in place with bobby pins.
“That lady out there was my third-grade teacher in school,” he explained. “Took a sassy, troubled little boy from a bad home—alcoholic mother, deadbeat father—and showed him what it was like to love and respect someone. Spent extra time with me and set my grades and my life on track. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d likely have ended up in prison or homeless on the streets. Instead, she molded me into the man I am now.” Tears bloomed in his eyes. “I can’t just put a bullet in her brain and believe that all those tender and sweet mercies she did on my behalf never took place. She’s out there and I’m in here, and that’s how it’ll remain… until God gives me the courage to return the favor.”
“What about all those buzzards? How can you stand them hovering around all the time? Why don’t you shoot or poison them?”
“They’re God’s creatures,” he told them. “They’re just doing what He programmed them to do.”
They turned their eyes away from the compound and didn’t look at it for the remainder of their meal.
“Are there any others here in town?” Levi asked curiously. “Other than these folks?”
“There are a few,” the reverend told him. “But they aren’t nearly as neighborly. They cling to the shadows and come out… creeping around, doing things no man ought to be allowed to do. Raping, murdering, and feeding off children. I suppose that’s what happens when there’s no law to speak of. You folks take care out on the road. There’s liable to be more folks of that sort around, taking advantage of the current situation. And they may not wait until dark to sow their evil. They could look and act like you and me. You know, wolves in sheep’s clothing, that sort of thing.”
“Thanks for the advice,” said Abe. “We’ll certainly take it to heart.”
Reverend Reggie picked at his food for a while, as though wrestling with something that was on his mind. “I have a favor to ask of you. I know we’ve only known each other for less than an hour, but I’m a good judge of character and I can tell you are decent folks. If you don’t want to do it, I’ll understand. No hard feelings.”
“What is it?” Levi asked.
“Would you take Big T with you?”
Levi and Abe looked at one another. “I don’t know…” began Levi reluctantly.
“Just hear me out and then decide. Something’s been preying heavily on Big T’s mind lately. His parents live outside of Asheville and he has no idea what’s become of them. He has it in his head to go looking for them, but I worry about him being out there on his own. Tyrone’s a good man, but he’s naive. Tends to want to trust everybody. If someone held a knife to his throat, he’s likely to think they were giving him a free shave, instead of about to slaughter him. If he’s going to go, he needs folks around to look out for him… good folks. He’s strong as a bull and good with guns. And he’s as loyal and tenacious as a bulldog. He’d be an asset in a fight, that’s for sure.”
“Where did he get that Thompson machine gun?” asked Levi.
The preacher laughed. “Believe it or not, I gave it to him. It was my grandfather’s. He was a moonshiner back during Prohibition. My grandmother told me once that he stole it out of the back of an FBI man’s car while he was traipsing through the woods, looking for him. I don’t have much from my mother’s side of the family, but I did get that Tommy gun.”
“I’ll have to talk to Nell and the rest about it,” Levi told him. “And, if he did go, it’d be a while before we made it to Asheville. I promised Abe and his wife a while back that we would be going to Hendersonville to check on Agnes’ sister, so that’s our main priority. Anything else comes afterward.”
“I understand… and I’m sure Big T will, too.” Reggie looked over at where the big man sat between Nell and Kate, laughing and digging into a plate piled six inches high with food. “I would hate for him to get a wild hair and head out on his own one morning… and we find him later on, crucified on some telephone pole a mile or so down the road.”
“If I know Nell, she’ll say yes,” Levi told him, taking a swig of sweet tea from a red disposable cup. “Looks like she’s taken a shine to him already. Kate, too. If it comes down to it, he could ride in the bed of the pickup. He’d be out in the open in case of a Biter attack, but that machine gun ought to even the odds right nicely.”
“Just lay it on the table and let them decide,” the preacher told him. “You’d be doing him a huge favor and it would give this old preacher man some much-needed peace of mind.”
As Levi finished his lunch, we considered Big T and what he could bring to the group. The way it was shaping up, he would end up with a small army rather than a band of travelers. And if things were as bad as Reverend Reggie suggested, they just might end up needing one.
Chapter 15
It was 5:30 in the evening and the shadows of dusk were gathering thickly around them when they saw headlights approaching from ahead.
Levi watched as they slowly made their way around a broad curve about a mile and a half away. There were a lot of them, perhaps fifteen or twenty vehicles.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” Nell told him.
“Me either,” he agreed.
Someone rapped on the rear window of the Ram’s cab and Jem slid it open. “Mr. Hobbs?” came Big T’s voice from the bed of the truck.
“Yeah?”
“See that turn-off up ahead? Cut your lights and ease on down in there.”
Levi didn’t argue. He did as Big T said. When Billy and Kate saw what he was doing, they too doused their headlights and followed. Soon they were heading down a steep dirt road that lead into a backwoods hollow.
“Where does this road go?” Avery asked.
“It circles down through the woods and comes back out on the highway five miles farther on,” the black man told him. “I figured it was best if we ducked down here and give those fellas the right of way. They’ve passed through Woodrow a time or two and they’re a nasty bunch.”
Carefully, they drove to the bottom of the hollow. It was dark in the thick of the woods and it was hard to see where you were going without headlights. As the steep grade leveled off, swinging parallel to the highway above, Levi stopped his truck. The Mercedes and Yukon eased to a halt behind him. Silently, they sat and watched the caravan of vehicles pass by three hundred yards above them. They couldn’t tell much, just that it was several large transport trucks, SUVs, a jeep or two, and about a dozen motorcycles, Harleys more than likely.
“I heard tell that they ambushed a National Guard unit and looted their armory,” Big T said from the back window. “Escaped prisoners and such. Not the kind of men you want to tangle with… especially if you have women and children traveling with you.”
Listening to Big T, Levi began to think that he wasn’t nearly as naïve and blindly trusting as the good reverend believed. When the long procession of vehicles roared past and the sound of them faded toward the west, he started the truck back up and turned on his lights. “We’ll come back out onto the highway and drive a little farther. According to Agnes, Hendersonville is only about thirty-five or forty miles from here.”
“Not telling you what to do, Mr. Hobbs,” Big T interrupted. “But I’d go down this road a mile or two farther and park for the night. These fellas, they roam up and down the highway all night long, looking for trouble, and sleep in the daytime. If we can hide out down here until dawn, I think we’ll be okay.”
“We’ve sort of been avoiding the woods lately,” Avery told him. “We had a run-in with a zombie bear a few days back.”
Big T laughed. “Don’t worry. There ain’t no bears around these parts.”
“These days, a squirrel or a possum can be just as dangerous,” Jem told him, pointing to the blackened, earless side of his head.
Big T swallowed dryly, turning his eyes from the ugly wound. “I still think it’d be worth taking the risk. Those men up yonder, they’ll gut you like a fish or skin you alive in a heartbeat. And they’d do worse to Miss Nell, Kate, and Miss Enolia.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” said Levi. He put the Ram into gear and headed slowly down the rutted back road, toward the middle of the forest.
That night, Big T took his turn at keeping watch.
While the others slept in sleeping bags on the leaf-scattered ground or on the seats of the vehicles, he sat on the tailgate of the pickup truck. He held the Tommy gun loosely in his big hands, feeling like he was about to nod off at any moment. He wasn’t accustomed to staying up in the middle of the night and it was getting to him. His big head would droop and then he would awaken, startled and disoriented. To tell the truth, sitting out there in the dark woods with no nocturnal light to speak of and no telling what sort of infected critters on the prowl, scared the fool out of him.
He was nodding off for the umpteenth time, when he distinctly heard a rustling noise come from the direction of the Mercedes, like the shuffling of dead leaves. Big T peered toward the expensive car and saw movement in the darkness, heading away from the camp and into the shadows of the woods just beyond.
Quietly, he hopped down off the back of the truck and made his way to the Mercedes. Enolia slept on her side, wrapped in a quilt. The blankets that her daughter had slept in were tangled up. The American Girl doll lay face down, abandoned. The place where Billy had slept was empty as well.
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